text:
Pinkerton

Pinkerton may refer to:

Places

 * Pinkerton, Ontario, named after surveyor and early settler Matthew Pinkerton
 * Pinkerton's Landing Bridge, railroad bridge in Pennsylvania

People

 * Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884), Scottish-American detective and spy, founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency
 * Bill Pinkerton, Scottish footballer
 * Brian Pinkerton (active from 2004), American fiction author
 * David Pinkerton (1836–1906), New Zealand politician
 * Godfrey Pinkerton (1858–1937), British architect
 * Henry Pinkerton (1915–86), Scottish footballer
 * James Pinkerton (born 1958), American columnist, author, and political analyst
 * Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton (born 1960), British private secretary in the Royal Household
 * Jay Pinkerton (born 1977), Canadian humorist
 * John Pinkerton (1758–1826), Scottish pseudo-historian
 * John Pinkerton (politician) (1845–1908), Irish politician and Member of Parliament
 * John Pinkerton (computer designer) (1919–97), British computer designer
 * Louis Pinkerton (active from 2007), American politician (North Dakota)
 * Mike Pinkerton (active from 1997), American software engineer
 * Nancy Pinkerton (1940–2010), American actress
 * Percy Edward Pinkerton (1855–1946), English translator and poet
 * Robert Pinkerton (1780–1859), Scottish missionary, linguist, translator and author
 * William Pinkerton (1810–1893), early South Australian settler

Fictional characters

 * Pinkalicious Pinkerton
 * Pinky Pinkerton, fictional character in Marvel Comics
 * Lieutenant Pinkerton, character in Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly

Films

 * Little Miss Pinkerton, Our Gang short comedy film of 1943
 * Nat Pinkerton in the Fight (German: Nat Pinkerton im Kampf), 1920 German film

Music

 * Pinkerton (album), a 1996 album by Weezer
 * Pinkerton Thugs, punk band from Kennebunk, Maine
 * Pinkerton's Assorted Colours, mid-1960s pop band from England

Other uses in arts, entertainment, and media

 * The Pinkerton Labor Spy, 1907 book which exposed intrigue and abuses by the Pinkerton Detective Agency
 * The Pinkertons, an American Western action-adventure detective television series

Policing

 * Pinkerton (detective agency), founded in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton
 * Anti-Pinkerton Act, a U.S. law of 1893
 * Pinkerton v. United States, 328 U.S. 640 (1946), a U.S. Supreme Court case
 * Pinkerton liability, a basis of conspiracy liability derived from Pinkerton v. United States

Other uses

 * Pinkerton Academy, a high school in Derry, New Hampshire
 * Pinkerton Lecture, an annual lecture named after computer designer John Pinkerton

title: Pinkerton


text:
Kuntilanak

The Kuntilanak (Indonesian name), also called Pontianak (Malay name), or Yakshi (in Hinduism/ Hindu mythology) is a mythological creature in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. It is similar to Langsuir in other Southeast Asia regions. The Pontianak usually takes the form of a pregnant woman who died during childbirth. Alternatively, it is often described as a vengeful female spirit. Another form of the Pontianak refers to the ghost or white lady of Southeast Asian folklore.

The Pontianak is often depicted as a long-haired woman dressed in white. She lures in unsuspecting men to incite fear and enact revenge. Signs that a Pontianak is nearby include the sound of an infant crying and the smell of a decaying corpse or the plumeria flower.

Etymology
Kuntilanak or Pontianak is often described as an astral female spirit; another version of this figure is a woman spirit with long sharp fangs and fingernails. It is similar to the spirit of a woman unable to give birth while her stillborn child was inside her womb. This figure is mainly known to reside in the Kalimantan region containing the city of Pontianak.

The Pontianak can disguise herself using the appearance of a beautiful woman to lure her prey. In Malaysia, lore depicts them as "vampiric" blood-suckers that dissect through the internal organs of men.

The Pontianak is derived from myths and folktales, some of which are particularly popular in Kalimantan (Borneo). Being one of the most famous pieces of Indonesian folklore, it inspired the name of a capital city in the Western Kalimantan region, called Pontianak. The city of Pontianak had a long history, it was founded and infested by ghosts, until Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie fended off the ghosts. After the two shots were fired at the exact same spot, then the sultanate had planned to construct the foundation of a mosque and a palace there at the forest. The first sultan of the Pontianak Sultanate, whose reign lasted from 1771 to 1808, was haunted by these wicked creatures. Today, the place is covered in trees and locals still believe it is haunted by the Pontianak. It is tradition to shoot carbide cannons made from logs to pay tribute to the Sultan.

Physical appearance and behavior
The Kuntilanak (Pontianak) is often depicted as a beautiful woman with pale skin, red eyes, and long black hair. She is often dressed in a blood-smeared white dress. The Kuntilanak is also described as changing into a more monstrous form when she captures her prey which is typically men or helpless people. Because she is bloodthirsty and has a carnivorous nature, a Pontianak can also appear as a beast or a ghost, resembling the Dracula vampire.

Pontianak only appears under the full moon and typically announces her presence with the cries of infants or feminine laughter. It is said that if the sounds are quiet, she is nearby, but if they are loud, she is far away. Some sources also state that a dog howling at night indicates that a Pontianak is present, but not too close; if the dog whines, then a Pontianak is near. Its presence is also said to be heralded by a floral fragrance, identifiable as that of the Plumeria flower, followed by a stench similar to that of a decaying corpse.

The Pontianak kills her victims by using her long fingernails to physically remove their internal organs to be eaten. In cases where the Pontianak desires revenge and retribution against a man, it is said to eviscerate the victim with its hands. If a victim has their eyes open when a Pontianak is near, she will suck them out of their head. The Pontianak is said to locate her prey by the scent of their clean laundry; because of this, some Malaysians refuse to leave any piece of clothing outside their house overnight.

The Pontianak is associated with banana trees, and her spirit is said to reside in them during the day. According to folklore, a Pontianak can be fought off by driving a nail into the hole on the nape of her neck, which causes her to turn into a beautiful woman and a good wife until the nail is removed.

The Indonesian Kuntilanak is similar to the Pontianak in Malaysia, but commonly takes the form of a bird and sucks the blood of virgins and young women. The bird, which makes a "Ke-ke-ke" sound as it flies, may be sent through black magic to make a woman fall ill; the characteristic symptom being vaginal bleeding. When a man approaches her in her female form, the Kuntilanak suddenly turns and reveals that her back is hollow, much like the Sundel bolong the prostitute ghost with her large gaping hole on her back. A Kuntilanak can be subdued by plunging a sharp nail into the top of her head.

In popular culture
The Kuntilanak has been portrayed in Indonesian and Malaysian horror films and on Indonesian and Malaysian television.

 * Malaysian films:
 * Pontianak (1957)
 * Dendam Pontianak (1957)
 * Sumpah Pontianak (1958)
 * Anak Pontianak, also known as The Pontianak Child (1958)
 * The Return of Pontianak (1963)
 * Pontianak Musang Cave (1964)
 * Pontianak (1975)
 * Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (2004)
 * Perempuan, Pontianak dan Dot Dot Dot (2004)
 * Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam 2 (2005)
 * The Scream of Pontianak (2005)
 * Anak Pontianak TV Series (2007)
 * Ponti Anak Remaja (2009)
 * Ponti Anak Remaja Mini Series (2010)
 * Help! My Girlfriend Is A Pontianak (2011)
 * Pontianak vs Oily Man (2012)
 * The Nail of Pontianak (2013)
 * Misteri Bisikan Pontianak (2013)
 * Pontianak Sesat Dalam Kampung Telemovie (2016)
 * Dendam Pontianak (2019)
 * Ex Aku Pontianak, also known as My Ex Is A Pontianak (2022)
 * Pulau (2023)
 * Indonesian films:
 * Kuntilanak (1962)
 * Kuntilanak (1974)
 * Lawang Sewu (2007)
 * Casablanca Tunnel (Red Kuntilanak) (2007)
 * Kuntilanak's Nest (2008)
 * Kuntilanak (2006), Kuntilanak 2 (2007), Kuntilanak 3 (2008)
 * Kuntilanak's Morgue (2009)
 * Kuntilanak Beranak (2009)
 * Nail Demon (2009)
 * Santet Kuntilanak (2012)
 * Kuntilanak (2018)
 * Indonesian Video Games:
 * DreadOut (2014)
 * Pamali: Indonesian Folklore Horror (2018)
 * Singaporean films:
 * Return of Pontianak, also known as Voodoo Magic (2001)
 * Dendam Pontianak, also known as Revenge of the Pontianak (2019)
 * Hong Kong films:
 * The Demon's Baby (1998)
 * Malaysian fiction:
 * The House of Aunts (2011) by Zen Cho

 * Singaporean fiction:
 * Folklore: "Nobody"
 * American fiction:
 * Supernatural: "Cold Fire"
 * Internet Subculture:
 * The VTuber Mika Melatika of Nijisanji ID is described in her character lore as a kuntilanak.

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

title: Kuntilanak


text:
Pedro Páez

Pedro Páez Jaramillo, S.J. (Pero Pais; 1564 – 20 May 1622) was a Spanish Jesuit missionary in Ethiopia. Páez is considered by many experts on Ethiopia to be the most effective Catholic missionary in Ethiopia. He is believed to be the first European to see and describe the source of the Blue Nile, which he reached on 21 April 1618.

Páez' two-volume História da Etiópia (History of Ethiopia) is regarded by scholars of Ethiopian history as one of the most valuable and accurate works on the contemporary Solomonic Empire and its history (as understood by local sources) up to his own time, particularly as the works of local writers, despite the Ethiopian Orthodox Church's long tradition of literate monastic scholarship and the regular compilation of imperial chronicles, have in large part been lost in the centuries of intermittent conflict that followed or otherwise remained unknown to contemporary scholarship.

Life
Páez was born in 1564 in the village of Olmeda de la Cebolla (now Olmeda de las Fuentes), near Madrid, which until August of that year had been a hamlet of the city of Alcalá de Henares. He was born sixteen years before the union of the Spanish and the Portuguese crowns (1580-1640); that union would determine the span of Páez's missionary activity. In his youth, he studied at the Jesuit college in Belmonte, Cuenca. He was long thought to have then proceeded to study in the University of Coimbra, but recent studies have shown that he did his higher studies at the University of Alcalá. Around that time, he entered the Society of Jesus and was later ordained a priest.

In keeping with his religious vows as a Jesuit, Paez offered himself up for service in the East Indies, and in 1588 was sent to Goa (then part of Portuguese India), where he served at the College of St. Paul operated by the Jesuits in that city. The following year, a direct command of King Philip II of Spain was given for some Jesuits to go to Ethiopia to make contact with the surviving members of a Jesuit mission there, as well as exploring the possible union of the Ethiopian Church with the Catholic Church. With Antonio de Montserrat in command, the two set out for Ethiopia. Upon arrival in Yemen, however, the pair were betrayed by the native officer who had been entrusted with accompanying them on the mission. Handed from one local chieftain to another, they were held captive for nearly seven years, from 1590 to 1596, during which he learned Arabic. During this period he had to travel through the Hadramaut and Rub 'al Khali deserts, and tasted coffee in Mocha, being one of the first European to undergo such experiences since Pero da Covilhã in 1488 or Francisco Alvares in 1562. The pair were finally ransomed by the Jesuits in Goa and returned to that city, where they spent some time recuperating from their ordeal. Unfortunately Monserrat never recovered, dying in 1600.

Upon his own recovery, Paez again set out on the mission. He finally arrived at Massawa in 1603, and proceeded to Debarwa where he met the chief of the Portuguese in Ethiopia, John Gabriel, on 11 May, and four days later had made his way to Fremona, the Jesuit base in Ethiopia. Unlike his predecessor, Andre de Oviedo, Paul Henze describes him as "gentle, learned, considerate of the feelings of others". When summoned to the court of the young Emperor (negusä nägäst) Za Dengel, his knowledge of Amharic and Ge'ez, as well as his knowledge of Ethiopian customs impressed the sovereign so much that Za Dengel decided to convert from the Coptic Church to the Roman—although Páez warned him not to announce his declaration too quickly. However, when Za Dengel proclaimed changes in the observance of the Sabbath, Páez retired to Fremona, and waited out the ensuing civil war that ended with the emperor's death.

This caution benefited Páez when Susenyos I assumed the throne in 1607. Susenyos invited him to his court, where the two became friends. Susenyos made a grant of land to Páez on the peninsula of Gorgora on the north side of Lake Tana, where he built a new center for his fellow Jesuits, starting with a stone church, which was dedicated 16 January 1621.

Eventually Páez also converted Susenyos to Catholicism shortly before his own death in 1622. Some of the Catholic churches he designed are still standing, most importantly in the area of Bahir Dar and Gondar, which influenced Ethiopian architecture for the rest of the 17th century. Páez's efforts did not achieve the long-term success that might have been expected because other Jesuits sent to the region afterwards used a rigid approach in their evangelizing methods which led to their expulsion from the territory in 1633.

Writings
Páez's account of Ethiopia, História da Ethiópia, which he completed in 1620, was not published during his lifetime, although Manuel de Almeida borrowed extensively from it to compose his Historia de Etiopía a Alta ou Abassia decades later. After almost three centuries, Páez's history was printed as Volumes II and III of Camillo Beccari's Rerum Aethiopicarum Scriptores occidentales Inedtii (Rome, 1905–17). His work was published in 1945 at Porto in a new edition by Sanceau, Feio and Teixeira, Pêro Pais: História da Etiópia. In Spanish, his complete work was finally published in 2014 with the title Historia de Etiopía. História da Ethiópia has been translated to English by Christopher J. Tribe and published by The Hakluyt Society in 2011.

In addition to translating the Roman Catechism into Ge'ez, Páez is believed to be the author of the treatise De Abyssinorum erroribus.

title: Pedro Páez


text:
George O. Smith

George Oliver Smith (April 9, 1911 – May 27, 1981) (known also by the pseudonym Wesley Long) was an American science fiction author. He is not to be confused with George H. Smith, another American science fiction author.

Biography
Smith was an active contributor to Astounding Science Fiction during the Golden Age of Science Fiction of the 1940s. His collaboration with the magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. was interrupted when Campbell's first wife, Doña, left him in 1949 and married Smith.

Smith continued regularly publishing science fiction novels and stories until 1960. His output greatly diminished during the 1960s and 1970s when he had a job that required his undivided attention. He was awarded the First Fandom Hall of Fame award in 1980.

He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers.

Writing career
Smith wrote mainly about outer space, with such works as Operation Interstellar (1950), Lost in Space (1959), and Troubled Star (1957).

He is remembered chiefly for his Venus Equilateral series of short stories about a communications station in outer space. Most of the stories were collected in Venus Equilateral (1947), which was later expanded with the remaining three stories as The Complete Venus Equilateral (1976).

His novel The Fourth "R" (1959) – re-published as The Brain Machine (1968) – was an examination of a child prodigy, a digression from his concern with outer space.

title: George O. Smith


text:
Talk:Peaches Browning

Untitled
Putnam County is in which state? RickK 01:40, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There is a Putnam County in New York State, but perhaps you knew that already. But is that the county in which the trial took place?

Their honeymoon was in Cold Spring, New York http://www.pcnr.com/news/Column/03-21-01_1.html

Whoa! That article says the trial took place in White Plains, New York. Is White Plains in Putnam County? (click, click) No, it isn't. It's in Westchester County. (I should have known that, since I grew up about ten miles from White Plains).

Cold Spring is in Putnam County.

Various other Putnam Counties seem to be in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri... yikes. http://www.naco.org doesn't have an alphabetized list for the whole country, but you can pull down various states, and I see there is no Putnam County in Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or Vermont, or New Hampshire, or Rhode Island.

Therefore, IF the trial really took place in a Putnam County, I think it's very likely that it was Putnam County, New York. The county seat is Carmel, so probably the courthouse and trial would have been in Carmel.

But did it take place in Carmel, Putnam County, New York? Or did it take place in White Plains, Westchester County, New York?

I have no clue. Dpbsmith 02:49, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

http://www.greenepa.net/~barondin/library/1920de.html says:

 * January 25, 1927 - The "Daddy and Peaches" separation trial begins in New York. An ongoing saga, the sex-drenched tale of the courtship and stormy marriage of millionaire Edward West "Daddy" Browning (age 52) and his 15-year-old child-wife Frances Belle "Peaches" Heenan, was one of the most publicized stories of the decade that gripped the lurid imaginations of the press and public, despite its complete unimportance. Peaches sued Daddy for separation, claiming mental anguish from practical jokes and sexually perverse behavior. The judge ruled that Peaches' testimony was not credible and Daddy won the case.

So, it was in New York. But we still don't know whether it was in White Plains or in Putnam County. Dpbsmith 02:53, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)
 * It was White Plans, see citation I added to article. Also, grounds for divorce were abondonment on her part.User:BANNED IMPERSONATOR) 17:22, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Grounds for divorce
Assuming we've settled that it is indeed New York we're talking about, could you even get a divorce here prior to 1968 without proving adultery? That might have been part of the young lady's problem, in which case it's a pertinent bit of trivia.–♥ «Charles A. L.» 14:54, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

The trial was about settling the terms for a legal separation, rather than a divorce. Hope I've cleared this up now. Kazrene (talk) 22:47, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

title: Talk:Peaches Browning


text:
Death, Deceit and Destiny Aboard the Orient Express

Death, Deceit and Destiny Aboard the Orient Express is a 2000 thriller film about a group of international terrorists who, a few days before the start of the new millennium, lure a group of very rich celebrities and businesspeople on board the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul in order to extort large sums of money from them. The screenplay for the movie was written by Peter Welbeck (aka Harry Alan Towers) and Peter Jobin. The film, which was directed by Mark Roper, starred Richard Grieco, Joanna Bukovska, Romina Mondello, Christoph Waltz, Sendhil Ramamurthy and Götz Otto.

Plot
When an anonymous benefactor invites a party of celebrities and business magnates to a New Year's celebration aboard the Orient Express, it is the guests' greed which brings them all together. Apart from an enjoyable free trip on the luxury train, the businessmen among the passengers also expect to make a lucrative deal. However, just outside Paris the whole train is taken over by terrorists—without anybody noticing. Jack Chase (Richard Grieco), a young American actor who has also been invited, realizes that one of the waiters is missing but does not know that he has been killed together with all his colleagues.

Very soon the passengers sense that something is wrong. For example, a powerful jamming station on board the train ensures that they cannot contact the outside world via their mobile phones. Then, before dinner, they get to know their host: It is Tarik (Christoph Waltz), a well-known, internationally wanted Arab terrorist, who communicates with them via interactive television. Tarik announces the "Fundamentalist Revolution", the "victory of faith over corruption", and demands one tenth of each of his hostages' fortunes. Tarik himself is in fact on the train disguised as a cook, but no one has so far found out. The captives also learn that the terrorists have rigged the train with explosives: If the train slows, stops or passes the midnight hour the bombs are rigged to blow.

Predictably, the passengers try to do something about their predicament. While the businessmen ponder the question of whether to pay up or not, it is the women who take an active part in fighting the terrorists, most notably Nadia (Joanna Bukovska), a young Russian dancer who has fallen in love with Chase and who even saves his life when he is attacked by one of the thugs. The couple secretly climb on the roof of the train and succeed in finding some of the explosives. In the end, shortly before their arrival in Istanbul, the locomotive, with Tarik in it, is uncoupled from the rest of the train and blown to pieces by the bombs planted by the terrorist himself.

Although the film was released long before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the character of Tarik is a thinly disguised Osama bin Laden. There are also some minor but obvious parallels to the 1974 film Murder on the Orient Express, which is based on an Agatha Christie novel. These parallels almost exclusively concern the setting and the constellation of characters: There are no similarities whatsoever regarding the plot.

Cast

 * Richard Grieco as Jack Chase
 * Nicky Henson as Tom Finlay
 * Barry Flatman as Reid Archer
 * Jennifer Nitsch as Rita Evans
 * Lou Hirsch as Fred Wallace
 * Gotz Otto as Boris
 * Romina Mondello as Klara
 * Christoph Waltz as Ossama / Tarik
 * Yoanna Boukovska as Nadia
 * Hunter Phoenix as Natasha
 * Nina Muschallik as Polly
 * Sendhil Ramamurthy as Nikki
 * Jana Karaivanova as Imogen
 * Anjela Lauren Smith as Nora
 * Hristo Shopov as Chief Du Train
 * Dechko Chuntov as Terrorist Leader
 * Ilian Simeonov as Terrorist
 * Delyan Dabov as Evil Barman
 * Antonio Milenov as Evil Steward #1
 * Emil Videv as Evil Steward #2
 * Michail Elenov as Evil Steward #3
 * Hristo Paskalev as Evil Waiter #1
 * Daniel Tzotchev as Evil Waiter #2
 * Petia as Girl #1
 * Rada as Girl #2


text:
George Albert Smith (disambiguation)

George Albert Smith (1870–1951) was the eighth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).

George Albert Smith may also refer to:
 * George A. Smith (1817–1875), American leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and the LDS Church
 * George Albert Smith (filmmaker) (1864–1959), English hypnotist, astronomer and cinema technology pioneer
 * George Albert Smith Jr. (1905–1969), American professor at Harvard Business School

title: George Albert Smith (disambiguation)


text:
Dynasties of ancient Egypt

In ancient Egyptian history, dynasties are series of rulers sharing a common origin. They are usually, but not always, traditionally divided into 33 pharaonic dynasties; these dynasties are commonly grouped by modern scholars into "kingdoms" and "intermediate periods".

The first 30 divisions come from the 3rd century BC Egyptian priest Manetho, whose Aegyptaiaca, was probably written for a Greek-speaking Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt but survives only in fragments and summaries. The names of the last two, the short-lived Persian-ruled 31st Dynasty and the longer-lasting Ptolemaic Dynasty, are later coinings.

While widely used and useful, the system does have its shortcomings. Some dynasties only ruled part of Egypt and existed concurrently with other dynasties based in other cities. The 7th might not have existed at all, the 10th seems to be a continuation of the 9th, and there might have been one or several Upper Egyptian Dynasties before what is termed the 1st Dynasty.

title: Dynasties of ancient Egypt


text:
Talk:Lists of national parks

Untitled
'

Naming
Shouldn't all the pages linked to from here be at List of... national parks like the Canadian one is? Angela 01:54, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

 * Either that or List of national parks of ... . Either way, avoiding the parentheses is much better. --Minesweeper 03:36, Dec 1, 2003 (UTC)

Category:National Parks
Category:National parks, which I did not create but have added to. I'm putting this article in that category. I suggest filling the category with the articles in these lists. I'll start, but can't do the whole thing! Gwimpey 17:25, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Someone ruined the list of national parks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2607:FEA8:3DA0:4ED:8DE:1FF1:AE5A:AFD8 (talk) 20:16, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Removal of links
Removed all the links from the headings as per Manual of Style. If you need to link to a list of national parks in a specific region, do so in a see also, as has been done in africa. skorpion 10:38, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

New Discussion
A discussion has been started at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries/Lists of countries which could affect the inclusion criteria and title of this and other lists of countries. Editors are invited to participate. Pfainuk talk 13:37, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

the list is not accurate. FOR example the UK does not have any IUCN designated National parks. BUt Nature Parks - the UK gvt says the same. I fixed the wikipedia page on this. BUT NOT THIS PAGE. Here you can see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_parks_of_the_United_Kingdom — Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.190.199.126 (talk) 12:15, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Template produces poor PDF (print) output
PDF output using Google Chrome's built-in distiller produces poor results with this page. (Use the Ctrl P command in Chrome to preview). Issue may be with the template used or (more likely) the the way content was entered (coded) into the template and saved by the contributor. For example, when printing this article with Google's PDF printer, the first page has too much white (wasted) space; overlap of a table and image occurs on another page. Note that the font size should not dynamically scale up or down to fit a page; font size of the main-body text content should be about 12 points on outputted PDF page(s); it is the images and table cells that should dynamically scale up or down to fit the info box and template in order to maintain the two-column Wikipedia layout. The offending elements appear to be the tables. Refer to this Wikipedia article for a proper printer-friendly layout using tables with images -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_German_Navy_ships Printchecker (talk) 16:24, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on List of national parks. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120805123753/http://www.parcsnationaux.fr/Decouvrir-Visiter-Partager/Les-dix-parcs-nationaux-francais to http://www.parcsnationaux.fr/Decouvrir-Visiter-Partager/Les-dix-parcs-nationaux-francais

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 07:38, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

title: Talk:Lists of national parks


text:
Talk:Trophic dynamics

Untitled
The presentation on this page looks overly academicized. It lacks a description of energy tranfer efficiency between trophic levels and contains a lot of material on production levels in different biomes that really is irrelevant to the concept of energy metabolims in the environment. Really needs an ecologist to along and fix it up. A Primack

3 trophic levels is the usual case, but 4 and 5 are found as well; 6 levels exist but is really exceptional. Anthère

 * Including information on the maximum number of levels found would be good - I believe 6 is basically the limit, but I haven't got any source for this right now. Richard001 07:25, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

I think that this page should probably be condensed and the links improved. Much of what is on this page is irrelevant, and much of the rest is better covered on other pages, including trophic pyramid, primary production, food web, soil food web, biodiversity. Justinleif 18:12, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

I think this page would be much more useful if a section were devoted to humans, showing that it is much more efficient (and healthy) for humans to eat plants than to eat animals. User:BillShurtleff 24 April 2007

 * That's a good idea. The topic is well covered on the environmental vegetarianism page, but it would be good to mention it and link to it here, or perhaps on the trophic pyramid, which discusses the efficiency of transfer between trophic levels. This is probably not the place to discuss the health benefits of vegetarianism, but definitely the efficiency argument. I am considering revising this page (primarily by shortening it and improving the links), and will include your idea if I get around to it. Cheers Justinleif 20:12, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

There's something wrong with this phrase: "The only known exception to this is in deep sea hydrothermal vents chemosynthetic archaea form the base of the food chain).", namely, the lack of an opening parenthesis. Could someone fix this, please? ;) -- Anonymous Coward —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.139.134.186 (talk) 14:15, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

producers
picture of list of pruducers —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.229.49.230 (talk) 22:20, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

A question regarding numbering of trophic levels
Consider this food chain:

Organism P is a plant. This is trophic level 1. Organism A is a herbivore that feeds on P. It's trophic level is 2. Organism B is a carnivore that feeds on A. It's trophic level is 3. Organism C is a carnivore that feeds on B. It's trophic level is 4.

Now suppose there is a fifth organism, D. This is a carnivore that feeds on all the above animals, A to C.  What is this creature's trophic level? Is it level 5 (i.e. based on the longest potential food chain it is involved in), or 3 (i.e. based on the shortest)?

Wardog (talk) 13:43, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

 * According to the article, "Secondary Consumers ... can consume the two levels before it. ... Tertiary Consumers can eat all three levels below them." That implies that the trophic level is based on the longest food chain, so your hypothetical apex predator is at level 5. My understanding is that these levels only apply to eating the adult form of the organism -- so if organism C eats herbivore A and small, immature forms of carnivore B (but not the full-grown carnivore B), then C only counts as being at level 3, and D only counts as at level 4.

 * Consider this food chain:
 * Grass is a plant, at trophic level 1.
 * A zebra is a herbivore that feeds on grass, at trophic level 2.
 * A lion will kill and eat a zebra.
 * Occasionally a crocodile will kill and eat a lion (in the water).
 * Occasionally a lion will kill and eat a crocodile (on land).

 * That last line puts a "loop" in the food web. Does that put lions at (potentially) "infinite" trophic level? In such a region, are both crocodiles and lions considered apex predators, or does this region have no apex predators? --68.0.124.33 (talk) 03:35, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

 * Usually, trophic levels are calculated as weighted averages rather than as the "maximum" possible length of the food chain; this eliminates the possibility of "infinite trophic levels". For example, Pimelodus pictus has an average estimated trophic level of 3.19 in the wild, meaning that it mostly eats herbivorous fish, but once in a while it will instead eat a carnivore. The probability of lion-crocodile-lion-crocodile "infinite loops" (as you mentioned) is vanishingly low, so it would contribute very little to the animal's actual trophic level. Lions probably have an average trophic level slightly above 3; usually they eat herbivores, but don't necessarily have to (some lions have been known to eat seals, who themselves have trophic levels around 4 since they primarily feed on fish). For humans the average trophic level could be anywhere from 2 (for vegetarians) to 4 (for humans who primarily eat fish). Stonemason89 (talk) 20:57, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Competition
I am surprised that this article does not even mention competition anywhere. While consumption should be the focus in trophic levels, shouldn't competition be at least mentioned somewhere. MATThematical (talk) 21:17, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Suggested move
Trophic dynamics should not have a main article - but should be nested as a sub-heading within food web. It was a title on a paper in 1942 by Lindeman - - who discussed food cycles (which is synonymous with food web). I'm working on food web and finding it difficult to think of ways to organize the links here. Trophic level deserves a main article page - but trophic dynamics is pretty much synonymous with food web.Thompsma (talk) 21:51, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Speedy deletion
I have requested a speedy deletion. Please see discussion in food chain. This is actually a merger between trophic dynamics, food web, food chain into food web.Thompsma (talk) 00:06, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

title: Talk:Trophic dynamics


text:
Talk:Sarah Emma Edmonds

Untitled
See Wikipedia talk:Edit war for a case study of a ridiculous edit war.

More info
This article really needs more info. I'm currently working on a history fair project about her, and I've found that there's a lot of info that's not in this article that should be. I've made just about all of the recent edits, including the addition of several new sources. Please, please look into them and add more info to this aticle so it doesn't have to be so bare-bones.69.151.247.125 23:17, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Poor article
It's very badly written. For example what does this mean:

"There are also speculations that Edmonds may have deserted because of John Reid having been discharged months earlier. There is proof in his diary that she had mentioned leaving before she had contracted malaria."

There is no further mention of John Reid in the article?? It's either bogus or needs clarification by someone who knows this topic!

This article is unfortunately typical of the combitionation of a little truth and a lot of myth that surrounds the Sarah Emma Edmonds/Franklin Thompson tale.

First, "Nurse and Spy" is a work of fiction and wartime propaganda, and the spy adventures Edmonds wove into the story are demonstrably untrue. Yes, she served in the army; no, she was not a spy. Yes, she enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Infantry as a nurse and mail carrier up to her desertion in April of 1863; no, her gender was not a secret to all the men with whom she served.

The Edmonds spy story myth was solidly addressed in the 1990s in a real, serious and accurate study of Civil War intelligence by Edwin Fischel. He notes that Emma's absurd "report" of a major Confederate report to Gen George McClellan during the Peninsula Campaign was a work of fiction, that no such fort existed; and that there is no record of Franklin Thompson in the extensive intelligence papers and reports that exist for McClellan and Allan Pinkerton during the campaign.

Yet Fischel's research is constantly ignored or played down by writers of popular history. Quoting "Nurse and Spy" regarding Emma's adventures is akin to quoting a Superman comic book.

Emma's subsequent stories of spy and counter-spy in her book are even more ridiculous, and they continue to points in the Civil War AFTER she had really deserted from the army. Please, people, read "Nurse and Spy." It is not biographical at all, though its setting, against the backdrop of the 2nd Michigan's travels with the Army of the Potomac and then in Kentucky and the western theater of the war, is factual. The story itself is 19th century ficition, romantic, sentimental, filled with improbable if not impossible coincidences. It is a work of propanda, the sales of which were used to benefit sick and wounded Unon soldiers.

Again, let me stress: to quote Nurse and Spy as if it was an actual record of Emma Edmonds' experiences in the war is like quoting "The Night Before Christmas" to prove the existance of Santa Claus.

The Jerome Robbins diary at the University of Michigan Bently Library is proof that it took a man assigned to live and work with Franklin Thompson in the regimental hospital a matter of a couple of days to figure out that 'Frank has a secret' and a couple of more to know that Frank was female.

The diary shows fairly conclusively that Frank deserted in April of 1863 after the resignations of her regimental-then-brigade commander, Col. Orlando Poe, and her most recent close friend, Major James Reid of the 79th New York, a brigade officer. If Frank Thompson deserted because of illness, it seems very probable that Robbins would have recorded this. He did not, instead expressing comments on disappoinment, human nature and betrayal.

The Robbins diary makes plain the jealousy Frank felt when Robbins heard from his girlfriend at home, while Robbins was jealous of the attention paid Frank by Major Reid. The diary and letters to Robbins from Emma clearly indicate that Reid also knew her "secret." The diary of another Michigan soldier named Boston in the brigade with the 2nd Michigan makes clear that soldiers in their brigade were openly gossiping and laughing about Frank's desertion and supposed involvement with Reid. Clearly, the fact that Frank was a female WAS NOT A SECRET.

Emma would later claim that A) she had malarial fevers and had to desert rather than risk discovery and B) that she suffered heart, liver and kidney disease and other afflictions as a result of her mule falling on her while carrying mail. This later claim was made late in her life when she asked for an increase in her monthly pension. This was unsuccessful. Her penion records make clear the War Deparment noted there was no medical record from the war about this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Veritas109 (talk • contribs) 17:34, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Pre-war spy?
'Frank Thompson's career took a turn before the war when a Union spy in Richmond, Virginia was discovered and went before a firing squad...'

Presumably, before the war, nobody could be described as a 'Union spy', and there would have been no authority to execute them. Valetude (talk) 18:57, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

The myth of Sarah Emma Edmonds
The story of Sarah Emma Edmonds, the young woman who posed as a man and enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Infantry Regiment under the name Franklin Thompson, is enshrined in popular history and Civil War lore, repeated in classrooms by educators and republished regularly in pop biographies. In numerous books and articles and on scores of web sites, Edmonds is remembered as a heroic soldier for joining the Union Army, and according to her own account, venturing in disguise behind Confederate lines, spying for Union generals.

But only a fraction of this story is accurate, and her espionage tales are fiction.

The truth of Edmonds’ story is easily understood if one looks at her actual service record; her pension file; orders that she kept for the rest of her life and transcribed and published; the records of her regiment; and the Civil War diary of her comrade Jerome Robbins and two letters she wrote to him. These show Edmonds did join the 2nd Michigan Infantry Regiment in Detroit, posing as a man; that there were at least two men and probably others who knew Franklin Thompson was a woman, including an officer who was involved in some sort of relationship with her; that she was assigned to work first as a hospital attendant; then as a regimental mail carrier/postmaster and then as her brigade’s mail carrier; and lastly as an orderly to her commanding officer.

Each of these assignments took her out of the day-to-day life in the ranks of her regiment and afforded her more privacy and independence than typical privates had. There is no question that one of them, Lt. James Reid of the 79th New York, had a hand in her assignments and that he knew very well that Frank Thompson was a young woman.

This record is clear that Edmonds did not desert from her regiment because she was ill and would have been discovered had she been examined by doctors, as she would later claim; that shortly after she deserted she wrote her bestselling wartime adventure, Nurse and Spy; and that it became part and parcel of her legend when she emerged publicly in the 1880s to say that she had served as soldier Franklin Thompson, and applied for a pension from the U.S. government.

The evidence of her real story, outlined here, is generally ignored or downplayed by authors and biographers who repeat accounts in her book as though they were factual. But not all. Notable is the study by author and researcher Edwin Fishel, who wrote the standard reference on Civil War military intelligence. After more than three decades of research, he flatly asserted that Edmonds “was never a spy.” Beyond the claims made in her 1864 book, The Female Spy of the Union Army (bettered remembered by the title Nurse and Spy), there is no account, report or evidence from the war indicating her exploits actually happened. Fishel’s papers reflect his study and analysis of thousands of pages of intelligence reports and generals’ papers, fact-checking her book against these primary sources.

Twenty years after she wrote her book, Edmonds admitted after a fashion that her accounts weren’t really what she experienced. “Can that [Nurse and Spy] be regarded as authentic?” an interviewer asked Edmonds in 1883.

“Not strictly so,” Edmonds answered. “Still most of the experiences recorded were either MY own or came under my observation. I would like, however, to write differently of that portion of my life.” That statement is significant, and will be revisited later in this discussion.

Let’s start with her book. Only the most naïve modern reader would believe this farfetched adventure. Today any objective reader will find a heavily religious work of wartime propaganda – a patriotic and romantic melodrama with hair-breadth escapes, stolen secrets, far-fetched coincidences, deathbed salvations and declarations of Christian faith, noble heroes and vile villains – essentially, a mid-19th century adventure novel, woven around actual Civil War events and occurrences, personalities and battles. Edmonds’ narrative generally followed her regiment, first in the Army of the Potomac in 1861 and 1862, and then in the western theater to the fall of Vicksburg – something she says in her book that she witnessed, but one that happened some three months after she deserted from the army.

Remarkably, Edmonds wrote nothing in her book of how she enlisted in the 2nd Michigan posing as a man. That true story was simply not told. Instead, Edmonds set up her narrative with the notion that she is a young woman joining the war effort as an army “field nurse.” Her alias, Franklin Thompson, wasn’t mentioned in these ostensible war experiences, and she made only partial, incomplete references to the identity of her regiment. Thus the story of how Edmonds really managed to serve in the army went untold in her book, and her self-proclaimed adventures had nothing to do with her actual military service. Yet her book has continued to be accepted as if true, despite its huge and numerous fictions, factual problems, and inconsistencies.

How did this happen? While Nurse and Spy wasn’t anything like a realistic account of Edmonds’ service, it was presented as nonfiction when published in 1864. And it was a commercial success, reportedly selling 175,000 copies. It was nearly twenty years later that it publicly emerged an obscure soldier named Franklin Thompson was really a woman who served and deserted from the 2nd Michigan.

Thompson’s real identity, Sarah Emma Edmonds, wasn’t even mentioned when Michigan’s military administrator, Adjutant General John Robertson, included an anecdote about the mysterious female soldier in his 1880 book about the state’s contributions in the Civil War. But Robertson, in describing Frank Thompson, ascribed to her cloak-and-dagger missions of the sort that appeared in Edmonds’ fictional Nurse and Spy. The fact that Michigan’s adjutant general linked soldier Frank Thompson to Civil War espionage has been taken by Edmonds’ supporters as proof that her spy adventures were factual. In truth, Robertson, Michigan’s state military administrator, would have had no direct knowledge of Union military intelligence in Virginia in 1862. But by the time Edmonds deserted in 1863 there were hundreds of Union soldiers who heard the story that Frank Thompson was a woman and at least two of them knew her real identity. One of them, Michigan’s Jerome Robbins, certainly knew that his friend Frank/Emma became a bestselling author after her desertion. A small town physician after the war, Robbins attended numerous regimental reunions as did thousands of other ex-soldiers. That the state’s adjutant general would have heard about this mix of fact and fiction regarding Edmonds’s real service and ostensible espionage is hardly surprising.

Unfortunately for history, Robertson published that anecdote about Frank Thompson in his book, and helped to create and “verify” a Civil War myth. Two years after the story of that female soldier and spy appeared in Robertson’s Michigan in the War, Edmonds, now a wife and mother in Kansas with the last name Seelye, came forward to say she had been Frank Thompson. This was a sensation when it appeared in newspapers in 1883.

Soon after Edmonds was approved for a pension and her desertion record removed through acts of Congress, based on the enthusiastic statements of several former comrades. These men stated that they didn’t know Frank Thompson was a woman, while Edmonds herself said that she had to desert from her regiment in April, 1863 because she was sick and would have been discovered had she been examined by doctors.

This claim – that she had to desert rather than risk a medical exam, like her secret service adventures – wasn’t true. But it was not challenged by anyone who knew the real story, and thus it became part of the heroic Frank Thompson-Emma Edmonds story. The mixing of these elements – Edmonds’ real but essentially untold experience of serving as a soldier, revealed in the 1880s; her best-selling wartime book with its espionage tales; and questionable claims in her later pension applications – combined to form a legendary story that continues to flourish.

THE EVIDENCE

Consider the notion in most pop histories and biographies that Edmonds went undiscovered while she posed as male soldier, that no one knew her secret. This was not true, as evidenced by the Civil War diary kept by one of Edmonds’ comrades, as well as letters she wrote to this man during the war. These showed the “secret” that Frank Thompson was a woman was not a secret to him, and there was also indications that others knew. When she deserted, soldiers were actually laughing and gossiping about Frank, the girl mail carrier.

“Though never frankly asserted by her, it will be understood that my friend Frank is a female….” wrote Jerome Robbins, a religious and literate young soldier in the 2nd Michigan, shortly after he was assigned to work in the regimental hospital with Thompson in the fall of 1861. Robbins used the pronouns “her” and “she” when recording the truth, but then switched back to referring to Frank as if male, sometimes underlining pronouns “he,” “his,” and “him,” knowing that Frank was a woman but going along with the charade in case someone read his diary.

Then there were Edmonds’ own words. Three months before she deserted from her regiment in Kentucky, she wrote Robbins a letter late in 1862 which she signed “Your loving friend Emma.” This letter, a kind of “if only we had met under different circumstances” missive, showed that Edmonds had been smitten with Robbins and had long since stopped pretending about her gender to him.

Going back to the fall of 1861, Robbins’ diary showed they were close, sharing discussions of their Christian faith, going for walks and attending prayer meetings. But theirs was a rocky friendship (or relationship), and at times they weren’t speaking; they could be comically jealous of each other. When Robbins received letters from a young woman in Michigan (or when he wrote back to her), he recorded that his friend Frank was unhappy. Late in 1862 on into early 1863, after Robbins was away for his regiment for months, his diary showed that Frank had become close to an officer, James Reid of the 79th New York, a regiment in the same brigade as the 2nd Michigan. Robbins was sometimes perturbed at the attention paid to his friend, describing Frank as Reid’s “pet.”

Lt. Reid, like Robbins, was a significant figure in the real Edmonds story, and evidence shows he also knew the truth. Reid served as a staff officer in the brigade commanded by Col. Orlando Poe of the 2nd Michigan. These two men were close to Edmonds; Reid shared a tent with her. As her last superior officers, Poe and Reid had assigned her to be the brigade postmaster and orderly serving Poe. But both officers resigned their commissions for different reasons, with Poe departing their encampment at Lebanon, Kentucky on April 10 or 11, 1863. Reid left ten days later.

Robbins’ diary shows that a few days after Poe left, with Reid’s departure imminent, his friend Frank/Emma no longer had the freedom and access to brigade headquarters she enjoyed previously. He noted that Thompson was stopped by a sentry – something that had not happened when Poe was in command. When she appealed to another colonel about her treatment, she was denied. With Poe and Reid no longer in charge, Edmonds, in the guise of Frank Thompson, faced the prospect of going back to the ranks. By the time Robbins recorded this incident, Edmonds had already deserted, just two or three days before Reid left camp.

Robbins expressed disgust after Edmonds deserted. He noted that “Lieut. Reid, Frank’s particular friend,” boarded a train on April 20. Edmonds had been missing for about three days, and now Robbins learned from the departing Reid it was true that “Frank has deserted for which I do not blame him. His was a strange history.” In the sentences that followed, Robbins complained about Frank’s “ingratitude” and that “he [Emma/Frank] was the last I deemed capable of the petty baseness which was betrayed by his friend R[eid] at the last minute.” Robbins didn’t say what Edmonds’ “petty baseness” was, but he felt betrayed. “I am excited to pity that poor humanity can be so weak as to repay kindness, interest, and the warmest sympathy with deception, almost every petty attribute of a selfish heart,” he complained.

Edmonds would later claim in alternate pension applications that, first, she was very sick, and second, physically injured at the time of her desertion. While Robbins recorded Frank had been sick early in April, his bitter description of her desertion two weeks later says nothing about illness or incapacity, but something much more personal, and that involved James Reid.

Rumors quickly circulated in their brigade about Frank Thompson and Reid and Poe, harsh but humorous to the soldiers. “We are having quite a time at the expense of our brigade postmaster,” wrote William Boston, a soldier in the 20th Michigan. “He turns out to be a girl, and has deserted when his lover, Inspector Read [sic] and General Poe resigned.” Though Boston got Thompson’s last name wrong, he was  clearly referring to Emma Edmonds. Boston’s commander, Col. Byron Cutcheon, would later, as a member of Congress, shepherd through laws to grant Edmonds a pension. But he made clear that by December 1862, soldiers “suspected and discussed in the brigade that Frank Thompson was a girl.” This was four months before her desertion.

There were more words from Edmonds disproving her later desertion story. In a letter to Robbins about three weeks after she left the army, she indicated she had traveled from her regiment’s camp in Kentucky to Sandusky, Ohio, and then to Washington, where she visited wounded soldiers; she told Robbins she was about to leave for New York and considering joining a foreign mission. This was not a woman who was so ill or crippled by injury that she would have been discovered had she stayed in the army. Edmonds was making rigorous travels, visiting wounded men, and well enough to consider missionary work.

Edmonds had also remained heard from James Reid, who obviously knew how to reach her after they had both left the army. “He says he wants me to come & visit his wife who is very anxious to meet me,” Edmonds continued in what may be one of oddest comments in the surviving record of her Civil War experience. By this point in May, 1863, Edmonds had resumed her female identity and befriended a young woman, “Lizzie H.” from Ohio, whose brother was in the hospital at Alexandria, Va. Still, Edmonds wanted to know about the conversation Robbins and Reid had about her before Reid left the army: “Reid seems to think that you are the only friend I have in camp,” she wrote. “It may be so but I had hoped that I had one or two more at least. I think I am more fortunate in making friends now than when you knew me.” Edmonds noted that it was pleasant to once again have a female friend.

What should be made of Edmonds’ comments? Of her own seemingly sarcastic remark to Robbins that she had more “friends” in the army than just him? Consider that two decades later, when Edmonds applied for a pension, several former comrades spoke of their regard and fondness for Frank Thompson, and what a faithful soldier Frank had been. A woman who identified herself as Mrs. D. McConkey, supporting Edmonds’ claim in the 1890s, told of dealing with Edmonds in Oberlin, Ohio, in both her male and female guises in 1863. McConkey indicated that Edmonds was outgoing and personable, quickly befriending the local family of “Miss H.,” and traveling with her to Washington to see her brother in the hospital, just as Edmonds’ letter of May 1863 indicated.

It seems obvious that Edmonds had more than “one or two more (friends)” during her time in the army. She proved affable, persuasive and impressive both as Thompson and as herself. Was her comment to Robbins really about the number of her friends in the regiment, or about those with whom she had shared her secret? While we can’t know, it is nonetheless true that at the point Edmonds deserted, scores if not hundreds of soldiers in their brigade were talking about her, according to William Boston. Her “secret” was out, the subject of soldiers’ gossip.

Late in her life, when Edmonds Seelye (her married name) sought an increase in the pension granted her by the U.S. Congress, she asked former comrade R.H. Halstead to revise the affidavit he’d given on her behalf, instructing him to say “with a clear conscience” that he hadn’t known Thompson’s real gender during the war. “Just after the statement ‘she was my bunkmate a considerable portion of the time’ please just add – But I never knew that she was a woman,” she directed Halstead. Having this specific language in a similar statement from a former commander, Orlando Poe, was critical, she wrote, in her being given a pension.

One of Edmonds’ last army assignments, according to Poe and Jerome Robbins, was that she also served the colonel as an orderly – a soldier attending a commanding officer as a kind of servant/runner. Yet Poe, like other supporters, insisted he hadn’t known Thompson was female, though adding that, in retrospect, he should have recognized that this was the case. Historian Betty Fladeland, who examined the Edmonds story in the 1960s, thought the truthfulness of these men’s statements was very much in question, and that they were supporting an old friend’s pension request as a favor, understanding that Edmonds couldn’t get the stipend without their help, and not being able to admit publicly that they knew or suspected Thompson was a woman.

WOMEN IN THE 2ND MICHIGAN

Then what was true about Emma Edmonds? It is generally accepted that she was a dramatic and determined young woman of about 20 (but really, perhaps 23 or 24), a New Brunswick native who had been disguising herself as a man, selling books and using the alias Frank Thompson for about four years by the time the Civil War began; that she lived in the Flint area and northern Oakland County as she sold books; that she enlisted at Detroit in Company F of the 2nd Michigan in May of 1861; and that she deserted in 1863.

But a key circumstance for Edmonds in the first months of the war is always unaddressed by her biographers. It has been generally assumed that Edmonds was soldiering in a world of men, where there were no women. What is always neglected in the story of Edmonds’ service is that 20 women joined the 2nd Michigan as volunteer nurses when the war began, though their numbers soon diminished. At a time when it was considered shocking for a young woman to go off and join several hundred men, these volunteers (like Edmonds herself) were throwing off convention, called by patriotism and Christian faith to service and duty.

One of the 2nd Michigan’s nurses, Anna Etheridge, became a national hero during the Civil War, decorated for her dedicated service with Michigan outfits in the Army of the Potomac. Another nurse from the 2nd Michigan, Jane Hinsdale, was credited for bravely walking into Confederate lines, trying to find her soldier-husband after the first Battle of Bull Run. She helped wounded soldiers who had been captured, and reportedly came back to Union lines with information about the strength and disposition of Confederate forces.

Also with the regiment during the early part of the war was the young wife of the 2nd Michigan’s first commander, Col. Israel Richardson, described by one medical officer as strong willed and independent minded while accompanying husband’s regiment early in the war. Edmonds made reference to riding with Mrs. Richardson toward Bull Run in the summer of 1861 in one of her book’s anecdotes that is actually confirmed by another account.

These volunteer nurses and the colonel’s wife were determined women initially serving with Frank Thompson, who spent much of the first year of the war assigned as a nurse (albeit a presumed male nurse) in the regimental hospital. There is no specific record as to how long these women were with the 2nd Michigan, or for their toilet and bathing facilities while encamped near thousands of men, but their privacy would not have been left to chance. Certainly these included covered privies and tents for bathing.

Consider again the postwar statement of Mrs. McConkey, who said she ran the boarding house in Ohio where Frank Thompson landed after deserting in 1863. McConkey, in a statement sent to a Michigan congressman, noted that Edmonds easily switched her hair style and clothing, posing alternately as “cousins” Emma Edmonds and Frank Thompson. McConkey said that Edmonds enjoyed shocking two new friends (in this case, both women) by revealing that young Mr. Frank Thompson was not a man, but Emma in disguise.

Obviously there is no way to know if Edmonds shared the secret of Frank Thompson with the female nurses of the 2nd Michigan during the early months of the war, or if they came to realize that Thompson was a woman. But it is worth noting that it took her new friend Jerome Robbins a matter of days to realize in the fall of 1861 that there was a “mystery” surrounding Frank Thompson, with the secret being discovered or revealed to him within about two weeks. If the women of the 2nd Michigan knew Edmonds’ secret in the first weeks and months of the war, it would have allowed her to hide in plain sight with access to personal privacy while in camp – something that would have otherwise been virtually impossible in a place where bathing for soldiers was communal, in the nearest creek or spring, and where men relieved themselves in “sinks” or slit trenches according to regulations.

A SOLDIER’S RECORD

Other than Jerome Robbins’ diary and the two surviving letters Edmonds wrote him, the most important primary source in the real story of Emma Edmonds is the service of Frank Thompson as preserved in the rolls of the 2nd Michigan’s Company F, and the service record compiled by the War Department. These show that in about a month’s time of the 2nd Michigan arriving in Washington, Thompson was assigned to be a nurse in the regimental hospital. Near the end of her nurse posting, Frank was sent to a general hospital at Georgetown. Frank Thompson’s nurse assignment lasted until mid-February of 1862.

Thompson’s assignment is significant, since those soldiers ordered by their officers to work as nurses and hospital attendants were often those who were themselves convalescents, weak or poor enough examples of soldiers that they were not missed in the ranks. This is a matter of record. Certainly it is possible that Edmonds was assigned to the hospital not because surgeons and officers suspected the youthful soldier was a woman, but because they felt Thompson was too young to be in the ranks, or that “he” was empathetic and better at helping sick men. However it was decided, the order to work as nurse took her out of the ranks and certainly allowed her more privacy than other soldiers had, with late-shift working hours and a degree of separation of the regimental hospital from the rest of camp. Her assignment to a general hospital near Washington late in 1861 into 1862 provided even more privacy and personal freedom.

Thompson was sent back to her company in the 2nd Michigan on Feb. 16, 1862 – no reason was given for the reassignment – and the record reflects the soldier was “absent on duty” for the months of March and April. In March the Army of Potomac shipped out to Virginia’s York-James Peninsula for a new offensive, leading first to the siege of Confederate positions at Yorktown in April and then combat around Richmond.

Those who choose to believe Edmonds’ espionage adventures note this was the period described in Nurse and Spy that she went on her first mission, disguised as a male slave by darkening her skin with silver nitrate and wearing a theatrical Afro wig. The mysterious detachment of Thompson from duty in the regiment, these writers maintain, is evidence indicative of secret work.

But this is nonsense. In reality, the fact that Thompson was “absent on duty” from her regiment during this time had nothing to do with confidential missions. An order that Edmonds kept for the rest of her life and later transcribed in print showed that Frank Thompson was designated mail carrier for the 2nd Michigan on March 4th, 1862, by Col. Poe, the 2nd Michigan’s second commanding officer. This order came before the Army of the Potomac moved by sea to begin the new offensive, with all the difficulties of establishing new, longer supply and communications lines. Thompson’s posting as mail carrier was recorded again on muster rolls as April, 1862 ended, and would continue into the late fall, eventually evolving into the bigger job of brigade mail carrier and postmaster. The term “absent on duty” in the spring of 1862 simply meant that Edmonds was given a reasonably routine job by her superior officers.

These assignments as mail carrier took Edmonds away from her regiment for a portion of any given week while the army was on the move, since mail carrying required her to ride or accompany wagon trains back and forth from bivouacs at the front to Union supply depots in the rear – a journey that could have taken a day or two each way during the Peninsula Campaign and in northern Virginia and Maryland afterward.

The job of mail carrier, like hospital nurse, was not without danger, but it was safer than being on a skirmish line or in line of battle. Traveling behind the Union front, Edmonds again would have more freedom and privacy away from regimental camp life and duty. It seems she would have reported to regimental command officers. Again, this assignment was not arbitrary, but one that officers picked Frank Thompson to do. A transcription of an order dated Dec. 5, 1862 from Poe’s brigade showed that Thompson was then assigned to be the brigade’s mail carrier and postmaster, and Robbins’ diary and Poe’s later statements show that Thompson was also serving as his orderly at the battle of Fredericksburg (less than two weeks after the brigade postmaster assignment). But their brigade wasn’t involved in this fighting. Within three months the 2nd Michigan was ultimately moved with its brigade to Kentucky, where Edmonds continued to work as postmaster and where her army service abruptly ended.

NURSE AND SPY?

The biggest myths surrounding Edmonds began with the publication of Nurse and Spy while the war was still raging – that the author, a young woman, first posed as a black youth and then an Irish peddler woman (and other subsequent disguises), going behind Confederate lines, gathering critical intelligence, outwitting Rebel officers, reporting to Gen. McClellan and even besting a guerilla leader in cavalry combat. Of course, at the time the book came out in 1864, Edmonds’ publishers insisted it was true. “The ‘Nurse and Spy’ is simply a record of events which have transpired in the experience and under the observation of one who has been on the field and participated in numerous battles,” her publisher insisted. “…[S]he penetrated the enemy’s line, in various disguises, no less than eleven times.”

Unfortunately for Edmonds’ espionage myth, that statement is belied by the fact that there is not a single mention of either Emma Edwards or Frank Thompson on the roster of spies employed in the spring and summer of 1862 by Union Army secret service chief Allan Pinkerton, or in the papers of McClellan, consummate military engineer, logistician, and administrator who then commanded the Army of the Potomac. This record of Union intelligence, in which the names of secret operatives are given, encompasses not hundreds, but thousands of pages. Fishel, who studied Civil War intelligence for his major book on the topic, rejected the adventures given by Edmonds in Nurse and Spy.

His case against the reality of her spy tales was even longer and stronger than his simple dismissal of Edmonds in his 1996 book. Fishel noted how she claimed to have seen Gen. Robert E. Lee in a Rebel camp (when Lee was actually in Richmond), or that she brought back intelligence about a Confederate fort at Yorktown with 150 artillery pieces (when no such fort existed). Fishel’s list of her fictions went on, but he simply did not have room in his own book to include it all. Fishel noted that Allan Pinkerton wrote his own semi-fictional memoir of his Civil War secret service work long after Nurse and Spy, outlining both real and imaginary operatives and adventures. Frank Thompson was not among them. Like many other “true” autobiographies of alleged Civil War spies, hers was fiction.

Though her biographers have tended to ignore or downplay it, Edmonds herself made what has become known today as a “non-denial denial” about the espionage tales in Nurse and Spy when she had to give a more accurate version of her military career. “I make no statement of any secret services,” she said in a sworn statement as she applied for a pension from the government. “In my mind there is about as much odium attached to the word ‘spy’ as there is to the word ‘deserter.’ There is so much mean deception necessarily practiced by a spy that I much prefer every one [sic] should believe that I never was beyond the enemy’s lines rather than fasten upon me by oath a thing that I despise so much.”

She continued: “It may do in war time, but it is not pleasant to think upon in time of peace.” It’s an incredible statement; Edmonds hadn’t minded identifying herself as a spy while the war was going on, when she had been in her 20s and selling a book in which sensational claims could only help sales. But once it emerged that Edmonds had been soldier Frank Thompson, she could “make no statement of any secret services” because there were none, and no witness or report to support her. As she sought a pension in 1884, she had to distance herself from the fantastic stories in her book. Had she really risked her life as a spy for the U.S., she could have said so; given some detail as to whom she worked with and reported to; and quickly been approved for a pension. It is important, too, to remember Edmonds’ reason for writing Nurse and Spy, something stated plainly by self and her publisher: Her proceeds from the book’s sales would be donated to benefit sick and wounded Union soldiers. In this she succeeded, with Edmonds’ profit of more than $1,000 going to efforts to help sick and wounded soldiers. Tales of derring-do and combatting enemy spies brought in wide-eyed readers and sales, but didn’t inform the truth. Had she written her real experiences, the officers under whom she served would have found themselves in trouble. That was not her intention.

Another popular story from Nurse and Spy was that Edmonds – somehow – was an orderly for an aggressive and well-liked Union general named Phil Kearny in a fierce battle outside of Richmond on May 31, 1862. This story, though false, provided the title for one of the past popular biographies of Edmonds – She Rode With the Generals. Edmonds wanted the reader to believe that she, the female volunteer nurse narrating the story, was dressed in an army uniform, accompanying Kearny into battle and then racing on horseback, carrying important orders back to bring up reinforcements. Later in her narrative, she said she witnessed Kearny being killed in action while she was on yet another secret mission – another ludicrous if not impossible circumstance.

Years later, as Edmonds sought a pension and had to give that accurate account of her service, she admitted she was ill at the time of the battle of Fair Oaks – not at a general’s side. “I was sick with chills and fever, but worked among the wounded until they were sent away,” she said. Not surprisingly, there is no order or record, not in the Thompson service record, nor in the regimental musters, nor in her own pension claims, of her being assigned to Kearny, a well-known Civil War hero. It’s an example of how Edmonds, in her book, linked herself to a martyred general who was then a household name and hero.

In fact, Anna Etheridge, nurse with the 2nd Michigan and other regiments, was reportedly recognized by Kearny and made a “regimental sergeant” for her dedicated service to wounded soldiers, something that appeared in newspapers of the day. Of course, Kearny didn’t have the legal authority to give a female volunteer nurse any sort of military position or rank, if he actually did so. Chances are good that Etheridge’s “promotion” was strictly camp gossip, a reporter’s invention, or an “honorary” position at best. But Kearny was killed in action in the late summer of 1862, and long since dead when Edmonds’ book came out. Still, it was true Etheridge would in time receive the “Kearny Cross,” a medal made in his honor, awarded to her by another Union general. That raises the question of whether Edmonds incorporated in her book the dramatic experiences of Etheridge and of Jane Hinsdale, who had truly ventured behind Rebel lines.

The factual shortcomings in Nurse and Spy go well beyond Edmonds’ adventures. A careful reading reveals a book filled with remarkable inconsistencies, fictions and errors, whose narrator leaves much unexplained. From an opening scene, Edmonds establishes the pattern that follows – drama and rhetorical flourish trumping reality. She relates that she’s on a train traveling to New England, to her adopted hometown, when the news of the war arrives. Suddenly she is describing an unnamed western village (Flint, Michigan) where she witnesses regiment after volunteer regiment forming, their bayonets gleaming in the sun, and then boarding trains for Washington D.C.

It’s a vivid picture of Northern patriotism and strength, but a product of her imagination. In the opening weeks of the war when Emma joined the 2nd Michigan in Detroit, only one regiment had left the state a few days prior to her own enlistment. Her regiment would leave Detroit about three weeks later. In Flint, where there was no train station and where Edmonds had lived and had friends, only one company, the one she joined, had formed and left for Detroit. This exaggeration is typical of her narrative; Edmonds didn’t let facts get in the way of a stirring tale.

Consider her own frenetic activity in the course of her book, nursing the sick and wounded, foraging in the countryside for food and bandages, trading shots with and wounding a Rebel woman but converting her over to the Union side, taking on secret missions, reporting to Gen. McClellan, escaping across raging battlefields, going back to nursing, carrying important dispatches for generals, and conducting counter-intelligence operations. The war was a rollicking but very proper and Christian adventure in Edmonds’ accounting; Union soldiers are noble souls who do not gamble, swear, drink, suffer bad morale or question the Union cause – things that were routinely expressed and described in soldiers’ letters and diaries, including men in her own company.

Though several former comrades willingly and emphatically supported Edmonds’ request for a pension, there were, apparently, those who didn’t remember her fondly. Whether there were comrades angry that she had truly deceived them while they were soldiers, or whether disapproving of her book and the heroic status accorded to her, or whether they simply remembered the actual circumstances of Thompson’s service and desertion, it seemed that some comrades (or maybe their wives) reacted negatively when Edmonds first attended a reunion of the 2nd Michigan in Flint in 1884. “I was properly punished for going to the reunion,” she wrote a friend and comrade three months later. “God forgive me for going.” Edmonds said she was proud to have been a member of the regiment, but that she was insulted at the reunion “…I discovered while at Flint that the honor of membership has cost me more than I am willing to pay, that of slurs upon my character.”

Late in her life, Edmonds repeated the notion that she would produce a second memoir, “to write differently about that portion of her life,” meaning her service in the war. She made it clear to the wife of a former comrade, Mrs. Damon Stewart of Flint, that she was writing a new autobiography. Sometime in 1897, Edmonds, now living in Texas, found a publisher in Houston: she had circulars printed up, advertising the story of her “honourable and eventful life,” and calling it “a life that has no parallel in the history of American Womanhood.” The circular told of her heroism in the Civil War, her authorship of Nurse and Spy and her deep patriotism and faith.

But Edmonds’ plans fell through. “You ask when my book will be ready to put on the market,” Edmonds wrote in the summer of 1897, when she said she just turned 60. “I am almost done writing the manuscript but I find the publisher is not in circumstances to publish it without my paying him in advance, which I am not prepared to do.” Edmonds complained that if she published it herself, she would receive ten or 15 cents for every copy sold. “I am not willing to have it published in that way,” she said, “the margin is too small for all the trouble I have had with it.”

Edmonds died just over a year later. Did she “write differently” about her life in the war, as she said she would in 1883 when asked about the veracity of Nurse and Spy? What happened to that second memoir she said she had nearly finished? Did she tell the true story as to how she joined the 2nd Michigan and “successfully” kept her sex a secret, now that the world knew the story, however embellished, of Frank Thompson and Emma Edmonds?

Given the patriotic and religious hyperbole of her 1897 circular for that unproduced memoir – and the fact that a real account of her service would require a personal and revealing explanation of how she hid her gender – the likely answer is no. Even thirty years after the war, it would seem from the advance publicity material about her new memoir that only a sanitized and heroic account would do.

Her one-time friend and comrade, Jerome Robbins, kept two of her letters, though his diary clearly reflects he received more letters from her than this. But he glued together the pages of his journal in which he noted Frank Thompson’s secret, writing instructions on them not to be opened without his permission. It wasn’t until 100 years later this secret was shared with the public in a magazine of Michigan history, exposing the truth behind the myth that had long since grown up around her.

The real story of Edmonds’ service – without the fictions and exaggerations of Nurse and Spy – remains largely untold and unexplained, with the exception of the bare bones of her service record and the Jerome Robbins papers. Even without the unreal spy exploits of Nurse and Spy, a true account of her Civil War service would have been a remarkable memoir. As her friend Jerome Robbins recorded in 1863 the Frank Thompson-Emma Edmonds matter “was a strange history” – one that remains mythologized and misunderstood, but enthusiastically repeated, despite its fictions.
 * Thank you for your long commentary. There are a number of reputable histories published recently by historians interested in military history and women's history that have tried to separate the dramatic fictions from the reality of her exploits.  I have added these titles to the article's reference section.  Please consider using them, especially Gansler and Leonard's works, in making improvements to this article. If you need a copy, you can ask your local library to request if for you from the Pritzker Military Museum & Library via interlibrary loan.TeriEmbrey (talk) 15:44, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Factual accuracy
Thanks to the extensive notes above, I've tagged the article with Disputed until anyone has time to attempt a rewrite. Basie (talk) 00:56, 14 October 2014 (UTC)

Behind Rebel Lines
I also note that the book Behind Rebel Lines by Seymour Reit (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1988)(ISBN: 978-0-15-216427-0) begins with the assertion that her story is completely true and the book only takes liberties with some speeches and thoughts for readability. This is quite an assertion.

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Sarah Emma Edmonds. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20071008130543/http://www.saltmag.net/givetous/Andrea_21405.pdf to http://www.saltmag.net/givetous/Andrea_21405.pdf

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 19:39, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Contradiction
''...Fanny Campbell and her adventures on a pirate ship during the American Revolution while dressed as a woman. Fanny remained dressed as a man in order to pursue other adventures...''
 * If she 'remained' dressed as a man, then the first statement must be wrong. Valetude (talk) 16:25, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 7 August 2019
Please add to "Further Reading" section this entry:

Gardner, Bonnie Milne. "The Secret War of Emma Edmonds." An original play produced October 2013 at Ohio Wesleyan University. Website: bmgardner.weebly.com. Bmgwriter (talk) 18:18, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: "Further reading" should preferably be scholarly material and accessible online or in libraries. You can also not link to your own writings. – Thjarkur (talk) 19:58, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

title: Talk:Sarah Emma Edmonds


text:
Indra Devi

Eugenie Peterson (Eiženija Pētersone, Евгения Васильевна Петерсон; 22 May, 1899 – 25 April 2002), known as Indra Devi, was a pioneering teacher of yoga as exercise, and an early disciple of the "father of modern yoga", Tirumalai Krishnamacharya.

She went to India in her twenties, becoming a film star there and acquiring the stage name Indra Devi. She was the first woman to study under the yoga guru Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, alongside B.K.S Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois who went on to become yoga gurus. Moving to China, she taught the first yoga classes in that country at Madame Chiang Kai-shek's house.

Her popularization of yoga in America through her many celebrity pupils in Hollywood, and her books advocating yoga for stress relief, earned her the nickname "first lady of yoga". Her biographer, Michelle Goldberg, wrote that Devi "planted the seeds for the yoga boom of the 1990s".

Early years
Eugenie "Zhenya" Peterson was born on 12 May 1899 in Riga in the Russian Empire (now Latvia), to Vasili Peterson, a Swedish bank director, and Aleksandra Labunskaya, a Russian noblewoman who acted at the Nezlobina Theatre. Eugenie was given a Russian Orthodox baptism. She went to high school in Saint Petersburg, graduating with a gold medal in 1917. She briefly attended drama school in Moscow. In the Russian Revolution, her father served as an army officer and went missing in action in the civil war. Eugenie and her mother escaped to Latvia as the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, losing the family fortune; in 1920 they moved to Poland, and in 1921 to Berlin, where she became an actress and dancer.

In 1926, attracted by a notice in a bookshop in Tallinn, she went to hear Jiddu Krishnamurti at a Theosophical Society meeting in the Netherlands; his chanting of Sanskrit mantras around a campfire had a powerful effect on her. She later said "It seemed to me, I was hearing a forgotten call, familiar, but distant. From that day everything in me turned upside down."

India
Devi's fascination with India began at 15 when she read a book by poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and a yoga instruction book by Yogi Ramacharaka. In Berlin, she worked as an actor in The Blue Bird, touring Europe, and accepted a proposal of marriage from the banker Herman Bolm, on condition she could first go to India; he agreed and paid for the trip. She set off on 17 November 1927, crossing India from south to north, wearing a sari for the first time, sitting on the floor and eating with her fingers. She came back three months later, a changed woman, speaking only of India, and returned Bolm's engagement ring. She soon went back to India, selling her valuables to pay for the trip. At the Theosophical Society in Adyar (Madras, now Chennai), dancing "an Indian temple dance", she met Jawaharlal Nehru, starting a long-term friendship, and the Indian film director Bhagwati Mishra, who gave her a part in Sher-e-Arab (Arabian Knight): the 1930 premiere made her a film star in India, under a new stage name, Indra Devi. In 1930, she married Jan Strakaty, a commercial attache to the Czechoslovak consulate in Bombay, and for some years lived as a society hostess there.

She became interested in yoga, Nepal's prince Mussoorie showing her some asanas, and she was impressed by the yoga guru Krishnamacharya's demonstration of apparently stopping his heart. She asked to study with him; in 1938, he reluctantly accepted her as a student after his employer, the Maharaja of Mysore, spoke on her behalf. She was obliged to keep to the strict vegetarian diet and the monastic hours, with lights out at 9pm. She was the first foreign woman among his students in the yogasala in the Mysore Palace, studying alongside B.K.S Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois who went on to become world-famous yoga teachers. When she was leaving India to follow her husband to China, Krishnamacharya asked her to work as a yoga teacher there.

China
In 1939, she held what are believed to be the first yoga classes in China and opened a school in Shanghai at the house of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the nationalist leader and a new yoga enthusiast. The classes began with 20 minutes of relaxation in shavasana, followed by bridge, shoulderstand, gentle backbends such as cobra pose, lotus position (including leaning right forward into Yogamudrasana), and headstand, against a wall for beginners. There were many Americans and Russians among her pupils; she also taught free classes in orphanages. More and more people began to call her Mataji, which means "respected mother".

India and China
Her husband died unexpectedly in 1946, and Devi returned to India, arriving in Bombay as the British Raj was coming to an end. She was hosted by the maharajah of Tehri Garhwal at his palace in the Himalayas. She was hoping to stay in Kashmir to teach yoga in a centre to be run by the Cambodian monk Bellong Mahathera, but her mother called her back to Shanghai, where Devi's house was being requisitioned by the army in the Chinese Civil War. Devi arrived there in time to sell many of her possessions before the house was taken over. She claimed later that she had wanted to return to India, but she obtained a United States visa, and sailed on the troopship USS General W. H. Gordon to San Francisco at the end of 1947.

United States

In California, assisted by her experience as a diplomat's wife with a patrician manner and the natural confidence of the wealthy, she met the author and philosopher Aldous Huxley and Krishnamurti, giving her access to spiritually-inclined Americans; an especially valuable contact was the diet and health guru Paul Bragg, who advised film and stage stars. In 1948 she opened a yoga studio at 8806 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, the first in Los Angeles; she had a distinctive style and appearance, as she normally wore a sari. Her friends Magaña and Walt Baptiste opened a yoga school in San Francisco in 1952; she became godmother to their son Baron Baptiste, who went on to found Baron Baptiste Power Yoga.

Devi taught her own form of hatha yoga, with asanas (postures) and pranayama (breath control); she avoided spiritual teaching, which she preferred to leave to yoga gurus. Her teaching style was in Stefanie Syman's words "gentle and even relaxing". She was almost immediately successful in attracting leading stars, including men as well as women; Syman notes that "she could charm the pants off men". Elliott Goldberg gives a different explanation for her success, attributing it to her packaging of yoga for women as a "beauty secret, youth elixir, and health tonic". More generally, in his view, Devi saw yoga as a remedy for anxiety and stress, noting that this transformed yoga from something that dissolved the ego to something that strengthened it, because, he commented, Americans did want to change "but not all that much". Devi's advocacy of yoga for stress relief contributed, in Goldberg's view, to the widespread acceptance of yoga in America, and earned her the nickname "first lady of yoga".

She taught yoga to many celebrities including Greta Garbo, Eva Gabor, and Gloria Swanson. Also among her students were Ramon Novarro, Robert Ryan, Yul Brynner, Jennifer Jones, and the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who brought Iyengar to the West.

Her books, including the 1953 Forever Young, Forever Healthy and the 1959 Yoga for Americans described a gentle, relaxing style of yoga using a small number of asanas, practised slowly. Devi's biographer, Michelle Goldberg, describes Yoga for Americans as having "a chipper, secular practicality perfectly calibrated for Eisenhower's America." Devi introduced the book as of value to artists, "businessmen and sportsmen, models and housewives" and office workers. Menuhin wrote the foreword. The two books were "an enormous success", and were translated into languages including French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

In 1953 Devi married the German anthroposophical physician Sigfrid Knauer. In the mid-1950s she was granted American citizenship and changed her legal name to Indra Devi. In 1960 she visited the USSR, seeing Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) for the first time in 40 years, and meeting the government ministers Andrei Gromyko and Alexei Kosygin at the Indian ambassador's reception at the Sovetskaya Hotel. Devi later recorded several instructional talks on yoga, including "Renew Your Life with Yoga."

Latin America
In 1961, Knauer bought Devi a large ranch near Tecate in Mexico; she opened the Indra Devi Foundation there. From 1966, she became close to the Hindu guru Sathya Sai Baba, and she travelled often from Tecate to Bangalore and Puttaparthi. She closed the Tecate operation in 1977 and moved with her very ill husband to Bangalore. In 1984 she and Knauer made a trip to Sri Lanka, where he died.

In 1985 she moved to Argentina. In 1987 she was elected president of honour of the International Yoga Federation, and of the Latin American Union of Yoga under the presidency of Swami Maitreyananda at Montevideo, Uruguay. She died in Buenos Aires in 2002.

Legacy
Biographer Michelle Goldberg comments that for most of her life, Devi's "only goal" was to bring yoga to the West, and when it became "a ubiquitous part of cosmopolitan urban culture, signifier of a lifestyle at once wholesome and sexy" in the 1990s, she had certainly succeeded, even if the new yoga is "much more vigorous than the style she taught".

Yoga remains, Goldberg writes, as Devi had made it, a predominantly female pursuit, despite the energetic workouts of Power Yoga; she created the link in the Western mind between yoga and organic food, "holistic spas, and biodynamic beauty products". Goldberg also notes that yoga in the West is "a hybrid culture", with "an immense gulf between the limber young women in Lululemon yoga gear ... and the ash-smeared half-naked yogins .. on the banks of the Ganges".

title: Indra Devi


text:
Madhu Sudan

Madhu Sudan (born 12 September 1966) is an Indian-American computer scientist. He has been a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2015.

Career
He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Delhi in 1987 and his doctoral degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. The dissertation he wrote at the University of California, Berkeley is titled Efficient Checking of Polynomials and Proofs and the Hardness of Approximation Problems. He was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York from 1992 to 1997 and became a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after that. From 2009 to 2015 he was a permanent researcher at Microsoft Research New England before joining the Harvard University faculty in 2015.

Research contribution and awards
In 1998, he received the Sloan Research Fellowship. He was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize at the 24th International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2002. The prize recognizes outstanding work in the mathematical aspects of computer science. Sudan was honored for his work in advancing the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs—a way to recast a mathematical proof in computer language for additional checks on its validity—and developing error-correcting codes. For the same work, he received the ACM's Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1993 and the Gödel Prize in 2001 and was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1998. He is a Fellow of the ACM (2008). In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2014 he won the Infosys Prize in the mathematical sciences. In 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2021, he was awarded the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for 2022.

Sudan has made important contributions to several areas of theoretical computer science, including probabilistically checkable proofs, non-approximability of optimization problems, list decoding, and error-correcting codes.

title: Madhu Sudan