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Sean Bean

Sean Bean (born Shaun Mark Bean; 17 April 1959) is an English actor. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Bean made his professional debut in a production of Romeo and Juliet in 1983 at The Watermill Theatre. Retaining his Yorkshire accent, he first found mainstream success for his portrayal of Richard Sharpe in the ITV series Sharpe, which originally ran from 1993 to 1997.

Bean's film roles include Patriot Games (1992), GoldenEye (1995), Ronin (1998), Don't Say a Word (2001), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), Equilibrium (2002), National Treasure (2004), Troy (2004), Flightplan (2005), North Country (2005), The Island (2005), Silent Hill (2006), Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010), Black Death (2010), Jupiter Ascending (2015), and The Martian (2015).

His television roles include the BBC anthology series Accused, Broken, Game of Thrones, and the ITV historical drama series Henry VIII and Legends. As a voice actor, Bean has been featured in the video games The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, and the feature films Wolfwalkers and Mummies among others. Since 2002, Bean has been the main voice over for O2 adverts, with the most recent advert released in July 2024.

In 2022, Bean won the British Academy Television Award as Leading Actor in Time, a BBC One drama.

Early life
Shaun Mark Bean was born on 17 April 1959 in Handsworth, a suburb of Sheffield, the son of Rita (Tuckwood) and Brian K. Bean (born 1934). He has a younger sister, Lorraine. His paternal grandfather, Harold Bean Jr. (1914–2001), served in the Royal Navy in the Second World War and was a stud mill labourer who later became a pacifist. His father owned a fabrication company that employed 50 people, including Bean's mother, who worked as a secretary. Despite becoming relatively wealthy, the family never moved away from the council estate as they preferred to remain close to friends and family. As a child, Bean smashed a glass door during an argument, which left a piece of glass embedded in his leg that briefly impeded his walking, and left a large scar. This prevented him from pursuing his ambition of playing football professionally.

Bean first attended a local school, Handsworth Junior School, before going to Athelstan School until he was 12, when he went to study at Brook School. In 1975, Bean left Brook Comprehensive School with O levels in Art and English. After a job at a supermarket and another for the local council, he started work at his father's firm. Once a week, he attended Rotherham College of Arts and Technology to study welding. While at college, he came upon an art class, and decided to pursue his interest in art. After attending courses at two other colleges, one for half a day and the other for less than a week, he returned to Rotherham College, where he enrolled in a drama course. After some college plays and one at Rotherham Civic Theatre, he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), starting a seven-term course in January 1981.

Career

Bean graduated from RADA in 1983, making his professional acting debut later that year as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury. His early career involved a mixture of stage and screen work. As an actor, he adopted the Irish spelling of his first name. His first national exposure came in an advert for Barbican non-alcoholic lager. In 1984, he starred in David and Jonathan by William Douglas-Home at the Redgrave Theatre in Farnham. Between 1986 and 1988, he was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in productions of Romeo and Juliet, The Fair Maid of the West, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. He appeared in his first film, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio (1986), opposite Tilda Swinton, playing Ranuccio Tomassoni, followed by the same director's War Requiem (1988). In 1989, he starred as the evil Dominic O'Brien in The Fifteen Streets, where he gained a dedicated following.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bean became an established actor on British television. In 1990, Bean starred in Jim Sheridan's adaptation of the John B. Keane play The Field. Also in 1990, his role as the journalist Anton in Windprints examined the difficult problems of apartheid in South Africa. He appeared in the BBC productions Clarissa (1991) (with Saskia Wickham and Lynsey Baxter) and Lady Chatterley (1993) (with Joely Richardson). In 1996, he combined his love of football with his career to finally achieve his childhood dream of playing for Sheffield United, starring as Jimmy Muir in the film When Saturday Comes. Although the film was not critically acclaimed, Bean received credit for a good performance. In August 1997, Bean appeared in what became a famous Sky Sports commercial for the upcoming 1997–98 Premier League season. His football related work continued in 1998 when he narrated La Coupe de la Gloire, the official film of the 1998 FIFA World Cup held in France.

Bean's critical successes in Caravaggio and Lady Chatterley contributed to his emerging image as a sex symbol, but he became most closely associated with the character of Richard Sharpe, the maverick Napoleonic Wars rifleman in the ITV television series Sharpe. The series was based on Bernard Cornwell's novels about the Peninsular War, and the fictional experiences of a band of soldiers in the famed 95th Rifles. Starting with Sharpe's Rifles, the series followed the fortunes and misfortunes of Richard Sharpe as he rose from the ranks as a Sergeant, promoted to Lieutenant in Portugal, to Lieutenant Colonel by the time of the Battle of Waterloo.

Bean was not the first actor to be chosen to play Sharpe. As Paul McGann was injured while playing football two days into filming, the producers initially tried to work around his injury, but it proved impossible and Bean replaced him. The series ran continuously from 1993 to 1997, with three episodes produced each year. It was filmed under challenging conditions, first in Ukraine and later in Portugal. After several years of rumours, more episodes were produced: Sharpe's Challenge, which aired in April 2006, and Sharpe's Peril, which aired in autumn 2008 and was later released on DVD. Both of these were released as two cinema-length 90-minute episodes per series. With a role as enigmatic Lord Richard Fenton in the TV miniseries Scarlett, Bean made the transition to Hollywood feature films. His first notable Hollywood appearance was that of an Irish republican terrorist in the 1992 film adaptation of Patriot Games. While filming his death scene, Harrison Ford hit him with a boat hook, giving him a permanent scar. Bean's rough-cut looks made him a patent choice for a villain, and his role in Patriot Games was the first of several villains that he would portray, all of whom die in gruesome ways.

In the 1995 film GoldenEye, Bean portrayed James Bond's nemesis Alec Trevelyan (MI6's 006). He played the weak-stomached Spence in Ronin (1998), a wife-beating ex-con in Essex Boys (2000), and a malevolent kidnapper/jewel thief in Don't Say a Word (2001). He was also widely recognised as villainous treasure hunter Ian Howe in National Treasure, and played a villainous scientist in The Island (2005). In the independent film Far North, he plays a Russian mercenary who gets lost in the tundra and is rescued by an Inuit woman and her daughter, whom he later pits against one another.

Bean's most prominent role was as Boromir in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. His major screen time occurs in the first instalment, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. He appears briefly in flashbacks in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, as well as in a scene from the extended edition of The Two Towers. Before casting finished, rumours circulated that Jackson had considered Bean for the role of Aragorn, but neither Bean nor Jackson confirmed this in subsequent interviews. Bean's fear of flying in helicopters caused him difficulties in mountainous New Zealand, where the trilogy was filmed. After a particularly rough ride, he vowed not to fly to a location again; in one instance, he chose to take a ski lift into the mountains while wearing his full costume (complete with shield, armour, and sword) and then hike the final few miles.

Other roles gave more scope for his acting abilities. In 1999's Extremely Dangerous, his character walked a fine line between villain and hero. He became a repentant, poetry-reading Grammaton cleric who succumbs to his emotions in 2002's Equilibrium, a quirky alien cowboy in 2003's The Big Empty, and a sympathetic and cunning Odysseus in the 2004 film Troy. He appeared with other Hollywood stars in Moby's music video "We Are All Made of Stars" in February 2002. In the same year, he returned to the stage in London performing in Macbeth. Due to popular demand, the production ran until March 2003.

Bean has done voice-over work, mostly in the British advertising industry. He has featured in television adverts for O2, Morrisons and Barnardos as well as for Acuvue and the Sci-Fi Channel in the United States. He also does the voice over for the National Blood Service's television and radio campaign. Bean has also filmed a TV ad for Yorkshire Tea, a United Kingdom brand of tea. For the role playing video game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, he voiced Martin Septim. Bean's distinctive voice has also been used in the intro and outro segments of the BBC Formula 1 racing coverage for the 2011 and 2012 seasons.

Bean completed a one-hour pilot, Faceless, for US television. He has also appeared in Outlaw, an independent British production, and a remake of 1986 horror film, The Hitcher (released in January 2007); here he used an American accent again. In 2009, he appeared in the Red Riding trilogy as the malevolent John Dawson. He also appeared in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010), playing the role of Zeus, the king of Mount Olympus and god of the sky, thunder, and lightning. Also that year, Bean starred in Cash, playing the lead role of Pyke Kubic, a dangerous man determined to recover his wealth in a bad economy. Cash explored the role money plays in today's hard economic times. Bean also played the villain's twin brother, Reese. Bean starred in the first season of Game of Thrones, HBO's adaptation of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R. R. Martin, playing the part of Lord Eddard "Ned" Stark. Bean and Peter Dinklage were the two actors whose inclusion show runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss considered necessary for the show to become a success, and for whose roles no other actors were considered. His portrayal won him critical praise; as The A.V. Club reviewer put it, he "portrayed Ned as a man who knew he lived in the muck but hoped for better and assumed everyone else would come along for the ride." HBO's promotional efforts focused on Bean as the show's leading man and best-known actor.

In August 2012, Bean appeared as cross-dressing teacher Simon in the opening episode of the second season of UK television series Accused, a role which would earn him a Royal Television Society best actor award. He starred in Soldiers of Fortune and the 2012 film Cleanskin, in which he plays a secret service agent faced with the task of pursuing and eliminating a suicide bomber and his terrorist cell. In 2012 he also appeared in Tarsem Singh's Snow White film, Mirror Mirror, which was released in the U.S. in March. He also reprised his role as Christopher Da Silva in the Silent Hill film sequel Silent Hill: Revelation, and co-starred in the ABC drama series Missing, which premiered in early 2012.

Bean starred in the espionage television series Legends as Martin Odum, an FBI agent who takes on various fabricated identities to go undercover. The show was cancelled after its second season. An intensive viral marketing campaign was centred on the hashtag #DontKillSeanBean, focusing on the various deaths of his past characters and promising his character in Legends would not suffer the same fate. The campaign culminated with a Funny or Die exclusive video featuring Bean filming a scene for the show where he's become so accustomed to dying on screen that he expects his character to die a bizarrely gruesome death despite the simplicity of the scene.

From 2015 to 2017, Bean starred in the ITV Encore drama series The Frankenstein Chronicles. In that time, he also starred in multiple notable films including Jupiter Ascending, Pixels, and The Martian. In 2017, Bean starred in the BBC series Broken as the troubled priest Father Michael Kerrigan, which earned him a BAFTA award for Best Actor. In 2019, Bean played a damaged veteran in the TV drama World on Fire, basing his interpretation on his late paternal grandfather.

On 31 May 2020, Bean appeared on Josh Gad's YouTube series Reunited Apart which reunites the cast of popular movies through video-conferencing, and promotes donations to non-profit charities. The episode saw Bean reunited with fellow Lord of the Rings castmates Sean Astin, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Ian McKellen, Dominic Monaghan, Viggo Mortensen, Miranda Otto, John Rhys-Davies, Andy Serkis, Liv Tyler, Karl Urban, and Elijah Wood, plus composer Howard Shore, writer Philippa Boyens and director Peter Jackson.

In 2021, the actor was reunited with Jimmy McGovern (author of Broken and Accused) and Stephen Graham (his co-star in Tracie's Story) for the 3-part BBC prison drama Time.

In September 2021, it was announced that Stefan Golaszewski's new drama, Marriage would air in 2022 and would star Bean alongside Nicola Walker. The series opened to mixed reviews from both critics and viewers.

Personality
Bean is often described as "down to earth" and has retained his Yorkshire accent. He says that he does not mind being considered as a "bit of rough" by women. He has developed a reputation as a loner, a label that he considers unfair. He has described himself instead as quiet, and interviewers confirm that he is a "man of few words", with one interviewer calling him "surprisingly shy". He admits that he can be a workaholic; he reads books or listens to music in his spare time, and is a skilled pianist. He is also a keen gardener, welder, and sketcher. Popular in his home county, a 2018 poll for Yorkshire Day saw Bean ranked the second greatest Yorkshireman ever behind Monty Python comedian, and fellow Sheffielder, Michael Palin.

Acting style
Despite being professionally trained, Bean adopted an instinctive style of acting that some say makes him especially well-suited to portraying his characters' depths. He has said that the most difficult part is at the start of filming when trying to understand the character. After achieving this, he can snap in and out of character instantly. This ability to go from the quiet man on set to the warrior Boromir "amazed" Sean Astin during filming of The Fellowship of the Ring. Other fans include directors Mike Figgis and Wolfgang Petersen, who described working with Bean as a "beautiful thing".

Deaths of characters
Bean's characters tend to die on screen, a phenomenon that has gained notoriety on the internet and in The Lord of The Rings, Game of Thrones and James Bond fandoms and become an Internet meme. In September 2019, Bean revealed that he had been turning down roles that would have his character killed following Game of Thrones, so that his performances would not become predictable. Bean's favourite on-screen death is Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring: "I thought his death was very heroic and triumphant and poignant. It had pathos."

Personal life
Bean has been married five times and divorced four times. He married his secondary school sweetheart Debra James on 11 April 1981, and they were divorced in 1988. He met actress Melanie Hill at RADA, and they were married on 27 February 1990. Their first daughter was born in October 1987, and their second was born in September 1991. Their marriage ended in divorce in August 1997. During the filming of Sharpe, Bean met actress Abigail Cruttenden, and they were married on 22 November 1997. Their daughter was born in November 1998. They were divorced in July 2000. In addition to his three children, Bean has four grandchildren.

Bean began dating actress Georgina Sutcliffe in 2006. After cancelling their planned January 2008 wedding on the eve of the ceremony for "personal reasons", he married Sutcliffe at the Marylebone Town Hall in London on 19 February 2008. During allegations that Bean physically abused Sutcliffe in 2009, domestic disturbances resulted in the police being called to their home in Belsize Park on three occasions. Bean and Sutcliffe's separation was announced on 6 August 2010, and a decree nisi was granted on 21 December 2010. He married Ashley Moore on 30 June 2017.

Bean has been a fan of Sheffield United (the "Blades") since he was eight years old, and has a tattoo on his left shoulder that reads "100% Blade". He opened their Hall of Fame in 2001 and, after making a six-figure contribution to the club's finances, was on their board of directors between 2002 and 2007 to help raise the profile of the club. He stepped down in 2007 to "go back to being an ordinary supporter" where he feels at home. During his time there, he had a dispute with Neil Warnock, former manager of Sheffield United, after Warnock claimed that Bean stormed into his office and shouted at him in front of his wife and daughter when the club had just been relegated from the Premier League. Bean denies it, calling Warnock "bitter" and "hypocritical". He wrote the foreword and helped to promote a book of anecdotes called Sheffield United: The Biography. He also follows Yorkshire County Cricket Club.

Bean has a tattoo of the number nine on his shoulder, written using Tengwar, in reference to his involvement in the Lord of the Rings films and the fact that his character was one of the original nine companions of the Fellowship of the Ring. Seven of the other actors of "The Fellowship" (Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Ian McKellen, Dominic Monaghan, and Viggo Mortensen) have the same tattoo. John Rhys-Davies, whose character was also one of the original nine companions, arranged for his stunt double to get the tattoo instead.

Aligned with the British left, in 2015 Bean expressed support for Jeremy Corbyn and for "old Labour", the era before Tony Blair rebranded the party as New Labour; Bean also spoke of his admiration for Tony Benn.

Bean is a Christian and a gardener in his spare time.

Awards and honours
In his home city of Sheffield, he has received several honours and acclaims, including an honorary doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University in 1997 and a Doctor of Letters in English Literature from the University of Sheffield in July 2007. He was selected as one of the inaugural members of Sheffield Legends (the Sheffield equivalent of the Hollywood Walk of Fame) and a plaque in his honour has been placed in front of Sheffield Town Hall. Bean commented: "I did get a doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University about 11 or 12 years ago so now I'm a double doctor. But this was wonderful, especially from my home city."

title: Sean Bean


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Central Black Earth Region

The Central Black Earth Region, also Central-Chernozem Region or Chernozemye (Центрально-Чернозёмная полоса) is a segment of the Eurasian Black Earth belt that lies within Central Russia and comprises Voronezh Oblast, Lipetsk Oblast, Belgorod Oblast, Tambov Oblast, Oryol Oblast and Kursk Oblast. Between 1928 and 1934, these regions were briefly united into Central Black Earth Oblast, with the centre in Voronezh.

The Black Earth Region is famous for its high quality soil, called Chernozem (Black Earth). Although its importance has been primarily agricultural, the Chernozem Region was developed by the Soviets as an industrial region based on iron ores of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly.

The area contains a biosphere nature reserve called Central Black Earth Nature Reserve (42 km2). It was created in 1935 within the Kursk and Belgorod oblasts. A prime specimen of forest steppe in Europe, the nature reserve consists of typical virgin land (tselina) steppes and deciduous forests.

Juozas Vareikis was the First Secretary of Communist Party's Regional Committee for the Central Black Earth Region (1928–1934).

History

On May 14, 1928, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and Government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic passed a directive on the formation of the Central Black Earth Oblast using the territory of the former Voronezh, Kursk, Oryol and Tambov Governorate Governorates with its centre as the city of Voronezh.

On July 16, 1928 the composition of the Central Black Earth Oblast was determined and on July 30 of the same year its districts were founded. Later, from 1929 to 1933, these districts were revised several times.

On June 3, 1929 the centre of the region, Voronezh, was designated as an independent administrative unit directly subordinate to the regional Congress of Soviets and its executive committee.

On September 16, 1929 the Voronezh Okrug was abolished and its territory was split among the newly founded Stary Oskol and Usman Okrugs.

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

title: Central Black Earth Region


text:
Roy Stryker

Roy Emerson Stryker (November 5, 1893 – September 27, 1975) was an American economist, government official, and photographer. He headed the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression, and launched the documentary photography program of the FSA. It hired photographers to travel across the United States and document people in different areas and settings as part of showing the state of people in rural areas in those years. Specific projects were conceived to help assess effects of government programs.

He later worked several years on a documentary project for Standard Oil, established the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL), consulted with other companies, and taught photo-journalism at University of Missouri. In his later years he returned to the West, living at last in Colorado.

Life
After serving in the infantry in World War I, Stryker went to Columbia University, where he studied economics. He used photography to illustrate his economics texts and lectures. At Columbia, he worked with Rexford Tugwell. When Tugwell became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration, Stryker followed him. Tugwell and Stryker refocused the attention of the Resettlement Administration to document the problems of the heartland, and in 1935 Stryker became the head of the Historical Section (Information Division) of the RA. The RA was renamed as the Farm Security Administration, and Stryker set up the photo-documentary project.

Stryker was a manager of the FSA's photographic project. The photographers involved attested to his skill in getting good work from them. He ensured that the photographers were well briefed on their assigned areas before being sent out, and that they were properly funded. However, Stryker has been criticized for his destructive editing, as he would sometimes physically deface negatives by punching holes in them. "'Roy was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable,' photographer and artist Ben Shahn has been quoted saying."

Stryker also made sure that mainstream publications had access to FSA photographs. This both helped focus public attention on the plight of the rural poor and set up the commercial careers of his photographers. Overall, from 164,000 developed negatives, some 77,000 different finished photographic prints were made for the press, plus 644 color images.

Photographers hired by Stryker for the FSA included Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, John Collier, Carl Mydans, and Edwin and Louise Rosskam.

During World War II, the photographic unit of the FSA was reassigned to the Office of War Information. It was used to produce what was essentially propaganda and disbanded after a year. At the same time, the US Congress disbanded the FSA. The holdings of the FSA's photographic unit were transferred to the Library of Congress.

Stryker resigned from the government. He worked for Standard Oil in its public relations documentary project from 1943 to 1950, hiring some of the photographers he had worked with at FSA. In selecting photographers for projects at Standard Oil (SO), Stryker sought those who possessed what he described as an "'insatiable curiosity, the kind that can get to the core of an assignment, the kind that can comprehend what a truck driver, or a farmer, or a driller or a housewife thinks and feels and translate those thoughts and feelings into pictures that can be similarly comprehended by anyone.'"

Photographers on the SO project included, among others: Berenice Abbott, Gordon Parks and Todd Webb; as well as Esther Bubley, Harold Corsini, Russell Lee, Arnold S. Eagle, Elliott Erwitt and Sol Libsohn, who would later follow Stryker to his next project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After suggesting topics he wanted to be documented, Stryker gave his photographers the freedom to pursue their individual approaches to their subjects. As with all his projects, Stryker was adamant that his staff understand their subjects and their context before going out on an assignment.

From 1950 to 1952, Stryker worked to establish the Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL). In 1960, the collection was transferred to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

After leaving the PPL, Stryker directed a documentation project at Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. Thereafter, he accepted consulting jobs on occasion and conducted seminars on photo-journalism at the Journalism School of University of Missouri. Stryker eventually returned to the West in the 1960s. He died in Grand Junction, Colorado.

The Roy Stryker Papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, and vintage prints from the Stryker-directed projects: Farm Security Administration (FSA), the Standard Oil (New Jersey) Co. and Jones & Laughlin Steel, are held in Photographic Archives, Archives and Special Collections, University of Louisville.

title: Roy Stryker


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Juana Manuela Gorriti

Juana Manuela Gorriti Zuviria (15 June 1818 – 6 November 1892) was an Argentine writer with extensive political and literary links to Bolivia and Peru. She held the position of First Lady of Bolivia from 1848 to 1855.

With the publication of La quena (1845), Gorriti became recognized as the earliest novelist in what would become Argentina. In La quena, Gorriti challenged the notion of poverty, ignorance, tyranny, and the oppression of women, writing, "A day shall come in which man's science will discover those treasures; but by then men will be free and equal, and they shall use wealth to serve humanity! The reign of worries and despotism will have ended, and only man's genius will rule the world, it reside upon the head of a European, or upon that of an Indian." Gorriti's commitment to women's issues sparked the interest of both women and men, including Abel Delgado. His essay, "La educación social de la mujer", ("The Social Education of Woman," 1892) discussed male and female spheres and justified women's participation in law and politics.

Biography
Juana Manuela Gorriti was born on 15 June 1818, in Rosario de la Frontera, in the province of Salta in the north of Argentina. She came from a wealthy upper-class family and attended a convent school when she was eight. She was born to José Ignacio de Gorriti and Feleciana Zuviria. Her father was a politician and soldier, and signed the Argentine Declaration of Independence on 9 July 1816. She was also the niece of the infamous guerrilla Jose Francisco "Pachi" Gorriti. Her family was liberal and supported the Unitarians during a time when Juan Manuel de Rosas ran the country. De Rosas was a conservative Governor of Buenos Aires Province from 1829 to 1832 who used violent measures to dispossess indigenous people and pave the way for expansion. In 1831, when Gorriti was thirteen, the federal caudillo Facundo Quiroga forced Gorriti and much of her family into exile.

Goritti's family settled in Tarija, Bolivia, where she met her future husband, Manuel Isidro Belzú, who was a captain in the Bolivian Army at the time. They married when she was fifteen, and they had two daughters. As his career advanced, their marriage suffered, and he abandoned her in 1842 after nine years together. Gorriti did not receive the divorce papers until fourteen years later, after his assassination. After her return to Argentina, she died on 6 November 1892, in Buenos Aires at the age of 74.

The Salons
In Lima, the coastal city where she lived, she developed a name as an influential journalist and started to host tertulias on a regular basis. These salons would be attended by fashionable and mostly well-educated men and women, such as Ricardo Palma and Manuel González Prada, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Teresa González de Fanning. They would meet to discuss literature and social progress, themes that Gorriti felt passionate about and would include in much of her literature.

By organizing and hosting her tertulias, Gorriti provided a great opportunity for female writers to come together and discuss literature, progress, and the progress of women. Many of the attendees would later go on to write more about these subjects, including Teresa González de Fanning, who founded an enlightened women's movement.

Women's rights
Gorriti was an ardent feminist before the term itself was invented, and her dedication to women's rights showed in many of her journals. Through her writings, she instructed and inspired women to take on the gender roles more commonly found in Europe and North America. She wanted women to be heard, to educate themselves, and not be afraid to go against social norms.

First Lady of Bolivia
Manuel Isidoro Belzú, husband to Gorriti, went on to become president of Bolivia in 1848. He survived an assassination attempt two years later and ruled for a further five years until retiring in 1855, having sponsored his son-in-law, Jorge Córdova, to succeed him. Córdova was overthrown in a coup d'état two years later and was succeeded by José María Linares, who in turn was ousted by his Minister of War, José María de Achá in 1861. Achá survived for three years until replaced, through another coup, by General Mariano Melgarejo. Belzú raised an army against Melgarejo who, according to unconfirmed rumours, invited him to the presidential palace and shot him during a fake embrace. He died on 23 March 1865.

Battlefield nurse
In 1866, the Spanish Navy shelled ports on Peru's and Chile's coastlines, including the port of Lima, where Gorriti served as a battlefield nurse. Gorriti received a military honor from Peru for her heroic acts of saving injured Peruvian soldiers. She also risked her life evacuating the wounded when the Spanish surrendered at Callao. For her heroism, and Florence Nightingale-like actions, Gorriti was seen as a Peruvian freedom fighter and was awarded the Second Star of May by the Peruvian government. She wrote about these events in numerous articles and short stories, later collected and published in the Album of Lima founded by herself and her friend and fellow writer Carolina Freyre de Jaimes.

Return to Argentina
In 1878, Gorriti returned to Argentina. Even after having faced numerous scandals in her life such as divorce, exile, and Belzu having a child out of wedlock, she was still seen as an exceptional woman who brought great pride to her country. Gorriti became a mother to two daughters, Edelmira Belzu and Mercedes Belzu de Dorado. Her daughter Mercedes became sick in Peru in 1879, but Gorriti could not go to her because of the war between Chile and Peru over the provinces of Tacna and Arica. Mercedes died later that year. Gorriti also founded the newspaper The Argentina Dawn, in which she published many articles on the rights and education of women. When she died, Argentines hailed her as a famous, instructive, influential journalist of her day.

Literary contributions
Gorriti left Bolivia for Peru, where her literary life would take off. When she initially arrived in Peru she had no financial support or resources. Gorriti founded an all-girls school in Bolivia, where she dedicated her life to teaching and writing. She was an ardent feminist, and it showed in many of her journals. Gorriti wrote several short novels and numerous short stories. Her novels include El Pozo de Yocci (The Yocci Well), a love story, ghost story and Gothic horror rolled into one, set in one of the most critical periods in the history of the Argentine Republic, contrasting the idealistic patriotism behind the War of Independence with the savagery of the civil wars that followed. This was followed by La oasis de la vida (The Oasis of Life), a melodramatic novel written in the 1880s. La tierra natal (The Native Land), her last major work, published in 1889, relates a physical journey through northern Argentina, back to the places where she had lived over the course of her lifetime, as well as a voyage back through her memories of the people and events she had known and experienced along the way. Two of her most famous short stories are La hija del mazorquero and El lucero de manantial; both are melodramatic tales with a strong anti-Rosista political message. Gorriti also founded the newspaper The Dawn of Argentina (La Alborada del Plata) with fellow poet Numa Pompilio Llona.

Her intermittent three-year stay in Lima resulted in the publication of La Quena, a short but influential novella, in the prestigious newspaper El Comercio. Later, as Peruvian politics began to stabilize, she contributed to the Revista de Lima with stories like El Angel Caido and Si haces mal no esperes bien.

Gorriti's stories are finely crafted and bear witness to trends in South American literature of the 19th century.

Novels

 * El pozo de Yocci (1869)
 * Oasis en la Vida (1888)
 * La tierra natal (1889)

Novellas, short stories, and miscellaneous writings

 * Sueños y realidades (1865)
 * Panoramas de la vida (1876)
 * Misceláneas (1878)
 * El mundo de los recuerdos (1886)

English translations of her work

 * Dreams and Realities translated by Sergio Waisman, OUP USA, 2003.
 * The Yocci Well translated by Kathryn Phillips-Miles, The Clapton Press, London, 2020.
 * Our Native Land translated by Kathryn Phillips-Miles, The Clapton Press, London, 2021.

title: Juana Manuela Gorriti


text: Wikipedia:Wikipedians by birthday

title: Wikipedia:Wikipedians by birthday


text:
Tan Dun

Tan Dun (, ; born 18 August 1957) is a Chinese-born American composer and conductor. A leading figure of contemporary classical music, he draws from a variety of Western and Chinese influences, a dichotomy which has shaped much of his life and music. Having collaborated with leading orchestras around the world, Tan is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Grawemeyer Award for his opera Marco Polo (1996) and both an Academy Award and Grammy Award for his film score in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). His oeuvre as a whole includes operas, orchestral, vocal, chamber, solo and film scores, as well as genres that Tan terms "organic music" and "music ritual."

Born in Hunan, China, Tan grew up during the Cultural Revolution and received musical education from the Central Conservatory of Music. His early influences included both Chinese music and 20th-century classical music. Since receiving a DMA from Columbia University in 1993, Tan has been based in New York City. His compositions often incorporate audiovisual elements; use instruments constructed from organic materials, such as paper, water, and stone; and are often inspired by traditional Chinese theatrical and ritual performance. In 2013, he was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.

Biography
Tan Dun was born in 1957 in a village in Changsha in Hunan, China. As a child, he was fascinated by the rituals and ceremonies of the village shaman, which were typically set to music made with natural objects such as rocks and water. Due to the bans enacted during the Cultural Revolution, he was discouraged from pursuing music and was sent to work as a rice planter on the Huangjin commune. He joined an ensemble of other commune residents and learned to play traditional Chinese string instruments. Following a ferry accident that resulted in the death of several members of a Peking opera troupe, Tan Dun was called upon as a violist and arranger. This initial success earned him a seat in the orchestra, and from there he went to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 1977. While at the Conservatory, Tan Dun came into contact with composers such as Toru Takemitsu, George Crumb, Alexander Goehr, Hans Werner Henze, Isang Yun, and Chou Wen-Chung, all of whom influenced his sense of musical style.

In 1986, he moved to New York City as a doctoral student at Columbia University, once again studying with Chou Wen-Chung, who had studied under Edgard Varèse. At Columbia, Tan Dun discovered the music of composers such as Philip Glass, John Cage, Meredith Monk, and Steve Reich, and began incorporating these influences into his compositions. He completed his dissertation, Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee, in 1993. Inspired by a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, Death and Fire is a short symphony that engages with the paintings of Paul Klee. On 15 June 2016, he created the Grand Opening Theme Song of Shanghai Disney Resort. On 1 August 2019 he was appointed as dean of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Opera
During his time at Columbia University, Tan Dun composed his first opera, a setting of nature poems by Qu Yuan called Nine Songs (1989). The poems are sung in both Classical Chinese and contemporary English alongside a small ensemble of Western and Chinese instruments. Among these are a specially built set of 50 ceramic percussion, string, and wind instruments, designed in collaboration with potter Ragnar Naess. To emphasize the shamanistic nature of Qu Yuan's poetry, the actors dance and move in a ritualized manner.

Tan Dun's second work in the genre, Marco Polo (1996), set to a libretto by Paul Griffiths, is an opera within an opera. It begins with the spiritual journey of two characters, Marco and Polo, and their encounters with various historic figures of literature and music, including Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Scheherazade, Sigmund Freud, John Cage, Gustav Mahler, Li Po, and Kublai Khan. These sections are presented in an abstract, Peking opera style. Interwoven with these sections are the travels of the real-life Marco Polo, presented in a Western operatic style. Though the score calls for traditional Western orchestral instrumentation, additional instruments are used to indicate the location of the characters, including recorder, rebec, sitar, tabla, singing bowls, Tibetan horn, sheng, and pipa. The opera won the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1998.

That same year, Tan Dun premiered his next opera, The Peony Pavilion, an adaptation of Tang Xianzu's 1598 Kunqu play of the same name. Directed by Peter Sellars in its original production, Tan Dun's work is performed entirely in English, though one of the characters must be trained in Peking or Kunqu style. The small ensemble of six musicians performs electronics and Chinese instruments onstage with the actors. Stylistically, the music is a blend of Western avant-garde and Chinese opera.

At this point in his career, Tan Dun had created many works for "organic instruments," i.e. instruments constructed from materials such as paper, water, ceramic, and stone. For his fourth opera, Tea: A Mirror of Soul (2002), co-authored by librettist Xu Ying, organic instruments factor prominently into the structure of the opera itself. The title of each act corresponds to the materials of the instruments being used, as well as the opera's plot. The first act, entitled "Water, Fire", opens with a tea ceremony onstage while percussionists manipulate glass bowls of water. The second act, "Paper", features music on rice paper drums and depicts the characters' search for The Classic of Tea, the first book to codify tea production and preparation in China. The third and final act, "Ceramic, Stones", depicts the death of the protagonist's love. Percussionists play on pitched flowerpots, referred to as "Ceramic chimes" in the score.

Tan Dun's most recent opera, The First Emperor (2006), was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera with the title role created for Plácido Domingo. Co-authored by Tan Dun and Chinese novelist Ha Jin, the opera focuses on the unification of China under Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, and his relationship with the musician Gao Jianli. Like Tan Dun's previous operas, The First Emperor calls for Chinese instruments in addition to a full orchestra, including guzheng and bianzhong. The original Met production was directed by Zhang Yimou, with whom Tan Dun had collaborated on the film ''Hero.

Film and multimedia
Tan Dun earned more widespread attention after composing the score for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), for which he won an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, and a BAFTA Award. Other film credits include the aforementioned Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002), Gregory Hoblit's Fallen (1998), and Feng Xiaogang's ''The Banquet (2006).

Following the composition of the film score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Tan Dun rearranged the music to create the Crouching Tiger Concerto for cello, video, and chamber orchestra. Containing edited footage from the film, this work reverses the role of music in film by treating video as secondary. This same technique was later applied to his film scores for Hero and The Banquet, resulting in the larger work known as the Martial Arts Cycle.

In 2002, Tan Dun continued experimenting with application of video in music The Map, also for cello, video, and orchestra. The Map features documentary footage depicting the lives of China's Tujia, Miao, and Dong ethnic minorities. The musicians onstage, including the cello soloist, interact with the musicians onscreen—a duet of live and recorded performance. The work was premiered and commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Yo-Yo Ma.

Tan Dun's most recent multimedia work, Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women (2013), is a 13-movement work for video, solo harp, and orchestra. Following years of ethnomusicological research in Hunan, the work captures the sounds of Nüshu script, a phonetic writing system devised by women speakers of the Xiangnan Tuhua dialect who had been disallowed from receiving formal education. Considered a dying language, Tan Dun's research resulted in a series of short films of women singing songs written in Nüshu, which are presented alongside the orchestral performance. As with The Map, the songs in the video are used in counterpoint to the live music.

Orchestral Theatre series
In the 1990s, Tan Dun began working on a series of orchestral pieces that would analyze the relationship between performer and audience by synthesizing Western classical music and Chinese ritual. According to the composer, "If we look at the idea of 'art music' with its firm separation of performer and audience, we see that its history is comparatively short. Yet the history of music as an integral part of spiritual life, as ritual, as partnership in enjoyment and spirit, is as old as humanity itself."

In the first piece of the series, Orchestral Theatre I: O (1990), members of the orchestra make various vocalizations—chanting nonsense syllables, for instance—while playing their instruments using atypical techniques. For examples, the harp is played as a gushing, and the violins are played as percussion instruments.

Orchestral Theatre II: Re (1992) expands the concept of ritual by involving the audience. The orchestra is split, with the strings, brass, and percussion onstage, while the woodwinds surround the audience. The score also calls for two conductors, with one facing the stage, and the other facing the audience. The latter conductor cues the audience to hum along with the orchestra in certain sections of the music. The work's namesake derives from humming the solfège pitch "re".

The third piece in the series, Red Forecast (Orchestral Theatre III) (1996), involves more staging elements than its predecessors, adding television monitors, lighting, and even stage directions for the musicians. In this multimedia work, the orchestra is led by both a human conductor and a virtual conductor who appears on the monitors. While the human conductor leads, the monitors depict a variety of images from the 1960s and the Cold War: a collage of Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, The Beatles, Nikita Khrushchev, and hydrogen bomb testing. In addition to the video, an audio recording of a weather forecast is played.

The final piece in the series, The Gate (Orchestral Theatre IV) (1999), focuses on three women of literary fame: Yu from The Hegemon-King Bids His Concubine Farewell, Juliet from Romeo and Juliet, and Koharu from The Love Suicides at Amijima. Based on the theme of sacrifice for love, The Gate is structured as a theme and variations. The style of each section corresponds to its respective character's country of origin. Additionally, Yu is played by a Peking opera singer (Shi Min), Juliet by a Western opera soprano (Nancy Allen Lundy), and Koharu by a Japanese puppeteer (Jusaburō Tsujimura). As in Orchestra Theatre II: Re, the orchestra is distributed onstage and amongst the audience. The Gate also incorporates video, but unlike the prerecorded images used in Red Forecast, a projection screen displays live images of the three actress-soloists, manipulated in real time by a video artist. The video artist for the 1999 premiere was Elaine J. McCarthy.

Organic music
Many of Tan Dun's works call for instruments made of materials such as paper, stone, or water, but the compositions that he classifies as "organic music" feature these instruments most prominently. The first major work for organic instruments was his Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra (1998), dedicated to Toru Takemitsu. According to the composer, the sounds made by the soloist are inspired by the sounds of everyday life growing up in Hunan. Basins are filled with water, and the contents are manipulated with bowls, bottles, hands, and other devices. Other water instruments used include the waterphone. Various means of amplification are used, including contact microphones on the basins.

The techniques devised in the Water Concerto were used again in Tan Dun's Water Passion After St. Matthew (2000). Written to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, the work for chorus, orchestra, and water percussion follows the Gospel of Matthew, beginning with Christ's baptism. The chorus doubles on tingsha, and the soprano and bass soloists double on xun. The score also requires Mongolian overtone singing from the soloists. As with Orchestral Theatre I: O, members of the orchestra play their instruments with techniques borrowed from non-Western traditions.

Tan Dun's next major organic work, Paper Concerto for Paper Percussion and Orchestra (2003), explores the acoustic range of paper. Instruments constructed from differing thicknesses of paper are used as cymbals, drums, or reeds. Additionally, sheets of paper are shaken or struck. These sounds are amplified primarily through wireless microphones worn by the musicians. This work was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Earth Concerto for stone and ceramic percussion and orchestra (2009) draws from Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), which in turn draws from the poetry of Li Po. Ceramic instruments include percussion instruments similar to those Tan Dun had used in previous works, as well as wind instruments and xun.

Symphonies, concertos, and chamber works
In the mid-1990s, Tan Dun began working on another series of orchestral works known as the Yi series, named for the I Ching (Yi Jing in pinyin). Each numbered work in the series builds upon the original, Yi°: Concerto for Orchestra (published 2002), by adding a solo instrument. The first concerto in the series, Yi1: Intercourse of Fire and Water (1994), was written for and premiered by cellist Anssi Karttunen. The second work, Yi2: Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra (1996), combines flamenco and pipa techniques and was premiered by Sharon Isbin.

Originally titled Secret Land, Tan Dun wrote a concerto for 12 solo cellos and orchestra called Four Secret Roads of Marco Polo (2004). Commissioned and premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic, the work is a musical exploration of the Silk Road. To achieve these sounds, the cello soloists employ sitar and pipa techniques.

Tan Dun wrote a concerto for Lang Lang titled Piano Concerto: "The Fire" (2008), a commission by the New York Philharmonic. The concerto is reportedly inspired by the composer's love for martial arts, and the soloist is instructed to play certain passages of the music with fists and forearms. Other more tranquil sections evoke ancient Chinese instruments such as the guqin.

In 2008, Tan Dun was commissioned by Google and YouTube to write an inaugural symphony for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra (YTSO) project. The resultant work, Internet Symphony No. 1 "Eroica", was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra and uploaded to YouTube in November 2008, thus beginning the open call for video audition submissions. Voted on by members of the YouTube community as well as professional musicians, the YTSO was assembled of 96 musicians from over 30 countries. In April 2009, a mashup video of the submissions was premiered at Carnegie Hall, followed by a live performance of the work.

Tan Dun has also conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony to record parts of the album Away from Xuan by fellow composer Chen Yuanlin, released in 2009.

He composed a symphonic poem for piano for pianist Yuja Wang titled "Farewell My Concubine for Peking Opera Soprano and Piano". The work was commissioned by Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and made its world premiere on 31 July 2015 in Xinghai Concert Hall with the orchestra conducted by Long Yu and Wang as piano soloist.

Theatre-inspired works
Though not explicitly opera, many of Tan Dun's works borrow operatic elements, in terms of both melody and staging. For example, his violin concerto, Out of Peking Opera (1987, revised 1994), quotes jinghu fiddling music often heard in Peking opera. Additionally, Ghost Opera (1994), for pipa and string quartet, includes minimal sets and lighting. Originally composed on commission for Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, Ghost Opera has been performed globally and recorded by Kronos for Nonesuch Records.

List of compositions
Some of the generic classifications included below are Tan Dun's own concepts, including "organic music" and "music ritual." "Organic music" refers to musical works performed on non-traditional instruments, typically involving organic materials such as paper, water, or stone. "Music ritual" refers to works derived from Chinese spiritual traditions.

Opera

 * Marco Polo (1995)
 * Peony Pavilion (1998)
 * Tea: A Mirror of Soul (2002)
 * The First Emperor (2006)
 * Peony Pavilion (2010)

Symphonic works and concertos

 * Self Portrait, from "Death and Fire" (1983)
 * On Taoism (1985)
 * Out of Peking Opera (1987)
 * Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee (1992)
 * Concerto for Pizzicato Piano and Ten Instruments (1995)
 * Heaven Earth Mankind: Symphony 1997 (1997)
 * Overture: Dragon and Phoenix, from Heaven Earth Mankind (1997)
 * Requiem and Lullaby, from Heaven Earth Mankind (1997)
 * Song of Peace, from Heaven Earth Mankind (1997)
 * Yi1: Intercourse of Fire and Water (1994)
 * Yi2: Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra (1996)
 * 2000 Today: A World Symphony for the Millennium (1999)
 * Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa (1999)
 * Concerto for String Orchestra and Zheng (1999)
 * Yi°: Concerto for Orchestra (2002)
 * Four Secret Roads of Marco Polo (2004)
 * Piano Concerto: "The Fire" (2008)
 * Internet Symphony (2009)
 * Symphony for Strings (2009)
 * Symphonic Poem on 3 Notes (2011)
 * Atonal Rock n' Roll (2012)
 * Concerto for Orchestra (2012)
 * Percussion Concerto: "The Tears of Nature" (2012)
 * Double Bass Concerto: "Wolf Totem" (2015)
 * Passacaglia: Secret of Wind and Birds (2015)
 * Farewell My Concubine for Peking Opera Soprano and Piano (2015)

Chamber and solo music

 * Eight Memories in Watercolor, for piano (1978, 2002)
 * Eight Colors for String Quartet (1986)
 * In Distance (1987)
 * Silk Road, for soprano, voice, and percussion (1989)
 * Traces, for piano (1989, 1992)
 * Elegy: Snow in June, for cello and percussion (1991)
 * Circle with Four Trios, Conductor and Audience (1992)
 * Lament: Autumn Wind (1993)
 * C A G E, for solo piano (1994)
 * A Sinking Love, for soprano and 4 violas da gamba (1995)
 * Concerto for Six (1997)
 * Concerto for String Quartet and Pipa (1999)
 * Dew Drop Falls, for solo piano (2000)
 * Seven Desires for Guitar (2002)
 * Secret Land, for 12 cellos (2006)
 * Violin Concerto: The Love (2009)
 * Chiacone—after Colombi, for solo cello (2010)
 * Crouching Tiger Sonata for cello and piano (2016)

Organic music

 * Water Concerto for water percussion and orchestra (1998)
 * Paper Concerto for paper percussion and orchestra (2003)
 * Water Music (2004)
 * Earth Concerto for stone and ceramic percussion with orchestra (2009)

Music ritual

 * Nine Songs (1989)
 * Orchestral Theatre I: O (1990)
 * Orchestral Theatre II: Re (1992)
 * Ghost Opera
 * Red Forecast (Orchestra Theatre III) (1996)
 * The Gate (Orchestral Theatre IV) (1999)
 * Buddha Passion (2018)

Oratorio

 * Water Passion (2000)

Movie scores

 * Don't Cry, Nanking (1995)
 * Fallen (1998)
 * Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
 * Hero (2002)
 * The Banquet (2010)

Multimedia

 * Crouching Tiger Concerto, for cello and chamber orchestra (2000)
 * The Map: Concerto for Cello, Video and Orchestra (2002)
 * Hero Concerto (2010)
 * The Banquet (2010)
 * Martial Arts Cycle (2013)
 * Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women (2013)

DVD

 * Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001)
 * Hero (2004)
 * Lang Lang: Live at Carnegie Hall (2004)
 * The Map (2004)
 * Tea: A Mirror of Soul (2005)
 * The Banquet (2006)
 * The First Emperor: Metropolitan Opera (2008)
 * Marco Polo (2009)
 * Paper Concerto: Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (2009)
 * Water Concerto: Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (2009)

Awards and honors

 * Second prize at the Dresden International Weber Chamber Music Composition Competition, 1983, String Quartet: Feng Ya Song
 * Academy Award, Best Original Score, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
 * Grammy Award, Best Soundtrack, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
 * BAFTA Award for Best Film Music, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
 * Grawemeyer Award, Music Composition, Marco Polo
 * Musical America Composer of the Year, 2003
 * Shostakovich Award, 2012
 * Bach Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, 2011
 * Musikpreis der Stadt Duisburg, 2005
 * The Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts, 1994
 * The Glenn Gould Protégé prize, 1996

title: Tan Dun


text:
Chernozem

Chernozem (from чернозём; "black ground"), also called black soil, regur soil or black cotton soil, is a black-colored soil containing a high percentage of humus (4% to 16%) and high percentages of phosphorus and ammonia compounds. Chernozem is very fertile soil and can produce high agricultural yields with its high moisture-storage capacity. Chernozems are a Reference Soil Group of the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB)

Distribution
The name comes from the Russian terms for black and soil, earth or land (chorny + zemlya). The soil, rich in organic matter presenting a black color, was first identified by the Russian geologist Vasily Dokuchaev in 1883 in the tallgrass steppe or prairie of Eastern Ukraine and Western Russia.

Chernozem cover about 230 million hectares of land. There are two "chernozem belts" in the world. One is the Eurasian steppe that extends from eastern Croatia (Slavonia), along the Danube (northern Serbia, northern Bulgaria (Danubian Plain), southern and eastern Romania (Wallachian Plain and Moldavian Plain), and Moldova, to northeast Ukraine across the Central-Chernozem Strip of Central and Southern Russia into Siberia. The other stretches from the Canadian Prairies in Manitoba through the Great Plains of the United States as far south as Kansas. Chernozem layer thickness may vary widely, from several centimetres up to 1.5 metres (60 inches) in Ukraine, as well as the Red River Valley region in the northern United States and Canada (location of the prehistoric Lake Agassiz).

The terrain can also be found in small quantities elsewhere (for example, on 1% of Poland, Hungary, and Texas). It also exists in Northeast China, near Harbin. The only true chernozem in Australia is located around Nimmitabel, some of the richest soils on the continent.

Previously, there was a black market for the soil in Ukraine. The sale of agricultural land was illegal in Ukraine from 1992 to 2020, but the soil, transported by truck, could be traded legally. According to the Kharkiv-based Green Front NGO, the black market for illegally acquired chernozem in Ukraine was projected to reach approximately US$900 million per year in 2011.

Canadian and United States soil classification
Chernozemic soils are a soil type in the Canadian system of soil classification and the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB).

Chernozemic soil type "equivalents", in the Canadian system, WRB, and U.S. Department of Agriculture soil taxonomy:

Theories of Chernozem origin:

 * 1761: Johan Gottschalk Wallerius (plant decomposition)
 * 1763: Mikhail Lomonosov (plant and animal decomposition)
 * 1799: Peter Simon Pallas (reeds marsh)
 * 1835: Charles Lyell (loess)
 * 1840: Sir Roderick Murchison (weathered from Jurassic marine shales)
 * 1850: Karl Eichwald (peat)
 * 1851: А. Petzgold (swamps)
 * 1852: Nikifor Borisyak (peat)
 * 1853: Vangengeim von Qualen (silt from northern swamps)
 * 1862: Rudolf Ludwig (bog on place of forests)
 * 1866: Franz Josef Ruprecht (decomposed steppe grasses)
 * 1879: First chernozem papers translated from Russian
 * 1883: Vasily Dokuchaev published his book Russian Chernozem with a complete study of this soil in European Russia.
 * 1929: Otto Schlüter (man-made)
 * 1999: Michael W. I. Schmidt (neolithic biomass burning)

As seen in the list above, the 19th and 20th-century discussions on the pedogenesis of Chernozem originally stemmed from climatic conditions from the early Holocene to roughly 5500 BC. However, no single paleo-climate reconstruction could accurately explain geochemical variations found in Chernozems throughout central Europe. Evidence of anthropomorphic origins of stable pyrogenic carbon in Chernozem led to improved formation theories. Vegetation burning could explain Chernozem's high magnetic susceptibility, the highest of the major soil types. Soil magnetism increases when soil minerals goethite and ferrihydrite convert to maghemite on exposure to heat. Temperatures sufficient to elevate maghemite on a landscape scale indicate the influence of fire. Given the rarity of such natural phenomena in the modern day, magnetic susceptibility in Chernozem likely relates to control of fire by early humans.

Humification can darken soils (melanization) absent a pyrogenic carbon component. Given the symphony of pedogenic processes that contribute to the formation of dark earth, the term Chernozem summarizes different types of black soils with the same appearance but different formation histories.

title: Chernozem


text:
Talk:Postwar Japan

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Dianturn.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:01, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Edit
I have made this page a timeline of the Showa period. This increase in the volume was enough to knock off 'stub' notation but might not be what should be here. Anyway feel free to contribute.

Revth 13:59, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Massive copyvio
Recent edits from Revolutionary were copyright violations - copy-and-pasted straight from Britannica - so reverted.

Unfortunately, this leaves the subsequent edit by 132.66.16.12 without a place in the article. Since appears original, here it is; perhaps someone can work it back in:

 * Another aspect in Japanese foreign policy was the Middle East. After 1952 the Japanese policy towards that region involved a dilema between pursuing relations with the government of Israel or relations with the Arab governments, this due to political pressures by the League of Arab States to refrain from any contacts with the Israeli government. The Japanese government, therefore, took a middle course betwen the two alternatives, maintaining diplomatic relations with both sides while keeping relations with the Israeli government at a low key. Diplomatic relations were established with the Israeli government at a Legation level on May 15, 1952. They were raised to Embassy level only on July 5, 1963.

 * As part of its low key involvement, the Japanese government refrained from advocating clear-cut solutions for the Arab-Israeli conflict, while supporting some form of compromise between the parties under UN auspices. This position was evident in the Japanese voting behaviour in 1967, as the Japanese UN delegation demanded an unspecified Israeli withdrawal without condemnations for Israeli conduct in the Six Day War. This changed on November 22, 1973, as the Japanese government began demanding an Israeli withdrawal from all territories occupied in 1967. This change in policy resulted from the oil crisis generated by OPEC. During the 1990s, the Japanese government endorsed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and became a member among the donor countries to the Palestinian Authority.

-- JTN 23:35, 2005 Mar 20 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I propose that Postwar Japan be merged into Post-occupation Japan. As far as I can tell, they refer to nearly the same thing. "Post-occupation Japan" is an older and larger article, hence why I propose "Postwar Japan" be merged into it, rather than the other way around. Citobun (talk) 09:07, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

 * Japan was occupied until 1952, so I don't think the title "Post-occupation Japan" would be very clear or accurate, because it doesn't account for the almost 7 years of occupation after the war. I agree it is confusing have two articles on more or less the same theme though. It you are going to merge it, please also rename the new merged page. I suggest "Post-World War II Japan", as that would be in keeping with other nominclature. There are alot of other "Post-World War II ...." articles, e.g. "Post-World War II Poland".Felixkrater (talk) 17:47, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Support merge in reverse-Postwar Japan is much more inclusive than the Post-occupation Japan period. Agree with 's naming choice.--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 06:14, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

✅ It made no sense to have two articles with identical information. "Post-occupation Japan" was the much more superior article. AmericanAir88 (talk) 04:01, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

 * I'd like to see this moved to Postwar Japan. One would be hard-pressed to find history books covering the specific category of "post-occupation Japan" from 1952 to present. In fact, I can't find any at all in English. However, postwar Japan is a very significant field of study: Postwar Japan as History by Andrew Gordon, The Diplomatic History of Postwar Japan by Makoto Iokibe, Japan's Postwar History by Gary D. Allinson, Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan by William D. Hoover, etc... Kate Riley2019 (talk) 12:56, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

 * I much prefer "postwar Japan" -- as do the reliable sources. Rjensen (talk) 15:12, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

 * I strongly agree with the consensus here, and not sure why this hasn't been done yet. "Post-occupation Japan" as a distinct time period lasting from 1952 to 1989 is not an actual thing. This is neither how Japanese periodize their own history nor how English language scholarship does so. Even a cursory search of academic literature shows overwhelming use of "postwar Japan" to describe this time period, and includes the Occupation. --Ash-Gaar (talk) 05:34, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

 * ✅ The page is now titled Postwar Japan --Ash-Gaar (talk) 14:16, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

Post-occupation cultural developments
@TH1980: Have you read Murakami's first book? The source being cited is discussing the author's entire oeuvre, all of which either appeared after this period or at the very end of said period. Admittedly, the book was published in 1995, but there are still at least a dozen more representative "post-Occupation" authors who should be mentioned in this article before Murakami, and if you are that interested in show-horning Murakami into this article, then the WP:BURDEN is on you to do the work and add the others first. (The exact list can be found in any source discussing "post-Occupation". Most such sources no doubt completely ignore Murakami -- you need to find a source that does discuss Murakami specifically as a "post-Occupation" author along with all the other authors more representative of this period. The book Magical Realism : Theory, History, Community fails this test.) Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 01:34, 23 December 2015 (UTC)

title: Talk:Postwar Japan


text:
American Computer Science League

ACSL, or the American Computer Science League, is an international computer science competition among more than 300 schools. Originally founded in 1978 as the Rhode Island Computer Science League, it then became the New England Computer Science League. With countrywide and worldwide participants, it became the American Computer Science League. It has been in continuous existence since 1978. Each yearly competition consists of four contests. All students at each school may compete but the team score is the sum of the best 3 or 5 top scores. Each contest consists of two parts: a written section (called "shorts") and a programming section. Written topics tested include "what does this program do?", digital electronics, Boolean algebra, computer numbering systems, recursive functions, data structures (primarily dealing with heaps, binary search trees, stacks, and queues), lisp programming, regular expressions and Finite State Automata, bit string flicking, graph theory, assembly programming and prefix/postfix/infix notation.

Divisions
There are five divisions in ACSL: Elementary, Classroom, Junior, Intermediate, and Senior. The Elementary Division is a non-programming competition for grades 3 - 6. It tests one topic per contest. The Classroom Division is a non-programming competition for all grades and consists of a 10 question test on 4 topics each contest. Junior Division is recommended for middle school students (no students above the ninth grade may compete in it). Intermediate and Senior Divisions are for secondary school students, Intermediate being easier and Senior being more difficult. At the All-Star Contest, the Junior teams consist of 5 members each while the Senior and Intermediate teams can consist of 3 or 5 members. Each team competes against other same-sized teams in its division.

Regular season
The Regular Season, in which individual students compete to get their school team qualified for the All-Star Contest, consists of four rounds. These rounds consist of a programming part and a written part. In the programming part, students have 72 hours to complete a program in any computer language to perform the given task. In the written part, students have a total of 30 minutes to answer 5 questions based on given topics. Students then receive a score of up to 10 points (5 for written and 5 for programming). For the Classroom Division, students receive 45 minutes to solve 10 written problems. For the Elementary Division, students have 30 minutes to solve 5 written problems. Prizes are awarded to top scoring teams and students based upon cumulative scores after the fourth contest.

Finals contest
The Finals Contest is held online on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend each year. Top students are invited to participate in the contest. Students in the Junior, Intermediate, and Senior divisions start in the morning with a 3-hour block in which to solve 2 programming problems. All divisions have a one-hour quiz (20 multiple choice questions) on topics that are covered in the written questions in the Regular Season rounds. The scores of the programming and theory sections are added together to determine the winners in each division.

title: American Computer Science League


text:
Dorset Street, Dublin

Dorset Street (Sráid Dorset in Irish) is an important thoroughfare on the northside of Dublin, Ireland, and was originally part of the Slighe Midh-Luchra, Dublin's ancient road to the north that begins where the original bridging point at Church Street is today. Subsequently, yet prior to the street being given its current name in the 18th century, the road was known as Drumcondra Lane and was shown on maps as such. It is divided into Dorset Street Lower (northeast end) and Dorset Street Upper (southwest end).

Location and layout
The street runs northeast from Abbey Street and Bolton Street at Dominick Street junction, north of Parnell Square and Mountjoy Square, and leads into Drumcondra Road at Binn's Bridge on the Royal Canal. It makes up part of the most common route from Dublin Airport to the city centre, and the R132 regional road follows Dorset Street for part of its route. It meets the R135 route at the junctions with Blessington Street, location of the Blessington Street Basin, and St. Mary's Place; other major roads feeding onto this spine street include North Circular Road, Gardiner Street, Eccles Street, North Frederick Street, and Granby Row.

Physically the street rises up from the Liffey valley at its south western end to its apex at roughly where it meets with Blessington and North Frederick Streets; proceeding north-west the street slopes down again on the approach to Binn's Bridge at the Royal Canal.

Some early Georgian houses are dotted along the street, primarily identifiable by the stone Gibbsian doorcase entrances, and close to the crossroads with Blessington and North Frederick Streets. Much of the street redeveloped during the Victorian era, with a number of significant buildings built, such as the Gothic style stone-built Dominican priory, designed by J. L. Robinson in 1884–87 at the corner of Dominick Street, while across from it is the red brick Italianate former fire station, designed by C. J. McCarthy and completed in 1903. Much of the street consists of vernacular Victorian terraces, with shops opening straight onto footpaths at ground-floor level. During the latter part of the twentieth century, stretches of the street were again redeveloped by Dublin Corporation for social housing flat complexes near Dominick Street.

Naming and pronunciation
Until 1728, the street was marked on maps as Drumcondra Lane. Dorset Street was named after Lionel Cranfield Sackville, 1st Duke of Dorset, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1756. While the English county of Dorset is pronounced with the first syllable stressed, "Dorset Street" is pronounced locally (by Northsiders) as Street, with emphasis on the second syllable of "Dorset".

St. Joseph's Place Housing Scheme
St Joseph's Place housing scheme has been in planning for many years, which date back as far as 1896. The scheme contained 80 units, with a high density of 30 dwellings per acre. The area named "White's Lane" required major improvements, as the houses were simply inhabitable by means of spatial planning, cleanliness, conveniences, sanitization and many more basic human needs that were desperately needed. Hence under the Housing of the Working Class act, 1890, the improvement scheme for this area was published in October, but by June there was still only partial approval for the loan in order to commence construction. This was due to the displacement of tenants during this time who were sent to areas such as Lurgan Street, Linenhall Street, and Church Street but would not stay in these areas during the construction period for various reasons such as costs and poor sanitation in the houses, and the following year, tenants then began to request compensation for their displacement.

The scheme was then outlined by the City surveyor, Mr Harty, who proposed that the land was completely cleared and constructed an entirely new scheme. This plan consisted of the construction of 80 cottages. Each of them to be one storey high, and a site to construct a boys' national school. This scheme came to life in July 1896 and has not greatly changed since. St. Joseph's Place still consists of these classic one-storey cottages.

Historic residents

 * Irish author Seán O'Casey and Irish dramatist and educator Thomas Sheridan were born on this street.
 * Seán O'Casey was born at number 85, since demolished and replaced by a branch of the Bank of Ireland (now disused), his family having previously occupied numbers 6 and 23½ before moving there. At the time, the street was considered to be a reasonably fashionable location in Dublin.
 * Playwright, Westminster Parliament member, and son of Thomas, Richard Brinsley Sheridan was born on this street at number 12 in 1751; Brinsley Sheridan's works include The Critics and A School for Scandal.
 * No 16 - site of - was the residence of United Irishman Napper Tandy in 1779
 * No 68 - site of - home to Peadar Kearney (1883–1942); Songwriter and author of the national anthem, "The Soldier's Song", also known in Irish as Amhrán na bhFiann. Kearney was born at this address, and by trade became a house painter and theatre set decorator, as too did his more famous nephew, the playwright Brendan Behan, who also lived nearby at Russell Street.

Today
In recent years the street has been improved at its northern end with new trees and lighting; however, the street has been let to deteriorate at its southern city end with stretches of dereliction and vacancy having increased. An over-scaled new "Maldron" hotel built in conjunction with Senator Donie Cassidy now sits on the site of the former National Wax Museum (and before that Plaza Cinema and Bethesda Chapel), and is one of the very few new buildings. Road engineering by Dublin City Council, designed primarily to facilitate cars, continues to prove destructive – with the street now quite notorious as a hostile environment for pedestrians. Nonetheless, the street continues to host a number of pubs, including the very authentic Joxer Daly's, as referenced by Seán O'Casey in Juno and the Paycock, fast food outlets, an assortment of small retail units, and apartments and small offices.

title: Dorset Street, Dublin


text:
Talk:List of Japanese people

BoA (Born in South Korea) under Musicians
She is not Japanese. She is Korean. She is just popular in Japan and sings some japanese music. Since this is the list of Japanese PEOPLE, I removed her. nakjisanjeok

Update
Sigh. This page needs INCREDIBLE update :( Revth 14:11, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The page claims that names are in Japanese order but in fact many of the names are not.Brettr 06:19, 2005 Apr 5 (UTC)

Sin-Itiro Tomonaga
I included this non-Hepburn romanization because that's the name under which he won the Nobel Prize for physics.

Name order
What is the justification for using the Japanese name order for modern people on this page? The Manual of Style (Japan-related articles) says to use the usual name order. For example, Toshiro Mifune, rather than Mifune Toshirō. I noticed User:AutumnSnow changed the list of actors into Japanese order, can someone justify doing that please? I did do a revert on the page but I have undone it again, since I would rather not take that kind of drastic action. Perhaps there is a reason for this name ordering. Comments? --DannyWilde 08:23, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

 * This comment makes sense. And I notice that in almost 6 years no one has argued against these points. Nonetheless, the page is a confused mix of name orders. And, the instructions to use Japanese name order remain at the top of the page. That (to me) is not helpful. I came to the page and thought to contribute several names. The people I added were already in Wikipedia, so I just linked to their pages. Those pages used western name order. I hope it doesn't rub anyone the wrong way, but I'm going to delete the note about using Japanese name order. It's misinformation, as far as I can see. — Comment added by Lupa avens (talk • contribs) 00:43, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Akebono
Removed Akebono from the list (Sumo) because errr.... he isn't Japanese. He's from Hawaii. Saiing 13:30, 7 March 2006 (JST)

 * errr... he became a Japanese citizen in 1996. Check wikipedia. So please put it back where it was.122.27.250.213 (talk) 03:08, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Crime
Why no section on famous Japanese criminals? I will start compiling one shorly for introduction to the main page. If you have any comments or suggestions for inclusion please let me know. 122.27.250.213 (talk) 02:46, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Animators
How come there are no Japanese animators?--Yacatisma (talk) 23:05, 28 July 2014 (UTC)

title: Talk:List of Japanese people