Trivial Biographies

NAME Martin Luther King Jr. He was born Michael King Jr., and both he and his father were renamed in 1934 after the elder King's trip to Germany for the Baptist World Alliance Congress in Berlin — a tribute to the German reformer Martin Luther. (1) (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR An American Baptist minister and the most celebrated leader of the American Civil Rights Movement. Through campaigns of nonviolent resistance — the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Birmingham, Selma and the March on Washington — he fought segregation and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. His "I Have a Dream" speech of August 28, 1963 remains one of history's most famous orations.

BIRTH King was born on January 15, 1929, in an upstairs room of the family home at 501 Auburn Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia.

King's childhood home in Atlanta By Mikefairbanks

FAMILY BACKGROUND He was the second of three children: an older sister, Christine, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel, known as A.D. His father, Martin Luther King Sr. ("Daddy King"), was pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a missionary and an early figure in the civil rights struggle. His mother, Alberta Williams King, was a schoolteacher who played the organ at Ebenezer. King was the great-grandson of a southern slave. (2)

CHILDHOOD King grew up in the prosperous "Sweet Auburn" district of Black Atlanta, behind the church his father led. He encountered racism early: at six, his friendships with two white playmates were ended by their parents.

He suffered from depression from early on. Biographers recount that when he was twelve, he mistakenly believed his brother had accidentally caused the death of his beloved grandmother, and in grief threw himself from an upstairs window of the family home, escaping injury. Later that year his grandmother did die, and convinced he was to blame for having sneaked off to a parade on the Sabbath, he jumped from the same window again — and again survived. (2)

EDUCATION King attended Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, skipping two grades. In 1944, aged fifteen, he entered Morehouse College — a private, all-male, historically black college in Atlanta — under a wartime programme that admitted bright students early, provided they passed the entrance exams.

He graduated in 1948 with a B.A. in sociology at nineteen, then enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, taking his B.Div. in 1951.

He earned his Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation comparing the conceptions of God of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. (2)

CAREER RECORD 1954 King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, at age 25.

1955–1956 He assumed the leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association, guiding the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott that brought national attention to racial segregation on public transit.

1957 He co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to coordinate nonviolent civil rights efforts across the American South, serving as its president.

1960 He returned to his hometown of Atlanta to serve as co-pastor alongside his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the church where he had been baptized.

1963 He led major nonviolent demonstrations during the Birmingham campaign and helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

1965–1968 He expanded his efforts northward to tackle housing and economic discrimination during the Chicago Housing Movement, launched the Poor People's Campaign, and became an outspoken public critic of the Vietnam War

APPEARANCE King stood 5 feet 7 inches tall, with a compact, sturdy build, expressive eyes, and a carefully groomed mustache. He was slight and compact, with thick black hair, and long, expressive hands.

Photo: Yoichi Okamoto, White House, 1966 — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

FASHION Martin Luther King Jr. was usually seen in public wearing a well-tailored suit, a crisp white shirt and a conservative tie, reflecting the conventional dress of a Southern Baptist minister and the professional standards of the era. His formal appearance also served a wider purpose: it reinforced the dignity and moral seriousness of the civil rights movement, challenging racist stereotypes and insisting that its members be treated with respect.

CHARACTER King lived modestly on his pastor's salary and worked punishing hours. He described himself as "a symbol of the movement." Beneath the composure lay the childhood depression.

He possessed extraordinary moral courage, patience, and profound resilience in the face of constant hostility. Despite enduring repeated violence, death threats, and imprisonment, he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolent reconciliation and love as social forces. (2) (3)

SPEAKING VOICE King spoke with a rich, measured baritone with the rolling cadences of the Black Baptist pulpit, building slowly from quiet introduction to thunderous climax. The style was learned in his father's church rather than the seminary — at Crozer he managed only a C+ in public speaking. (2)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Dry and quick. He teased his wife for years about their wedding night: "Honey, do you remember we spent our honeymoon at a funeral parlor?" Deflecting white fears that his movement promoted interracial marriage, he quipped: "I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law." (4)

RELATIONSHIPS He met Coretta Scott in Boston in 1952 on a blind date; she was a voice student at the New England Conservatory of Music.

They married on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' home in Marion, Alabama, in a ceremony performed by King's father. Because no hotels in segregated Marion would take a Black couple, the newlyweds spent their wedding night in the guest room of a funeral parlor run by family friends.

Their four children — Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott and Bernice Albertine — all became civil rights activists. Coretta, an accomplished soprano, wove freedom songs into the movement's rallies, and King confessed in a 1965 sermon that his secretary had to remind him of his wife's birthday and their anniversary. (2) (4)

The Kings' generosity reached beyond the movement: when the actress Julia Roberts was born in Smyrna, Georgia, on October 28, 1967, they paid her parents' hospital bill — Roberts' parents ran the Atlanta acting school attended by the King children, and the families had become close friends. (5)

Coretta Scott King and her husband Martin Luther King in 1964

MONEY AND FAME King lived modestly on his pastor's salary and donated his Nobel Prize money — $54,123 — to the civil rights movement.

Time named him Man of the Year in 1963.

The writer Dorothy Parker, who never met him, bequeathed her estate to King; he reportedly had no idea who she was, and after his assassination the bequest passed to the NAACP. (6)

FOOD AND DRINK He loved southern soul food — fried chicken, collard greens, black-eyed peas, cornbread and apple pie with ice cream. He was also a lifelong smoker, though he kept the habit hidden. (7)

MUSIC AND ARTS Gospel music was the soundtrack of his life. His favorite song was the gospel standard "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," which he played in times of stress and often asked Mahalia Jackson to sing at rallies to lift the crowds. At the March on Washington it was Jackson who shouted "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" — prompting him to improvise the most famous passage of his life. She sang the hymn at his funeral. (8)

LITERATURE King wrote five books, including Stride Toward Freedom (1958) and Why We Can't Wait (1964).

His famous Letter from Birmingham Jail—drafted on scraps of newspaper and paper towels following his arrest on April 12, 1963, and published by The New York Post Sunday Magazine on May 19, 1963. The letter was written in response to "A Call for Unity," an open letter by eight white Alabama clergymen criticizing his methods. (2)

NATURE King viewed the natural world through a deeply theological lens, frequently referencing landscapes, mountains, and valleys as symbols of spiritual elevation, equality, and social transformation in his speeches

HOBBIES AND SPORTS As a young man King was an enthusiastic dancer and a sharp billiards player. He was also a devoted Star Trek fan — the only show, he told Nichelle Nichols, that he and Coretta let their children stay up to watch. When Nichols planned to quit the role of Lieutenant Uhura in 1967, King talked her out of it, telling her that for the first time the world was seeing Black people "as we should be seen." (4) (9)

Image by Chat GBT

SCIENCE AND MATHS King rejected the notion that science and faith were enemies, arguing that scientific progress without moral progress merely multiplied the means of oppression.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY At thirteen he shocked his Sunday school class by denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus. He later concluded that the Bible contained profound truths and entered the ministry, though he remained a theological liberal. His mature creed fused two traditions: "Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, and Gandhi furnished the method" — Jesus' command to love your enemies combined with Gandhi's nonviolent resistance. (2)

King demanded total commitment: SCLC volunteers signed a strict pledge committing them to daily meditation on Jesus' teachings and regular prayer. (8)

ACTIVISM Martin Luther King Jr. came to national attention during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which began on December 1, 1955, after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. The boycott lasted 381 days, during which King's home was bombed. On one occasion, he faced an angry crowd of armed supporters and persuaded them to put down their guns and respond to violence with love. It was an extraordinary achievement in a situation where almost everyone had a perfectly understandable reason to be furious.

In 1957, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organisation dedicated to advancing civil rights through nonviolent protest. He then embarked on a schedule that would have tested the stamina of a travelling salesman: that year alone, he covered 780,000 miles and delivered 208 speeches.

King was arrested 29 times during his life, occasionally for reasons that would have seemed comical had the consequences not been so serious. On September 3, 1958, he was arrested in Montgomery for loitering outside the courthouse and fined $14 for disobeying a police order. He chose to serve 14 days in jail rather than pay. Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers, apparently anxious to avoid the unwelcome publicity, paid the fine himself.

Photo: Birmingham Police Department, 1963 Wikimedia Commons

On April 12, 1963, King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama. While in jail, he wrote his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, responding to eight white clergymen who had criticised the civil rights demonstrations. The letter was published in the New York Post Sunday Magazine on May 19, 1963, and became one of the defining documents of the movement.

Later that year, on August 28, King addressed approximately 250,000 people at the March on Washington. His speech became famous for its refrain, "I have a dream," which he delivered after departing from his prepared text. The words were not entirely new to him; he had used the refrain in earlier speeches. What was new was the occasion, the audience and the extraordinary force with which he delivered it.

In 1966, King took the civil rights campaign to Chicago, where he encountered jeering crowds who hurled bricks and waved Nazi and Confederate flags. He later said he had never witnessed such hatred, not even in Mississippi or Alabama. It was a sobering reminder that the struggle for racial equality was not confined to the Deep South, nor was opposition to it always as polite as its opponents might have preferred.

POLITICS King voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 but refused to tie the movement to either party. In 1967, anti-Vietnam War Democrats urged him to run for president as a third-party candidate with Dr. Benjamin Spock as his running mate. He contemplated it, but declined, feeling uneasy with politics and better suited to his morally unambiguous role as an activist. (10)

SCANDAL King was the target of intensive federal surveillance under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In 1964 the Bureau sent his wife an anonymous package containing tapes of his alleged extramarital affairs and a letter suggesting he commit suicide.

His womanizing, including one relationship with a woman his biographers say he saw almost daily, has been documented. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on his lawn, and in 1991 Boston University found that his doctoral dissertation contained plagiarized passages, though the degree was allowed to stand.

MILITARY RECORD A committed pacifist, he was too young for World War II and became the most prominent American opponent of the Vietnam War, denouncing it at Riverside Church, New York, on April 4, 1967 — exactly one year before his death. (2)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Beyond the childhood depression, King's health was battered by the movement. In 1958 a mentally ill woman stabbed him with a steel letter opener at a Harlem book signing; the blade lodged so close to his aorta that doctors said a sneeze could have killed him. Doctors performing the autopsy are reported to have found that, although only thirty-nine, he had the heart of a sixty-year-old — a comparison biographers attribute to the stress of thirteen years in the civil rights struggle. (9)

HOMES He was born and raised at 501 Auburn Avenue, Atlanta, now preserved within the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.

As a young pastor he lived in the Dexter Avenue parsonage in Montgomery, which was bombed during the boycott. He subsequently resided in modest rented and purchased houses in Montgomery, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia. (2)

TRAVEL In 1959 he spent five weeks in India, meeting Prime Minister Nehru and studying Gandhi's techniques, saying: "To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim."

In September 1959, after speaking in Tucson, King made an impromptu visit to the Tohono O'odham (then Papago) Indian Reservation at Sells, Arizona, meeting astonished tribal leaders; he later spoke out against the government's treatment of Native Americans. (1)

DEATH On the evening of April 3, 1968, at Mason Temple in Memphis, King told the crowd: "I've been to the mountaintop... And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you" — an allusion to Moses. The next day, April 4, 1968, he was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at the age of thirty-nine as he left his room to attend a dinner at the home of the Reverend Samuel "Billy" Kyles. James Earl Ray was convicted of the murder. One of his aides removed the cigarettes from King's jacket so the public would not discover he was a smoker.

After a funeral service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, public rites were held at Morehouse College, where a student usher was the future actor Samuel L. Jackson.

King was initially buried at South-View Cemetery in Atlanta; his remains were later moved to a tomb beside the reflecting pool at the King Center, adjacent to Ebenezer, inscribed "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I am free at last."

The King family never believed Ray acted alone; in a 1999 civil suit a Memphis jury found that café owner Lloyd Jowers and others, including government agencies, were liable — though subsequent Justice Department reviews found no credible evidence to support it.

On June 30, 1974, King's mother Alberta was herself assassinated, shot at the organ of Ebenezer by Marcus Wayne Chenault. (1)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA King has been portrayed on screen many times, including by Paul Winfield in the 1978 miniseries King, Jeffrey Wright in Boycott (2001) and David Oyelowo in Selma (2014).

ACHIEVEMENTS King's campaigns led directly to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ending legal segregation in the South and guaranteeing Black Americans the vote.

He was Time's Man of the Year in 1963, won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize as its youngest recipient to that point, and received the posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal.

Ronald Reagan signed the bill creating Martin Luther King Jr. Day on November 2, 1983; it was first observed in 1986 and in all fifty states from January 17, 2000, when Utah dropped its "Human Rights Day." The holiday is even observed in Hiroshima, Japan, where a mayoral banquet tradition begun in 2005 teaches young people the importance of electoral politics and nonviolent social change.

The Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site was established on October 10, 1980 (since redesignated a National Historical Park), his National Mall memorial opened in 2011, and more than 900 American streets bear his name.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford (3) The Seattle Times (4) Mental Floss (5) Los Angeles Times (6) NAACP (7) National Park Service Los Angeles Times (8) Enyclopaedia of Trivia (9) TIME (10) Rolling Stone

Kim Jong Un

2016-05-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Kim Jong Un, also written Kim Jong-un or Kim Jong Eun. In Korean usage, Kim is the family name. His principal offices are general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs Commission. (1), (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Kim Jong Un is the supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, commonly called North Korea. The third ruler of the Kim dynasty, he succeeded his father, Kim Jong Il, in December 2011 and is the grandson of the state’s founder, Kim Il Sung. His rule has combined severe political repression with accelerated nuclear and ballistic-missile development. (3)

BIRTH Kim was born on January 8, probably in 1984, although 1982 and 1983 have also been reported. The United States government has used 1984, while North Korean statements have favoured 1982. Even his birthplace has not been conclusively established. (4)

FAMILY BACKGROUND His father, Kim Jong Il (1941–2011), ruled North Korea from 1994 until his death; his paternal grandfather, Kim Il Sung (1912–1994), founded the country. Below are portraits of Kim Jong Un's father and grandfather (Arirang Festival mass games in Pyongyang)

By Poniol

His mother, Ko Yong Hui, was an ethnic Korean born in Osaka, Japan, in 1952 to a Zainichi Korean family whose roots lay on Jeju Island. She was Japanese-born, rather than “half-Japanese” as sometimes claimed, and moved to North Korea as a child. (5)

Kim’s full brother is Kim Jong Chul and his sister is the influential official Kim Yo Jong; he also had an older half-brother, Kim Jong Nam.

His great-grandfather Kim Hyong Jik was a teacher, Korean independence activist, Christian and part-time Protestant missionary. (6)

CHILDHOOD Kim grew up amid guarded villas, swimming pools, bowling alleys and exceptional privilege during years when many North Koreans suffered famine. North Korean propaganda later presented him as a child prodigy: a teachers’ manual claimed that he could drive and shoot at the age of three and win a yacht race at nine. These were state-sponsored legends, not verified biographical facts. (7), (8)

The route by which he became heir is more complicated than the familiar Disneyland story. Kim Jong Nam, once considered a possible successor, was detained at Tokyo’s Narita Airport in May 2001 while travelling on a false passport and said that he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland. The humiliation contributed to his fall from favour, after which Jong Un eventually emerged as Kim Jong Il’s chosen successor. (9)

EDUCATION Kim lived secretly in Switzerland. A boy identified as him attended the Liebefeld-Steinhölzli state school in Köniz, near Bern, as “Pak Un,” supposedly the son of a North Korean embassy employee, from 1998 until late 2000. Other evidence suggests that he had been in Switzerland earlier and may also have attended the International School of Berne. (10)

Former classmates remembered a quiet, private pupil who initially struggled with German but became more sociable. He was far more absorbed in basketball—especially Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls—than in academic work and was intensely competitive on court. After returning home, he reportedly studied at Kim Il Sung University and Kim Il Sung Military University, obtaining qualifications in physics and military studies. (11)

North Korean education devotes considerable time to ideological instruction and praise of the ruling family. The claim that exactly one-third of every pupil’s instruction concerns the Kims cannot be established as a universal figure, but elementary curricula include separate subjects about family members, and an 81-hour secondary-school course on Kim Jong Un was introduced in 2014. (12), (13)

CAREER RECORD 2009 Appointed to North Korea's National Defence Commission and secretly designated by his father, Kim Jong Il, as the official heir to the leadership—passing over his eldest half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, who had fallen out of favour after trying to sneak into Japan on a forged passport to visit Disneyland.

2010 Made a four-star general in the Korean People's Army and appointed Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea.

2011 Declared Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army following the death of Kim Jong Il on December 17, 2011.

2012 Formally assumed the top leadership titles, including First Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

2016 Elected Chairman of the newly created State Affairs Commission, solidifying absolute governance over state institutions.

2018 Held historical summits with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore, becoming the first North Korean leader to meet a sitting U.S. President.

2021 Elevated his title to General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, further centralising control over party administration.

APPEARANCE Kim is a short, heavy-set man with a broad face and closely shaved sides beneath a high, swept-back top. His hairstyle, gestures, horn-rimmed glasses and rounded silhouette have often been interpreted as deliberate echoes of Kim Il Sung, whose image possessed greater warmth and revolutionary legitimacy than that of Kim Jong Il. (14)

Kim in 2023 By Mil.ru, Wikipedia

FASHION His signature garment is a dark, high-collared Mao-style suit, often subtly pinstriped, worn with polished black shoes. It presents socialist continuity and visually links him to his grandfather, although Kim sometimes adopts Western business suits, overcoats or a black leather trench coat to project a younger, more modern image. (15)

CHARACTER School acquaintances described him as introverted, decisive, humorous and fiercely competitive, with a temper when he lost at basketball. As ruler he has appeared calculating, risk-tolerant and ruthless in removing possible rivals, while using smiles, embraces and informal “field guidance” to appear more approachable than his father. (11), (16)

SPEAKING VOICE Kim’s first televised public address, delivered at a military parade on April 15, 2012, lasted about twenty minutes. Contemporary reports described a youthful voice and a hesitant delivery; he kept his eyes largely on his prepared text. Regular public speeches marked a contrast with his taciturn father and associated him with his more demonstrative grandfather. (17), (18)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Former classmates recalled that Kim could be funny and “good for a laugh.” Dennis Rodman has described private occasions filled with laughter, karaoke, skiing and horse riding, although Rodman’s unusually friendly account cannot be treated as an impartial assessment of Kim’s character. (11), (19)

RELATIONSHIPS Kim is married to Ri Sol Ju, a former singer whose status as his wife was publicly confirmed in July 2012.

Ri in 2018 By Blue House (Republic of Korea)

They are widely believed to have three children, although only a daughter—believed to be Kim Ju Ae—has appeared publicly. First shown beside an intercontinental missile in November 2022, she became increasingly prominent and by 2026 was assessed by South Korean intelligence as being positioned as a probable successor. (20)

His most unlikely foreign friendship is with retired American basketball player Dennis Rodman, who has visited North Korea repeatedly. Rodman revealed Ju Ae’s reported name after meeting the family in 2013. (19)

MONEY AND FAME No credible audit can separate Kim’s personal wealth from assets controlled by the North Korean state, so widely circulated multibillion-dollar “net worth” figures are speculative. Satellite research has nevertheless identified numerous luxurious family compounds with yachts, pools and equestrian facilities. A 2024 South Korean report estimated spending of up to $1.8 billion on vehicles, luxury goods, medical care and rewards for the elite. (21)

Kim’s face and activities dominate North Korean news, school materials and propaganda films. In 2011, as he was being prepared for succession, authorities reportedly instructed others bearing his name to change it “voluntarily”—a word carrying little practical choice in a dictatorship. (22)

FOOD AND DRINK Accounts from visitors and former household staff describe a taste for expensive cheese, wine, seafood, caviar and spirits, but many colourful claims about his diet are difficult to verify. His access to imported luxuries contrasts with persistent food insecurity among ordinary North Koreans. (23), (24)

A related family legend says that Kim Jong Il invented the hamburger. North Korean reporting actually credited the elder Kim with introducing a “double bread with meat,” or gogigyeopbbang, around 2000 and ordering its production for university students. It was a renamed hamburger rather than an original invention by Kim Jong Un. (25)

MUSIC AND ARTS Kim established the all-female Moranbong Band in 2012 as a modern showcase for state-approved pop and spectacle. Its debut unusually included Disney imagery and arrangements of Western music. Rodman has said that Kim enjoys 1980s American music, Frank Sinatra and karaoke. (19)

LITERATURE State publishing houses generate vast collections of ideological literature and political treatises credited to Kim Jong Un, which form mandatory reading material for North Korean citizens.

A selection of Kim Jong Un's works. By jennybento from Jackson Heights

His first major address was titled Let Us March Forward Dynamically Towards Final Victory, Holding Higher the Banner of Songun, and a collection called Aphorisms appeared in 2016. (18)

There is little reliable evidence about Kim’s private reading.

NATURE State photography repeatedly places Kim on a white horse at snowy Mount Paektu, the mountain central to the dynasty’s revolutionary mythology. The carefully staged images convey vigour, sacred lineage and national destiny rather than documenting a personal commitment to conservation. (26)

PETS He is frequently shown with horses, and in 2024 he presented Vladimir Putin with two Pungsan hunting dogs, a native Korean breed, during Putin’s visit to Pyongyang. (27)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Basketball has been Kim’s best-documented enthusiasm since adolescence. In Switzerland he wore Chicago Bulls kit and Air Jordan shoes, played almost daily and hated losing; as leader he hosted Rodman and a basketball exhibition in Pyongyang.

He has also been associated with horse riding, skiing, yachting and jet-skiing. (11), (19)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kim reportedly earned a physics qualification, although the secrecy surrounding his education makes its academic value impossible to assess. His government has promoted science, technology, computing and distance learning, extended compulsory education from eleven to twelve years and emphasized technical training as a route to economic and military self-reliance. (1), (28)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Kim officially upholds Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism and Juche, the dynasty’s doctrine of political independence and self-reliance, reinforced by the Suryong principle of absolute leadership.

North Korea is formally secular, but researchers compare its compulsory veneration of the Kim family to a state-sponsored theology; unauthorized religious belief and practice are severely punished. (29)

LEADER OF NORTH KOREA Kim Jong Un began to emerge as his father Kim Jong Il’s intended successor in the late 2000s, reportedly receiving posts within North Korea’s security and defence apparatus. It was not the sort of career progression that involved submitting a CV, attending an interview and waiting nervously for an email. In North Korea, the succession plan was rather more of a family matter.

In 2010, Kim was publicly promoted to four-star general and appointed vice-chairman of the Workers’ Party’s Central Military Commission, despite having no known military command experience. This was an impressive achievement for a young man whose military career had barely begun, rather like being made admiral after successfully finding the swimming pool.

After Kim Jong Il died on December 17, 2011, Kim Jong Un was proclaimed the “great successor” and assumed supreme command of the Korean People’s Army. A January 2011 directive reportedly ordered North Koreans who were already named Kim Jong Un to change their names and prohibited parents from giving the name to newborn children. It is difficult to imagine many governments having quite such a low tolerance for nominative competition.

In 2012, Kim became first secretary of the Workers’ Party, chairman of its Central Military Commission and first chairman of the National Defence Commission. In July he was awarded the rank of marshal, completing an extraordinarily rapid ascent through the military hierarchy. Most people have to spend years working their way up an organisation; Kim had the advantage of being the organisation’s next owner.

Between 2013 and 2017, Kim consolidated his power through purges while North Korea conducted four nuclear tests and accelerated its missile programme. In November 2017, the country tested the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, after which Kim declared North Korea’s nuclear force complete. This was an unusually confident use of the word “complete,” given that the missiles and nuclear weapons had presumably not received the memo.

In 2016, Kim was elected chairman of the Workers’ Party and became chairman of the newly created State Affairs Commission, further concentrating political and military authority in his hands. North Korea had never been especially enthusiastic about spreading power around, but Kim was clearly determined to make certain nobody misunderstood the point.

In 2018 and 2019, Kim embarked on an extraordinary period of diplomacy. He held three summits with South Korean president Moon Jae-in and three unprecedented meetings with US president Donald Trump, in Singapore, Hanoi and at the Korean Demilitarized Zone. The meetings temporarily reduced tensions and produced an impressive collection of handshakes and photographs, but no lasting agreement on denuclearisation. Diplomacy had, at least briefly, replaced missile tests as the preferred form of international theatre.

In 2021, Kim adopted the title general secretary of the Workers’ Party, the same title previously held by his father and grandfather. Political titles in North Korea have a pleasingly hereditary quality, rather like a family recipe, except that this one comes with considerably more artillery.

From 2023 to 2025, Kim strengthened North Korea’s strategic and military ties with Russia. He met Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Far East in 2023, while Putin visited Pyongyang in 2024. In September 2025, Kim travelled to Beijing to attend China’s Victory Day parade, his first appearance at a multilateral gathering of foreign leaders. After years of relative isolation, he was now becoming a considerably more regular presence on the international stage.

In February 2026, the Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party re-elected Kim as general secretary. The following month, the Supreme People’s Assembly reappointed him as president of the State Affairs Commission, confirming his position at the centre of North Korea’s political system. After all, when your grandfather founded the family business, your father ran it and you have inherited it, there is little reason to worry about an uncertain career path.

POLITICS Kim presides over a hereditary totalitarian system centred on the Workers’ Party, security agencies and armed forces. He initially combined limited market tolerance and high-profile construction with byungjin—the parallel pursuit of economic development and nuclear weapons—but after the failed Hanoi summit emphasized self-reliance, weapons expansion and closer alignment with Russia. In the 2020s he abandoned the older goal of peaceful Korean reunification and treated South Korea as a separate hostile state. (3), (30)

SCANDAL The gravest issue is state repression. A United Nations commission found that North Korean authorities had committed crimes against humanity including extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, sexual violence, enforced disappearance and deliberately prolonged starvation. It warned Kim that command responsibility could make him personally accountable.

Kim’s uncle by marriage, Jang Song Thaek, was arrested and executed in December 2013 during a sweeping consolidation of power, officially for treason and factional activity. (31)

Kim’s estranged half-brother Kim Jong Nam was assassinated with VX nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in February 2017; investigators linked the operation to North Korea, although Pyongyang denied responsibility. (9),

MILITARY RECORD Kim has no known battlefield service. His four-star generalship in 2010 was a political appointment designed to prepare the succession, but he later made military modernization his regime’s central achievement. Under him North Korea carried out four of its six nuclear tests and developed intercontinental, submarine-launched, hypersonic and solid-fuel missiles. (32)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kim is a heavy smoker and has long been obese; photographs have also shown periods of weight loss, a limp and apparent difficulty walking. In September 2026 South Korea’s intelligence service assessed him at more than 140 kilograms and at high cardiovascular risk, while reporting no immediate sign that he was unable to perform normal activities. North Korea’s secrecy makes recurrent stories of operations, comas or imminent death unreliable. (23)

A persistent lesion on Kim’s left cheek, first discernible in photographs from December 2020, appeared to increase in size over the following years and was estimated at approximately one centimetre by June 2024. Dermatologists examining photographs suggested several possible explanations, including a wart, cutaneous horn or keratoacanthoma, but no diagnosis has been confirmed. South Korean intelligence has separately reported that Kim suffers from dermatitis associated with allergies and stress. (33)

A growth on Kim's cheek, June 2024. By Kremlin.ru,

HOMES The ruling family uses numerous heavily secured residences. Satellite imagery has revealed coastal villas around Wonsan, private islands, marinas, yachts, pools, a riding track and shooting facilities. Former guest Dennis Rodman compared the Wonsan retreat to a private version of Hawaii or Ibiza. (34)

TRAVEL Kim has often used an armoured train for international diplomacy. His known foreign journeys as leader have taken him to China, Singapore, Vietnam, Russia and the southern side of the inter-Korean border; he has met Xi Jinping, Moon Jae-in, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. (35)

In September 2025 he travelled to Beijing with Kim Ju Ae for a major Chinese military parade, giving his daughter her international debut. (20)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Within North Korea, Kim appears constantly in Korean Central Television news, “field guidance” reports and documentaries that depict him as a soldier, builder and benevolent father. The 2022 propaganda film The Great Year of Victory, 2021 showed him riding a white horse, visiting construction projects and apparently limping while its narration praised his self-sacrifice.

Outside North Korea he has become a frequent subject of news documentaries, memes and satire. Randall Park played a fictionalized Kim in the 2014 film The Interview, in which American television journalists are recruited to assassinate him. Pyongyang condemned the film, whose release became entangled with the cyberattack on Sony Pictures.

ACHIEVEMENTS From the regime’s perspective, Kim’s greatest achievements are the secure consolidation of dynastic power, North Korea’s emergence as a credible nuclear-armed state, major advances in long-range missiles and unprecedented summit diplomacy with a serving US president. He also oversaw showpiece housing and resort projects and education reforms stressing science and technology.

These gains came at enormous cost. Diplomacy did not bring sanctions relief or denuclearization, economic improvement remained uneven, food insecurity persisted, and political freedom and human rights remained severely restricted. His record is therefore one of successful regime survival and military advancement rather than broad prosperity for North Koreans.

Sources: (1) Encyclopaedia Britannica (2) KBS World (3) Council on Foreign Relations (4) Wikipedia (5) BBC News (6) Wikipedia: Kim Hyong-jik (7) Brookings Institution (8) UPI (9) Reuters: Kim Jong Nam (10) Reuters: Switzerland (11) Politico (12) Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (13) BBC News: School Course (14) USA Today (15) Yonhap: Fashion (16) Radio Free Asia (17) ABC News Australia (18) Kim Jong Un’s First Public Speech (19) Reuters: Dennis Rodman (20) Reuters: Kim Ju Ae (21) The Wall Street Journal via To Vima (22) Reuters: Name Directive (23) The Straits Times (24) NK News (25) RedOrbit (26) KBS World: North Korean Documentaries (27) Reuters: Pungsan Dogs (28) Korea Institute for National Unification (29) US Department of State (30) The Diplomat (31) United Nations Commission of Inquiry (32) National Committee on North Korea (33) Asia Economy (34) Radio Free Asia: Residences (35) Yonhap News Agency

Nicole Kidman

2016-05-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Nicole Mary Kidman. During her childhood she was nicknamed “Stalky” or “Stalk” because of her unusually tall, slender build. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Nicole Kidman is an Academy Award-winning Australian-American actress and producer famous for her exceptional versatility in both blockbusters and critically acclaimed arthouse cinema. She achieved widespread international recognition with films like Days of Thunder, To Die For, and Moulin Rouge!, and became the first Australian to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of writer Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002). In addition to her film career, she has won multiple Emmy Awards for her television work on series such as Big Little Lies. (2),

BIRTH Nicole Kidman was born on June 20, 1967, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her Australian parents were temporarily living in the United States while her father pursued academic research, and the family later spent time in Washington, D.C. Kidman possesses both American and Australian citizenship. (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Her father, Antony David Kidman, was a biochemist, clinical psychologist and author who became director of the Health Psychology Unit at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital. He died suddenly in Singapore on September 12, 2014, aged 75. Nicole’s mother, Janelle Ann Kidman, née Glenny, was a nursing instructor, edited her husband’s books and belonged to the Australian feminist organisation the Women’s Electoral Lobby. She died on September 7, 2024, aged 84. (4), (5)

Nicole is the elder of two daughters. Her younger sister, Antonia Kidman, became a television presenter and journalist. The sisters grew up in an intellectually curious household in which political, psychological and social questions were openly discussed. (6)

CHILDHOOD The Kidman family returned permanently to Australia when Nicole was about four and settled on Sydney’s North Shore. She was a shy, introverted child with very pale skin, freckles and naturally curly red hair. Because she burned easily in the Australian sun, she spent much of her free time indoors reading, inventing characters and acting out scenes from plays.

Her height made her conspicuous. By the age of 13 or 14 she was already approximately 5 feet 9 inches tall and was teased for being a lanky, red-haired schoolgirl. Acting provided a refuge in which the self-conscious teenager felt more confident and in control. (7)

When Janelle Kidman developed breast cancer during Nicole’s adolescence, her daughter temporarily reduced her acting work. Kidman studied massage so that she could help with her mother’s physical therapy and reportedly earned money doing massage work. Janelle recovered after treatment. (1)

EDUCATION Kidman attended Lane Cove Public School and North Sydney Girls High School. She took ballet lessons from the age of three and later studied acting at Sydney’s Phillip Street Theatre, the Australian Theatre for Young People and, for a period, Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts. Naomi Watts, who became one of her closest friends, was among the young performers she met through acting school.

Kidman did not follow a conventional university course. She began obtaining professional acting work as a teenager and concentrated on practical training in drama, mime, movement and voice. Her parents, who had originally hoped that she might study medicine or law, eventually supported her decision. (8)

CAREER RECORD 1983 Made her film debut in the Australian holiday film BMX Bandits and appeared in the remake of Bush Christmas.

1984 Temporarily halted her rising acting career to study massage therapy after her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, using her new skills to assist her mother's physical therapy and earn money for the family.

1989 Gained international attention starring in the Australian psychological thriller Dead Calm.

1990 Made her Hollywood debut in Days of Thunder opposite Tom Cruise, establishing herself as a global star.

2001 Earned her first Academy Award nomination for her performance as Satine in Baz Luhrmann's musical drama Moulin Rouge!.

2002 Starred as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, the BAFTA, and the Golden Globe Award.

2004 Starred in Baz Luhrmann's £18 million Chanel No. 5 commercial, earning a spot in the Guinness World Records for the highest payment per minute to an actress in a commercial ($3.71 million).

2017 Executive-produced and starred in HBO's Big Little Lies, winning Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress and Outstanding Limited Series.

APPEARANCE Kidman is approximately 5 feet 11 inches tall, making her noticeably taller than many actresses. Her natural appearance includes pale, freckled skin, blue eyes and curly red hair, although she has frequently appeared blonde and has worn wigs or changed her hair colour for roles. As a teenager she regarded her height and complexion as disadvantages; they later became distinctive elements of her screen presence. (9)

Kidman in 2006 By Michael Albov

FASHION Kidman became one of Hollywood’s most closely watched red-carpet figures, favouring sculptural gowns, strong colours and designs by major fashion houses. A pale-green embroidered Christian Dior dress worn to the 1997 Academy Awards helped establish her reputation as a fashion risk-taker. She has subsequently represented Chanel, Omega, Jimmy Choo and other luxury brands. (2)

In Moulin Rouge! she wore the “Satine” necklace, designed by Stefano Canturi. The 18-carat white-gold piece contained 1,308 diamonds totalling 134 carats and was valued at about $2.5 million. It was recognised as the most valuable item of jewellery created for a film. (10),

CHARACTER Kidman has described herself as fundamentally shy and introverted, despite choosing a profession requiring continual public exposure.

Colleagues frequently emphasise her preparation, willingness to take emotional risks and readiness to work with challenging directors. She has said that acting allows her to explore impulses and personalities very different from her private self.

She is also known for loyalty to longstanding friendships, particularly with Naomi Watts, and for maintaining close ties to her Australian family. Her production work has increasingly focused on creating complicated leading roles for women rather than waiting for such roles to be offered. (11)

SPEAKING VOICE Kidman retains an Australian accent in private life, although years in the United States have softened it. Her screen work has required numerous accents, including English for Virginia Woolf, American for Lucille Ball and Russian-inflected English in Nine Perfect Strangers. Her natural voice is soft and measured, but she can shift into an unusually low, breathy register for dramatic roles. (3)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Kidman’s humour is generally dry and self-deprecating. She has laughed publicly about her inability to cook moist chicken and her preference for the foam rather than the coffee in a cappuccino. A frequently reported party trick is her remarkably accurate impression of Tweety Pie from the Looney Tunes cartoons. (12)

RELATIONSHIPS Kidman met Tom Cruise while making Days of Thunder. They married in Telluride, Colorado, on December 24, 1990, and adopted two children, Isabella Jane and Connor Antony. Their separation was announced on February 5, 2001, and the divorce became final in August 2001, with irreconcilable differences cited in the proceedings. (13)

After the divorce Kidman had a private relationship with musician Lenny Kravitz. She later confirmed that they had been engaged, but said that neither was ready for marriage. They remained on friendly terms. (14)

Kidman met Australian country singer Keith Urban at a G’Day USA event in 2005. They married at Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel in Sydney on June 25, 2006. Their daughter Sunday Rose was born on July 7, 2008, and Faith Margaret was born through a gestational surrogate on December 28, 2010. Kidman and Urban separated in 2025, and their divorce was finalised in Nashville on January 6, 2026. (13)

Kidman and Urban in 2011 By David Torcivia

MONEY AND FAMEKidman has ranked among the film industry’s highest-paid performers, but reliable figures for her total wealth vary considerably. Her 2004 Chanel No. 5 advertisement, directed by Baz Luhrmann, reportedly cost about £18 million. Guinness World Records recognised her as the highest-paid actress in an advertising commercial after she received approximately $3.7 million for the production. (1)

Fame has often made privacy difficult. While playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Kidman discovered that she could leave the set wearing Woolf’s prosthetic nose without being recognised by photographers following her during her divorce from Cruise. (1)

FOOD AND DRINK Kidman says that she eats most foods in moderation rather than following a rigid diet. Her favourite Australian meal is a seafood platter containing Sydney rock oysters, prawns, mud crab and lobster; she also enjoys the simple Australian “sausage sizzle.” Her preferred cappuccino contains plenty of foam and chocolate sprinkles.

Although generally health-conscious, she follows what she has called an 80-per-cent healthy approach rather than denying herself treats. (12)

She has said that she is allergic to strawberries (15)

TV AND MOVIE CAREER Nicole Kidman made her feature-film debut as a teenager in 1983 with the Australian Christmas adventure Bush Christmas.

She followed it that same year with BMX Bandits, a lively little film about three young bicycle enthusiasts getting themselves into considerably more trouble than their bicycles would suggest. Its international popularity made it the better remembered of her two early films and gave audiences their first glimpse of an actress who would eventually become considerably harder to keep on a BMX bike.

In 1987, Kidman attracted wider attention in Australia with the television miniseries Vietnam, playing a young woman whose experiences unfolded against the political and social divisions created by the Vietnam War. Two years later, Dead Calm brought her international notice. She starred opposite Sam Neill and Billy Zane in the maritime thriller, in which the ocean turns out to be considerably less calming than the title promises. She also appeared in the Australian television miniseries Bangkok Hilton.

Kidman's Hollywood breakthrough arrived in 1990 with Days of Thunder, a motor-racing drama in which she starred opposite Tom Cruise. The two married in 1990 and subsequently appeared together in Far and Away (1992) and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

In 1995, Kidman played Dr Chase Meridian in Batman Forever, but it was her performance as the ruthlessly ambitious television presenter Suzanne Stone in To Die For that demonstrated how much darker her comic talents could be. Her performance won her first Golden Globe and established that she could play a character who was charming, calculating and faintly terrifying, sometimes all within the same sentence.

Her films in the late 1990s included Practical Magic, with Sandra Bullock, and Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final film. The latter's long, highly confidential production kept the project in the news almost as much as the finished film did. Kidman emerged from the decade with a growing reputation for taking roles that were rather more interesting than simply being the attractive person standing next to the leading man.

In 2001, she displayed another talent as Satine, the glamorous courtesan at the centre of Baz Luhrmann's wildly theatrical Moulin Rouge!. She sang her way through the film and earned her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. That same year she starred in the supernatural thriller The Others, proving that she could move from singing and dancing in a gloriously excessive Parisian nightclub to wandering around a gloomy mansion without seeming to have changed careers.

Kidman's most celebrated dramatic performance came in 2002 with The Hours, in which she played writer Virginia Woolf. A prosthetic nose made her almost unrecognisable, although the performance itself was considerably more important than the disguise. She won the Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe for Best Actress. Around the same period she appeared in Dogville, Cold Mountain and The Human Stain, continuing a run of films that made it increasingly difficult to predict what sort of role she would choose next.

From 2004 to 2008, Kidman appeared in Birth, The Interpreter, Bewitched, Fur, The Golden Compass and Baz Luhrmann's Australian historical epic Australia. Somewhere along the way she also became the face of Chanel No. 5, which meant that even when she wasn't on a cinema screen, there was a reasonable chance she was appearing in a television advertisement looking extraordinarily elegant while surrounded by an amount of perfume-related mist normally associated with weather systems.

In 2010, Kidman starred in and produced Rabbit Hole, playing a mother struggling with the grief of losing her young son. The intensely emotional performance earned her another Academy Award nomination and showed that the spectacularly polished movie star could also carry a film through painful, restrained drama.

Her films from 2012 to 2016 included The Paperboy, The Railway Man, Before I Go to Sleep, Paddington and Lion. In Lion, she played an adoptive Australian mother, earning her fourth Academy Award nomination. It was another reminder that Kidman's career had long since escaped the conventional Hollywood path: she could move from serious dramas to a talking bear without appearing to regard the transition as particularly remarkable.

In 2017, Kidman made one of her most successful moves into television with HBO's Big Little Lies, which she also executive-produced. Her portrayal of Celeste Wright, a wealthy lawyer trapped in an abusive marriage, won her Emmy and Golden Globe awards. She also appeared that year in Top of the Lake: China Girl, The Beguiled and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a particularly productive period in which her characters ranged from deeply troubled to considerably more deeply troubled.

From 2018 to 2021, Kidman's work included Boy Erased, Destroyer, Aquaman and Bombshell. She returned to leading television roles in The Undoing and Nine Perfect Strangers, before portraying Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos. The performance earned her fifth Academy Award nomination.

Kidman's projects from 2022 to 2024 included The Northman, Special Ops: Lioness, Expats, A Family Affair, The Perfect Couple and Babygirl. For Babygirl, she received the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. She was unable to collect the prize in person, however, having left the festival following the death of her mother.

In 2026, Kidman took on one of her more formidable television assignments, playing forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta in Amazon's adaptation of Patricia Cornwell's crime novels. She also returned to one of her earlier roles, playing Gillian Owens opposite Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic 2, released 28 years after the original. Hollywood had spent decades making sequels to everything imaginable, but even so, nearly three decades is a fairly impressive interval between visits to the same enchanted kitchen.

MUSIC AND ARTS Kidman sings in Moulin Rouge! and recorded the duet “Somethin' Stupid” with Robbie Williams, which reached #1 in the United Kingdom. She can play the piano and has maintained a strong interest in theatre, dance and visual art. Her marriage to Keith Urban also brought her into close contact with the country-music world. (3), (9)

LITERATURE As a pale-skinned child often kept indoors, Kidman became an enthusiastic reader and acted out Chekhov plays in her bedroom. She recalled reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace at about 13 or 14. She later narrated an unabridged audiobook of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. (8)

Kidman has also been reported as an admirer of Philip Larkin, including his bleakly humorous poetry about family life. (1), (21)

NATURE Kidman values rural quiet and has described the simplicity, clean air and peace of her New South Wales farm as its principal attractions. Its grounds have included cattle, goats, lavender fields, an orchard and chickens, and she has made jam from its fruit. (16)

PETS Kidman is an enthusiastic animal lover. At various times her household has included Siberian cats, fish, chickens, a poodle named Julian and six alpacas kept in Australia. Her first childhood dog was a schnauzer named Ozzie, although she joked that the dog appeared to dislike the family. (9), (6)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Swimming is one of Kidman’s favourite forms of exercise. She also enjoys running, yoga, spinning and walking, and inherited an enthusiasm for running from her marathon-running father. When in Sydney she likes running near the beach; in Tennessee she has preferred wooded routes. (12)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kidman grew up around science and psychology through her father’s work as a biochemist and clinical psychologist. Her role as forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta required her to become familiar with the language and procedures of pathology and criminal investigation. (5)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Kidman was raised as a Roman Catholic and has described herself as religious. She has said that the Ten Commandments strongly influenced her childhood values and that she continued to attend church with her family. Her 2006 marriage to Keith Urban took place in a Catholic chapel. (8)

POLITICS Kidman’s feminism was strongly influenced by her mother, who took Nicole and Antonia to meetings of the Women’s Electoral Lobby. Kidman became a goodwill ambassador for UNIFEM, later UN Women, campaigning particularly against violence towards women. (6), (17)

In 2017 her suggestion that Americans should support their newly elected president, Donald Trump, was interpreted by some as a political endorsement. Kidman clarified that she had merely been expressing support for democracy and the United States Constitution, not endorsing Trump or his policies. (5)

SCANDAL Kidman’s marriage to Tom Cruise generated persistent speculation connected with Cruise’s sexuality and Scientology. Claims that the marriage was merely a cover have never been substantiated. Cruise successfully pursued legal action against pornographic performer Chad Slater after Slater made a false claim about a sexual relationship with him.

Kidman has generally declined to discuss Scientology or the religious choices of her two older children. She has said that they are adults entitled to make their own decisions and that her responsibility as their mother is to love them unconditionally. (18)

MILITARY RECORD Her professional connection with warfare has been through acting, notably the Vietnam War miniseries Vietnam and the Second World War drama The Others.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kidman protects her exceptionally fair skin with high-factor sunscreen. She exercises through swimming, running, yoga and spinning but does not follow an inflexible fitness regime. In 2020 she broke her ankle after stepping into a pothole while running near her Nashville home. (9), (12)

She has an intense fear of butterflies and moths dating from childhood. She once attempted to overcome it by entering the butterfly enclosure at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, but said the experience did not cure her fear. (15)

HOMES Kidman has divided much of her adult life between Australia and the United States. Her residences have included homes in Sydney, Sutton Forest in New South Wales, Nashville, Los Angeles and New York. Her 111-acre Australian country property has functioned as a working farm as well as a family retreat. (16), (11)

TRAVEL Kidman’s birthplace, dual citizenship and international career have given her a life divided between continents. She has travelled extensively for filming, festivals and humanitarian work.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA In addition to her acting roles, Kidman has appeared in advertising campaigns for Chanel No. 5, Omega, Jimmy Choo and Etihad Airways. Her stylised Chanel film with Baz Luhrmann reunited her with the director of Moulin Rouge! and became one of the most expensive advertisements ever produced.

Kidman has graced the covers of hundreds of major international magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Time.

In 2021 she became the face of AMC Theatres’ “We Make Movies Better” campaign. The solemn advertisement, in which she celebrates the communal experience of cinema, became an internet phenomenon and was widely imitated, quoted and parodied.

ACHIEVEMENTS She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2003 (The Hours), becoming the first Australian actress to receive the honor.

Her accolades also include two Primetime Emmy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2006, she was made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for her service to the performing arts and humanitarian causes

In 2024 the American Film Institute presented her with its Life Achievement Award, making her the first Australian actor to receive the honour

Sources (1) Encyclopedia of Trivia (2) National Portrait Gallery of Australia (3) Encyclopaedia Britannica (4) ABC News (5) ABC News Australia (6) Tatler (7) BBC Radio 4 (8) DuJour (9) The Guardian (10) Canturi (11) Time (12) Delish (13) People (14) Los Angeles Times (15) Hello! (16) BBC Countryfile (17) UN Women (18) BBC News

Nikita Khrushchev

2016-05-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, commonly rendered as Nikita Khrushchev in English. His surname is also sometimes transliterated as Khrushchov. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Khrushchev was the dominant leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s until 1964. He is best remembered for denouncing Joseph Stalin, beginning de-Stalinization, promoting “peaceful coexistence” with the West and confronting the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (2)

BIRTH He was born on April 15, 1894, in Kalinovka, a village in the Kursk Governorate of the Russian Empire, near the present Russian border with Ukraine. During his lifetime he celebrated his birthday on April 17, but the local church register revealed that April 15 was the correct date. (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Khrushchev came from an impoverished Russian peasant family. His father, Sergei Nikanorovich Khrushchev, worked intermittently as a farm labourer, railwayman and coal miner, while his mother, Ksenia Ivanovna, undertook domestic and agricultural work; Nikita also had a younger sister named Irina. (4)

CHILDHOOD The family lived in a mud-walled peasant cottage, and Nikita spent part of his childhood tending livestock and working in the fields.

In 1908 they moved to the industrial settlement of Yuzovka, now Donetsk in Ukraine, where the 14-year-old Khrushchev became an apprentice metal fitter and later worked in the mines. (5)

EDUCATION Khrushchev received only a few years of elementary schooling but was reportedly an able pupil with a particularly good memory.

After the Russian Civil War he attended a workers’ school in the Donbas, and in 1929 he entered Moscow’s Stalin Industrial Academy, although party work prevented him from completing a conventional engineering qualification. (6)

CAREER RECORD 1908 Worked as a metal fitter, mechanic, and miner in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

1918 Joined the Bolshevik Party and fought as a Red Army commissar during the Russian Civil War.

1929 Moved to Moscow to study at the Industrial Academy, where he began climbing the Communist Party hierarchy under Stalin's patronage.

1935 Appointed First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party, overseeing the construction of the Moscow Metro.

1938 Appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, becoming a full member of the Politburo in 1939.

1941-1945 Served as a high-ranking military political officer during World War II, participating in the defense of Stalingrad.

1953 Outmaneuvered political rivals following the death of Joseph Stalin to become First Secretary of the Communist Party.

1958 Appointed Premier of the Soviet Union, consolidating his absolute authority over both the party and state.

1964 Ousted from power in a bloodless palace coup orchestrated by Leonid Brezhnev and forced into retirement.

APPEARANCE Khrushchev was short, bald, round-faced and heavily built, with prominent ears and an expressive smile. His squat, unmistakable appearance contrasted sharply with the austere public image cultivated by Stalin and made him an immediately recognizable figure in newsreels and political cartoons.

He had small, deep-set eyes, a conspicuous gap between his upper front teeth, and several facial moles or warts, including a prominent one on his cheek. (7)

Official portrait, 1954

FASHION He generally wore plain, loosely fitting dark suits, white shirts and conservative ties, while his military appearances featured a lieutenant general’s uniform covered with decorations. His clothing was practical rather than elegant and reinforced his deliberately unpretentious, working-class image. (2)

CHARACTER Khrushchev was energetic, impulsive, emotional and intensely ambitious. He could be warm, sociable and surprisingly accessible, but he was also impatient, domineering and capable of furious outbursts; his combination of genuine reforming instincts and reckless improvisation made his leadership notably inconsistent. (6)

SPEAKING VOICE He spoke emphatically in a rough, strongly projected voice and retained traces of southern Russian and Ukrainian speech. Khrushchev preferred improvisation to polished scripts, peppering his remarks with peasant sayings, jokes and colourful expressions; diplomats observed that he spoke with conviction but sometimes chose his words carelessly. (8)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Khrushchev enjoyed teasing companions and puncturing solemnity with earthy jokes. When asked about fishing, he reportedly described the fish looking at the hook and wondering what fool was sitting at the other end of the line—a joke reflecting his impatience with inactive pastimes. (6)

RELATIONSHIPS His first wife, Yefrosinia Pisareva, died of typhus during the Russian Civil War, leaving him with two children, Yulia and Leonid. A brief second relationship or marriage followed before he formed a lasting partnership in the 1920s with Ukrainian Communist activist Nina Kukharchuk; they did not formally register their marriage until 1965. (5)

Khrushchev and Nina had four children, although their first died in infancy; the surviving children were Rada, Sergei and Yelena. Leonid, Khrushchev’s son by his first wife, disappeared while serving as a Soviet fighter pilot in 1943 and was presumed killed. (5)

Khrushchev's with his second wife Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk in 1924

MONEY AND FAME High office gave Khrushchev access to government residences, servants, official cars and guarded holiday homes, but there is no persuasive evidence that he accumulated a personal business fortune. After his removal, he retained an apartment, a country dacha and a state pension, eventually reported as about 400 roubles a month. (9)

FOOD AND DRINK Khrushchev favoured substantial Russian and Ukrainian cooking, particularly meat, borscht, dumplings, pies and millet-and-pork kulesh.

Despite his political enthusiasm for planting maize, it was principally intended as animal feed rather than his favourite food; his personal chef recalled that he particularly enjoyed tenderloin and meat cooked with mushrooms or prunes. (10)

His preferred drink was plain vodka, which he enjoyed at both official banquets and private gatherings, and cognac became a fixture of his entertaining once he rose to the leadership, regularly appearing at receptions and toasts with foreign visitors. Biographer Roy Medvedev noted that, unlike Stalin, Khrushchev "knew how to drink but never got dead drunk" and did not force guests into the punishing marathon toasts Stalin had inflicted on the Politburo. (11)

In his later years doctors advised him to curb his health regimen because of kidney, bladder and prostate trouble, and while he was told to give up smoking, he continued drinking cognac and vodka in moderate quantities rather than abandoning them altogether — so his restraint was more a matter of long-standing temperament than a strict late-life discipline.

MUSIC AND ARTS Khrushchev preferred melodic, accessible music and enjoyed Russian and Ukrainian folk songs, violinist David Oistrakh and the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre.

He attended opera and theatre regularly but had little enthusiasm for ballet or abstract art; in December 1962 he notoriously abused avant-garde artists at an exhibition in Moscow’s Manege. (12), (13)

LITERATURE He maintained a rigid socialist realist standard during his regime, though he personally supported the 1962 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, believing that Stalinist abuses should be exposed. After retirement he read Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and admitted, “We shouldn’t have banned it. I should have read it myself.” (14)

From 1967 he dictated extensive memoirs into a tape recorder at his dacha. Copies of the recordings were secretly taken abroad, providing the basis for Khrushchev Remembers, published in the West in 1970 despite Soviet attempts to discredit it. (15)

NATURE He enjoyed country life, planting fruit trees and tending vegetables, tomatoes, peas and maize on the grounds of his dachas. His son Sergei remembered him as an enthusiastic gardener who also liked searching the woods for wild mushrooms. (13)

Image by Chat GBT

PETS Khrushchev received several dogs as diplomatic gifts, reportedly including Chihuahuas from Fidel Castro and a white poodle from Queen Elizabeth II. In retirement he kept a much-loved shepherd named Arbat and later a mongrel called Belka, arguing that mongrels were cleverer and less demanding than pedigree dogs. (16)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS His favourite outdoor recreation included walking, gardening, mushroom picking and hunting ducks, hares, deer and wild boar.

He enjoyed entertaining guests and prolonged conversation, but fishing held less appeal; in retirement, however, he sometimes went fishing with his grandchildren. (6), (10)

In retirement, he took up amateur photography and gardening.

SCIENCE AND MATHS His early technical training gave him an enduring interest in machinery, industrial production and agricultural technology, though he was not a scientist or mathematician.

As Soviet leader he strongly backed rockets and space exploration, presiding over the launches of Sputnik 1 in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s first human space flight in 1961. (4)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Although raised in an Orthodox Christian environment, Khrushchev became a committed Marxist-Leninist and atheist. His belief that scientific socialism would eventually supersede capitalism lay behind the notorious phrase “We will bury you,” which meant that communism would outlast capitalism rather than that the Soviet Union intended literally to bury Western populations.

His government nevertheless conducted an aggressive anti-religious campaign, closing thousands of churches, monasteries and seminaries and restricting religious education. These measures formed a conspicuous exception to the broader cultural relaxation associated with the Khrushchev Thaw. (17)

LEADER OF THE SOVIET UNION Nikita Khrushchev inherited a Soviet Union that was still living in the enormous shadow of Joseph Stalin, a man who had spent decades making the Communist Party less a political organisation than a very large machine for frightening people. Khrushchev began dismantling that legacy in one of the most extraordinary speeches of the 20th century.

In February 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev delivered what became known as the "Secret Speech," a four-hour denunciation of Stalin's crimes. He described the purges, executions, forced confessions and arbitrary repression carried out under Stalin, and attacked the former dictator's increasingly extravagant personality cult. It was an astonishing admission from a Soviet leader: the system had not merely made mistakes; it had spent years terrorising its own citizens. The speech was intended for a restricted audience, but its contents soon leaked and spread around the world, producing shock throughout the Communist bloc.

The result was a period of relative relaxation known as the Khrushchev Thaw. Censorship was eased, political prisoners were released in large numbers, and writers, artists and intellectuals found somewhat more room to breathe. Soviet life did not suddenly become a model of free expression — this was still the Soviet Union, after all — but compared with the Stalin years, the atmosphere was positively springlike.

Khrushchev was equally determined to transform Soviet agriculture, although his enthusiasm sometimes ran considerably faster than the soil. His most ambitious agricultural project was the Virgin Lands Campaign, launched in 1954, which brought millions of acres of previously uncultivated land in Kazakhstan, Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union under the plough. The initial harvests were spectacular, encouraging Khrushchev to believe that the Soviet Union had discovered the agricultural equivalent of a magic trick. Unfortunately, the long-term results were much less impressive. Soil erosion, drought and other problems eventually exposed the limitations of simply ploughing enormous quantities of land and hoping for the best.

Khrushchev's leadership was characterised by this mixture of genuine reform, enormous ambition and a tendency to charge ahead before anyone had quite worked out where the road was going. He could be energetic and surprisingly pragmatic one moment and impulsive the next. His enthusiasm for agricultural experiments extended even to maize, which he promoted with almost missionary zeal after becoming impressed by American farming methods. Soviet officials sometimes found themselves cultivating corn in places where the climate appeared to regard the idea as a personal insult.

His foreign policy was similarly unpredictable. Khrushchev sought peaceful competition with the West but was perfectly capable of producing international crises, most famously during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba brought the world frighteningly close to nuclear war. The crisis ended with a compromise, but it reinforced the impression that Khrushchev was a leader capable of taking enormous risks and then having to work rather hard to get everyone safely back from the edge.

His tenure therefore produced an unusual mixture of liberalisation and confrontation, reform and improvisation. Khrushchev attacked Stalin's dictatorship, encouraged a cultural thaw and attempted to modernise Soviet agriculture, yet he remained an authoritarian Communist leader with little patience for opposition. His career demonstrated that removing one dictator's portrait from the wall does not necessarily mean changing the entire building.

In October 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power by his colleagues, who had evidently decided that his particular combination of energy, unpredictability and agricultural enthusiasm was becoming rather exhausting. He spent his remaining years in retirement, writing his memoirs and living quietly outside public life. For all his faults, Khrushchev had helped expose some of Stalin's worst crimes and had loosened the grip of terror that had dominated the Soviet Union for decades. His reforms did not transform the system, but they changed what could be said about it — and sometimes, in politics, getting people to admit that the emperor has no clothes is the first difficult step.

POLITICS Khrushchev attempted to reform Soviet communism without abandoning the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. He reduced the authority of the security police, freed and rehabilitated many victims of Stalinism, and expanded housing and consumer production.

He championed "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist West while simultaneously competing aggressively for global influence across Third World nations. Khrushchev maintained strict control over Eastern Bloc satellite states, including forcibly suppressed the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and supporting the construction of the Berlin Wall. (2) (4)

SCANDAL Khrushchev’s later denunciation of Stalin did not erase his own complicity in the purges. As a senior party official in Moscow and Ukraine, he zealously implemented Stalinist policies, approved repression and presided over campaigns in which numerous officials and ordinary citizens were arrested, imprisoned or executed. (18)

He is widely remembered for supposedly removing a shoe and banging it on his desk at the United Nations in 1960. Eyewitness accounts conflict, no film conclusively records the act and the famous photograph showing the shoe was altered, so the precise details remain disputed. (19)

MILITARY RECORD During the Russian Civil War Khrushchev served as a Bolshevik political officer rather than as a front-line commander.

In World War II he sat on the military councils of several fronts, including the Stalingrad Front, advised senior commanders and finished the war with the rank of lieutenant general. (20)

Nikita Khrushchev posing in a Red Army uniform following the Soviets' entry into the conflict.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Khrushchev’s weight increased substantially during his political career, although he remained active and maintained a punishing working schedule.

His removal was publicly attributed to age and ill health, but it was a political ousting; during retirement he experienced depression, periods of illness and several heart attacks. (21)

HOMES Khrushchev was born in a poor cottage in Kalinovka and spent his youth among the mines and workers’ settlements of the Donbas. As leader he occupied state apartments and guarded dachas; following his dismissal, he lived mainly at a more modest government dacha at Petrovo-Dalneye, west of Moscow, while retaining a Moscow apartment. (15), (9)

TRAVEL Khrushchev travelled extensively as Soviet leader, visiting Britain, Yugoslavia, France, India, Indonesia and numerous other countries. His 1959 American tour was the first visit to the United States by a serving Soviet leader and took him from Washington and New York to Hollywood and an Iowa farm.

During the American visit he made two much-publicized requests: to visit Disneyland and to meet John Wayne. Security officials prevented the Disneyland excursion, but Khrushchev met Wayne at a Hollywood reception and enthusiastically discussed the relative merits of vodka and tequila with him. (7)

DEATH Khrushchev suffered his third major heart attack at his country home and died in Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital on September 11, 1971, aged 77. The Soviet government denied him a state funeral and burial at the Kremlin Wall, and he was interred instead at Novodevichy Cemetery. (23), (24)

His striking tomb was designed by Ernst Neizvestny, one of the modernist sculptors Khrushchev had publicly attacked. Its interlocking black granite and white marble symbolized the contradictory dark and progressive sides of Khrushchev’s life and rule. (22)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Khrushchev’s animated public appearances made him one of the first Soviet leaders to become an international television personality. His impromptu “Kitchen Debate” with U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon at the American National Exhibition in Moscow on July 24, 1959, was recorded on colour videotape and broadcast in both countries.

The Cuban Missile Crisis played out before a worldwide television and radio audience and brought the Cold War closer to nuclear conflict than at any other time. Its immediate phase ended on October 28, 1962, when Khrushchev announced that the Soviet missiles in Cuba would be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union.

Howard da Silva portrayed Khrushchev in the 1974 television film The Missiles of October, a dramatization of the crisis starring William Devane as John F. Kennedy and Martin Sheen as Robert Kennedy.

ACHIEVEMENTS Khrushchev broke decisively with Stalin’s personality cult, released political prisoners and permitted a limited cultural and intellectual thaw. His period in power also encompassed mass housing construction, Sputnik, Gagarin’s flight and the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Encyclopaedia Britannica (3) U.S. National Park Service (4) BBC History (5) History (6) America Magazine (7) Los Angeles Times (8) GlobalSecurity.org (9) The Washington Post (10) Russia Beyond (11) Russian Life (12) Seventeen Moments in Soviet History (13) Chapman University: Interview with Sergei Khrushchev (14) Lapham’s Quarterly (15) Columbia University Libraries (16) Gateway to Russia (17) Seventeen Moments in Soviet History: Anti-Religious Campaign (18) Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (19) United Nations News (20) Generals.dk (21) UPI Archives (22) TIME

Johannes Kepler

2016-05-06T16:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Johannes Kepler. He is occasionally rendered in older English texts as "Johann Kepler."

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician and astronomer best known for his three laws of planetary motion, which established that planets orbit the Sun in ellipses rather than perfect circles and that their speeds vary depending on their distance from the Sun. His analysis of Tycho Brahe's observational data led him to discover these laws, published first in Astronomia Nova (1609) and completed in Harmonice Mundi (1619). His work provided crucial evidence for the heliocentric model of Copernicus and later underpinned Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation. (1)

BIRTH Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, at the Free Imperial City of Weil der Stadt, roughly 50 miles west of Stuttgart in what is now Germany. He arrived as a premature "seven-month" child, a fact he later documented with characteristic precision, noting the pregnancy had lasted exactly 224 days, 9 hours, and 53 minutes. (2)

Kepler's birthplace, in Weil der Stadt, Germany By MarkusHagenlocher

FAMILY BACKGROUND Kepler's father, Heinrich Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary soldier and abandoned the family when Johannes was five years old; Kepler himself later described him as "vicious, inflexible, quarrelsome, and doomed to a bad end."

His mother, Katharina Guldenmann, was the daughter of an innkeeper and worked as a healer and herbalist, though Kepler described her too in unflattering terms as "small, thin, swarthy, gossiping and quarrelsome."

His paternal grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had served as mayor of Weil der Stadt, while his maternal grandfather was an innkeeper and mayor of the nearby village of Eltingen. (2) (3)

CHILDHOOD Kepler was introduced to astronomy at an early age and, at age six, observed the Great Comet of 1577; two years later his mother took him to a hilltop to witness a lunar eclipse.

Around the same period he survived a severe bout of smallpox that left his hands partially crippled and his eyesight permanently impaired with multiple vision, afflictions that made him unsuited for physical labor but pushed him toward intellectual pursuits.

He spent time being raised largely by his grandparents while his parents were often absent, and guests at his grandfather's inn were reportedly astonished by the boy's ability to solve numerical problems. (4)

EDUCATION Kepler attended the Tübinger Stift at the University of Tübingen, where he studied philosophy and theology while proving himself a superb mathematician.

He earned a reputation as a skillful astrologer even as a student, casting horoscopes for his fellow students, and his mathematics professor Michael Maestlin introduced him to the Copernican heliocentric theory. He passed his Master's examination in 1591 and continued as a graduate student before being recommended, near the end of his studies, for a teaching post rather than the ministry he had originally intended to pursue. (5)

CAREER RECORD 1594 Kepler accepted a position as teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz, Austria, at the age of 23.

1600 Kepler first met the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe on February 4, at Benátky nad Jizerou near Prague, where Brahe's new observatory was being constructed; he stayed as a guest for two months analyzing Brahe's observations of Mars.

1601 Kepler was supported directly by Tycho Brahe, who assigned him to analyze planetary observations; after Brahe's unexpected death on October 24, Kepler was appointed his successor as Imperial Mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II.

1609 Kepler published his first two laws of planetary motion in Astronomia Nova (New Astronomy).

1611 Kepler published Dioptrice, a study of telescopic optics that helped legitimize Galileo's telescopic discoveries.

1619, Kepler outlined his third law of planetary motion, discovered on March 8, 1618, in Harmonice Mundi (Harmony of the Worlds).

1628, following the military successes of General Wallenstein's armies during the Thirty Years' War, Kepler was appointed an official adviser to Wallenstein, providing astronomical calculations and occasional horoscopes.

APPEARANCE Kepler was described as short, slight, and physically fragile. His bout with smallpox as a young child left him with permanently damaged eyesight—including severe myopia and multiple vision (polyopia)—as well as skin lesions and crippled, weak hands. Contemporaries described his appearance as modest, studious, and somewhat unkempt. (6)

Portrait by August Köhler 1910 after 1620 original

FASHION Kepler dressed in the sober, dark clothing typical of a Lutheran academic and court mathematician of his era, favoring plain scholarly attire over ostentation. There is little evidence he took any particular interest in fashion, his energies being devoted almost entirely to his studies. (6)

CHARACTER Kepler possessed an intensely curious, rigorous, and open-minded intellect combined with deep humility and spiritual piety. He was intensely self-analytical, frequently writing candid assessments of his own personal flaws and intellectual struggles. Known for his persistent work ethic, he spent years performing tedious hand calculations to prove planetary orbits.

Kepler was described by contemporaries as amiable and affectionate in private, generous in recognizing the achievements of others, and largely free of envy despite the professional rivalries he faced. He was also solitary and prone to melancholy, with a strongly speculative, almost mystical bent of mind that coexisted with rigorous scientific precision — a combination that made his character, in the words of one early biographer, "especially difficult to estimate." (7)

SPEAKING VOICE The evidence suggests Kepler was not a naturally compelling lecturer: his mathematics classes at Graz reportedly drew very few students, and by his second year none at all, forcing him to teach other subjects like Virgil and rhetoric to justify his salary.

His written "voice," however, is extensively documented and offers the best window into how his mind worked: contemporaries and later historians describe his prose as notoriously fast-moving, digressive, and intellectually intense, frequently interrupting scientific argument with personal anecdotes, numerological asides, or excited exclamations about a new geometrical relationship. Kepler himself acknowledged this restless quality, explaining that he wrote as he did in order to "lighten the hard work and difficulty of a subject by mental relaxation," and his surviving letters reveal the same quick, associative, sometimes tangential energy that likely characterized his conversation. (8) (9)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Kepler's writings show flashes of dry wit, particularly in his astrological polemics, where he compared popular astrology to a "foolish daughter" dependent on her "wise mother," astronomy. He also wrote a satirical piece imagining a lunar-based perspective on Earth's astronomy, a device that reveals a playful, imaginative side balanced against his more severe scientific temperament. (10)

RELATIONSHIPS Kepler married twice. On April 27, 1597, he married his first wife, Barbara Mühleck (Müller), then 23, in a match arranged by friends and matchmakers; the marriage was reportedly unhappy owing to her difficult temperament, and she bore him five children, only two of whom survived, before her death in 1611.

Oil on copper portraits of Kepler and his wife, Barbara, c. 1600

In 1613, at age 41, Kepler married Susanna Reuttinger, then 24, having methodically evaluated eleven proposed candidates before choosing her; this second marriage, which produced seven children of whom three died young, was said to be considerably happier. (11) (3)

MONEY AND FAME Kepler's income was frequently precarious, and he supplemented his salary throughout his career by casting horoscopes and almanac forecasts for patrons and clients, a practice he privately regarded with some disdain even as he relied on it financially.

His scientific reputation grew steadily through his roles as Imperial Mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and adviser to General Wallenstein, though fame did not translate into lasting financial security, and he died while traveling to collect debts owed to him. (12)

FOOD AND DRINK Kepler was born and raised in the wine-growing region of Swabia, and his father kept a tavern in which the young Johannes reportedly worked as a pot-boy for a period after being withdrawn from school. (13)

His adult habits leaned toward austerity, driven as much by chronic financial hardship as personal taste: in a startlingly candid self-portrait written at age 25, comparing himself to a dog, Kepler noted that his own appetites were dog-like — "he liked gnawing on bones and dry crusts of bread, and was so greedy that whatever he saw he grabbed; yet like a dog he drinks little and is content with the simplest food." Chronic stomach ailments and fevers plagued him throughout his life, though no surviving source directly links these complaints to specific foods or to alcohol. (14)

MUSIC AND ARTS Kepler held a lifelong fascination with music, which played a central role in his astronomical theory of celestial harmony. In Harmonice Mundi, he mapped the movements and speed ratios of planets to musical intervals, arguing that planetary motion follows music's template; for example, the ratio between Jupiter's maximum speed and Mars's minimum speed corresponds to a minor third, while that between Earth and Venus corresponds to a minor sixth. (1)

LITERATURE Kepler is sometimes described as a father of science fiction for his novel Somnium (The Dream), which imagined a journey to the Moon and used the device to explain astronomical principles from a lunar viewpoint. It was published posthumously in 1634

He also wrote extensively in Latin across astronomy, optics, and mathematics, and left behind a substantial body of personal correspondence that offers rare insight into his inner life. (10)

Reproduction of 1634 title page of Somnium (The Dream)

NATURE Kepler held a deep awe for the natural world, viewing the entire cosmos as a reflection of an underlying divine and mathematical harmony.

He integrated his religious convictions directly into his understanding of nature, regarding the Sun as a physical image of God's power and light. This philosophical view drove his exploration of geometry, the five regular polyhedra, and the close packing of spheres, which he applied to explain natural structures like the hexagonal shape of honeycomb cells.

Alongside his broader planetary work, Kepler investigated a wide array of natural phenomena, studying atmospheric optics, the mechanics of human eyesight, and snow crystal structures, the latter leading to his pioneering 1611 treatise On the Six-Cornered Snowflake. (5) (15)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Kepler's chronic ill health, including weak eyesight and general physical frailty, ruled out strenuous physical activity, and his intellectual energies were absorbed almost entirely by mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. He did, however, pursue practical inventive projects as something of a side interest, including efforts to design and patent an improved water pump. (5)

ASTRONOMY Johannes Kepler spent roughly forty years making a career out of trying to persuade the heavens to behave mathematically. It was not a straightforward undertaking. He worked through religious persecution, political upheaval, financial uncertainty and, for several years, the deeply irritating planet Mars. Yet from this rather unpromising mixture emerged the three laws of planetary motion that helped transform astronomy into modern science.

Kepler's professional career began in a slightly unexpected place: not an observatory, but a classroom. In April 1594, aged 23, he took a post teaching mathematics at the Protestant school in Graz, Austria. His original ambition had been to become a Lutheran minister, but life, as it occasionally does, had other plans.

While in Graz he produced his first important work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). Kepler proposed that the distances between the planets could be explained by nesting the five Platonic solids — a wonderfully elaborate solution to a problem that, unfortunately for him, nature had not actually set. The idea was wrong, but it demonstrated his fierce commitment to the Copernican model of a Sun-centred universe.

Kepler's Platonic solid model of the Solar System, from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)

Graz was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for Protestants, however, and by 1600 the pressure had become impossible to ignore. Kepler refused to convert to Catholicism, and he and his family were effectively expelled. He therefore packed up and moved to Prague, which was already home to one of Europe's most remarkable astronomers.

That astronomer was Tycho Brahe, the Danish nobleman with an enormous collection of astronomical observations and, by all accounts, an enormous personality to go with it.

Kepler joined Brahe near Prague in 1600. His principal assignment was to investigate the orbit of Mars, which was proving particularly troublesome. Mars had the unfortunate habit of refusing to fit neatly into the circular planetary orbits that astronomers had been using for centuries. Kepler was given Brahe's observations and set about making sense of them.

He did not have long with his new employer. Brahe died unexpectedly in October 1601, leaving Kepler with something far more valuable than a comfortable working relationship: access to the painstaking observations that would eventually unlock the true shape of the planetary orbits.

After Brahe's death, Kepler succeeded him as Imperial Mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II, an extraordinarily prestigious appointment. It also gave him access to the observations he needed for his increasingly obsessive investigation of Mars.

The next twelve years were astonishingly productive. Kepler published Astronomiae Pars Optica (1604), an important study of optics; De Stella Nova (1606), concerning the new star, or supernova, he had observed in 1604; and Astronomia Nova (1609), which contained his first two laws of planetary motion.

The great breakthrough was that planets did not travel in perfect circles after all. Their orbits were ellipses, with the Sun occupying one focus. This sounds obvious now, but Kepler reached it only after years of calculations, revisions, false starts and what has become known as his "war with Mars." It was, in effect, a six-year argument with a planet, and Mars was winning for much of it.

Kepler also made important advances in optics. His Dioptrice (1611) helped explain the discoveries being made with telescopes and described the design of what became known as the Keplerian telescope.

The death of Rudolf II in 1612 brought another change. Kepler moved to Linz in Upper Austria, where he became district and provincial mathematician. He remained there until 1626, although political and religious turmoil made the place progressively less congenial.

Despite the troubles, Kepler continued working. In 1618 he discovered his third law of planetary motion: the square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the Sun. He published it in Harmonice Mundi in 1619.

He also produced the Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae (1618–1621), a systematic presentation of Copernican astronomy incorporating all three laws. The work became influential throughout Europe and helped establish the mathematical framework that would later prove so useful to Isaac Newton.

Eventually, however, religious and political upheaval associated with the Counter-Reformation made life in Linz untenable. In 1626 Kepler moved on again, this time to Ulm.

In Ulm, Kepler finally completed one of the projects that had occupied him for years. In 1627 he published the Rudolphine Tables, combining Tycho Brahe's extraordinarily precise observations with Kepler's new mathematical model of elliptical planetary orbits.

The result was the most accurate set of astronomical tables yet produced. It was also a fitting culmination of the unlikely partnership between Brahe, the great observer, and Kepler, the man who spent years trying to make sense of what Brahe had observed. One supplied the numbers; the other supplied the explanation. Science has rarely looked so much like a very long group project.

From 1628 Kepler also served as an adviser to General Albrecht von Wallenstein during the Thirty Years' War. Among other things, he provided astrological calculations for his patron, a reminder that even one of the founders of modern astronomy lived in a world where astronomy and astrology had not yet completely gone their separate ways.

Kepler's career ended, rather unglamorously in 1630, when he died in Regensburg while travelling to collect money that was owed to him. After a lifetime spent calculating the movements of planets, he was still having difficulty getting people on Earth to pay their bills.

Across four turbulent decades, Kepler had transformed astronomy. The old system had insisted that the heavens must move in perfect circles because circles were considered philosophically superior. Kepler eventually abandoned the philosophy in favour of what the observations were actually telling him. The planets travelled in ellipses, at changing speeds, according to mathematical relationships that could be measured and tested.

It was a decisive change in the way humanity understood the universe. Kepler supplied the laws; Newton would later explain the force behind them. Together, they helped turn astronomy from a subject in which the heavens were expected to conform to elegant assumptions into a science in which the heavens were allowed, at last, to have the last word.

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kepler made fundamental contributions to mathematics and optics. He developed early methods of integration (infinitesimal calculations) to compute the volumes of wine barrels (Nova Stereometria Doliorum), which contributed to the later development of calculus.

In optics, he correctly explained how light enters the human eye, how the retina projects inverted images, and how lenses correct near-sightedness and far-sightedness.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Brought up in the Protestant faith, Kepler had originally intended to become a minister before circumstances led him toward mathematics and astronomy instead. He believed his scientific discoveries revealed the divine order underlying the universe, famously stating, "Science is thinking God's thoughts after him," and he wrote of his convictions, "I believe only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ. In him is all refuge and solace." He remarked that his discoveries "may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited 6,000 years for an observer," reflecting his confidence that his work served a divine as well as scientific purpose. (16) (17)

POLITICS Kepler operated largely within the patronage system of the Holy Roman Empire, serving as Imperial Mathematician under Emperor Rudolf II and his successors, and later as an adviser to General Wallenstein during the Thirty Years' War, providing astronomical calculations for Wallenstein's astrologers. As a Protestant working within a predominantly Catholic imperial court, he navigated considerable religious and political tension throughout his career, particularly as the confessional conflicts of the era intensified.

SCANDAL In 1615, at the height of his scientific career, Kepler's mother Katharina was accused of witchcraft in Leonberg. Her defense initially relied on local lawyers, and the trial dragged on for years through delays and procedural complications until, in 1620, a concerned Kepler took a more active role, using his scholarly connections to gather evidence refuting the charges and writing letters and petitions on her behalf. Katharina was ultimately acquitted in 1621, narrowly avoiding execution at the stake, though she died just six months later, reportedly worn down by the ordeal. (17)

MILITARY RECORD Kepler was closely connected to military affairs through his role as an adviser to General Wallenstein from 1628 onward during the Thirty Years' War, supplying astrological and astronomical calculations relevant to Wallenstein's campaigns. (7)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kepler was sickly from birth as a premature child and nearly died of smallpox around age four, an illness that left him with crippled hands and permanently impaired, multiple vision.

Throughout his life he suffered from headaches, sensitivity to cold, hemorrhoids that made calculation while seated difficult, and other chronic ailments, some of which historians have suggested may have included an element of hypochondria. He was also reportedly reluctant to bathe, going as long as eight years at one point before his first wife persuaded him to do so. (3) (18)

HOMES Kepler's life was markedly itinerant, shaped by religious upheaval and shifting patronage: he lived successively in Weil der Stadt, Leonberg, Tübingen, Graz, Prague, and later Linz, before his final years took him to Ulm, Sagan, and finally Regensburg. This constant relocation reflected the instability of Protestant scholars working within the religiously and politically fractured Holy Roman Empire during the era of the Thirty Years' War.

House of Kepler and Barbara Müller in Gössendorf, near Graz (1597–1599) by Mrbeachguide

TRAVEL Kepler's travels were largely dictated by his career and patronage, taking him from Graz to Prague to work with Tycho Brahe in 1600, and later to Linz and other imperial territories as his position and the ongoing war required. His final journey, in 1630, took him to Regensburg to collect interest owed to him on Austrian bonds, a trip from which he never returned. (12)

In 1608, he introduced the concept of solar sails, writing: "Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will brave even that void."

DEATH Johannes Kepler died in the southeastern German city of Regensburg on November 15, 1630, at the age of 58, apparently following a brief feverish illness. His burial site in Regensburg was lost after Swedish forces destroyed the churchyard during the ongoing Thirty Years' War, and only his own self-composed poetic epitaph survives: "I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure / Skybound was the mind, earthbound the body rests." (17)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Kepler has been featured across modern media and scientific tributes:

Film: The biographical film Johannes Kepler (1974) produced in East Germany, and the 2002 film Eye of the Astronomer.

Literature: John Banville's 1981 historical novel Kepler, which dramatizes his life and scientific struggles.

Spaceflight: NASA named its planet-hunting space telescope the Kepler Space Telescope, launched in 2009 to search for exoplanets.

Astronomy: Features named in his honor include the lunar crater Kepler, the Martian crater Kepler, and the asteroid 1134 Kepler.

ACHIEVEMENTS Kepler's three laws of planetary motion remain foundational to modern astronomy and provided one of the essential building blocks for Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation.

He also advanced the science of optics through his work on the Keplerian telescope and the study of light within the eye.

Kepler wrote what is considered an early work of science fiction in Somnium,

He anticipated the modern concept of solar sails more than three centuries before their practical realization.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

2016-05-03T16:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, known affectionately throughout her life as "Jackie." She was born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, took the name Kennedy upon her first marriage, and became Onassis after her second. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was the First Lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963 as the wife of President John F. Kennedy. She became a global icon of elegance, culture, and style, renowned for her historic restoration of the White House and her poise in leading a grieving nation following her husband's assassination. Later in life, she established a distinguished career as a senior book editor in New York City. (2)

BIRTH Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, New York, to Wall Street stockbroker John Vernou "Black Jack" Bouvier III (1891–1957) and Janet Norton Lee (1907–1989). (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Jackie's father was a charming but financially erratic Wall Street broker of French Catholic descent, while her mother came from a socially ambitious Irish-American family. The Bouviers were part of the East Coast social elite, and Jackie's maternal grandfather, James T. Lee, was a wealthy New York real estate developer and banker.

Jackie had one younger sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, known as "Lee," who later became Princess Lee Radziwill. (3)

CHILDHOOD Jackie's early years were divided between New York City and East Hampton, Long Island, at the Bouvier family estate known as "Lasata."

From a very young age she showed a gift for horsemanship, reportedly able to control her own pony at just three years old, and she went on to become an accomplished equestrienne who competed in horse shows throughout her childhood.

Her parents' marriage was troubled by her father's drinking and infidelity, and they divorced in 1940, a rare and socially difficult event for the era.

In 1942 her mother married Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss, and Jackie and Lee moved in with their mother's new family, dividing their time between two grand estates: Merrywood in McLean, Virginia, and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island. (4)

Six-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier with her dog in 1935

EDUCATION Jackie was educated at Miss Chapin's School in New York and later at Holton-Arms School near Washington, D.C., before attending the exclusive Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. She went on to study art and history at Vassar College, spent a formative year of study in Paris (an experience she called the happiest of her life), and completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in French literature at George Washington University in 1951.

In 1951, at age 22, she also won a prestigious Vogue Prix de Paris writing contest, besting 1,279 other entrants for a role that promised six months as a junior editor in New York and six months in Paris; she famously quit on her very first morning at the magazine. (5)

CAREER RECORD 1951 Worked briefly as an "inquiring photographer" for the Washington Times-Herald newspaper, interviewing members of the public and photographing them for a daily column, a job that also indirectly brought her into contact with Washington's political circles.

1953-1961 Following her marriage to Senator John F. Kennedy, she supported his political career, becoming a prominent Senate wife.

1961-1963 Served as First Lady of the United States, leading the historic restoration of the White House and establishing the White House Fine Arts Committee; her televised tour of the restored White House on February 14, 1962, drew more than 80 million viewers and earned her an honorary Emmy.

1975 onward, became a prominent campaigner for historic preservation in New York City, most notably helping save Grand Central Terminal from demolition, a fight that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978.

1975-1978 Worked as a consulting editor at Viking Press in New York.

1978-1994 Worked as a book editor at Doubleday, where she edited numerous titles including several John F. Kennedy biographies and Michael Jackson's 1988 autobiography, Moon Walk. (6)

APPEARANCE Jackie was tall and slender for the era, with dark hair, wide-set eyes, and a striking, photogenic bone structure that made her a natural for the camera from a young age. Already considered stylish and graceful as a teenager, in 1948 she was dubbed "Debutante of the Year" by Hearst society columnist Igor Cassini. Her poise and elegance became so central to her public identity that she was regularly ranked among the most photographed women in the world throughout her adult life. (7)

Kennedy at a State dinner on May 22, 1962

FASHION In the early 1960s, Jackie was largely responsible for popularizing the bouffant hairstyle, and her clean-lined suits with skirts hemmed to the middle of the knee, three-quarter sleeves on notch-collar jackets, sleeveless A-line dresses, above-the-elbow gloves, and pillbox hats became known collectively as the "Jackie look."

Because she had been publicly criticized for favoring foreign designers, the New York salon Chez Ninon created line-for-line American reproductions of Chanel designs for her, including the pink wool suit she wore on November 22, 1963.

After John F. Kennedy's assassination, Jackie refused to change out of that bloodstained pink suit for Lyndon B. Johnson's swearing-in aboard Air Force One, reportedly telling Lady Bird Johnson, "Oh no, I want them to see what they've done to Jack." (7)

CHARACTER Those who knew her described Jackie as intelligent, private, and fiercely protective of her children, combining old-money reserve with genuine intellectual curiosity about literature, art, and history. She once wrote in her school yearbook that her ambition in life was "not to be a housewife," a statement that hinted at an independence of spirit unusual for women of her social class in that era.

Friends and biographers frequently noted her contradictions: a woman who craved privacy yet lived much of her life in the full glare of global publicity, and who combined vulnerability with steely self-discipline, particularly evident in the composure she displayed after her husband's assassination. (8)

SPEAKING VOICE Jackie was known for her distinctive soft, breathy, almost whispery speaking voice, often imitated and parodied but instantly recognizable, which many contemporaries found hypnotic and which contributed to her mystique on television and radio broadcasts. She was multilingual and taped campaign radio advertisements in French, Italian, and Spanish during her husband's 1960 presidential run, in addition to being proficient in German and Polish. (3)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Jackie was known among friends for a sharp, dry wit that rarely surfaced in public but delighted those close to her, and she could be self-deprecating about the pressures of fame. She once remarked, "I think my biggest achievement is that, after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane. I'm proud of that," a comment that captured both her humor and her resilience. (9)

RELATIONSHIPS Before meeting John F. Kennedy, Jackie was engaged at age 22 to Wall Street banker John Husted, but she broke off the engagement after three months in 1952, reportedly finding him dull and remaining hesitant about becoming a housewife.

She and then-Congressman Kennedy were introduced by a mutual friend at a Washington dinner party in May 1952; their relationship deepened after his election to the Senate that November, and they married on September 12, 1953, at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island, before an estimated 800 guests at the ceremony and 1,000 at the reception at Hammersmith Farm.

The couple had four children: Caroline (b. 1957), John Jr. (1960–1999), a stillborn daughter in 1956, and Patrick, who died two days after his premature birth in August 1963; Jackie also suffered a miscarriage in 1955. (3)

John and Jacqueline Kennedy at Christmas 1961

Following JFK's assassination, Jackie married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis on October 20, 1968, on his private island of Skorpios, and after his death in 1975 she formed a close, lasting companionship with Belgian-American diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman, who remained at her side until her death in 1994. (10)

MONEY AND FAME Jackie became one of the most photographed and famous women on earth after her marriage to JFK, a fame that intensified enormously after his assassination and again after her controversial second marriage to Onassis in 1968, which drew heavy criticism in the American press.

Her second marriage brought vast wealth, and after Onassis's death she inherited a $26 million settlement that Maurice Tempelsman, acting as her financial adviser, reportedly helped grow into a fortune worth roughly $200 million by the time of her death. (10), (11)

FOOD AND DRINK Jackie was famously disciplined about her diet, reportedly preferring lunches of fewer than 500 calories, often a baked potato topped with a spoonful of fresh caviar accompanied by a glass or two of champagne. (3)

MUSIC AND ARTS As First Lady, Jackie made the arts central to the Kennedy White House, hosting concerts by classical musicians such as cellist Pablo Casals and inviting poets, composers, and artists to state functions in an effort to position the United States as a cultural, not just political, leader during the Cold War.

Her passion for historic decorative arts drove her White House restoration project, for which she assembled a Fine Arts Committee of experts including antiquarian Henry du Pont, and she later extended this cultural advocacy into New York City preservation battles. (2), (12)

LITERATURE Jackie studied French literature at George Washington University and remained an avid, serious reader throughout her life, a passion that shaped her second career. From 1975 she worked as an editor, first at Viking Press and then, from 1978 to 1994, at Doubleday, where she championed literary and historical titles, worked on several biographies of her first husband, and in 1988 edited Michael Jackson's autobiography Moon Walk. (6), (13)

NATURE Jackie developed a lifelong love of the outdoors during her Long Island and Virginia childhoods, spent among the horse country of Merrywood and Hammersmith Farm, and this affinity later drew her to build a retreat at Red Gate Farm on Martha's Vineyard, where she enjoyed walking, riding, and sailing amid open land and coastline. (14), (15)

PETS Growing up, and later as a mother, Jackie kept dogs throughout her life, including a much-loved terrier named Shannon during her White House years, reportedly one of her longest canine companions.

As First Lady she also helped design a special play area near the West Wing for her children's menagerie of pets, which included the famous pony Macaroni, a gift to Caroline from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, alongside dogs, rabbits, and guinea pigs. (16), (17)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS An accomplished equestrienne from early childhood, Jackie rode and competed in horse shows throughout her youth and continued riding as an adult. She also enjoyed sailing, water-skiing, and swimming, activities associated with the Kennedy family's active outdoor lifestyle at Hyannis Port, and in later life she took up long walks through Central Park near her Fifth Avenue apartment. (4), (10)

Jacqueline Kennedy and her children John F. Kennedy Jr. and Caroline Kennedy riding.

SCIENCE AND MATHS While not naturally drawn to abstract mathematics or hard sciences, she took an active interest in historic preservation science, architectural conservation, and urban planning.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Raised a Roman Catholic, Jackie remained a practicing Catholic throughout her life, a faith that shaped both her wedding to JFK at St. Mary's Church in Newport and her funeral Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Manhattan.

Among her favorite literary works was the poem "Ithaca" by Constantine P. Cavafy, which Maurice Tempelsman read at her graveside, reflecting her enduring reflection on life as a meaningful journey rather than a fixed destination. (10)

FIRST LADY Jacqueline Kennedy served as First Lady of the United States from January 20, 1961, until the assassination of her husband on November 22, 1963. In less than three years, she managed to transform what was, at least on paper, a largely ceremonial position into something rather more consequential. She reshaped America's cultural image abroad, turned the White House into a serious historical institution, and became one of the most copied women on the planet—an achievement made all the more remarkable when one considers that the job came with no instruction manual, no measurable objectives and, presumably, rather a lot of people offering unsolicited advice.

Official portrait of Kennedy at the White House

When John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1961, Jacqueline Kennedy was 31, making her one of the youngest First Ladies in American history. She arrived at the White House with an unusual combination of youth, elegance and formidable intellectual equipment. She spoke French, Italian and Spanish, and had even recorded foreign-language radio advertisements during her husband's 1960 presidential campaign urging voters to support him.

This was useful. America in the early 1960s was engaged in the Cold War, a period in which the world's two great powers glared at one another across oceans and continents while possessing enough nuclear weaponry to make the entire exercise seem rather unnecessarily final. Jackie Kennedy offered something different: a cosmopolitan, cultured and multilingual face of America. She could charm foreign audiences without requiring the assistance of an aircraft carrier, which was probably a welcome change.

Her most enduring accomplishment as First Lady was the restoration of the White House. Jackie had visited the presidential residence as a 12-year-old in 1941 and was disappointed by how little visitors were told about its history. When she moved into the building twenty years later, she found much the same problem on a considerably larger scale. The rooms were insufficiently documented, historically inconsistent and, to her eye, rather bland.

She decided to do something about it.

Jackie recruited interior decorator Dorothy "Sister" Parish, antiquities expert Henry du Pont and Parisian designer Stéphane Boudin, and established a Fine Arts Committee to locate museum-quality American furniture and art. The distinction she drew was important. This was not, she insisted, "redecoration." It was restoration.

"Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there," she told Life magazine. "It would be sacrilege merely to redecorate it—a word I hate. It must be restored, and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship."

It was an unusually scholarly approach to interior design, and a refreshing one. Most people redecorate because they are tired of the curtains. Jackie Kennedy was prepared to summon historians.

The project reached its public climax on February 14, 1962, when CBS broadcast A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy. More than 80 million people watched as the First Lady guided them through the newly restored rooms, an audience sufficiently large to suggest that Americans had either developed a sudden passion for antique furniture or were simply curious to see what Jackie Kennedy had done with the place. The programme earned her an honorary Emmy Award.

Congress also acted to preserve the results. Public Law 87-286 formally recognised the White House as a museum and helped protect its historic state rooms from being radically altered by succeeding administrations. This ensured that future presidents could change governments, policies and occasionally the entire direction of the country without being able to replace George Washington's furniture with something from a discount showroom.

Kennedy with Charles Collingwood of CBS News during their televised tour of the restored White House

Jackie Kennedy also made culture central to the Kennedy White House. She hosted concerts, state dinners and receptions that brought musicians, writers and artists into the presidential orbit and presented the United States as a country capable of producing more than elections, missiles and congressional hearings.

Her foreign appearances were especially successful. During a 1961 visit to Paris, she captivated enormous crowds and reportedly charmed even President Charles de Gaulle, who was not a man generally known for being easily captivated. A year later, she travelled alone on a goodwill tour of India and Pakistan, where her poise, curiosity and language skills demonstrated that she was more than simply the elegantly dressed woman standing beside the President.

She had become, in her own right, an extraordinarily effective ambassador for the United States.

Then there was the matter of clothes.

Jackie Kennedy's appearance became an international phenomenon. She popularised the bouffant hairstyle and wore tailored suits with knee-length skirts, three-quarter sleeves and clean, uncomplicated lines. Her sleeveless A-line dresses, above-the-elbow gloves and pillbox hats became so widely copied that an entire generation of women attempted to look like her, with varying degrees of success and an enormous increase in the global consumption of hats.

Collectively, these elements became known as the "Jackie look." It was elegant, modern and immediately recognisable, and it spread through the fashion world with the speed usually associated with influenza.

For all the public attention, Jackie Kennedy remained deeply involved in the lives of her children, Caroline and John Jr. She created a play area near the West Wing and filled the White House with pets, among them Caroline's celebrated pony, Macaroni, a gift from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Her family life was also marked by profound tragedy. On August 7, 1963, she gave birth prematurely to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. He survived for only two days before dying of respiratory distress syndrome. The loss devastated the Kennedys and, by many accounts, brought the couple closer together.

It was an intensely private grief endured in the most public of circumstances, and it occurred only months before an even greater tragedy would overtake the family.

Jackie Kennedy's time as First Lady ended with shocking suddenness on November 22, 1963. She was sitting beside President Kennedy in an open limousine in Dallas when he was shot.

In the days that followed, her grief and composure were witnessed around the world. She famously refused to change out of her bloodstained pink suit before Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as President, saying that she wanted "them" to "see what they've done to Jack."

It was a terrible and unforgettable image. In the space of less than three years, Jacqueline Kennedy had transformed the White House, redefined the cultural possibilities of the First Lady's role and become an international symbol of elegance and modernity. Then, in a few terrible seconds in Dallas, her public life changed forever.

The dignity she displayed in the aftermath fixed her place in history. Few First Ladies have served for so short a period and left behind such a large shadow.

POLITICS Although never a politician herself, Jackie was deeply embedded in American political life as the wife of a senator and then president, campaigning actively for JFK, including taping foreign-language radio advertisements in French, Italian, and Spanish for the 1960 election.

When Kennedy became president on January 20, 1961, Jackie, at 31, became one of the youngest First Ladies in American history, and she used the position to advance cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. (3), (2)

SCANDAL Jackie's 1968 marriage to Aristotle Onassis, a much older, twice-divorced Greek tycoon, caused a storm of controversy and public disapproval, with many Americans feeling she had betrayed the memory of the assassinated president.

Reports also emerged that President Kennedy himself had once ordered a Secret Service agent to keep Jackie from meeting Onassis during a 1961 trip to Greece, hinting at earlier tensions over the friendship years before the marriage. (3)

MILITARY RECORD As First Lady she nonetheless carried out ceremonial duties connected to the armed forces and was later buried with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery alongside her first husband. (2)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Jackie generally maintained a slim, athletic figure through horseback riding, swimming, and disciplined eating, and she was a lifelong cigarette smoker, though she largely avoided being photographed doing so in public out of image consciousness.

In 1993 she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, for which she began chemotherapy, and her health declined rapidly over the following months. (10), (18)

HOMES Jackie's residences traced the arc of her extraordinary life: the Bouvier family estate "Lasata" in East Hampton and the Auchincloss estates of Merrywood in Virginia and Hammersmith Farm in Newport during her youth; a Georgetown townhouse and later Hickory Hill during her early marriage; the White House from 1961 to 1963; a Georgetown mansion and then a Fifth Avenue apartment in New York after 1964; and Red Gate Farm, her retreat on Martha's Vineyard.

Her 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park remained her primary residence until her death, later shared with Maurice Tempelsman. (14), (15)

TRAVEL As First Lady, Jackie undertook celebrated foreign visits, including a hugely successful 1961 trip to France and a solo tour of India and Pakistan in 1962, both of which showcased her cultural fluency and multilingual charm on the world stage.

In later life she traveled extensively for leisure, including sailing trips aboard the Onassis yacht Christina O and summer voyages with Maurice Tempelsman on his own vessel. (2)

DEATH Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died of cancer (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma) on May 19, 1994, at her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City, at the age of 64, with Maurice Tempelsman and her two children at her bedside. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia beside President Kennedy and their stillborn daughter and infant son, Patrick. (3)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Jackie's most famous television appearance was her February 14, 1962 broadcast, A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, watched by more than 80 million Americans and later honored with an Emmy Award.

She has since been portrayed extensively in film and television, notably by Natalie Portman in Jackie (2016) and by Jacqueline Bisset, Blair Brown, and others in earlier dramatizations, cementing her status as one of the most depicted women in American popular culture.

ACHIEVEMENTS Jackie's restoration of the White House permanently transformed it into a protected historic museum rather than a house subject to the changing tastes of each administration, an achievement formalized by Public Law 87-286 in 1961.

Later, as a private citizen, she was instrumental in saving New York's Grand Central Terminal from demolition, co-founding the Committee to Save Grand Central Station and helping carry the fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in the landmark's favor in 1978 in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City; the terminal's 42nd Street entrance was later named in her honor.

She also built a respected second career as a book editor at Viking Press and Doubleday

In 1999 she was named in Gallup's list of the Most Admired Men and Women of the 20th century.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Britannica (3) Encyclopedia of Trivia (4) Encyclopedia.com (5) White House Historical Biography (6) Timenote (7) Biography.com (8) PBS American Experience (9) LibQuotes (10) Tampa Bay Times (11) Deseret News (12) JFK Library (13) Yahoo Entertainment (14) Scene Therapy (15) Martha's Vineyard Magazine (16) Carl Anthony Online (17) Mashable (18) Nine Honey

John F. Kennedy

2016-05-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

NAME John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often known by his initials JFK. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR John F. Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963, and remains famous as the youngest man ever elected to the office and the first Roman Catholic to hold the presidency. (2)

He is remembered for his Cold War leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis, his inspirational rhetoric, the creation of the Peace Corps, and for his shocking assassination in Dallas, which turned him into an enduring symbol of youthful promise cut short. (3)

BIRTH John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second child of Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy Sr. and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald Kennedy. (4) (5)

FAMILY BACKGROUND His father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. (1888–1969), was a wealthy businessman, financier, and later a politician and diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. (6)

His mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890–1995), was a philanthropist and socialite whose own father, John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, had been mayor of Boston;

JFK was the second of nine children in this large, ambitious Irish-Catholic family. (7)

Below is a photo showing The Kennedy family in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with JFK at top left in the white shirt, c. 1931

CHILDHOOD According to the Miller Center, Kennedy enjoyed a "privileged childhood of elite private schools, sailboats, servants and summer homes" even during the years of the Great Depression, and he later claimed he only really learned about the Depression's hardships from books he read at college. (7)

He grew up with every material advantage, yet also suffered a series of childhood medical ailments, including scarlet fever, which he learned to underplay throughout his life. (6)

EDUCATION Kennedy attended the Choate boarding school in Connecticut before briefly enrolling at Princeton University, which he left after just one semester due to illness, subsequently transferring to his home state to attend Harvard College. (7)

At Harvard, in his senior year, he wrote a thesis examining British government failures to prevent the Second World War; this became his first book, Why England Slept, published in 1940 when he was only 22, and he graduated from Harvard in 1940. (8)

CAREER RECORD 1941 Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy, eventually commanding the patrol torpedo boat PT-109 in the Pacific during World War II.

1946 He won election to the U.S. House of Representatives for Massachusetts's 11th district, succeeding James Michael Curley, and served three terms as a congressman until 1953.

1952 Kennedy defeated incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge II to win a seat in the U.S. Senate.

1957 His book Profiles in Courage won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; he donated his entire $100,000 congressional/senate salary at points during his career to charity.

1960 He was elected the 35th President of the United States, defeating Richard Nixon by roughly 113,000 popular votes out of nearly 69 million cast.

1961–1963 Served as President until his assassination on November 22, 1963. (9)

APPEARANCE Kennedy was known for his photogenic, youthful appearance, striking blue eyes, and thick, dark chestnut hair. He stood 6 feet 1 inch tall.

Kennedy had a perpetual tan that many mistook for robust health, when in fact both were partly side effects of the medication he took for his chronic illnesses. (10)

Oval Office portrait, 1963

FASHION As president, Kennedy favored simple, tailored two-button suits and was known for going hatless even at his frigid January 1961 inauguration, a choice widely credited with accelerating the decline of the American hat industry as other men followed his lead.

Kennedy changed his shirt up to three times a day. (10)

CHARACTER Kennedy was widely described as charismatic, witty, and outwardly relaxed under pressure, even though he privately battled chronic pain and illness that he worked hard to conceal from the public.

He possessed a sharp intellect and a pragmatic approach to politics, driven by a strong desire to live life intensely due to a lifelong awareness of his own mortality. (7)

His experiences with his sister Rosemary, who had been given a lobotomy that left her unable to walk or speak normally, were said to be a major motivation behind his advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities. (10)

SPEAKING VOICE Kennedy spoke with a distinct, aristocratically accented Boston-Irish accent characterized by non-rhotic pronunciation (dropping the "r" sound in words like "car" or "Harvard").

Kennedy had a crisp, energetic delivery; he has been cited as the fastest recorded public speaker among major political figures, reaching speeds of around 327 words per minute. (10)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Kennedy was famed for his quick, self-deprecating wit, once dryly explaining his PT-109 heroism by saying, "It was involuntary. They sank my boat." He regularly used humor to defuse tension at press conferences, a skill that helped make him one of the most quotable presidents in American history. (11)

RELATIONSHIPS John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier on September 12, 1953, at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island, in a wedding attended by roughly 800 guests and blessed by Pope Pius XII. (10)

The couple had four children: a stillborn daughter in 1956, Caroline (born 1957), John Jr. (1960–1999), and Patrick, who was born prematurely in August 1963 and died just two days later. (2)

The First Family in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, 1962

Kennedy was reported to have had extramarital affairs with several women, including actress Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline's press secretary Pamela Turnure, though the true extent of the Monroe relationship remains unconfirmed. (12)

MONEY AND FAME Born into vast wealth managed via family trust funds, Kennedy was an heir to a fortune generated by his father.

Despite his family's immense wealth, Kennedy reportedly never carried cash and was known to borrow small amounts from friends and aides, sometimes failing to repay them.

He donated his presidential salary to a range of charities, including the United Negro College Fund, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. (10)

FOOD AND DRINK Although the Kennedy White House became known for elevating state dinners with elegant French cuisine, JFK personally preferred simple lunches, usually soup, with New England-style fish chowder among his favorites, a nod to his Massachusetts roots.

He was notably self-conscious about his weight and traveled with a portable bathroom scale wherever he went. (10)

MUSIC AND ARTS The Kennedy White House was celebrated for hosting cultural events, with Jacqueline Kennedy leading a broader effort to showcase classical music, opera, and the arts to elevate the White House's cultural profile during his presidency. (2)

LITERATURE Kennedy was an avid reader and a published author in his own right, writing Why England Slept (1940) as a young man and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage (1957), which profiled U.S. senators who had shown political courage. (9)

He had a well-known fondness for Ian Fleming's James Bond thrillers, having first read Casino Royale while recovering from back surgery in the mid-1950s, and in a March 1961 Life magazine profile of his reading habits he listed Fleming's From Russia, with Love among his ten favorite books. The endorsement is widely credited with transforming Bond's fortunes in America, sending Fleming's U.S. sales sharply upward and helping make him the country's bestselling crime writer almost overnight; Fleming himself later described the Kennedys' interest as having an "electric effect" on his American sales. (13) (14)

NATURE Kennedy had a lifelong love of the sea, sailing and swimming from childhood at the family's Cape Cod home in Hyannis Port, a passion reflected in his choice to commission a mural of the Massachusetts waterfront for the White House pool to remind him of home. (7)

PETS Kennedy loved animals and, over his lifetime, owned cats, dogs, hamsters, a horse, a rabbit, a parakeet, and a canary.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the family a dog named Pushinka, daughter of the Soviet space dog Strelka, and Pushinka's romance with the Kennedys' Welsh terrier Charlie produced four puppies the president jokingly called "pupniks." (10)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Kennedy swam roughly twice a day in the White House pool, which was heated to around 90 degrees, and he was a lifelong sailing enthusiast. He was also a life member of the National Rifle Association. (10)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kennedy's most notable engagement with science as president came through his strong support for the U.S. space program, famously committing the nation in 1961 to landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out. (2)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY A practicing Roman Catholic who attended Trinity Church in Washington during his presidency, Kennedy was nonetheless a firm advocate of separation of church and state, wary of mixing religious and political institutions.

Evangelist Billy Graham had reportedly held back from discussing personal faith with Kennedy shortly before the assassination due to a cold, a meeting that never got the chance to happen again. (10)

PRESIDENCY On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected the 35th president of the United States, defeating the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard Nixon, by a popular-vote margin of roughly 113,000 votes out of nearly 69 million cast. It was, by any reasonable standard, a spectacularly close election. In a country containing something like 180 million people, the presidency had effectively been decided by a number of voters that would barely fill a large football stadium.

Kennedy was 43 years old when he won, making him the youngest person ever elected president—a distinction sometimes confused with being the youngest president. That honour belongs to Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and Roosevelt inherited the job without having to endure the tiresome business of winning a presidential election first. Kennedy was also the first president born in the 20th century, an apparently simple distinction that nevertheless announced that America was entering a new political generation.

He was inaugurated on January 20, 1961, and arrived in Washington promising a "New Frontier" of national progress.

JFK Inauguration

His presidency soon acquired another, rather more romantic nickname: "Camelot." The label was encouraged after his death by his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, who recalled his fondness for the Broadway musical Camelot, with its nostalgic vision of a brief, shining kingdom that could never quite be recaptured. It was an unusually effective piece of myth-making, though the actual Kennedy White House contained considerably more telephones, briefing papers and geopolitical anxiety than King Arthur's court.

Kennedy's administration lasted less than three years, but it was packed with enough history to keep several ordinary presidencies busy. Within months of taking office, he authorised the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, a CIA-backed attempt by Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro. The operation collapsed with embarrassing speed, leaving Kennedy to learn one of the oldest lessons of politics: inherited problems can be unpleasant, but inherited secret military plans are often worse.

There were more constructive initiatives as well. In March 1961, Kennedy established the Peace Corps, placing his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, in charge. The organisation sent American volunteers overseas to work in education, health, agriculture and community development, and became one of the administration's most enduring symbols of youthful idealism.

Abroad, Kennedy faced a succession of Cold War crises. The Berlin Crisis intensified tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Then, in October 1962, came the Cuban Missile Crisis, when American reconnaissance discovered Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba. For 13 extraordinarily tense days, the world watched two nuclear superpowers manoeuvre around one another with the sort of caution normally associated with carrying a tray of full cups across a freshly polished floor. The crisis ended when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for an American promise not to invade Cuba, alongside a separate, initially secret agreement to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

Kennedy also made space exploration a central national ambition. In May 1961, only weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, Kennedy challenged the United States to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. It was an astonishingly ambitious promise considering that America had, at that point, barely managed to send an astronaut into space for a few minutes. Yet the enormous expansion of the Apollo programme that followed eventually produced the Moon landing in 1969, fulfilling Kennedy's goal six years after his death.

At home, the growing Civil Rights Movement presented Kennedy with an equally profound challenge. Initially cautious about alienating Southern Democrats, he became increasingly involved as protests against racial segregation intensified. Federal troops and marshals were used to enforce court orders protecting Black students seeking admission to previously segregated universities, including the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama. In June 1963, Kennedy addressed the nation and called civil rights a "moral issue," proposing legislation that would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Kennedy's presidency was therefore a strange combination of glamour, optimism, catastrophe and near-catastrophe. There were elegant state dinners and youthful idealism, but also nuclear brinkmanship, failed invasions and deepening conflict over racial inequality. The Camelot image suggested a golden age, though in reality it was a very brief administration conducted under the persistent possibility that the entire world might, at any moment, become considerably less picturesque.

POLITICS A moderate Liberal Democrat, Kennedy championed domestic reforms under his "New Frontier" agenda, which sought federal funding for education, medical care for the elderly, government intervention to stem recession, and federal action against racial discrimination. In foreign policy, he combined firm anti-communist containment with diplomatic initiatives like the Alliance for Progress. (7)

SCANDAL Rumors of extramarital affairs, most persistently with Marilyn Monroe, have dogged Kennedy's legacy, with the two reportedly spending time together at Bing Crosby's house in March 1962, although the full nature of the relationship has never been conclusively established. (12)

MILITARY RECORD Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy and by August 1943 commanded the patrol torpedo boat PT-109 in the Solomon Islands, where it was rammed and split in two by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Kennedy led his surviving crew on a three-mile swim through shark-infested waters to a nearby island, where they survived on coconuts for about a week before Solomon Islanders Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana helped alert the Navy and secure their rescue. (11)

For his leadership, Kennedy received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism and the Purple Heart for his injuries, and his ordeal later inspired the 1963 film PT 109, for which he recommended actor Cliff Robertson to play him. (15)

Kennedy on his navy patrol boat, the PT-109, 1943.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kennedy was hospitalized dozens of times over his life and was given the last rites on at least three occasions, with signs of adrenal trouble appearing as early as 1940. (10)

In September 1947, while a 30-year-old congressman, he was diagnosed with Addison's disease, a hormonal deficiency that a later review suggested was likely caused by a rare autoimmune condition. He managed the disease with daily doses of the steroid hydrocortisone, a treatment that boosted his energy but carried side effects including mood changes and depression, and he also suffered chronic back problems that required a brace and often forced him to work from bed or a hot bath. (12)

HOMES Kennedy's childhood began at the modest family home at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, before the growing family moved to a larger house nearby in 1920.

As an adult, his favorite retreat was the family compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, and as president he lived at the White House in Washington, D.C. (5)

TRAVEL As a senator and president, Kennedy traveled extensively, including a landmark 1963 visit to West Berlin, where his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech became one of the most quoted moments of Cold War diplomacy. (10)

His final trip took him to Texas in November 1963 on a political tour intended to shore up support ahead of the 1964 election. (9)

DEATH Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, while riding in an open-top convertible motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, with his wife Jacqueline beside him. He was struck by two bullets, one through the upper back and throat and a fatal shot to the head, and was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital at 1:00 p.m.

The Kennedys and the Connallys in the presidential limousine moments before the assassination

He received a state funeral on November 25, 1963, three days after his death, with a Requiem Mass at St. Matthew's Cathedral followed by burial at Arlington National Cemetery, an event watched by hundreds of thousands lining the streets and attended by representatives from more than 100 nations.

Suspected gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested but denied the shooting and was himself fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963. Ruby was later convicted but died of cancer-related complications in January 1967 before a retrial could occur. (9)

Kennedy is the only U.S. President to be outlived by his grandmother; Mary Josephine Hannon (1865–1964) outlived him by ten months and was never told of his assassination.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Kennedy's wartime heroics were dramatized in the 1963 film PT 109, starring Cliff Robertson, whom Kennedy himself had suggested for the role. (15)

Kennedy was a pioneer of television politics; his September 26, 1960 debate against Richard Nixon was watched by over 60 million people and established television as a key medium in American presidential campaigns.

His assassination and funeral were among the most extensively broadcast news events of the 20th century, and Oswald's on-camera shooting became the first murder ever televised live to a national audience.

ACHIEVEMENTS Kennedy became the youngest person ever elected U.S. president and the first Roman Catholic to hold the office.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage.

Kennedy established the Peace Corps, which has since sent more than 200,000 Americans to serve in over 130 countries.

He steered the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis without nuclear war, set the goal of a Moon landing, and negotiated the 1963 Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty;

Mount Kennedy in Canada was named in his honor in 1964, and his brother Robert became the first person to climb it the following year.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Britannica (3) Library of Congress (4) National Park Service (5) NPS – JFK Birthplace (6) National Archives (7) Miller Center (8) New England Historical Society (9) JFK Library (10) Encyclopedia of Trivia (11) National Archives – PT-109 (12) Los Angeles Times (13) The Desert Sun (14) Woman's World (15) Military.com

Grace Kelly

2016-04-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Grace Patricia Kelly, later Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Grace Kelly was an American actress who starred in eleven films between 1951 and 1956, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Country Girl, before retiring at age 26 to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco and become Princess Grace, one of the 20th century's most enduring style icons. (2)

BIRTH Grace Kelly was born on November 12, 1929, at Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was baptized a few weeks later, on December 1, 1929, at St. Bridget's Catholic Church in the East Falls neighborhood of the city. (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Her father, Irish-American John B. Kelly, Sr. (1889–1960), won 126 consecutive single scull rowing races between 1919 and 1920 and took three Olympic gold medals for sculling; he also built a highly successful brickwork contracting company well known across the East Coast. During the Second World War he was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as National Director of Physical Fitness, and he later ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Philadelphia.

Her mother, Margaret Katherine Majer, was a former model and the first woman to coach women's athletics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Grace was the third of four children, with an older sister, Margaret ("Peggy"), an older brother, John Jr. ("Kell"), who followed his father into competitive rowing, and a younger sister, Elizabeth ("Lizanne"). (1)

CHILDHOOD Grace grew up in the family home built in 1929 in the East Falls district of Philadelphia, in a household that prized athleticism, competition and boisterous confidence — qualities the shy, bookish Grace did not share with her siblings.

She wore glasses, avoided competitive sports, and was drawn instead to make-believe games and the amateur theatricals staged by her Kelly and Godfrey relatives; her uncle George Kelly was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.

By her own account the Kelly children were "always competing for everything – competing for love," and Grace often felt like the family's underachiever next to her celebrated father and glamorous older sister. (4)

EDUCATION Kelly was educated at Ravenhill Academy, a convent school, and then at the Stevens School in Philadelphia, before moving to New York City in 1947 to train at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, from which she graduated in 1949. She supported herself as a fashion and catalogue model while studying, appearing on the covers of magazines including Cosmopolitan. (2)

CAREER RECORD 1949 Kelly made her Broadway debut in a revival of Strindberg's The Father, having already begun appearing in television dramas broadcast live from New York.

1951 She made her film debut in a small role in Fourteen Hours. Her performance was not noticed by critics and did not lead to immediate movie offers.

1952 Co-starred as Amy Fowler Kane alongside Gary Cooper in the classic Western High Noon, which established her as a rising Hollywood talent.

1952 MGM signed Kelly to a seven-year film contract paying $850 a week, and two months later she and the cast travelled to Nairobi to begin filming Mogambo; her role as Linda Nordley won her a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and her first Academy Award nomination.

1952–1956, Kelly's four-year career as a Hollywood leading lady produced several classics, including three collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock — Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.

1954 Her deglamorized performance in The Country Girl, opposite Bing Crosby, earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress.

1956 She starred in her final film, the musical High Society, released three months after her real-life wedding to Prince Rainier.

1956, Kelly retired from acting at age 26 upon marrying Prince Rainier III of Monaco, who subsequently banned the showing of her films within the Principality; Hitchcock reportedly tried for years afterward to lure her back to the screen.

APPEARANCE Kelly stood approximately 5 feet 6½ inches tall, with blonde hair, blue-grey eyes and the porcelain, symmetrical beauty that led Hitchcock to describe her as a "snow-covered volcano." (2) She reportedly disliked her own wide jaw, calling herself "too tall, too leggy, too chinny," and learned to tilt her head to make her face appear narrower on camera. (4)

Kelly in 1955

FASHION Kelly favored a polished, understated elegance of tailored suits, full skirts, gloves and pearls that made her one of fashion's most imitated women, and she is credited with popularizing the head-covering created by knotting a silk scarf under the chin — a look still known simply as "the Grace Kelly." The Hermès handbag she famously used to shield her pregnancy from photographers in 1956 was subsequently renamed the "Kelly" bag in her honor. (5)

CHARACTER Those who knew her described a woman of quiet reserve and self-discipline masking genuine warmth; designer Oleg Cassini, who dated her in the early 1950s, recalled that she was "warm, funny, and caring, but also very serious about her work" and never stayed out past 11 p.m. (6)

Colleagues frequently noted a combination of shyness and steely professionalism inherited from a childhood spent proving herself against more extroverted siblings. (4)

SPEAKING VOICE Kelly cultivated a cultured, softly modulated mid-Atlantic voice during her drama training, distinct from her native Philadelphia accent, which became part of her poised on-screen persona.

SENSE OF HUMOUR Despite her icy screen persona, friends and co-stars often spoke of her dry, cheeky, and earthy sense of humor off-camera.

RELATIONSHIPS Before Prince Rainier, Kelly had romances with several older, established men in Hollywood, including actors Clark Gable and Ray Milland, and a two-year, reportedly secret engagement to Russian-born fashion designer Oleg Cassini. (6)

She met Rainier III in the spring of 1955 during a Cannes Film Festival photo shoot arranged by Paris Match, ended her relationship with Cassini after apparent pressure from her parents, and became engaged to the Prince within days of his visiting her family in Philadelphia over Christmas 1955; Kelly later admitted to a friend, "Do you realize if my mother hadn't been so difficult about Oleg Cassini, I probably would have married him? ... That one decision changed my entire future." (7)

The engagement was announced on January 5, 1956 — the same day Kelly topped the U.S. Best-Dressed list — and the couple married on April 18, 1956 in a civil ceremony at the royal palace, followed the next day by a formal religious ceremony at Monaco's Cathedral of St. Nicholas, televised to an estimated thirty million viewers. Kelly's ivory gown, designed by MGM's Helen Rose, used 450 yards of silk and lace; the religious ceremony itself lasted only 15 minutes, but the recitation of the 142 royal titles she acquired took a further 25. (8)

The couple had three children: Caroline, born January 23, 1957, and now heiress presumptive to the Monegasque throne; Albert, born March 14, 1958, later Albert II, Prince of Monaco; and Stéphanie, born February 1, 1965.

MONEY AND FAME Kelly moved from a comfortable but not fabulously wealthy Philadelphia upbringing into genuine global stardom during her brief screen career, then into the considerable wealth and near-mythic fame of Monegasque royalty. (2)

In 1993, over a decade after her death, she became the first actress to appear on a United States postage stamp, issued jointly with a matching Monaco stamp on the same day.

FOOD AND DRINK Kelly was a genuine gourmet who enjoyed cooking and relished classic French and Provençal cuisine, favoring dishes such as pissaladière and ratatouille Niçoise, and she made Perrier-Jouët's Belle Époque her favorite Champagne, sponsoring the house from 1970 as patron of Monaco's annual Rose Ball charity gala.

Early in her marriage, friends noted she "knows and likes to drink good French wines," once serving guests a dinner of clear soup, roast lamb and Peach Melba with a 1949 Château Latour . Away from formal entertaining, however, her personal diet was strict rather than indulgent: she followed the nutrition philosophy of celebrity dietician Gayelord Hauser, built her mornings around oatmeal, and relied on raw salads, whole grains and occasional multi-day "cleanses" of fruit, skimmed milk and green tea, largely avoiding sugar, white bread and dessert .

As Princess of Monaco she hosted numerous state banquets and gala dinners, including a 1959 Élysée Palace dinner with President Charles de Gaulle, a 1960 state banquet in Bern with Swiss President Max Petitpierre, and a 1961 State Banquet at Dublin Castle . Yet she never fully abandoned her American roots at the table: she insisted on a traditional turkey dinner at the Monaco palace every Thanksgiving, a custom her son Prince Albert has spoken about publicly, and she kept a private fondness for homemade cheeseburgers as an occasional treat. (9)

As a young actress reading scripts, Kelly was photographed snacking on celery, an image later cited by fashion writers as an example of her disciplined, understated approach to appearance and health. (5)

MOVIE CAREER Grace Kelly’s career as a Hollywood leading lady lasted just four years, from 1952 to 1956—a remarkably brief period in which she nevertheless managed to leave behind four films generally regarded as classics. Three of them were directed by Alfred Hitchcock: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief. Then, at the age of 26, she retired from the screen altogether. Hitchcock, who evidently had not yet learned that princesses are not easily summoned back to work, repeatedly urged her to return, but she never made another film.

Kelly’s retirement became still more complete after her marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Showings of her films were banned in the principality—a rather extraordinary way of dealing with the problem of having a world-famous movie star for a wife. There was, however, one final cinematic curiosity. In High Society, Kelly’s bride-to-be character wears a magnificent diamond ring that was not a prop at all, but her actual Cartier engagement ring, given to her by Prince Rainier. The film reached American cinemas just three months after the royal wedding, allowing audiences to admire the future princess wearing the real thing while pretending, for professional purposes, to be someone else.

MUSIC AND ARTS Kelly's final film, High Society (1956), was a musical built around songs by Cole Porter and co-starring Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

As princess she remained a patron of the arts, establishing the Princess Grace Foundation in 1964 to support local artisans, musicians, dancers and actors. (2)

In her later years she also became a recognized amateur artist, creating pressed-flower collages signed "G.P.K." that were exhibited at the Galerie Drouant in Paris in 1977 and 1980. (10)

LITERATURE In 1980, Kelly co-authored My Book of Flowers, a book combining horticultural advice with reflections on her pressed-flower artistry, in which she wrote that arranging petals brought "the same kind of tranquility as doing needlework, crocheting, or knitting." (10)

NATURE Kelly had loved flowers since childhood in Philadelphia and, once settled in Monaco, founded the Monaco Flower Show in 1966 and the Garden Club of Monaco, later serving as an international judge of floral displays. (10)

She once said, "To have complete satisfaction from flowers you must have time to spend with them. I talk to them and they talk to me." (11)

A rose garden dedicated to the memory of Kelly was opened in 1984 by Rainier in Monaco's Fontvieille district.

PETS Kelly was frequently photographed with her French poodle, Oliver, one of several dogs she kept during her acting years and into her time in Monaco. (5)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Unlike her athletic siblings, Grace avoided competitive sport as a child, gravitating instead toward theatre and, later in life, toward gardening and the delicate craft of pressed-flower collage-making, an art form known as oshibana. She described the hobby as her "best relaxation," working only when she had a quiet hour free from interruption. (4) (12)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kelly supported medical advancements and public health initiatives through her charity work as President of the Red Cross of Monaco.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Kelly was raised and remained a practicing Roman Catholic throughout her life, attending Mass regularly and observing traditional Friday fasting as a child, though her biographers note her family's faith was more habitual than intensely devout. (3)

As princess, she deepened her religious commitments, collaborating with Holy Cross Father Patrick Peyton's Family Theater Productions on rosary-themed broadcasts and once telling an interviewer that helping the world's less fortunate must "find their origin in the hearts and minds of each of us." (13)

POLITICS Kelly did not pursue an independent political career, but her marriage carried political weight: Monaco's 1918 treaty with France stipulated the Principality would revert to French control if the ruling Grimaldi family failed to produce an heir, making the births of her children a matter of national significance. (7)

SCANDAL Kelly's swift shift from a reported secret engagement to Oleg Cassini to marriage with Prince Rainier fueled persistent tabloid speculation that her family had pressured her into an arranged-style match, with love letters auctioned decades later appearing to confirm the seriousness of the Cassini relationship. (6)

Separately, biographer Wendy Leigh has alleged Prince Rainier had multiple affairs within months of the wedding, claims that have added to enduring speculation about the private strains behind the couple's public "fairy tale" image. (7)

The Prince and Princess of Monaco arrive at the White House for a luncheon, 1961

MILITARY RECORD Her father, John B. Kelly, Sr., was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Second World War as National Director of Physical Fitness.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kelly was generally reported to be in good health throughout her life, though medical opinion after her death concluded she had suffered a mild stroke, described as a "cerebral vascular incident," at the wheel of her car shortly before the fatal 1982 crash. (14)

HOMES Kelly grew up in the Kelly family's home in the East Falls section of Philadelphia, built the same year she was born, and after 1956 divided her time between the Prince's Palace of Monaco and the family's country retreat at Roc Agel in the hills above the Principality.

TRAVEL Kelly travelled to Kenya in 1953 to film Mogambo on location in Nairobi, and crossed the Atlantic repeatedly between Hollywood, New York and Europe both during her acting career and afterward as Princess of Monaco engaged in charitable and diplomatic duties.

DEATH On September 13, 1982, Kelly suffered a stroke while driving her 1971 Rover P6 3500 from the family's country home at Roc Agel back to Monaco, with her daughter Stéphanie in the passenger seat; Stéphanie's attempts to regain control of the vehicle failed, and the car plunged around 120 feet down the mountainside.

Kelly never regained consciousness and died the following night, September 14, 1982, at the age of 52, after Prince Rainier and their children agreed to withdraw life support. (14) )

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA . She has been portrayed in numerous biographical films, documentaries, and books, including the 2014 biopic Grace of Monaco.

ACHIEVEMENTS Kelly won the Academy Award for Best Actress and three Golden Globe Awards during a Hollywood career that lasted barely five years, and was later ranked 13th on the American Film Institute's list of the 25 Greatest Female Stars of classic Hollywood cinema.

As Princess of Monaco she founded the Princess Grace Foundation, the Monaco Flower Show and the Garden Club of Monaco, and in 1993 became the first actress honored on a U.S. postage stamp.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Encyclopaedia Britannica (3) The Catholic Company (4) BBC Culture (5) The Telegraph (6) People (7) Grunge (8) The Business Soirée (9) Tasting Table (10) Tres Bohèmes (11) Flower Power Daily (12) Le Figaro (13) OSV News (14) The New York Times

John Harvey Kellogg

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NAME John Harvey Kellogg. He was widely known simply as "Dr. Kellogg" and, in later life, as the "Corn Flake King," though he despised the commercial trivialization of his work. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR John Harvey Kellogg was an American physician, surgeon, and health reformer best known as the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, a spa-like medical institution that attracted the rich and famous for six decades. He and his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, invented the breakfast cereal that became cornflakes, transforming the way Americans ate breakfast, though John Harvey came to resent the sugary, mass-market direction his brother later took the business. He was also a prolific inventor with dozens of patents, a tireless anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol campaigner, and, more controversially, a leading American advocate of eugenics. (2)

BIRTH John Harvey Kellogg was born on February 26, 1852, in the small farming community of Tyrone Township, Livingston County, Michigan. He was the fourth of eight children who survived infancy, born to John Preston Kellogg and his second wife, Ann Janette Stanley Kellogg. (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND His father, John Preston Kellogg, had five children from a first marriage before Ann Janette became his second wife, and the household eventually included the extended blend of both families. Before John Harvey turned one, his parents converted to the newly formed Seventh-day Adventist movement, a decision that would shape virtually every aspect of his upbringing and career. (4)

CHILDHOOD The family moved first to Jackson, Michigan, in 1853 to be near a small Adventist community, then settled permanently in Battle Creek around 1856, where his father established a broom-making factory and small grocery store.

John Harvey was a sickly child who spent much of his boyhood helping sort brooms in the family factory rather than attending school, since the Adventists believed the Second Coming was imminent and formal education seemed of secondary importance.

At around age 12, he was invited by James White, a principal founder of the Adventist Church, to learn the printing trade at the church's publishing house, and he became an avid, largely self-taught reader in his spare time. (5)

EDUCATION Kellogg's early education was patchy and supplemented mainly by voracious independent reading of health-reform literature, including the writings of Ellen G. White, the Adventist prophetess.

In 1872 he enrolled at Michigan State Normal School in Ypsilanti to train as a teacher, then briefly attended the reform-minded Hygieo-Therapeutic College in New Jersey before deciding he needed more conventional medical training.

He completed his studies at the University of Michigan Medical School and finally at Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City, receiving his MD in 1875, and later travelled to London and Vienna to study surgery. (6)

CAREER RECORD 1874 He became editor of the Adventist health journal Health Reformer, later renamed Good Health, a post he held for the rest of his life.

1876 He took over as physician-in-chief of the Adventist-run Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, which he renamed the Battle Creek Sanitarium the following year, building it into a famous "health resort" that drew thousands of wealthy and celebrity patients.

1895 He founded the American Medical Missionary College in Battle Creek to train medical missionaries.

1896 Working with his brother Will Keith Kellogg, he developed a wheat-flake breakfast cereal called Granose, followed soon after by an improved corn-flake version.

1906 His brother broke away to found the Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Company, sparking a decade of business rivalry and eventual courtroom battles over the family name.

1914 He founded the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek to promote eugenics research and conferences.

1943 Kellogg continued operating the Sanitarium and performing surgery into his eighties, having carried out an estimated 22,000 operations over his career. (7)

APPEARANCE Kellogg was a short, stocky man, standing around 5 feet 4 inches, with a bald head, a neatly trimmed Vandyke or goatee beard, and pale, thinning hair. He was famously fastidious about dressing entirely in white — suits, shoes, and all — a habit he claimed helped him "more beneficially receive the sun's rays," and one that also made him instantly recognizable and photogenic. (8) , (9)

Kellogg, c. 1915

FASHION He was famously fastidious about dressing entirely in white — suits, shoes, and all — a habit he claimed helped him "more beneficially receive the sun's rays," and one that also made him instantly recognizable and photogenic.

His signature all-white wardrobe was as much theatre as hygiene, designed to set him apart from the crowd and reinforce his image as a showman of clean living. It was a personal branding exercise decades before the term existed. (8) , (9)

CHARACTER Kellogg was a driving, restless workaholic who dictated correspondence continuously to secretaries while racing between the Sanitarium's wards, treating patients, writing books, and managing his sprawling business interests.

He was famously stubborn, self-assured, and unyielding in his convictions, a trait that made him a compelling reformer but also fuelled the bitter, lifelong rift with his brother.

Colleagues and biographers alike described him as a consummate self-publicist, tirelessly promoting his own methods and inventions. (10)

SPEAKING VOICE Contemporaries and later dramatizations, including Anthony Hopkins's Oscar-nominated performance in the 1994 film The Road to Wellville, portray Kellogg as an energetic, declamatory speaker fond of pithy aphorisms about health, famously summarizing his philosophy with lines such as "the tongue is the billboard of the bowels."

He delivered lectures to reporters and patients with the showmanship of a stage performer rather than a conventional physician. (11) , (12)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Kellogg was a serious, mission-driven man who took his health crusade with total earnestness, and most historical accounts emphasize his fanaticism rather than any noted wit. He did, however, institute organized "laughing therapy" sessions for Sanitarium patients, suggesting he saw humour as a genuine component of physical wellbeing even if he was not renowned for cracking jokes himself. (13)

RELATIONSHIPS Kellogg married Ella Ervilla Eaton, a fellow health reformer and cookbook author, on February 22, 1879. Believing firmly that all sexual activity, even within marriage, was detrimental to health, the couple never consummated their union and reportedly spent part of their honeymoon revising one of his anti-sex manuscripts together.

They had no biological children but fostered more than 40 children over the years and legally adopted seven or eight of them, raising them at the Sanitarium's associated "Bungalow" home; Ella died in 1920. (14)

MONEY AND FAME The Battle Creek Sanitarium made Kellogg one of the most famous physicians in America, and he reportedly lived entirely off income from his prolific writing rather than charging patients directly for treatment.

His fame reached its peak through the international success of the breakfast cereal he pioneered, though he lost a decade-long legal battle with his brother Will over rights to the family name, culminating in a Michigan Supreme Court ruling in 1920 that awarded Will exclusive commercial use of "Kellogg" on cereal packaging. (15) , (16)

BREAKFAST CEREALS John Harvey Kellogg was a Seventh-day Adventist surgeon and superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a place where the American breakfast was subjected to rather more scrutiny than it had probably expected. Kellogg took nutrition extremely seriously and devoted considerable energy to developing bran-rich foods that were wholesome without being quite as joyless as they sounded. A committed vegetarian, he was particularly keen to remove meat from the breakfast table, apparently on the grounds that a person could only be trusted with so much excitement before nine o'clock.

In 1896, after a good deal of experimentation, Kellogg and his younger brother, William Keith Kellogg, who worked as the Sanitarium's general office assistant, developed a new breakfast food that was easy to chew. It consisted of flakes made from wheat and was given the rather grand name Granose. This was, by the standards of health food at the time, practically a party.

The breakthrough that led to cornflakes came about partly by accident, as many great culinary discoveries do, usually after somebody has forgotten something in the kitchen. After some boiled corn was left sitting unattended, one of Kellogg's cooks discovered that it had separated into crisp flakes. John Harvey Kellogg developed the idea into a new cereal, improving on Granose and giving breakfast another opportunity to become dry and crunchy.

William, however, saw something his older brother apparently regarded as secondary: money. In 1906, the more commercially minded Kellogg broke away and founded the Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Company on February 19 to market the cereal. The result was the beginning of one of the world's most successful breakfast-food empires—and proof, perhaps, that if you leave something lying around in a kitchen long enough, someone may eventually build a multinational corporation out of it.

Early Kellogg's Corn Flakes advertisement

FOOD AND DRINK A committed vegetarian, Kellogg dedicated much of his career to developing palatable, fibre-rich, meat-free alternatives for his patients, inventing or popularizing peanut butter, granola, soy milk, and various meat substitutes such as "Protose" and "Nuttose."

He strictly banned meat, alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco from the Sanitarium regimen, believing bland, plain food curbed unhealthy passions. (17)

MUSIC AND ARTS Kellogg made music and performance a visible part of daily life at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, employing a full-time orchestra and choir for evening dances and musicales, staging plays and lantern-slide shows in a dedicated theater, and having patients exercise and march to a brass band playing the specially composed "Battle Creek Sanitarium March".

He also personally invited an English organist to perform at the institution in 1882, and Sanitarium records list a standing "Music" division within its Social and Recreation Department. These activities functioned mainly as entertainment and structured exercise accompaniment rather than a codified therapeutic prescription, in contrast to his far more explicit theories about diet, exercise, and bowel health. (18)

LITERATURE Kellogg was an extraordinarily prolific author, publishing around 50 books during his lifetime on health, diet, and hygiene, alongside decades as editor of the Adventist health journal Good Health. His works included titles such as Plain Facts About Sexual Life, The Living Temple, and Needed — A New Human Race, blending medical advice with his Adventist convictions and, later, his eugenic theories. (19)

NATURE Central to Kellogg's "biologic living" philosophy was an emphasis on fresh air, sunshine, and outdoor exercise, which he prescribed to patients alongside dietary reform as essential pillars of good health. He encouraged patients at the Sanitarium to spend time outdoors and believed direct exposure to sunlight was so beneficial that he tailored his own all-white clothing partly around the idea. (15)

PETS Kellogg kept a pet cockatoo that perched on his shoulder, and the Sanitarium grounds featured a deer park (18)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Kellogg was an ardent promoter of physical exercise and devised numerous mechanical exercise devices and fitness apparatus for use at the Sanitarium, some of which he patented. He personally practiced vigorous daily exercise routines well into old age and prescribed similarly disciplined regimens of walking, calisthenics, and hydrotherapy-based activity to his patients as core parts of the "Battle Creek Idea." (6) , (15)

Breathing exercises Battle Creek Sanitarium

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kellogg held around 30 patents covering inventions from the flaked-cereal process to an electric blanket, a "light bath" electrotherapy device, and a dynamometer for measuring muscular strength. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006 for developing the tempering process and the first dry flaked breakfast cereal. (2)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Raised a devout Seventh-day Adventist, Kellogg combined the church's health-reform theology, emphasizing the body as a "temple" to be kept pure, with scientific medicine in a system he called "biologic living."

Disputes over the publication of his book The Living Temple, which church leaders viewed as theologically unorthodox, led to his formal disfellowshipping from the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1907, though he continued to maintain many Adventist friendships and lifestyle habits until his death. (17) , (20)

POLITICS Kellogg was heavily involved in the Progressive Era's public health and social reform movements, and from 1914 he channelled much of this energy into founding the Race Betterment Foundation, which promoted eugenics conferences, a national eugenics registry, and racial segregation policies.

He served as the first president of the American Eugenics Society from 1922 to 1926 and held leadership roles in several other eugenics organizations, views now regarded as deeply discredited and harmful. (19)

SCANDAL Kellogg's most damaging controversy was his decades-long advocacy of eugenics and racial segregation, which historians now view as a serious blot on his public health legacy.

His bitter, very public legal feud with his brother Will over rights to use the "Kellogg" name on cereal packaging also dragged through Michigan courts for roughly a decade, ending in a 1920 Supreme Court defeat for John Harvey and permanent estrangement between the brothers. (16)

MILITARY RECORD John Harvey Kellogg pursued a civilian career in medicine throughout his adult life. His Battle Creek Sanitarium later served the Red Cross and, during the World Wars, some of his associated properties supported convalescent and military-adjacent uses, but he himself held no service record. (5)

BATTLE CREEK SANITARIUM Under John Harvey Kellogg's leadership, the Battle Creek Sanitarium expanded from a fairly modest Adventist retreat into a world-famous health resort affectionately known as “The San.” It was an establishment that combined the features of a luxury hotel, hospital and spa, which must have made checking in an interesting experience: “Would you like a suite, a surgical procedure or perhaps a vigorous rubdown?”

Kellogg treated notable patients including former president William Howard Taft, aviator Amelia Earhart, industrialist Henry Ford, and inventor Thomas Edison.

Guests could enjoy hydrotherapy, electric-light baths, radium therapy, exercise classes and vegetarian meals, all under one roof and with considerably less opportunity to slip away for bacon. The San attracted tens of thousands of visitors each year, including leading figures from business, politics and the arts, who came to Battle Creek in search of better health—or at least a memorable holiday involving electricity and boiled vegetables.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kellogg was a sickly child, but he built a robust adult constitution through his own strict regimen of vegetarian diet, daily exercise, abundant water intake, and abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee.

He remained professionally active as a surgeon until around age 88 and reportedly performed more than 200 consecutive operations at one point without losing a patient, a remarkable record for the pre-antibiotic era. (6)

HOMES Kellogg lived for decades in and around Battle Creek, Michigan, where the Sanitarium complex formed the centre of his professional and domestic life. He also extended the reach of his health-reform network by opening a Sanitarium branch in Chicago's slums as part of his commitment to the Social Gospel movement. (5) , (21)

TRAVEL Kellogg travelled to Europe to study surgical techniques in London and Vienna early in his career, experience he brought back to modernize American surgical practice.

He also undertook further European trips in later years, and it was during one such absence that his brother Will was able to consolidate control of the corn flake company's stock, a pivotal moment in their rift. (6) , (22)

DEATH John Harvey Kellogg died on December 14, 1943, in Battle Creek, Michigan, at the age of 91, following an acute attack of bronchitis.

He was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek alongside his wife.

In one of the more poignant footnotes to his life, he had written a letter that same year seeking to reconcile with his estranged brother Will, but his secretary judged that he had demeaned himself in it and withheld it from the post; Will did not see the letter until after John Harvey's death. (3) , (7)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Kellogg is the central figure of T. Coraghessan Boyle's 1993 satirical novel The Road to Wellville, which was adapted into a 1994 film of the same name directed by Alan Parker, with Anthony Hopkins delivering a flamboyant, buck-toothed portrayal of the doctor opposite Bridget Fonda and Matthew Broderick.

He has also featured in numerous documentaries and podcasts examining the history of breakfast cereal and the wellness industry, reflecting his enduring status as a colourful, if controversial, figure in American popular history.

ACHIEVEMENTS Kellogg pioneered the flaked breakfast cereal that reshaped the Western breakfast table, held around 30 patents, and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.

He built the Battle Creek Sanitarium into one of the most famous medical institutions of its era, treating notable patients including former president William Howard Taft, aviator Amelia Earhart, industrialist Henry Ford, and inventor Thomas Edison, while also authoring roughly 50 books and campaigning against tobacco decades before the medical mainstream accepted its dangers.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias (3) Encyclopedia.com (4) History Defined (5) Michigan State University Archives (6) American Journal of Public Health (PMC) (7) Encyclopedia of Trivia (8) Universität Wien Dissertation (9) Alan Parker: Making of The Road to Wellville (10) History Hit (11) Wikipedia (12) RogerEbert.com (13) The Guardian (14) American Aristocracy (15) Unitarian Universalist Association (16) NPR (17) Vegan Literary Studies, University of Geneva (18) Deep Blue Library (19) Eugenics Archive Canada (20) Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists (21) JSTOR Daily (22) Mitchell IP Law

Helen Keller

2016-04-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Helen Adams Keller. (1) , (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Helen Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist, and lecturer who became deaf and blind as an infant, yet learned to read, write, and speak, and went on to become the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She spent her adult life campaigning for the blind and deaf, for women's suffrage, for workers' rights, and for world peace, becoming one of the most admired women of the twentieth century. (3)

BIRTH Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. (4)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Her father, Arthur H. Keller, was a former Confederate Army captain, a farmer, and the editor of the local newspaper, the North Alabamian.

Her mother, Kate Adams Keller, was an educated woman from Memphis and Arthur's second wife.

Helen was the elder of their two daughters, and she also had two older half-brothers from her father's first marriage. (4)

CHILDHOOD At just 19 months old, Helen was struck by an illness, described by doctors at the time as "brain fever" but now thought to have probably been scarlet fever or meningitis, which left her permanently blind and deaf. Unable to see, hear, or speak intelligibly, she developed her own crude system of home signs to communicate with her family, and grew increasingly frustrated and prone to violent tantrums as she struggled to make herself understood.

Her worried parents eventually sought help from inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children, and he directed them to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, which sent a young teacher named Anne Sullivan to Tuscumbia in March 1887. (5) , (6)

EDUCATION Anne Sullivan, herself partially blind, arrived when Helen was seven years old and remained her teacher and lifelong companion for the next 49 years. Sullivan's breakthrough came within weeks, when she spelled the word "water" into Helen's hand while cool water ran over it at the pump, and Helen suddenly grasped that everything had a name.

Helen went on to learn to read Braille, to write with a specially made typewriter, and to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of a speaker while the words were simultaneously spelled into her hand; she also learned to speak, though her voice remained difficult for strangers to understand.

She studied at the Perkins Institution, the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York, and the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, before entering Radcliffe College of Harvard University in 1900, with Sullivan interpreting lectures for her by spelling them into her hand.

Keller in the Radcliffe College yearbook, 1904

In 1904 Helen graduated cum laude from Radcliffe, becoming the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. (6) , (7)

CAREER RECORD 1902-1903 Helen published her first two books, The Story of My Life and Optimism, launching her career as a writer even before she finished college.

1904 She graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College and began a lifelong career as an author and public lecturer, campaigning for education and support for the blind and deaf.

1913 She began touring on the lecture circuit, often with an interpreter relaying her speech, raising money and awareness chiefly on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB).

1920 She became a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union alongside Roger Baldwin and Jane Addams.

1924 She joined the newly formed American Foundation for the Blind as its chief fundraiser and spokeswoman, a role she held for the rest of her working life, touring the United States and eventually 35 countries.

1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. (8)

APPEARANCE Anne Sullivan described the young Helen as "large, strong, and ruddy," with a well-formed, vigorous body, a fine head, and a large, finely shaped mouth, though one eye protruded slightly more than the other, a legacy of her childhood illness.

As an adult, biographer Dorothy Herrmann described Keller as having "regular, almost perfect features and blue eyes that were the colour of the sky," a clear complexion, and long chestnut hair; her natural eyes were later surgically replaced with glass ones to correct the protrusion. (9) , (10)

Keller c. 1904

FASHION Keller was noted in her lecture and vaudeville years for dressing elegantly for her public appearances, often in fashionable gowns suited to the formal occasions and grand halls in which she spoke, reflecting the celebrity status she held as one of the most photographed women of her era. (9)

CHARACTER Those who knew Keller described her as remarkably determined, curious, and warm, with an unpredictable, alternately animated and still, facial expression that reflected her thoughts vividly since she could not see or mirror others' faces.

She combined a fierce independence and stubbornness, evident from her childhood tantrums onward, with deep compassion for the suffering of others, particularly the poor and disabled, which drove her lifelong activism. (9) , (11)

SPEAKING VOICE Helen learned to produce audible speech under the tutelage of Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston, but her voice remained flat, guttural, and difficult for unfamiliar listeners to understand throughout her life, so she typically relied on an interpreter, often Anne Sullivan or later her secretary Polly Thomson, to repeat her words clearly during public lectures. (6) , (11)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Keller had a lively wit that surprised people who expected only solemnity from her; Mark Twain, one of her closest friends, refused to pity her and once quipped to a companion that "blindness is an exciting business," a remark Keller relished. She also playfully teased Twain for his pessimism, showing she was comfortable trading jokes even with a literary giant twice her age. (12)

RELATIONSHIPS Keller's closest and most enduring relationship was with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who lived with and worked alongside her for 49 years until Sullivan's death in 1936, after which Keller's secretary Polly Thomson became her constant companion.

Helen Keller in 1899 with lifelong companion and teacher Anne Sullivan.

In 1916, while Sullivan was recuperating from illness, Keller fell in love with her temporary secretary, Peter Fagan, and the couple secretly obtained a marriage license in Boston, but the engagement became public in the press and Keller's mother forcibly separated them, ending the relationship; Keller later wrote about the episode as "a little island of joy surrounded by dark waters." She never married and had no children. (13) , (14)

MONEY AND FAME Keller achieved international celebrity from childhood onward, and her fame helped her raise substantial sums for disability causes; wealthy admirer Henry Huttleston Rogers, prompted by Mark Twain, funded her education, and she later established a two-million-dollar endowment fund for the American Foundation for the Blind.

Despite mixing with millionaires, royalty, and presidents, Keller herself lived modestly and devoted much of her adult income and effort to fundraising for others rather than personal wealth. (3) (15)

FOOD AND DRINK Keller had famously simple tastes, reportedly loving hot dogs with mustard so much that her secretary Polly Thomson once banned them from the house to stop her eating little else, and she was fond of martinis in her later years, enjoying a couple of stiff drinks most evenings.

As a child, she recalled happily helping in the kitchen, making ice cream and licking stirring spoons during holiday preparations. (16)

MUSIC AND ARTS Though she could not hear music, Keller described experiencing it through vibration, placing her hands on a piano or radio speaker to feel the rhythm and tone, and she wrote appreciatively about the sensation of "feeling" an orchestra play.

She was also involved in the arts through cinema, starring as herself in the 1919 silent film Deliverance, a dramatized account of her life story. (6) , (11)

LITERATURE Keller was a prolific author who wrote 12 to 14 books along with hundreds of speeches and essays, on subjects ranging from her own life to animals and Mahatma Gandhi. Her best-known work, the 1903 autobiography The Story of My Life, chronicled her childhood and education with Anne Sullivan and became an international bestseller; other titles included The World I Live In (1908), Out of the Dark (1913), My Religion (1927), Midstream: My Later Life (1929), and Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955). (6) , (17)

NATURE Keller wrote often about experiencing the natural world through touch and smell, describing the textures of leaves, flowers, and running water with great sensory precision in her books, and she found particular joy in gardens and the outdoors throughout her life. Her celebrated 1908 essay collection The World I Live In devoted whole chapters to how she perceived nature without sight or hearing. (6)

Keller holding a magnolia, c. 1920

PETS Keller was a devoted, lifelong dog lover who almost always kept a dog by her side, including a pit bull named Sir Thomas.

During a 1937 visit to Akita Prefecture in Japan, she was so moved by the story of the loyal Akita dog Hachiko that she expressed a wish to own one, and she was given a puppy named Kamikaze-Go, becoming the first person to bring the Akita breed to the United States; when Kamikaze died of distemper months later, the Japanese government sent her his brother, Kenzan-Go, whom she nicknamed Go-Go. (18) , (19)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Beyond her extensive travel and public speaking, Keller enjoyed activities such as horseback riding, rowing, tandem bicycling, and swimming, engaging in physical recreation with characteristic enthusiasm despite her disabilities.

She also kept up an active correspondence and enjoyed exploring gardens by touch and smell as a favored pastime. (6)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Keller's own education involved close engagement with the mechanics of speech and hearing through her association with Alexander Graham Bell, whose scientific interest in deafness first brought him into her family's life, and she maintained a curiosity about technology and invention throughout their decades-long friendship. She did not pursue science as a profession but wrote and lectured on how technology and medicine could reduce preventable blindness. (11) , (20)

ACTIVISM At the beginning of the 20th century, blindness was not a subject that women’s magazines were especially keen to discuss. This was partly because a surprisingly large proportion of blindness cases were associated with venereal disease, which was then considered a matter best dealt with by lowering one’s voice and pretending it wasn’t happening. Into this rather awkward silence stepped Helen Keller.

After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1904, Keller became one of the most energetic advocates for people with disabilities of her age. She worked for the American Foundation for the Blind for many years, travelling throughout the United States and visiting dozens of countries abroad. She became an internationally celebrated author and speaker, which is remarkable enough when you consider that she could neither see nor hear. The rest of us can barely manage a presentation when the projector refuses to cooperate.

Keller’s interests extended far beyond blindness and deafness. She was a suffragist, pacifist, Christian socialist and supporter of birth control, and she was an outspoken critic of President Woodrow Wilson. She campaigned for better conditions for disabled people and spoke publicly about the discrimination faced by deaf people. In 1915, she and George A. Kessler founded Helen Keller International, an organisation devoted to research and programmes involving vision, health and nutrition.

She was also deeply troubled by racial injustice. In 1916, Keller donated money to the NAACP, saying she was ashamed by the un-Christian treatment of Black Americans in the American South. This was at a time when racial segregation and discrimination were not merely widespread but woven into the machinery of American life.

In 1920, Keller helped establish the American Civil Liberties Union. She continued travelling extensively with her teacher and companion Anne Sullivan, visiting more than 40 countries and making several trips to Japan, where she became particularly popular. She met every American president from Grover Cleveland through Lyndon B. Johnson and counted among her friends such figures as Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain.

Keller and Twain had more in common than a fondness for extraordinary company. Both were regarded as political radicals and sympathised with left-wing causes, which was not necessarily the safest way to endear oneself to respectable society in their day.

Keller was particularly concerned with poverty and the opportunities—or lack of them—available to poor children. She believed that poverty could crush people before they had a chance to discover what they were capable of. Keller acknowledged that her own achievements had been helped by the advantages of her birth and upbringing, and she recognised that such opportunities were not equally available to everyone.

Her point was a simple but rather inconvenient one: success is not merely a matter of determination. Sometimes people also need somebody to give them a chance. Keller had been fortunate enough to receive that chance, and she spent much of the rest of her life trying to make sure that others did too.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Keller became a committed follower of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, whose mystical Christian theology she credited with giving her spiritual comfort and meaning, and she wrote about her faith in the 1927 book My Religion. Her worldview combined this spiritual conviction with a strong belief in social and economic justice as a moral imperative. (17)

POLITICS Keller was a committed socialist and radical activist who joined the Socialist Party of America in 1909, wrote that she loved "the red flag and what it symbolizes," and argued that the industrial conditions causing poverty were also a leading cause of blindness among the poor.

She was a suffragist, a supporter of birth control, an opponent of child labor, and a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, and in 1916 she donated to the NAACP and had her support published in its journal, The Crisis. (20) , (21)

SCANDAL Keller's brief secret engagement to Peter Fagan in 1916 became a public sensation after newspapers reported his application for a marriage license, embarrassing her family and prompting her mother to swiftly end the relationship and issue a public denial on Keller's behalf.

Separately, her outspoken socialism and associations with Communist-linked front organizations during the 1930s and 1940s drew unfavorable press attention and made her a subject of ongoing government scrutiny. (13) , (22)

MILITARY RECORD Keller had no military service of her own, though her father, Arthur H. Keller, served as a captain in the Confederate Army before her birth.

During the Second World War, Keller toured military hospitals extensively to comfort soldiers who had been blinded or otherwise disabled in combat. (5) , (8)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Aside from the illness at 19 months that left her deaf and blind, Keller enjoyed generally robust health for most of her life, being described by Anne Sullivan as strong, vigorous, and never ill in the years following her early illness.

Her health declined later in life, and she suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1961 that curtailed her public activities and confined her to her home for her final years. (9) , (23)

HOMES Keller was born and raised at Ivy Green, her family's estate in Tuscumbia, Alabama, before later years spent largely in Massachusetts and New York during her education.

Keller's birthplace in Tuscumbia, Alabama By Calstanhope

In 1936, following Anne Sullivan's death, she settled permanently in Easton, Connecticut, at a home she named Arcan Ridge, where she lived for the rest of her life. (23)

TRAVEL As the American Foundation for the Blind's chief representative, Keller toured extensively on its behalf, ultimately traveling to around 35 to 39 countries across five continents to advocate for the blind and deaf and to raise funds.

In 1937 she toured Japan, and in 1948 General Douglas MacArthur sent her there again as America's first postwar Goodwill Ambassador; she also represented the United States informally on other overseas missions and met numerous foreign heads of state. (3)

DEATH Helen Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961, which ended her public career, and she spent her final years at Arcan Ridge in Easton, Connecticut. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, a few weeks before her eighty-eighth birthday. (2)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Keller starred as herself in the 1919 silent film Deliverance, a dramatized retelling of her life. Her story was later immortalized in The Miracle Worker, first a 1957 television play, then a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1959 Broadway play, and finally a celebrated 1962 film starring Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan and Patty Duke as young Helen, both of whom won Academy Awards for their performances. (2)

ACHIEVEMENTS Keller became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1904.

She co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union,

Keller introduced the Akita dog breed to the United States

In 1964 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, for her lifetime of advocacy on behalf of people with disabilities.

Her birth date, June 27, is commemorated as Helen Keller Day in Pennsylvania.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Britannica (3) Perkins School for the Blind (4) American Foundation for the Blind: Biography (5) National Women's History Museum (6) National Portrait Gallery (7) Perkins School for the Blind FAQ (8) American Foundation for the Blind: Chronology (9) UPenn Digital Library: The Story of My Life (10) Hazlitt (11) Grunge (12) SignDNA (13) American Printing House (14) American Foundation for the Blind: Chronology of Her Life (15) Britannica 100 Women (16) The Takeout (17) Encyclopedia.com (18) Akita Club of America (19) Wikipedia: Hachiko (20) Ragged Edge Magazine (21) Utne Reader (22) 24/7 Wall St. (23) The Trouble Begins at Eight (Mark Twain Project blog)

John Keats

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NAME John Keats. He was born John Keats and never used a middle name.

WHAT FAMOUS FOR John Keats was one of the key figures of the second generation of English Romantic poets, alongside Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Despite dying at the age of 25, his sensory, emotionally charged poetry, including his famous odes, earned him a lasting place as one of the most celebrated poets in the English language.(2).

BIRTH John Keats was born at the Swan and Hoop inn at Moorgate, London, on October 31, 1795. The Globe pub now occupies the site, a few yards from the modern-day Moorgate station (2)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Keats's father, Thomas Keats, worked as a hostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop Inn, an establishment he later came to manage, and where the growing family lived for several years. His mother was Frances Jennings, and John was the eldest of four surviving children, with two younger brothers, Tom and George, and a younger sister, Fanny. He remained close to all three siblings throughout his life (2),

CHILDHOOD The first seven years of Keats's life were happy ones. His troubles began in 1803, when his father died after fracturing his skull in a fall from his horse. His mother remarried soon afterwards but quickly left her new husband, moving herself and her children to live with Keats's grandmother, Alice Jennings.

When Keats was 14, his mother died of tuberculosis, leaving him and his siblings in his grandmother's custody. As a boy, Keats was not considered promising material: he was lazy, hot-tempered, and seemingly interested only in pranks and fighting (2)

EDUCATION Keats attended the liberal John Clarke's School in Enfield, Middlesex, while living with his grandmother, and it was here that he first developed a love of literature. He was introduced to the poetry of Edmund Spenser by the headmaster's son, Charles Cowden Clarke, and Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" proved a turning point in his development, inspiring his first poem, "Imitation of Spenser," in 1814 when he was 19.

His grandmother's appointed guardians removed him from Clarke's school to apprentice him to a surgeon, and in 1810 the teenage Keats began an apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond, a doctor and family friend in Edmonton, Middlesex. He cancelled his fifth year as an apprentice to become a medical student at Guy's Hospital, registering there on October 1, 1815, and qualified as an apothecary the following year (3).

CAREER RECORD 1810 Started an apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond, a doctor and family friend in Edmonton, Middlesex.

1815 Cancelled his fifth year as an apprentice doctor and became a medical student at Guy's Hospital in London.

1816 Qualified as a licensed apothecary and surgeon with credit, but chose not to practice medicine professionally.

1818 Devotedly nursed his younger brother Tom through terminal tuberculosis until Tom died on December 1, 1818. A legacy from his grandmother helped influence his decision to abandon medicine entirely and become a full-time poet

APPEARANCE Keats stood only about 5 feet tall, a fact about which he was notably self-conscious. He had an unusually small head, reddish-brown hair, and was generally considered handsome, with striking, expressive eyes that struck many of his contemporaries (2)

Posthumous portrait by William Hilton, c. 1822

FASHION When feeling low and disinclined to write, Keats found that dressing smartly often lifted his mood, treating fine clothes almost as a personal remedy for melancholy. He also grew the nail of his little finger long, shaping it into the form of a pen nib (2).

CHARACTER Contemporaries described Keats as kind, easygoing, generous, and warm-hearted, with a strong loyalty to his friends and family. Despite the hardships of his short life, he maintained a resilient and often playful disposition, tempered by bouts of melancholy that deepened as his health declined

SPEAKING VOICE Keats spoke with a clipped Cockney accent, a mark of his London upbringing that some more socially conservative critics used to mock him as a "Cockney poet." His accent was distinctive enough that friends nicknamed him "Junkets" in reference to how he pronounced his own name (2).

SENSE OF HUMOUR Keats was noted by friends as humorous and playful, delighting in wordplay, punning letters, and affectionate teasing of his circle. This lighter side coexisted with the more famously melancholic and intense tone of his mature poetry (2).

RELATIONSHIPS In 1818, Keats moved into Wentworth Place in Hampstead, a house newly built by his friend Charles Armitage Brown, taking the front parlour of Brown's half while a widow, Mrs. Brawne, and her children occupied the other half. There he fell deeply in love with the widow's eldest daughter, Fanny Brawne, then 18, and the couple became secretly engaged around Christmas 1818.

Their feelings were not entirely equally matched at first, and Keats's declining health and lack of money repeatedly frustrated their plans to marry.

Fanny mourned him for years after his death, wearing his engagement ring until she married Louis Lindon in 1833.

The posthumous publication of their love letters in the Victorian era scandalised polite society, which regarded such intimate correspondence as improper for public consumption (4).

Watercolour of Fanny Brawne, 1833.

MONEY AND FAME Keats lived much of his adult life in financial difficulty, relying partly on a legacy from his grandmother and loans from friends after giving up his medical career, a decision that dismayed his guardians. His poetry received little commercial success or critical acclaim during his lifetime, and it was only after his death that his reputation grew, until by the end of the nineteenth century he was regarded as one of the most beloved poets in the English language (5)

FOOD AND DRINK Keats had a genuine passion for claret, which he called "the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in," relishing how it went down "cool and feverless" on summer evenings. His relationship with food was more variable than simply "hearty," ranging from a fondness for game birds to periods of restricted or plain eating during illness. (6)

His frail constitution and eventual illness limited his appetite and stamina in his final years (2).

MUSIC AND ARTS Keats loved music and wrote admiringly of composers in his letters, telling a friend in 1816 that his heart had been "warm'd luxuriously by divine Mozart" and moved by the works of Thomas Arne.

On his deathbed in Rome, his devoted friend Joseph Severn played sonatas by Haydn on a hired pianoforte to soothe the dying poet (2).

POETRY In 1814, at the tender age of 19, John Keats was already sufficiently smitten with poetry to write his first poem, “Imitation of Spenser,” inspired by Edmund Spenser’s "The Faerie Queene." This was a promising start, although being 19 and inspired by "The Faerie Queene" suggests he had rather more enthusiasm for poetry than most people of that age had for anything other than avoiding responsibility.

Keats made his first appearance in print on May 5, 1816, when his friend Leigh Hunt published the sonnet “O Solitude” in The Examiner. After that, the poems came tumbling out. "Endymion" appeared in 1818, his abandoned epic poem "Hyperion" was written between 1818 and 1819, and “Ode to a Nightingale” followed in May 1819. Keats was producing masterpieces at a rate that would make most writers look as if they were waiting for the furniture to arrive.

His final collection, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, was published in July 1820. It included “To Autumn,” now regarded as one of his finest poems and, according to a 1995 BBC poll, the sixth most popular poem ever written. This is a particularly impressive achievement for a poem whose principal subject is, essentially, fruit becoming ripe.

Keats's final poem was “Bright Star,” which he wrote on the blank pages of a volume of Shakespeare. He had a habit of scribbling poems on whatever scraps of paper came to hand and then hiding them around the house, apparently on the principle that poetry was best stored like emergency biscuits. After his death, a friend searched the house to recover these scattered verses, helping preserve the work of a poet whose career had lasted barely six years but whose influence has lasted considerably longer.

LITERATURE Keats developed a passion for reading in his early teenage years and rarely travelled without a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare. His own poetic career, though it lasted barely six years, produced some of the most celebrated works in English literature, including "Endymion," "Hyperion," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To Autumn." (2)

NATURE Keats found deep inspiration in the natural world, most famously composing "Ode to a Nightingale" in the garden at Wentworth Place beside a plum tree on a May evening in 1819, after hearing a nightingale that had nested nearby. "To Autumn" similarly grew out of a walk he took near Winchester on an autumn evening in 1819, capturing the season's quiet abundance (2).

Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath by Joseph Severn, 1845

PETS Keats loved cats and showed a deep empathy for animals generally, once boasting of his capacity to imaginatively enter the mind of a sparrow hopping on his windowsill: "If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence & pick about the gravel" (2).

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Keats was an avid walker. In the summer of 1818, Keats undertook an ambitious walking tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, covering around 600 miles in a month and often rising before dawn to complete 26 miles before noon. The tour included an arduous climb of Ben Nevis, which he likened to "mounting ten St Paul's without the convenience of a staircase," though a throat infection contracted on the Isle of Mull forced him to abandon his original plan of reaching John O'Groats (2).

SCIENCE AND MATHS Keats's scientific grounding came chiefly through his medical training. Although he abandoned the profession, this scientific training informed his precise sensory observations in poetry. His years at Guy's Hospital gave him a working knowledge of anatomy and disease that later allowed him to diagnose his own tuberculosis with unsettling accuracy (7)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Keats developed his own informal philosophy of poetry and suffering, articulated in letters describing concepts such as "negative capability," the poet's capacity to inhabit uncertainty and doubt without an irritable reaching after fact and reason. He also wrote of the world as a "vale of Soul-making," a personal theological reflection on how experience and hardship shape the human spirit (1).

POLITICS Keats was drawn to the liberal and reformist circle of Leigh Hunt, whose radical journal The Examiner was, in Keats's own estimation, a kind of Bible to him. This association with Hunt's politics contributed to the hostile reception of "Endymion" by conservative critics, who dismissed Keats as part of the disparaged "Cockney School" of poetry (8)

SCANDAL The posthumous publication of Keats's intimate love letters to Fanny Brawne scandalised Victorian society, which considered such candid personal correspondence unsuitable for public readership.

During his lifetime, he was also the target of savage reviews branding him a vulgar "Cockney poet," with Lord Byron notoriously and cruelly dismissing him as showing "the drivelling idiotism of the mankin" (2)

MILITARY RECORD Keats had no military record and did not serve in the armed forces

MEDICAL CAREER Keats trained at Edmonton under Thomas Hammond before studying at Guy's Hospital in London. He passed his exams to become a licensed apothecary and surgeon in 1816. However, he gave up medicine in 1818 to dedicate himself to poetry full time, to the dismay of his guardians.

Image by Gemini

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Keats nursed his younger brother Tom devotedly through his fatal battle with tuberculosis, which claimed Tom's life on December 1, 1818, and Keats's own health began to deteriorate markedly soon afterward. His grueling walking tour of Scotland in 1818, his tormented love for Fanny Brawne, and the wounding reviews of "Endymion" are all believed to have worsened his tubercular tendencies.

He also suffered from syphilis, for which he was treated with mercury, a common but toxic remedy of the period.

His medical training meant he recognised his condition immediately upon coughing arterial blood, reportedly declaring, "I know the colour of that blood! It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived by that colour. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die" (9)

HOMES While living with his grandmother, Keats's home was on Lamb Street in Edmonton, Middlesex. In 1818 he moved to the newly built Wentworth Place in Hampstead, owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown, taking the front parlour of Brown's half of the quiet white Regency building, where he lived for the next seventeen months.

His final home, where he died, was 26 Piazza di Spagna in Rome, a pale yellow building run as a boarding house by a formidable landlady, Anna Angeletti (2).

26 Piazza di Spagna in Rome,

TRAVEL Beyond his celebrated 1818 walking tour of Scotland, Keats's most significant journey came in his final months. In September 1820, hoping the warmer climate would help his failing health, he traveled to Italy aboard the ship Maria Crowther, arriving in Rome in November 1820, accompanied by his devoted friend, the portrait painter Joseph Severn (10)

DEATH A month before his death, Keats suffered a violent relapse in Rome and attempted suicide, after which Severn devoted himself to reading aloud and playing soothing music at his bedside.

John Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, clasping Joseph Severn's hand and reportedly saying, "I shall die easy. Don't be frightened. Thank God it has come."

Surgeons who carried out an autopsy afterward found his lungs almost completely destroyed and were amazed he had survived as long as he had.

Keats was buried at the Protestant Cemetery outside Rome, near the Porta San Paolo, with Fanny Brawne's love letters placed in his coffin, and per his final request his tombstone bears no name or date, only the words "Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water" (10)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Keats' life and poetry have inspired numerous adaptations, including the 2009 biographical drama film Bright Star directed by Jane Campion. Based on Andrew Motion's biography of the poet, it focuses on his relationship with Fanny Brawne, tracing their relationship up to his death in Rome.

Kears also appears as a character in Dan Simmons' science fiction novel Hyperion and various historical fiction novels and plays.

His poetry continues to feature widely in television, film, and literary adaptations exploring the Romantic era.

ACHIEVEMENTS Keats produced some of the most enduring masterworks of English poetry, including "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "To Autumn." Despite a writing career that effectively spanned only six years, he is universally recognized as one of the major poets of the Romantic movement.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Encyclopedia of Trivia (3) King's College London (4) Wikipedia (Fanny Brawne) (5) Britannica (6) The Project Gutenberg eBook of Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (7) PubMed: John Keats, poet, patient, physician (8) Wordsworth Grasmere (9) IFLScience (10) PBS NewsHour

Buster Keaton

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NAME Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton

WHAT FAMOUS FOR American silent film comedian, director, and producer nicknamed "The Great Stone Face" for his deadpan, unexpressive facial reactions paired with extraordinary physical comedy, acrobatics, and dangerous visual stunts, He created silent cinema masterpieces such as Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, and The General (1).

BIRTH Buster Keaton was born on October 4, 1895, in Piqua, Kansas, a small town his mother happened to be passing through with her family's traveling show. He was born into a life on the road rather than in any fixed family home. (2)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Keaton's father, Joseph Hallie "Joe" Keaton, ran a traveling show called the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, performing comic sketches on stage while selling patent medicine to the crowd.

His mother, Myra Edith Cutler, was the daughter of the troupe's owner, Frank Cutler, who strongly disapproved of Myra's marriage to Joe.

Buster was the eldest of three children; a younger brother and sister followed.

The family were itinerant vaudeville performers rather than settled homeowners, and young Buster grew up amid greasepaint, boarding houses, and railway timetables rather than a conventional domestic setting. (3)

CHILDHOOD At age three, Keaton began performing with his parents in the act billed as "The Three Keatons." His father would hurl him bodily across the stage, into the orchestra pit, and occasionally into the audience — a suitcase handle was even sewn into his clothing to make him easier to throw. The act, dubbed "The Roughest Act That Was Ever in the History of the Stage," drew repeated accusations of child abuse and occasional police intervention, but Keaton was always found free of bruises or broken bones, since he had learned to fall safely and "land like a cat." He was billed as "The Boy Who Can't Be Damaged."

Keaton later insisted he was never hurt and that the routine was simply a matter of technical precision. He said he initially laughed while being thrown around, but noticing this made the audience laugh less, he adopted the impassive expression that would define his career.

Family lore also held that a cyclone once picked him up and deposited him four blocks away — unharmed.

According to a frequently repeated (though possibly embellished) story, magician Harry Houdini witnessed Keaton tumble down a flight of stairs as a baby without injury and remarked, "That's some buster!" The nickname stuck for life. (4)

Six-year-old Keaton and his parents in a publicity photo for their vaudeville act, The Three Keatons

EDUCATION Keaton's schooling was almost nonexistent because of his nonstop life in vaudeville. Laws banning child performers meant he was occasionally required to attend school while working in New York, but by his own account he attended for only part of a single day.

He said he learned to read and write late in childhood, taught largely by his mother, Myra. His true education came from the stage itself: acrobatics, comic timing, and the mechanics of a well-built gag, honed through nightly performance rather than a classroom. (1) , (6)

CAREER RECORD 1899 Keaton made his first stage appearance in Wilmington, Delaware, joining his parents' act, "The Three Keatons," at around age three.

1917 He met Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios in New York and was hired on the spot after impressing Arbuckle with his natural comic instincts. He appeared in 14 Arbuckle two-reelers through 1920, quickly becoming Arbuckle's gag-writing collaborator as well as co-star.

1920 Keaton's Buster Keaton Productions began releasing his own two-reel comedies, including One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), and Cops (1922), establishing him as a major independent comic filmmaker.

1923–1928, He moved into feature-length films he wrote, directed, and starred in, producing his most celebrated work: Three Ages and Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances and Go West (1925), Battling Butler and The General (1926), College (1927), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The Cameraman (1928).

1928 He signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, surrendering his creative independence — a decision he later called the worst business mistake of his life. His career and personal life declined through the early 1930s amid studio interference and alcoholism, and MGM fired him in February 1933.

1934–1937, He made comeback shorts for Educational Pictures and later starred in a further series for Columbia Pictures (1939–1941), while working as an uncredited gag writer at MGM for the Marx Brothers and others.

1949–1965, Critics and audiences rediscovered him, leading to cameo roles in prestige films such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952), along with numerous television appearances, commercials, and the 1965 experimental short Film, written by Samuel Beckett.

1959 He received an Honorary Academy Award "for his unique talents which brought immortal comedies to the screen."

APPEARANCE Keaton was of slight build, standing about 5 feet 5 inches (165 cm) tall, with dark hair, brown eyes, and a lean, wiry physique built for acrobatics. His face became one of the most recognizable in cinema history precisely because of what it did not show: a fixed, mournful, unblinking stare that earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face." (5)

Keaton in late c.1920s

FASHION Keaton's most enduring sartorial trademark was his flat-crowned "pork pie" hat, which he wore both on and off screen and reportedly made by hand himself, stiffening and shaping ordinary Stetsons to his exact specifications.

On screen, his costumes were typically plain, ill-fitting suits or workwear that emphasized his everyman characters rather than glamour. Off screen, associates recalled him as unpretentious in dress, favoring simple, practical clothing over Hollywood showiness. (6)

CHARACTER Those who knew Keaton described him as quiet, stoic, and intensely private, someone who preferred action to words and let his physical performances speak for him.

He was famously meticulous and inventive, personally devising most of his own gags rather than relying on staff writers — director Leo McCarey once complained that other studios "had no luck" trying to poach Keaton's gag men "because he thought up his best gags himself."

Keaton was also fiercely independent and proud, a trait that led directly to his refusal to return to MGM after being fired in 1933, even when offered reconciliation.

He was quiet, unassuming, and generous to fellow performers, though his personal life suffered under periods of deep depression and heavy drinking during his career setback in the 1930s (2)

SPEAKING VOICE Contemporaries who worked with Keaton in his sound-era pictures and television appearances described his voice as flat, dry, and unhurried, matching his deadpan screen persona; he rarely raised it for effect.

His laconic, understated delivery made him an effective comic foil for more manic co-stars, most notably the boisterous Jimmy Durante, with whom he was teamed in three MGM comedies precisely because their contrasting vocal styles worked so well together.

SENSE OF HUMOUR Keaton's comedy was built on meticulous physical engineering rather than verbal wit — elaborate, dangerous, perfectly timed visual gags executed with total seriousness. His refusal to smile on screen was itself the joke: audiences laughed harder at catastrophe met with total composure.

He also had a sharp satirical edge, using parody throughout his career to mock rival performers and genres; his short The Frozen North (1922) lampooned cowboy star William S. Hart so precisely — down to Hart's trademark glycerin tears — that Hart refused to speak to Keaton for two years.

Off screen, colleagues described a dry, understated wit that mirrored his screen persona rather than a boisterous, joke-telling personality.

RELATIONSHIPS Keaton married three times. In 1921 he wed Natalie Talmadge, sister of stars Norma and Constance Talmadge, and the couple had two sons, Joseph and Robert. The marriage grew troubled through the late 1920s amid his professional decline and drinking, and Natalie divorced him in 1932, reportedly changing their sons' surname to Talmadge afterward.

Keaton with Natalie Talmadge and Joseph in 1922

In 1933, in the midst of alcoholism and personal crisis, he impulsively married nurse Mae Scriven in Mexico; the marriage was volatile and ended in divorce by 1936.

In 1940 Keaton married Eleanor Norris, an MGM contract dancer 23 years his junior, and the marriage proved to be his happiest and most stable. Eleanor helped him control his drinking, limiting him to two beers before dinner, and remained his devoted companion, business partner, and occasional co-star until his death in 1966. (7)

MONEY AND FAME At his commercial peak in the 1920s, Keaton ran his own production company and commanded significant creative and financial control over his films, but his fortunes collapsed after he signed away his independence to MGM in 1928 — a decision he called the worst of his life.

The Great Depression, his divorce, and heavy studio interference compounded his financial troubles through the 1930s, when he worked cheap two-reelers and even as an uncredited gag writer to make ends meet.

His fame endured through television revivals, commercials for brands including Alka-Seltzer and Budweiser, and a critical rediscovery beginning around 1949, culminating in his 1959 Honorary Academy Award — recognition that arrived decades after his commercial peak but restored the fame that had once made him one of cinema's biggest stars. (8)

FOOD AND DRINK Keaton's most consequential relationship with drink was destructive rather than pleasurable: during his professional decline at MGM in the early 1930s, amid a failing marriage and studio frustration, he descended into serious alcoholism, once ending up hospitalized in a straitjacket. His third wife, Eleanor Norris, is credited with saving his health by limiting him to two beers before dinner each evening for the rest of his life after their 1940 marriage, a discipline he maintained for the following 26 years. (7)

MOVIE CAREER Buster Keaton was one of the supreme figures of silent cinema, a man who could make catastrophe look like an afternoon errand. He directed or co-directed most of his great silent features and performed his own stunts, often with the sort of confidence that would nowadays cause a studio insurance department to burst into flames. In one famous sequence, a two-ton house facade falls directly toward him, and Keaton survives because he happens to be standing exactly where an open window frame lands around him. It is the sort of stunt that makes you wonder whether the first draft of the script simply read, “Buster nearly dies, but with excellent comic timing.”

Keaton was born into show business and made his stage debut as a child in his parents' vaudeville act. He became a star performer, famous for his remarkably deadpan expression as he was thrown, knocked and generally abused around the stage. The expression was central to his screen persona: while the world collapsed around him, Keaton maintained the calm, slightly puzzled face of a man who had just discovered that the universe had misplaced his receipt.

In 1917, Keaton left vaudeville for the movies and made his screen debut alongside Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in the two-reel comedy The Butcher Boy. The partnership proved an important starting point for his film career, but Keaton quickly developed ambitions beyond simply appearing in front of the camera.

By 1920, he had established his own independent production unit under producer Joseph M. Schenck. Keaton wrote, directed and starred in a series of increasingly inventive short films, including One Week and The Playhouse. These films allowed him to refine the distinctive mixture of physical comedy, mechanical ingenuity and apparent indifference to mortal danger that became his trademark.

Between 1923 and 1928, Keaton moved into feature-length silent films and produced a remarkable run of comedies. Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr. demonstrated just how much could be accomplished with visual storytelling when dialogue was unavailable to get in the way. The General, in particular, is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of silent cinema, although audiences at the time were rather less enthusiastic about it. This is one of the recurring annoyances of history: posterity sometimes has considerably better taste than the people actually buying the tickets.

Keaton's greatest problem arrived in 1928, when he signed a restrictive contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The deal gave the studio much greater control over his work and effectively ended the artistic independence that had defined his best films. Keaton later described signing the contract as the single worst mistake of his life. For an artist who had built his career around controlling every detail of a carefully constructed comic disaster, being told what to do by a large studio was rather like asking a tightrope walker to share the rope with a committee.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Keaton's career went into steep decline. He struggled with severe alcoholism and personal problems and was eventually fired by MGM in 1933. He continued working, but largely away from the starring roles and creative control that had made him famous. He wrote gags for Columbia Pictures shorts, contributed uncredited script work and appeared in smaller film parts. The man who had once directed masterpieces was now often being asked to supply jokes for other people's movies, which is a particularly Hollywood form of humiliation.

From the 1950s onward, however, Keaton experienced a remarkable revival. Television appearances, stage revivals and increasingly prominent film roles introduced him to a new generation. He appeared in Sunset Boulevard in 1950 and Around the World in 80 Days in 1956, while commercials and television helped turn the once-forgotten silent comedian back into a familiar face.

Keaton's reputation continued to grow as critics and filmmakers rediscovered the sophistication of his work. In 1959, he received an Academy Honorary Award, formal recognition of a career that had gone from childhood vaudeville performer to silent-film superstar, through Hollywood decline and personal disaster, and finally to renewed admiration. His best films endured because the jokes never depended entirely on their era. A man walking calmly toward a two-ton building while it falls on him remains funny, provided you are watching from a safe distance.

MUSIC AND ARTS Keaton was a genuine musician as a byproduct of his vaudeville upbringing: he learned singing, dancing, piano, and ukulele as a child, taught by the professional musicians who worked alongside his family on the circuit. Tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson reportedly taught him dance steps decades before doing the same for a young Shirley Temple, and Harry Houdini, a family friend from the medicine-show days, taught him card tricks and magic. He played the ukulele right-handed despite writing left-handed, a quirk traced to a childhood injury that crushed his right index finger at age three. (9)

LITERATURE There is little record of Keaton as a devoted reader or man of letters; his creative energies were channeled almost entirely into visual and physical storytelling rather than prose.

In 1960, he published his autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, detailing his vaudeville youth and Hollywood silent era.

In 1965 Irish playwright Samuel Beckett specifically requested Keaton for the lead role in his only screenplay, the experimental 1965 short Film — a mark of high literary respect for Keaton's purely visual expressiveness, even though Keaton reportedly found Beckett's avant-garde approach puzzling.

NATURE Keaton's films frequently placed his characters against dramatic natural backdrops and forces — rivers, waterfalls, cyclones, avalanches of boulders — used as engines of physical comedy rather than settings for quiet contemplation. The most famous example is the climax of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), in which the facade of a two-story building collapses around him, and The General (1926), filmed extensively outdoors on real Oregon locations with genuine trains and landscapes standing in for the Civil War South.

PETS Keaton was, by his own family's account, "famously doggy" and kept dogs throughout his life, with a particular fondness for St. Bernards. His most celebrated companion was Elmer, a 170-pound long-haired St. Bernard who lived with him during his Hollywood heyday at MGM in the late 1920s — named, Keaton said, after a character he had played in Free and Easy.

Elmer became something of a studio legend: he had his own unofficial "expense account," intimidating studio butchers into handing over the best steaks and charging them to Keaton, and reportedly ate three lunches a day rotating between Keaton's bungalow, Marion Davies's set, and the MGM executives.

Elmer was also famously devoted, in his own aloof way, to Greta Garbo, silently escorting her on her solitary strolls around the studio lot but growling and stepping out of reach whenever she tried to pet him — leading Keaton to joke, "Elmer isn't looking for love. He wants prestige."

"Elmer" was something of a recurring name rather than a single dog, as Keaton kept several St. Bernards over the years and reused it much as he reused character names in his films.

Other dogs in his life included Captain, an ex-police dog given to him and his first wife, Natalie Talmadge, as a wedding gift. His third wife, Eleanor Keaton, carried on the tradition after his death, breeding St. Bernards descended from one of Buster's own dogs, some of which were later trained by Eleanor for the Beethoven film franchise. (10)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Baseball was Keaton's genuine passion. He organized games between takes on his film sets and, according to Hollywood legend, screened prospective employees with an application asking only two questions: "Are you a good actor?" and "Are you a good baseball player?" A "yes" to either was enough to get hired. He also led the comedians' team every year in Hollywood's charity baseball game for Mount Sinai Hospital during the 1930s.

Because of the childhood injury to his right index finger, Keaton threw right-handed but batted left-handed at baseball, a split-handedness that also carried into his ukulele playing.

Card games were another lifelong pursuit, a skill sharpened by Houdini's early tutoring; he reportedly died peacefully in his sleep shortly after playing cards with his wife. (5)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Keaton had no formal scientific training, but he possessed a remarkable intuitive engineering mind, applied almost entirely to the mechanics of comedy and stunt work. On his first day working with Roscoe Arbuckle in 1917, he borrowed a movie camera, took it back to his hotel room, and had completely dismantled and reassembled it by morning simply to understand how it worked — a hands-on curiosity that fed directly into his later gift for engineering elaborate, physics-defying visual gags, from collapsing buildings to speeding locomotives.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Secular in outlook, Keaton possessed an almost stoic, fatalistic approach to life that was mirrored in his screen persona: a small man confronting an unfeeling, unpredictable universe with determination and practical problem-solving.

POLITICS Largely apolitical throughout his life, Keaton's most notable brush with a politically charged subject came through his art rather than activism: The General (1926) dramatized an actual Civil War incident, and some contemporary reviewers at the time questioned the propriety of building a comedy around the war, though Keaton's intent was spectacle and historical fidelity rather than political statement.

SCANDAL Keaton's most serious personal scandal was self-inflicted: his heavy drinking during his marriage to Natalie Talmadge and his years at MGM in the early 1930s, which included visibly intoxicated behavior on set and off, culminating in hospitalization.

He was also embroiled by association in one of Hollywood's most notorious scandals when his close friend and mentor Roscoe Arbuckle was accused (and later acquitted) of causing the death of actress Virginia Rappe in 1921; Keaton was one of the few colleagues, alongside Charlie Chaplin, who publicly defended Arbuckle's character throughout the ordeal.

His hasty, ill-considered 1933 marriage to Mae Scriven, contracted in Mexico during a period of personal crisis, was also widely reported as a mistake he made while drinking heavily.

MILITARY RECORD Keaton was drafted into the United States Army in July 1918 and assigned to the 159th Infantry Regiment, 40th Infantry Division — nicknamed the "Sunshine Division." After brief training at Camp Kearny near San Diego, he sailed for Liverpool aboard the HMS Otranto and was stationed in France with the American Expeditionary Forces, though his unit saw no combat action.

Buster Keaton's draft card; "motion picture performer" employed by Roscoe Arbuckle

He organized a group of fellow soldiers into an entertainment troupe called "The Sunshine Players," performing vaudeville routines in barracks and YMCA huts.

During his service he developed a severe ear infection from sleeping near drafty barrack floors, which left him permanently deaf in one ear. He returned to the United States in February 1919 and was discharged as a corporal two months later.

During the Second World War, he served again, as a private in the 1st Evacuation Regiment of the California State Guard. (11)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Keaton's career depended on extraordinary physical fitness and pain tolerance; he performed nearly all his own stunts, insisting "stuntmen don't get laughs," and suffered numerous injuries over his career, including a broken neck during the filming of Sherlock Jr. in 1924 he did not realize he had sustained until an X-ray years later revealed it.

His health suffered seriously during his years of alcoholism in the early 1930s.

Late in life, filming A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1965) in Spain, his declining health forced director Richard Lester to use a stand-in for distance running shots and conserve Keaton's strength for major stunts.

He was diagnosed with lung cancer, though he was reportedly not told the diagnosis and believed he was recovering from bronchitis until close to the end. (12)

HOMES At the height of his fame in the 1920s, Keaton built and owned an opulent 20-room Italian Renaissance-style mansion in Beverly Hills, just three blocks behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, which he wryly joked about, saying, "I took a lot of pratfalls to build that dump." He lost the house amid his financial and personal decline in the early 1930s; it was later purchased by actor James Mason, who discovered numerous cans of Keaton's long-lost films stored in the property, including the classic short The Boat.

Keaton spent his final years living more modestly in Woodland Hills, California, with his third wife, Eleanor. (8)

TRAVEL Keaton's life was itinerant from birth, born mid-journey to a traveling medicine show, and travel remained a constant throughout his career. He crossed the Atlantic for military service in France during the First World War, made films in Paris and England during the mid-1930s to satisfy European production requirements, and later traveled extensively for location shooting and personal appearances, including Mexico, Italy, Spain, and Canada, where he starred in the National Film Board production The Railrodder (1965), traveling the length of the country by handcar. He also appeared at the Venice Film Festival in 1965.

DEATH Buster Keaton died on February 1, 1966, at his home in Woodland Hills, California, at age 70. The cause was lung cancer, though his doctors and wife kept the terminal nature of his diagnosis from him, telling him he was recovering from bronchitis. He reportedly died peacefully in his sleep shortly after playing a card game with his wife, Eleanor.

He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills.

His final on-screen appearance came in The Scribe, a Canadian workplace safety film completed shortly before his death. (1) , (26)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Beyond his own vast filmography of shorts and features, Keaton has been the subject of extensive documentary and dramatic treatment, including Kevin Brownlow's Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow (1987) and Peter Bogdanovich's The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018).

A fictionalized 1957 biopic, The Buster Keaton Story, starred Donald O'Connor, and Keaton himself was surprised on the NBC program This Is Your Life that same year.

He appeared as a guest star across numerous 1950s and 1960s television programs, including The Twilight Zone episode "Once Upon a Time" (1961), The Donna Reed Show, and The Ed Sullivan Show.

ACHIEVEMENTS Keaton directed, wrote, and starred in a run of features between 1923 and 1928 now regarded among the greatest in cinema history, with The General, Sherlock Jr., and The Navigator all placed on the American Film Institute's "100 Years... 100 Laughs" list.

He received an Honorary Academy Award in 1959 "for his unique talents which brought immortal comedies to the screen,"

Two stars bear his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for motion pictures and television (

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Biography.com (3) Famous Clowns (4) PBS American Masters (5) IMDb (6) Culturedarm (7) Closer Weekly (8) Haute Living (9) Namu Wiki (10) Vintag.es (11) The Doughboy Center (12) StoryShift

Danny Kaye

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NAME Danny Kaye, born David Daniel Kaminsky. He performed early in his career under the stage names Danny Kolbin and Red (of the duo "Red and Blackie") before settling on "Danny Kaye" in 1933. (1), (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Danny Kaye was an American actor, singer, dancer and comedian best remembered for his manic pantomime, rapid-fire "patter songs" and tongue-twisting routines. He starred in classic films including White Christmas (1954) and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), as well as Hans Christian Andersen (1952) and The Court Jester (1956). Off screen he was UNICEF's first celebrity Goodwill Ambassador, once flying a jet to 65 cities in five days to publicise the charity. (3)

BIRTH He was born David Daniel Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, on January 18, 1911, though for most of his life he and the public believed the year to be 1913 — a discrepancy his daughter Dena only corrected publicly in 2013.

FAMILY BACKGROUND Kaye was the youngest of three sons born to Jacob and Clara (née Nemerovsky) Kaminsky, Russian Jewish immigrants from Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipro, Ukraine). His parents and two older brothers, Larry and Mac, had emigrated two years before his birth, making Danny the only son born on American soil. His father worked as a tailor after arriving in New York.

CHILDHOOD Kaye grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, attending Public School 149, which was later renamed in his honour, where he entertained classmates with songs and jokes.

His mother died when he was in his early teens, a loss that hit him hard, and not long afterward he and a friend, Louis Eilson, ran away to Florida, singing for money to get by.

As a boy he dreamed of becoming a surgeon, but his family could not afford to send him to medical school.

EDUCATION He attended Public School 149 in Brooklyn and later entered Thomas Jefferson High School, though he dropped out before graduating to pursue a career in entertainment and odd jobs.

He received no formal musical education or dramatic training, learning to perform and sing entirely by ear and practice (4)

His real education came on the "Borscht Belt" — the Catskill Mountain resorts — where he learned his craft as a tummler, or all-purpose entertainer, from around age 13 or 14. (5),

CAREER RECORD 1933 Kaye adopted the stage name "Danny Kaye" while touring with the vaudeville dance act the Three Terpsichoreans, later joining the revue La Vie Parée on a six-month tour of Asia, where his pantomime style developed out of the language barrier.

1937 He signed with New York's Educational Pictures, appearing in a series of low-budget two-reel comedy shorts as a fast-talking Russian character, ending when the studio folded in 1938.

1939 His Broadway debut came in The Straw Hat Revue, followed in 1941 by his star-making turn in Lady in the Dark, in which his rendition of "Tschaikowsky (and Other Russians)" — naming more than 50 Russian composers in under 40 seconds — made him a sensation.

1944 He made his feature film debut in Samuel Goldwyn's Up in Arms, beginning a run of hit Technicolor musical comedies through the 1940s and 1950s, including Wonder Man (1945), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), White Christmas (1954) and The Court Jester (1956).

1954 He became UNICEF's first Goodwill Ambassador, a role he held until his death, combining humanitarian touring with entertainment specials such as The Secret Life of Danny Kaye (1956).

1963-1967 He hosted the top-rated variety series The Danny Kaye Show on CBS, which won four Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award.

1976 He owned a share of the newly formed Seattle Mariners baseball franchise alongside business partner Lester Smith, a stake he held until 1985.

APPEARANCE Kaye was tall and lean, standing around 5 feet 11 inches, with a rubbery, expressive face that could shift instantly from manic energy to gentle warmth. He had naturally red hair, which Samuel Goldwyn had bleached blond for his early Technicolor films because it photographed better, and a prominent nose that Goldwyn once wanted him to have altered — a request Kaye refused. (5)

Danny Kaye

FASHION On screen Kaye's look varied wildly with his roles, from the medieval motley of The Court Jester to the sharp suits of Phil Davis in White Christmas, but off screen he favoured comfortable, casual clothing suited to his hobbies of flying and cooking rather than Hollywood glamour. Contemporary profiles note he was more at home in an apron in his custom Chinese kitchen than in formal attire. (6)

CHARACTER Those who knew him described Kaye as restlessly energetic and endlessly curious, a man who threw himself completely into whatever interested him, whether cooking, flying or conducting an orchestra.

He could also be private and complex; his wife and closest collaborator, Sylvia Fine, once described a hidden alter-ego called "Kaplan," a pompous, illiterate character Kaye performed only for family and friends, sometimes staying "on Kaplan for two hours." (1)

SPEAKING VOICE Kaye's speaking and singing voice was famous for its elastic range and speed, capable of rattling off tongue-twisting lyrics at breakneck pace without seemingly pausing for breath, most notably in "Tschaikowsky (and Other Russians)."

Despite claiming he could not read music, he was said to have perfect pitch, and his vocal delivery could pivot in a moment from gibberish scat and mock-foreign dialects to tender, sincere balladry.

SENSE OF HUMOUR His comedy relied on physical pantomime, absurd facial contortions and verbal dexterity rather than scripted one-liners, a style he first developed while performing for non-English-speaking audiences in Asia in the 1930s.

He also delighted in private, semi-improvised comic routines, such as the "Kaplan" character, and was known for genuinely improvising much of his stage material even though his wife wrote the bulk of his songs.

RELATIONSHIPS Kaye married Sylvia Fine, a pianist, composer and lyricist he met at a 1939 audition, on January 3, 1940, in Fort Lauderdale; she went on to write many of his signature songs and manage much of his career.

The marriage endured until his death, aside from a separation in 1947 and 1948 during which Kaye was involved with actress Eve Arden, and the couple had one daughter, Dena, born in 1946, who became a journalist.

Sylvia and Kaye, 1945

MONEY AND FAME By the mid-1940s Kaye was one of Hollywood's biggest box-office draws, headlining a run of lucrative Technicolor musical comedies for Samuel Goldwyn and later Paramount, and he expanded his fortune through business ventures including Kaye-Smith Enterprises, a chain of Pacific Northwest radio stations he co-founded with Lester Smith in 1958.

His fame extended into humanitarian circles through UNICEF, and in 1976 his business group paid $6.2 million for the American League expansion franchise that became the Seattle Mariners. (7)

FOOD AND DRINK Kaye was a celebrated amateur chef with a particular passion for Chinese cuisine, studying for years under San Francisco restaurateurs Johnny Kan and Cecilia Chiang and eventually installing a custom Chinese kitchen — complete with a multi-burner wok stove and circulating ice water cooling system — in the alley behind his Beverly Hills home, which he nicknamed "Ying's Thing."

He hosted lavish multi-course dinners there for guests including Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant and Luciano Pavarotti, and chefs who trained him signed him an honorary "Meilleur Ouvrier de France" diploma, though he was not eligible for the official French professional title. (6), (8)

MOVIE CAREER Danny Kaye made his name in a run of hugely successful Technicolor comedies during the 1940s and 1950s, a period when Hollywood seemed to believe that every mild-mannered fellow with a funny voice and an alarming tendency to get into trouble deserved his own Technicolor epic. Kaye was particularly good at playing ordinary dreamers who found themselves deposited, usually with little warning and considerably less preparation, into extraordinary situations.

His film career took off with Up in Arms (1944), followed by Wonder Man (1945) and The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), which established him as one of Hollywood's most distinctive comic performers. In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), he played the timid Walter Mitty, whose spectacular daydreams are rather more exciting than his actual life. The Inspector General (1949) gave him another chance to turn confusion into an art form, while Hans Christian Andersen (1952) allowed him to combine comedy, music and dance in a much more sentimental setting.

Then came White Christmas (1954), in which Kaye teamed with Bing Crosby in one of the most enduring musical comedies of the era, and The Court Jester (1955), arguably his great comic showcase. As the hapless Hubert Hawkins, Kaye rattled through tongue-twisters, disguises, swordplay and general medieval mayhem with the sort of confidence that suggests he had been born knowing precisely how to make a fool of himself in several languages.

Kaye's appeal went beyond slapstick. He was an accomplished singer, dancer and mimic, and his ability to switch rapidly between characters, accents and absurd verbal routines made him unusually versatile. His films often gave him elaborate comic set pieces, but he could also carry a musical number or a more tender scene without making it feel like a detour from the comedy. By the end of the 1950s, he had become one of America's best-known entertainers, equally at home in movies, on television and on the stage.

MUSIC AND ARTS Beyond acting, Kaye had a substantial recording career, scoring hits with songs including "Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo)" and "The Woody Woodpecker Song" with the Andrews Sisters, and "Wonderful Copenhagen" and "Thumbelina" from Hans Christian Andersen.

He frequently guest-conducted elite orchestras—including the New York Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, and Philadelphia Orchestra—combining serious musical direction with comedic antics like conducting with flyswatters or flyswatter batons. He did this despite being unable to read music, learning entire scores by ear and raising more than five million dollars for musicians' pension funds through his comic charity concerts. (4)

LITERATURE He loved reading classic literature, children's fables, and biographies, and he authored and narrated several children's storybook records, including collections of Hans Christian Andersen tales.

Kaye brought several literary and folkloric figures to the screen, most notably playing the title role in Hans Christian Andersen (1952) and Walter Mitty, the daydreaming clerk from James Thurber's short story, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947). He also appeared as Captain Hook in a 1976 television musical version of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and voiced Geppetto from Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio the same year. (1), (18)

NATURE Danny Kaye’s best-documented connection with the outdoors was aviation. A licensed pilot and Learjet-qualified flyer, he travelled widely on behalf of UNICEF and flew a jet to 65 cities in the United States and Canada in five days to publicise its Halloween fundraising campaign. (4)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Alongside cooking and flying, Kaye was a lifelong, passionate baseball fan devoted to the Brooklyn (later Los Angeles) Dodgers, possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of the game and reputedly excelling as an amateur second baseman. He recorded the novelty hit "D-O-D-G-E-R-S Song (Oh, Really? No, O'Malley!)" during the 1962 pennant race and later became a part-owner of the Seattle Mariners. (7)

He was also an enthusiastic golfer before shifting his energy toward flying in 1959.

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kaye's boyhood ambition had been to become a surgeon, and in adulthood he was honoured as an honorary member of both the American College of Surgeons and the American Academy of Pediatrics in recognition of his charitable work and interest in medicine. He maintained a fascination with medicine and surgical procedures, often observing complex surgeries in operating rooms through his friendships with leading surgeons.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Proud of his Jewish heritage, Kaye frequently visited Israel on solidarity missions and visited wounded soldiers in hospitals during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, also conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra several times for charity. Beyond this expression of cultural and religious identity, Kaye practiced a secular humanist worldview centered on global goodwill, tolerance, and direct humanitarian action for those in need. (3)

POLITICS Danny Kaye was a Democrat who supported Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign. He also joined the Committee for the First Amendment, a Hollywood organisation formed to oppose the House Un-American Activities Committee and defend freedom of expression. Most of his public service, however, was non-partisan: from 1954 until his death he served as UNICEF’s first Goodwill Ambassador, advocating for children regardless of race, nationality, colour or faith. (9)

Kaye's humanitarian profile brought him into governmental circles; he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan in June 1987, accepted on his behalf by his daughter Dena.

SCANDAL He maintained a remarkably clean public record throughout his long career, avoiding major personal scandals or tabloid controversy.

MILITARY RECORD Kaye did not serve in the armed forces during World War II, but he was active in supporting the war effort through entertainment, performing extensively for American servicemen at home and abroad in USO-style tours during the early-to-mid 1940s. He continued touring military bases and hospitals during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. (3)

Danny Kaye on USO tour at Sasebo, Japan, October 25, 1945.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Danny Kaye had a back problem that led to his being classified 4-F and therefore rejected for wartime military service during World War II.

He continued performing through injuries, including finishing a run of the musical Two by Two on stage in a wheelchair after tearing a leg ligament.

In 1983, Kaye underwent quadruple bypass heart surgery, during which he received a blood transfusion that left him infected with hepatitis C, a fact not diagnosed until years later. He largely recovered and continued public appearances, but the hepatitis caused intestinal bleeding that led to his final hospitalisation in 1987. (10) (11)

HOMES Kaye lived for many years in Beverly Hills, California, in a home famous for the elaborate Chinese kitchen and eight-seat restaurant he built in the alley behind it, nicknamed "Ying's Thing." He was devoted enough to it that, while filming The Madwoman of Chaillot in France, he once flew home simply to eat dinner there. (6), (8)

TRAVEL Kaye travelled extensively throughout his life, first touring Asia with a vaudeville troupe in 1934 — an experience that shaped his pantomime style — and later logging roughly 50,000 miles across ten countries during a celebrated UNICEF tour documented in The Secret Life of Danny Kaye (1956).

As an accomplished pilot, he once flew a Learjet to 65 cities in the United States and Canada in five days to promote UNICEF's Halloween "Trick-or-Treat" campaign, a feat that earned him an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. (4)

DEATH Danny Kaye died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in the early hours of March 3, 1987, at the age of 76. The cause was heart failure and internal bleeding brought on by hepatitis C, contracted from the contaminated blood transfusion he received during his 1983 bypass surgery.

At his request there was no funeral service; his body was cremated and his ashes interred in the foundation of a bench at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, decorated with engravings of a baseball, an aircraft, a piano and a chef's toque. (10), (12)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Beyond his classic motion pictures, he was a regular guest on major television specials, talk shows, and news programs, as well as the subject of numerous documentaries regarding his humanitarian efforts for UNICEF.

ACHIEVEMENTS Awarded two Academy Awards (an Honorary Oscar in 1955 and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1982).

Won an Academy Award for Assignment Children (1955), a short documentary highlighting UNICEF's global health initiatives.

Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, by President Ronald Reagan in 1987.

Named the Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1986.

Honored as UNICEF's first Goodwill Ambassador in 1954, serving faithfully in the post for 33 years until his death.

Set a Guinness World Record by piloting a private Learjet to 65 cities in the United States and Canada in five days to greet volunteers and promote the Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF campaign.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Spotify Artist Bio (3) UNICEF USA (4) Jewish Virtual Library (5) IMDb (6) Silver Scenes Blog (7) Baseball-Reference (8) Forever A Pleasure (9) Library of Congress (10) New York Times (11) Los Angeles Times (12) Find a Grave

Franz Kafka

2016-04-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Franz Kafka

WHAT FAMOUS FOR The Czech-born German author of The Trial and The Metamorphosis gave us the word ‘Kafkaesque’, which means something that has ‘a complex, bizarre, or illogical quality’. Before his death, he ordered his close friend, Max Brod, to destroy all his unpublished manuscripts, but Brod ignored the instructions, ensuring Kafka's work reached a global audience. (1) (2)

BIRTH Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, near Prague’s Old Town Square. At the time Prague was a multilingual city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: predominantly Czech-speaking, with a substantial German-speaking minority and a Jewish population divided by class, language and degree of religious observance. Kafka’s birthplace, in the former House at the Tower near the Church of St. Nicholas, no longer survives in its original form, but a plaque marks the site. (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Kafka was the eldest surviving child of Hermann Kafka, a merchant, and Julie Kafka, née Löwy. His father had risen from very poor rural circumstances: Hermann’s father had been a kosher butcher in the south Bohemian village of Osek. Julie came from the better-established Löwy family, whose relatives included merchants, doctors and Talmudic scholars. Hermann and Julie were ambitious, assimilated Jews who made a comfortable place for themselves in Prague’s German-speaking middle class. (4)

CHILDHOOD Kafka had two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, both of whom died in infancy. He then grew up with three sisters: Gabriele, known as Elli; Valerie, known as Valli; and Ottilie, known as Ottla. The youngest, Ottla, became the sibling closest to him.

Kafka at about ten with his sisters Valli (left) and Elli (center)

Kafka later portrayed his father as dominating, loud and physically imposing, while he saw himself as frail and inadequate by comparison. His mother worked long hours in the family business, so the children were often cared for by governesses and servants. (4)

His relationship with Hermann Kafka became one of the central dramas of his inner life. In his never-delivered 1919 Letter to His Father, Kafka accused Hermann of humiliating and intimidating him, while also recognizing the father’s energy and hard-won commercial success. The emotional truth of the letter should not be treated as a complete impartial family history, but it reveals how deeply Kafka understood himself as unequal to his father’s forceful personality. (5)

EDUCATION Kafka attended the German Boys’ Elementary School in Prague from 1889 to 1893 and then the rigorous Old Town German Grammar School, the Altstädter Staatsgymnasium. He did well academically and passed his final examinations in 1901. His schooling was conducted in German, though he also knew Czech and later had some French and English. He studied in an intellectual environment that valued German culture while existing within a city where Czech national feeling was increasingly strong. (6) (7)

In 1901 Kafka enrolled at Prague’s German Charles-Ferdinand University, now Charles University. He initially chose chemistry, but switched to law after two weeks, a practical move that pleased his father and promised reliable employment. Law also left scope for classes in philosophy, German literature and art history. Kafka received his Doctor of Law degree on June 18, 1906, then completed the compulsory year of unpaid legal training in Prague’s civil and criminal courts. (8)

CAREER RECORD 1906–1907 Worked as an unpaid clerk at the civil and criminal courts in Prague to fulfill his mandatory post-degree legal practice.

1907–1908 Employed at the Assicurazioni Generali, an Italian insurance company, working long, grueling night shifts that left him with little energy or time for writing.

1908–1922 Joined the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His duties involved investigating industrial injuries, assessing risk classifications, and drafting legal reports. He was a meticulous and highly respected employee, earned several promotions, and worked there until his early retirement due to illness in July 1922

1912 Kafka wrote The Judgment in a single night and soon began The Metamorphosis. He published stories and sketches in literary journals, but writing remained a private, precarious vocation rather than a commercially successful career.

APPEARANCE Kafka was tall, slim and dark-haired, with prominent cheekbones, large ears and an intense, watchful gaze. Surviving photographs show an elegant young man, particularly in the famous 1910 portrait taken in Prague. He was acutely self-critical about his body and often described himself in letters and diaries as weak, unattractive or physically deficient. His self-image was not necessarily shared by others. Friends remembered him as strikingly good-looking, intelligent and composed. (9)

Kafka in 1910

FASHION Kafka dressed conventionally and carefully for a professional man of his era. Photographs commonly show him in a dark suit, white shirt, tie and high collar. He neither cultivated bohemian eccentricity nor used clothes to advertise the fact that he was a writer. As an insurance official, he had to appear respectable; his restrained, neat clothing helped him pass in the bourgeois Prague world from which his fiction so often seemed inwardly estranged. (9)

CHARACTER Kafka’s diaries and letters can make him appear relentlessly self-disparaging, hypersensitive and tortured. He repeatedly feared that others found him mentally and physically repulsive, and he doubted his ability to sustain ordinary adult commitments such as marriage, domestic life and professional advancement. Yet this is only one side of the man. Max Brod and other friends found him intelligent, truthful, courteous and capable of close companionship. He could be quiet and cautious, but he was not merely the helpless victim of the mythology that later developed around his name. (9)

SPEAKING VOICE Kafka spoke German as his principal literary and social language, though he could also converse in Czech. Contemporary accounts suggest that his manner of speaking was soft, precise and restrained rather than rhetorical or theatrical. His writing voice can seem coldly exact, but friends emphasized his ability to make a point with exceptional economy. (4)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Despite the dark themes of his fiction, Kafka possessed a strong, often darkly comic sense of humour. His friend Max Brod recalled that, while reading the opening chapter of The Trial aloud to a small circle of friends, Kafka laughed so hard that at times he could not continue. Kafka himself wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer: “I can also laugh … I am even known as a big laugher.”

His humour was usually ironic, grotesque and self-mocking rather than cheerful in any conventional sense. (10) (11)

RELATIONSHIPS Kafka never married, although he had several important romantic relationships. The most famous was with Felice Bauer, a Berlin office worker whom he met at Max Brod’s home in Prague on August 13, 1912. Their relationship was largely conducted through letters. Kafka sent Felice nearly 600 letters and postcards between 1912 and 1917, while their personal meetings were relatively rare.

Kafka and Felice became engaged twice, in 1914 and again in 1917, but each engagement ended. His fears about marriage were entwined with his devotion to writing and his need for solitude. The second engagement collapsed after his tuberculosis diagnosis. The surviving correspondence is unusually revealing because Felice preserved his letters, while her replies to him did not survive. (12)

Felice Bauer and Franz Kafka

He also had relationships with the Czech journalist and translator Milena Jesenská and, in his final year, Dora Diamant, a Polish-born Jewish woman he met in 1923. Kafka and Dora lived together in Berlin for a time. When his illness became severe, she helped care for him and remained deeply important to him until his death. (13)

MONEY AND FAME Kafka earned a respectable professional salary as an insurance official and remained financially tied to the security of middle-class employment for most of his adult life. He did not live in poverty, but he was never rich and did not become famous during his lifetime. A small number of his stories appeared in journals and books, often in limited editions. The international Kafka industry—translations, adaptations, university courses, museums and tourism—developed after his death. (14)

FOOD AND DRINK Kafka was interested in health reform and followed a largely vegetarian diet from around 1910. He drank little alcohol, did not smoke and was preoccupied with digestion and physical wellbeing.

He experimented with “Fletcherizing,” the then-fashionable practice of chewing food excessively before swallowing. This habit caused tension at the family table and seems to have fitted his desire to bring strict discipline to a body he felt often betrayed him.

Max Brod recalled a famous anecdote in which Kafka addressed fish in a Berlin aquarium: “Now at least I can look at you in peace. I don’t eat you anymore.” The story may have been polished in retelling, but it captures both Kafka’s vegetarianism and his capacity for deadpan humour. (15) (16)

MUSIC AND ARTS Kafka attended theatres, cabarets, lectures and concerts in Prague, a city rich in German, Czech and Jewish cultural life. He had a particular interest in Yiddish theatre after seeing a troupe from Lemberg, now Lviv, perform in Prague in 1911. He befriended the actor Yitzhak Löwy and defended the troupe against condescension from assimilated Jewish audiences. The experience sharpened his interest in Jewish identity, performance and the precarious status of artists. (4)

WRITING CAREER Franz Kafka had the slightly unfortunate arrangement of being a writer who needed a day job. He wrote in German, usually late at night, after spending the day working at an insurance office, which is not an especially promising recipe for literary genius but apparently worked for him. He was also afflicted with such severe self-doubt and perfectionism that he regularly abandoned large projects when they failed to meet the exacting standards of the man who had written them. Several of his novels were left unfinished, as if even Kafka's books could not quite bring themselves to reach the end.

During his lifetime, Kafka published only a modest amount of work, including The Judgment in 1913, The Metamorphosis in 1915 and In the Penal Colony in 1919. His three major novels—The Trial, The Castle and Amerika—were still unfinished when he died. They were published after his death in 1925, 1926 and 1927 respectively, and went on to become some of the defining works of modern literature. Kafka, meanwhile, had apparently intended that none of this should happen.

In the final months of his life, Kafka asked his closest friend, Max Brod, who was also his literary executor, to burn his unpublished notebooks, manuscripts, letters and sketches without reading them. This was an unusually drastic form of editing, but Kafka was quite clear about it. Brod ignored the instruction.

Instead, he preserved the papers, edited the unfinished novels and arranged for their publication. Thanks to Brod's disobedience, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika survived and became central works of modern literature. Whether Kafka secretly expected Brod to ignore him has been debated ever since. Perhaps he knew his friend too well. In any case, the facts are wonderfully Kafkaesque: a writer who wanted his life's work destroyed entrusted the destruction to a man who decided, rather sensibly for the rest of us, not to do it.

LITERATURE Kafka began writing seriously while still young and regarded literature not as a diversion but as a necessity. His major influences included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Gustave Flaubert, Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He admired concise, exact prose and distrusted decorative literary display. His own work combines surreal premises with sober narration, creating an effect in which the impossible is reported as if it were administrative routine. (9)

NATURE Although associated with urban anxiety and office corridors, Kafka found restoration in fresh air, walks, gardens, swimming and sanatorium life. Brod remembered his fascination with “the greatness of nature” and with simple, health-giving things.

Kafka often took holidays outside Prague and wrote appreciatively of landscapes, though he was rarely an uncomplicated outdoorsman; bodily discomfort and self-observation travelled with him. (9) (16)

PETS Kafka did not keep pets, largely due to his urban apartment living, his obsession with cleanliness, and his delicate health. Animals, however, are everywhere in his imaginative world: the insect-like Gregor Samsa, the ape narrator of “A Report to an Academy,” the dog of “Investigations of a Dog,” the mole-like creature of “The Burrow,” and the hunger artist’s panther. His animal stories use non-human perspectives to expose the arbitrary rules and isolation of human society. (2)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Kafka was not athletically competitive, but he took his physical condition seriously. He swam, walked, rowed, exercised and practised the daily fitness system devised by the Danish athlete Jørgen Peter Müller. He visited health resorts and sanatoriums, sought fresh air and slept with windows open. These activities were not merely hobbies: they were part of a disciplined, sometimes obsessive attempt to manage his nerves, digestion and growing frailty. (15) (16)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kafka briefly enrolled to study chemistry before changing to law.

Kafka had a functional knowledge of science and mathematics required for his legal work in industrial accident insurance, where he evaluated machinery hazards, risk statistics, and safety engineering reports. (14)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Kafka was born into an assimilated Jewish family. Though non-observant for much of his life, he developed a deep interest in Jewish mysticism, Hasidism, and the Hebrew language in his later years.

Kafka's notebook with his studies of Hebrew

Kafka’s fiction has inspired Jewish, Christian, existentialist, psychoanalytic and political interpretations, but it refuses to settle comfortably into any one system. His stories repeatedly stage questions of guilt, judgment, law, grace and inaccessible authority, but they rarely offer a stable theological answer. (4)

POLITICS Kafka lived through the final decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the First World War and the creation of Czechoslovakia, all of which shaped Prague’s tense national and linguistic politics. He sympathized with Zionism at times and attended Jewish cultural events, but his principal political legacy is indirect: readers have found in his writing powerful descriptions of bureaucratic dehumanization and the individual’s vulnerability before institutions. (4)

SCANDAL Kafka’s most notorious private “scandal” was the 1914 collapse of his engagement to Felice Bauer after a painful confrontation at Berlin’s Askanischer Hof hotel. Kafka later described the scene in terms that made it resemble a tribunal, an experience often linked to his work on The Trial. His correspondence with Felice’s friend Grete Bloch added to the tension, though the details are difficult to judge fairly because the surviving record is incomplete and disproportionately reflects Kafka’s side. (12) (17)

The principal post-mortem controversy centers on his friend Max Brod disobeying Kafka's final instructions to burn his unprinted manuscripts, a choice that created a bitter, decades-long legal dispute over the ownership of Kafka's literary archive. (2)

MILITARY RECORD During the First World War Kafka was initially exempted from active service because his work at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute was considered important to the war economy. He was later classified as fit only for limited service, and his tuberculosis ultimately made military duty impossible. (14)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kafka worried throughout his life about weakness, nervousness, insomnia and digestion. In August 1917 he began coughing blood and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He spent periods in sanatoriums and took leave from work, but the disease progressively worsened. By 1924 tuberculosis had affected his larynx, making swallowing painfully difficult and severely limiting his ability to eat. (2)

HOMES Kafka spent most of his life in Prague and moved frequently within the city, often living with his parents or close to the family home. The Kafkas lived above Hermann’s fancy-goods business in the Old Town during Franz’s early years, and later moved through a series of rented flats. His lasting emotional geography was Prague: the Old Town, Jewish Quarter, riverbanks, cafés, offices and streets that hover behind the cityscapes of his fiction. (3)

Kinský Palace where Kafka's father owned a shop

In 1923 Kafka moved to Berlin with Dora Diamant, hoping that distance from Prague, family obligations and office work would enable him to write more freely. Inflation, poor health and worsening tuberculosis made the experiment short-lived. In April 1924 he returned to Austria for treatment. (2)

TRAVEL Kafka travelled within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and to Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy. He made several journeys to Berlin, partly because of Felice Bauer, and took holidays at health resorts and rural retreats. In 1911 he travelled with Max Brod to Paris, Milan and northern Italy.

Travel did not turn him into a cosmopolitan adventurer; it often heightened his sensitivity to discomfort, hotels, strangers and the need to record experience in letters and diaries. (9)

DEATH Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, aged 40, at Dr. Hoffmann’s sanatorium in Kierling, near Klosterneuburg outside Vienna, Austria. The immediate cause was starvation caused by laryngeal tuberculosis. - because his throat condition made swallowing extremely painful, he was unable to eat.. Dora Diamant and his friend, the medical student Robert Klopstock, helped care for him during his final days. He was buried in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery on June 11, 1924. (2)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Kafka has appeared, directly and indirectly, in an immense range of films, television programs, plays, novels, songs, visual artworks and comic books.

Notable screen adaptations include

Orson Welles' film The Trial (1962).

Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 film Kafka, starring Jeremy Irons, blends biographical material with the atmosphere of The Trial and The Castle.

The BBC television play Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life (1993), which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

His work has also supplied the basis for adaptations of The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle, while “Kafkaesque” has become a convenient shorthand in journalism and popular culture for administrative absurdity.

ACHIEVEMENTS Kafka published comparatively little in his lifetime, but his posthumous achievement is extraordinary. The preservation of his papers by Max Brod enabled later readers to encounter novels and stories that transformed modern literature. His work has influenced writers including Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Philip Roth and J. M. Coetzee.

More unusually, his surname has become a word: “Kafkaesque” is now used far beyond literary criticism for situations that feel simultaneously logical in procedure and irrational in outcome.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia: Franz Kafka (2) Encyclopaedia Britannica: Franz Kafka (3) Franz Kafka Museum: Biography Timeline (4) YIVO Encyclopedia: Kafka, Franz (5) Kafka Online: Letter to His Father (6) Franz Kafka Museum: University (7) Goethe-Institut: Short Biography of Franz Kafka (8) Radio Prague International: Franz Kafka Biography (9) Shipwreck Library: Kafka Biography (10) Goethe-Institut: The Big Laugher (11) Johns Hopkins University Press: Franz Kafka (12) The New York Review: Kafka’s Love Letters (13) Porta Polonica: Dora Diamant (14) Generali: Franz Kafka, Distinguished Clerk (15) International Vegetarian Union: Franz Kafka, Vegetarian Activist (16) Seisma Magazine: Kafka, Eating and Health (17) Literary Hub: Kafka Was a Terrible Boyfriend

Justinian I

2016-03-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Justinian I, born Petrus Sabbatius, later Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus. He is commonly styled "Justinian the Great," and is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. (1),

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Justinian I was Byzantine (East Roman) emperor from 527 to 565, best remembered for his sweeping codification of Roman law, known as the Corpus Juris Civilis, which remains the basis of civil law in many modern states. He is equally famous for his ambitious military campaigns to reclaim lost western provinces of the Roman Empire, his lavish building programme — above all the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople — and his controversial marriage to the former actress Theodora. (2)

BIRTH Justinian was born Petrus Sabbatius, probably on May 11, 483, in the small town of Tauresium, in the region of Dardania, roughly 12 miles (20 kilometres) southeast of modern Skopje in North Macedonia. (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND He came from a peasant family of Illyrian or Latin-speaking stock. His mother, Vigilantia, was the sister of Justin, a soldier of humble origin who rose through the ranks of the imperial guard to become the Byzantine emperor Justin I in 518. It was this family connection to his uncle that would transform Justinian's life. (4)

CHILDHOOD Little is recorded of Justinian's earliest years in Tauresium. What is known is that his uncle Justin, already established in Constantinople as a successful soldier, took the boy under his wing and formally adopted him, bringing him to the capital to be raised and educated away from his rural, peasant origins. (5)

EDUCATION Justinian completed his education in Constantinople, where he studied jurisprudence, theology, and Roman history under his uncle's patronage. Despite this thorough education, he reportedly never fully mastered Greek and always spoke it with a noticeable accent, since Latin remained his first language throughout his life., (6)

CAREER RECORD 518 Following Justin I's accession to the throne, Justinian was appointed candidate of the palace guard and rose rapidly to commander of the garrison, military commander (magister militum), and patrician. (

521, He served as Roman consul, organizing lavish public games to secure popular support in Constantinople.

525, Created Caesar by his uncle, becoming the official second-in-command and heir apparent to the Byzantine throne.

527, Elevated to co-emperor as Augustus on April 1, 527. Following the death of Justin I on August 1, 527, Justinian became the sole sovereign of the Byzantine Empire, reigning until his death in 565.

Throughout his reign he pursued an extensive building programme across the empire and worked, largely unsuccessfully, to reunify the eastern and western branches of the Christian Church. (7)

APPEARANCE The contemporary chronicler John Malalas, who lived during Justinian's reign, described him as short, fair-skinned, curly-haired, round-faced, and handsome. (8)

The court historian Procopius, in his hostile Secret History, similarly described him as of average height, not thin but moderately plump, with a round face and good colour even after fasting, noting a resemblance to the emperor Domitian. (9)

Detail of a mosaic of Justinian in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, AD 547 By Petar Milošević

FASHION As emperor, Justinian would have worn the elaborate court dress of Byzantine royalty: a purple silk chlamys (cloak) fastened with a jewelled brooch, ornate gold-threaded garments, and a diadem, as depicted in the famous mosaic of Justinian and his retinue at the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. Purple, produced from rare and costly dye, was reserved exclusively for imperial use and symbolised his supreme authority. (10)

CHARACTER Justinian was, by most accounts, a man of extraordinary capacity for work, with a temperate, affable, and lively character, yet he could also be unscrupulous and crafty when it suited his purposes. Procopius, though a hostile source, painted a far darker picture in his Secret History, calling him deceitful and easily led, though this account is now generally regarded by historians as an exaggerated, embittered polemic. (3), (9)

SPEAKING VOICE His first language was Latin, the ancestral tongue of the Roman administration. Though fluent in Greek, the dominant language of the Byzantine population, he spoke it with a distinct and noticeable provincial accent. (2)

SENSE OF HUMOUR He maintained a genial and pleasant public exterior, though historical sources rarely recorded him indulging in levity, as he was consumed by his intense work ethic and sense of imperial duty. (2)

RELATIONSHIPS In 525, Justinian married Theodora (c. 500-548), a former actress and daughter of a bear-keeper at the Hippodrome. Since actresses were regarded as being on a social level akin to prostitutes, such a marriage would previously have been forbidden to a man of Justinian's rank; his uncle Justin had passed a law permitting intermarriage between social classes, which cleared the way for the union.

Theodora proved to be one of the most influential empresses in Byzantine history, acting as a genuine political partner to her husband, most famously urging him to stand firm during the Nika riots rather than flee the city.

She died in 548, likely of cancer, and Justinian never remarried during his remaining seventeen years. (11), (12)

Mosaic of Theodora, Justinian's wife by Petar Milošević

MONEY AND FAME As Byzantine emperor, Justinian commanded the resources of the wealthiest state in the Mediterranean world, which he poured into his legal codification, church-building, and military campaigns, at times straining imperial finances to their limits. His fame has proved extraordinarily durable: he is remembered today chiefly through the Corpus Juris Civilis, still cited as a foundation of civil law, and through the Hagia Sophia, one of the most celebrated buildings in the world. (2)

FOOD AND DRINK He was extremely temperate in his habits, eating simple foods, avoiding excessive alcohol, and observing rigorous religious fasts where he abstained from wine and meat. (2)

MUSIC AND ARTS Justinian presided over a genuine flowering of Byzantine art and architecture, commissioning magnificent mosaics, including the celebrated depictions of himself and Theodora at the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, which remain among the most iconic images of Byzantine imperial art. (10)

LITERATURE Justinian's own great "literary" legacy is legal rather than artistic: the Corpus Juris Civilis, comprising the Codex, the Digest, the Institutes, and the Novels, systematised centuries of Roman legal writing into a coherent body of work compiled between 529 and 534 under the direction of the jurist Tribonian. (7)

NATURE Justinian took a close administrative interest in agricultural taxation and the management of landed estates across the empire. Since land taxes and produce levies underpinned the imperial treasury, he issued laws regulating provincial assessments, tax receipts, land measurement, tenant obligations, ecclesiastical estates, and the treatment of abandoned land. His concern was principally fiscal: to secure revenue, reduce evasion and corruption, and keep productive land in cultivation. (13)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Justinian was closely associated with the Hippodrome of Constantinople and its chariot racing, since the venue was the setting of the Nika riots of 532, when supporters of the rival Blue and Green factions united against him; however, there is little evidence that Justinian himself was a devoted sportsman or took part in racing as a pastime. (14)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Justinian sponsored one of late antiquity’s most daring architectural enterprises when he commissioned Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus to design the new Hagia Sophia after its predecessor was destroyed in the Nika riots. Anthemius, a mathematician and specialist in geometry, and Isidore, a geometer, physicist and engineer, devised its immense central dome, carried on pendentives: curved triangular supports that channelled its weight down into four colossal piers. Completed in 537, the building represented an innovative large-scale application of this structural system, although its original dome later collapsed and was rebuilt on a higher profile. (15)

In 529 he ordered the closure of Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum in Athens, ending centuries of pagan philosophical teaching that had included natural philosophy and mathematics. (2)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY A deeply pious man, Justinian expelled pagan teachers and closed the schools of pagan philosophy in Athens, including Plato's Academy, viewing Christian orthodoxy as central to imperial unity. He worked strenuously, though ultimately without lasting success, to reconcile the eastern and western branches of the Christian Church, which were divided over the precise theological relationship between Christ and God the Father. (2)

Below is a 6th-century mosaic in Ravenna, showing Justinian with the bishop Maximianus, bodyguards, and courtiers.

By Roger Culos

EMPEROR In 518, Justin, Justinian’s uncle, became emperor, and his nephew wasted little time making himself useful. Justinian rose rapidly through the Byzantine court, acquiring senior military and administrative positions as his uncle’s health began to deteriorate. It was a useful arrangement: Justin had the throne, while Justinian increasingly looked like the man who knew what to do with it.

On April 1, 527, Justinian was made co-emperor. Four months later, on August 1, Justin died, leaving Justinian as sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire. He would remain emperor until his death in 565, giving him one of the longest and most consequential reigns in Byzantine history. He also acquired the rather formidable reputation of a man who was determined to reorganize practically everything within reach.

One of his most enduring achievements was the Corpus Juris Civilis, the great compilation of Roman law commissioned between 529 and 534. Prepared under the direction of the jurist Tribonian and his team, it gathered, edited and systematized centuries of Roman legal material. It was an enormous undertaking and, unlike many imperial projects, one that continued to matter long after Justinian and virtually everyone involved had become historical dust. Much of modern European civil law ultimately traces part of its ancestry back to this work.

Justinian very nearly lost his throne in 532 during the Nika riots, when a spectacularly angry crowd in Constantinople turned a dispute over chariot racing factions into a full-scale uprising. The capital descended into violence, buildings were burned and the emperor's position became alarmingly precarious. Justinian reportedly considered fleeing, but his wife, Theodora, helped stiffen his resolve. The rebellion was eventually crushed, leaving thousands dead and Justinian still on his throne, although probably with a somewhat reduced enthusiasm for public entertainment.

The destruction caused by the riots also gave Justinian an opportunity to rebuild on a grand scale. The most famous result was the Hagia Sophia, which was reconstructed and reconsecrated in 537. Its enormous dome and extravagant interior made it one of the greatest architectural achievements of the ancient world, and Justinian is said to have exclaimed that he had surpassed Solomon. This was perhaps a little difficult to verify, but the building certainly made the point rather effectively.

Justinian was not content merely to repair the empire's buildings. He wanted to repair the empire itself. Beginning in 533, his brilliant general Belisarius launched a campaign against the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa. Within a remarkably short time, the Vandals were defeated and the territory was restored to Roman control. For Justinian, it was the first major step in his grand ambition to recover the western provinces that had slipped away from the Roman Empire during the preceding century.

Italy proved considerably less cooperative. From 535 onward, Belisarius and later Narses fought a long and exhausting series of campaigns against the Ostrogoths. Rome, Sicily and Dalmatia were eventually brought back under imperial control, but the fighting devastated much of Italy and consumed enormous quantities of money and manpower. By the time the struggle was effectively over, Justinian had succeeded in recovering substantial former Roman territory, though the achievement was rather like winning back an old house after discovering that the roof, plumbing and most of the furniture had gone with it.

Throughout his reign, Justinian pursued an immense programme of construction, lawmaking and military expansion. He also spent considerable effort trying to reunite the eastern and western branches of Christianity, which had become divided by theological disputes that were apparently incapable of being settled without generating several more theological disputes. His efforts produced limited success.

By the time Justinian died in 565, he had transformed much of the Byzantine Empire. He had codified Roman law, rebuilt Constantinople, expanded imperial territory across the Mediterranean and attempted to restore the political and religious unity of the old Roman world. His achievements were immense, although the wars had left the empire exhausted and many of his western conquests would prove difficult to hold. Like many men who attempt to restore a fallen empire, Justinian discovered that rebuilding the past is considerably easier on a map than it is in real life.

POLITICS Justinian pursued a policy of centralising imperial authority, reorganising the administration of the empire and outlawing the sale of provincial governorships in an effort to curb corruption. His reliance on efficient but deeply unpopular advisers, such as the tax official John the Cappadocian, nearly cost him his throne during the Nika riots of January 532, when the normally opposed Blue and Green chariot-racing factions united in rebellion. (14)

SCANDAL Justinian's marriage to Theodora, a former actress associated with the disreputable world of the Hippodrome, scandalised the traditional Byzantine aristocracy and required a change in the law to permit it. Procopius's Secret History, written after Justinian's death, went even further, levelling scandalous and almost certainly exaggerated accusations of demonic possession and monstrous cruelty against the emperor and his wife. (9), (11)

MILITARY RECORD Justinian's reign was dominated by ambitious wars of reconquest, conducted largely through his brilliant generals Belisarius and Narses rather than by Justinian leading troops in person.

His forces conquered the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa in 533-534 and, after a long and devastating war lasting two decades, brought the whole of Italy back under imperial control by 562, while also fighting intermittent campaigns against the Persian Empire and defending the northern frontier against Bulgar, Slav, and Hun incursions. (2)

The map below shows the Byzantine Empire at its greatest extent since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, under Justinian I in 565 AD.

By NeimWiki

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS In 542, at the height of the devastating pandemic now known as the Plague of Justinian, the emperor himself contracted the disease but survived, unlike a large proportion of the population of Constantinople, which lost perhaps two-fifths of its inhabitants to the outbreak. He lived to the age of about 82, a notably long life for the era, suggesting a generally robust constitution despite this brush with the plague. (16)

HOMES As emperor, Justinian's principal residence was the Great Palace of Constantinople, the sprawling imperial complex adjoining the Hippodrome and the Hagia Sophia, from which he governed the empire for nearly four decades. (7)

TRAVEL Unlike many Roman emperors of earlier centuries, Justinian rarely travelled far from Constantinople during his reign, instead directing his generals and officials to conduct military campaigns and administer distant provinces such as Italy, North Africa, and the eastern frontier on his behalf. (2)

DEATH Justinian died on November 14, 565, in Constantinople. Having no surviving children, he was succeeded by his nephew Justin II, the son of his sister Vigilantia, who was married to Sophia, a niece of Empress Theodora. (2)

Justinian's body was entombed in a specially built mausoleum at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, until the tomb was desecrated and robbed during the sack of the city by the Latin forces of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. (2)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Justinian appears as a major character in Dante Alighieri's Paradise in the Divine Comedy, as well as numerous historical novels including Count Belisarius by Robert Graves and various screen adaptations of late Roman history.

ACHIEVEMENTS Justinian's codification of Roman law in the Corpus Juris Civilis stands as one of the most influential legal achievements in Western history, still underpinning civil law systems across much of Europe today.

His reconquest of North Africa and Italy briefly restored much of the old Roman Empire under Byzantine rule

His building programme, crowned by the reconstruction of the Hagia Sophia in 537, left an enduring architectural legacy.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Britannica (3) Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 (4) Britannica (Justin I) (5) Britannica Kids (6) Encyclopedia.com (7) World History Encyclopedia (8) Encyclopedia of Trivia) (9) Procopius, Secret History (Sacred Texts) (10) Wikipedia (Theodora) (11) World History Encyclopedia (Theodora) (12) De Imperatoribus Romanis (Theodora) (13) The Novels of Justinian: Novel 128 (14) Encyclopaedia Romana (Nika Riot) (15) American Society of Civil Engineers: Hagia Sophia (16) Britannica (Plague of Justinian)

Carl Jung

2016-03-20T17:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Carl Gustav Jung, born Karl Gustav II Jung, named after his paternal grandfather. He later adopted the modern spelling "Carl" while at university. (1), (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded the school of analytical psychology, a discipline distinct from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. He developed some of the most widely used concepts in modern psychology, including the introvert and extrovert personality types, archetypes, the collective unconscious, and synchronicity, the theory that seemingly coincidental events are connected through meaning rather than cause. His personality theories became "the grandfather" of most modern personality tests, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which many contemporary psychologists regard as pseudoscience. (3)

BIRTH Carl Gustav Jung was born on July 26, 1875, at 7:27 p.m. in Kesswil, on Lake Constance, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau. He was baptized on August 29, 1875, with Ernst Jung and Robert Fiechter as godfathers and Auguste "Gusteli" Preiswerk as godmother. (4)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Jung's father, Paul Achilles Jung, was an ordained Swiss Reformed minister and a scholar of Oriental languages who earned a doctorate for a dissertation on an Arabic version of the Song of Songs; he also served as chaplain at Friedmatt, the insane asylum of Basel.

His mother, Emilie Preiswerk, came from a family of theologians and was said to possess "second sight," taking a lively interest in occult phenomena that later fed into Jung's own psychical experiments as a student.

His paternal grandfather, also named Carl Gustav Jung, was a physician and Freemason rumoured (without solid evidence) to be an illegitimate son of Goethe, while his maternal grandfather, Samuel Preiswerk, was a Basel clergyman who claimed to converse with the dead.

Eight of Jung's uncles, as well as his maternal grandfather, were also pastors, filling his childhood with an atmosphere of religious tradition. (5)

CHILDHOOD Jung was the fourth-born but first-surviving child of his parents, two earlier infants having died; he remained an only child until his sister Gertrud arrived when he was nine.

His childhood was lonely, though rich in imagination, and he spent much of it quietly observing the behaviour of the adults around him.

When he was about three years old, his mother suffered a breakdown and spent months in a psychiatric hospital, an absence that left Jung permanently wary of the word "love" spoken by a woman.

He also developed a sense of having two distinct personalities: an ordinary Swiss schoolboy, and an older, more mysterious figure he privately called "No. 2." (6)

Jung as a child, early 1880s

EDUCATION Jung attended the village school at Klein-Hüningen from around age six, where his father also began teaching him Latin.

He went on to study at the University of Basel from 1895 to 1900, initially exploring several subjects before settling on medicine, and developed a strong side-interest in spiritualist and parapsychological phenomena as a student.

He then specialised in psychiatry at the University of Zurich, earning his M.D. in 1902 with a dissertation titled "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena." (7), (8)

CAREER RECORD 1900 Jung began work as an assistant physician at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich under the renowned psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, where he developed the word-association test and studied schizophrenia, then known as "dementia praecox."

1905 He was appointed senior physician at Burghölzli and also became a lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Zurich, a post he held until 1913.

1907 Jung began a close professional relationship and correspondence with Sigmund Freud, becoming president of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1910 and widely seen as Freud's chosen successor.

1909 He resigned from Burghölzli to concentrate on his growing private practice, admitting patients at his home in Küsnacht.

1912 Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (later translated as The Psychology of the Unconscious), a work that grew increasingly critical of Freud's approach and created an irreparable rift between the two men, leading to their final break in 1913.

1913 onward Jung developed his own independent system, which he named "analytical psychology," built around concepts such as the collective unconscious, archetypes, and psychological types.

1933 He became president of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, a professional body based mainly in Germany that came under Nazi influence, a role that generated lasting controversy.

1944 Jung was appointed professor of medical psychology at the University of Basel, though ill health forced him to resign the following year.

Throughout his career, Jung wrote prolifically, lectured internationally including at Clark University, Fordham, Yale and Harvard, and built the Zurich-based C.G. Jung Institute into the centre of his psychological school. (9), (10)

APPEARANCE Jung was a big man, standing six feet one inch tall, with broad shoulders and what observers called a "peasant's frame." He had a strong, angular face with a high, broad forehead, an arched nose, a firm chin, and small, alert, penetrating eyes that witnesses variously recalled as blue, grey or brown.

He was clean-shaven apart from a moustache, and as he aged his hair thinned into soft white wisps he jokingly called his "feathers," while his once-lean build filled out into a stocky, stout figure in later life. (11)

Jung, c. 1935 E-Pics Bildarchiv online

FASHION Jung favoured practical, old-fashioned country dress rather than fashionable tailoring, often photographed in tweed jackets, waistcoats and sturdy boots suited to his rural retreat at Bollingen. He had little interest in modish clothing, preferring the plain, durable garments of a Swiss countryman to the formal elegance expected of a prominent Zurich physician. (11)

CHARACTER Colleagues described Jung as possessing enormous physical and intellectual presence, with Martin Freud remarking that he carried himself more like a soldier than a physician. He could be warm, playful and generous, especially with patients, but was also strong-willed, domineering in argument, and prone to breaking decisively with those who challenged his ideas, as his rupture with Freud demonstrated.

He was intensely private about his inner life yet driven by a restless curiosity that pushed him into religion, mythology, alchemy and the paranormal throughout his career. (11), (6)

SPEAKING VOICE Those who watched his 1959 BBC interview recalled a slow, deliberate, faintly accented voice, marked by long thoughtful pauses before he answered difficult questions, and an occasional stutter that seemed to reflect careful weighing of words rather than nervousness. His manner was calm and unhurried, often smoking his pipe as he spoke, giving him an air of quiet, settled authority even at eighty-four. (12)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Visitors noted the fan-like creases at the corners of Jung's eyes, which the writer Laurens van der Post attributed to continuous laughter rather than sun exposure, suggesting a naturally jovial disposition. He described his own mother as having "hearty animal warmth and a great sense of humour," a trait admirers felt he inherited, and colleagues recalled him as a genial and often mischievous conversationalist despite the seriousness of his subject matter. (13)

RELATIONSHIPS Jung married Emma Rauschenbach on February 14, 1903, and the couple had five children together; she remained his loyal companion and a scientific collaborator in her own right until her death in 1955.

Emma Jung c1911

Alongside his marriage, Jung conducted a long affair with his former patient Sabina Spielrein between roughly 1904 and 1909, and an even longer, decades-spanning relationship with another former patient turned analyst, Toni Wolff, whom Jung openly brought into his family home and once described as his "other wife." Emma reportedly considered divorce over these arrangements but remained married to Jung, while Wolff continued as his close collaborator and confidante until her death in 1953. (14), (15)

MONEY AND FAME Jung grew up relatively poor compared with wealthier relatives and school friends, an early awareness of financial hardship that stayed with him.

His later career brought considerable prosperity through his flourishing private practice, book royalties, and international lecture fees, allowing him to build both a substantial family home in Küsnacht and his private retreat tower at Bollingen.

By the time of his 1959 BBC Face to Face interview, he was, in the words of his interviewer's producers, "the most honoured living psychiatrist," a global celebrity intellectual whose face and ideas were recognised well beyond medical circles. (16)

FOOD AND DRINK Jung typically ate a soft-boiled egg for breakfast, often leaving traces of it on his moustache, and insisted on silence during meals, a habit that extended to his children at the family table.

He was a devoted pipe smoker, puffing almost constantly through the day, and enjoyed a Brazilian cigar after lunch, though he tried and failed to give up tobacco in his seventies. (11)

MUSIC AND ARTS Jung took a keen interest in the arts as expressions of the unconscious, and his encounter with an exhibition of African art and culture at the 1924–25 British Empire Exhibition in Wembley Park directly inspired his 1925 African expedition.

He spent years illustrating his vivid internal experiences in The Red Book and took up masonry, hand-carving intricate stone sculptures and inscriptions at his tower retreat in Bollingen, work he called his "confession in stone." (17), (18)

LITERATURE As a student, Jung was a voracious reader of philosophy, and his teenage discovery of philosophical texts, combined with childhood disappointments, helped steer him away from the family's clerical tradition and toward medicine.

He became a prolific author himself, producing landmark works including Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), Psychological Types (1921), and his posthumously published memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), alongside decades of scholarly writing collected in his Collected Works. (7)

NATURE Jung felt a deep, lifelong pull toward the natural world, tracing it to a childhood visit to Lake Constance with his mother, after which he decided he must live near water. This need shaped his adult life directly: his home in Küsnacht and his retreat at Bollingen were both built on the shores of Lake Zurich, where he found solitude, drew water by hand, chopped his own firewood, and worked outdoors well into old age. (19)

PETS Jung kept dogs at his family home in Küsnacht. One visitor recalled being greeted at the door by his “famous two dogs,” and said Jung believed they could be unusually perceptive of a new patient’s mental state. (12)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS At his Bollingen retreat, Jung took up stone carving as a serious pastime, personally chiselling faces, inscriptions and symbolic figures into blocks delivered for a garden wall, and he also enjoyed sailing on Lake Zurich. He was physically active well into old age, chopping his own firewood and maintaining the tower himself, activities he treated as a grounding counterpart to his intense intellectual work. (18), (11)

Jung stone carving Image by Perplexity

SCIENCE AND MATHS Jung trained rigorously in medical science at Basel and Zurich, and his early scientific reputation rested on the word-association test he developed at the Burghölzli clinic, a method still referenced in psychology today. However, his later theories, including archetypes, the collective unconscious and especially synchronicity, moved well beyond mainstream empirical science and remain widely regarded by modern psychologists as scientifically untested or pseudoscientific, a criticism that also extends to the personality-typing tools his ideas inspired. (8)

IDEAS Carl Jung’s ideas make up a large, elaborate and occasionally rather mysterious system of thought known as analytical psychology. Where Sigmund Freud tended to see the human mind as a place where sex, childhood trauma and things we would really rather not discuss at dinner were constantly wrestling for control, Jung took a broader view. He became interested in symbols, mythology, religion, dreams and the lifelong business of trying to become a psychologically complete human being.

Jung divided the mind into three broad regions. There was the ego, which is the conscious “I” getting through the day, paying bills, answering questions and wondering where it left the keys. Beneath this lay the personal unconscious, containing forgotten memories, repressed material and emotional patterns. Jung also identified complexes: clusters of memories and feelings organised around particular subjects, such as a mother complex or an inferiority complex.

Then there was the collective unconscious, which was Jung’s most famous and most controversial idea. Unlike the personal unconscious, it was not made up of experiences belonging to one particular person. Jung proposed that it was an inherited layer of the psyche containing universal patterns that recur throughout human experience. This, he argued, helped explain why remarkably similar images, stories and themes appear in myths, religions, dreams, folklore and works of art produced by cultures that had never met. It was a bold idea, and one that has proved rather easier to discuss than to demonstrate scientifically.

These recurring patterns were what Jung called archetypes. An archetype was not a ready-made character living somewhere in the basement of the mind, waiting for its cue, but a general psychological pattern that could appear in many different forms. The Self, for example, represented the organising principle of the whole psyche and the possibility of psychological wholeness, rather than simply the everyday ego. The Shadow contained qualities a person refused to recognise in themselves. The Persona was the social mask we present to the world: the respectable employee, charming dinner guest or person who says “No problem” when there is, in fact, very much a problem.

Jung also wrote about the Anima and Animus, which in his original, distinctly early-20th-century formulation represented the unconscious feminine aspect of a man and masculine aspect of a woman. There was the Wise Old Man or Woman, representing insight and guidance, and the Hero, who leaves the safety of the familiar, confronts danger and returns changed. These figures turn up with such remarkable regularity in stories and legends that Jung understandably became fascinated by them, although modern psychology is considerably less persuaded that they are inherited structures of the mind.

The Shadow provides one of Jung’s more easily understood ideas. Suppose a person takes enormous pride in never becoming angry and regards anger as something belonging only to unpleasant people. If that person then repeatedly dreams about a violent stranger, Jung might suggest that the stranger represents the dreamer’s own disowned anger or assertiveness. The unconscious, in this interpretation, has simply found a rather dramatic way of saying: You know that thing you insist isn't part of you? About that...

Jung believed that the central task of adult life was individuation. This did not mean becoming selfish or spending several years announcing that one was “finding oneself,” preferably while travelling around India. It meant becoming a more integrated and psychologically conscious individual. The process involved recognising the difference between the social Persona and the deeper self, confronting the Shadow, paying attention to dreams and emotions, and attempting to reconcile opposing sides of one’s personality.

Thus, someone might have to find a workable relationship between reason and feeling, independence and intimacy, ambition and contentment. Jung regarded recurring dreams, personal crises, creative difficulties and the unease that can accompany middle age as possible signs that some neglected part of the personality was demanding attention. The solution was not necessarily to make the troublesome feeling disappear, but to understand what it was trying to say.

Jung also developed an influential theory of personality types. He introduced the terms introversion and extraversion, although Jung preferred the latter spelling. An introverted person, in his terminology, directed psychological energy primarily towards the inner world, while an extraverted person was more oriented towards people, activity and the external world. He then identified four psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.

Thinking involved evaluating things through logic and concepts; feeling involved judging according to values and emotional significance; sensation dealt with concrete sensory information; and intuition concerned possibilities, patterns and implications. Jung believed people tended to favour one attitude and one principal function. These ideas later had a considerable influence on personality systems such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, although modern personality psychology generally prefers measurable traits existing along continua, as in the Big Five model, rather than putting everyone into psychological pigeonholes.

Jung’s interests eventually extended beyond conventional psychology into religion, alchemy and the strange territory of coincidences. He coined the term synchronicity to describe what he regarded as a meaningful coincidence: two events that appear to have no ordinary causal connection but seem psychologically or symbolically related.

Imagine someone having an unusually vivid dream about a scarab beetle, only for a scarab-like insect to appear at the window during the following therapy session. Jung would not have claimed that the dream summoned the insect, like some sort of particularly niche form of pest control. Rather, he suggested that the coincidence might possess meaning for the person experiencing it.

His interest in synchronicity, spirituality and paranormal subjects has contributed to both his enduring popularity and his reputation for being difficult to fit neatly into academic psychology. Jung has consequently remained highly influential in psychotherapy, literature, religion, film and art, even among people who would hesitate before accepting all of his theories as scientific fact.

Jung’s legacy is therefore rather uneven. His ideas about introversion and extraversion helped influence later personality research, while his emphasis on dreams, symbolism, personal narratives and conflicting motives remains useful in therapeutic and cultural interpretation. His concepts of the collective unconscious and inherited archetypes, however, are much harder to test or falsify. Critics argue that recurring human themes can be explained by common experiences and cultural transmission without requiring a universal inherited psychic database. His original ideas about the Anima and Animus are also widely regarded as overly binary and dated.

The fairest way to view Jung, then, is probably not as the discoverer of a secret wiring diagram for the human brain. He was a thinker who provided an extraordinarily rich vocabulary for discussing identity, imagination, hidden motives and psychological transformation. Much of that vocabulary remains fascinating and useful. Whether it describes the actual architecture of the unconscious mind is another matter entirely, and on that question science has so far declined to hand Jung the keys to the building.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Religion and philosophy sat at the very centre of Jung's thought, shaped by a childhood steeped in Protestant ministry on both sides of his family and by his own uneasy relationship with his father's fading religious conviction.

His analytical psychology drew heavily on Gnosticism, alchemy, Eastern religion and mythology, treating religious experience as a genuine and necessary psychological phenomenon rather than mere superstition.

Asked on BBC television's Face to Face whether he believed in life after death, interviewer John Freeman received the now-famous reply, delivered after a thoughtful pause: "I don't believe, I know." (20), (12)

POLITICS Jung largely avoided formal political engagement, but his 1933 acceptance of the presidency of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, a body increasingly controlled by Nazi Germany, drew him into lasting controversy. He maintained that he took the position specifically to protect Jewish colleagues and keep German psychotherapy open to Jewish practitioners, and biographer Deirdre Bair records that he was involved in two failed plots to have physicians declare Hitler mentally unfit to rule; he also later worked for the American Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA, during the Second World War. (21), (10)

SCANDAL The greatest scandal of Jung's career was the accusation, debated ever since, that his writings and remarks about "Aryan" versus "Jewish" psychology during the 1930s reflected antisemitic sympathies, a charge historians continue to dispute on both sides.

His personal life brought a separate scandal: his long affairs with two former patients, Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff, both of whom he had originally treated clinically before they became his lovers and later his professional collaborators. (21), (14)

MILITARY RECORD Jung was drafted as a military doctor with the Swiss army during the First World War and, in that capacity, commanded a camp responsible for interned British officers and soldiers, though Switzerland's neutrality meant he saw no combat. (22)

During World War II, he provided psychological intelligence reports on Nazi leaders to Allen Dulles of the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services).

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Jung remained physically robust for much of his life, noted for his powerful build and continued vigour, cutting his own firewood and working stone at Bollingen even in his eighties.

His health suffered a serious setback during his 1938 trip to India, when he fell ill and spent two delirious weeks in hospital in Calcutta, an episode his mistress Toni Wolff blamed on his neglect of proper travel inoculations.

In his final years his breathing became laboured and his gait slower, and he died of heart and circulatory problems that had troubled him for several weeks beforehand. (23), (24)

HOMES Jung's family moved from his Kesswil birthplace to Laufen and then, when he was four, to Klein-Hüningen near Basel, where his father held a parish post.

As an adult he settled at Küsnacht on the shore of Lake Zurich with his wife Emma and their children, and from 1923 he built a private retreat tower at nearby Bollingen, which he expanded over decades into a personal sanctuary carved with his own symbolic stonework. (5), (18)

Bollingen Tower as seen from Lake Zürich by cgjung.net

TRAVEL Jung travelled widely for both work and personal research, beginning with a 1909 trip to the United States alongside Freud to lecture at Clark University, followed by further American visits in 1912, 1924-25 and 1936 that included time among Native American Pueblo communities in New Mexico.

In 1920 and again in 1925-26 he travelled through North Africa and East Africa, undertaking the Bugishu Psychological Expedition to study societies he believed were untouched by European civilisation, and in December 1937 he journeyed to India at the invitation of the British colonial government to mark the 25th anniversary of the University of Calcutta, a trip that would be his last outside Europe. (25), (23)

DEATH Carl Jung died at his home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, on June 6, 1961, at the age of 85, following heart and circulatory problems that had appeared several weeks earlier. Famously, he had spoken to BBC interviewer John Freeman less than two years before his death about his lack of fear of what lay beyond, telling him he did not merely believe but "knew" that some form of existence continued after death. (26), (12)

He was buried in the Protestant churchyard in Küsnacht.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Jung's best-known media appearance was the BBC television programme Face to Face, in which John Freeman interviewed him at his Küsnacht home in March 1959; broadcast on October 22, 1959, it became one of the most famous psychological interviews ever filmed and provoked a storm of public comment over Jung's remarks on God and the afterlife.

His life and rivalry with Freud were later dramatised in the 2011 feature film A Dangerous Method, directed by David Cronenberg, which focused heavily on his relationship with Sabina Spielrein.

ACHIEVEMENTS Jung founded analytical psychology as a distinct discipline from Freudian psychoanalysis, introducing enduring concepts such as archetypes, the collective unconscious, psychological complexes, and the introvert-extrovert typology that later shaped the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

He also coined the concept of synchronicity to describe meaningfully connected coincidences and developed the word-association test still referenced in clinical psychology

Jung left behind a vast body of published work, including his influential posthumous memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, that continues to shape psychology, religious studies and popular culture worldwide.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Speaking of Jung (3) Britannica (4) Astro-Databank (5) Psychology Today (6) Biography.com (7) Encyclopedia.com (8) GeniusRevive (9) International Association for Analytical Psychology (10) Open Culture (11) Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences (12) Carl Jung Depth Psychology Site (13) Astro-Databank (14) National Geographic (15) Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences (16) Uncertain (17) Jung Down Under (18) The Robert Moss Blog (19) Astro-Databank (20) Britannica (21) Institute of Historical Research (22) Jung Down Under (23) Carl Jung Depth Psychology Site (24) Jung Society Funeral Transcript (25) Jung Down Under (26) Jung Society Funeral Transcript

Julian of Norwich

2016-03-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

NAME Julian of Norwich (also known as Lady Julian, Dame Julian, Mother Julian, or Juliana of Norwich). Her real given name is unknown; she took her name from St Julian’s Church in Norwich, where she lived enclosed as an anchoress. (1), (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Julian of Norwich is famous for Revelations of Divine Love (also called Showings), an account of sixteen mystical visions of Christ's Passion and God's love that she experienced during a near-fatal illness in 1373. She spent the rest of her life as a walled-in anchoress attached to St Julian's Church in Norwich, meditating on and eventually expanding her account into what became one of the most celebrated works of medieval Christian mysticism, famous for lines such as "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." (3)

BIRTH Julian was born around 1342, probably in Norwich, Norfolk, England, though the exact date is unknown; historians deduce the year from her own statement that she was "thirty and a half years old" when her visions occurred in May 1373. Her birth name is unrecorded, and "Julian" is a name she took (or was given) from St Julian's Church in Norwich, where she later lived as a recluse. (4)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Almost nothing certain is known of Julian's family, though scholars generally believe she came from a family of some means, possibly involved in Norwich's prosperous textile or mercantile trade, given the education and literacy her writing displays. Her own account of her illness in 1373 mentions that her mother was present at her bedside, one of the very few personal biographical details she includes in her book. (5), (6)

CHILDHOOD Details of Julian's childhood are entirely absent from the historical record, as she reveals nothing of her early years in her writings. She was around six years old when the Black Death arrived in Norwich in 1348-1350, an event that devastated the city and almost certainly shaped the world of loss and suffering she grew up in.

EDUCATION Julian describes herself in her writings as "unlettered," which most scholars interpret to mean she had not been formally schooled in Latin (the language of the educated clergy) rather than that she was illiterate in English. Some historians suggest she may have been educated by Benedictine nuns, possibly at a school attached to Carrow Abbey near Norwich, which would explain the sophistication of her theological thought despite her claimed lack of formal Latin schooling. (7)

CAREER RECORD 1373 While critically ill in May, Julian experienced a series of mystical visions of Christ, which she wrote down shortly after recovering in what is known as the "Short Text."

1390 She entered full enclosure as an anchoress at St Julian’s Church in Norwich, taking a formal vow to remain in her small cell attached to the church for the rest of her life to devote herself to prayer, contemplation, and spiritual counseling.

1395 After two decades of quiet theological meditation on her visions, she completed the expanded "Long Text" of Revelations of Divine Love, creating the first book known to have been authored by a woman in English.

1413 Margery Kempe, another famous medieval English mystic, visited Julian at her cell in Norwich to seek spiritual advice, documenting Julian's wisdom in The Book of Margery Kempe.

APPEARANCE No contemporary portraits or physical descriptions of Julian exist. Historical depictions generally visualize her in the simple dark habit and veil worn by medieval recluses and vowesses, looking out from the window of her anchorhold.

David Holgate's statue of Julian, outside Norwich Cathedral, completed in 2000 By User:Poliphilo -

FASHION As a consecrated anchoress, Julian wore plain, coarse monastic garments—typically a dark tunic, a black veil, and simple wool robes designed for warmth in an unheated stone cell. She eschewed worldly clothing entirely. (6)

CHARACTER Julian was deeply compassionate, serene, and intellectually courageous

Julian's writing reveals a character marked by warmth, intellectual courage, and deep compassion; she grappled openly with difficult theological questions, such as why an all-loving God permits sin and suffering, rather than offering easy answers. Her repeated insistence that God is never angry and that "all shall be well" reflects a personality inclined toward hope and reassurance even amid the plague, poverty, and social unrest of fourteenth-century Norwich. (8)

SPEAKING VOICE No direct description of Julian's speaking voice survives, but Margery Kempe, who visited her around 1413, recorded that Julian 'was expert in such things and could give good counsel,' offering reassuring, affirming spiritual guidance — a portrait consistent with the warm, direct tone of her own writing. Julian herself distinguished this outward counsel from the interior locutions of her visions, which she described as words 'formed in mine understanding,' an inward voice of spiritual clarity addressing her soul directly." (9)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Her writings reveal a subtle, quiet warmth and an occasional light touch. In her visions, she describes God scoffing at the Devil's impotent malice, noting that God "scorned his malice and discounted his powerlessness," reflecting her belief that evil is ultimately devoid of real substance.

RELATIONSHIPS Julian never married and had no recorded children, having withdrawn into religious life following her illness. She is known to have had a maid or servant who lived in a room adjoining her cell, and she maintained an ongoing pastoral relationship with visitors, most notably the mystic Margery Kempe, who sought her counsel and recorded the encounter in The Book of Margery Kempe. (7), (10)

Julian maintained a deep connection with the local community through her cell's parlor window, serving as a spiritual guide, counselor, and confidante to visitors from all walks of life.

MONEY AND FAME As an enclosed anchoress, Julian would have owned no personal property, but she was sufficiently well-regarded that Norwich citizens left her bequests in their wills to support her and her servants, indicating genuine local renown during her lifetime.

Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe by Gemini

Her lasting fame, however, is a modern phenomenon: for centuries her work was little known outside a small circle, and she only became widely celebrated as a major spiritual writer and the first female author in English from the twentieth century onward. (7)

FOOD AND DRINK No record survives of Julian's specific diet, but as an anchoress she would have followed guidance such as the Ancrene Wisse, which prescribed a modest, largely meat-free diet of bread, pottage, vegetables, and limited drink such as ale, provided by her servant through the cell's window. (11)

MUSIC AND ARTS Though Julian left no account of it herself, the layout of her cell — with a window opening directly onto the church — meant her daily life would have been immersed in the sounds of the Latin liturgy, chanted Psalms, and church bells. (12)

Her writing itself has since inspired numerous artists, composers, and poets, including T. S. Eliot, who quoted her in Four Quartets, and Denise Levertov. (1)

REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE On May 13, 1373, Lady Julian of Norwich, who was seriously ill and apparently had quite enough on her plate already, experienced sixteen mystical visions over the course of two days. In these revelations, God showed her something she would spend the rest of her life thinking about: the extraordinary depth and persistence of his love.

The visions were not simply a dramatic spiritual experience to be filed away under Things That Happened Once. Julian believed they had been given to her so that she could meditate on them, understand them more deeply, and share what she had learned with others. Which is rather generous, considering most of us struggle to remember what we were thinking about yesterday.

After making a full recovery, she wrote an account of each vision, producing a manuscript now referred to as the Short Text.

The beginning of the 15th-century Short Text.

About twenty years later, when she was around fifty, Julian wrote a far more extended version of her writings, now known as the Long Text. this much-expanded version was circulated in manuscript form as A Revelation of Love. It was the first surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman, and one of the great works of Christian mystical literature.

For nearly three centuries, Julian's work existed only in a handful of manuscript copies and was read by very few people. The title as its known today, Revelations of Divine Love, first appeared in 1670, when the English Benedictine monk Serenus de Cressy published the first-ever printed edition, under the full title XVI Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Servant of Our Lord, called Mother Juliana, an Anchorete of Norwich: Who lived in the Dayes of King Edward the Third.

Julian's central message was remarkably simple: however alarming things may look, God's love is greater than all of it. In Julian's words, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” It is difficult to imagine a more useful thought to carry around with you.

LITERATURE Besides authoring her own masterpiece, Julian was well-versed in devotional literature and spiritual classics of her time. Her writing shows the influence of Middle English vernacular traditions and contemporary mystical literature.

NATURE Julian's most famous image drawn from the natural world is her vision of all creation as "a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand," which she used to illustrate the smallness of creation compared to God's infinite love. This image demonstrates a contemplative sensibility attuned to finding profound spiritual meaning in small, ordinary natural objects. (6)

PETS Anchoritic guides such as the Ancrene Wisse generally forbade animals, with a specific exception for a cat to control vermin. Though no contemporary record confirms it, popular tradition holds that Julian kept such a cat, and she is frequently depicted with one in later art, such as a stained glass window in Norwich Cathedral. (13)

Julian of Norwich (window in Norwich Cathedral) By Amitchell125 -

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Julian's days were structured around religious devotion rather than hobbies or recreational activities in any conventional sense; sources indicate she spent at least five hours daily in prayer. (8)

No record survives of Julian's specific daily activities outside prayer and writing, but anchoritic guides such as the Ancrene Wisse indicate that needlework and spinning were common, sanctioned occupations for enclosed women of her era, sometimes extending to mending or maintaining plain church textiles. (14)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Though not a scientist, Julian expressed a striking, holistic vision of cosmology, viewing the entire universe as a small, created object held safely in the hand of God. Her work shows a keen, logical mind that systematically analyzed her mystical experiences over decades.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Julian's theology is centred on the conviction that God is entirely loving and never angry, even in the face of sin and suffering — a strikingly optimistic and, for her time, unusual position. She famously described God in maternal terms, referring to the "Motherhood of God," and explored themes including predestination, the nature of evil, and the reconciliation of sin with divine love, making her one of the most original theological voices of medieval England. (3), (9)

POLITICS Julian was politically neutral and completely removed from secular statecraft. However, she lived in Norwich during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, led in Norfolk by Geoffrey Litster, which brought violent unrest directly to her doorstep.

SCANDAL "Her writings edged toward theological positions that sat uneasily with orthodox doctrine — including a striking insistence that God feels no wrath toward humanity, and reflections that some scholars read as gesturing toward universal salvation. She never crossed the church's teaching on hell outright, and repeatedly affirmed her submission to Church authority within the text itself. Combined with her quiet, enclosed life and the fact that her book circulated only among a small readership until its first printing in 1670, this shielded her from any accusation of heresy in her lifetime. (15) (16)

MILITARY RECORD She was a non-combatant religious recluse living through the period of the Hundred Years' War between England and France.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS In May 1373, at age thirty, she suffered a severe, unidentified illness that left her paralyzed and near death, prompting her priest to administer the last rites before her sudden recovery. After entering her anchorhold, she lived a sedentary, indoor life into her seventies

HOMES For most of her adult life, Julian lived in a small cell attached to St Julian's Church in Conisford, Norwich, where she remained permanently enclosed as an anchoress, with only a window opening onto the church and another onto the street through which she received visitors. This cell, now reconstructed as a shrine, remains a site of pilgrimage today. (7), (8)

TRAVEL As an anchoress under a vow of permanent enclosure, Julian did not travel once she entered her cell, living her entire later life within the confines of St Julian's Church in Norwich.

DEATH The exact date and circumstances of Julian's death are unknown; a contemporary will confirms she was still alive in 1416, making her at least 73, but no record survives of when or how she died.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Julian of Norwich has been referenced by numerous modern writers and poets, most notably T. S. Eliot, who drew on her phrase "All shall be well" in his poem cycle Four Quartets, as well as by Denise Levertov and Iris Murdoch.

She continues to be commemorated in the Church of England and Roman Catholic calendars, with a feast day observed on May 8 and May 13 respectively, and remains a popular subject of biographies, theological studies, and devotional literature.

ACHIEVEMENTS Julian of Norwich's central achievement is authorship of Revelations of Divine Love, recognized as the first surviving book in the English language written by a woman, and one of the most significant and original works of medieval Christian mysticism.

Her theological insight — particularly her unwavering vision of God's love as constant and unconditional even amid immense suffering — has secured her lasting recognition as one of the most important English mystics and theologians, with interest in her work growing substantially in recent decades.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Wikipedia (3) Britannica (4) Wikiquote (5) EBSCO Research Starters (6) The Culturium (7) Julian of Norwich Centre (8) Encyclopedia.com (9) A Clerk of Oxford (10) CBE International (11) Mysterious Britain (12) Patrick Comerford (13) University of New Brunswick journal (Ancrene Wisse study) (14) PieceWork Magazine (15) Disoriented Theology (16) Patheos

Judas Maccabeus

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NAME Judas Maccabeus, also rendered Judah Maccabee (Hebrew: יהודה המכבי, Yehudah HaMakabi). The surname "Maccabeus" (from the Aramaic/Hebrew for "hammer") was a nickname given to him personally, later extended to his father and brothers, who became collectively known as "the Maccabees" or the Hasmonean dynasty (1), (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Judas Maccabeus is famous as the Jewish priest and guerrilla commander who led the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the 2nd century BC, driving the Greek-Syrian occupiers from Jerusalem and restoring Jewish worship at the Temple. His recapture and rededication of the Temple in 164 BC is commemorated every year in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, making him one of the most celebrated heroes in Jewish history (3)

BIRTH No exact birth date survives for Judas Maccabeus; historians estimate he was born around 190 BC, somewhere in the Judean countryside, most likely in or near the priestly village of Modi'in northwest of Jerusalem. He was the third of five sons born to Mattathias, a priest of the Hasmonean family (4)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Judas was the son of Mattathias ben Johanan, an aged priest descended from the priestly order of Joarib, tracing his lineage back through Simeon and John to a forebear named Hasmonaeus, from whom the family name "Hasmonean" derived. Mattathias had settled in Modi'in, and

Judas grew up with four brothers, John (called Gaddi), Simon (called Thassi), Eleazar (called Avaran) and Jonathan (called Apphus), along with a sister. All four brothers played central leadership, military, or religious roles in the Maccabean struggle and the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty.(5)

CHILDHOOD Little is documented about Judas Maccabeus's early years, as the ancient sources (chiefly the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees and the writings of Josephus) focus almost entirely on the revolt itself rather than his upbringing. As the son of a priest in a small rural town under Seleucid rule, he would have grown up steeped in Jewish law and Temple ritual at a time when Hellenistic Greek culture was steadily encroaching on Judean life (3) (6)

EDUCATION Judas would have received the traditional religious education of a priestly family, learning the Torah, Hebrew scripture, and the duties of temple service from his father Mattathias. There is no record of any formal Greek schooling, and his family's resistance to Hellenization suggests his upbringing emphasized strict adherence to Jewish law over Greek learning (6)

His martial education was practical, learned through outdoor life in the rugged terrain of Judea, which later equipped him with intimate knowledge of mountain passes, defiles, and guerrilla tactics.

CAREER RECORD 167 BC: When the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes outlawed Jewish religious practice on pain of death, Mattathias killed a Hellenizing Jew and a royal officer at Modi'in and fled to the hills with his five sons, launching an armed uprising.

166 BC: Following the death of his father Mattathias, Judas assumed command of the revolt according to his father's dying wish, leading guerrilla raids against Seleucid garrisons and Hellenized Jewish settlements.

166-165 BC: Judas won a rapid string of victories over Seleucid forces at Emmaus, Beth Horon, and Beth Zur, defeating several Seleucid generals despite being heavily outnumbered.

164 BC: Judas recaptured Jerusalem (excepting the Seleucid garrison in the Acra citadel), cleansed the Temple of pagan idols, and on December 14, 164 BC re-established a regular order of priests, an event commemorated as Hanukkah.

161 BC: Judas sent emissaries Eupolemus and Jason to Rome, resulting in the Roman-Jewish Treaty, the first recorded diplomatic contact between the Jewish people and the Roman Republic.

160 BC: Judas was killed leading his forces at the Battle of Elasa against a much larger Seleucid army commanded by the general Bacchides.

APPEARANCE No physical description of Judas Maccabeus survives from antiquity; ancient chroniclers were concerned with his military deeds rather than his looks.

Later artistic depictions, such as Peter Paul Rubens's 17th-century painting The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus, portray him as a robust, bearded warrior in classical armour, though these are artistic inventions rather than historical record (7)

Detail from The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus by Peter Paul Rubens, 1634–36

FASHION As a Jewish priest and guerrilla fighter operating from the Judean hills, Judas Maccabeus wore practical, simple clothing suited to warfare and priestly custom rather than anything resembling fashionable Hellenistic dress, which his movement fiercely rejected.

During his early life and priestly service, he wore the traditional linen vestments of the Judean priesthood, but once the rebellion began, he and his followers adopted practical military attire suitable for guerrilla warfare in the wilderness—including leather tunics, woolen cloaks for cold nights, and light armor captured from fallen Seleucid soldiers—disdaining Greek-style attire as a symbol of cultural assimilation. (6)

CHARACTER Ancient sources consistently describe Judas as a bold, resolute, and pious commander who combined military cunning with deep religious conviction, using surprise attacks and swift mobility to overcome numerically superior Seleucid armies. Even at Elasa, when most of his men fled before overwhelming odds, Judas chose to stand and fight rather than retreat, a decision that cost him his life but cemented his reputation for steadfast courage (8)

SPEAKING VOICE No ancient source records anything about Judas Maccabeus's actual voice or manner of speech. What survives instead are the rousing exhortations to his troops recorded in 1 Maccabees, in which he is portrayed calling on his men to trust in divine deliverance before battle, though these speeches were likely composed or embellished by later chroniclers. His address before the Battle of Emmaus is recorded as direct, urgent, and deeply grounded in scriptural rhetoric: "It is better for us to die in battle than to see the misfortunes of our nation and of our sanctuary." (3)

Judas Maccabeus before the army of Nicanor, by Gustave Doré

SENSE OF HUMOUR Nothing in the surviving historical record touches on Judas Maccabeus's sense of humour; the sources that preserve his story, 1 and 2 Maccabees and Josephus's histories, are solemn religious and military chronicles with no interest in personal wit or levity (3)

RELATIONSHIPS Judas's closest relationships were with his father Mattathias, who appointed him leader of the revolt on his deathbed, and his four brothers, John, Simon, Eleazar, and Jonathan, who fought alongside him throughout the campaign. After Judas's death at Elasa, his brothers Jonathan and Simon retrieved his body from the battlefield and continued the resistance, with Jonathan taking over leadership and Simon later founding the Hasmonean royal line.

MONEY AND FAME Judas Maccabeus was not a man of personal wealth; his campaign was funded and sustained through the resources of his guerrilla movement rather than any private fortune, and his fame rests entirely on his military and religious achievements rather than material success. His fame spread rapidly throughout the Near East during his lifetime, making his name feared among Seleucid rulers and celebrated across the Jewish diaspora as a symbol of divine liberation.

His renown grew enormously after his death, as he became a celebrated symbol of Jewish resistance, later inspiring the Zionist "Maccabiah Games" and countless works of art, music, and literature named in his honour. (9)

FOOD AND DRINK Adherence to Jewish dietary laws (kashrut) was one of the core religious issues that triggered the Maccabean Revolt, as Antiochus IV attempted to force Jews to consume swine and sacrificial pagan meats. Judas and his followers adhered strictly to dietary purity, even when forced to subsist on wild vegetation, roots, and herbs in the mountains to avoid ritually defiled food supplied in Hellenized towns.

According to the ancient Scroll of Antiochus, however, Judas and his brothers were said to draw their strength partly from fasting and prayer, beseeching God for success before engaging the enemy in battle. (9)

MUSIC AND ARTS Judas's relationship with music was primarily liturgical and martial. Following the purification of the Second Temple on December 14, 164 BC, he instituted elaborate religious celebrations that featured the playing of harps, lutes, cymbals, and the chanting of Psalms of thanksgiving. He rejected Hellenistic theatrical arts and secular music, viewing them as instruments of foreign cultural assimilation. (9)

Judas Maccabeus became the subject of major artistic works long after his death, most famously George Frideric Handel's 1746 oratorio "Judas Maccabaeus," composed to a libretto by Thomas Morell and framed as a celebration of the Duke of Cumberland's victory over the Jacobite rising of 1745. The oratorio's best-known chorus, "See, the Conqu'ring Hero Comes," later had its tune adapted for the Easter hymn "Thine Be the Glory, Risen Conquering Son." (10), (11)

Peter Paul Rubens also depicted him in the painting "The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus."

LITERATURE Though not an author of surviving literary works himself, Judas was well-versed in the Torah and the writings of the Hebrew prophets, frequently referencing the heroic exploits of David, Joshua, and Gideon to inspire his followers.

Judas Maccabeus's story is preserved chiefly in the deuterocanonical books of 1 and 2 Maccabees and in the Antiquities of the Jews by the historian Josephus.

He was also dramatized by William Shakespeare, who included him among the "Nine Worthies" performed in the play-within-a-play in Love's Labour's Lost, where the character Holofernes plays Judas Maccabaeus and is mocked for sharing his first name with Judas Iscariot. (3)

NATURE As a guerrilla commander operating from the Judean hill country, Judas Maccabeus relied heavily on his knowledge of the rugged, arid terrain around Modi'in and the desert fringes to stage ambushes and night raids against better-equipped Seleucid forces. The natural landscape of Judea was central to his military strategy, allowing his smaller forces to avoid open battle where possible (3)

PETS His military operations involved the practical use of cavalry and pack animals, and ancient accounts record his soldiers' encounters with and tactical counter-measures against Seleucid war elephants deployed in battle.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Unlike Hellenized citizens who frequented gymnasiums for athletic contests, Judas rejected Greek sports and physical culture on religious grounds. His leisure time was virtually non-existent due to continuous campaigning; his physical activities were entirely devoted to martial training, swordsmanship, archery, tactical drills, and religious devotion. (3)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Judas was educated within the practical frameworks of ancient Near Eastern sacred calendar calculation and basic logistics. He understood field engineering, siegecraft, fortification construction, and the arithmetic involved in military supply chains, troop movements, and dividing battle spoils among soldiers and dependents.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Judas adhered to an unyielding, traditionalist Jewish monotheism. He believed firmly in divine providence, the absolute authority of the Mosaic Law, and the sacred obligation to keep Judea free from idolatry.

Judas Maccabeus's entire campaign was rooted in theological conviction: resistance to the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes's attempt to forcibly Hellenize the Jewish people and abolish their religious practices under pain of death. Antiochus, whose title "Epiphanes" meant "God manifest" but whom enemies mockingly called "Epimanes" or "madman," had desecrated the Jerusalem Temple by erecting a statue of Zeus and sacrificing swine on the altar, an act of profound theological outrage that Judas's revolt was dedicated to reversing. (7)

The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus, Rubens

POLITICS Politically, Judas Maccabeus sought first religious freedom and then full political independence for Judea from Seleucid rule, and after recapturing Jerusalem he took the historically significant step of sending emissaries to Rome. This resulted in the Roman-Jewish Treaty of 161 BC, the first recorded diplomatic contact between the Jewish people and the Roman Republic, though it had little practical effect in deterring further Seleucid attacks (7)

MACCABEAN REVOLT Judas Maccabaeus was the man who took the Maccabean Revolt from “this is getting rather unpleasant” to “we appear to have captured Jerusalem.” The rebellion had begun in 167 BC with his elderly father, Mattathias, refusing to obey the religious restrictions imposed by Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Judas then took over the fighting and turned his father’s act of defiance into a sustained guerrilla campaign, eventually recapturing Jerusalem and restoring Jewish worship in the Temple.

The trouble began in 167 BC at Modi'in, where Mattathias, an elderly priest, killed both a Hellenizing Jew and a royal officer rather than participate in the enforced abandonment of Jewish religious practice. He then did what seems to have been the sensible thing after killing two people on behalf of a religious principle: he ran for the hills with his five sons.

When Mattathias died around 166 BC, he handed leadership to Judas, his third son. This was apparently because Judas was the most capable military commander among the brothers, which was fortunate, because “good with spreadsheets” would not have been particularly useful at this stage.

Judas inherited a relatively small collection of rebels and set about turning them into something resembling an army. He developed an intelligence network, sent agents through the countryside to recruit fighters and acquire weapons, and gradually transformed a family rebellion into a remarkably organised resistance movement.

Judas quickly demonstrated that he was very good at the sort of warfare in which the other side has the larger army and considerably more expensive equipment. Rather than obligingly meeting the Seleucids in large, tidy battles, he favoured surprise attacks, night raids and strikes against villages and small garrisons.

He also destroyed pagan altars and punished Jews who had collaborated with the Hellenizers. This was not, in other words, a campaign built around the principle of sending everyone a polite letter first.

His first significant victory came against Apollonius, the Seleucid governor of Samaria. Judas defeated him and reportedly took his sword, which he subsequently used for the rest of his career. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient piece of recycling.

Judas then defeated a succession of much larger Seleucid forces at Emmaus, Beth Horon and Beth Zur between 166 and 165 BC. His advantages were surprise, knowledge of the terrain and an ability to change tactics according to circumstances. His enemies had numbers; Judas had the rather more awkward habit of being somewhere they did not expect him to be.

His victories earned him the nickname Maccabaeus, usually understood as “the Hammer”, a name that was eventually applied to the whole family.

By 164 BC, Judas had driven most Seleucid resistance out of the Judean countryside and recaptured Jerusalem, although the Seleucid garrison remained in the Acra citadel. The city itself, however, was back in Jewish hands.

Judas then led priests into the desecrated Temple, where they removed the pagan idols and altars installed under Antiochus, rebuilt the altar and restored the sanctuary to Jewish worship. The Temple was rededicated, an event commemorated ever since by Hanukkah.

Josephus later says that Judas was granted the office of high priest, although the ancient sources are not entirely helpful about precisely when this happened or how long he held the position. Ancient history does occasionally leave you with the feeling that somebody should have taken better notes.

Judas did not stop once Jerusalem had been recovered. He carried the war into Galilee, seeking to reclaim Jewish territory there, and also looked beyond the immediate conflict by establishing diplomatic contact with Rome. His representatives negotiated the Roman–Jewish Treaty of 161 BC, an indication that the rebellion had grown into something considerably more significant than a local uprising.

But Judas's success eventually ran into the rather substantial problem of having to fight an army that was both large and determined.

In 160 BC, at the Battle of Elasa, a Seleucid force of about 20,000 men commanded by Bacchides confronted Judas and his much smaller army. Most of Judas's troops fled when the battle turned against them. Judas, however, stayed and fought, and was killed.

Judas had not started the revolt, and he did not live to see the ultimate achievement of Jewish independence. But he became its defining military figure. His brothers carried on the struggle after his death, and the family eventually established the Hasmonean dynasty, bringing a degree of Jewish independence that Judas himself had fought for but never lived to witness.

It is one of those historical stories in which the person who lights the fire does not necessarily get to sit beside it. Judas's father started the rebellion; Judas turned it into a revolution; and his brothers finished the job. History, as ever, had neglected to provide a convenient timetable.

SCANDAL Judas Maccabeus's career was marked by bitter internal conflict as much as by war against the Seleucids, since much of the fighting was effectively a Jewish civil war between religious traditionalists and a Hellenizing Jewish faction. High-ranking Hellenized Jews viewed Judas as a dangerous religious extremist and outlaw whose raids disrupted social order and Judea's economic ties to the wider Seleucid world. Judas and his followers killed Hellenized Jewish collaborators and tore down pagan altars across the countryside, actions 1 Maccabees frames as punishing "traitors," but which pro-Seleucid Jewish factions and neighbouring peoples condemned as lawless violence.

His fiercest opponents within the Jewish community were successive Hellenizing High Priests. Menelaus, who had bought the high priesthood through bribery and was denounced by biblical authors as "a traitor to the laws and to his country," was eventually executed by the Seleucid regent Lysias in 162 BC — not by Judas directly, but as a casualty of the wider turmoil his revolt had unleashed. Alcimus, who succeeded Menelaus as High Priest, then became Judas's most dangerous domestic adversary: he personally warned the Seleucid king Demetrius I that "those of the Jews who are called Hasideans, whose leader is Judas Maccabeus, are keeping up war and stirring up sedition," and it was this accusation that prompted Demetrius to send the general Nicanor, and later Bacchides, against Judas — the campaign that ultimately led to Judas's death at Elasa in 160 BC. (12) (13)

MILITARY RECORD Judas Maccabeus is remembered chiefly as a brilliant guerrilla commander who defeated a succession of Seleucid armies through surprise attacks, ambushes, and superior mobility despite being consistently outnumbered, winning key engagements at Emmaus, Beth Horon, and Beth Zur before recapturing Jerusalem in 164 BC. (7)

Judas' brother Eleazar fighting an elephant at the Battle of Beth Zechariah By Jan Luyken

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS He maintained exceptional physical conditioning throughout his adult life, necessitated by years of continuous wilderness warfare, marching across rugged terrain, and hand-to-hand combat. The Scroll of Antiochus records that he and his brothers attributed part of their fighting strength to fasting and prayer (9)

HOMES Judas Maccabeus's family home was in Modi'in, a village northwest of Jerusalem where his father Mattathias had settled after leaving Jerusalem.

During the years of revolt he had no fixed residence, operating instead from hideouts in the Judean hills and wilderness before eventually establishing headquarters in a reclaimed Jerusalem (6)

TRAVEL Judas Maccabeus's movements were confined largely to Judea, ranging between his base in the hill country, Jerusalem, and battle sites such as Emmaus, Beth Horon, Beth Zur, and finally Elasa. He also extended a campaign into Galilee to reclaim Jewish territory.

While he never personally traveled to Rome, Judas' diplomatic emissaries Eupolemus and Jason journeyed there on his behalf to negotiate the Roman-Jewish Treaty (6)

DEATH Judas Maccabeus was killed in April 160 BC at the Battle of Elasa, fighting a Seleucid army of around 20,000 men under the general Bacchides. Vastly outnumbered and abandoned by most of his own troops, Judas refused to retreat and fell in the fighting; his brothers Jonathan and Simon recovered his body from the battlefield and buried him in the family tomb at Modi'in (7)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Judas Maccabeus has featured prominently in Western art, literature, and music across centuries:

1595 William Shakespeare featured him in Love's Labour's Lost, where the character Holofernes attempts to present him in a pageant of the Nine Worthies, only to be heckled due to sharing a first name with Judas Iscariot. (2), (6)

1621 The Italian poet Torquato Tasso's legacy influenced epic poems about his life, including Walter Charleton's 17th-century works.

1746 Composer George Frideric Handel created his celebrated oratorio Judas Maccabaeus (HWV 63) with a libretto by Thomas Morell. Written in the context of the Jacobite rising of 1745, its famous chorus "See, the conqu'ring hero comes!" became an iconic piece of classical music.

1848 Author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a five-act verse drama titled Judas Maccabaeus.

ACHIEVEMENTS Judas Maccabeus's central achievement was leading a small, poorly equipped Jewish force to defeat a series of much larger Seleucid armies, recapturing Jerusalem and, on December 14, 164 BC, re-establishing a regular order of priests at the Temple after cleansing it of pagan idols, an event still celebrated annually as Hanukkah.

He also secured the first recorded diplomatic treaty between the Jewish people and Rome in 161 BC, and his leadership set the stage for his brothers Jonathan and Simon to eventually win full Jewish political independence, founding the Hasmonean dynasty.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Wikipedia (3) Britannica (4) The Collector (5) Wikipedia (German) (6) GotQuestions.org (7) Encyclopedia of Trivia (8) Encyclopedia.com (9) Chabad.org (10) Wikipedia (11) Hyperion Records (12) Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (Book XII) (13) McClintock and Strong Biblical Cyclopedia

James Joyce

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NAME James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.

WHAT FAMOUS FOR James Joyce was an Irish novelist, short story writer, and poet, widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He is best known for his novel Ulysses (1922), his short story collection Dubliners (1914), and his experimental final work Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce pioneered the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique, which sought to reproduce the unfiltered flow of a character's thoughts on the page.

BIRTH James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane "May" Murray, at 41 Brighton Square, in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar.

FAMILY BACKGROUND Joyce's father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was appointed rate collector by Dublin Corporation when James was five, and the family subsequently moved to the fashionable new suburb of Bray.

In November 1887, John Joyce, a spendthrift and alcoholic, was entered in Stubbs Gazette, an official register of bankruptcies, and suspended from work; six years later he was dismissed outright and given a pension. This marked the start of the family's slide into poverty, driven mainly by John's drinking and financial mismanagement.

John Joyce later became the model for the character of Simon Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, as well as for several characters in Dubliners. (1)

CHILDHOOD At the age of nine, James wrote a poem, Et Tu Healy, marking the death of the Irish nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell; his father was so proud that he had it printed and even sent a copy to the Vatican library.

Despite the family's dwindling fortunes, young Joyce showed an early gift for language and a fierce intellectual curiosity that would define his adult life (1)

Joyce aged six (1888)

EDUCATION Joyce was initially educated at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school in County Kildare, which he entered at the age of six. He did well academically, but was forced to leave when his father lost his job and could no longer afford the fees.

In 1893 he was offered a place at the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, at least partly in the hope that he might develop a vocation and join the Jesuit order himself; while there, he slipped back in all subjects except English.

In 1898 he entered University College, Dublin, to study modern languages, specifically English, French, and Italian, and many of the friends he made there would later reappear as characters in his fiction. (1)

CAREER RECORD 1902 Joyce traveled to Paris to study medicine at the Faculté de Médecine, but abandoned his studies and returned to Ireland in 1903 when his mother became terminally ill.

1904 Deciding to pursue a career as a writer, Joyce moved to Continental Europe, settling first in Pola before taking a position at an English school in Trieste (Austro-Hungarian Empire) to teach English.

1909 Joyce made two trips to Dublin to negotiate the publication of Dubliners and to organize the opening of the Volta Cinema, Ireland's first dedicated cinematograph theater.

1915 Following the outbreak of World War I, Joyce relocated his family to neutral Switzerland, living in Zurich where he gave private language lessons and worked full-time on his writing.

1920 At the invitation of Ezra Pound, Joyce moved to Paris, remaining based there for two decades while writing and overseeing the publication of his major literary works.

1940 Following the fall of Paris and the German invasion of France during World War II, Joyce moved back to Zurich as a refugee.

APPEARANCE Joyce was tall, thin, and loose-jointed, with an erect yet loose carriage that struck contemporaries from his student days onward. His University College Dublin friend Constantine Curran recalled first meeting him in 1899 and, looking back decades later, described him as "tall, slim and elegant... an uptilted, long, narrow head, and a strong chin that jutted out arrogantly" with pale blue eyes. (2)

A 1922 profile likewise described him as "tall and slender, possessing a face reminiscent of Dante and piercing blue eyes," and noted he often carried an ash-plant walking stick

He wore spectacles from childhood owing to weak eyesight, and from his mid-twenties suffered from severe eye disease, undergoing around a dozen operations and eventually wearing a black patch, usually over his left eye. (3) (4)

Joyce in a September 1922 issue of Shadowland, photographed by Man Ray

FASHION Joyce favoured neat, formal continental dress typical of an educated European gentleman of his era, often finished with a walking cane and glasses. His practical white jacket, adopted purely to compensate for his failing sight rather than for style, became one of his more curious sartorial habits. (5)

CHARACTER Known among his school peers for his cheerful disposition—earning him the childhood nickname "Sunny Jim"—Joyce was nevertheless a complex and uncompromising personality. He possessed an extraordinary intellectual self-confidence, extreme artistic stubbornness, and a deep sensitivity to criticism. Despite his outward reserve, he could be intensely convivial, charismatic, and unruly during evenings out.

SPEAKING VOICE Joyce had a fine tenor voice and trained seriously enough to enter the 1904 Feis Ceoil singing competition in Dublin, where he was tipped for the gold medal until he refused to complete a sight-reading exercise and was awarded the bronze instead. (6)

Popular legend holds that a disgusted Joyce threw the medal into the River Liffey, but his biographer Richard Ellmann established that he in fact gave it to his Aunt Josephine, saying he had "no use for it." (7)

He was fluent in numerous languages, and his ear for the sound and rhythm of speech, rather than strict grammatical correctness, shaped his famously musical and inventive prose style.

SENSE OF HUMOUR Witty, satirical, and deeply fond of absurd humor, foreign wordplay, and trans-lingual puns, Joyce embedded comedy across his life and literature. In Ulysses, he poked fun at the statue of songwriter Thomas Moore standing above a Dublin public lavatory by joking that Moore's most famous song was "The Meeting of the Waters."

During the 1920s in Paris, a drunken Joyce would occasionally provoke brawls in bars, then duck behind his friend Ernest Hemingway and yell, "Deal with him, Hemingway!" (1)

RELATIONSHIPS Joyce arranged to meet the sharp-tongued, auburn-haired Nora Barnacle near a Dublin bookshop for their first date, but she failed to show up; he persisted, and on June 16, 1904, the pair finally met and went walking, a date Joyce later used as the setting for Ulysses, now celebrated annually by fans as "Bloomsday." (8)

Nora Barnacle, c. 1926 in this cropped photograph by Berenice Abbott

Joyce and Nora had two children, George, born in 1905, and Lucia, born in 1907, but for decades he refused to marry Nora because he had lost his Catholic faith and would not let a man speak what he considered meaningless words over him.

The couple finally married for "testamentary reasons" on July 4, 1931, at Kensington Register Office in London, with their grown son attending; they leased a home at 28B Campden Grove in London for four months during that period.

Nora never read Ulysses, reportedly because she was upset by its frank revelation of her intimate thoughts and bodily secrets. (1)

MONEY AND FAME Joyce and his family lived in bohemian poverty for years, a hardship eased only from 1915 onward when grants from literary patrons began to arrive. Despite widespread condemnation from critics and censors, his reputation and eventual fame grew steadily, particularly after the publication of Ulysses in 1922, which today still sells around 100,000 copies a year, largely to academics (9)

FOOD AND DRINK Curiously for an Irishman, Joyce's favourite drink was a Swiss white wine, Fendant de Sion, which he regularly enjoyed at Mulligan's pub on Poolbeg Street in Dublin.

He gave his fictional creation Leopold Bloom in Ulysses a memorably robust appetite, describing a man who "ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls," savouring thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, and grilled mutton kidneys "which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine." (1)

MUSIC AND ARTS Music was central to Joyce's sensibility; he had a genuine singing talent and a deep love of opera and popular song that infused the rhythm of his prose. As a student in Dublin he made several trips to London specifically to see the celebrated Italian actress Eleonora Duse perform. (1)

WRITING CAREER James Joyce’s literary career began, as these things sometimes do, with a review. In 1900 he wrote about Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, which so impressed the great Norwegian playwright that Ibsen himself sent Joyce a letter of thanks. This was an encouraging start, although Joyce would soon discover that the gratitude of distinguished writers is considerably easier to obtain than the cooperation of publishers. He wrote several articles and at least two plays during these early years, though the plays have since disappeared, presumably having found the prospect of posterity too burdensome.

Dubliners was an even more protracted affair. Joyce submitted the collection eighteen times to fifteen different publishers between 1905 and 1914, which is an impressive amount of rejection for a book that was eventually to become a classic. When it finally appeared, it sold just 259 copies in its first year. Joyce therefore had the unusual distinction of being both a literary genius and, initially, a fairly poor investment.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, first conceived under the more modest title Stephen Hero, was published by the American firm B. W. Huebsch on December 29, 1916. Then came Ulysses, which Joyce began on June 16, 1904, the day that would become famous as Bloomsday. He spent hours walking around Dublin taking notes, apparently deciding that if he was going to write a novel about an ordinary day, he might as well make the ordinary day extraordinarily complicated.

The resulting book took roughly 20,000 hours of Joyce’s working life and compresses an entire Dublin day into an epic examination of the human mind. Joyce employed stream of consciousness to follow his characters' thoughts, associations and unconscious reactions, with the prose sometimes behaving rather like a mind that has been given a typewriter and told it has the afternoon off.

The response was spectacularly divided. One critic called Ulysses “the literature of the latrine,” another “rotten caviar.” Virginia Woolf dismissed it as “the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples,” while E. M. Forster described it as “a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud.” It is difficult to imagine a book receiving a more emphatic range of professional encouragement.

Ulysses by James Joyce, Paris : Shakespeare, 1922 By Geoffrey Barker

Joyce was not, however, deterred. Finnegans Wake, written in Paris over seventeen years and published in 1939, pushed his experiments with language to a point where ordinary dictionaries could no longer be expected to provide much assistance. The first chapter alone took him around 1,000 hours to write, and the book contains such inventions as a hundred-letter compound intended to represent the sound of a long fall. Most authors would regard making up a word longer than some people's shopping lists as a warning sign. Joyce regarded it as progress.

The result was a body of work in which Joyce gradually moved from writing about Dublin to attempting, with increasingly elaborate linguistic machinery, to contain the entire human experience. He succeeded often enough to become one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, although it is probably fair to say that he did not make reading him noticeably easier.

LITERATURE Joyce knew seventeen ancient and modern languages and used foreign vocabulary and made-up words for their phonetic qualities. His narrative techniques transformed modern literature by exploring internal monologues and unconscious reactions:

Narrative Theory: Joyce believed that if all thoughts of one man in a single day could be recorded just as they entered his mind, the result would reveal the fundamental mechanics of human operation. (2)

Neologisms: In Finnegans Wake, he crafted the 100-letter word "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonntonnerronntuonnthunntrouarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurrnuk" to represent the thunderous sound of a fall.

Reader Demands: Asked about the difficulty of his prose, Joyce stated: "The demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works."

Legacy: Today, Ulysses sells 100,000 copies annually and remains the subject of exhaustive academic study, including a famous three-volume critical edition compiled by German scholar Hans Walter Gabler. (1)

NATURE Joyce's writing is steeped in the natural rhythms of the River Liffey and Dublin Bay, most memorably in the closing "Anna Livia Plurabelle" passages of Finnegans Wake, where the river itself becomes a character. While Joyce was primarily an urban writer fascinated by city life, water and rivers recur throughout his work as powerful symbolic threads.

PETS During their years living in Paris, Joyce and Nora kept two parakeets named Pierre and Pepi. (1)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS At school Joyce won several cups for hurdling and took a keen interest in cricket. He also enjoyed singing throughout his life, a pastime that briefly won him competitive recognition in a Dublin contest. (1)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Joyce had no formal scientific training, having studied modern languages and briefly medicine, but his invented word "quark" in Finnegans Wake was later borrowed, entirely independently of his intent, by physicist Murray Gell-Mann to name a fundamental particle of matter. (9)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY The offer of a place at Belvedere College was made partly in hopes that James would prove to have a religious vocation and join the Jesuits. Joyce rejected Catholicism by age 16; however, the scholastic philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas shaped the structure and thought of his fiction. His break from the Church was decisive enough that he refused to marry Nora in a religious ceremony for decades, only doing so civilly in 1931 for legal reasons. (1)

POLITICS Joyce's politics have been described by scholars as broadly libertarian, blending sympathy for socialism without adherence to Marxism and an anarchist streak without any appetite for violence. He is generally characterised as a political liberal: tolerant, democratic, and supportive of social reform, while remaining largely nonideological and focused on the freedom of the individual. (10)

SCANDAL Ulysses was condemned by critics and banned from publication in the United States and other English-speaking countries for years over allegations of obscenity, a controversy that dogged Joyce for much of his career. (11)

MILITARY RECORD Joyce had no military record; he avoided the disruption of the First World War by relocating his family to neutral Switzerland rather than serving in any armed force.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Joyce suffered from serious eye problems caused by glaucoma and related conditions, which became severely handicapping by the late 1920s and led to a long series of operations and the need to wear a patch over one eye.

Some accounts note he underwent as many as a dozen eye surgeries over his lifetime due to anterior uveitis, and he was at times reduced to writing in large red crayon on oversized paper because his sight had deteriorated so badly. (3)

HOMES Joyce's early life was spent at various Dublin addresses, including 41 Brighton Square in Rathgar, before the family moved to Bray when his father took the rate collector's post.

As an adult he lived a peripatetic, largely exilic life, residing in Pola, Trieste, Zurich, and, for two decades, Paris, before the fall of France in 1940 forced him and Nora back to Zurich to escape German occupation. (9)

TRAVEL After leaving Ireland for continental Europe in his early twenties, Joyce made only a handful of return visits before his final trip in 1912—when, after failing to overcome his publisher's objections to Dubliners, he vowed never to set foot in his homeland again, a promise he kept for the rest of his life.

His life took him through Pola, Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, and he was fluent enough in numerous languages that he supported himself at times as a language instructor across these various cities.

DEATH On January 11, 1941, Joyce underwent surgery in Zurich for a perforated ulcer; he initially seemed to improve but relapsed the following day. On January 13, 1941, he asked a nurse to call his wife and son before losing consciousness again, and died fifteen minutes later, before they could reach him, with his last recorded words reportedly being "Does nobody understand?" (8)

He is buried in Fluntern Cemetery near Zurich Zoo, alongside Nora, who outlived him by ten years.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Joyce and Nora Barnacle's turbulent relationship was dramatized in the 2000 film Nora, starring Ewan McGregor as Joyce and Susan Lynch as Nora, tracing their life together from Dublin to Trieste.

Joyce's life and works have been adapted into films (including movie adaptations of Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and John Huston's The Dead), theatrical plays (such as Tom Stoppard's Travesties), and documentaries.

He is celebrated worldwide every June 16 on "Bloomsday," when admirers retrace the Dublin footsteps of Leopold Bloom.

ACHIEVEMENTS Revolutionized 20th-century literature through his development of stream of consciousness and complex interior monologue.

Authored Ulysses, widely regarded as one of the single greatest novels written in the English language.

Helped open Ireland's first dedicated cinema, the Volta Cinema, in Dublin in 1909.

Inspired the scientific term for the subatomic "quark" through his prose in Finnegans Wake.

Sources: (1) Encyclopedia of Trivia (2) The New York Times, 1922 (3) StudySmarter (4) RACGP - Doctors, disease and James Joyce (5) The Ophthalmologist (6) Medium - James Joyce FAQ (7) IrishCentral (8) Mental Floss (9) Britannica (10) UC Press eBooks - James Joyce or Socialist Realism? (11) Britannica Kids

Joséphine de Beauharnais

2016-03-02T16:00:00.000-08:00

NAME Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, later known as Joséphine Bonaparte and popularly remembered as Joséphine de Beauharnais, though this was technically the surname of her first husband rather than a name she used herself in later life

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Joséphine de Beauharnais was the first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte, which made her the first Empress of the French from May 18, 1804 until their marriage was annulled on January 10, 1810. She was also Queen consort of Italy during this period, and her descendants went on to sit on the royal thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Luxembourg.

BIRTH Joséphine was born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie on June 23, 1763, at Les Trois-Îlets, Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, though a persistent alternative theory places her birth at Paix Bouche, Babonneau, on the neighboring island of Saint Lucia (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Her father, Joseph-Gaspard Tascher de La Pagerie, was a plantation manager on Martinique and a lieutenant in the French naval marine troops who had earlier served as a page at the French royal court. The Taschers were an old but impoverished noble family, and her father was almost perpetually close to bankruptcy despite the family's aristocratic lineage.

CHILDHOOD Joséphine was the eldest of three daughters, and her family knew her by the nickname Yeyette, later going by Rose or Marie-Rose during her youth (2)

The family endured a devastating hurricane along with chronic financial hardship, and at around age ten she was sent to a boarding school in Fort-Royal run by nuns, where she learned reading, writing, singing, dancing, and embroidery.

EDUCATION At age ten, Joséphine was sent alongside her sister to a local convent school in Fort-Royal (now Fort-de-France) run by the Bénédictines de la Providence. There she received a conventional education for young women of her social standing, learning basic reading, writing, penmanship, dancing, and embroidery over a four-year period. (3)

CAREER RECORD 1779: She relocated from Martinique to mainland France to marry Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais, entering the French aristocratic social world.

1795: Following her release from imprisonment during the Reign of Terror, Josephine established herself as one of the prominent salon hostesses and social figures of post-Revolutionary Paris during the Directory era.

1796: She married General Napoléon Bonaparte, accompanying him during part of his Italian Campaign and serving as a diplomatic and social asset to his rising political status.

1799: Josephine acquired the Château de Malmaison, establishing it as an influential social retreat, agricultural experimental ground, and artistic sanctuary.

1804–1810: She served as Empress of the French following Napoléon's elevation to Emperor, undertaking ceremonial duties, state hosting, and extensive artistic patronage across the Empire.

1810–1814: Retained the title of Empress following her marital annulment, living in comfortable retirement at Malmaison as Duchess of Navarre and managing her estate and collections until her death.

APPEARANCE Joséphine had long legs, a slender, willowy figure, silky chestnut-brown hair, hazel eyes, and a rather sallow complexion, with a small straight nose and a well-formed mouth she habitually kept closed to hide her poor teeth.

The Duchesse d'Abrantès noted that "her teeth were frightfully bad" but that from a few paces away she still appeared young and pretty, and Joséphine reportedly trained herself to laugh with closed lips to conceal blackened teeth caused by chewing sugar cane in her youth. (4)

Empress Josephine in coronation costume in 1807–1808 by François Gérard

FASHION Joséphine was expertly groomed and devised a signature style using the flimsiest fabrics while staying just on the respectable side of propriety, helping to define the Empire style of dress.

When her wardrobe was inventoried in 1809, she reportedly owned 666 winter dresses and 230 summer dresses, alongside only two pairs of knickers, and she took a daily bath, an unusual habit for the era. (4)

CHARACTER Josephine was among the gayest and most good-natured French women of her era, widely admired for her refined manners, tact, and diplomatic sweetness. While noted for her warmth and generosity, she was also notoriously financially irresponsible and easily prone to extravagant spending.

SPEAKING VOICE She was noted for her elegance and for a low, silvery, beautifully modulated speaking voice, which contemporaries considered one of her most attractive features alongside her graceful bearing. (5)

SENSE OF HUMOUR She had a lighthearted, pleasant sense of humor, often using gentle wit and smile-filled reserve to disarm guests and navigate delicate social and political situations smoothly. (5)

MARRIAGE TO NAPOLEON Joséphine met Napoléon Bonaparte in 1795, when he was six years younger than she was and climbing rapidly through the ranks of the revolutionary army. Their civil marriage followed on March 9, 1796, helped along, at least in part, by Joséphine's connection to the influential Paul Barras. Napoléon was captivated by her grace, her delicately turned-up nose and her long-lashed eyes—proof, perhaps, that even men who spend their lives rearranging Europe are not immune to a pretty face. It was also Napoléon who began calling her Joséphine, replacing the name Rose by which she had previously been known.

The marriage certificate was a surprisingly shaky piece of official business. Joséphine knocked four years off her age, while Napoléon added about eighteen months to his, presumably in the hope that arithmetic might make them look more suitably matched. The official conducting the ceremony was not properly authorised, and one of the witnesses was underage. It was, in short, not the sort of paperwork one would expect to survive a particularly determined audit, let alone precede the creation of an empire.

On December 2, 1804, Napoléon crowned himself Emperor at Notre-Dame, then crowned Joséphine Empress. The arrangement neatly avoided the awkward possibility of anyone else having the final say in the matter.

But their marriage eventually ran aground on the one thing imperial ambition could not manufacture: an heir. When it became clear that Joséphine could not bear Napoléon a child, he annulled their marriage on January 10, 1810. Joséphine accepted the decision, allowing him to marry again in the hope of producing a successor. Three months later, Napoléon married Marie Louise of Austria, leaving Joséphine with the rather dubious consolation of having been Empress of the French and the considerably more enduring distinction of having been the woman who once made Napoleon Bonaparte lose his head.

RELATIONSHIPS Before Napoléon, Joséphine had been the mistress of the French Revolutionary politician Paul Barras, a member of the Directoire, who helped arrange her introduction to the future Emperor.

During their marriage she had a well-documented affair with a Hussar lieutenant, Hippolyte Charles, which infuriated Napoléon when he learned of it, while Napoléon himself pursued affairs including one with Pauline Fourès during his Egyptian campaign.

Although Joséphine had no children with Napoléon, her bloodline endures on several European thrones through her son Eugène de Beauharnais: his daughter Joséphine of Leuchtenberg married King Oscar I of Sweden, and through this line Joséphine de Beauharnais is a direct ancestor of the present-day monarchs of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the grand ducal house of Luxembourg.

MONEY AND FAME Joséphine and Napoléon were both passionate about jewels and spent enormous sums on them, with Napoléon recovering many stones from the former French crown jewels to have reset for her (4)

Her extravagant spending was a recurring source of tension in the marriage, and Napoléon once remarked that the only thing that ever came between them was her debts.

FOOD AND DRINK Having grown up on a Martinique sugar plantation, Joséphine retained ties to her Caribbean origins in adulthood, and she had sweet potatoes cultivated at Malmaison for her own table, helping briefly revive French interest in the vegetable around 1796 — though it never took hold widely, since France's climate wasn't well suited to the crop. (4)

MUSIC AND ARTS As Empress, Joséphine became one of the era's leading art patrons, cultivating a distinctive Consular and Empire style at Malmaison through collaborations with sculptors, painters, and interior decorators.

She commissioned major works from the Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, including Dancer with Hands on Hips and The Three Graces, and sat for portraits and commissioned works by painters including Jacques-Louis David, François Gérard, and Antoine-Jean Gros.

Portrait of Joséphine, c. 1809 by Antoine-Jean Gros

LITERATURE Joséphine maintained an extensive personal library at Malmaison and regularly supported contemporary authors, playwrights, and poets through literary pensions and private subscriptions.

Joséphine commissioned the botanical publication Les Roses from the artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté, produced between 1817 and 1820, which documented roses cultivated in her gardens and stands as one of the notable botanical texts of the period.

NATURE Joséphine's Château de Malmaison was celebrated for its magnificent rose garden, which she personally supervised owing to her passionate interest in roses collected from around the world, and Napoléon ordered his warship commanders to search seized vessels for plants destined for her collection. (4)

She is credited as a pioneering patron of modern rose cultivation, sometimes called the "Godmother of modern rosomaniacs" for helping popularize vernacular cultivar names and controlled hybridization techniques.

Rosa Joséphine de Beauharnais by Salicyna

PETS Joséphine loved exotic animals and pets. She owned a pug named Fortuné, who famously bit Napoléon on the leg on their wedding night when he tried to enter her bed. She also kept a pet orangutan that reportedly joined her for dinner at Malmaison dressed in a white cotton blouse. (4)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Gardening and horticulture were Joséphine's abiding passions, particularly after her divorce, when she retired to the smaller court of Malmaison and devoted herself to cultivating the flowers she loved (4)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Through her collaboration with horticulturalists including André Dupont and Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Joséphine developed genuine expertise in botany and plant classification, and her garden became an important site for early controlled-pollination rose hybridization

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Joséphine was raised and remained a Roman Catholic, and her religious status became relevant when Pope Pius VII objected to crowning an imperial couple who had not undergone a religious marriage, prompting Napoléon and Joséphine to take religious vows on December 1, 1804, the day before their coronation (2)

She maintained a practical, traditional religious posture throughout her life, though her personal outlook was shaped more by Enlightenment salon culture and post-Revolutionary pragmatism.

POLITICS Though she held no official political office, Joséphine wielded significant soft power. During the Directory and the First Empire, her social tact helped smooth political tensions between royalists and republicans, making her an indispensable political asset to Napoléon.

SCANDAL During the French Revolution, her first husband was accused of poor military performance at Mainz and executed. Joséphine was imprisoned in the Carmes prison and was freed five days after his execution thanks to the fall and execution of Robespierre, which ended the Reign of Terror.

Image by Perplexity

Joséphine's affair with Hippolyte Charles during her marriage to Napoléon became a well-known scandal that damaged the couple's relationship, and a separate incident at Château de Saint-Cloud, in which she caught Napoléon in the bedroom of one of her ladies-in-waiting, nearly ended the marriage before their coronation.

MILITARY RECORD Joséphine held no military role herself, but she was closely associated with military history through her husband's campaigns, accompanying elements of his circle to Italy in 1796 and 1797, and her son Eugène de Beauharnais frequently served alongside Napoléon on campaign,

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS She maintained her health through regular walking and outdoor leisure. Unusually for her era, she took a daily bath, a personal hygiene routine that was practically unheard of in French society at the time. (4)

Joséphine suffered a serious injury in 1798 when a balcony collapsed under her and her entourage at Plombières-les-Bains, leaving her temporarily unable to walk with a suspected broken pelvis, and she made repeated visits to the spa town in an unsuccessful effort to treat her infertility. (2)

HOMES Joséphine purchased the Château de Malmaison near Paris in 1799 while Napoléon was in Egypt, having it landscaped in an English style, and it became her primary residence both during her marriage and after her divorce, when she was styled Duchess of Navarre.

Front view of Château de Malmaison By Pedro Faber

TRAVEL She traveled from Martinique to France in her youth for her first marriage.

Joséphine traveled to Italy in 1796, spending roughly eighteen months there based mainly in Milan and at Château de Mombello to join Napoléon during his military campaign, and she had earlier crossed from Martinique to France in 1779.

DEATH Joséphine died at Rueil-Malmaison on May 29, 1814, of pneumonia contracted after walking with Tsar Alexander I of Russia in the gardens of Malmaison, and she was buried in the nearby Church of Saint-Pierre-Saint-Paul in Rueil (1) Despite his remarriage, Napoléon's reported final words on his deathbed at St. Helena were "France, the Army, the Head of the Army, Joséphine" ("France, l'armée, tête d'armée, Joséphine") (4)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Joséphine has been portrayed in dozens of historical films notably by Abel Gance's 1927 silent film Napoléon, the 1954 film Désirée (played by Merle Oberon), and Ridley Scott's 2023 biographical film Napoleon (played by Vanessa Kirby).

She was also played by Jacqueline Bisset in the 1987 miniseries Napoléon and Joséphine: A Love Story, and by Isabella Rossellini in the 2002 miniseries Napoléon.

She has also inspired songs, including "Josephine" by The Magnetic Fields and Tori Amos, and figures in numerous documentaries such as In Search of Joséphine (2012).

ACHIEVEMENTS Joséphine became the first Empress of the French and Queen consort of Italy

She is remembered as a pioneering patron of the arts and horticulture whose Malmaison rose collection helped shape modern rose cultivation and the Empire decorative style

Through her children by Alexandre de Beauharnais, she became the ancestor of the present royal houses of Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the grand ducal house of Luxembourg.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Mental Floss (3) Britannica (4) Encyclopedia of Trivia (5) Château de Malmaison National Museum

Joseph (Old Testament Character)

2016-02-27T16:00:00.000-08:00

NAME Joseph (Hebrew: יוֹסֵף, Yosef), later given the Egyptian name Zaphnath-Paaneah by Pharaoh.

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Joseph is one of the most prominent figures in the Old Testament Book of Genesis. He is best known for his "coat of many colors," his ability to interpret prophetic dreams, and his rise from a Hebrew slave and prisoner to become the Vizier of Egypt, the second most powerful man in the land. He is celebrated for saving Egypt and his own family from a seven-year famine and for his ultimate act of forgiveness toward the brothers who sold him into slavery.

BIRTH Date of birth unknown. According to the biblical chronology, Joseph was born in Paddan Aram (Aram-Naharaim), identified with the region of present-day Harran, Turkey, where his father Jacob was living in the household of his uncle Laban. He was the eleventh of Jacob's twelve named sons, and the first child of Rachel, Jacob's most beloved wife, who had previously been unable to conceive. Rachel named him Joseph, saying, "God has taken away my reproach" (Genesis 30:23–24). (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Joseph was the son of the patriarch Jacob (also called Israel) and his wife Rachel.

His maternal grandparents were Laban (Rachel's father) and his paternal grandparents were Isaac and Rebecca; his great-grandparents were Abraham and Sarah, founding figures of the Hebrew nation.

Jacob had twelve sons altogether, by four different women: his wives Leah and Rachel, and their respective handmaids Bilhah and Zilpah. Joseph's ten older half-brothers were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, and Zebulun. He had one full younger brother, Benjamin, also born to Rachel, and at least one half-sister, Dinah.

Jacob's favoritism toward Joseph — born in his old age by his favorite wife — created deep family tensions that would shape the rest of Joseph's life. (2)

CHILDHOOD Joseph grew up in the land of Canaan among his large and frequently quarrelsome family. His father Jacob showed conspicuous favoritism toward him from an early age: because Joseph was born when Jacob was an old man, and because he was the son of the beloved Rachel, Jacob singled him out for special treatment. This favoritism was most visibly expressed in the giving of the famous coat of many colors — an elaborate, ornate garment that signified Joseph's elevated standing in the family above his older half-brothers. Jacob also assigned Joseph the sensitive role of monitoring his brothers — reporting back to his father on their conduct — a task that made him deeply unpopular.

As a teenager, Joseph had two remarkable prophetic dreams: in the first, his brothers' sheaves of grain bowed to his; in the second, the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowed to him — images implying his future dominance over his entire family. When he shared these dreams, his brothers' jealousy reached its breaking point. (3)

Children of Jacob sell their brother Joseph, by Konstantin Flavitsky, 1855.

EDUCATION No formal education is described in the biblical text. However, Joseph clearly acquired considerable administrative, linguistic, and intellectual skills — he became proficient in Egyptian and was capable of managing the grain stores of an entire empire. (

His father Jacob, a former herder and trader, would have given him a thorough grounding in Hebrew oral tradition, family history, and religious practice; Jacob's lineage traced back to Abraham and included knowledge of God's covenant with the Israelites.

Joseph's extraordinary ability to interpret dreams was understood not as a learned skill but as a direct gift from God: when Pharaoh's court magicians and wise men failed to interpret the royal dreams, Joseph told Pharaoh plainly, "It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace" (Genesis 41:16). (1)

CAREER RECORD 1890 BC (approx.): Joseph served as the personal steward to Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh’s guard. He was given full authority over Potiphar's entire household and estate.

1880 BC (approx.): Following a false accusation by Potiphar’s wife, Joseph was imprisoned. While in jail, he was promoted by the warden to oversee all other prisoners and the facility's daily operations.

1877 BC (approx.): Joseph was summoned to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams. After successfully predicting seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, he was appointed Vizier (Prime Minister) of Egypt.

1870 BC (approx.): During the Great Famine, Joseph managed the national grain reserves, selling food to both Egyptians and foreign nations, which effectively brought the entire wealth and land of Egypt under Pharaoh’s direct control.

APPEARANCE The biblical text does not describe Joseph's physical features in detail, but his striking attractiveness is implied at several points. Potiphar's wife "cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, Lie with me" (Genesis 39:7), suggesting compelling physical presence. In Islamic tradition, his handsomeness is emphasized more explicitly: the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said, "One half of all the beauty God apportioned for mankind went to Joseph and his mother; the other one half went to the rest of mankind." In the Eastern Orthodox tradition he is called "Joseph the All-Comely," a title reflecting both physical and spiritual beauty.

FASHION Joseph's most famous garment is, of course, his legendary coat of many colors (Hebrew: ketonet passim, כְּתֹנֶת פַּסִּים), given to him by his father Jacob as a visible symbol of his special status within the family. The coat was an elaborate, ornate garment — possibly long-sleeved or multi-paneled — that set Joseph apart from his brothers and functioned as a mark of authority and parental favoritism. (3)

The biblical story of Joseph and his coat of many colors is found in Genesis 37. Joseph's father Jacob was particularly proud of him because he was born when Jacob was an old man, and made him an elaborate coat of many colors to signify his important standing in the family. The coat was probably made of wool — the Bible contains many references to wool, and woolen fabrics were the predominant textile of the ancient Near East in this period. (2)

When Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, they tore the coat, dipped it in goat's blood, and presented it to Jacob as false evidence that his son had been killed by a wild animal (Genesis 37:31–33).

Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob by Diego Velázquez, 1630.

Upon his appointment as Vizier of Egypt, Joseph was clothed in fine Egyptian linen and given a gold chain by Pharaoh (Genesis 41:42), marking his transformation from Hebrew slave to Egyptian grandee. (

CHARACTER Joseph is consistently portrayed as a man of exceptional integrity, moral courage, and resilience. His refusal to sleep with Potiphar's wife — even at the cost of his freedom — is presented as emblematic of his fundamental character: "How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?" (Genesis 39:9).

His capacity for forgiveness is perhaps his most celebrated quality: when he finally revealed himself to the brothers who had sold him into slavery, his first words were not of anger but of reassurance — "And now be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life" (Genesis 45:5). (1)

Joseph wept openly and repeatedly throughout the narrative — when he saw his brother Benjamin, when he finally revealed himself, when he embraced his father — suggesting a man of deep emotional warmth beneath his administrative composure.

Jewish tradition regards him as a near-perfect figure of wisdom, loyalty, and compassion; in the Midrash, he is described as faithfully applying the teachings of his father Jacob even in the alien environment of Egypt.

SPEAKING VOICE Joseph was evidently a commanding and eloquent speaker: he addressed Pharaoh with sufficient confidence and persuasiveness to be immediately appointed second-in-command of Egypt (Genesis 41:37–41).

He was fluent in Egyptian — he spoke to his brothers through an interpreter so they would not know he understood Hebrew, and only revealed himself by speaking to them directly in their own language (Genesis 42:23; 45:4). His ability to operate in two languages at the highest level of Egyptian court life attests to considerable linguistic and rhetorical skill.

SENSE OF HUMOUR The biblical narrative does not record any jokes or comic observations by Joseph. However, his elaborate multi-stage deception of his brothers — planting his silver divination cup in Benjamin's sack, insisting he is a spy, returning their silver to their money bags — has a distinctly playful, almost theatrical quality, as though he was testing and teasing them as much as formally assessing their character. Jewish tradition interprets these episodes as morally purposeful tests, but there is a decided wryness to Joseph's conduct — concealing his identity while weeping privately, watching his brothers squirm, and eventually breaking down in the most dramatic of revelations.

RELATIONSHIPS Jacob (father). The central emotional relationship of Joseph's life. Jacob's unconcealed preference for Joseph above all his other sons — expressed most vividly in the gift of the coat of many colors — shaped both Joseph's destiny and the family dynamics that led to his enslavement. Their reunion after more than twenty years apart was, by any account, overwhelming: Jacob declared he could now die in peace (Genesis 46:30). Joseph nursed Jacob through his final illness, ensured his burial in the ancestral cave of Machpelah, and honored his every wish.

Rachel (mother). Rachel, Jacob's beloved wife and Joseph's mother, died giving birth to Joseph's younger brother Benjamin (Genesis 35:16–19). Joseph therefore grew up without his mother.

Brothers. Joseph had ten older half-brothers (Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, and Zebulun) and one full younger brother (Benjamin). His relationship with the half-brothers was catastrophically broken by their act of selling him into slavery; his relationship with Benjamin remained warm and close throughout. The reconciliation with the half-brothers — after years of distance and concealment — is one of the most emotionally complex scenes in all of scripture.

Asenath (wife). Joseph married Asenath, daughter of Potipherah, priest of On (Heliopolis), as arranged by Pharaoh at the time of his appointment as Vizier (Genesis 41:45). She bore him two sons: Manasseh ("God has made me forget all my trouble") and Ephraim ("God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction") (Genesis 41:50–52). (1)

Joseph meets Asenath (1490s painting) Yair Haklai

Potiphar's wife. Joseph's most hostile relationship. She repeatedly attempted to seduce him; his consistent refusal led her to accuse him of rape, a charge that cost him his freedom (Genesis 39:7–20). In later Islamic and Jewish tradition she was named Zuleikha and her story became an elaborate literary sub-genre in its own right.

MONEY AND FAME Joseph began his Egyptian career with nothing — a foreign slave with no legal standing. By his appointment as Vizier he controlled, in effect, the economy of the most powerful nation in the ancient world. During the famine years he accumulated virtually all of Egypt's money, livestock, and land for Pharaoh, creating a tax system that persisted for generations (Genesis 47:14–26). (

Joseph lived in considerable personal splendor: Pharaoh's own signet ring, fine linen, a gold chain, and a chariot placed him among the very highest Egyptian elite (Genesis 41:42–43).

He was effectively the second most famous and powerful man in Egypt during the famine years — directing the affairs of a nation while his true identity remained unknown to those closest to him.

FOOD AND DRINK Food and its management are central to Joseph's entire career. His interpretation of Pharaoh's famine dream led directly to the greatest food storage and distribution operation in the ancient Near East. During the seven years of plenty he ensured Egyptian granaries were filled beyond measure — "as the sand of the sea" (Genesis 41:49).

Below, Joseph gave orders to his servants to fill their sacks with wheat: illuminated Bible by Raphaël de Mercatelli, Ghent, late 15th century.

When his brothers first came to Egypt to buy grain, Joseph hosted them at his own table; the Egyptians, however, could not dine at the same table as Hebrews, whom they considered unclean, so the brothers were served separately (Genesis 43:32). Joseph's silver cup — the famous prop of his trap for Benjamin — was used by him for divination, a practice associated in the ancient world with liquids and their patterns (Genesis 44:5; 44:15).

MUSIC AND ARTS Joseph's story inspired one of the most popular musicals in theatre history — Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, first performed in March 1968 at Colet Court school in Hammersmith, London. The work began as a 15-minute "pop cantata" for a school choir before expanding into a full-length West End and Broadway production. (4)

LITERATURE Joseph's story has generated an extraordinarily rich literary afterlife. The most celebrated literary adaptation is Thomas Mann's four-volume novel Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943), widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th-century fiction.

The 13th-century Cistercian monk Jean de Limoges wrote Somnium morale Pharaonis, a fictional exchange of letters between Joseph, Pharaoh, and other characters. (

Anita Diamant's 1997 novel The Red Tent, focused on Joseph's half-sister Dinah, also features Joseph as a secondary character.

In Islam, the Quranic Surah Yusuf is considered literary perfection — "the best of stories." (

The 2019 novel Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness by Stephen Mitchell retells the story in midrashic form, exploring Joseph as a flawed and evolving human being.

NATURE Joseph spent his early life as a shepherd in the pastoral landscapes of Canaan, tending flocks and reporting on his brothers in the fields.

His dreams are saturated with natural imagery: sheaves of wheat, fat and lean cattle, fruitful and blighted ears of grain — all drawn from an agrarian world where the natural cycle of growth and famine was a matter of life and death.

Joseph's dream of grain

PETS As a shepherd in his youth, Joseph would have been constantly surrounded by sheep and goats. In Egypt, he would have been familiar with the sacred status of cats and the use of hunting dogs by the nobility.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS As a youth, Joseph practiced animal husbandry and shepherding. In his Egyptian life, his "hobbies" appeared to be administrative—he was a master of logistics and organizational systems.

SCIENCE AND MATHS Joseph's management of Egypt's grain reserves during the seven years of plenty, followed by the distribution of those reserves during seven years of famine, represents one of the most impressive feats of large-scale resource management and forward planning in the ancient world. He was essentially applying what we might today call economic forecasting: predicting supply shortfalls years in advance and building strategic reserves to mitigate their impact. The fiscal system he introduced — taxing a fifth of all produce on government-owned land — was in effect a practical application of proportional taxation, and the Bible notes it remained operative until the time of Moses (Genesis 47:26).

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Joseph's life is built around a core theological conviction: that what appears to be human evil is, within God's larger plan, purposeful and ultimately redemptive. His most quoted declaration — "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good" (Genesis 50:20) — is one of the most succinct statements of providential theology in all of scripture.

Joseph is regarded by Jewish tradition as the ancestor of the Messiah "Mashiach ben Yosef."

In the Christian patristic tradition he was widely read as a typological precursor of Christ — sold for silver, unjustly condemned, exalted to high authority, and acting as a savior to his people. John Chrysostom described Joseph's suffering as "a type of things to come"; John Calvin wrote that "in the person of Joseph, a lively image of Christ is presented."

In Islam, Joseph is a prophet (nabi), and the Quran's Surah Yusuf is the only chapter of the Quran dedicated to a single complete narrative.

RISE TO POWER IN EGYPT Joseph's career trajectory was unusual, even by Biblical standards.

At seventeen, he was dispatched by his father Jacob to check on his brothers, who were looking after sheep near Dothan. This seemed a perfectly reasonable errand, unless you happened to know that the brothers in question already disliked Joseph with a depth and enthusiasm normally reserved for tax inspectors and rival football supporters. Jacob's favouritism had not helped, and Joseph's habit of recounting dreams in which everyone eventually bowed down to him had somehow failed to improve family relations.

The brothers initially considered murder, which rather suggests that family counselling was not yet a developed profession. In the end they settled for throwing Joseph into a pit and selling him to passing merchants for twenty pieces of silver. It was, from Joseph's perspective, one of those days that had started badly and then gathered momentum.

Transported to Egypt, he was sold to Potiphar, captain of Pharaoh's guard. Joseph proved remarkably competent and soon found himself running the entire household. Unfortunately, efficiency was not enough to protect him from Potiphar's wife, who attempted to seduce him. Joseph refused, largely because he believed some things mattered more than convenience. This was admirable but, as is often the case with admirable behaviour, it turned out not to be immediately rewarding. Potiphar's wife accused him of attempted rape and Joseph was thrown into prison.

There, astonishingly, he was promoted again.

One begins to suspect that if Joseph had somehow found himself imprisoned in a dungeon at the bottom of the sea, he would shortly have been appointed Assistant Director of Underwater Operations.

The prison governor put him in charge of the other inmates. While there he met Pharaoh's chief cup-bearer and chief baker, both of whom had managed to upset the king. Joseph interpreted their dreams. The cup-bearer would be restored to favour; the baker would be executed. Both predictions came true with impressive accuracy, though only one recipient found the news encouraging.

Joseph asked the restored cup-bearer to put in a good word for him with Pharaoh. The cup-bearer promptly forgot. Not for a few days or weeks, but for two years. This is one of the Bible's more reassuring reminders that human beings have always been human beings.

Then Pharaoh began having disturbing dreams involving skinny cows eating fat cows and shrivelled ears of grain swallowing healthy ones. None of his advisers could explain them. At this point the cup-bearer's memory suddenly returned, no doubt accompanied by a moment of intense embarrassment.

Joseph was summoned. He explained that Egypt would experience seven years of abundance followed by seven years of devastating famine. More importantly, he proposed a practical solution. Pharaoh was impressed by this rare combination of spiritual insight and administrative competence and appointed Joseph as his Vizier, second only to himself in authority.

Joseph was thirty years old.

One day he had been forgotten in prison; the next he was wearing fine linen, sporting a gold chain, carrying Pharaoh's signet ring and answering to the rather magnificent Egyptian name Zaphnath-Paaneah. Life can be surprisingly dramatic when God is writing the script.

During the seven good years Joseph organised grain storage on a colossal scale. He married Asenath and became father to two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Then the famine arrived exactly as predicted.

Soon people from across the region were travelling to Egypt for food. Joseph oversaw the entire operation, effectively running one of history's largest emergency relief programmes. The administrative details were complex, involving grain, money, livestock, land and taxation. It was not glamorous work, but then saving civilisation rarely is.

Eventually Joseph's brothers arrived from Canaan seeking grain.

They did not recognise him. This was perhaps understandable. The last time they had seen him he had been a teenager at the bottom of a pit. Finding him as ruler of Egypt would not have been most people's first guess.

Joseph recognised them immediately and subjected them to a series of tests designed to discover whether they had changed. At last, unable to contain himself any longer, he revealed his identity.

The resulting emotional scene was spectacular. Joseph wept so loudly that people outside the room heard him. It is one of Scripture's most moving reunions, and also one of its least dignified.

He invited the entire family—seventy people in all—to settle in Egypt, where they were given the fertile region of Goshen.

Not long afterwards Joseph was reunited with his father. More than twenty years had passed since Jacob had believed him dead. Their embrace is one of those moments where even the most determined cynic tends to become unexpectedly interested in something elsewhere in the room.

After Jacob died, Joseph arranged an elaborate burial in Canaan. He continued serving Egypt while caring for his extended family, reassuring the same brothers who had once sold him that he had no intention of taking revenge.

Joseph eventually died at the age of 110, having lived long enough to see his great-grandchildren.

Looking back over his life, one is struck by how often disaster turned out not to be the end of the story. Pits became pathways. Prisons became promotions. Betrayals became reconciliations.

Which is not to say that Joseph enjoyed the process. It merely suggests that God has a curious habit of accomplishing remarkable things with circumstances that appear, at first glance, to be complete disasters.

POLITICS As Vizier of Egypt, Joseph was one of the most powerful political figures of his era. He held three simultaneous titles of office: "father to Pharaoh," "lord of all his house," and "ruler over all the land of Egypt" (Genesis 45:8) — a threefold description that corresponds precisely to the threefold division of a vizier's responsibilities as understood in Egyptian administrative records.

Joseph wielded Pharaoh's own signet ring, giving him the authority to seal royal documents and govern in the king's name.

SCANDAL The most dramatic scandal of Joseph's life was his false accusation of attempted rape by Potiphar's wife (Genesis 39:7–20). Her repeated attempts to seduce him had been consistently refused; enraged, she used his abandoned garment as false evidence, and Joseph was imprisoned without trial.

In Jewish tradition, Potiphar privately doubted his wife's account — Abravanel notes she had made similar accusations against other servants before — and petitioned Pharaoh to spare Joseph's life rather than execute him.

The garment, in a painful irony, echoes the fate of the coat of many colors: in both cases, a piece of clothing was used to deceive a powerful man about Joseph's fate.

Joseph in prison, by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, 17th century.

MILITARY RECORD While Joseph was not a soldier, as Vizier he would have had oversight of the state's security and the "Captain of the Guard." His rise to power was a civil and administrative appointment rather than a military one.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Joseph survived extraordinary physical and psychological hardships: being thrown into a pit, sold into slavery, transported across the Sinai desert to Egypt, and imprisoned for a substantial period. He appears to have maintained his health and composure throughout — he was described as rising to positions of trusted responsibility in both Potiphar's household and in prison.

Joseph lived to the remarkable age of 110 years, surviving to see his great-grandchildren — a lifespan that in the ancient Near Eastern tradition symbolized a life of exceptional fullness and divine blessing. (5)

HOMES Joseph was born in Paddan Aram (modern Turkey) and grew up in Canaan, in the household of his father Jacob.

As Potiphar's superintendent he lived within Potiphar's Egyptian estate, possibly in or near Memphis or the capital of the day (Genesis 39:1–6). He spent an indeterminate period in an Egyptian prison, where he nonetheless rose to an administrative role. (

Upon becoming Vizier Joseph would have occupied official state residences appropriate to the second-in-command of Egypt.

In his old age, his entire family was settled by his arrangement in the fertile province of Goshen, in the eastern Nile Delta region of Egypt (Genesis 45:10; 47:11).

TRAVEL Joseph's life involved remarkable geographical mobility — unusual for the ancient world. He was born in Paddan Aram (modern Turkey), grew up in Canaan, was transported by slave traders across the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, spent years in an Egyptian prison, and then, as Vizier, administered a territory covering the entire Nile Valley.

Joseph led a great ceremonial funeral procession from Egypt back to Canaan to bury his father Jacob in the cave of Machpelah — a journey that attracted the attention of the local Canaanite population, who named the mourning place "Abel Mizraim" (Genesis 50:7–11).

DEATH Joseph died in Egypt at the age of 110 years — an age considered in the ancient Near Eastern tradition to signify a perfectly complete and divinely favored life. He had lived to see his great-grandchildren, and the children of his son Manasseh's son Machir were "brought up upon Joseph's knees" (Genesis 50:23).

Before he died, he made the children of Israel swear an oath: "God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence" (Genesis 50:25). His body was embalmed in the Egyptian manner and placed in a coffin in Egypt.

The oath was honored: when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt in the Exodus, he took Joseph's bones with him (Exodus 13:19), and they were ultimately buried at Shechem in a parcel of ground purchased by Jacob from the sons of Hamor — a site traditionally identified with Joseph's Tomb near the modern city of Nablus in the West Bank (Joshua 24:32).

Joseph's Tomb in Shechem Tom Miller https://www.flickr.com/

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Joseph's story has inspired an enormous range of adaptations across theatre, film, and television.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968 onward): The musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, originally a 15-minute school cantata performed at Colet Court, Hammersmith, on March 1, 1968, grew into a long-running West End and Broadway show. It opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on January 27, 1982. (6)

It was adapted as a television film in 1999, starring Donny Osmond as Joseph, with Joan Collins and Richard Attenborough. (7)

Joseph (1995): A made-for-television film starring Paul Mercurio as Joseph, with Ben Kingsley as Potiphar, Lesley Ann Warren as Potiphar's wife, and Martin Landau as Jacob.

Joseph: King of Dreams (2000): A direct-to-video DreamWorks animated musical film, with Ben Affleck providing the speaking voice of Joseph.

The Story of Jacob and Joseph (1974 film): Joseph portrayed by Tony Lo Bianco.

The Story of Joseph and His Brethren (1961 film): Joseph played by Geoffrey Horne.

The Ballad of Little Joe (2003): A VeggieTales children's retelling set in the American West.

Prophet Joseph (Yousuf-e Payambar, 2008–2009): A popular Iranian television series based on the Quranic account.

José do Egito (2013): A Brazilian miniseries on RecordTV, with Ângelo Paes Leme as the adult Joseph.

The Red Tent (2014 TV miniseries): Joseph appears as a secondary character, portrayed by Will Tudor.

ACHIEVEMENTS Served as Vizier of Egypt — second-in-command of the most powerful ancient civilization of his era — having arrived in Egypt as a penniless foreign slave.

Designed and implemented a grain storage and distribution system that saved Egypt and surrounding nations from starvation during a seven-year famine.

Introduced a tax and land reform system that shaped Egyptian fiscal law for generations (Genesis 47:26).

Reunited his family after more than twenty years of separation, resettled them in Egypt, and preserved the lineage that would eventually become the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Became the founding ancestor of two Israelite tribes — the Tribe of Manasseh and the Tribe of Ephraim — through his sons, whom Jacob adopted as his own heirs (Genesis 48:5).

Regarded as a prophet in Islam and a prefiguration of Christ in Christian theology — one of very few Old Testament figures to hold significant sacred status across all three Abrahamic faiths.

His life narrative, spanning Genesis 37–50, is the longest and most novelistically developed story of any individual in the entire Pentateuch.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia — Joseph (Genesis) (2) Encyclopaedia of Trivia — Coat (3) Christianity.com — Joseph's Coat of Many Colors (4) YouTube — The Early Days: Making of Joseph (Lloyd Webber/Rice) (5) Bible Gateway — Genesis 50:22–26 (Death of Joseph) (6) Playbill — Original Broadway Production of Joseph (7) PBS SoCal — Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Michael Jordan

2016-02-25T16:00:00.000-08:00

NAME Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Known widely by his initials "MJ," and by nicknames including "Air Jordan" and "His Airness."

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Michael Jordan is widely regarded as the greatest basketball player of all time, a six-time NBA champion with the Chicago Bulls who transformed the sport into a global spectacle. He is also famous as a businessman, becoming the first billionaire NBA player and the face of Nike's record-breaking Air Jordan sneaker line.

BIRTH Michael Jeffrey Jordan was born on February 17, 1963, at Cumberland Hospital in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City. (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND He was the son of Deloris (née Peoples), a bank employee, and James R. Jordan Sr., an equipment supervisor. He had two older brothers, James Jr. and Larry, an older sister named Deloris, and a younger sister named Roslyn. The family was raised Methodist. (2)

CHILDHOOD In 1968, when Jordan was a toddler, the family moved from New York to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he grew up.

As a boy he took a home economics class in high school to learn to cook, reportedly because he worried that his large ears would make it hard to find a wife. He tried out for his high school's varsity basketball team as a sophomore but, at just 5 feet 11 inches, was deemed too short and was cut, spurring him to work relentlessly on his game. (3)

He spent countless hours in the backyard playing basketball with his older brother Larry, whose intense competitiveness heavily influenced Michael’s own legendary drive.

EDUCATION Jordan attended Emsley A. Laney High School in Wilmington, where he played basketball, baseball, and football, making the varsity basketball team in 1979-80 after growing four inches over a summer. In 1981, he accepted a scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in cultural geography, partly out of an early interest in meteorology. He left UNC a year early to enter the NBA draft but returned to complete his degree, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in geography in 1986. (3)

CAREER RECORD 1981 Michael Jordan enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he played under coach Dean Smith. As a freshman, he hit the winning jump shot in the 1982 NCAA Championship game against Georgetown, helping North Carolina win the national title.

1984 Jordan was selected by the Chicago Bulls with the third overall pick in the NBA Draft. He quickly became one of the league's biggest stars, winning NBA Rookie of the Year in 1985.

1987-1993 Jordan won seven consecutive NBA scoring titles and led the Bulls to three successive NBA championships in 1991, 1992, and 1993, winning the Finals MVP award each time.

1992 He was part of the United States "Dream Team" that won Olympic gold in Barcelona.

1993 Jordan retired from basketball and briefly pursued professional baseball, playing for the Birmingham Barons in the Chicago White Sox organization.

1995 He returned to the Bulls and helped them win three more consecutive NBA championships from 1996 to 1998. The 1995-96 Bulls set an NBA record with 72 regular-season victories.

2001 Jordan returned to the NBA with the Washington Wizards. He played two seasons before retiring for good in 2003.

2006 He became part-owner and head of basketball operations for the Charlotte Bobcats (later Hornets), acquiring a controlling interest in 2010 and selling his majority stake in 2023.

2009 Jordan was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

APPEARANCE Jordan stands 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 meters) tall and played at a competition weight of around 216 pounds (98 kilograms). He is known for his shaved head, a look he adopted early in his career after noticing his hair thinning, and for his prominent, memorable ears, which he once worried would hinder his romantic prospects. (3)

Jordan in 1997 by Steve Lipofsky Basketballphoto.com

FASHION Jordan is credited with popularizing the baggy shorts trend in the NBA, having asked uniform maker Champion to make his North Carolina-style longer shorts so he could grip them while catching his breath during games.

He also famously continued wearing his Nike Air Jordan sneakers even after the NBA banned them for violating uniform colour rules, accepting personal fines of 5,000 dollars per game while Nike covered the cost as a marketing strategy. (2)

CHARACTER Jordan is renowned for a fierce, almost obsessive competitiveness that extended to practice sessions, card games, and golf outings alike, often manufacturing slights to fuel his motivation. This intensity made him a demanding teammate; he was known to openly criticize colleagues he felt lacked focus, though it was also central to his effectiveness as a clutch performer under pressure. (

SPEAKING VOICE Jordan speaks in a distinctive, gravelly, mid-pitched voice with a light Southern inflection reflecting his North Carolina upbringing, delivered in the measured, confident cadences familiar from decades of televised interviews and Nike commercials.

SENSE OF HUMOUR Jordan's humour often surfaced as sharp, competitive needling of rivals. After an opposing fan heckled him during a 1987 dunk over the diminutive John Stockton to "pick on someone your own size," Jordan promptly dunked over the much taller Mel Turpin on the next play and asked the heckler, "Was he big enough?" (2)

RELATIONSHIPS Jordan married Juanita Vanoy, whom he met at a Chicago restaurant, in Las Vegas in 1989; the couple had three children, Jeffrey, Marcus, and Jasmine, before divorcing in 2006. Before receiving the $168 million divorce settlement from Michael Jordan, Juanita Jordan hired a private investigator to follow him for four years and document his infidelity.

In 2013, he married Cuban-American model Yvette Prieto in a lavish ceremony in Palm Beach, Florida, and the couple had twin daughters, Victoria and Ysabel, in 2014.

Jordan was extremely close to his father, James Sr., whose murder in 1993 profoundly affected him. (4) , (5)

MONEY AND FAME As one of the most recognizable faces on the planet, Jordan's wealth matches his fame; he is the wealthiest athlete in history, with a net worth estimated at 4.3 billion dollars as of 2026, built through NBA earnings, Nike's Air Jordan royalties, and the 2023 sale of his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets.

Grocery store chain Dominick's Finer Foods ran a steak advertisement in Sports Illustrated in 2009 congratulating Jordan on his Hall of Fame induction, without securing his likeness rights; Jordan sued and, in 2015, a jury awarded him 8.9 million dollars for the unauthorized use of his name and image. (6)

The longevity and strength of his brand mean that Jordan's endorsement income has long dwarfed his playing salary, with Forbes reporting that he earned around 100 million dollars in a single year in the mid-2010s, more than his entire NBA career salary of roughly 90 million dollars combined.

He became the first billionaire in NBA history in 2014 and famously earned more from endorsements in 2013 than his entire NBA playing salary ever paid him in a single season. (7)

FOOD AND DRINK Jordan is known to enjoy fine dining, premium cigars, and high-end tequila, having co-founded the ultra-premium tequila brand Cincoro in 2019 alongside a group of fellow NBA team owners, with the venture's rarest bottling, an extra añejo, retailing for around 1,600 dollars. His diet during his playing days was notoriously steak-heavy before games, as his longtime trainer Tim Grover built a pregame routine around a large steak and baked potato eaten about four hours before tip-off to keep his blood sugar stable through the fourth quarter. (8) (9)

MUSIC AND ARTS Jordan holds an enduring place in 1990s pop culture, largely because his Air Jordan sneakers became deeply intertwined with the era's hip-hop scene, frequently referenced in rap lyrics and worn as a status symbol despite Jordan's own more modest taste in music. Contrary to the tough, hip-hop-fueled image fans might expect, Jordan was famously a devoted fan of smooth R&B, particularly singer Anita Baker; he named her 1988 song "Giving You the Best That I Got" as his personal pre-game anthem after a memorable 1989 playoff win, and teammates recalled him singing the tune to opponents mid-game as a form of trash talk. (10)

Jordan starred as himself in the 1996 live-action and animated film Space Jam, blending his basketball fame with popular culture and cementing his status as an entertainment icon beyond sport.

LITERATURE Jordan authored his own autobiographical photo book, Rare Air: Michael on Michael, published in 1993 with photography by Walter Iooss Jr and the 1998 autobiography For the Love of the Game, in which he revealed he had been contemplating retirement from basketball as early as the summer of 1992, reflecting on the toll of fame and competition.

Jordan has more often been the subject of countless biographies. The most famous literary work surrounding him is journalist Sam Smith's controversial 1991 bestseller The Jordan Rules, which exposed the intense, sometimes harsh inner workings of the Chicago Bulls during their first championship season and Jordan's demanding, occasionally combative leadership style toward teammates like Bill Cartwright and Will Perdue.

NATURE Jordan chose to study geography at the University of North Carolina in part because of its connection to meteorology, an early interest of his in weather and the natural world.

His numerous properties, particularly his Florida and North Carolina estates, are noted for their extensive landscaped grounds and golf-course settings.

SPORTING CAREER Michael Jordan acquired the nickname "Air Jordan" on account of his extraordinary ability to leave the ground and remain, for a moment at least, in a place where ordinary basketball players had no business being. This was most spectacularly demonstrated by his habit of launching himself from the free-throw line and dunking, a feat that made the laws of physics look less like laws and more like suggestions. He won consecutive Slam Dunk Contests in 1987 and 1988, with the second victory coming on February 6, 1988, in Chicago, when he produced a perfect 50-point dunk from the far end of the court. The image of Jordan sailing towards the basket became so closely associated with him that it inspired Nike's iconic Jumpman logo. He also popularized a move known as the "Leaner," in which his body tilted noticeably away from the vertical, as if even gravity had briefly lost an argument with him.

On February 14, 1990, Jordan discovered that his famous No. 23 jersey had disappeared from the locker room before a game against the Orlando Magic. Forced to wear a nameless No. 12 instead, he responded to this minor wardrobe catastrophe by scoring 49 points, setting a franchise record for a player wearing that particular number. Most people would regard this as a good evening's work under normal circumstances.

Jordan's scoring statistics were equally absurd. Wilt Chamberlain had been the only other player to score 3,000 points in a season before Jordan managed it in 1986-87. Jordan then won seven consecutive scoring titles from 1986-87 through 1992-93, followed by an eighth in 1995-96, eventually collecting ten in total. His official career regular-season scoring average was 30.1 points per game, while his playoff average was an even more remarkable 33.4. He also became famous for regarding failure as a necessary companion to success, noting that he had missed 12,345 shots during his NBA regular-season career. It is perhaps the most impressive way ever devised of admitting that, occasionally, even Michael Jordan missed.

Jordan led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships, winning three in succession from 1991 through 1993 and three more from 1996 through 1998. He was named Finals MVP in all six victories. He also won the NBA's regular-season MVP award five times, in 1988, 1991, 1992, 1996, and 1998. On the international stage, he helped the United States win Olympic gold in 1984 and again in 1992, when he was part of the celebrated "Dream Team." By then, Jordan had become rather more than a basketball player: he was a global sporting phenomenon who happened to be exceptionally good at putting a ball through a hoop.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Jordan is a passionate and highly competitive golfer, frequently seen on the course with friends, cigars in hand, and has also displayed a taste for high-stakes gambling, including well-publicized trips to casinos in Atlantic City during NBA playoff runs. (11)

SCIENCE AND MATHS To maintain his edge, Michael Jordan practiced with strobe lights as part of a training technique called "perceptual-cognitive training," which aims to improve an athlete's ability to process and react to visual information quickly and accurately. By flashing lights at different frequencies and patterns, the technique disrupts the athlete's visual processing and forces them to adapt and improve their reaction times. The technique also helped Jordan become more accustomed to the sudden flashes of cameras during high-stakes games. (2)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Jordan’s philosophy centers entirely on the relentless pursuit of victory. He believed that the mind was stronger than the body, and he used every slight—real or imagined—as psychological fuel to destroy his opponents.

Jordan was raised Methodist and has generally kept his personal religious views private, rarely discussing theology publicly, though he has periodically referenced faith and family values in interviews about his father's death and his own motivations.

POLITICS Jordan largely avoided political activism during his playing career, most famously declining in 1990 to publicly endorse Democratic Senate candidate Harvey Gantt against Jesse Helms, reportedly reasoning that "Republicans buy sneakers, too." He later said the remark was intended humorously and that he did not see himself as a political figure, though in 2000 he did endorse Democrat Bill Bradley, and in 2020 he and the Jordan Brand pledged 100 million dollars over ten years toward racial equality and social justice initiatives. (1)

SCANDAL Jordan's gambling habits drew significant media scrutiny throughout his career, most notably a 1993 trip to an Atlantic City casino the night before a playoff game, which fed rumors, later denied, that his first retirement was connected to a secret gambling-related suspension. His first marriage was also affected by publicized extramarital relationships, and a related legal claim brought by Karla Knafel was resolved in Jordan's favor in 2006. (11)

MILITARY RECORD Michael Jordan has no personal military record. His younger brother, James Jr., however, served in the U.S. Army and retired in 2006 as Command Sergeant Major of the 35th Signal Brigade of the XVIII Airborne Corps. (2)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Jordan trained rigorously throughout his career, including practicing with strobe lights as part of "perceptual-cognitive training" designed to sharpen his visual reaction times. He overcame a broken foot that sidelined him for 64 games in the 1985-86 season and later played through knee cartilage problems during his comeback with the Washington Wizards.

His most legendary display of fitness under adversity came in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals against the Utah Jazz, when, weakened by fever and food poisoning, he scored 38 points in the so-called "Flu Game." (2)

HOMES Jordan built a 56,000-square-foot mansion in Highland Park, Illinois, completed in 1995 at a cost of around 50 million dollars, featuring a regulation basketball court, cigar room, and trophy room; it has remained unsold on the market for over a decade.

His primary residence today is a roughly 28,000-square-foot estate in the exclusive Bear's Club community of Jupiter, Florida, which he shares with his wife Yvette Prieto, and he has since purchased an additional Jupiter property. He also maintains ties to North Carolina, his boyhood home state. (12) , (13)

TRAVEL As a global ambassador for basketball and Nike, Jordan has traveled extensively around the world. His trips to Paris and Tokyo for preseason games and promotional tours drew crowds equivalent to major heads of state

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Jordan seamlessly crossed over into Hollywood by starring alongside Bugs Bunny in the beloved 1996 live-action/animated film Space Jam. He was also the subject of the critically acclaimed 2020 documentary miniseries The Last Dance.

His cultural footprint was so large that fans developed extreme devotions; when she was in third grade, Irene Liao of New York famously carried a Michael Jordan cardboard cutout everywhere she went because she was completely obsessed with him. (2)

ACHIEVEMENTS Jordan's honors include six NBA championships, six NBA Finals MVP awards, five NBA Most Valuable Player awards, fourteen NBA All-Star selections, ten scoring titles, and NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 1988.

He was twice inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, in 2009 for his individual career and in 2010 as part of the 1992 Dream Team,

In 1999 was named the 20th century's greatest North American athlete by ESPN.

In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Encyclopedia of Trivia (3) NCpedia (4) Heavy.com (5) ESPN (6) Associated Press (7) SportsLeo (8) Forbes (9) TheSportsRush (10) EssentiallySports (11) Yahoo Sports (12) Sportskeeda (13) Traded.co

Ben Jonson

2016-02-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

NAME Benjamin "Ben" Jonson.

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Ben Jonson was an English Stuart dramatist, lyric poet, and literary critic, widely regarded during his lifetime and in modern scholarship as the second most important playwright of the English Renaissance after William Shakespeare. He popularised the "comedy of humours" and wrote enduring satirical masterpieces including Every Man in His Humour, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. He was also England's unofficial first Poet Laureate and pioneered court masques alongside architect Inigo Jones. (1)

BIRTH Ben Jonson was born on June 11, 1572, in Westminster, London, although some sources give the date with a question mark since parish records are incomplete.

FAMILY BACKGROUND His father was a clergyman who died shortly before Jonson was born, leaving his mother to raise him alone until she remarried a master bricklayer. Jonson's stepfather brought him up in this trade household, and it was this stepfather's bricklaying business that Jonson himself was later forced to join. (2)

CHILDHOOD As a child, Jonson was reportedly so unattractive and so ridiculously dressed that he was mercilessly teased by his schoolmates, and he retreated into reading to escape his misery. This early hardship is thought to have contributed to the thin-skinned, combative temperament he displayed throughout his adult life. (3)

EDUCATION Jonson attended a free parish school in St. Martin's Lane before being sponsored by the headmaster to study at Westminster School, where he came under the influence of the great classical scholar and antiquarian William Camden.

He was forced to leave in 1589 without completing a university education after losing his scholarship, and was made to work as a bricklayer alongside his stepfather instead — a background he resented and later scholars have often seen as spurring his determination to be recognised as a serious, classically learned writer. (4)

CAREER RECORD 1589 Forced to abandon his formal education, he began an unwilled apprenticeship as a bricklayer under his stepfather in London.

1591 Traveled to Flanders as a volunteer soldier, fighting with Sir Francis Vere's English regiments during the Eighty Years' War.

1597 Returned to London and joined Philip Henslowe's theatrical company as an actor and apprentice playwright, earning money by revising existing repertory plays.

1598 Achieved widespread theatrical fame with his play Every Man in His Humour, produced by the Lord Chamberlain's Men with William Shakespeare in the cast.

1605 Began a decades-long career writing elaborate court masques for King James I and Queen Anne of Denmark, beginning with The Masque of Blackness.

1616 Published The Workes of Beniamin Ionson, a landmark folio that treated published stage plays as serious literature for the first time. He was awarded a royal pension of 100 marks per year, making him the effective Poet Laureate.

1628 Appointed City Chronologer of London following a stroke that limited his physical mobility.

APPEARANCE In his youth he was said to be strikingly ugly and dressed absurdly, a combination that made him a target for childhood bullies. (3)

Jonson himself described his own physique bluntly in verse, writing of his "mountain belly" and "rocky face," and the antiquarian John Aubrey recorded that he had "one eye lower than tother and bigger" and had once possessed "a clear and fair skin." In his youth he was said to be strikingly ugly and dressed absurdly, a combination that made him a target for childhood bullies. (5)

Ben Jonson by Abraham van Blyenberch c 1617-1618

FASHION Aubrey noted that despite his fame Jonson's personal habit of dress was "very plain," and that the actor John Lacy recalled him wearing a coat resembling a coachman's coat, slit under the armpits. The one certain surviving portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, shows him simply and soberly attired rather than in the ornate fashions of the court he entertained. (4)

CHARACTER Jonson was famously proud, quarrelsome, and quick to take offence, yet he inspired intense loyalty among a devoted circle of younger writers who called themselves "the Tribe of Ben." Britannica describes him as "a man of contraries," at once an angry and stubborn figure and one who attracted more disciples than almost any other writer of his age. (6)

SPEAKING VOICE Jonson prized eloquent, direct speech and believed that "language most shows a man," arguing that no mirror reveals character so truly as the way a person speaks. Contemporaries who met him, including the poet William Drummond, recorded him as a dominating and voluble conversationalist who talked at great length once he got going. (7)

SENSE OF HUMOUR His comic sensibility was satirical rather than gentle, built on exposing greed, vanity, and hypocrisy through characters who each embodied a single dominant "humour" or vice. This dry, mocking wit made him a celebrated companion at London's Mermaid Tavern, where he traded witty stories with fellow writers.

RELATIONSHIPS Jonson married Ann Lewis on November 14, 1594, at the church of St Magnus-the-Martyr near London Bridge, and he later described her to William Drummond as "a shrew, yet honest." The marriage appears to have been troubled, and for around five years Jonson lived apart from his wife, relying instead on the hospitality of his patron, Lord Aubigny, with a possible legal separation occurring later in life. (3)

His friendship with William Shakespeare was close but famously complicated, marked by intellectual sparring at the Mermaid Tavern and by the ambivalent preface Jonson wrote for the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, which both praised and gently criticised his late rival. Jonson also enjoyed the company of Sir Walter Raleigh and later collaborated, often stormily, with the designer Inigo Jones on court masques. (3)

Image by Gemini

MONEY AND FAME During their lifetimes Jonson actually eclipsed Shakespeare in fame and was far better known to contemporaries.

His 1616 royal pension of 100 marks (roughly £60-66) was not always paid on time, and by the late 1620s he was so short of money that he wrote the bitter "Ode to Himself" complaining of "the loathsome age." Fellow poets rallied to his defence, and Charles I responded by increasing his pension to £100 a year along with a gift of £100 and an annual allowance of Canary wine. (2) , (21, Britannica poet laureate) (8)

FOOD AND DRINK Jonson had a well-documented fondness for drink, regularly meeting friends such as Shakespeare and Raleigh at the Mermaid Tavern on Bread Street, Cheapside, where they drank Canary wine (a type of sherry) and swapped stories. His own poem "Inviting a Friend to Supper" celebrates just such a cup of "rich Canary wine," and both Drummond and Aubrey specifically noted his heavy drinking in their accounts of him. (3)

DRAMAS After fighting in Flanders during the Eighty Years' War Ben Jonson returned to England in the mid 1590s. Doing what ambitious young writers have always done when faced with the prospect of starvation, he joined the theatre. He became part of Philip Henslowe's London company as an actor and jobbing playwright, revising existing plays whenever required. It was not quite the glamorous literary career one imagines in retrospect, but it paid the bills and put him in the right place at the right time. Jonson is also thought to have played Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, which must have been one of the few occasions when a future literary giant got to murder people onstage without anyone calling the police.

In 1598, Jonson's comedy Every Man in His Humour established the style that would become known as the "comedy of humours" and made his reputation. The play's original cast included William Shakespeare, which gives us one of those pleasing moments in literary history when two men who would later be studied by generations of scholars were simply trying to get through another night's performance without forgetting their lines.

Jonson's great run of satirical comedies followed in the years that came next. Volpone appeared in 1605–06, followed by Epicoene, or the Silent Woman in 1609, The Alchemist in 1610, and Bartholomew Fair in 1614. These plays established Jonson as one of the sharpest comic writers of his age, with an impressive talent for exposing human greed, vanity and foolishness. In Jonson's world, people generally behaved badly for money, status or sex, and occasionally managed to achieve all three at once.

From 1605 onward, Jonson also devoted much of his time to producing elaborate masques for the court of King James I. In 1616, James I granted Jonson an annual pension, a significant mark of royal favour. The payment later helped earn Jonson a place in history as England's first Poet Laureate, although this is slightly misleading: the title itself was never formally bestowed upon him. Still, Jonson had something almost as useful as a title—an income from the Crown, which is generally regarded by writers as a fairly good substitute.

Jonson died in 1637, still working almost to the end of his life. He had spent his career writing plays, poetry and masques, leaving behind a body of work that helped shape English drama and comedy. He had begun as an actor and jobbing playwright and ended as one of the most influential literary figures of the English Renaissance—a career progression rather more impressive than most people manage after starting out in the theatre.

MUSIC AND ARTS From 1605 Jonson spent much of his career writing court masques, an entertainment form combining music, dance, and elaborate costume that placed spectacle above plot and is regarded as a forerunner of ballet and opera. His first masque, The Masque of Blackness, was written specifically to satisfy Queen Anne of Denmark's wish to appear on stage as an African woman.

His most celebrated collaborator on these projects was the designer Inigo Jones, who created the scenery for Jonson's Oberon, the Faery Prince, performed at Whitehall on January 1, 1611, in which Prince Henry, King James's eldest son, played the title role. Over time a bitter professional rivalry grew between the two men, as Jones's increasingly spectacular stage effects, such as boats on wheels and clouds suspended on wires, began to overshadow Jonson's own text. (3)

LITERATURE In 1616, Jonson published The Workes of Beniamin Ionson, the first folio publication in history to include stage plays alongside poetry, establishing drama as a legitimate literary art form and paving the way for Shakespeare's First Folio in 1623.

Beyond his plays, Jonson was a gifted lyric and epigrammatic poet whose collected poems, including "On My First Sonne," rank among the most personal and moving verse of the era. His influence extended to later novelists such as Henry Fielding and to a generation of Restoration dramatists who styled themselves "the Tribe of Ben" in tribute to him. (2)

NATURE One of Jonson's best-known poems, "To Penshurst," is a country-house poem celebrating the natural abundance and harmony of an aristocratic estate, reflecting the classical pastoral tradition he admired. His verse generally favoured order, cultivation, and moral instruction drawn from the natural world over romantic wilderness for its own sake.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Jonson's chief recreational pursuit outside writing was convivial drinking and conversation with fellow wits at taverns such as the Mermaid, where intellectual debate functioned almost as sport.

His years as a young soldier in Flanders gave him genuine combat training, and he later put his swordsmanship to lethal use in a real duel with the actor Gabriel Spenser at Hoxton Fields on September 22, 1598, reflecting the wider Elizabethan enthusiasm for fencing as a mark of masculine accomplishment. (9)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Jonson was deeply fascinated by pseudo-science, particularly alchemy and astrology, which he researched thoroughly in order to satirise tricksters and gullible victims in his famous comedy The Alchemist. (6)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Jonson was for a period a convert to Roman Catholicism, famously described as having been "twelve years a papist," before returning to the Protestant fold, reflecting the religious pressures and shifting loyalties of Jacobean England. Britannica notes the irony that despite this Catholic interlude he became, in practice, Protestant England's first poet laureate. (6)

POLITICS Jonson wrote extensively for the royal court under both James I and Charles I, producing masques that flattered and entertained the monarchy, yet he was repeatedly caught up in political trouble for perceived slights against the crown or its allies. His work for the Stuart court placed him at the centre of Jacobean and Caroline political culture even as his own writings sometimes provoked the authorities. (3)

SCANDAL Jonson's life was filled with legal trouble and scandal. In 1597 he was imprisoned in Marshalsea for co-writing the controversial lost play The Isle of Dogs. The authorities found it so offensive that all copies were destroyed, leaving the exact nature of the scandal unknown.

On September 22, 1598, he killed actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel at Hogsden Fields. Imprisoned in Newgate and facing execution, Jonson escaped the gallows by pleading "benefit of clergy" (proving he could read Latin), resulting in the forfeiture of his goods and a felon's brand on his thumb.

Image by Perplexity

In 1605, passages in Eastward Ho, co-written with John Marston and George Chapman, were judged insulting to the Scots, and Jonson and his fellow writers were briefly arrested before being released and celebrating with a banquet.

In 1628 Jonson was mistakenly arrested on suspicion of having written verses approving of the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham; on his release, he returned home only to find his house on fire. (3)

MILITARY RECORD After his apprenticeship as a bricklayer, Jonson travelled to the Netherlands and volunteered to serve as a soldier with the English regiments commanded by Sir Francis Vere in Flanders, reportedly distinguishing himself in single combat against an enemy soldier before returning to England to begin his theatrical career. (2)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS In his youth, Jonson was physically strong and athletic.

Jonson was a large, heavily built man in later life, by his own admission possessing a "mountain belly" that made him stoop, and he suffered increasingly poor health, including apparent strokes, in his final years. (5)

He also reported a vivid, unsettling vision of his eldest son marked with a bloody cross around the time the boy died of plague in London, an episode recorded by Drummond. (10)

HOMES Jonson lived in and around London and Westminster for most of his life, and for a period during his marital estrangement he resided as a guest at the household of his patron, Lord Aubigny, rather than with his wife.

Shortly after his arrest in 1628, his London home caught fire, destroying many of his books and unpublished manuscripts. (3)

TRAVEL Jonson's most significant journey abroad was his time in the Netherlands as a young soldier fighting with English regiments in Flanders.

Later, in 1618-1619, he made a lengthy walking tour to Scotland, during which he stayed with the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, whose notes on their nightly conversations remain a key primary source for Jonson's life and character. (7)

DEATH Ben Jonson died on August 6, 1637, and his funeral was held three days later; he was buried standing or sitting upright in the north aisle of the nave at Westminster Abbey, in a plot too small for a conventional burial after he reportedly asked King Charles I for a mere "two feet square" of ground.

His grave is marked with the inscription "O Rare Ben Johnson," the word "rare" deriving from the Latin rarus, meaning remarkable.

The Ben Jonson Memorial, in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey By 14GTR - Own work,

In 1849, the Dean of Westminster, William Buckland, disturbed the grave and took the heel bone, which resurfaced decades later in a junk shop in 1938. (3)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Jonson appears as a character in numerous historical plays, novels, and television dramas focusing on Shakespeare's era, including the 2011 film Anonymous (played by Sebastian Armesto) and the BBC drama Will (2017).

Jonson's plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, have been revived on stage repeatedly since the 18th century.

His preface to the Shakespeare First Folio remains one of the most quoted pieces of early modern literary criticism, frequently cited in documentaries and books about Shakespeare. (15, Britannica)

ACHIEVEMENTS Jonson pioneered the comedy of humours, transformed the Jacobean court masque, became England's first Poet Laureate, and elevated playwriting to a recognized literary art form with his landmark 1616 Folio.

He mentored an entire generation of Cavaliers and Restoration poets known as the "Tribe of Ben," including Robert Herrick and Richard Lovelace, and profoundly influenced later writers such as Henry Fielding.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Academy of American Poets (3) Encyclopedia of Trivia (4) Cambridge University Press - Images of Ben Jonson (5) Marsh Hawk Press (6) Britannica (7) The Paris Review (8) Britannica - Poet Laureate (9) London Historians' Blog (10) Our Civilisation - Ben Jonson Anecdote