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Talk:End of World War II in Europe

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"Defeat of Nazi Germany" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Defeat of Nazi Germany. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 June 11 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  20:31, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Operation Haudegen Svalbard
"A small group of German soldiers deployed on Svalbard in Operation Haudegen to establish and man a weather station there lost radio contact in May 1945; they surrendered to some Norwegian seal hunters on 4 September, two days after Japan formally surrendered." - wrong, right open radio communication with weather reports from the troop for weather broadcast. problem the difficult evacuation through norwegian english troops 46.94.171.52 (talk) 17:21, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

Order JCS 1067 (Morgenthau Plan)
Order JCS 1067 was signed into effect by President Harry S. Truman on 10 May 1945. This was part of the post-war economic plan that advocated how the Allied occupation would include measures to prevent Germany from waging further war by eliminating its armament industry and the removal or destruction of other key industries required for military strength. This included the removal or destruction of all industrial plants and equipment in the Ruhr. In 1947, JCS 1067 was replaced by JCS 1779 that aimed at restoring a "stable and productive Germany"; this led to the introduction of the Marshall Plan.

This seems to me very pointy and I think is a way of trying to include undef "Order JCS 1067" the  Morgenthau Plan by the back door (it was used by the Nazis as a propaganda tool to encourage the German People to fight on to the bitter end). However as the Morgenthau Plan article states

The paragraph is written as if "Order JCS 1067" was implemented as Allied Policy " It was not, or ever was, an Allied plan. Again to quote from the Morgenthau Plan article "".

Also while it is true that the Morgenthau Plan was "", "Order JCS 1067" was not "", instead as Morgenthau Plan article makez clear it was a guide for the US Army only to help the Germans with reconstruction to prevent undue suffering by the Germans: (" ")

So in summery if the paragraph I removed is to be retained it needs to be rewritten so it is clear what is was (not a regurgitation of Morgenthau Plan) and that it was limited to the American zone. However it introduces a bias because it is emphasising American plans and not those od the Allies in their zones. In that it falls foul of WP:UNDUE. So this aricle would probably need a whole section (or link to an article) dedicated to life in the various Occupid Zones immediatly post war to remove UNDUE. -- PBS (talk) 13:58, 28 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Using WikiBlame I found the insertion of this paragraph: as of 11:16, 30 September 2016 by 81.132.173.235 with the edit comment: "Timeline of surrenders and deaths: no mention of the Morgenthau Plan - for post war Germany."  Which confirms my initial comment in my first post to this section "This seems to me very pointy and I think is a way of trying to include undef "Order JCS 1067" the   Morgenthau Plan by the back door". — PBS (talk) 14:19, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Liberation of Auschwitz
I have moved this from the article because it is misleading. It is too subjective a subject to start cherry picking events of historical importance and calling it the end. The Allies had not even entered German territory when Auschwitz was liberated. I thought the the consensus for this article and the "end" was German troops began to be captured unequivocally in large numbers and the Allies had entered de facto German territory. Without clarity of what is the end, it could could be argued that the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 was the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. It's a very slippery slope.

Red Army soldiers from the 322nd Rifle Division liberated Auschwitz concentration camp on 27 January 1945 at 15:00. Two hundred and thirty-one Red Army soldiers died in the fighting around Monowitz concentration camp, Birkenau, and Auschwitz I, as well as the towns of Oświęcim and Brzezinka. For most of the survivors, there was no definite moment of liberation. After the death march away from the camp, the SS-Totenkopfverbände guards had left.

About 7,000 prisoners had been left behind, most of whom were seriously ill due to the effects of their imprisonment. Most of those left behind were middle-aged adults or children younger than 15. Red Army soldiers found 600 corpses, 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 articles of women's clothing, and seven tonnes (7.7 tons) of human hair. At Monowitz camp, there were about 800 survivors and the camp was liberated on 27 January by the Soviet 60th Army, part of the 1st Ukrainian Front.

Soldiers who were used to death were shocked by the Nazis' treatment of prisoners. Red Army general Vasily Petrenko, commander of the 107th Infantry Division, remarked, "I, who saw people dying every day, was shocked by the Nazis' indescribable hatred toward the inmates who had turned into living skeletons. I read about the Nazis' treatment of prisoners in various leaflets, but there was nothing about the Nazis' treatment of women, children, and old men. It was in Auschwitz that I found out about the fate of the Jews."

As soon as they arrived, the liberating forces, which contained the Polish Red Cross, helped survivors by organizing medical care and food; Red Army hospitals cared for 4,500 survivors. There were also efforts to document the camp. As late as June 1945, there were still 300 survivors at the camp who were too weak to be moved. 80.189.122.156 (talk) 11:25, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

E 86.143.207.120 (talk) 22:55, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Grammar Error?
Cessation of Formal Hostilities and Peace Treaties, paragraph 4 contains a possible grammatical error:

"End of state of war with Germany was declared by many former Western Allies from 1950."

Not sure what the passage is trying to say. Are we missing a "from 1950 to 1952" or something like that? Or perhaps "from" should be replaced with "in" or "around": "...was declared by Allies in the years around 1950." Idk, thoughts? INSANITYISAVIRTUE (talk) 19:31, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:End of World War II in Europe


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Talk:Pacific War

Attitudes Towards the Enemy
I have added a section to shed light on the attitudes that each participant in the war held towards their enemy as I was surprised that there was little mention of this on the page. I have only written about American attitudes however as this is the only side which I know enough about to write on, but I was hoping that someone more knowledgeable than me on Japanese social history could write a section on the Japanese attitudes, and it time more sections can be added for other participants such as China, Australia etc. Rhinocerous777 (talk) 09:11, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
 * While I do feel there can be a place for a section on this topic, I also feel that this section can only be included if it covers Japanese attitudes as well. Either someone should immediately add a subsection on Japanese attitudes, or the whole section should be removed for the time being and later reinstated when it includes a Japanese subsection.104.228.9.173 (talk) 13:37, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi I am a university student and I have studied the Japanese in World War Two for the past 2 years and could write the Japanese narrative for this section. I also have studied the American attitudes so I could possibly assist with that as well. Please let me know what you think. Goldenl03 (talk) 10:15, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 * This section seems to have been removed (I approve). Generally Homo sapiens individuals have a belligerent attitude towards and enemy, and each warring party is called a Belligerent. Nuances of belligerence are generally manipulated by government propaganda. A short 'Propaganda' section would make sense, each sentence having one or two links to articles on WWII Propaganda or the nature of racism during WWII—but no such dedicated articles exist. There is an article on Anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States with 1300-word section on World War II; the balancing material Anti-Americanism is very short and only covers the postwar period, so a balanced NPOV will require a lot of research/editing. In Japan there is the fascinating phenomenon of "war painting," with Tsuguharu Foujita as the most famous painter; a category page for "Japanese war artists" also exists. Vagabond nanoda (talk) 00:18, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

US casualties in infobox
, when you amended the US casualties in the infobox by changing the number of KIA, you did not amend the total. This is not a simple addition as the source will probably have MIA as an additional casualty category. Please amend the figure according to the source. Cinderella157 (talk) 00:07, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

And once again about American losses
My edit to the article was removed, and they said that before these figures were published, they needed to be discussed.I think the losses are a little higher than those given in the article. 72k dead in the army, 40k dead in the navy, and 24k dead marines.https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-us-military-numbers https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/index.html https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/us-navy-personnel-in-world-war-ii-service-and-casualty-statistics.html 95.25.208.74 (talk) 06:05, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * As per WP:SCHOLARSHIP, modern secondary sources are preferable to the older primary ones you have posted and your general feeling that 'the number was probably higher' has no real bearing on site policy. And the fact this point has been continually raised by IPs over a total of 2 years, all of which are based within Moscow which indicates they all the same person, the fact that several editors on this page have continually rejected these changes, then this seems to indicate that these changes are unwanted, and the best course of action would be to WP:DROPTHESTICK. Loafiewa (talk) 19:57, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Ok 176.59.82.175 (talk) 16:42, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Death Toll
The allied civilian death toll is given as 26,000,000+ but that isn't even close to the upper bound of the numbers cited. The Chinese civilian casualty toll is also grossly underestimated and the very source cited for the 1-6m estimate only states military and civilian casualties which it places at 25,000,000 as opposed to 1-6m.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/asia-pacific-war-1945 https://www.nationalww2museum.org/students-teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-deaths-world-war Originalcola (talk) 08:12, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

 * https://guides.loc.gov/sino-japanese-war-1937-1945#:~:text=With%20half%20of%20China%20ruined,the%20bloodiest%20in%20world%20history.
 * The easiest available reliable online sources give far higher death tolls for China. Originalcola (talk) 08:14, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

 * Casualties for China in the infobox reflect the scope of the article - ie from December 1941. Cinderella157 (talk) 23:23, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
 * It says 1937-45 for casualties for China and total on the article. Originalcola (talk) 16:39, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
 * "Estimates of 1 to 6 million Chinese civilian deaths (1937–1945)", "Civilian deaths 26,000,000+ (1937–1945)" and the source for Chinese casualties also doesn't give a number of casualties from December 1941. Originalcola (talk) 16:40, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Number of killed
It may be a stupid question, but why does the article indicate in the column that 1.7 million died on the Allied side. When China alone lost 3.8 million Nationalists and Communists killed, and other non-Chinese allies lost 400k ? Hikka1999 (talk) 15:32, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

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

title: Talk:Pacific War


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Talk:Kevin Smith

Not sure where this comes from? "He photographed her for a nude pictorial in Playboy that consisted of photographs by various celebrities." No reference.
 * See, and Quaerens-veritatem (talk) 23:52, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Kevin Smith


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Talk:Bush Administration

Notice: This is a daughter article of George W. Bush - It was taken from the mother page made to alleviate the size of the older article. WhisperToMe 07:24, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I oppose moving the list of cabinet members to this page. The list is part of the standard presidential bio template and we should not violate that (unless the entire template is changed). Move information on his policies instead. --Jiang 08:42, 4 Jan 2004 (UTC)

title: Talk:Bush Administration


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Talk:George W. Bush 2000 presidential campaign

Untitled
Notice: This is a daughter article of George W. Bush - It was taken from the mother page made to alleviate the size of the older article. WhisperToMe 07:25, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)

-- this article should have some history of the primary campaign.

Vote!
I seek your input at WikiProject POTUS Campaigns. Please come weigh in. jengod 23:07, Mar 19, 2004 (UTC)

Announcement?
When and where did he announce that he was running for president? --Rubber cat 07:02, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * June 14, 1999, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "I'm running for the President of the United States and there's no turning back," Mr Bush said. -

 * Cumulus Clouds 07:35, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

"The slogan "Compassionate Conservatism" was endlessly used, abused, debated, and interpreted during the Presidential campaign of 2000."

I would argue that the above use of the word "abused" constitutes opinion and is therefore not encyclopedic. I submit that it should be deleted.

Low importance
In keeping with other campaign articles, this article is reclassified from Top to Low importance within WikiProject United States. Lagrange613 (talk) 16:38, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 14:53, 20 July 2019 (UTC)
 * President05-large 1 (cropped).jpg

Crowley
I remember a woman named Crowley who spoke for the Bush campaign during the campaign and the dispute with Florida but why isn't her name listed under Key People. 110.33.138.212 (talk) 04:46, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Please provide a reliable source to back up your claim. Memory based off of something that happened 20 YEARS ago isn't reliable. Plus, it's original research. Minecrafter0271 (talk) 15:14, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

My memory is the only thing I have going therefore I am not able to provide a source as I am the one who is asking for info on this.

That was not helpful. 110.33.138.212 (talk) 17:24, 7 February 2020 (UTC)


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Talk:History of the city

Notice: This is a daughter article of City - It was taken from the mother page and made into another article WhisperToMe 07:26, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)

title: Talk:History of the city


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Epworth, Lincolnshire

Epworth is a town and civil parish on the Isle of Axholme, in the North Lincolnshire unitary authority of Lincolnshire, England. The town lies on the A161, about halfway between Goole and Gainsborough. As the birthplace of John Wesley and Charles Wesley, it has given its name to many institutions associated with Methodism. Their father, Samuel Wesley, was the rector from 1695 to 1735.

History
Epworth is in the Isle of Axholme. The Isle is so called because, until it was drained by the Dutch engineer Sir Cornelius Vermuyden in 1627–1629, it was an inland island, surrounded by rivers, streams, bogs and meres.

The Domesday Book in 1086 recorded:

"Manor In Epeuerde, Ledwin had eight carucates of land to be taxed. Land to twelve ploughs. Geoffrey de Wirce has there two ploughs, and eight sokemen, with two carucates and five oxgangs of this land; and thirteen villanes and nine bordars with six ploughs, and eleven fisheries of five shillings, and 16 acre of meadow. Wood pasture 1 mi long and 1 mi broad.. Value in King Edword's time £8 now £5. Tallaged at twenty shillings.

A grant of the common land to the freeholders and other tenants, made by deed in 1360 by John de Mowbray, Lord of the Manor, gave privileges and freedoms over the use of common land, reed gathering, rights over fish and fowl and such wildlife as could be taken by the commoners for food. The deed caused repercussions in the reign of King Charles I (1625-1649) when Vermuyden was granted the task of draining the Isle and he and his Dutch partners came under regular attack in their stockade at Sandtoft. The draining of the land saw the ancient rights of the commoners encroached upon: as the land dried up they lost their supply of wildfowl for food, foraging rights and employment as mere men, swanniers, and ferry operators in addition to their grazing rights. A whole way of life that had seen annual otter hunts on the Trent, not to mention abundant salmon, was lost along with many livelihoods. The resentment felt by the Isle of Axholme towards the king doubtless explains their siding with Parliament in the English Civil War (1642-1651). Nevertheless, Vermuyden's work, an outstanding piece of irrigation engineering, turned thousands of acres of marsh and bog, which had been impassable except in high summer or hard frost, into the rich arable farmland that the Isle benefits from today.

The Isle of Axholme was originally the eight parishes of Althorpe, Belton, Crowle, Epworth, Haxey, Luddington, Owston and Wroot.

Nathan Francis Young was born here in 1654 and is commonly referred to as a ‘founding farmer’ of the original town. He is recorded as the first to monopolise the local land between the farmers spread throughout the area. There is a plaque dedicated to him in the town centre as well as a small museum that now stands near the site of his original home.

Landmarks
The Old Rectory, a Queen Anne style building, rebuilt after the fire of 1709, has been completely restored and is now the property of the World Methodist Council. It is maintained as a museum. It is also the site of supposed paranormal events that occurred there in 1716, while the Wesley family was living in the house.

The Church of England parish church of Saint Andrew is on a hill overlooking the town. Its architecture suggests that its oldest part may have been built in the late 12th century with later additions in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Rev. Samuel Wesley, father of John and Charles Wesley, was Rector here (and is buried in the churchyard).

Epworth is described as the 'Home of Methodism' and there is a Methodist church in the centre of the town. This was built in 1888 (opened for worship in 1889) and continues to be a busy hub in the centre of the community. The church (along with the town as a whole) attracts hundreds of visitors from around the world each year tracing the history of the Methodist movement. There is a trail around the town linking the sites which were significant for the Wesley family.

Transport
Epworth is served by buses provided by Isle Coaches, Stagecoach Buses and First South Yorkshire which give the town services to towns such as Doncaster, Scunthorpe and Haxey. The town was served by a station on the Axholme Joint Railway which ran from Goole to Lincoln via a connecting spur to the Doncaster to Lincoln Line. The station closed to passengers in 1933 and the line closing to freight and excursion services in 1956. The site has been redeveloped and is now occupied by a farm store. Another station was opened on the Doncaster to Lincoln Line in the town of Haxey. However, this station closed in 1964 lasting longer than the previous station of the same name. The nearest mainline station is now in the nearby town of Crowle.

Media
Television signals are received from either the Emley Moor or Belmont TV transmitters. The town is served by both BBC Radio Humberside and BBC Radio Sheffield. Other radio stations are Greatest Hits Radio Yorkshire, Viking FM, Lincs FM and TMCR 95.3, a community based radio station which broadcast from its studios in Thorne. Local newspaper is served by the Doncaster Free Press (formerly The Epworth Bells).

Epworth Show
The Epworth Show has been held for over 60 years, and takes place on the August Bank Holiday Monday.

The show was first held before the Second World War on Battle Green, later moving to Scawcett Lane. Today it is held at Wroot Road – the site has been enlarged and extra facilities added – where a number of other community events are held.

Originally the show catered only for the local area. Over the years it has grown, and whilst still having an agricultural aspect – with cattle, sheep, goats, shire horses and vintage tractors – it provides entertainment and activities including show jumping, mountain & moorland ponies, trade stands, vintage vehicles, a beer tent, children's entertainment and a dog show.

Epworth Show has links with the three Epworth churches which come together for a prior Sunday evening service, and on show day share an information tent.

The Show is run by the Epworth and District Agricultural Society, a charitable organisation. Its committee comprises community and honorary members, and patrons. Other activities run by the society between May and September include four horse & pony events, and an August Bank Holiday weekend Beer Festival with live bands.

Festival of the Plough
Epworth has hosted the Epworth Festival of the Plough agricultural fair for a number of years.

Notable people
Beside John and Charles Wesley, other notable people associated with Epworth are:
 * John de Mowbray, 4th Baron Mowbray, born in Epworth
 * William de Epworth, fourteenth century judge and Crown official in Ireland, born in Epworth
 * Alexander Kilham, founder of the Methodist New Connexion, born in Epworth
 * Ian Botham, cricketer, former resident
 * Benjamin Huntsman, inventor and manufacturer, born Epworth 1704
 * Sheridan Smith, actress, born Epworth in 1981
 * Mehetabel Wesley Wright (1697–1751), poet
 * Charles Wesley (1707–1788), priest and hymnwriter
 * John Wesley (1703–1791), priest and one of the founders of Methodism

title: Epworth, Lincolnshire


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Lesser crested tern

The lesser crested tern (Thalasseus bengalensis) is a tern in the family Laridae.

Etymology
The genus name is from Ancient Greek Thalasseus, "fisherman" from thalassa, "sea". The specific bengalensis means "of Bengal", the type locality, historically referring to much of northern India and Bangladesh.

Distribution
It breeds in subtropical coastal parts of the world mainly from the Red Sea across the Indian Ocean to the western Pacific, and Australia, with a significant population on the southern coast of the Mediterranean on two islands off the Libyan coast. Accidental breeding has also been reported in Italy and France. The Australian birds are probably sedentary, but other populations are migratory, wintering south to South Africa.

Subspecies
This bird has a number of geographical subspecies, differing mainly in size and minor plumage details:
 * T. b. emigrata (Neumann, 1934) : breeding in the Mediterranean on islands off the coast of Libya, wintering West Africa. Pale grey above (only marginally darker than Sandwich tern); slightly larger.
 * T. b. bengalensis (Lesson, 1831) : northern Indian Ocean, wintering to South Africa. Medium-dark grey above; slightly smaller.
 * T. b. torresii (Gould, 1843) : Indonesia south to Queensland, Australia, wintering in the same area (birds breeding in the Persian Gulf are also often given as this race). Dark grey above; slightly larger.

The Mediterranean race is a rare vagrant to Europe, and has bred in pure or mixed pairs (with Sandwich tern) in Italy, Spain and England.

This species breeds in dense colonies on coasts and islands. It nests in a ground scrape and lays one to two (rarely three) eggs. Nesting behaviour is very similar to that of Sandwich terns, with predator avoidance by nesting in very dense colonies, and also (in race emigrata at least) by nesting in the late summer when predatory yellow-legged gulls have finished breeding and departed from the nesting area.

Description
Like all Thalasseus terns, lesser crested tern feeds by plunge-diving for fish, usually from saline environments. It usually dives directly, and not from the "stepped-hover" favoured by Arctic tern. The offering of fish by the male to the female is part of the courtship display. This is a medium-large tern, very similar in size and general appearance to its three very close relatives Sandwich tern, Elegant tern and Chinese crested tern. The summer adult has a black cap, black legs and a long sharp orange bill. The upperwings, rump and central tail feathers are grey and the underparts white. The primary flight feathers darken during the summer. In winter, the forehead becomes white. The call is a loud grating noise like Sandwich tern.

The grey rump is a useful flight identification feature distinguishing it from the related species. The Elegant tern also differs in a slightly longer, slenderer bill, while Chinese crested tern differs in a black tip to the bill and Sandwich tern a black bill with a yellow tip.

Juvenile lesser crested terns resemble same-age Sandwich terns, but with a yellow-orange bill, and paler overall, with only faint dark crescents on the mantle feathers.

There are two other orange-billed terns within the range of this species, royal tern and Greater crested tern. Both are much larger and stouter-billed; royal also has a white rump and tail, while crested (which shares the grey rump) is darker overall above and has a yellower bill. See also orange-billed tern.

Conservation
T. bengalensis is one of the species to which the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA) applies, and one of 10 marine bird species listed in Mediterranean marine birds Action Plan.

In India the Lesser crested tern is protected in the PM Sayeed Marine Birds Conservation Reserve.

title: Lesser crested tern


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A. S. Byatt

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (Drabble; 24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023), known professionally by her former married name, A.S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

After attending the University of Cambridge, she married in 1959 and moved to Durham. It was during Byatt's time at university that she began working on her first two novels, subsequently published by Chatto & Windus as Shadow of a Sun (1964; reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title, The Shadow of the Sun) and The Game (1967). Byatt took a teaching job in 1972 to help pay for the education of her son. In the same week she accepted, a drunk driver killed her son as he walked home from school. He was 11 years of age. Byatt spent a symbolic 11 years teaching, then began full-time writing in 1983. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) was the first of The Quartet, a tetralogy of novels that continued with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).

Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance received the 1990 Booker Prize, while her short story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994) received the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize and won the 2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her critical work includes two studies of Dame Iris Murdoch (who was a friend and mentor), Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976). Her other critical studies include Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970) and Portraits in Fiction (2001).

Byatt was awarded the Shakespeare Prize in 2002, the Erasmus Prize in 2016, the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2017 and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award in 2018. She was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Early life
Antonia Susan Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, on 24 August 1936, as the eldest child of John Frederick Drabble, QC, later a County Court judge, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning. Her sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon. Her brother Richard Drabble KC is a barrister. The Drabble father participated in the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s. The mother was a Shavian and the father a Quaker. As a result of the bombing of Sheffield during the Second World War the family moved to York.

Byatt was educated at two independent boarding schools, Sheffield High School and The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York.

An unhappy child, Byatt did not enjoy boarding school, citing her need to be alone and her difficulty in making friends. Severe asthma often kept her in bed where reading became an escape from a difficult household. She attended Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College (in the United States), and Somerville College, Oxford. Having studied French, German, Latin and English at school, she later studied Italian while attending Cambridge so that she could read Dante.

Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of the University of London (1962–71), the Central School of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London. She began writing full-time in 1983.

Personal life and death
Byatt married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and moved to Durham. They had a daughter together, as well as a son, Charles, who was killed by a drunk-driver at the age of 11 while walking home from school. She spoke of her son's death and its influence on her lecturing and subsequent career after publishing The Children's Book, in which the image of a dead child features. She came to regard her academic career symbolically. She later wrote the poem "Dead Boys". The marriage was dissolved in 1969. Later that year, Byatt married Peter Duffy, and they had two daughters.

Byatt's relationship with her sister Margaret Drabble was sometimes strained due to the presence of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship was no longer especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry" and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists." Byatt was an agnostic, though she maintained an affinity for Quaker services. She enjoyed watching snooker, tennis, and football.

Byatt lived primarily in Putney, and died at home on 16 November 2023, at the age of 87.

Influences
Byatt was influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Tennyson and Robert Browning, in merging realism and naturalism with fantasy. She was not an admirer of the Brontë family, nor did she like Christina Rossetti. She was ambivalent about D. H. Lawrence. She knew Jane Austen's work off by heart before her teens. In her books, Byatt alluded to, and built upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature. She cited art historian John Gage's book on the theory of colour as one of her favourite books to reread.

Fiction
Byatt wrote a lot while attending boarding school but had most of it burnt before she left.

She began writing her first novel while at the University of Cambridge, where she did not attend many lectures but when she did, she passed the time attempting to write a novel, which—given her limited experience of life—involved a young woman at university trying to write a novel, a novel, her novel, which—she knew—was "no good". She left it in a drawer when she was finished. After departing Cambridge, she spent one year as a postgraduate student in the United States and began her second novel, The Game, continuing to write it at Oxford when she returned to England. After getting married in 1959 and moving to Durham, she left The Game aside and resumed work on her earlier novel. She sent it to literary critic John Beer, whom she had befriended while at Cambridge. Beer sent Byatt's novel to the independent book publishing company Chatto & Windus. From there Cecil Day-Lewis wrote her a response and invited her to lunch at The Athenaeum. Day-Lewis was Byatt's first editor; D. J. Enright would succeed him.

Shadow of a Sun, Byatt's first novel, is about a girl and her father and was published in 1964. It was reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title, The Shadow of the Sun, intact. The Game, published in 1967, concerned the dynamics between two sisters. The reception for Byatt's first books became confused with her sister's writing; her sister had a quicker rate of publication.

The family theme is continued in The Quartet, Byatt's tetralogy of novels, which begins with The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and continues with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002). Her quartet is inspired by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love. The family portrayed in the quartet are from Yorkshire. Byatt said the idea for The Virgin in the Garden came in part from an class she taught in which she had read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and in part from her time living in Durham in 1961, the year in which her son was born. The book was an attempt to understand what could be achieved if Middlemarch were written in the middle of the twentieth century. Byatt's book features a powerful death scene, which she invented in 1961 (inspired by Byatt's reading of Angus Wilson's book The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and the accident in its opening), a death scene that has drawn complaints from numerous readers for its vividness. Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then tracing her journey as a divorcée with a young son as he makes a new life in London. Byatt says some of the characters in her fiction represent her "greatest terror which is simple domesticity." Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s.

Also an accomplished short story writer, Byatt's first published collection was Sugar and Other Stories (1987). The Matisse Stories (1993) features three pieces, each describing a painting by the eponymous painter; each is the tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives. The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, published in 1994, is a collection of fairy tales. Byatt's other short story collections are Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, published in 1998, and Little Black Book of Stories, published in 2003. Her books reflect a continuous interest in zoology, entomology, geology, and Darwinism among other repeated themes. She is also interested in linguistics and takes a keen interest in the translation of her books. Byatt said: "I can't say how important it was to me when Angela Carter said 'I grew up on fairy stories—they're much more important to me than realist narratives'. I hadn't had the nerve to think that until she said it, and I owe her a great deal". Carter, in an earlier (first) meeting with Byatt after a Stevie Smith poetry reading, had dismissed Byatt's work, so this change of heart vindicated Byatt's approach to writing and Byatt readily acknowledged it.

Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the lives of two (fictional) 19th-century poets whom they are researching. It won the 1990 Booker Prize and was adapted for a film released in 2002.

Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia was included in Angels & Insects (1992), which was turned into the eponymous 1995 film; that film received an Academy Award for Best Costume Design in 1997.

Byatt's novel The Biographer's Tale, published in 2000, she originally intended as a short story titled "The Biography of a Biographer", based on her notion of a biographer's life in a library investigating another person's life. This she developed into writing about a character called Phineas G. Nanson, who is attempting to learn about a biographer for a book he intends to write, but who can only locate fragments of his three unwritten biographies, which are on Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus. Phineas Gilbert Nanson is named after an insect and is almost an anagram of Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus, though Byatt said this was an uncanny coincidence that she did not realise until afterwards.

The Children's Book, published in 2009, is a novel spanning from 1895 until the end of the First World War, centring on the fictional writer Olive Wellwood. She is based upon E. Nesbit. Another character—Herbert Methley—is a combination of H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence, according to Byatt. The novel also features Rupert Brooke, Emma Goldman, Auguste Rodin, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, all appearing as themselves. Byatt initially intended to title the book The Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad March Hare.

She wrote at her home in Putney, West London, and at another house in the Cévennes in Southern France, where she spent her summers. She did not write her fiction on a computer, she did so by hand, though she had deployed a computer for non-fiction articles. According to a 1991 unpublished interview with the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Byatt said she began her writing day at around 10 a.m., prompting herself by reading something easy and then something harder: "And then after a bit if I read something difficult that's really interesting I get this itch to start writing. So what I like to do is to write from about half past twelve, one, through to about four". At this point, she said, she would begin reading again.

Criticism
Byatt wrote two critical studies of Dame Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and another significant influence on her own writing. They were titled Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976). Byatt also described Murdoch's husband John Bayley's decision to publish a memoir of his time with her as "wicked" and "unforgivable", saying: "I knew her enough to know that she would have hated it... it's had a horrible effect on how people feel about her and see her and think about her."

Byatt's other critical studies include Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970). 2001's Portraits in Fiction is about painting in novels, and features references to Emile Zola, Marcel Proust and Iris Murdoch; Byatt had earlier touched upon this subject in a 2000 lecture she delivered at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Byatt had been a public encourager of the new young generation of British writers, including Philip Hensher (Kitchen Venom), Robert Irwin (Exquisite Corpse), A. L. Kennedy, Lawrence Norfolk,  David Mitchell (Ghostwritten),  Ali Smith (Hotel World),  Zadie Smith (White Teeth) and Adam Thirlwell, saying in 2009 that she was "not entirely disinterested, because I wish there to be a literary world in which people are not writing books only about people's feelings... all the ones I like write also about ideas". She contrasted some of those preferences with the work of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Graham Swift—then added, "In fact I admire all four of those writers... they don't only do people's feelings... nevertheless it's become ossified". Norfolk she described in 2003 as "the best of the young novelists now writing". She also spoke of her admiration for American writer Helen DeWitt's book The Last Samurai. Hensher, who counts Byatt as a friend, said: "She's very unusual for an English person, in that she's quite suspicious of comedy. With most people, sooner or later, every intellectual position comes down to a joke—it never does with her."

Byatt was a judge on many literary award panels, including the Betty Trask Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction, the Hawthornden Prize and the Booker. She also wrote for the media, including for The Times Literary Supplement, British journal Prospect and newspapers The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times.

Awards and honours

Byatt was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Honours
Byatt was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1990 New Year Honours, and was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), "for services to Literature", in Elizabeth II's 1999 Birthday Honours.

She was also awarded:

 * 1991: Honorary DLitt from the Durham University
 * 1993: Honorary LittD from the University of Liverpool
 * 1994: Honorary Doctorate from the University of Portsmouth
 * 1995: Honorary Doctorate from the University of London
 * 1999: Honorary DLitt from the University of Cambridge
 * 1999: Honorary Fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge
 * 2004: Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent
 * 2004: Honorary Fellow, University College London
 * 2008: The Times named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945
 * 2010: Honorary doctorate from Leiden University
 * 2017: Fellow of the British Academy of the British Academy
 * 2017: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement

Literary

 * 1986: PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, for Still Life

 * 1990: Booker Prize for Fiction, for Possession: A Romance
 * 1990: Irish Times International Fiction Prize, for Possession: A Romance
 * 1991: Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book), for Possession: A Romance
 * 1995: Premio Malaparte (Italy)
 * 1995: Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, for The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
 * 1998: Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, for The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
 * 2002: Shakespeare Prize (Germany)
 * 2009: Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix
 * 2009: Booker Prize shortlist, for The Children's Book
 * 2010: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for The Children's Book
 * 2016: Erasmus Prize (Netherlands), for "exceptional contribution to literature"
 * 2017: Park Kyong-ni Prize (South Korea)
 * 2018: Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award (Denmark)

Memberships

 * 1987–1988: Kingman Committee of Inquiry into the teaching of English Language, (Department of Education and Science)
 * 1984–1988: Management Committee, Society of Authors (Deputy chairman, 1986, Chairman, 1986–1988)
 * 1993–1998: Board, British Council (Member of Literature Advisory Panel, 1990–1998)
 * 2014: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foreign Honorary Member

Novels
The following books form a tetralogy known as The Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).

 * 1964: Shadow of a Sun, Chatto & Windus reprinted in 1991 with originally intended title The Shadow of the Sun
 * 1967: The Game, Chatto & Windus
 * 1978: The Virgin in the Garden, Chatto & Windus
 * 1985: Still Life, Chatto & Windus
 * 1990: Possession: A Romance, Chatto & Windus
 * 1996: Babel Tower, Chatto & Windus
 * 2000: The Biographer's Tale, Chatto & Windus
 * 2002: A Whistling Woman, Chatto & Windus
 * 2009: The Children's Book, Chatto & Windus
 * 2011: Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, Canongate ISBN 9780802120847

Short story collections

 * 1987: Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus
 * 1993: The Matisse Stories, Chatto & Windus
 * 1994: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Chatto & Windus
 * 1998: Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, Chatto & Windus
 * 2003: Little Black Book of Stories, Chatto & Windus
 * 2021: Medusa's Ankles: Selected Stories, Chatto & Windus

Novellas

 * 1992: Angels and Insects, Chatto & Windus; comprises a pair of novellas:
 * Morpho Eugenia
 * The Conjugial Angel

Essays and biographies

 * 1965: Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus
 * 1970: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, Nelson
 * 1976: Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study, Longman
 * 1989: Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life, Hogarth Press
 * 1991: Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings, Chatto & Windus
 * 1995: Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (with Ignes Sodre), Chatto & Windus
 * 2000: On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, Chatto & Windus
 * 2001: Portraits in Fiction, Chatto & Windus
 * 2016: Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, Knopf ISBN 978-1101947470

Texts edited

 * 1989: George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (editor with Nicholas Warren), Penguin
 * 1995: New Writing Volume 4 (editor with Alan Hollinghurst), Vintage
 * 1997: New Writing Volume 6 (editor with Peter Porter), Vintage
 * 1998: Oxford Book of English Short Stories (editor), Oxford University Press
 * 2001: The Bird Hand Book (with photographs by Victor Schrager), Graphis Inc. (New York)

title: A. S. Byatt


text:
Northeast Kingdom

The Northeast Kingdom (also, locally, "The Kingdom" and abbreviated NEK) is the northeast corner of the U.S. state of Vermont, approximately comprising Essex, Orleans, and Caledonia counties and with a population of 64,764 at the 2010 census. The term "Northeast Kingdom" is attributed to George D. Aiken, former Governor of Vermont and a U.S. senator, who first used the term in a 1949 speech.

It includes several "gateway" towns, considered to be entry points to the region from a particular direction: at the southeastern corner, St. Johnsbury, just a few miles from the New Hampshire border; to the north, Newport and Derby, close to the Canada–US border; and to the southwest, Hardwick and Danville.

Interstate 91, Interstate 93, U.S. Route 5, and U.S. Route 2 are the main roads that connect travelers to the Northeast Kingdom.

Geography
The Northeast Kingdom is bordered on the east by the Connecticut River and on the west by the Green Mountains. The highest point is Jay Peak, a summit on the main ridge of the Green Mountains, at 3858 ft. The highest point outside of the Green Mountains is East Mountain in East Haven, with a summit elevation of 3439 ft.

The Kingdom encompasses 55 towns and gores, with a land area of 2027 mi2, about 21% of the state of Vermont. The city of Newport is the only incorporated city in the tri-county area.

As of 1997, 80% of the Northeast Kingdom was covered by forest; 59% was northern hardwood, 29% spruce or fir.

The Northeast Kingdom has been listed in the North American and international editions of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz. In 2006, the National Geographic Society named the Northeast Kingdom as the most desirable place to visit in the country and the ninth most desirable place to visit in the world.

The largest municipalities in the Northeast Kingdom are the towns of St. Johnsbury (population 7,603), Lyndon (5,981), and Derby (4,621), and the city of Newport (4,589).

Geology
Although Vermont is known as the Green Mountain State, the Northeast Kingdom lies outside that geological formation and is based on a set of long-ago volcanic islands, compressed during collision with the Taconic orogeny. Views and vistas differ sharply from those of the state's central mountain spine.

The presence of kame terraces in the counties are of interest in connection with the glacial drift that gave the Northeast Kingdom its soil and its surface stones and boulders. These terraces have beds of sand and clay from which bricks were once manufactured.

Two land masses collided at the end of the Ordovician Period about 466 million years ago. This collision first formed what are now the Green Mountains which extend into the westernmost part of the Northeast Kingdom. It also created great pressure within the earth, resulting in active volcanoes. The resultant eruptions produced igneous rock which became the granite found in many of the region's mountains and in the Connecticut River Valley.

The remaining geology was created during the Silurian–Devonian Period, about 400 million years ago, and left behind slate, with some granite, schist, and limestone.

An expansion of the polar glaciers resulted in an ice age which greatly affected the geology. A 1 mi sheet of ice covered the Kingdom several times, over one million years, until 13,500 years ago. It brought the many boulders seen in the area and created many prominent features, including Lake Memphremagog, Lake Willoughby, and Crystal Lake.

The retreat of the Laurentide glacier allowed the Green Mountains again to arise, but much eroded. A saltwater incursion resulting in the Champlain Sea from the Atlantic Ocean covered much of Vermont, including what is now Lake Memphremagog. This incursion stopped 11,000 years ago and became fresh water. Forests later appeared after the water receded.

Flora
According to the A. W. Kuchler U.S. potential natural vegetation types, the Northeast Kingdom would have four dominant vegetation types and forms listed below from highest to lowest elevation.

 * 1) A dominant vegetation type of Northeastern Spruce/Fir (96) with a dominant vegetation form of Northern Conifer Forest (22).
 * 2) A dominant vegetation type of Northern Hardwoods/Spruce (108) with a dominant vegetation form of Northern Hardwoods (23).
 * 3) A dominant vegetation type of Northern Hardwoods (106) with a dominant vegetation form of Northern Hardwoods (23).
 * 4) Transitional dominant vegetation types of Northern Hardwoods (106) and Appalachian Oak (104) with transitional vegetation forms of Northern Hardwoods (23) and Eastern Hardwood Forest (25).

The plant hardiness zone at Island Pond is 3b with an average annual extreme minimum air temperature of -31.8 °F. The spring bloom typically peaks around May 13 and fall color usually peaks around September 30.

Fauna
In 1996, the moose population totalled 2,000, about 1.75/mi² (0.676/km²). In 2005, the population was 5,000; 3.4/mi² (1.313/km²). State officials determined that the herd had become stressed due to overpopulation, and that the 1996 figure was more desirable. As a result, 1,260 hunting permits were issued in 2008 to cull the herd. In 2009, state officials aimed for one moose per 1 mi2.

There are also black bear, deer, bobcat, coyote, fox, fisher, loon, wild turkey, and ruffed grouse.

In 2013, Canadian lynxes were spotted. These prey on the snowshoe hare.

Martens, extinct in Vermont by the early 20th century, have found their way back to the Northeast Kingdom in small groups in the 21st century from New Hampshire or Canada.

The Virginia opossum moved into the area in the 1950s.

Climate
According to the Köppen climate classification system, the Northeast Kingdom has a Warm-summer, Humid continental climate (Dfb). Dfb climates are characterized by a least one month having an average mean temperature ≤ 32.0 °F, at least four months with an average mean temperature ≥ 50.0 °F, all months with an average mean temperature < 71.6 °F and no significant precipitation difference between seasons. Although most summer days are comfortably humid in the Northeast Kingdom, episodes of warmth and moderate humidity can occur with heat index values > 88 °F. Since 1981, the highest air temperature at Island Pond was 91.0 °F on 07/08/1988, and the highest daily average mean dew point was 70.0 °F on 07/02/2018. Since 1981, the wettest calendar day was 3.67 in on 08/28/2011. During the winter months, the average annual extreme minimum air temperature is -31.8 °F. Since 1981, the coldest air temperature at Island Pond was -40.7 °F on 01/04/1981. Episodes of extreme cold and wind can occur with wind chill values < -48 °F.

The average growing season is about 123-130 frost-free days.

On December 30, 1933, the lowest recorded temperature in the New England states was registered as -50.8 F, at Bloomfield in Essex County.

Snowfall is plentiful in the region, and very large snowstorms occur every few years. These have included the 2007 Valentine's Day Blizzard, which brought 21.1 in to the area over a two-day period. This was nearly matched on March 6, 2011, when the area received 20.3 in of snow. This snow fall variable was matched again on two separate occasions in 2017, with 18-24" of new snow covering the area exactly a month apart. Both storms also severely effected the rest of New England and Upstate New York.

Early human history
The retreating glacier allowed the northern migration of early humans around 9300 BCE, descendants of Asian immigrants during the Ice Age. By 7300 BCE, people and a changing environment had eliminated large game from the area such as caribou and mastodons.

From 1000 BCE to 1600 CE, Abenakis inhabited the Kingdom.

Perhaps as many as a thousand Cowasuck Indians lived in Essex County near the Connecticut River in 1500. This tribe included all people from the Cahass, Cohassiac, Coos, Coosuc, and Koes tribes. The Cowasucks were Abenakis, members of the Wabanaki Confederacy, the Algonquian pact of five tribes which banded together to combat Iroquois aggression perhaps about 1500, though the exact date of the Iroquois pact is unknown.

European diseases, such as typhus, contracted from exposure to traders, killed many of the Cowasucks until only a few hundred were left in the Northeast Kingdom by 1600.

Modern history
The Northeast Kingdom's popularity as a destination grew strongly from the moment that Governor George Aiken delivered a name for the region in 1949. Vermont Public Radio reporter Charlotte Albright researched the naming process and wrote, "The novelist Howard Frank Mosher, who immortalizes the area in his fictional "Kingdom County," believes Aiken cooked up the phrase while fishing in Essex County." Aiken and his wife Lola were surprised at how strongly the term caught on.

Patent medicines were popular here, as in other rural regions, in the late 19th century. The local pharmacists who devised these "cures" gradually metamorphosed into today's pharmacies, and in the Northeast Kingdom they are still businesses where residents are often recognized and greeted by name. Similarly, the area's "country doctors" are now affiliated with two regional hospitals (North Country Hospital in Newport, VT, and Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital in St. Johnsbury, VT), as well as the Dartmouth-Hitchcock network.

There were about 49 "town dumps" where residents disposed of trash, operating in the NEK prior to 1987. After the state began regulating the environment in 1987, 41 of these closed down, including the one at what is now Gardner Park in Newport. Seven of the remainder closed during subsequent state regulatory activity. Only the one in Coventry, owned by Charlie Nadeau, remained. The Parker landfill in Lyndonville closed, as did the ones in Barton, Morrisville, Colebrook, Morgan, Westmore, and Lunenburg.

In 2010, Yankee magazine named the NEK the second favorite romantic getaway and the third favorite family getaway in New England.

In 2015, the region featured half a dozen local radio stations, as well as regional versions of Vermont Public Radio (FM88.5 broadcast from Burke Mountain) and Montpelier's The Point; popular are Magic 97.7 FM broadcast from Lyndonville, VT, and MOO (WMOO) at 92.1FM from Derby Center, Vermont.

Demographics
In all three counties, estimated population dropped between 2010 and 2012 by about 200 people. State population declined slightly as well.

Government
As in the rest of New England, there is a strong state government. Town government often uses unpaid volunteers for its services. There is a superficial county government, all funded by the state. The counties have sheriffs, judges, prosecutors, and other officers; all, except for judges, elected by the county, but funded by the state.

Recognizing the need for services on an intermediate level, state legislation created the Regional Planning Commissions (RPC), to aid the towns in land use issues, and Economic Development Commissions (EDC), tasked with fostering economic development in their jurisdictions. These RPCs and EDCs report to the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development. They must also report to their boards, which are made up of representatives of each town in the commission. As with some state agencies there is provision for these commissions to also organize as nonprofit groups, yet still maintain status as government agencies. This method of organization permits RPCs and EDCs to augment their state and federal funding with other sources of income. This arrangement also allows the EDCs to own properties such as industrial parks and Business Incubator Facilities.

RPCs and EDCs have no taxing or regulatory authority. However, RPCs do write a regional plan (as towns can have town plans). Town plans can not run contrary to the regional plans. RPCs also have automatic party status to any ACT 250 applications. ACT 250 permits are the state's Land Use Permit issued by the Land Use Panel of the Vermont Natural Resources Board. ACT 250 applications must be in compliance with the RPC's Regional Plan. A copy of all ACT 250 permit applications must be submitted (by the applicants) to the RPCs for review.

The Northeast Kingdom is unique, as it benefits from an agency that is both an Economic Development Commission as well as a Regional Planning Commission, the Northeastern Vermont Development Association and Regional Planning Commission (NVDA). Under a state legislators' study to lower state government spending, lawmakers have been looking to the Northeast Kingdom's RPC/EDC as a model for possible consolidation of agencies throughout the state.

Municipalities are governed by an elected Board of Selectmen and managed by an elected town or city clerk.

Public health
Various organizations are tasked with aiding public health including the Northeast Kingdom Human Services.

The Kingdom is part of a Rural Economic Area Partnership which the federal government funds. This may pay for improvements in health and safety.

Farming
In 2010 the largest dairy farmer in the state was in Orleans County with 5,000 head and 2,500 milkers, spread over five farms.

Maple syrup is produced in the region.

Tourism
The area offers mountain biking, skiing, and fall foliage viewing. A rail trail across the southern part of the Kingdom originates in St. Johnsbury on South Main Street as part of the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail; in the north, the Kingdom Heritage Lands feature multiple use access, including hiking, bicycling, and hunting; and in the center of the Kingdom, radiating outward from Burke Mountain, are hundreds of acres threaded with well-kept trails provided via Kingdom Trails of East Burke, VT.

NGOs
There are a number of non-profit, non-governmental agencies, that either offer services or promote business or housing. These include the Northern Community Investment Corporation, based in St. Johnsbury; Rural Edge, formerly known as the Gilman Housing Trust; the Lyndon Outing Club, an all-volunteer-run ski hill providing affordable skiing to the community since 1937; and The Kingdom Trail Association, which builds and maintains the non-motorized recreational trail network in Burke.

Infrastructure
In 2008, 74% of the roads were rated in poor or very poor condition. There were 480 bridges with spans of 20 ft or more. There were a number of bridges deemed structurally deficient. 63 percent of those were municipally owned.

Railroads
Two railroads traverse the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont:

 * Washington County Railroad (part of the Vermont Rail System) - WACR has just recently been awarded a 30-year contract to operate the track running from White River Junction north through St. Johnsbury and Newport. Most of the track through the Kingdom meets FRA Class 2 standards, 25 mph for freight movement; 30 mph for passengers.
 * The St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad - Six trips a day between Island Pond and Maine. Four trips a day between Island Pond and Canada. Lumber is the principal freight.

The St. Johnsbury and Lamoille County Railroad operated an east-west route terminating in St. Johnsbury from the 1880s to the 1990s, under varying names. Much of the right-of-way is now the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail.

Bus
Rural Community Transportation runs out of Saint Johnsbury and serves Caledonia, Essex, Lamoille, and Orleans counties.

Airports
There are three state airports: Northeast Kingdom International Airport (KEFK) in Newport/Coventry, Caledonia County State Airport (KCDA) in Lyndonville; and John H. Boylan State Airport (5B1) in Island Pond. Light private and business aircraft land there. KEFK has two runways, its long 5300 ft runway allows for jet operations. KEFK is served by U.S. Customs as a designated Landing Rights Airport.

Solid waste disposal
The Northeast Kingdom Waste and Central Vermont Solid Management Districts are in charge of implementing Vermont's Act 148, initiating mandatory recycling. In 2014, the NEK recycled about 20%, low for the state which averages 30–36%. Recycling rates in the Central Vermont District meet the state average. An average citizen here produces 2 lb of trash per person per day, compared to 3 lb for the rest of the state. The budget for the 2016 calendar year was $716,673. Towns or haulers were charged $23.25 per ton. The Kingdom produced about half the national average of trash. This is the result of lower incomes and fewer places to shop.

In popular culture
Peacham was used as the filming location for the 1993 movie Ethan Frome, based on the novel of the same name. The 1996 film The Spitfire Grill was largely shot in Peacham.

Robert Frost wrote a poem with the Kingdom as its topic entitled "A Servant to Servants".

Several of Archer Mayor's books in the Joe Gunther series based on a Vermont detective are set in the Northeast Kingdom.

Chris Bohjalian's novel Midwives places most of its action in the Northeast Kingdom.

Newspapers

 * The Caledonian-Record, the area's largest newspaper, is published daily in St. Johnsbury.
 * The Chronicle - published weekly in Barton
 * The Newport Daily Express - published daily except Saturdays and Sundays in Newport. Owned by Horizon Publications out of Marion, IL. Printed in Canada
 * The North Star Monthly - published monthly in Danville
 * The Hardwick Gazette - published weekly in Hardwick

Radio
Sources:

 * WSTJ - 1340 AM; St. Johnsbury, VT - Standards
 * WIKE - 1490 AM; Newport, VT - Classic Rock (rebroadcasts WMTK Littleton, N.H.)
 * W276DK - 103.1 FM; Newport, VT - Rebroadcast of WIKE
 * WVPA - 88.5 FM; St. Johnsbury, VT - Vermont Public Radio
 * WCKJ - 90.5 FM; St. Johnsbury, VT - Religious - "The Light"
 * WVLR-FM - 91.5 FM; Lyndonville, VT - Vermont Public Co.
 * WMOO - 92.1 FM; Derby Center, VT - Hot Adult Contemporary - "Moo 92"
 * WJSY-LP - 96.1 FM; Newport, VT - Religious
 * W243AE - 96.5 FM; Orleans, VT - Religious - "The Light"
 * WGMT - 97.7 FM; Lyndon, VT - Hot Adult Contemporary - "Magic 97.7"
 * W257AU - 99.3 FM; St. Johnsbury, VT - Rebroadcast of WMOO
 * WKXH - 105.5 FM; St. Johnsbury, VT - Country - "Kix 105.5"
 * WDOT - 95.7 FM; Danville, VT - Adult Album Alternative - "The Point" (rebroadcasts WNCS/Montpelier)
 * WVTI 106.9 FM broadcasts classical music from Island Pond, Vermont.

Television
The Northeast Kingdom is part of the Burlington / Plattsburgh television market. However, the use of cable and satellite to view television in the region is essential in many areas, due to the mountainous terrain between the region and most of the market's main television transmitters, many of them broadcasting from Mount Mansfield.

Many areas of the Northeast Kingdom receive cable television from either Comcast or Charter.

 * UHF Channel 20, WVTB (PBS), St. Johnsbury, Vermont PBS
 * Channel 14 W14CK Newport (programming unknown, last known as a rebroadcast of WWBI-LP)
 * Cable Channel 7, KATV, Kingdom Access Television, Lyndonville, Public-access television cable TV

title: Northeast Kingdom


text:
Talk:Percy Shaw

Untitled
The cat's eye road reflector is a simple device that has saved countless lives. These inexpensive glass and rubber reflectors are set on the roadway at regular intervals, and help motorists see where the road is at night. Each of the cat's eyes reflects oncoming light, acting like lights set into the road. This device was invented in 1933 by Percy Shaw, from Yorkshire, England. He invented it after he had been driving on a dark, winding road on a foggy night; he was saved from going off the side of the hill by a cat, whose eyes reflected his car's lights. Shaw's invention mimicked the reflectivity of a cat's eyes. Because of his invention, Shaw was awarded the Order of the British Empire ("OBE") by Queen Elizabeth of England in 1965.

I remember seeing a BBC TV feature back in the 1960s (the "Tonight" program, I think) which claimed that while Percy Shaw invented the self-cleaning mechanism for cat's eyes, he did not invent the reflecting cat's eye itself, this being an earlier relatively unsuccessful invention. 82.71.74.190 13:32, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

IP 220.253.195.86
I moved the comment from IP 220.253.195.86 to the discussion page:

 * the story i heard on a school excursion in the late 70s or early 80s was that percy shaw needed to navigate home from the pub up a steep hair pinned road at night so he made cats eyes so he can navigate home after a few beers. 220.253.195.86, 06:29, 20.August 2008.

--DrJunge (talk) 06:50, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Earlier inventor
http://www.catseyes.com/freddie-lee-biography.asp —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.133.124.13 (talk) 18:32, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I see that this web page was "created by Freddie Lee's daughters". Professional looking job, but is there an independent, reliable source that carries this information? --Old Moonraker (talk) 20:58, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

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User:Cuneytgurer

Department of Political Science Kent State University Kent/OH cgurer@kent.edu

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Iron Guard

The Iron Guard (Garda de Fier) was a Romanian militant revolutionary fascist movement and political party founded in 1927 by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as the Legion of the Archangel Michael (Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail) or the Legionary Movement (Mișcarea Legionară). It was strongly anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, anti-communist, and anti-Semitic. It differed from other European far-right movements of the period due to its spiritual basis, as the Iron Guard was deeply imbued with Romanian Orthodox Christian mysticism.

In March 1930, Codreanu formed the Iron Guard as a paramilitary branch of the Legion, which in 1935 changed its official name to the "Totul pentru Țară" party—literally, "Everything for the Country". It existed into the early part of the Second World War, during which time it came to power. Members were called Legionnaires or, outside of the movement, "Greenshirts" because of the predominantly green uniforms they wore.

When Marshal Ion Antonescu came to power in September 1940, he brought the Iron Guard into the government, creating the National Legionary State. In January 1941, following the Legionnaires' rebellion, Antonescu used the army to suppress the movement, destroying the organization; its commander, Horia Sima, along with other leaders, escaped to Germany.

Name
The "Legion of the Archangel Michael" (Legiunea Arhangelul Mihail) was founded by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu on 24 June 1927 and led by him until his assassination in 1938. Despite various changes of the (intermittently banned) organization's name, members of the movement were widely referred to as "legionnaires" (sometimes "legionaries"; legionarii) and the organization as the "Legion" or the "Legionary Movement".

In March 1930, Codreanu formed the "Iron Guard" (Garda de Fier) as a paramilitary political branch of the Legion; this name eventually came to refer to the Legion itself. From June 1935 onwards, the organization used the name "Totul pentru Țară", literally meaning "Everything for the Country", in electoral contexts.

Founding and rise
In 1927, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu left the number two position (under A.C. Cuza) in the Romanian political party known as the National-Christian Defense League (Liga Apărării Național Creștine, LANC), and founded the Legion of the Archangel Michael.

The Legion differed from other fascist movements in that it had its mass base among the peasantry and students, rather than amongst military veterans. However, the legionnaires shared the general fascist "respect for the war veterans". Romania had a very large intelligentsia relative to the general population with 2.0 university students per one thousand of the population compared to 1.7 per one thousand of the population in far wealthier Germany, while Bucharest had more lawyers in the 1930s than did the much larger city of Paris. Even before the worldwide Great Depression, Romanian universities were producing far more graduates than the number of available jobs and the Great Depression in Romania had further drastically limited the opportunities for employment by the intelligentsia, who turned to the Iron Guard out of frustration. Many Orthodox Romanians, having obtained a university degree, which they expected to be their ticket to the middle class, were enraged to find that the jobs they were hoping for did not exist, and came to embrace the Legion's message that it was the Jews who were blocking them from finding the middle-class employment they wanted.

Beyond that, Romania had traditionally been dominated by a Francophile elite, who preferred to speak French over Romanian in private and who claimed that their policies were leading Romania to the West with the National Liberal Party, in particular, maintaining that their economic policies were going to industrialize Romania. The national Great Depression seemed to show the literal bankruptcy of these policies and many of the younger Romanian intelligentsia, especially university students, were attracted by the Iron Guard's glorification of "Romanian genius" and its leaders who boasted that they were proud to speak Romanian. The Romanian-born Israeli historian Jean Ancel wrote that from the mid-19th century onward, that Romanian intelligentsia had a "schizophrenic attitude towards the West and its values".

Romania had been a strongly Francophile country starting in 1859 when the United Principalities came into being, giving Romania effective independence from the Ottoman Empire (an event largely made possible by French diplomacy which pressured the Ottomans on behalf of the Romanians), and from that time onward, most of the Romanian intelligentsia professed themselves believers in French ideas about the universal appeal of democracy, freedom and human rights, while at the same time holding antisemitic views about Romania's Jewish minority. Despite their antisemitism, most of the Romanian intelligentsia believed that France was not only Romania's "Latin sister", but also a "big Latin sister" that would guide its "little Latin sister" Romania along the correct path. Ancel wrote that Codreanu was the first significant Romanian to reject not only the prevailing Francophilia of the intelligentsia, but also the entire framework of universal democratic values, which Codreanu claimed were "Jewish inventions" designed to destroy Romania.

In contrast to the traditional idea that Romania would follow the path of its "Latin sister" France, Codreanu promoted a xenophobic, exclusive ultra-nationalism, where Romania would follow its own path and rejected the French ideas about universal values and human rights. In a marked departure from the traditional ideas held by the elite about making Romania into the modernized and Westernized "France of Eastern Europe", the Legion demanded a return to the traditional Eastern Orthodox values of the past and glorified Romania's peasant culture and folk customs as the living embodiment of "Romanian genius."

The leaders of the Iron Guard often wore traditional peasant costumes with crucifixes and bags of Romanian soil around their necks to emphasise their commitment to authentic Romanian folk values, in marked contrast to Romania's Francophile elite who preferred to dress in the style of the latest fashions of Paris. The fact that many members of Romania's elite were often corrupt and that very little of the vast sums of money generated by Romania's oil found its way into the pockets of ordinary people, further enhanced the appeal of the Legion who denounced the entire elite as irredeemably corrupt.

With Codreanu as a charismatic leader, the Legion was known for skillful propaganda, including a very capable use of spectacle. Utilizing marches, religious processions, patriotic and partisan hymns and anthems, along with volunteer work and charitable campaigns in rural areas, in support of anti-communism, the League presented itself as an alternative to corrupt parties. Initially, the Iron Guard hoped to encompass any political faction, regardless of its position on the political spectrum, that wished to combat the rise of communism in the USSR.

The Iron Guard was purposely anti-Semitic, promoting the idea that "Rabbinical aggression against the Christian world"—which manifested through Freemasonry, Freudianism, homosexuality, atheism, Marxism, Bolshevism, and the civil war in Spain"—were undermining society.

The Vaida-Voevod government outlawed the Iron Guard in January 1931. On 10 December 1933, the Romanian Liberal Prime Minister Ion Duca banned the Iron Guard. After a brief period of arrests, beatings, torture and even killings (18 members of the Legionary Movement were killed by the police force), Iron Guard members retaliated on 29 December 1933, by assassinating Duca on the platform of Sinaia railway station.

Struggle for power

In the 1937 parliamentary elections the Legion came in third with 15.5% of the vote, behind the National Liberal and the National Peasant Parties. King Carol II strongly opposed the Legion's political aims and successfully kept them out of government until he himself was forced to abdicate in 1940. During this period, the Legion was generally on the receiving end of persecution. On 10 February 1938, the king dissolved the government and initiated a royal dictatorship.

Codreanu advised the Legion to accept the new regime. However, Interior Minister Armand Călinescu did not trust Codreanu and ordered him arrested on 16 April. Realizing that the government was looking for an excuse to have him executed, Codreanu ordered the Legion's acting commander, Horia Sima, to take no action unless there was evidence that he was in immediate danger. However, Sima, who was known for his violent streak, launched a wave of terrorist activity in autumn. Codreanu got wind of this and ordered the violence to end.

The order came too late. On the night of 29–30 November 1938, Codreanu and several other legionnaires were strangled to death by their Gendarmerie escort, purportedly during an attempt to escape from prison. It is generally agreed that there was no such escape attempt, and that Codreanu and the others were killed on the king's orders, probably in reaction to the 24 November 1938 murder by legionnaires of a relative (some sources say a "friend") of Călinescu. In the aftermath of Carol's decision to crush the Iron Guard, many members of the Legion fled into exile in Germany, where they received both material and financial support from the NSDAP, especially from the SS and Alfred Rosenberg's Foreign Political Office.

For much of the interwar period, Romania was in the French sphere of influence, and in 1926 Romania signed a treaty of alliance with France. Following the Remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, Carol started to move away from the traditional alliance with France as the fear grew within Romania that the French would do nothing in the event of German aggression in Eastern Europe, but Carol's regime was still regarded as essentially pro-French. From the German viewpoint, the Iron Guard was regarded as far preferable to King Carol. The royal dictatorship lasted just over one year. On 7 March 1939, a new government was formed with Călinescu as prime minister; on 21 September 1939, he, in turn was assassinated by legionnaires avenging Codreanu. Călinescu favored a foreign policy where Romania would maintain a pro-Allied neutrality in World War II, and as such, the SS had a hand in organizing Călinescu's assassination. Further rounds of mutual carnage ensued, with the government massacring over 300 Legionnaires nationwide in reprisal.

In addition to the conflict with the king, an internal battle for power ensued in the wake of Codreanu's death. Waves of repression almost eliminated the Legion's original leadership by 1939, promoting second-rank members to the forefront. According to a secret report filed by the Hungarian political secretary in Bucharest in late 1940, three main factions existed: the group gathered around Sima, a dynamic local leader from the Banat, which was the most pragmatic and least Orthodox in its orientation; the group composed of Codreanu's father, Ion Zelea Codreanu, and his brothers (who despised Sima); and the Moța-Marin group, which wanted to strengthen the movement's religious character.

After a long period of confusion, Sima, representing the Legion's less radical wing, overcame all competition and assumed leadership, being recognised as such on 6 September 1940 by the Legionary Forum, a body created at his initiative. On 28 September the elder Codreanu stormed the Legion headquarters in Bucharest (the Green House) in an unsuccessful attempt to install himself as leader. Sima was close to SS Volksgruppenführer Andreas Schmidt, a volksdeutsch (ethnic German) from Romania, and through him become close to Schmidt's father-in-law, the powerful Gottlob Berger who headed the SS Main Office in Berlin. The British historian Rebecca Haynes has argued that financial and organizational support from the SS was an important factor in Sima's rise.

Sima's ascendancy
In the first months of World War II, Romania was officially neutral. However the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, initially a secret document, stipulated, among other things, Soviet "interest" in Bessarabia. After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on 1 September, joined by the Soviet Union on 17 September, Romania granted refuge to members of Poland's fleeing government and military. Even after the assassination of Călinescu on 21 September, King Carol tried to maintain neutrality, but the later French surrender to Germany and the British retreat from Europe rendered them unable to fulfil their assurances to Romania. A lean toward the Axis powers was probably inevitable.

This political alignment was obviously favourable to the surviving legionnaires, and became even more so after France fell in May 1940. Sima and several other legionnaires who had taken refuge in Germany began slipping back into Romania. A month after the fall of France, Carol restructured his regime's single party, the National Renaissance Front, into the more overtly totalitarian "Party of the Nation," and invited a number of legionnaires to take part in the restructured government. On 4 July, Sima and two other leading legionnaires joined the government of Ion Gigurtu. However, they resigned after only a month due to mounting pressure for Carol to abdicate.

The Second Vienna Award, which forced Romania to cede much of northern Transylvania to Hungary, angered Romanians of all political shades and all but destroyed Carol politically. Despite this, a legionnaire coup on 3 September failed.

Electoral history
At the 1927 and the 1931 elections the movement stood for the Chamber of Deputies as Legion of the Archangel Michael. In 1932 it stood as the Codreanu Group, winning five of the 387 seats. It did not compete in the 1928 election and was banned in 1933. At the 1937 election it stood as Everything for the Country Party, winning 66 of the 387 seats. At the 1939 election, all opposition parties were banned.

In power
More or less out of desperation, King Carol II named General (later Marshal) Ion Antonescu as prime minister, partly because of the general's close ties with the Legion. Unknown to Carol, however, Antonescu had secretly reached an agreement with other political figures to force out the king. Amid popular outrage at the Second Vienna Award, Carol's position became untenable, and he was forced to abdicate in favour of his son Michael, who quickly confirmed Antonescu's dictatorial powers and granted him the title of Conducător (leader) of Romania.

Although Antonescu was an archnationalist and authoritarian, his first preference was to form a government of national unity, in which all parties would have accepted him as dictator. However, with the exception of the Legion, the other parties at least wanted to maintain the appearance of parliamentary rule. The Legion, in contrast, fully supported Antonescu's vision of an ultranationalist and authoritarian regime. With this in mind, Antonescu formed an alliance with the Legion on 15 September. As part of the deal, Romania was proclaimed a "National Legionary State," with the Legion as the country's only legal party. Antonescu became the Legion's honorary leader. Sima became deputy premier, and four other legionnaires joined Sima in the cabinet. The Iron Guard was the only Fascist movement outside Germany and Italy to come to power without foreign assistance.

Once in power, from 14 September 1940 until 21 January 1941, the Legion ratcheted up the level of already harsh anti-Semitic legislation and pursued, with impunity, a campaign of pogroms and political assassinations. On 27 November 1940 more than 60 former dignitaries or officials were executed in Jilava prison while awaiting trial. The following day, historian and former prime minister Nicolae Iorga and economic theorist Virgil Madgearu were assassinated; assassination attempts were made on former prime ministers and Carol supporters Constantin Argetoianu, Guță Tătărescu and Ion Gigurtu, but they were freed from the hands of the Legionary police and put under military protection.

Armaments
As a paramilitary force, the Iron Guard had no shortage of firearms while in power. At the start of 1941, in Bucharest alone, the Legionnaires had 5,000 guns (rifles, revolvers and machine guns) as well as numerous hand grenades. Included in their small arms was the MP28/II submachine-gun supplied by Himmler's SD. The Legion also possessed a small, mostly symbolic armored force of four vehicles: two police armored cars and two Renault UE Chenillettes from the Malaxa factory. The Malaxa factory had been licence-producing these French armored vehicles since mid-1939, and aside from the two such machines, the factory also supplied the Legion with machine guns and rifles. For transport, the Legion possessed almost 200 trucks in Bucharest alone.

Failure and destruction
Once in power, Sima and Antonescu quarreled bitterly. According to historian Stanley G. Payne, Antonescu intended to create a situation analogous to that of Francisco Franco's regime in Spain, in which the Legion would be subordinated to the state. He demanded that Sima cede overall leadership of the Legion to him, but Sima refused.

Sima demanded that the government follow the 'legionary spirit', and all major offices be held by legionaries. Other groups were to be dissolved. Economic policy, said Sima, should be coordinated closely with Germany. Antonescu rejected Sima's demands and was alarmed by the Iron Guard's death squads. He decided to bide his time until he had a chance to destroy the Legion once and for all. On 14 January 1941, after securing approval in person from Hitler, and with support of the Romanian army and other political leaders, Antonescu moved in. The Guard started a last-ditch coup attempt but in a three-day civil war, Antonescu won decisively with support from the Romanian and German armies. During the run-up to the coup attempt, different factions of the German government backed different sides in Romania with the SS supporting the Iron Guard while the military and the Auswärtiges Amt supported General Antonescu. Baron Otto von Bolschwing of the SS who was stationed at the German embassy in Bucharest played a major role in smuggling arms for the Iron Guard.

During the crisis, members of the Iron Guard instigated a deadly pogrom in Bucharest. Particularly gruesome was the murder of dozens of Jewish civilians in the Bucharest slaughterhouse. The perpetrators hanged the Jews from meat hooks, then mutilated and killed them in a vicious parody of kosher slaughtering practices. The American ambassador to Romania Franklin Mott Gunther who toured the meat-packing plant where the Jews were slaughtered with the placards reading "Kosher meat" on them reported back to Washington: "Sixty Jewish corpses were discovered on the hooks used for carcasses. They were all skinned....and the quantity of blood about was evidence that they had been skinned alive". Gunther wrote he was especially shocked that one of the Jewish victims hanging on the meat hooks was a 5-year-old girl. Sima and other legionnaires were helped by the Germans to escape to Germany.

During the rebellion and pogrom, the Iron Guard killed 125 Jews, while 30 soldiers died in the confrontation with the rebels. Following it, the Iron Guard movement was banned and 9,000 of its members were imprisoned. On 22 June 1941, the Iron Guards imprisoned in Iași since January by the Antonescu regime were released from prison and organized and armed by the police as part of the preparations for the Iași pogrom. When it came to killing Jews, the Antonescu regime and the Iron Guard were capable of finding common ground despite the failed coup in January 1941; Antonescu was as virulently anti-Semitic as the Guard. When the pogrom began in Iași on 27 June 1941, the Iron Guards armed with crow-bars and knives played a prominent role in leading the mobs that slaughtered Jews on the streets of Iași in one of the bloodiest pogroms ever in Europe.

Between 1944 and 1947 Romania had a coalition government in which the Communists played a leading, but not yet dominant role. Journalist Edward Behr claimed that in early 1947, a secret agreement was signed by the leaders of the exiled Iron Guard in displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany and Austria and the Romanian Communist Party, under which all of the Iron Guards in the DP camps except for those accused of the murder of Communists could return home to Romania in exchange for which the former Iron Guards would work as thugs to terrorize the anti-communist opposition as part of the plans for the ultimate Communist take-over of Romania. Behr further claimed that in the months after the "non-aggression pact" between the Communists and the Legion, thousands of Iron Guards returned to Romania, where they played a prominent role working for the Interior Ministry in breaking opposition to the emerging socialist government.

Ideology
Historian Stanley G. Payne writes in his study of Fascism, "The Legion was arguably the most unusual mass movement of interwar Europe." It was distinguished among other contemporaneous European fascist movements with respect to its understanding of nationalism, which was indelibly tied to religion. According to Ioanid, the Legion "willingly inserted strong elements of Orthodox Christianity into its political ideology to the point of becoming one of the rare modern European political movements with a religious ideological structure."

The movement's leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, was a religious nationalist who aimed at a spiritual resurrection for the nation, writing the movement was a "spiritual school...[which] strikes to transform and revolutionise the Romanian soul." According to Codreanu's philosophy, human life was a sinful, violent political war, which would ultimately be transcended by the spiritual nation. In this schema, the Legionnaire might have to perform actions beyond the simple will to fight, suppressing the preservation instinct for the sake of the country.

Like many other fascist movements, the Legion called for a revolutionary "new man", though this was not defined in physical terms, as with the Nazis, but was aimed at recreating and purifying oneself to bring the whole nation closer to God.

One of the qualities of this new man was selflessness; Codreanu wrote "When a politician enters a party the first question that he puts is 'what can I gain from this?...when a legionary enters the Legion he says 'For myself I want nothing'".

The Legion lacked a well-developed and consistent economic policy, though it generally promoted the idea of a communal or national economy, rejecting capitalism as overly materialistic.

The movement considered its main enemies to be the present political leadership and the Jews.

Style
Members wore dark green uniforms, which symbolized renewal, and accounted for them being occasionally referenced as "Greenshirts" (Cămășile verzi). Like fascist counterparts in Italy, Spain, and Germany, legionnaires greeted each other using the Roman salute.

The main symbol of the Iron Guard was a triple cross (a variant of the triple parted and fretted one), standing for prison bars (as a badge of martyrdom), and sometimes referred to as the "Archangel Michael Cross" (Crucea Arhanghelului Mihail).

The Legion developed a cult of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, best exemplified by the action group, Echipa morții, or "Death Squad". Codreanu claimed the name was chosen because members were ready to accept death while campaigning for the organization. A chapter of the Legion was called a cuib, or "nest," and was arranged around the virtues of discipline, work, silence, education, mutual aid, and honor.

The Iron Guard and gender
According to a 1933 police report, 8% of the Iron Guard's members were women, while a police report from 1938 placed the figure at 11%. Part of the reason for the overwhelming male membership of the Iron Guard was that a disproportionate number of legionnaires were university students and very few women went to university in Romania during the inter-war period. In the Romanian language, plurals are attached to most nouns that have either a masculine or feminine form. Words in English that are gender-neutral, such as "youth" or "member", are used in Romanian to refer either to Romanian men or Romanian women, young men or young women, and male members or female members. The Iron Guard almost always used the masculine plural forms in their writings and speeches, which may perhaps suggest that they had a male audience in mind, although in Romanian, like most languages, the masculine plural is also used for mixed-gender groups.

The Iron Guard explained that the problem of poverty in Romania was due to the Jews' ongoing colonization of Romania, which prevented Christian Romanians from getting ahead economically. The solution to this perceived problem was to drive the Jews out of Romania, which the Iron Guard claimed would finally allow Eastern Orthodox Romanians to rise to the middle class. The Iron Guard claimed that this Jewish "colonization" was due to most Romanian men lacking the masculine courage to protect their interests. In strikingly sexualized language, the Iron Guards argued that most Romanian men had been "emasculated" and were suffering from "sterility", which one Iron Guard, Alexandru Cantacuzino, called the "plague of the present" in a 1937 essay. Notably, the term Cantacuzino used was the masculine sterilitate rather than the feminine stearpă. The Iron Guards constantly spoke in viscerally sexualized rhetoric of the need to create a "new man" who would be "virile" and "strong", and end the "emasculation" of Romanian men. Beyond that, the Legion's obsession with violence and self-sacrifice were both subjects that were traditionally considered to be masculine in Romania.

Legacy
The name Garda de Fier is also used by a small nationalist group active in the post-communist Romania.

There are several contemporary far-right organizations in Romania, such as Pentru Patrie (For the Motherland) and Noua Dreaptă (The New Right), the latter considering itself heir to the Iron Guard's political philosophy, including personality cult centered on Corneliu Codreanu; however, the group uses the Celtic cross, which is not associated with legionarism.

Legionary architecture
Through their summer work camps, the Legionnaires performed volunteer work involving the construction and reparation of roads, bridges, churches and schools in rural areas. One notable construction of the Iron Guard is the "Green House" (Casa Verde). Built in the Romanian architectural style, this building on the outskirts of 1930s Bucharest served as the Legion's headquarters and home to Codreanu. The intention of these camps was to cultivate athleticism, discipline, sense of community and elimination of certain societal divisions. Horia Sima stated that the camps "destroyed class prejudice" by bringing together those from different classes. The attendees were not allowed to leave the camp except for emergencies and in their free time were to read literature. Following completion of camp time a diploma was received.

Public commemoration
The Iron Guard is currently commemorated in Romania and elsewhere through permanent public displays (monuments and street names) as well as public distinctions (such as posthumous honorary citizenship) dedicated to some of its members. A few such examples include:

 * Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the Iron Guard, has a roadside cross a few miles from Bucharest, near Buftea. It was built on the spot where he was executed in 1938. The site serves as a current destination for neo-Legionaries, who regularly gather there to commemorate Codreanu. Occasionally, members of right-wing extremist parties from outside Romania (such as Germany, Sweden and Italy) also attend these ceremonies. In 2012, the Elie Wiesel Institute notified the Romanian general prosecutor about the monument, claiming that two symbols displayed at the site – the logo of the Iron Guard and a photograph of Codreanu – were illegal. The prosecutor decided that the memorial did not violate the law, because Codreanu had not been convicted for crimes against peace or crimes against humanity, and because the symbols displayed are not propaganda. Finally, the prosecutor referred to a legal exception which stated that the public use of such symbols is allowed if it serves an educational, academic or artistic purpose. However, the prosecutor also established that the flagpole and fence did not have a construction permit, so they were removed. The cross itself was left in its place.
 * Radu Gyr was a commander and ideologue of the Iron Guard who was convicted of war crimes. The Wiesel Institute requested the renaming of Radu Gyr Street in Cluj-Napoca. As of December 2017, the street had not been renamed.
 * Valeriu Gafencu was a Legionary who was active during the Legionary Rebellion. He is now an honorary citizen of the town of Târgu Ocna.
 * Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu was one of the main leaders of the Romanian anti-communist resistance movement, but prior to that he was a member of the Iron Guard. He now has a monument in his memory in Deva, plus a foundation that bears his name. The neo-Legionary "Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu" Foundation is active in promoting the memory of the Iron Guard, such as when it organized a symposium dedicated to Gogu Puiu, a prominent Iron Guard leader, in January 2016. A motion-picture about Ogoranu's life, Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man, was produced in 2010.
 * Ion Moța and Vasile Marin were two Legionaries who were killed during the Spanish Civil War on 13 January 1937 while fighting on Franco's side. At Majadahonda, the site of their deaths, a monument was built in their honor.
 * Mihail Manoilescu was an economist and politician, Governor of the National Bank of Romania between June and November 1931. In 1937, he joined the Iron Guard when he ran as a senator on the list of the Totul pentru Țară, an organization established by the Iron Guard. He succeeded in becoming senator following the election. His views corresponded to a large extent with the ideology of the Iron Guard. In 1948, he was detained at the Sighet Prison where he died in 1950. He never faced trial, and thus he was never convicted. On 14 April 2016, the National Bank of Romania issued a set of commemorative coins in the honor of three former bank governors. Manoilescu, who led the bank for several months in 1931, was among them. Manoilescu's inclusion drew strong protests from the Wiesel Institute, on the grounds of Manoilescu's advocacy of Fascist ideology and antisemitism before World War II. In spite of the criticism, the Bank did not withdraw the coin.
 * Historian Mircea Eliade was perhaps the most well-known person to have been a member of the Iron Guard. As with Manoilescu, his membership was the result of his joining the Totul pentru Țară. Eliade is currently honored by various means, ranging from stamps to busts.

Iron Guard in other countries
The defunct American neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party of the Nationalist Front took influence from Corneliu Zelia Codreanu for their ideology. The group's leader Matthew Heimbach (a Catholic convert to Orthodox Christianity) was photographed wearing a T-shirt promoting Codreanu and the Iron Guard's Archangel Michael's Cross symbol in the aftermath of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Archangel Michael's Cross was among the symbols emblazoned on the firearms used by Brenton Tarrant during the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings and by Payton S. Gendron during the 2022 Buffalo shooting.

During a 2018 interview with alt-right Mormon blogger Ayla Stewart, the Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy recommended Codreanu's book For My Legionaries—which explicitly called for the extermination of the Jews—calling it "very, very, very, very spot on, given a lot of what the movement is talking about right now"; she later said she no longer endorsed the book.

The Iron Guard symbol was also spotted at Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee when the building was burned deliberately.

In German

 * Heinen, Armin. Die Legion "Erzengel Michael" in Rumänien, (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1986, ISBN 978-3-486-53101-5) – one of the major historical contributions to the study of the Romanian Iron Guard.
 * Totok, William. "Rechtsradikalismus und Revisionismus in Rumänien" (I–VII), in: Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte Literatur und Politik, 13–16 (2001–2004).

title: Iron Guard