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Kamehameha II

Kamehameha II  (November 1797 – July 14, 1824) was the second king of the Kingdom of Hawaii from 1819 to 1824. His birth name was Liholiho and full name was Kalaninui kua Liholiho i ke kapu ʻIolani. It was lengthened to Kalani Kaleiʻaimoku o Kaiwikapu o Laʻamea i Kauikawekiu Ahilapalapa Kealiʻi Kauinamoku o Kahekili Kalaninui i Mamao ʻIolani i Ka Liholiho when he took the throne.

Due to his young age, his power was limited and he was controlled under Ka'ahumanu, the queen consort of his father Kamehameha I. However, Kamehameha II is disreputably known for the 'Ai Noa, when he broke traditional religious laws, leading to a lengthened period of taboo-breaking, the disbanding of the social class of priest, and the destruction of temples and images. With increased European contact, Christianity and Western influence began to appear during his reign.

Early life
Kamehameha II was born in the month of Hanaiaʻeleʻele (corresponding to November) 1797 in Hilo, on the island of Hawaiʻi, the first born son of Kamehameha I with his highest-ranking wife Keōpuolani. It was originally planned that he would be born at the Kūkaniloko birth site on the island of Oʻahu but the Queen's sickness prevented travel.

Given in care to his father's trusted servant Hanapi, who took the child to the lands of Kalaoa in Hilo Paliku, he was taken back, after five or six months, by his maternal grandmother Kekuʻiapoiwa Liliha because she felt he was not getting the right diet. Kamehameha I, then, put him in the care of Queen Kaʻahumanu (another wife of Kamehameha I), who was appointed as Liholiho's official guardian.

Jean Baptiste Rives, a Frenchman about his age, arrived on the islands in the early 19th century. Rives taught the royal princes some English and French, becoming a close friend (ʻaikāne). Other companions included Charles Kanaʻina, Kekūanaōʻa and Laʻanui.

He was named Kalaninui kua Liholiho i ke kapu ʻIolani. Liholiho (meaning glowing), a contraction of Kalaninuiliholiho or Kalaninui kua Liholiho i ke kapu meant "the great chief with the burning back kapu". ʻIolani meant "royal hawk" after the Hawaiian hawk (ʻio) whose high flight signified royalty.

Ascension
Liholiho officially inherited the throne upon Kamehameha I's death in May 1819. However, Queen Kaʻahumanu had no intention to give him actual leadership. When Liholiho sailed toward the shores of Kailua-Kona (the capital at the time), she greeted him wearing Kamehameha's royal red cape, and she announced to the people on shore and to the surprised Liholiho, "We two shall rule the land." Liholiho, young and inexperienced, had no other choice. Kaʻahumanu became the first Kuhina Nui (co-regent) of Hawaii. He was forced to take on merely a ceremonial role; administrative power was to be vested in Kaʻahumanu. He took the title "King Kamehameha II", but preferred to be called ʻIolani, which means "heavenly (or royal) hawk".

Reign
Kamehameha II is best remembered for the 'Ai Noa, the breaking of the ancient kapu (taboo) system of religious laws six months into his reign when he sat down with Kaʻahumanu and his mother Keopuolani and ate a meal together. The strict rules of the Hawaiian religion were no longer followed, leading to the traditional culture.

Kamehameha I had bequeathed his war god Kūkaʻilimoku and his temples to his cousin Kekuaokalani. Kekuaokalani demanded that Liholiho withdraw his edicts against the Hawaiian priesthood, permit rebuilding of the temples, and dismiss both Kalanimōkū and Kaʻahumanu. Kamehameha II refused. At the battle of Kuamoʻo on the island of Hawaiʻi, the king's better-armed forces, led by Kalanimōkū, defeated the last defenders of the Hawaiian gods, temples, and priesthoods of the ancient organized religion. The first Christian missionaries arrived only a few months later in the Hawaiian Islands.

He never officially converted to Christianity because he refused to give up four of his five wives and his love of alcohol. He (like his father) married several relatives of high rank, but he was the last Hawaiian king to practice polygamy. His favorite wife was his sister Kamāmalu. Kīnaʻu (Kamāmalu's full-blood sister) was his second wife who would later remarry and become Kuhina Nui. Princess Kalani Pauahi was his niece by his half-brother Pauli Kaōleiokū. She later remarried and gave birth to Princess Ruth Keʻelikōlani. Kekāuluohi was half-sister of Kamāmalu and Kīnaʻu through their mother Kaheiheimālie who was another of his father's wives. Princess Kekauʻōnohi was Liholiho's niece and granddaughter of Kamehameha I, and would later become royal governor of the islands of Maui and Kauaʻi.

He was known to be impulsive. For example, on November 16, 1820 he bought a Royal Yacht known as Cleopatra's Barge for 8000 piculs of sandalwood (over a million pounds), estimated to be worth about US$80,000 at the time. It had been sold a few years before for $15,400 by the Crowninshield family of Salem, Massachusetts. Kamehameha II was quite proud of his ship; in the words of Charles Bullard, the agent for the shipowner:

"If you want to know how Religion stands at the Islands I can tell you — All sects are tolerated but the King worships the Barge."

He tried to gain favor with missionaries by offering free passage on the opulent ship, and regularly entertained foreign visitors with their choice of alcoholic beverages. On April 18, 1822 it required a major overhaul because most of the wood had rotted. He paid to have wood shipped in from the Pacific Northwest for repairs, and then renamed his ship Haʻaheo o Hawaiʻi ("Pride of Hawaii"). After re-launching May 10, 1823 it was wrecked less than a year later.

In the summer of 1821, he was in a small boat intended for the ʻEwa beach, just west of Honolulu. A few nobles such as Chiefess Kapiʻolani and Governor Boki were aboard, with about 30 men. He ordered the ship to instead cross a dangerous channel all the way to the island of Kauaʻi, despite having no compass, charts, nor provisions on board. They somehow made it to Kauaʻi. When they arrived, the local Chief Kaumualiʻi did not fire his cannons on the unarmed ship but welcomed the young king. The Royal Yacht was sent for, and the royal party entertained themselves for over a month. Then one night after he invited Kaumualiʻi on board, Kamehameha II abruptly ordered the yacht to sail in the night. Upon returning to Honolulu, he had Kaumualiʻi "marry" Kaʻahumanu and kept him under house arrest in exile until his death.

Fatal visit to Great Britain
Another of his voyages would prove fatal. On April 16, 1822 English missionary William Ellis arrived with a schooner Prince Regent of six guns to add to his growing collection of ships. It was a gift from George IV the King of Great Britain, and Kamehameha II wrote to thank him, requesting closer diplomatic ties. He wanted to travel to London, but all his advisors including Keōpūolani and Kaʻahumanu were opposed to the idea. After his mother Keōpūolani's death on September 16, 1823, he made up his mind to go.

In November 1823 Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu commissioned the British whaling ship L'Aigle (French for "the Eagle") under Captain Valentine Starbuck to carry them to London. Going along were High Chief Boki and wife High Chiefess Kuini Liliha, and other chiefs and retainers including Manuia, Naihekukui, James Young Kānehoa, Kekūanaōʻa, Kauluhaimalama, Naʻaiweuweu, and Naukane who had already been to America (where he picked up the name John Coxe) and then England.

Since Ellis wanted to travel back to England anyway, he offered to be translator and guide, but Starbuck refused. Somehow Rives talked his way on board instead as translator.

In February 1824 they arrived at Rio de Janeiro in the newly independent Empire of Brazil. Emperor Pedro I received the visitors, presenting Kamehameha II with a ceremonial diamond-encrusted sword with a gold sheath, and in return accepting an ʻahu ʻula, a traditional feather cloak associated with high rank, which was lost in the 2018 fire at the National Museum of Brazil. Queen Kamāmalu received a diamond ring; in return, she offered a yellow feather necklace.

They arrived on May 17, 1824 in Portsmouth, and the next day moved into the Caledonian Hotel in London. Foreign Secretary George Canning appointed Frederick Gerald Byng (1784–1871) to supervise their visit. Byng was a Gentleman Usher, fifth son of John Byng, 5th Viscount Torrington and friend of Beau Brummell, known more for his gaudy fashions than diplomacy. Byng made sure they would have appropriate attire for all their public appearances.

Their arrival was met by the local press with a mixture of curiosity and derision. They were not sure what to call the king, spelling his "Liholiho" name various ways such as "Rheo Rhio". Some made puns on the fact that Byng's nickname was "Poodle" and in Hawaiian ʻīlio ʻīlio would mean "dog of dogs" and that the British name of the kingdom was "Sandwich Islands".

On May 28 a reception with 200 guests including several dukes was held in their honor. They toured London, visiting Westminster Abbey, but the king refused to enter because he did not want to desecrate the British royal burial place "with his presence or his feet stepping in that area." They attended opera and ballet at Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on May 31, and the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane on June 4 in the Royal Box. He and Kamāmalu were an unusual sight to the British people who had seen few Native Hawaiians, moreover, Kamāmalu was over six-feet tall. Several members of the court had portraits painted by the Hayter family.

King George IV finally scheduled a meeting for June 21, but it had to be delayed as Kamāmalu became ill. The Hawaiian court had caught measles, to which they had no immunity. They probably contracted the disease on their June 5 visit to the Royal Military Asylum (now the Duke of York's Royal Military School). Kamāmalu died on July 8, 1824. The grief-stricken Kamehameha II died six days later on July 14, 1824.

Vast crowds lined up when he was laid in state at the Caledonian Hotel on July 17. On July 18 the bodies were stored in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields church where they awaited transportation back home. Boki took over lead of the delegation and finally did have an audience with King George IV. Kānehoa (James Young), with superior English language skills conferred by his English father John Young, was entrusted with the official letters of introduction and served as new translator. Rives and Starbuck were accused of misspending the royal treasury and departed.

In August 1824 the bodies returned to Hawaii on the enormous Royal Navy frigate HMS Blonde (1819) under the command of Captain George Anson Byron.

The Blonde arrived back in Honolulu on May 6, 1825. Kalanimōkū had been notified of the deaths in a letter from Rives, so Hawaiian royalty gathered at his house where the bodies were moved for the funeral. The marines and crew from the ship made a formal procession, the ship's chaplain read an Anglican prayer, and an American missionary was allowed to make a prayer in the Hawaiian language. They were buried on the grounds of the ʻIolani Palace in a coral house meant to be the Hawaiian version of the tombs Liholiho had seen in London. They were eventually moved to the Royal Mausoleum of Hawaii known as Mauna ʻAla. Kamehameha II was succeeded by his younger brother Kauikeaouli, who became King Kamehameha III.

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

title: Kamehameha II


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King's College (Pennsylvania)

King's College is a private Catholic liberal arts college in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, United States. It is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and located within the Diocese of Scranton.

History
King's College was founded in 1946 by Congregation of Holy Cross priests and brothers from the University of Notre Dame. The original mission of the college was to educate the sons of local miners and mill workers who lived in the Northeastern Pennsylvania region. The college's Administration Building indicates the links to the coal mining industry: Built in 1913, it was designed by Daniel Burnham of Chicago to serve as the headquarters of the Lehigh Valley Coal Company.

The college's chapel, The Chapel of Christ the King, is located on West North Street. It features a 4,200-pound anthracite altar, highlighting the relationship between the coal industry and the college. It was created for King's in 1954 by renowned African-American sculptor and Wilkes-Barre resident, C. Edgar Patience.

In June 1972, massive flooding occurred in downtown Wilkes-Barre. Rains from Tropical Storm Agnes caused the neighboring Susquehanna River to overflow and flood most of the campus.

Campus
The campus covers nearly 50 acres in downtown Wilkes-Barre (adjacent to the Susquehanna River). Situated at the center of the campus, Monarch Court is the site of many campus community activities. The court includes a brick-paved area that encompasses a large King's Block K, also in brick, at its center. Each of the bricks surrounding the K is engraved with the names of students, alumni, and local businesses.

The Richard Abbas Alley Center for Health Sciences is home to academics programs such as Physician Assistant Studies, Athletic Training, and Exercise Science. It also includes student residences, an art and cultural display center, and a Chick-fil-A restaurant.

Many of King's athletic teams train and compete two miles from campus at the Robert L. Betzler Athletic Complex, a 33.5-acre athletic facility that includes McCarthy Stadium, a field house, and fields for baseball, softball, men's and women's soccer, football, and field hockey.

Administration

 * Administration Building  – 133 North River Street

College halls

 * Luksic Hall – corner of West Jackson and North Franklin Streets
 * Benaglia Hall – North Franklin Street
 * Hafey-Marian Hall – West Jackson Street (also located near the center of the campus)
 * Holy Cross Hall – located near Monarch Court
 * Hessel Hall – located near Monarch Court
 * Esseff Hall – corner of North Main and West Jackson Streets
 * Flood Hall – corner of Harrison and West North Streets
 * Alumni Hall – corner of East Jackson and North Main Streets
 * O'Hara Hall – corner of North Main and North Streets
 * Richard Abbas Alley Center for Health Sciences – Wilkes-Barre Public Square

College courts

 * Monarch Court – located near the center of the campus
 * Moreau Court – located near West North Street
 * Regina Court – located between Esseff Hall and the Sheehy-Farmer Campus Center

College centers and school(s)

 * The William G. McGowan School of Business – King's undergraduate business school
 * Mulligan Physical Science Center – located behind the Administration Building (adjacent to the Theater)
 * Charles E. & Mary Parente Life Sciences Center – corner of North River and West Jackson Streets
 * Gym|Scandlon Physical Education Center – North Main Street
 * Hessel Hall, Office of Admission – North Franklin Street
 * Sheehy-Farmer Campus Center – located behind the Library and Esseff Hall

College houses

 * John J. Lane House – North Franklin Street
 * Kilburn House – North Franklin Street (formerly used as the college president's home)
 * Sherrer House – corner of Spencer and North Franklin Streets

College places of interest

 * The Chapel of Christ the King at the George and Giovita Maffei Family Commons - West North Street
 * Maffei Theatre – located in the Administration Building
 * D. Leonard Corgan Library – West Jackson Street
 * Campus Ministry Center- corner of West Jackson and North Franklin Streets

College community buildings

 * Holy Cross Community – North Franklin Street
 * Holy Cross Community/Student Housing – North Franklin Street

Miscellaneous buildings

 * Environmental Studies – located behind Benaglia Hall
 * Alumni Engagement and Experience – North Franklin Street
 * Human Resources – North Franklin Street
 * Study Abroad – North Franklin Street
 * Maintenance – Harrison Street (behind the gym)

Academics
King's College is an independent, coed, four-year Catholic college with 2,130 students. Founded in 1946 by Congregation of Holy Cross priests and brothers from the University of Notre Dame. King's academic programs are recognized by leading accrediting agencies, including the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (one of only 48 undergraduate schools of business in the country with this accreditation), the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the Commission of Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education, the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for Physician Assistants, the Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education, and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

King's grants bachelor's degrees in 40 majors (business, education, humanities, sciences, social sciences, and allied health programs), 11 concentrations, and seven pre-professional programs. All of the degree programs at King's encourage students to develop practical experience and skills that prepare them to pursue rewarding and successful careers. The college's newest programs include civil and mechanical engineering and nursing. The average class size is 18 with a student-to-faculty ratio of 12:1. The average GPA for entering first-year students is 3.4.

The college has 152 full-time and 77 part-time faculty members. Eighty-five percent of full-time faculty members have PhD or an equivalent terminal degrees (graduate assistants do not teach courses). Seventy percent of all enrolled students graduate from King's, and 99 percent of graduates are employed or attend graduate school within six months of graduation. King's also offers a Master of Science (M.S.) degree in health-care administration, a Master of Education (MEd) degree in reading or curriculum and instruction, and a five-year physician assistant studies program leading to a master's degree.

Student life
The college has more than fifty student organizations. King's 25 NCAA Division III teams include men's baseball, basketball, football, ice hockey, golf, lacrosse, soccer, swimming, tennis, track and field, and wrestling. Women's sports include basketball, field hockey, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, track & field, and volleyball. The college also offers rugby and cheerleading as club sports. Intramural sports include basketball, flag football, indoor soccer, racquetball, and dodgeball.

Other co-curricular activities include academic clubs in almost every department: the King's Players (theater), Cantores Christi Regis (choir), Campus Ministry, the Experiencing the Arts Series, The Crown (student newspaper), the Regis (yearbook), and The Scop (literary magazine).

The college offers traditional dormitory housing and apartments. Traditional dorms include Esseff Hall (female freshmen only), Holy Cross Hall (male freshmen only), and Luksic Hall (a co-ed residence hall). Apartments include Alumni Hall (a four-story co-ed building), Flood Hall (co-ed), John Lane House (a three-story home), Gateway Corners (a three-story co-ed), and North Franklin Street (co-ed).

Clubs and organizations
King's College recognizes 46 clubs and organizations. These clubs focus on academics (Biology Club and Psychology Club), service (Knights of Columbus, and Sigma Kappa Sigma), health related organizations (Sports Medicine Society), arts and sciences, international (Multicultural/International Club), media and publishing (Media Club), music and arts (Campion Society), and special interests (Student Allies For Equality, Anime Club, Young Americans for Liberty).

Media and publications
The King's College student-run radio station, WRKC ("Radio King's College") focuses on music but also covers live athletic events and sponsors a news program. . The college also sponsors The Crown, a weekly student newspaper. King's literary magazine, The Scop, is published twice every year and accepts written and visual submissions from current students and alumni.

The college has a closed-circuit campus television station, KCTV 10, which broadcasts shows such as a talk show ("King's Live"), a music competition ("King's Idol"), news, and sports.

Athletics
King's Division III teams include men's baseball, basketball, football, ice hockey, golf, lacrosse, soccer, swimming, tennis, track & field, and wrestling. Women's NCAA sports include basketball, field hockey, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, track & field, and volleyball. The college also offers rugby & cheerleading as club sports. Intramural sports include basketball, flag football, indoor soccer, racquetball, and dodgeball.

Notable alumni

 * Mark Ciavarella, former Luzerne County President Judge Court of Common Pleas, convicted in Kids for cash scandal, sentenced to 28 years in Federal Prison
 * Joseph James Farnan, Jr., United States federal judge
 * Frank G. Harrison, former United States Congressman
 * Donora Hillard, author
 * Pat Kennedy, former head basketball coach at several NCAA Division I programs, including Florida State University and DePaul University
 * Thomas M. Leighton, former Wilkes-Barre mayor
 * Santo Loquasto, Tony Award winning Broadway set and costume designer
 * Bob MacKinnon Jr., Basketball Coach
 * Francis T. McAndrew, psychologist/professor/author
 * William G. McGowan, former MCI Communications chairman (Known for breaking up the Bell Telephone Company monopoly)
 * Patrick J. Murphy, Under Secretary of the Army and Chief Management Officer (CMO); former United States Congressman
 * Raphael J. Musto, former Pennsylvania state senator and former U.S. Congressman
 * James L. Nelligan, former United States Congressman (later donated records to college as part of the Dan Flood/James Nelligan Archives)
 * Paul F. Nichols, former member of the Virginia House of Delegates
 * Patrick J. O'Connor, lawyer, vice chairman of Cozen O'Connor in Philadelphia
 * Thomas J. O'Hara, Provincial of the U.S. Province of Priests and Brothers of the Congregation of Holy Cross; former president of King's College
 * Thomas Tigue, former Pennsylvania State Representative

title: King's College (Pennsylvania)


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Peter Brown (historian)

Peter Robert Lamont Brown (born 26 July 1935) is an Irish historian. He is the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. Brown is credited with having brought coherence to the field of Late Antiquity, and is often regarded as the inventor of said field. His work has concerned, in particular, the religious culture of the later Roman Empire and early medieval Europe, and the relation between religion and society.

Early life and education
Peter Brown was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1935, to a Scots-Irish Protestant family. Until 1939, he spent winter and spring each year in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where his father worked as a railway engineer based at Khartoum. For the rest of the year, he would return with his mother to Bray, in County Wicklow, near Dublin. Following the outbreak of war, Brown and his mother remained in Ireland, though his father did not return finally until 1948. Brown has a stutter and came later in life to be noted as an example of a successful public speaker with a stutter.

Brown has written and spoken about the influence of the Sudanese connection on several occasions. Speaking to the Daily Princetonian, he has remarked: "'Living in the Sudan put in me a love of the Middle East, a real interest in it, distant memories of a very sunny world with large, dark Sudanese servants in long white robes', combined with memories of 'hippopotami, crocodiles, and camels under starry skies'." After his father had returned to Ireland, 'a handbook of Sudanese Courtesy Customs, containing delicate Arabic phrases of greeting and polite enquiry, was prominent on his bookshelf, as was a deluxe edition of T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I would read, from cover to cover, every time that I returned home on holiday from my school in England." Such influences, with "roots deep in my childhood, already ensured, perhaps, that both religion and the 'exotic' (the non-European and, by implication, the non-classical) were both too large, too ever-present and too rich for their intrusion into the classical world to be dismissed out of hand, as unambiguously negative symptoms of decline. The power of both had begun to puzzle and intrigue me. The collapse of an enlightened empire might, indeed, be a catastrophic event, for all I knew; but it was unlikely to be uninteresting."

Brown was initially educated at Aravon School – now closed but, at that time, a distinguished preparatory school in Bray, County Wicklow, where he first studied Latin and French. Brown was then educated at Shrewsbury School and New College, Oxford. At Shrewsbury, Brown expected to concentrate on sciences, but first studied Ancient Greek and turned in earnest to the study of history: "'I myself had become a keen amateur astronomer, and had re-invented gunpowder to the detriment of my aunt's carpet. I fully intended to enter the Science stream of my new school. My housemaster summoned me to his study. In between puffs of his pipe, he announced with utter certainty: 'Brown, you did too well in [the] Entrance [examination] to do Science. You shall do ... Greek.' And Greek I did, if only for one year, before taking the Junior Certificate and then lapsing from the high calling of a classical scholar in the English Public School tradition into the study of mere History.'"

When asked to comment on his intellectual formation, Brown has also indicated that he completed his public schooling a year early, returning to Ireland (as he had done for school holidays) in 1952, the year he turned 17. It was then in Dublin that he read Michael Rostovtzeff's (1926), which he borrowed from the lending library of the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge. The academic year 1952–1953 was a "hiatus" for Brown, between school and university, during which he learned to type at a secretarial school, and received German lessons from an academic at Trinity College Dublin who had been a refugee from Nazi Germany.

In 1953, Brown took up a scholarship to read Modern History at New College, leaving in 1956. Most of his degree was "devoted to English History in its entirety and to the European High Middle Ages, from 919 to 1127", but in his final academic year, he undertook a Special Subject on The Age of Augustine, and was particularly influenced by the writings of Marrou and Piganiol. That Special Subject had a profound influence on Brown:

"'I was thrilled by the glimpse which both authors offered of the sheer resilience of a pre-Christian society and culture at the very moment of the triumph of the Christian church within the Roman empire. Institutions and powerful bodies of ideas, that I had known only in the medieval and post-Reformation periods — and many of which, in their modern form, still hung, like chill clouds, above the heart of any Irish boy, Catholic or Protestant — were shown to have originated first in a very distant, ancient world.'"

Employment and professional memberships
Following his graduation Brown began, but did not complete, a doctoral thesis under the external supervision of Arnaldo Momigliano (at that time professor of ancient history at University College London). The potential he had shown as an undergraduate was recognized by the award of the Harmsworth Senior Scholarship at Merton College, Oxford, and a seven-year Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. At a time when it was normally possible to remain in the college after the Prize Fellowship, All Souls College subsequently elected him a research fellow in 1963 and a senior research fellow in 1970. The Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford appointed him a special lecturer in 1970 and a reader (ad hominem) in 1973. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. Brown left Oxford to become professor of modern history and head of the Department of History at Royal Holloway College in the University of London (1975–78). He subsequently left Britain to become professor of classics and history in the University of California at Berkeley (1978–86) and then Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University (1986–2011). He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979, a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1988, and a resident member of the American Philosophical Society in 1995.

Before joining the tenured faculty at UC Berkeley and Princeton, Brown held visiting professorships at both institutions: at UC Berkeley in 1975, and at Princeton in 1983–6. He has also held visiting professorships at UCLA and in Italy. Other engagements as a visiting teacher have taken Brown to Toronto in the 1970s and, since 2000, to Hungary and Iceland. At Princeton, Brown was given the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2000.

Speaking engagements
Brown has delivered several named lecture series. These include the Carl Newell Jackson Lectures at Harvard University (1976); the Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago (1978); the ACLS Lectures in the History of Religion (1981-2); the Curti Lectures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1988); the Tanner Lectures at Cambridge and Yale (1993 and 1996 respectively); the Menahem Stern Lectures in Jerusalem (2000); the Lectures in Human Sciences at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (2012); and the James W. Richard Lectures at the University of Virginia (2012).

He has also delivered a multitude of named single lectures. These include national academic occasions in the UK and US: the Raleigh Lecture in History in the British Academy (1992); and the Charles Homer Haskins Lecture ("A Life of Learning") for the American Council of Learned Societies (2003).

Other named lectures include the Stenton Lecture at Reading University (1976); the Sigmund H Danziger Jr Memorial Lecture at the University of Chicago (1997); a Presidential Lecture at Stanford University (2002); the Clark Lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge (2004); the Gennadius Library Lecture at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (2007); the Fr. Alexander Schmemann Lecture at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, NY (2013); the Annual Distinguished Lecture in Religion at Rutgers University (2013); the Nicolai Rubinstein Lecture at Queen Mary College, University of London (2013); the Patricia H. Labalme Friends of the Library Lecture at the American Academy in Rome (2013); the Burke Lecture on Religion and Society, University of California, San Diego (2014); the Corish Lecture at Maynooth College, Ireland (2014); the Etienne Gilson Lecture at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto (2014); and the inaugural Costan Lecture at Georgetown University (2014).

He has also been a named lecturer, usually in retrospect, in all the universities at which he has held substantive posts: lectures include the Magie Lecture at Princeton (1991); the Pritchett Lecture at UC Berkeley (1993); the Hayes Robinson Lecture at Royal Holloway College, University of London (1997); the Ronald Syme Lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford, and the Dacre Lecture in the History Faculty at Oxford (2006 and 2010 respectively).

In 2007, Brown gave an inaugural talk at the opening of the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity. In 2015 he was hosted by the Group for the Study of Late Antiquity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in a public discussion with Paula Fredriksen.

Brown has also frequently been a keynote speaker at conferences and congresses. These include the International Congress of Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo (1986); the International Medieval Congress at Leeds (1999); the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium (2012); and the First Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Louis University (2013). He gave the inaugural address at the first Coloquio Internacional "Nuevas perspectivas sobre la Antigüedad tardía" in Segovia (2009).

Editorial work
For several decades, Brown has been General Editor of the book series "The Transformation of the Classical Heritage", published by the University of California Press. The first volume in the series was published in 1981. The full published list to date now exceeds fifty-five titles.

Research grants
Following his earlier books, Brown has received some prestigious and substantial research grants. These include the MacArthur Fellowship in 1982 and the Distinguished Achievement Award for scholars in the humanities from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2001.

Research overview
Brown, who has a knowledge of at least 26 languages, has been instrumental in the development of the study of late antiquity as a field. Within this broad field, he has also been central in the study of Augustine, monasticism (both the eremitical "holy man" and coenobitic alternatives), the cult of the saints and the practice of sexual renunciation. More recently, he has made fundamental contributions to the study of power relations in late Roman society and to the study of financial giving. He has produced a steady stream of articles (several being classics in the field) since 1961, and a steady series of influential books since 1967.

Janet Nelson, the distinguished British historian of the early Middle Ages, has said: "He took the study of medieval history into fields of cultural history and social history, social psychological history. He was interested in religion but not in an old-fashioned ecclesiastical history, institutional sort of way, but what made people think in this way: how did they conceptualise God? How did they think about religious symbols and rituals in the ways that they did? Why did these things change? That was his agenda. He wrote mostly about late antiquity, the very early period, but he sometimes ventured into the Middle Ages and whenever he did he transformed the scene. The great area he's famous for doing is the cult of the saints."

Drawing on her interview with Brown, Ruby Shao has remarked: "Brown cites the balance of his scholarship between eastern and western Christianity as his proudest accomplishment. Few scholars research both equally, as the task demands mastery of different languages and intuitions. His commitment has challenged him throughout his career to break into new territory, such as by examining the Desert Fathers, Syriac poetry, and languages like Greek and Coptic."

1956 to 1971
Following his exposure to the works of Marrou and Piganiol as an undergraduate, and shortly after joining All Souls College as a Prize Fellow, Brown travelled in Italy in 1957–8, doing research at the British School in Rome. During that time, he was especially influenced by the work of Santo Mazzarino, which provided a stimulus for Brown's earliest lectures at Oxford, on return from Italy in 1958. Other early influences were Norman Hepburn Baynes, William Frend and A. H. M. Jones.

Brown's earliest research articles concerned the Christianization of the senatorial aristocracy of Rome (1961), and the phenomena of religious dissent and coercion in late Roman North Africa (1961, 1963). From there, he turned to the study of Augustine's own views on the state (1963) and its use of coercion in matters of religion (1964). Italy and Africa in the fourth and early fifth centuries provided the principal context for the life of Augustine, which became the subject of Brown's substantial first book - Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967). This was followed by related articles that explored both the Pelagian milieu in Italy (1968, 1970) and the relation between Christianity and local culture in Roman Africa (1968).

Following the completion of Augustine, however, Brown felt "free, at last" to take a wider approach to Late Antiquity, and to turn in particular to the Near East and Central Asia. In 1964, A. H. M. Jones's vast magnum opus on The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey had appeared, on which Brown wrote a long and important review article for the Economic History Review (1967). In addition, as Augustine had been a Manichaean for many years, Brown already had a natural route into the religious history of the eastern half of the later Roman Empire and the Persian Empire. An article on "The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire" (1969) reflected the direction of his interests, and was spectacularly corroborated when, shortly after, the Cologne Mani-Codex came to light.

In 1969, Geoffrey Barraclough (as General Editor of the Thames & Hudson "Library of European Civilization" series) approached Brown with a view to commissioning a book on late antiquity - and Brown has since noted that it might well have been Barraclough who suggested "The World of Late Antiquity" as a title. At this point, Brown engaged increasingly with the work of Henri Pirenne – and also with that of the French Annales School, in particular Fernand Braudel. Their work, combined with the eastward shift in his interests, prompted Brown to think increasingly of the Mediterranean as "truly distinctive".

Brown's interest in analyzing culture and religion as social phenomena, and as part of a wider context of historical change, had already been fostered by engagement with the work of Baynes, Frend and Jones. But the Annales' influence in Brown's work can be seen in his increasing use of anthropology and sociology as interpretative tools for historical analysis. Brown was influenced by Anglo-American anthropology, himself noting the role of both a largely British tradition of social anthropology and a largely American tradition of cultural anthropology.

1971 to present
Brown's views slightly shifted in the eighties. In articles and new editions Brown said that his earlier work, which had deconstructed many of the religious aspects of his field of study, needed to be reassessed. His later work shows a deeper appreciation for the specifically Christian layers of his subjects of study.

His most recent research focuses on wealth and poverty in late antiquity, especially in Christian writers.

Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967; 2000)
Brown's biography of Augustine of Hippo was widely acclaimed. Reviewing it in the Journal of Theological Studies, William Frend – with whom Brown had had a courteous but critical difference of opinion on the religious history of Roman Africa – wrote: "This is a superb book, an intensely personal interpretation of its central figure, but one in which the scholar's full range of skills, those of the historian, the philosopher, and human psychologist have been brought to bear, sustained throughout by a profound knowledge of Augustine's writings and those of his contemporaries, as well as of modern critical works. The entire compass of the life and thought of the later Roman Empire in the West is its canvas."

The idiosyncrasies of the book did not go unnoticed. Another great master of Augustinian studies, the Rev. Henry Chadwick, remarked that Brown's book was a "biography without the theology" - a judgment that Brown has accepted as "fair". For this reason, among Anglophone students, Brown's book has often been read hand in hand with Gerald Bonner's St Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies, which first appeared four years earlier, in 1963, and which Bonner updated in subsequent editions.

Equally, however, it was Brown's distinctive and subtle de-emphasis of theological content, combined with his use of psychoanalytic insight - which was then highly unusual in the study of an ancient figure - that helped to set Augustine convincingly, as an individual, within a historical landscape. This was noticed by Richard Southern, who praised Brown for "bringing Augustine out of the tomb of theological doctrine, and setting his mind and emotions working before our eyes."

Brown published a new edition in 2000, closing with two new chapters, one focusing on new evidence and the other on new interpretations.

The World of Late Antiquity (1971)
In his second book The World of Late Antiquity (1971), Brown offered a radically new interpretation of the entire period between the second and eighth centuries AD. The traditional interpretation of this period was centred around the idea of decadence from a 'golden age', classical civilisation, after the famous work of Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1779). On the contrary, Brown proposed to look at this period in positive terms, arguing that Late Antiquity was a period of immense cultural innovation.

"The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity" (1971)
His most celebrated early paper concerned the figure of the 'holy man'. According to Brown, the charismatic, Christian ascetics (holy men) were particularly prominent in the late Roman empire and the early Byzantine world as mediators between local communities and the divine. This relationship expressed the importance of patronage in the Roman social system, which was taken over by the Christian ascetics. But more importantly, Brown argues, the rise of the holy man was the result of a deeper religious change that affected not only Christianity but also other religions of the late antique period – namely the need for a more personal access to the divine.

The Body and Society (1988)
Published in 1988, Peter Brown's The Body and Society was a groundbreaking study of the marriage and sexual practices of early Christians in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Brown focuses on the practice of permanent sexual renunciation-continence, celibacy, and lifelong virginity in Christian circles from the first to the fifth centuries A.D. and traces early Christians' preoccupations with sexuality and the body in the work of the period's great writers.

The Body and Society questions how theological views on sexuality and the human body both mirrored and shaped relationships between men and women, Roman aristocracy and slaves, and the married and the celibate. Brown discusses Tertullian, Valentinus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Constantine, the Desert Fathers, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine, among others, and considers asceticism and society in the Eastern Empire, martyrdom and prophecy, gnostic spiritual guidance, promiscuity among the men and women of the church, monks and marriage in Egypt, the ascetic life of women in fourth-century Jerusalem, and the body and society in the early Middle Ages. In his new introduction, Brown reflects on his work's reception in the scholarly community.

Through the Eye of a Needle (2012)
Brown's longest book to date, Through the Eye of a Needle concerns attitudes to philanthropic giving in the Latin West in Late Antiquity. Divided into five parts, the core of the book – the long Parts II and III – focuses on two generations between about AD370 and 430, when a rich diversity of views gave way to an increasing polarization of thought brought on by the debate between Augustine and the Pelagians. Parts I and IV–V place this highly focused study in the much wider frame of the social structures of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries.

Honours
Brown has received formal recognition for his academic achievements in at least twelve countries on three continents.

Honorary degrees and college fellowships
He has received some twenty honorary degrees. From outside the US, he has received honorary doctorates from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland (1974), Trinity College Dublin (1990), the University of Pisa (2001), Cambridge (2004), the Central European University in Budapest (2005), Oxford (2006), King's College London (2008), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2010), the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki (2010), and the University of St Andrews (2014). His US honorary doctorates include the University of Chicago (1978), Wesleyan University (1993), Tulane (1994), Columbia University (2001), Harvard University (2002), Southern Methodist University (2004), Yale University (2006), University of Notre Dame (2008), Amherst College (2009), and St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, NY (2013).

He is an honorary fellow of Royal Holloway College in the University of London (1997), and of New College at Oxford University (1998).

Prizes
Brown has received several major prizes, including the Heineken Prize for History from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), the Ausonius Prize for Ancient History from the University of Trier (1999) and the Premio Anaxilao from the Municipality of Reggio di Calabria (1999). In 2008 he was the co-winner, with Indian historian Romila Thapar, of the semi-regular Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Study of Humanity, from the US Library of Congress. In 2011, Brown was awarded the prestigious International Balzan Prize for the Humanities, for his works on Graeco-Roman antiquity. He shared the Dan David Prize in the category of "Retrieving the Past: Historians and their Sources" in 2015.

Learned centres, societies and academies
In addition to the professional memberships acquired during his career in the UK and US, Brown has received honorific recognition from a number of other learned bodies.

He is a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991); a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Letters in Barcelona (1997); an honorary fellow of the Italian Association for the Study of Sanctity, Cults and Hagiography; an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy (2010); a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Italy (2015); and a fellow of the Ecclesiastical History Society in the UK (2016).

He is also honorary president (from 2012) of the Centro Internacional de Estudios sobre la Antigüedad Tardía 'Teodosio el Grande', in the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, at Segovia.

Foreign public recognition
Brown is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France (1996).

Book prizes
Brown has won several distinguished book prizes. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967) won the Arts Council of Great Britain Prize. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988) won the Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550AD (2012) won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society, and the Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. It also secured the R.R. Hawkins Award (the top prize in a tiered structure) at the American publishing industry's annual PROSE Awards.

Books

 * Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967/2000) – ISBN 0-520-22757-3, new edition, with new epilogue, ISBN 978-0-520-22757-6
 * The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150–750 (1971/1989) – ISBN 0-393-95803-5
 * The Making of Late Antiquity (1978) – ISBN 0-674-54321-1
 * The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (1981) – ISBN 0-226-07622-9
 * Society & the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982) – ISBN 978-0-520-06800-1
 * The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988) – ISBN 0-231-06101-3
 * Power and Persuasion: Towards a Christian Empire (1992)
 * Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman world (1995) – ISBN 0-521-49904-6
 * The Rise of Western Christendom (1996/2003) – ISBN 0-631-22138-7
 * Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (2002)
 * Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West 350–550 AD (2012)
 * The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (2015)
 * Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity (2016)
 * Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (2023)--ISBN 9780691242286

title: Peter Brown (historian)


text:
Talk:Budweiser Rocket

huh
Huh? That last sentence is a dilly! Pollinator 06:12, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

removed
I removed the following apparently nonsensical text:

No account was made for the excessive drag forces which are now known to affect ground-level sound-barrier attempts at speeds higher than 700 MPH. Since there were neither any independent witness, nor any degree of measurement expertise involved in this assertion, it is not generally held to be appropriate proof of the claim.

 * Claimed speed: 739.666 miles per hour (Mach 1.01), released by the United States Air Force 8 hours after event
 * Eyewitness testimony: no sonic boom was audible
 * Recorded radar speed: 38 mph (recorded speed of truck nearby by accident)
 * Other recorded data: Accelerometer data from vehicle, photographic images.
 * Driver: Stan Barret
 * Other top speed claims: 638 mph in earlier attempt

~ Strathmeyer (talk) 19:55, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

I've added a note highlighting that a couple of independent witnesses from NASA Dryden were there, heard the boom and also supported the accuracy of the radar measurements. Originally posted on usenet as below, should anyone feel like chasing the original From: Mary Shafer Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military Subject: Re: F-86, first thru sound barrier. Date: 15 Oct 1998 10:19:10 -0700 Thoglette (talk) 03:14, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

title: Talk:Budweiser Rocket


text:
Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March 1

Images
Use only ONE image at a time

Eligible

 * 1805 – Samuel Chase, the only Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States to be impeached, was acquitted by the Senate.
 * 1870 – Paraguayan War: Marshal Francisco Solano López died at the Battle of Cerro Corá.
 * 1872 – Yellowstone National Park (bison pictured), located mostly in the present-day U.S. state of Wyoming, was established by President Ulysses S. Grant.
 * 1896 – Ethiopia defeated Italy at the Battle of Adwa, ending the First Italo-Ethiopian War.
 * 1896 – French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered the principle of radioactive decay when he exposed photographic plates to uranium salts.
 * 1921 – The Kronstadt rebellion began following mass protests in Petrograd demanding greater freedom in Russia with sailors and citizens taking up arms against the Bolsheviks.
 * 1944 – World War II: American and Australian troops won the Battle of Sio against Japanese forces as part of the New Guinea campaign.
 * 1950 – In a trial lasting less than 90 minutes, German–British physicist Klaus Fuchs was convicted of violating the Official Secrets Act by supplying information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union.
 * 1973 – Pink Floyd's critically acclaimed album The Dark Side of the Moon was released.
 * Born/died: | Vladislaus II of Hungary |b|1456| George Wishart |d|1546| Samuel Werenfels |b|1657| Thomas Campion|d|1620|Francesco Redi |d|1697| Angelo Emo |d|1792| John Brooks |d|1825| Théophile Delcassé|b|1852| Mercedes de Acosta|b|1893| Robert Bork|b|1927| Vic Mitchell|b|1934| Lupita Nyong'o|b|1983| Kesha|b|1987| C. Farris Bryant|d|2002|


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Michael Witbrock

Michael John Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. Witbrock is a native of New Zealand and is the former vice president of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine artificial intelligence.

Background and affiliations
Witbrock was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and has a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining Cycorp, he was a principal scientist at Terra Lycos, working on integrating statistical and knowledge-based approaches to understanding Web user behavior; he has also been associated with Just Systems Pittsburgh Research Center and the Informedia Digital Library at Carnegie Mellon.

Research topics
Witbrock's dissertation work was on speaker modeling; before going to Cycorp, he published in a broad range of areas, including:

 * Neural networks
 * Multimedia information retrieval
 * Genetic design
 * Computational linguistics
 * Speech recognition
 * Web-browser design

His work at Cycorp has focused on improving its knowledge formation efforts, particularly dialogue processing, and on improving accessibility to the Cyc project.

Selected publications

 * Witbrock, Michael, Baxter, David, Curtis, Jon, et al. "An Interactive Dialogue System for Knowledge Acquisition in Cyc," in Proceedings of the IJCAI-2003 Workshop on Mixed-Initiative Intelligent Systems, Acapulco, Aug 9, 2003.
 * O’Hara, Tom, Witbrock, Michael, Aldag, Bjorn, Bertolo, Stefano, Salay, Nancy, Curtis, Jon, and Panton, Kathy. "Inducing Criteria of Lexicalization of Parts of Speech using the Cyc KB," in Proceedings of IJCAI-03, Acapulco August 12–15, 2003.
 * Mittal, Vibhu O. and Witbrock, Michael J. "Language Modeling Experiments in Non-Extractive Summarization," Chapter 10 in Croft, W. Bruce and Lafferty, John, Language Modeling for Information Retrieval . Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrect, 2003.
 * Banko, Michele, Mittal, Vibhu O., and Witbrock, Michael J., "Headline Generation Based on Statistical Translation," in ACL-2000, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong Kong, Oct 3-6, 2000.
 * Witbrock, Michael J., and Mittal, Vibhu O., "Ultra-Summarization: A Statistical Approach to Generating Highly Condensed Non-Extractive Summaries," in SIGIR’99, Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Berkeley, CA, Aug 15-19, 1999.
 * Hauptman, A., Witbrock, M., and Christel, M., "News-on-Demand: An Application of Informedia Technology," d-lib Magazine, The Magazine of the Digital Library Forum, September 1995.
 * Fischer, Michael, Meyer, Michael, and Witbrock, Michael. "User Extensibility in Amiga Mosaic." Proceedings of the Second International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) '94: Mosaic and the Web, October, 1994.
 * Witbrock, Michael and Zagha, Marco. "Back-Propagation Learning on the IBM GF11," Chapter in Przytula, K.W., and Prasanna Kumar, V.K. Parallel Digital Implementations of Neural Networks PTR Prentice Hall. Englewood Cliffs. 1993.
 * Witbrock, Michael and Haffner, Patrick. "Rapid Connectionist Speaker Adaptation," Proceedings of the IEEE 1992 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, March, 1992.

Random art
Together with John Mount, Witbrock is credited with genetic art, a kind of Computer-generated art.

title: Michael Witbrock


text:
Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March 2

Images
Use only ONE image at a time

Eligible

 * 1444 – The League of Lezhë, an alliance of regional chieftains, was established in Venetian Albania with Skanderbeg as their commander.
 * 1791 – French inventor Claude Chappe and his brothers first demonstrated the semaphore telegraph, a system to convey information by means of visual signals, using towers with pivoting crossarms.
 * 1836 – Texas Revolution: At a convention of delegates in Washington-on-the-Brazos, the Mexican state of Texas adopted a declaration of independence, establishing the Republic of Texas.
 * 1859 – The Great Slave Auction, the largest single sale of slaves in U.S. history, with more than 400 people sold, began in Georgia.
 * 1865 – New Zealand Wars: Carl Sylvius Völkner, a Protestant missionary, was killed by Hauhau militants in Ōpōtiki for working as an agent for New Zealand governor-general George Grey.
 * 1877 – The Electoral Commission awarded twenty disputed electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes, thus assuring his victory in the 1876 U.S. presidential election.
 * 1901 – U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation and once the world's largest producer of steel, was founded by financier J. P. Morgan.
 * 1919 – Communist, revolutionary-socialist, and syndicalist delegates met in Moscow to establish the Communist International.
 * 1937 – The Steel Workers Organizing Committee, the precursor of the United Steel Workers of America, had a major success when it signed a collective-bargaining agreement with U.S. Steel.
 * 1943 – World War II: Australian and U.S. air forces attacked and destroyed a large Japanese naval convoy in the Bismarck Sea, north of Papua New Guinea.
 * 1962 – Led by General Ne Win, the Burmese military seized power in a coup d'état.
 * 1965 – Vietnam War: The American and South Vietnamese air forces began Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam that eventually became the most intense air–ground battle waged during the Cold War period.
 * 1965 – The Sound of Music is released in American theatres; it later became the highest grossing film of all time.
 * 1978 – As a cosmonaut on Soyuz 28, Czechoslovak military pilot Vladimír Remek (pictured) became the first person from outside the Soviet Union or the United States to go into space.
 * 1995 – Researchers at Fermilab in Illinois announced the discovery of the top quark, the most massive of all observed elementary particles.
 * 2017 – A naming ceremony for the chemical elements moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson took place at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

 * Born/died: | Hasan ibn Ali |b|625| Charles the Good |d|1127| George Sandys |b|1578| William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield |b|1705| Louis-Gabriel Suchet |b|1770|  Susanna M. Salter |b|1860|  James A. Gilmore |b|1876| Grete Hermann |b|1901| Gisela Januszewska |d|1943|  Lionel Matthews |d|1944| Dusty Springfield |d|1999

March 2

 * 1484 – The College of Arms, one of the few remaining official heraldic authorities in Europe, was incorporated by royal charter in the City of London.
 * 1776 – American Revolutionary War: Patriot militiamen from Georgia and South Carolina attempted to resist the British action to seize and remove supply ships anchored at Savannah, Georgia.
 * 1949 – The B-50 Superfortress Lucky Lady II landed in Fort Worth, Texas, to complete the first non-stop circumnavigation of the world by airplane.
 * 1962 – Playing for the Philadelphia Warriors, American basketball player Wilt Chamberlain (pictured) scored 100 points in a game against the New York Knicks, which remains an NBA record.
 * 2022 – Russian forces captured the city of Kherson, the only regional capital to be taken during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.


text:
Bene Israel

The Bene Israel (lit. 'Sons of Israel'), also referred to as the "Shanivar Teli" (lit. 'Saturday oil-presser')  or "Native Jew" caste, are a community of Jews in India. It has been suggested that they are the descendants of one of the Ten Lost Tribes via their ancestors who had settled there centuries ago. Starting in the second half of the 18th century, after they were taught about normative Sephardi Judaism, they migrated from villages in the Konkan region where they had previously lived to nearby cities throughout British India—primarily to Mumbai where their first synagogue opened in 1796 but also to Pune, Ahmedabad, and Karachi (now in Pakistan), where they gained prominent positions within the British colonial government and the Indian Army.

In the early part of the 20th century, many Bene Israel became active in the Indian film industry as actresses/actors, producers, and directors. With Indian independence in 1947 followed by the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, many Bene Israel, including those who had arrived in India after their exodus from newly-independent Pakistan, soon immigrated to the State of Israel, the United States, as well as Canada, and other Commonwealth countries. Emigration from India (mostly to Israel but also to the UK, the US, Canada and Australia) reduced the approximate population there from a peak of 20,000 in 1951 to 16,000 in 1961 and 5,500 in 1971, after which the emigration greatly declined.

History

The Bene Israel community believes that their ancestors fled Judea during the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes and are descended from fourteen Jews, seven men and seven women, who came to India as the only survivors of a shipwreck near the village of Navagaon on the coast about 20 mi south of Mumbai in 175 BCE. There is no evidence for this and Tudor Parfitt considers it mythical, saying that it is identical to an origin story told by the Chitpavan Brahmins, that they descended from 14 foreigners, 7 men and 7 women, who died when their vessel was shipwrecked off the same coast, only to be revived by Parashurama, who then initiated them into Brahamic rites. The Bene Israel acknowledge the similarity and have a different interpretation of the shipwreck legend. Some historians have thought their ancestors may have belonged to one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Genetic evidence as of 2005 suggests that the Bene Israel appear to carry a haplotype which points to a Middle Eastern origin, and Jews may have formed part of the founding group. They gradually assimilated to the people around them, while retaining customs that are considered Jewish. The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides may have been referring to the Bene Israel when he wrote in a letter: "The Jews of India know nothing of the Torah, and of the laws nothing save the Sabbath and circumcision."

At a point in history which is uncertain, an Indian Jew from Cochin named David Rahabi discovered the Bene Israel in their villages and recognized their vestigial Jewish customs. Rahabi taught the people about normative Judaism. He trained some young men among them to be the religious preceptors of the community. Known as Kajis, these men held a position that became hereditary, similar to the Cohanim. They became recognized as judges and settlers of disputes within the community.

Bene Israel tradition places Rahabi's arrival at either 1000 or 1400, although some historians have dated his arrival to the 18th century. They suggest that the "David Rahabi" of Bene Israel folklore was a man named David Ezekiel Rahabi, who lived from 1694 to 1772, and resided in Cochin, then the center of the wealthy Malabar Jewish community. Others suggest that the reference is to David Baruch Rahabi, who arrived in Bombay from Cochin in 1825.

It is estimated that there were 6,000 Bene Israel in the 1830s; 10,000 at the turn of the 20th century; and in 1948—their peak in India—they numbered 20,000. Since that time, most of the population has immigrated to Israel. In 2020, the Jewish population in Mumbai numbered about 3,500, out of which 99% were from the Bene Israel community. Mumbai and surrounding regions like Raigad houses several synagogues, most of which belong to the Bene Israel community.

Under British colonial rule, many Bene Israel rose to prominence in India; they were less affected by discriminatory legislation and gained prominent positions within the colonial government and the Indian Army, at a higher rate overall than their non-Jewish counterparts. Some of these enlistees with their families later immigrated to the British protectorate of Aden. In the 19th century, the Bene Israel did however meet with hostility from the newly anglicized Baghdadi Jews who considered the Bene Israel to be "Indian". They also questioned the Jewishness of the community. In response, the Bene Israel educator and historian, Haeem Samuel Kehimkar, spearheaded the defence of the Jewishness of the Bene Israel in the late 1800s. In his writings, he tried to portray the Bene Israel as a totally foreign community in India. He also divided the community into two endogamous groups, white (gora) and black (kala). He claimed the whites had pure blood and the blacks were the progeny of Indian women and therefore impure.

In the early twentieth century, numerous Bene Israel became leaders in the new film industry in India. In addition, men worked as producers and actors: Ezra Mir (alias Edwin Myers) (1903-1993) became the first chief of Films Division of India, and Solomon Moses was head of the Bombay Film Lab Pvt Ltd from the 1940s to 1990s. Ennoch Isaac Satamkar was a film actor and assistant director to Mehboob Khan, a director of Hindi films.

Given the relatively privileged position they had held under British colonial rule, many Bene Israel prepared to leave India at independence in 1947. They believed that nationalism and the emphasis on indigenous religions would mean fewer opportunities for them. Most immigrated to the state of Israel, which was newly established in 1948 as a Jewish homeland.

Life in Israel
Between 1948 and 1952, some 2,300 Bene Israel immigrated to Israel. In India, the Bene Israel and other Jews lived in urban areas, however in Israel they were settled into development towns. Members of the Bene Israel faced discrimination from other Jewish groups, including due to their darker skin colour. Several rabbis refused to marry Bene Israel to other Jews, on grounds that they were not legitimate Jews under Orthodox law. Between 1952 and 1954, following sit-down protests and hunger strikes by Bene Israel demanding to be sent back to India, the Jewish Agency repatriated 337 members of the Bene Israel community to India, though most eventually returned to Israel years later.

In 1962, authorities in Israel were accused of racism towards the Bene Israel. In the case that caused the controversy, the Council of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel ruled that before registering a marriage between Indian Jews and Jews not belonging to that community, the registering rabbi should investigate the lineage of the Indian applicant for possible non-Jewish descent, and in case of doubt, require the applicant to perform conversion or immersion. The discrimination may actually be related to the fact that some religious authorities believed that the Bene Israel were not fully Jewish because of inter-marriage during their long separation. Between 1962 and 1964, the Bene Israel community staged protests against the religious policy. In 1964 the Israeli Rabbinate ruled that the Bene Israel are "full Jews in every respect".

The Report of the High Level Commission on the Indian Diaspora (2012) reviewed life in Israel for the Bene Israel community. It noted that the city of Beersheba in Southern Israel has the largest community of Bene Israel, with a sizable one in Ramla. They have a new kind of transnational family. Generally the Bene Israel have not been politically active and have been of modest means. They have not formed continuing economic connections to India and have limited political status in Israel. Jews of Indian origin are generally regarded as Sephardic; they have become well integrated religiously with the Sephardic community in Israel. Abbink, on the other hand, states that the Bene Israel have become a distinct ethnic minority in Israel. The community despite being in Israel for many generations has maintained many of their traditions from India such as a form of Malida dedicated to the Jewish prophet Elijah as a thanksgiving ritual and wedding rituals such as mehndi. The prophet Elijah has become a kind of patron saint for Bene Israel. A ritual of thanksgiving dedicated to the Prophet Elijah is called Eliahu HaNabi (the Hebrew name for Elijah), and is performed at weddings and other celebratory events. The ceremony features a tray of flattened rice, grated coconut, raisins, spices, and fruit of two or more different kinds. The ceremony is regarded as a boundary marker between the Bene Israel and other Jewish communities. The Community also observes Tashlich, the ceremony of taking a ritual bath at Rosh Hashanah. The Bene Israel also like to attend their own synagogues to maintain group life. This is also seen in higher levels of endogamy compared to other Jewish groups.

Religiously, the Bene Israel adopted the devotional singing style Kirtan from their Marathi Hindu neighbors. A popular Kirtan is one based on the Story of Joseph. Their main traditional musical instruments are the Indian Harmonium and the Bulbul tarang.

The Central Organisation of Indian Jews in Israel (COIJI) was founded by Noah Massil. The organization has twenty chapters around Israel. Maiboli, the newsletter for the Bene Israel community is edited by Noah Masil. There is also a website called Indian Jewish Community in Israel which coordinates various cultural activities organized by the community. The community in Israel opened the museum of Indian Jewish Heritage in the town of Dimona in 2012. The museum is currently run by volunteers. At present, the museum has a small collection of items donated by the community. It also holds cultural and cooking classes for all communities.

Migration to other countries
Members of Bene Israel also settled in Britain and North America, mostly in Canada.

Notable people

 * Reuben Dhondji Ashtumkar (1820–after 1877), Indian soldier who fought in the Indian Rebellion of 1857
 * Joseph Ezekiel Rajpurkar (1834–1905), Indian writer and translator of Hebrew liturgical works into Marathi
 * Rebecca Reuben Nowgaokar (1889-1957), writer and educator
 * Jerusha Jhirad (1890–1984), the first female Indian Jewish physician
 * Ezra Mir alias Edwin Myers (1903–1993), noted in the Guinness Book of World Records as "the producer of the largest number of documentaries and short films".
 * David Abraham Cheulkar (1908–1982), actor who starred in Boot Polish (1954) and sang (on screen) "Nanhe Munne Bachche"
 * Firoza Begum (born as Susan Solomon), actor in the 1920s and 1930s
 * Reuben David (1912–89), zoologist, founder of Kankaria Zoo, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, father of Esther David
 * Benjamin Abraham Samson (1916–2008), Indian Navy Admiral, father of Leela Samson
 * Lila Erulkar (1921–2007), First Lady of Cyprus (1993–2003) and wife of Glafcos Clerides, president of the Republic of Cyprus
 * Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004), Indian poet
 * Fleur Ezekiel, model and 1959 Miss World India
 * Ralph Sam Haeems (1940–2005), Indian-born British criminal defence solicitor
 * Samson Kehimkar (d. 2007), Indian musician
 * Esther David (1945–), Indian writer and critic, daughter of Reuben David
 * Leela Samson (1951–), Indian dancer, choreographer, and actress; daughter of Benjamin Abraham Samson
 * Isaac David Kehimkar (1957–), Indian lepidopterist, butterfly expert based in Navi Mumbai
 * Liora Itzhak Pezarkar (1974–), Israeli singer of Indian origin.
 * Eban Hyams (1981–), Indian-born Australian professional basketball player
 * Madhura Naik (1984–), Indian actress
 * Bensiyon Songavkar (1985–), Indian cricket, silver medalist at the 2009 Maccabiah Games
 * Ezekiel Isaac Malekar, Indian rabbi

title: Bene Israel


text:
Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March 3

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 * 1776 – American Revolutionary War: Samuel Nicholas and the Continental Marines successfully landed on New Providence in the Bahamas and began a raid of Nassau, capturing the port the next day.
 * 1820 – The U.S. Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, which balanced the admission of Missouri as a slave state with that of Maine as a free state.
 * 1875 – French composer Georges Bizet's opera Carmen (poster pictured), based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris.
 * 1875 – The first indoor game of ice hockey was played at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal by James Creighton and students of McGill University.
 * 1933 – The first Nazi concentration camp was opened in Nohra to reduce overcrowding in prisons from the arrest of German Communists.
 * 1945 – A Polish Home Army unit massacred at least 150 Ukrainian civilians in Pawłokoma, Poland.
 * 1972 – The British rock band Jethro Tull released Thick as a Brick, a parody concept album allegedly adapted from an eight-year-old boy's epic poem.
 * 2012 – Two passenger trains collided near Szczekociny, Poland, resulting in 16 deaths and 58 injuries.
 * Born/died this day: | Michael Kantakouzenos Şeytanoğlu |d|1578|  Matthias de l'Obel |d|1616| Thomas Otway |b|1652| Robert Hooke |d|1703| Ghulam Kadir |d|1789| Thomas Field Gibson |b|1803| Georg Cantor |b|1845| Johanna Wokalek |b|1975| Rebecca Lancefield |d|1981| Tolu Ogunlesi |b|1982| Hergé |d|1983|


text:
Vigna subterranea

Vigna subterranea (common names: Bambara groundnut, Bambara nut, Bambara bean, Congo goober, earth pea, ground-bean, or hog-peanut ) is a member of the family Fabaceae. Its name is derived from the Bambara ethnic group. The plant originated in West Africa. As a food and source of income, the Bambara groundnut is considered to be the third most important leguminous crop in those African countries where it is grown, after peanut and cowpea. The crop is mainly cultivated, sold and processed by women, and is, thus, particularly valuable for female subsistence farmers.

Bambara groundnut represents the third most important grain legume in semi-arid Africa. It is resistant to high temperatures and is suitable for marginal soils where other leguminous crops cannot be grown. It is a low-impact crop. The entire plant is known for soil improvement because of nitrogen fixation.

Vigna subterranea is geocarpy which ripens its pods underground, much like the peanut (also called a groundnut). They can be eaten fresh or boiled after drying, and can be ground either fresh or dry to make puddings.

Origins and regions of cultivation
The origin of the Bambara groundnut is West Africa and the region of cultivation is Sub-Saharan Africa's warm tropics. Bambara nut grows well anywhere groundnut (peanut) grows, and so is vastly present from Kwara state, throughout the northern parts of Nigeria and Northern Ghana.

Growth, development, physiology
Bambara groundnut is a herbaceous, intermediate, annual plant, with creeping stems at ground level. It is a small legume plant that grows to a height of 0.25–0.37m with compound leaves of three leaflets having stipules about 3 mm long. The flowers have a tube calyx about 1 mm long and 5 lobes about 1 mm long as well as a whitish yellow corolla, 4–7 mm long. The fruit is an indehiscent pod almost globose about 2.5 cm in diameter. The plant generally looks like bunched leaves arising from branched stems, which form a crown on the soil surface.

Bambara is considered as a fast-growing crop. The growth cycle is between (min-max) 90–170 days and under optimal conditions the cycle is about 120–150 days to pod maturity. Flowers appear 40–60 days after planting. 30 days after pollination the pod reaches maturity and during another 55 days the seeds fully develop. Every 30 days they are produced again.

Generative reproduction is for the Bambara groundnut autogamous (self-fertilization) and cleistogamous (self-pollinating). After self-fertilization, pale yellow flowers are borne on the freely growing branching stems; these stems then grow downwards into the soil, taking the developing seed within the pods, which makes breeding and development of new cultivars for the traits of interest difficult. The seeds will form pods encasing seeds just below the soil. The pods are round, wrinkled and each contains one or two seeds that are round, smooth and very hard when dried.The seeds may be cream colored, brown, red, mottled or black eyed and their size is about 8.5–15 mm × 6.5–10 mm × 5.5–9 mm.

Several factors are essential for promoting cross-pollination in Bambara and these include a proper nursery habitat, short day lengths (<12h), an average temperature of 26 °C, which is necessary for optimum flowering and pod formation and a relative humidity of 90%. The strict photoperiod requirement of Bambara also limits its productivity in countries further away from the equator. In some accessions, long days (>12h) negatively affect pod-setting, resulting in crop failure.

The genus Vigna, which includes about 80 species, is found throughout the tropics. There are considerable morphological differences between wild and domesticated types of Bambara groundnuts. Long runners are produced by wild Bambara groundnut, and the seeds are smaller (9–11 mm long) and more uniform in size. The pods are thin and do not wrinkle when drying. Domesticated versions are more compact, have fleshy pods that wrinkle as they dry, with longer, less slender, and more erect petioles, and larger seeds (11–15 mm long). Wild and domesticated types are sometimes distinguished as ''var. spontanea (Harms) Hepper (wild) and var. subterranea'' (cultivated).

Biological nitrogen fixation
Like many other legumes, Bambara groundnut fixes atmospheric nitrogen through the process of biological nitrogen fixation. Its potential to be used as an alternative to chemical fertilizer in agriculture has been investigated for many years. The process is also very important to improve soil fertility and to supply other non-leguminous crops with the nitrogen left in the soil after the legume is harvested.

Soil requirements
Optimal soils for Bambara groundnut production are sandy soils to prevent waterlogging. Well-drained soils make the harvest easier and prevent rotting of the pods. Stony areas are typically avoided to prevent damage of the pods.

Optimal soil depth is between 50 and 100 cm, with a light soil texture. Soil fertility should be low and soil pH is best suited between 5 and 6.5 and should not be lower than 4.3 or higher than 7. Bambara groundnut is tolerant to salinity, but high sodium chloride concentration in the soil will result in yield losses.

Climate requirements
The production is best suited between a latitude of 20° and 30°, i.e. the tropical wet and dry (Aw) and the subtropical dry summer (Cs) climate zones. Optimal temperature is between 19 °C and 30 °C. Temperatures below 16 °C and above 38 °C are not suited for the production of Bambara groundnut.

The Bambara groundnut is very drought-resistant. The minimal annual rainfall requirement is about 300 mm and optimal annual rainfall is between 750 mm and 1400 mm and should not exceed 3000 mm. Bambara groundnut can tolerate heavy rainfall, but it will result in yield losses if they happen at harvest.

Seedbed requirements and sowing
Before sowing, the seeds can be treated with pesticides to prevent insect and fungal attack, and being eaten by bush fowl (Numida meleagris). Priming the seeds with water by soaking them overnight and then drying them before sowing improves seedling emergence, vigour and yield.

Sowing is usually performed manually by peasant farmers in tropical Africa, but it can also be done mechanically on industrial farms using modified soya bean planters. Manual sowing is generally done using a hoe or a cutlass to open the soil. One seed is placed in each hole which are then closed.

Seedbed type doesn't seem to affect yield or biomass production of Bambara groundnut. The crop can thus be planted on flat terrain, although it is also planted in ridges. Studies show that increased sowing density has a positive effect on production calculated on a per-area basis, but has a negative effect on per-plant yield. It is assumed that at higher sowing densities, increased competition between plants is the cause of lower pod and seed number per plant.

Cropping system and fertilization
The cropping system is semi-permanent and the Bambara groundnut can be cultivated as single crop or as intercrop. Best suited intercrops are sorghum, millet, maize, peanut, yams and cassava. Bambara groundnut is mainly cultivated as intercrop, however the planting density varies between 6 and 29 plants per square meter. For woodland savannas of Côte d'Ivoire, the highest yield is attainable with a plant density of 25 plants per square meter. Despite its suitability for intercropping systems due to its ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen, a non-negligible proportion of farmers grow the Bambara groundnut in monoculture and report that its performance is better as a single crop. Cultivation is mainly performed manually and is comparable to the production of peanut.

The Bambara groundnut can grow on soils with low fertility and is even reported to do better on these soils than on fertile ones. Nevertheless, phosphate fertilization can have a beneficial effect. For example, the application of superphosphate can improve the yield of the Bambara groundnut. Moreover, fertilization with phosphorus enhances the crop's nitrogen fixation and increases its nitrogen content.

Harvest and postharvest treatment
The Bambara bean typically takes about 130–150 days to mature, but early or late harvests only marginally reduce the yield. The pods, which grow belowground, are harvested manually by pulling out the whole crop and picking the pods by hand. Then, they are usually dried in the sun for some days. Post-harvest losses are reported to be on a low level. However, insect pests can cause damage to stored grains, most importantly Bruchids.

Interactions: Pests, diseases, symbionts
It is widely regarded as a pest and disease resistant crop. However, there is a lack of evidence to support this claim, with reports of fungal attacks by Rhizoctonia solani in Southern Thailand, and Cercospora canescens and Colletotrichum capsici in Nigeria, causing brown blotch disease. The crop is also susceptible to attack by cowpea weevil (Callosobruchus maculatus).

Importance
The annual production of Bambara groundnut is estimated to be 0.2 million tonnes from an area of 0.25 million hectares worldwide. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is the largest producer of Bambara groundnut, while a small quantity is produced in Southeast Asia (e.g., Thailand and Indonesia), the United States, and Australia. Additionally, the crop is cultivated in Brazil, where it was putatively introduced in the 1600s with the slave trade. West Africa is the main Bambara groundnut production region in SSA, where Burkina Faso, Niger, and Cameroon are the leading producers, contributing to 74% of global production. However, it was reported by Ghanaian farmers to contribute neither to a large part of the subsistence food nor of the income.

Worldwide production and yield
World production of Vigna subterranea increased from 29,800 tonnes in 1972 to 79,155 tonnes in 2015. The top six Bambara groundnut producing countries in Africa in 2018 include Burkina Faso, Niger, Cameroon, Mali, Togo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with a total production of 0.06, 0.05, 0.04, 0.03, 0.02, and 0.01 million tonnes, respectively.

The yield level of Bambara groundnut in Africa varies from 0.6 to 1 tonne per hectare, depending on variety and production conditions. However, unshelled mean yields of up to 3 tonnes per hectare were reported when cultivating some landraces in the transition agro-ecological zone in Nigeria. A low mean yield of 0.85 tonnes per hectare was reported in Ghana under good management practices close to yield levels of other legumes such as cowpeas (0.80 tonnes per hecatare) and pigeon peas (0.78 tonnes per hectare).

Nutrition
This nutrient-dense legume is sometimes termed a “complete food” due to its balanced macronutrient composition. It is considered to be a neglected and underutilized food source in Benin. The brown hull showed the highest concentrations of rutin and myricetin among flavonoids, while the red hull resulted in having with the highest concentrations of chlorogenic and ellagic acid among tannin compounds.

Macronutrient content
Bambara groundnut has nutritive value ranging between 57.9% to 64% carbohydrate and 24.0% to 25.5% protein content. In comparison, soybean (Glycine max) and chickpea (Cicer ariteneum) have 27% and 61% of carbohydrates.

Anti-nutritional factors
The presence of anti-nutritional factors (ANFs) in the Vigna subterranea can reduce protein digestibility, affecting bioavailability of amino acids by up to 50%, as well as lowering digestibility and bioavailability of other nutrients. ANFs include enzyme inhibitors, flatulence factors, tannins, phytic acid and saponins. ANFs can be removed or lowered by a variety of treatments:

 * 1) Cooking and thermal treatment of pulse seeds.
 * 2) Applications of pressure, heat, infrared radiation, dry extrusion and chemicals such as cysteine have been shown to reduce trypsin inhibitor activity in whole soybean.

Culinary use
The seeds are used for food, beverages because of their high protein content and for digestive system applications. In West Africa, the nuts are eaten as a snack, roasted and salted, processed into cake, or as a meal, boiled similarly to other beans.

The Bambara groundnut needs to be cooked for a relatively long time, which means that more fuel is needed than for cooking other legumes. The cooking time for fresh beans is 45–60 minutes, and dry beans may even take 3–4 hours. This presents an obstacle to a more widespread use of this crop. Moreover, if the bean is not cooked enough, it can cause bloating of the stomach, constipation and flatulence.

Traditional culinary use of Bambara groundnut in Nigeria
In South Eastern Nigeria, particularly in Enugu, the dried Bambara beans are ground into a fine powder, then mixed with palm oil, water and, more rarely, vegetables (e.g., utazi), then poured into banana leaf wraps or one-liter cellophane bags before being boiled into a pudding to make okpa, a common breakfast food. During the rainy season in many parts of central Nigeria, the fresh Bambara beans are cooked with their shells still on them, then eaten as a snack.

Potential use in probiotic beverage
Bambara groundnut milk can be fermented with lactic acid bacteria to make a probiotic beverage that not only increase the economic value of the nutritious legume but also help in addressing malnutrition.

Use as livestock feed
The Bambara groundnut plays an important role in the diet and culture of populations. The leaves, rich in phosphorus, are used for livestock feed. Seeds are given to pigs and poultry.

Traditional African medicine
The Bambara groundnut is used in some traditional African medicine.

Crop development
There are genetic resources available for breeding since around 6145 germplasms of the Bambara groundnut have been collected and are stored ex situ.

The primary goal of Bambara improvement programs is to focus on seed yield and nutritional quality traits. There is a notable gap between the potential yield of 4 t/ha and the average yield of 0.85 t/ha reported for African countries. Thus, breeding should aim at improving the yield. Results of studies exhibited high protein content among the test genotypes. Similarly, high levels of essential fatty acids, thiamine, ribovin, and vitamin K were recorded. Moreover, scientists examined the chemical properties of starches in Bambara groundnut. The results revealed that seed source and crop management practices affected chemical composition. Food fortification, the use of artificial supplements, and food imports are among the strategies used to overcome the problem of malnutrition in Africa. The adoption of traditional plant breeding methods to enhance nutritional benefits of orphan food crops such as Bambara groundnut is an economic and affordable strategy to decrease malnutrition in Africa.

The form and colour of Bambara groundnut were all important factors to optimize the best extraction yield of phytochemicals. Overall, the hulls of the crop were the optimum source of flavonoids and tannins: the brown and red hulls had the highest concentration of flavonoids compared to whole and dehulled, with the highest flavonoid concentration being rutin at 24.46 mg g−1 found in brown hulls and myricetin at 1.80 mg g−1 found in red hulls. Lastly, formulating products with higher concentration of Bambara groundnut hulls could potentially result in a product with higher phytochemical content.

title: Vigna subterranea


text:
Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March 4

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 * 306 – Roman Herculian guard Adrian of Nicomedia, who had converted to Christianity after being impressed with the faith of Christians that he had been torturing, was martyred.
 * 852 – Trpimir I, the founder of the Trpimirović dynasty of Croatia, issued a document that contains the first known use of the name Croats.
 * 1461 – Wars of the Roses: Henry VI, the Lancastrian king of England, was deposed by his Yorkist cousin, who succeeded him as Edward IV.
 * 1675 – John Flamsteed (pictured) was appointed the first Astronomer Royal by King Charles II of England.
 * 1681 – King Charles II of England granted Quaker William Penn a charter for the Pennsylvania Colony.
 * 1776 – American Revolutionary War: Using artillery transported from Ticonderoga, the Continental Army occupied Dorchester Heights, forcing the British to abandon Boston two weeks later.
 * 1804 – Irish convicts formerly involved at the Battle of Vinegar Hill during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 began an uprising against British colonial authorities in New South Wales, Australia.
 * 1824 – The Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a charity that saves lives at sea around the coasts of the British Isles, was founded as the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck by author and philanthropist William Hillary.
 * 1837 – Chicago was incorporated as a city.
 * 1890 – The Forth Bridge, a railway bridge connecting Edinburgh to Fife over the Firth of Forth, opened, eventually becoming an internationally recognised Scottish landmark.
 * 1918 – The United States Navy suffered its largest non-combat loss of life when the collier USS Cyclops (AC-4) set sail from Barbados to Baltimore and was never seen again, presumably disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle.
 * 1933 – Frances Perkins was appointed United States Secretary of Labor, making her the first female member of the Cabinet.
 * 1941 – Second World War: British Commandos successfully executed a raid on the Lofoten Islands in German-occupied Norway.
 * 1943 – The Holocaust: Almost all Jews in Bulgarian-occupied Western Thrace were deported to Treblinka extermination camp to be killed.
 * 1944 – Murder, Inc. leader Lepke Buchalter was executed, becoming the only American mob boss to receive the death penalty after being convicted of murder.
 * 1966 – During an interview, John Lennon of the Beatles argued that the band had become "more popular than Jesus".
 * 1979 – The space probe Voyager 1 discovered the rings of Jupiter, the third ring system to be discovered in the Solar System, after those of Saturn and Uranus.
 * 1987 – U.S. president Ronald Reagan made a nationally televised address in which he accepted full responsibility for illegal actions in the Iran–Contra affair.
 * 1990 – College basketball player Hank Gathers died after collapsing during a West Coast Conference tournament semifinal game in Los Angeles.
 * 2007 – Fourteen-year-old English schoolgirl Charlotte Shaw drowned on Dartmoor, becoming the first person to die in connection with the annual Ten Tors challenge.
 * 2009 – President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan was indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the War in Darfur.
 * 2012 – A series of blasts occurred at an arms dump in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, killing at least 300 people and injuring 2,500 others.
 * Born/died: | Stephen III of Hungary |d|1172| Hans von Aachen |d|1615| Jack Sheppard |b|1702| John Rolph |b|1793| Mariano Moreno |d|1811| Edwards Pierrepont |b|1817| Paul Lacôme |b|1838| Robert Emden |b|1862| Ernest Titterton |b|1916| Jane Fawcett |b|1921| Miriam Makeba |b|1932| Izaak Kolthoff |d|1993| Bobbi Kristina Brown |b|1993|

March 4: Feast day of Saint Casimir (Catholicism)

 * 1386 – Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, was crowned King of Poland as Władysław II Jagiełło (pictured), beginning the Jagiellonian dynasty.
 * 1773 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart departed Italy after the last of his three journeys there.
 * 1899 – Cyclone Mahina struck Bathurst Bay, Queensland, killing over 300 people in one of the deadliest natural disasters in Australian history.
 * 1918 – A case of influenza was recorded at Camp Funston, Kansas, conventionally marking the beginning of the Spanish flu pandemic.
 * 2017 – Construction began on a 69 m statue of the Buddha at Wat Paknam Bhasicharoen in Bangkok.


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Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March 5

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 * 363 – Roman–Persian Wars: Roman emperor Julian and his army set out from Antioch to attack the Sasanian Empire.
 * 1279 – The Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order suffered a great loss when 71 knights died in the Battle of Aizkraukle.
 * 1770 – American Revolution: British soldiers fired into a crowd in Boston, killing five people.
 * 1824 – The First Anglo-Burmese War began.
 * 1943 – World War II: The Gloster Meteor, the Allies' only operational jet aircraft, made its maiden flight.
 * 1963 – American country-music performers Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins were killed when their PA-24 crashed shortly after takeoff in Camden, Tennessee.
 * 1966 – BOAC Flight 911 disintegrated and crashed near Mount Fuji shortly after departure from Tokyo International Airport, killing all 113 passengers and 11 crew members on board.
 * Born/died: | Hermann Balk |d|1239| Louis I of Hungary |b|1326| Gerardus Mercator (pictured) |b|1512| Alessandro Volta |d|1827| Marietta Piccolomini |b|1834| Michael von Faulhaber |b|1869| Olav Bjaaland |b|1873| Lat |b|1951| Sergei Prokofiev |d|1953| Joseph Stalin |d|1953| Mary Louise Booth |d|1889| Lena Baker |d|1945| Elaine Paige |b|1948|

March 5: Learn from Lei Feng Day in China; St Piran's Day in Cornwall, England

 * 1811 – Peninsular War: At the Battle of Barrosa, Anglo-Iberian forces trying to lift the Siege of Cádiz defeated a French attack but could not break the siege itself.
 * 1825 – Roberto Cofresí, one of the last Caribbean pirates, was apprehended after his flagship sloop Anne was captured by authorities.
 * 1936 – The prototype (pictured) of the Supermarine Spitfire flew for the first time.
 * 1960 – Cuban photographer Alberto Korda took his iconic photograph Guerrillero Heroico of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.
 * 1981 – The ZX81, a pioneering British home computer, was launched by Sinclair Research, and went on to sell more than 1.5 million units around the world.


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Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March 6

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 * 1836 – Texas Revolution: Mexican troops captured the Alamo Mission in San Antonio from Texian forces after a 13-day siege.
 * 1853 – Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata premiered at La Fenice in Venice, but the performance was considered so bad that it caused him to revise portions of the opera.
 * 1913 – First Balkan War: The Greek army captured Bizani Fortress, near Ioannina, from the Ottomans.
 * 1930 – Organized by the Communist International, hundreds of thousands of people in major cities around the world marched to protest mass unemployment associated with the Great Depression.
 * 1943 – World War II: National Liberation Front forces defeated Italian occupiers in the Battle of Fardykambos, a major sign of the Greek resistance's growth.
 * 1945 – Petru Groza of the Ploughmen's Front became the first prime minister of the Communist Party-dominated government of Romania.
 * 1953 – Following Joseph Stalin's death, Georgy Malenkov succeeded him as Premier of the Soviet Union.
 * 1964 – In a radio broadcast, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad announced that American boxer Cassius Clay would change his name to Muhammad Ali (pictured).
 * 1987 – The ferry MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsized while leaving the harbour of Zeebrugge, Belgium, killing 193 people on board.
 * Born/died: | Alvise Loredan |d|1466| Luigi Alamanni |b|1495| Lucy Barnes |b|1780| William Claflin |b|1818| Ella P. Stewart |b|1893|  Ayn Rand |d|1982| Francisco Xavier do Amaral |d|2012|  Paul of Greece |d|1964|


text:
Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/March 7

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 * 321 – Emperor Constantine I decreed that Sunday, the day honoring the sun god Sol Invictus (disc pictured), would be the Roman day of rest.
 * 1277 – Bishop Étienne Tempier promulgated a condemnation of 219 heretical propositions that were being discussed at the University of Paris.
 * 1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: Napoleon's army forced Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov's Russian troops to withdraw from the Chemin des Dames, but French casualties exceeded Russian losses.
 * 1850 – United States senator Daniel Webster delivered a speech advocating compromise on slavery, which proved to be unpopular with abolitionists in his home state.
 * 1900 – The German ocean liner SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse became the first ship to send a wireless telegraph message to an onshore receiver.
 * 1936 – Nazi German forces re-occupied the demilitarized Rhineland, violating both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties that were signed after World War I.
 * 1945 – World War II: At the beginning of the Battle of Remagen, Allied forces unexpectedly captured the Ludendorff Bridge, which possibly hastened the war's conclusion.
 * 1968 – Vietnam War: The United States and South Vietnam began Operation Truong Cong Dinh to sweep the area surrounding the Mekong Delta town of Mỹ Tho to root out Viet Cong forces in the area.
 * 1985 – The charity single "We Are the World" by the supergroup USA for Africa was released, and went on to sell more than 20 million copies.
 * 2009 – The Kepler space telescope (depicted), designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, was launched.
 * 2009 – Dissident Irish republican campaign: Two off-duty British Army soldiers were shot dead by Real IRA paramilitaries outside Massereene Barracks in Antrim, Northern Ireland.
 * Born/died: | Heraclianus |d|413| Ewald Christian von Kleist |b|1715| Boris Kustodiev |b|1878| Harriet Jacobs |d|1897| Tom Acker |b|1930| Viv Richards |b|1952| Nicolas Dupont-Aignan |b|1961| Cool Papa Bell |d|1991