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Who Was The Man Buried In Viking Gokstad Ship?
The Gokstad ship wasn't merely a Viking ship. It was a burial mound of a great figure in the Viking age. A scientific article in 1883, people knew about the Gokstad ship as the ship of Olaf Geirstad-Alf a petty Viking king in Norway. However, recent research has shown that the ship didn't belong to King Olaf.
After studying the ship, scholars concluded that the ship was built around 890 AD which was the height of the Viking age. And until the year of 901, the ship was buried in the burial mound site in Vestfold, Eastern Norway.
The ship is primarily built with oak with around 24 meters in length (76ft) and 5.2 meters in width (17ft). There are 32 oar holes with 16 holes in each side. The ship is built to carry around 22 oarsmen. With the owner of the ship and the lookout, the crew made up to 35 people. But the real carrying capacity of the Gokstad ship was 70 men with some of their equipment. The Gokstad ship was so fast and flexible that it could be used for trades and raids.
See more: What Inside the Oseberg Ship?
What were inside this Gokstad Viking Mound Site?
The numbers of each item inside the Gokstad Viking Mound astonished the archaeologists. There were up to 64 shields painted in yellow and black. The shields were arrayed above the hulls of the ship.
The burial chamber was found later. Inside the chamber, everything was well decorated though the power of time and dust destroyed a lot of them. The walls were decorated with beautifully woven carpets. Many objects were also found. We don't really know about the meaning of each items but many of them were horns, fish hooks, lead, bronze, kitchenware, six beds, tents, smaller boats, etc. Animals like dogs, horses, peacocks were also buried with a vast number.
Depiction of Viking Gokstad burial site
The excavation was carried out in 1880 and there were signs of people entering the Gokstad site before the archaeologists. Of course, those early people were to steal the valuable things inside the burial site. We can know it because there is an absence of the valuable things in the Gokstad mound. Only the wealthy or the noble would afford and deserve such luxurious burial site. So they must have been buried with precious metals and weapons with them. Because the Vikings believed that metals and weapons buried would follow the dead in their afterlife to help them. The absence of such valuable things obviously indicated the ship burial site was plundered.
The skeleton inside the burial mound
In 2007, Per Holck, a professor at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Oslo, examined the skeletons found in the grave. The thorough examination pointed out that the bones belonged to the man who died around his 40s. He was approximately 180cm (~6ft) which was much taller than the average Viking (165 cm/5ft). The man must have experienced a wonderful source of nutrition and trained himself a lot to have a good physique.
A cut in the bone of the man's skeleton inside Gokstad burial site
Professor Per Holck showed there were many cuts in the bones. Five or six different cuts from axe, sword, or knife are still clear: one on each thigh bones, one on the right leg bone, and two or three on the left leg bone.
The man didn't seem to survive these injuries because there were no healing signs. None of the cuts were fatal though. But we cannot exclude the possibility that the man died because of the injury because only parts of the skull were found. So the injuries that caused his dead might be in his head.
In the ancient time, aiming at the leg was a very common technique. Because during the time, the warriors only wore chain for the upper body. So there was hardly any protection for the lower one. This made the legs become vulnerable and easy to be attacked.
The man wasn't King Olaf?
Back in 1887, the anatomy professor Jacob Heiberg published his piece of writing noting that the Gokstad ship belonged to King Olaf. And this has been generally accepted.
Snorri Sturluson mentioned in his writing Heimskringla King’s Sagas that Olaf was a petty king in Vestfold and he mentioned Olaf's brother Halfdan the Black (c. 810 – c. 869 AD). Olaf mentioned was around nineteen years older than his brother so he was probably born around the 800AD. But the ship was buried in 901 half century after Olaf's death, so it wasn't likely that Olaf was buried inside the chamber of Gokstad.
Then who rested in peace in the Gokstad burial?
Gokstad burial site in Vestfold, Eastern Norway
Without a doubt, he must have been a very wealthy and noble person with the high rank in the society. If not, he must have been honourable who devoted his life to serving the King and deserved a luxurious burial site. The ship and the items buried with him indicated this. It wasn't easy to afford a ship for a funeral. But this man was buried with a ship, shields, horses, and beautiful chamber.
The peacocks indicated that the man had an international network. Perhaps the peacock was from a king from other places or it was the award he brought from his raid. In Medieval times in Europe, peacock was a species from Asia that presented the power among kings and the royal family. The origin of the man remains a mystery. He might be a king, a chieftain, an earl or he might be a great Viking warrior of his time. | <urn:uuid:81aa2cc4-d562-4cad-9322-1150fef504a9> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://bavipower.com/blogs/bavipower-viking-blog/who-was-the-man-buried-in-viking-gokstad-ship | 2025-01-26T15:46:16Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703361941.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20250126135402-20250126165402-00000.warc.gz | en | 0.986172 | 1,207 | 3.5625 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
social psychology: Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Both experiments were conducted, at least partially, to help explain why seemingly normal people became Nazi collaborators in the World War II era. The experiments help demonstrate how individual authority over another allows individuals to exercise their own proclivities for cruelty and how being under the direction of authority figures causes people to engage in behavior that they find distasteful or cruel. The paper also examines Jane Elliot’s Brown Eye / Blue Eye experiment and what it says about the establishment of hierarchies.
Milgram and Zimbardo
After the end of World War II, as more and more information became available not just about the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but also about how seemingly normal individuals acted as collaborators to aid the Nazis in their pursuits, psychologists and sociologists became fascinated with how seemingly normal people could be do things that the average person found morally repugnant. The natural response was to recoil in horror from what people had done and suggest that it was impossible that normal people would behave in this way. In fact, some people even initially looked for some type of biological or sociological deficiency, which would have explained Nazi collaboration, a racist response that mirrored anti-Semitic beliefs in Nazi Germany in many ways. However, others who had studied human behavior did not believe that the Nazi collaborators had reacted in ways that stepped outside of the scope of human behavior. On the contrary, they pointed out that Nazi Germany may have had horrific conditions and the Holocaust may have been a large-scale atrocity, but that it was hardly unprecedented in human history. The Holocaust was actually only one of several holocausts that had targeted Jews in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. Moreover, Americans, horrified at the atrocities committed in concentration camps did not have to look abroad to see the potential negative impact of the legalized subjugation and abuse of a group of people; slavery and Jim Crow both demonstrated that even otherwise moral people were willing to act in an immoral and harmful manner if given approval to do so. The fact that it had occurred did not explain why these evil practices had occurred, and two researchers, Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo decided to conduct experiments targeting why evil occurs.
Milgram’s experiments did not target evil, per se, but was carefully tailored to investigate the impact of authority on an individual’s willingness to harm other people. It began with 40 male subjects ranging in age from 20 to 50 and asked them to inflict shocks on other research participants who answered questions incorrectly. No shocks were actually administered, and the “shocked” subjects were actually knowing participants in the experiment (BigHistory NL, 2013). Each time the participants provided an incorrect answer, the subjects were instructed to shock them, and the shocks escalated in intensity (2010). In the clip provided by YouTube username Markho, Stanley Milgram discusses people acting without any restraints on their behavior when instructed to do so by an authority figure. However, this characterization appears to be an oversimplification of how the subjects responded to the experiment. The subjects were clearly uncomfortable with administering the shocks, demonstrated a significant amount of distress, and questioned the researcher’s authority to administer the shocks.
Zimbardo’s prison experiment also examined authority, but from a different perspective. It examined the role that having authority played in one’s treatment of others. Philip Zimbardo believed that establishing a hierarchy that ranked some people over others, even if the people knew that there was no logical or reasonable basis for the hierarchy, was sufficient to elicit some negative behaviors from others (Mr1001Nights, 2008). To test this theory, he set up a fake prison at Stanford University, assigning some research subjects to be prison guards and others to be prisoners. Unlike Milgram, Zimbardo did not instruct the prison guards to treat the prisoners poorly; instead, he watched to see how establishing a hierarchical system of power would impact how people treated others (Another Boring Week, 2014). The extremes of the behavior of the guards towards the prisoners were so significant that Zimbardo actually stopped the experiment early.
While both experiments helped demonstrate that seemingly normal people will behave in an egregious and cruel manner and touched upon the nature of authority, they did not study the same thing. Milgram was looking at whether or not people would refuse to comply with an authority figure’s instructions that they do something to harm others. In contrast, Zimbardo’s experiment looked at how humans would behave towards other humans if placed in a situation where there was a power differential. The two are related, but distinct issues, which, taken together, do help explain the Nazi collaborators.
After all, Milgram’s study on how and why people respond to authority figures only explains collaborators once the Nazis were in power. Before the Nazis came to power, they would not have represented authority. Instead, Nazis had to build a steady base of authority. This was done through the use of scapegoating of minority groups, such as the Jews. Zimbardo’s study helps explain why, once people are told that they are superior to another group of people, they feel comfortable dehumanizing and abusing those people.
However, a third psychological experiment, not directly discussed in this assignment, has relevance for why people believe in arbitrary distinctions like race, in the first place. Jane Elliot’s Blue Eye Brown Eye experiment divided up school children into two groups and said that one group of children was superior to the other group of children (Ludwing Media, 2012). It did not take long for the “superior” group of children to begin bullying behavior towards the “inferior” group or for the “inferior” group of children to begin acting less deserving of good behavior. What this research suggests is that human beings may be searching for ways to establish hierarchies. If so, then Zimbardo’s research suggests that people will use or attempt to use those hierarchies to establish authority, and Milgram’s research suggests that once authority is established, even people who were not initially part of the hierarchy building will engage in antisocial behavior to reinforce those hierarchies because submitting to authority is considered prosocial even in an antisocial context.
Another Boring Week. (2013, January 4). Feature Film- The Stanford Prison Experiment.
Retrieved November 30, 2014 from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_LKzEqlPto
Big History NL. (2013, March 19). Milgram Experiment. Retrieved November 30, 2014 from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOYLCy5PVgM
Ludwing Media. (2012, November 19). Brown Eyes and Blue Eyes Racism Experiment
(Children Session)- Jane Elliot. Retrieved November 30, 3014 from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeK759FF84s
Markho. (2010, September 25). Milgram Obedience Study. Retrieved November 30, 2014
from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W147ybOdgpE
Mr1001nights. (2008, September 7). Zimbardo Shows How Most Evil Comes from Hierarchy.
Retrieved November 30, 2014 from YouTube website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jYx8nwjFQ
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Marsupial Mice and Cats, Tasmanian Devil: Dasyuridae
MARSUPIAL MICE AND CATS, TASMANIAN DEVIL: Dasyuridae
BRUSH-TAILED PHASCOGALE (Phascogale tapoatafa): SPECIES ACCOUNTSPHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Members of the family Dasyuridae include marsupial mice and cats and the Tasmanian devil. Marsupials are animals that do not have a very well developed placenta. A placenta is an organ that grows in the mother's uterus (womb) that allows the developing offspring to share the mother's food and oxygen. Because of this, pregnancy in marsupials is short and the young are born undeveloped and unable to fend for themselves. After birth, the young move to the mother's pouch and attach to her milk teats (nipples) until they have finished developing enough to live on their own.
None of the members of the family Dasyuridae are very large. This order includes some of the world's smallest marsupials, members of the genus (JEE-nus) Planigale, some of which are less than 4 inches (10 centimeters) long and weigh less than 0.2 ounces (5 grams). Other members of this family vary in size up to the Tasmanian devil, which is the largest species. The Tasmanian devil can be up to 25 inches (62 centimeters) long and weigh up to 29 pounds (13 kilograms).
Marsupial mice and cats, as well as the Tasmanian devil, have four legs. They have four toes on each of their two front feet and either four or five toes on their two back feet. When they have five toes on their back feet, the fifth toe is a hallux (HAL-lux). A hallux is a toe that does not have a claw. The species in this family usually have pointed snouts and long tails.
The fur of animals in this family is mostly gray or brownish, and sometimes is black. Fur color often depends on the habitat in which the species lives, and the kind of fur that best camouflages them helps them avoid predators, animals that hunt them for food. Some of the species have other markings. The northern quoll has white spots on its otherwise brown body. The teeth of members of this family vary depending on the preferred diet, but most have some sharp teeth for slicing and biting and other wider, flatter teeth for grinding. This combination of teeth is helpful for catching and eating other animals and insects.
Members of Dasyuridae live in Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania, and can also be found on some small islands in that area of the Pacific.
Members of the family Dasyuridae live all over Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea, and occupy all types of habitats. Some species live in trees, but most species are ground dwelling; some species prefer open grassland, and others prefer forests. Animals that have different habitats have different ways of finding or making dens and different ways of finding food.
Tasmanian devils have a reputation around the world for being vicious destroyers of property thanks to a Warner Brothers cartoon character named Taz. Taz, a Tasmanian devil, spins like a tornado destroying everything in his path. He stands on his hind legs and has teeth that can crush through anything. Although Tasmanian devils do have sharp teeth and very strong jaw muscles, they do not stand on their back legs alone. Tasmanian devils can be vicious when they feel threatened, but do not spin and certainly cannot destroy entire forests!
What the members of this family eat depends on their size. The species that have smaller bodies, such as the marsupial mice, usually eat insects and sometimes catch and eat small animals such as lizards. These smaller animals will eat large animals only if they are already dead, in which case they will feed from the carcass. Larger species in this family eat mainly other vertebrates, or animals that have backbones, such as wallabies and birds. Species that eat mainly vertebrates will occasionally eat some insects and other invertebrates, animals without backbones, as well. Some species will even supplement their diet with food that does not come from other animals, such as flowers and fruit. All species in this family are scavengers when they get the chance. They will eat animals that are already dead, if they are available. Members of this family are usually nocturnal and hunt and are active mainly at night.
BEHAVIOR AND REPRODUCTION
Like all marsupials, species in this family give birth to young that are often blind and hairless, and are not able to survive on their own. This means that pregnancy for these species is usually very short. When the young are born, they either move into the mother's pouch or to her underbelly where they attach themselves to her teats. When attached in this way, the developing young travel with their mother for weeks or months as they continue to grow and develop. Once the young are able to survive on their own, they are weaned from their mother and detach from her nipples. After this, there is usually a period during which the young stay close to home and hunt away from their mother for increasingly long periods before going off on their own. The males of these species usually travel farther from the mother's nest to find territories of their own than the females do.
Some species in this family mate only one time before they die. The males of these species often die soon after mating, although the females live long enough to raise their young and sometimes to have a second litter. Scientists think that the reason that males of some species only mate once and then die is because it takes so much energy for the males to mate, especially in years when there is not much food available. Scientists think that these animals use up so much energy mating that they no longer have enough energy to stay healthy.
MARSUPIAL MICE, CATS, TASMANIAN DEVIL, AND PEOPLE
Members of this family usually do not have much direct interaction with people. Some species, however, have been thought to kill livestock and because of this have been hunted by farmers.
No species in this family are known to be extinct, but many, such as the Kangaroo Island dunnart, are Endangered. Animals that are considered Endangered face a very high risk of becoming extinct in the wild. Many other members of this family are Vulnerable, facing a high risk of extinction in the wild. There are some species in this family that scientists do not yet have enough information about to know if they are endangered or not.
Physical characteristics: The brush-tailed phascogale has gray colored fur on its back and white or creamy fur on the underside of its body. Its brush tail is black with long, 2-inch (5.5-centimeter) hairs. Its body is 5.8 to 10.3 inches (14.8 to 26.1 centimeters).
Geographic range: Brush-tailed phascogales live in coastal areas of Australia.
Habitat: These animals live in dry eucalyptus forests and woodlands with an open understory—not a lot of smaller plants growing under the tallest trees—in temperate and tropical areas of Australia.
Diet: Brush-tailed phascogales feed on nectar (sweet liquid produced by plant flowers), large insects, spiders, and small vertebrates, animals with a backbone. They tear the bark off of trees to look for food.
Behavior and reproduction: This animal spends much of its time up in trees, and is nocturnal, or active at night. Brush-tailed phascogales make their nests in tree holes or forks, and also mate there. Females give birth to about eight young, who are attached to her nipples, feeding, for about forty days. After that, they stay in the nest until they're five months old.
Brush-tailed phascogales and people: These animals occasionally eat poultry raised by humans, but they also eat mice and insects, which humans may appreciate.
Conservation status: The brush-tailed phascogale is not currently threatened. ∎
TASMANIAN DEVIL Sarcophilus laniarius
Physical characteristics: The Tasmanian devil is a four-footed marsupial with four toes on its two front feet as well as four on its back feet. It does not have a hallux. It has black fur with some white markings, usually on the chest, shoulder, and rump. The Tasmanian devil has a pointed snout that is pinkish at the tip. Its sharp, pointed teeth are good for cutting and tearing meat. It also has flat grinding teeth for crushing the bones of the animals it eats. The ears of the Tasmanian devil are short and pointed and turn red when the animal is angry. Males of this species usually have a head and body length between 20 and 25 inches (50 to 62 centimeters) and weigh between 17 and 29 pounds (8 to 13 kilograms). Females usually have a head and body length between 21 and 22.5 inches (53 to 57 centimeters) and weigh between 10 and 20 pounds (4.5 to 9 kilograms).
Geographic range: Tasmanian devils live on Tasmania, a large island off the southeastern Australian coast.
Habitat: The Tasmanian devil lives in the forest. It makes dens using leaves and plant material, although it sometimes sleeps in hollow logs or in the dens of other animals.
Diet: The Tasmanian devil mainly eats the meat of vertebrate animals. It will even eat poisonous snakes, and also occasionally invertebrates or plants. It is mainly a scavenger, and likes to eat animals that have already been killed by other causes. A scientist who studied the Tasmanian devil found that its favorite foods were wallabies, wombats, sheep, and rabbits. Most of these animals were not hunted by the Tasmanian devil itself, but eaten after other animals, cars, or natural causes killed them. The Tasmanian devil makes use of all the parts of animals that it kills or finds, eating even the bones and fur.
Behavior and reproduction: The Tasmanian devil is nocturnal, meaning that it hunts and is active mainly at night. When Tasmanian devils feel threatened or are fighting, they can be very loud. They begin by growling softly, but become increasingly louder and can even make horrible screeching noises. Most mating occurs in February or March. Females are pregnant for about one month and then give birth to young that move into the mother's pouch and attach to her nipples. Female Tasmanian devils have four nipples, which means that four is the most young that can be supported while they develop. Tasmanian devils normally have two or four babies at a time.
Tasmanian devils and people: Most contact between humans and the Tasmanian devil has occurred because the Tasmanian devil may eat animals that farmers keep as livestock. The Tasmanian devil will eat chickens if the coops are not well protected, and also sheep and lambs. Farmers sometimes kill Tasmanian devils to keep them away from their livestock.
Conservation status: The Tasmanian devil used to live all over Australia, but now lives only in Tasmania. Scientists believe that this species disappeared from the Australian mainland because it had to compete with the dingo, a wild dog that is introduced, not a native species. There is no information on how many Tasmanian devils are left in the wild in Tasmania, but it is likely that they are being affected by the clearing of land for agriculture. ∎
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Fenton, Julie A. Kangaroos and Other Marsupials. Chicago: World Book, 2000.
Hoare, Ben, ed. International Wildlife Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 2002.
Nowak, Ronald M., ed. Walker's Mammals of the World, 5th ed. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Woods, Samuel G. Sorting Out Mammals: Everything You Want to Know About Marsupials, Carnivores, Herbivores, and More! Woodbridge, CT: Blackbirch Marketing, 1999.
Tasmanian Department of Primary Industries, Water & Environment. Tasmanian Devil.http://www.dpiwe.tas.gov.au/inter.nsf/WebPages/BHAN-5358KH?open (accessed on June 30, 2004).
"The Amazing Marsupials." Australian Ark Documentary Series. Columbia Tristar, 1994. | <urn:uuid:0020cc80-3713-4832-b804-2a8e040fb3cf> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/marsupial-mice-and-cats-tasmanian-devil-dasyuridae | 2025-01-26T16:01:01Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703361941.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20250126135402-20250126165402-00000.warc.gz | en | 0.961618 | 2,625 | 3.640625 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
We all know that high blood pressure is bad, but have you ever wondered what that actually means? We explain all about BP, how it's measured, what your numbers mean, and more.
🕒 5 min read
Your blood pressure (BP) is created by the heart pumping blood around a 'closed system' of blood vessels. Blood pressure naturally varies throughout the day and night, going up and down in response to factors such as your emotions, level of activity and hormone and electrolyte changes.
In Ireland, up to half of men and a third of women have high blood pressure, known medically as hypertension.
How blood pressure is measured
The pressure within your circulation was originally measured against the weight of mercury (Hg) it could support within a long, thin, glass tube.
The length of the column was measured in millimetres (mm) and the pressures recorded in units known as millimetres of mercury (mmHg). These units, which date back to the eighteenth century, are still in use today.
Two blood pressure readings are taken:
- Systolic pressure: the highest measurement occurs when your heart contracts to push blood around the circulation.
- Diastolic pressure: the lowest measurement is the background pressure in your circulation when your heart rests between beats.
Assessing your blood pressure
Blood pressure is most usually measured with the aid of a cuff placed around your arm or wrist. It's important that the cuff is positioned level with your heart to get an accurate reading.
The cuff is then rapidly inflated to a pressure that is high enough to temporarily stop the flow of blood in the underlying arteries.
The pressure is then slowly deflated until blood starts to flow again. This creates a distinct tapping noise (Korotkoff sound) and the pressure at which this noise is first detected is taken as the highest pressure – your systolic blood pressure.
As pressure in the cuff continues to fall, the tapping sounds change to a dull whooshing due to turbulence, while the cuff continues to constrict blood flow.
The pressure at which this whooshing suddenly stops marks the point at which the pressure in your arteries and the cuff is identical, and this is recorded as your diastolic blood pressure.
By convention, your systolic blood pressure reading is written over your diastolic blood pressure reading (e.g. 120/80 mmHg) and is described as, for example, 'one twenty over seventy'.
What should my blood pressure be?
An ideal blood pressure is one that is below 120/80 mmHg and above 90/60 mmHg.
What is high blood pressure?
In Ireland, high blood pressure, or hypertension, is diagnosed when your BP is consistently greater than 140/90 mmHg. This is confirmed using a wearable monitor to record measurements at regular intervals during your normal daily activities and sleep (ambulatory blood pressure monitoring).
In some countries, such as the US, a different cut-off is used, so that hypertension is diagnosed when your blood pressure is consistently greater than 130/80 mmHg.
What are the symptoms of high blood pressure?
Hypertension is described as a 'silent' disease, as it may produce few symptoms even when your blood pressure is dangerously high. If symptoms or signs of hypertension do appear, they tend to be non-specific, such as:
- tension headache
- feeling dizzy
- visual disturbances
- throbbing sensations (e.g. around the teeth)
- frequent nose bleeds
- having to pass water at night
- broken blood vessel in the white of the eye
These symptoms are not necessarily due to high blood pressure, but if they do occur, it's important to see your doctor for a check-up.
What can happen if blood pressure is too high
Having untreated high blood pressure damages artery walls and hastens hardening and furring up of the arteries.
This raises your blood pressure even more and increases your risk of heart rhythm abnormalities (atrial fibrillation), heart attack, heart failure, peripheral arterial disease, aortic aneurysm, stroke and vascular dementia.
Damage to other blood vessels also increases the risk of conditions such as chronic kidney disease, eye problems and male erectile dysfunction.
Untreated high blood pressure can lead to heart attack, heart failure, stroke and vascular dementia, among other problems.
What causes high blood pressure?
Blood pressure naturally tends to rise with age as your arteries become more stiff and less elastic. The genes you have inherited and lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol intake, diet, level of exercise, long-term stress and being overweight or obese can also affect your blood pressure.
For nine out of 10 people with high blood pressure there is no obvious single underling cause, and this is referred to as 'primary hypertension'.
For one in 10 people, there is an identifiable underlying cause such as kidney problems, hormone imbalance or taking certain drugs known to affect blood pressure.
What BP should be by age group
Systolic blood pressure rises with age but after around the age of 50 years, diastolic blood pressure tends to fall.
In your 20s, your BP may be around 115/70 mmHg, for example, but by the age of 50, average blood pressure is around 135/85 mmHg.
By the age of 60 it tends to rise to around 140/80 mmHg and by the age of 70 is 145/75 mmHg.
Everyone is different, however, and some people may have high blood pressure in their youth, while others may maintain good blood pressure readings throughout later life.
The only way to know is to have regular checks – ideally at least once every year or two, or as often as your doctor recommends.
How to lower a high blood pressure
If your blood pressure is raised, your doctor will recommend diet and lifestyle changes to help bring it down.
Follow a Mediterranean-style diet known as the DASH Dietary Approach to Stopping Hypertension). This way of eating is high in fruit, vegetables, nuts, garlic, low-fat dairy products and supplies protein in the form of fish, chicken and beans rather than red meat.
Reduce salt intake by not adding it during cooking or at the table. This is because salt can contribute to water retention, which raises blood pressure in some people. Additionally, cut back on caffeine intake, as caffeine can raise blood pressure.
Exercise for at least 30 to 60 minutes on most days – brisk walking, cycling, swimming, gardening or dancing are all good ways to increase your fitness, which helps lower BP.
If you smoke, do your utmost to stop, as chemicals found in tobacco raised blood pressure and damage artery linings. Keep alcohol intake without recommended levels – in particular, binge-drinking raises blood pressure.
Supplements to lower blood pressure
A number of supplements can help to lower blood pressure. For example, DHA and EPA – the long-chain omega 3s found in fish oil and marine algae extracts – contribute to the maintenance of normal blood pressure. Read about the Best Supplements for Blood Pressure. | <urn:uuid:82f75769-d5ab-49ed-b84e-1cd5dd00afae> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.healthspan.ie/advice/body/everything-you-need-to-know-about-blood-pressure/ | 2025-01-26T14:52:16Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703361941.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20250126135402-20250126165402-00000.warc.gz | en | 0.950504 | 1,483 | 3.90625 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
GINGER (Zingiber officinalis – Zingiberaceae)
Ginger, one of the most familiar of spices, is a tropical herbaceous perennial which grows to a height of about 60 – 90cm (2 – 3 ft). The ginger plant likes water, humidity and heat, and its long spiky leaves are similar in appearance to reeds. The flower is yellow with a purple lip, rather orchid-like, but it is the underground rhizomes or tubers which provide the spice. These are known as ‘hands’ as they often consist of several finger-like protuberances.
The ginger plant is thought to have originated in India, and was one of the first spices to reach Europe from Asia. The Spanish conquistadors introduced it to the West Indies, where it quickly naturalized, and Jamaica in particular became one of the major world producers of the spice. Ginger is now grown in many countries with suitable climates, among them India (50 per cent of the world production), Malaysia, Africa, Japan (where 40 species have been recorded), China, Queensland and Florida.
Ginger has been used for centuries in India, China and Japan for its medicinal properties and features largely in those traditional cuisines. The Ancient Egyptians grew ginger and used it in their cooking to keep epidemics at bay. The Greeks and Romans also used it both medicinally and in cooking. Dioscorides recommended it as a stomachic, to help a sluggish system, and as a stimulant of the digestion, giving it similar virtues to those of pepper. The Romans, interestingly, used ginger in ophthalmics: for advanced cataracts, a ginger preparation was made up and applied on the eyes several times a day. St Hildegarde, a twelfth¬ century healer, recommended it as a stimulant and tonic, and reiterated its effectiveness for eye diseases.
She also said it had aphrodisiac properties, especially for stimulating the vigour of older men married to young women! Ginger was used in the Middle Ages to counter the Black Death; it provoked sweating (much as does the spice when used in a good curry).
To the natives of the Pacific island of Dohu, ginger is sacred, and they use it in abundance in cooking, magic ritual and medicine. The witchdoctor chews the roots, and spits it on to his patients’ wounds and burns. The islanders believe it has remarkable healing effects. A story is also told on the island about the actions of fishermen when there’s a storm at sea: they too chew the ginger roots, but spit them out into the winds to make them abate. It works apparently!
GINGER ESSENTIAL OIL
Description: Ginger oil is distilled from the rhizomes. It is more or less fluid, and yellow, sometimes pale, sometimes dark. It is very aromatic, and camphory with a lemon note, and very peppery, rather like pimentoes.
The principal constituents: Sesquiterpenes (camphene, d-phellandrene, zingiberene), sesquiterpenic alcohols (isoborneol-linalool), and terpenes, with citrol and resins.
Dangers: The essential oil should never be applied or rubbed neat on the skin, or added neat to a bath, as the skin could react badly, with a nasty rash, followed by blisters. It must always be diluted in a pure cold-pressed vegetable oil base.
Ginger is well known as a warming stimulant and as an aid for digestion and digestive problems. It is also good for colds, coughs and sore throats. A little ginger oil mixed with a vegetable oil makes an effective warming rub for swellings caused by water retention or for rheumatism.
(See also dyspepsia.)
It is perhaps most revered for its reputed aphrodisiac properties (known to the Romans who would ginger up their wine for this purpose!).
- 10 ml (2 tsp) soya oil
- 3 drops ginger oil
- 3 drops wheat germ oil
- 2 drops savory oil
- 2 drops clove oil
- 1 drop rosemary oil
Mix together and massage gently into the spine for a few minutes, concentrating on the lower part. Follow this with a tisane; made with hot water, some grated ginger, a pinch each of dried savory and rosemary, and a stick of cinnamon. Infuse for 5 minutes and add honey if desired.
Ginger stimulates the gastric Juices, which in turn facilitates good digestion. Ginger’s antiseptic action was once used to protect against meat bacteria, but now its flavour is best known as a vital ingredient of many curries and Chinese stir-fry dishes. In the western world it is used primarily in sweet preparations – gingerbreads, cakes and biscuits feature in the cuisines of many European countries – but it is also used in preserves, confectionery, ginger beer and ginger ale.
Fresh ginger is now freely available (the rhizomes can stay viable for quite some time), as is dried ginger (which should be bruised before use to release the fragrance). Ginger preserved in syrup is prepared largely in China, and it can also be crystallized in sugar, pickled, and stored in a strong spirit or sherry. Ginger is conveniently bought ground, but the essential oil which gives it flavour is easily lost.
Use ginger in a number of dishes in the winter to give warmth and help those suffering from coughs and colds: add a little to milk puddings, and a slice of fresh to spiced hot drinks, ranging from hot chocolate to a wassail bowl at Christmas.
Ginger can be used for its aroma in spicy pot-pourris, but its most unusual use must be in an unscrupulous French veterinary practice. To impress clients or judges, horse dealers rub grated ginger under the horse’s tail. As the heat becomes unbearable, so the horse raises its tail, thus giving the illusion of vigorous health and fitness! | <urn:uuid:d46e4c64-49de-4552-abc5-d4f2a9be6c07> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://aromatherapybible.com/ginger/ | 2025-01-13T20:00:25Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362172.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20250113185921-20250113215921-00800.warc.gz | en | 0.956508 | 1,272 | 3.578125 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
Dance Curriculum Intent
Dance is present across many different cultures and societies around the world which offers a universal language for all to enjoy. Dance at Blenheim is inclusive of ability, gender and background and provides students with the opportunity to explore many different styles and choreographers to understand the basic functions of movement expression. Students focus on a wide range of dance skills and techniques, which lead to improving performance, choreography and analysing dance. The curriculum is designed to be engaging, exciting and inspiring for all students, with performance and evaluation at the heart of Dance at Blenheim. We strive to ensure the course content is accessible for all, regardless of dance ability, but also ambitious, to ensure all learners are challenged and make progress. Studying Dance increases confidence levels and helps develop cultural capital and lifelong transferable skills such as communication and literacy, team work and creativity.
Dance can be a specialist subject for students at KS3, with only a small percentage being exposed to it at KS2. Dance is a stand-alone subject at KS3 and goes above and beyond what is outlined in the National Curriculum. Therefore, it is designed to provide students with building blocks and foundational knowledge of physical and expressive skills required for Dance in their fortnightly lessons. These are, but are not limited to; communication with peers, understanding body motor skills, safety and awareness of others, creativity and basic rhythm. These skills are developed across the three main strands of Dance: Performance, Choreography and Analysis. Students start by learning basic body actions and rhythmic content, then focus shifts to understanding choreography learnt from the teacher, inspired by professional works or created themselves. Students will also develop their analytical skills through clear communication and learning of dance vocabulary, then applying this to professional works, their own and their peers. This is done through oracy tasks in lessons and using iPads to support learning. Lessons are inclusive and collaborative in nature, with the view to improve academic outcomes and subject knowledge.
In transitioning from KS3 to KS4, the use of Dance literacy and vocabulary becomes much more common as the 6 anthology works are studied and theory lessons are introduced. The prior learning at KS3 means students come into the GCSE Dance course already knowing key vocabulary required and helps build a strong subject knowledge. Their oracy skills continue to be developed and are also transferred to writing, to support the written component of the course. Students continue to enhance their physical skills through looking at performance, dance technique and choreography in depth. They continue to enhance their cultural capital by communicating and working with their peers, instilling aspirations of a love of learning and creativity. High expectations and challenging content make up every lesson at KS4 with progress regularly reviewed.
The GCSE Dance course is an individual option subject and is suited to students who have a keen interest in and aptitude for dance, typically having danced for a number of years outside of school.
Blenheim offers an extensive Dance Co-Curricular programme which runs through the entirety of the academic year. Students in all year groups are able to join the Blenheim Ambition Dance Academy and separately audition to be part of the Elite Dance Teams who compete at both regional and national level. Students also have the opportunity to perform in the annual Blenheim Dance Show. Our innovative and diverse offer provides students with high level dance coaching in a range of styles, local performance opportunities and compete IDTA external examinations. Our boys only dance club is growing and we are proud to be fully inclusive of all who want to dance. This showcases our true team Blenheim community, with students across different year groups working together, supporting each other and representing the school.
KS4 Dance GCSE
Board and Exam
AQA GCSE Dance
The course offers a broad variety of practical and theoretical work for our students, with practical work being predominantly in the contemporary dance style. Students have 6 lessons every fortnight; 4 practical and 2 theory. The course is assessed through 2 components; practical is worth 60% of the final grade, marked through a live examination day and theory is worth 40%, marked through a written examination (1 hour 30 minutes) at the end of Year 11.
The 60% practical examination assesses students in their performance and choreographic skills. Students will undergo mock examinations for each unit and they must be confident in performing in front of an audience throughout the course. The practical content is broken down as follows;
- Performance – 2 set phrases performed as a solo (1 minute in duration) and a duet or trio performance (3 minutes in duration)
- Choreography – either a solo (2 minutes in duration) or group (2-5 dancers) choreography (3 minutes in duration)
The 40% theoretical examination focuses on dance appreciation and analysis of students own work and professional works. Students are expected to critically evaluate the 6 anthology works in detail. Students will complete regular mock examinations to understand the vocabulary required for the written paper. The theoretical content is broken down as follows;
- Written examination – completed at the end of Year 11 (1 hour 30 minutes in duration)
How students are assessed
Critical Analysis of Dance |
40% of the qualification |
Non exam assessment |
Practical Performance |
60% of the qualification |
Students studying Dance in Years 9, 10 and 11 will have 1 hour of homework per week. This is typically a theoretical task, however can also be practical rehearsal. Students are expected to be dancing regularly outside of school for more than 1 hour a week – this could be with a dance school or part of our co-curricular provision. In the lead up to the practical examination in Year 11, students are expected to rehearse additionally for at least one hour per week on their exam pieces. All homework tasks are planned to build on the knowledge and skills learnt in lesson and frequently these tasks make use of student iPads.
How parents can help
As the course is heavily weighted in terms of practical ability, students must be participating in dance lessons regularly outside of school. It is therefore vital that parents actively encourage students to be involved with as much dance as possible. To achieve the best grades, students must use the knowledge gained in theory lessons and be able to apply it effectively. Please encourage your child to regularly practice the material learned, as well as taking an active role in discussion and analysis of their own performance and/or choreography. | <urn:uuid:309678ac-1c72-465d-a1ce-fe726cf8ec63> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.blenheim.surrey.sch.uk/240/subject-information/subject/20/dance | 2025-01-13T19:54:12Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362172.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20250113185921-20250113215921-00800.warc.gz | en | 0.958208 | 1,303 | 3.609375 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
children who have had chronic and intense fearful experiences often lose the capacity to differentiate between threat and safety. there are a number of widespread miscon- ceptions about how children experience, re- spond to, and learn fear.
This impacts our thinking and decision-making in negative ways, leaving us susceptible to intense emotions and impulsive reactions. All of these effects can leave us unable to act appropriately. Mental health. Other consequences of long-term fear include fatigue, clinical depression, and PSTD.
seem extreme or last past the normal age. cause your child to be very upset or have tantrums. keep your child from doing things — like going to school, sleeping alone, or being apart from you. cause physical symptoms (like stomachaches, headaches, or a racing heart) or your child feels breathless, dizzy, or sick.
“Fear-based parenting [often] results in children with low self-esteem, difficulties in friendship and romantic relationships, poor decision making skills, and difficulties with risk assessment.” One 2018 study , for example, found parental control to be associated with higher odds of: depression.
Fear and stress have a dramatic ability to affect learning, memory, and extinction processes in the brain. Memory of fearful events is often more robust than for neutral events and this is in part mediated by the release of stress-related hormones.
Fear can ramp up nervous system activity in some potentially unhealthy ways, according to StatPearls. It's also closely associated with mood disorders such as anxiety and depression, and may in some cases reinforce or even give rise to these mental health conditions, Davis says.
Constant fear or anxiety can hinder learners' attempts to read and understand their academic materials. It can cause physical symptoms such as shortness of breath, nausea, headaches, chills, sleeplessness, and digestive issues.
Motivation Through Fear
It is undeniable. Fear is a strong motivator. And it is incredible just how effectively we can 'motivate' our children using fear.
Fear-Based Thinking is what happens to our mind and brain when repeatedly exposed to experiences or messages that trigger fear.
Babies and toddlers often fear loud noises, heights, strangers and separation. Preschoolers might start to show fear of being on their own and of the dark. School-age children might be afraid of supernatural things (like ghosts), social situations, failure, criticism, tests and physical harm or threat.
Children also develop and express typical fears during the preschool period—of the dark, of strangers, of monsters, of going to the doctor, of dogs or other animals, and more. As children get older and can use more logical thinking skills, these fears can fade.
Fear disrupts learning, concentration, emotional regulation, information processing, and decision making. No amount of good pay and benefits can compensate for working in a fearful culture.
Fear alone does not change behavior. We may learn that certain behaviors we engage in are potentially harmful and have now become fearful; yet, we still engage in the harmful behaviors (Tannenbaum et al., 2015).
The potential effects of chronic fear on physical health include headaches turning into migraines, muscle aches turning into fibromyalgia, body aches turning into chronic pain, and difficulty breathing turning into asthma, said Moller.
Fear Can Make You Foggy
As some parts of your brain are revving up, others are shutting down. When the amygdala senses fear, the cerebral cortex (area of the brain that harnesses reasoning and judgment) becomes impaired — so now it's difficult to make good decisions or think clearly.
The freeze, flop, friend, fight or flight reactions are immediate, automatic and instinctive responses to fear.
Fear helps protect us. It makes us alert to danger and prepares us to deal with it. Feeling afraid is very natural — and helpful — in some situations. Fear can be like a warning, a signal that cautions us to be careful.
A meta-analysis found that fear appeals are effective at positively influencing a person's attitude, intentions and behaviors. However, this may not hold true for long-term lifestyle change, as the researchers found that fear appears to be most effective for one-time actions rather than repeated behaviors.
We are born with only two innate fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud sounds. A 1960 study evaluated depth perception among 6- to14-month-old infants, as well as young animals.
Fear can be innate or learned. Examples of innate fear include fears that are triggered by predators, pain, heights, rapidly approaching objects, and ancestral threats such as snakes and spiders.
It becomes an issue when fear and anxiety cause distress or interfere with everyday activities. Anxiety disorders in childhood and adolescence often cause adverse outcomes socially, academically, and personally.
Indeed, children who have had chronic and intense fearful experiences often lose the capacity to differentiate between threat and safety. This impairs their ability to learn and interact with others, because they frequently perceive threat in familiar social circumstances, such as in their home or neighbourhood. | <urn:uuid:59dbbd92-c633-4a1f-8ce7-63535a9d94e3> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.calendar-australia.com/faq/how-do-fears-affect-child-development | 2025-01-13T20:29:53Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362172.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20250113185921-20250113215921-00800.warc.gz | en | 0.954872 | 1,043 | 3.921875 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
When an oceanic plate collides with a continental plate, the oceanic plate (being heavier) bends and slides beneath the continental plate. When this plate is forced to bend downwards, the process is called subduction. The process of subduction results in the formation of a zone called a subduction zone.
When you look at a cake from above, what do you see? Obviously, you see both the icing and the chocolate chips. Only when you cut a piece are you able to observe the different layers inside the delicious dessert.
The same is the case with our planet. It ranges from a variety of topographic variations on the top, but the inside is also full of surprises. Interestingly enough, it’s actually these hidden parts that cause the changes in the surface of the earth that we see!
According to the theory of Plate Tectonics, the upper crust of Earth is composed of plates. There are two types of plates: continental and oceanic. The oceanic plates are comparatively heavier, so when these collide with the continental plates, they subduct downwards, forming a zone referred to as a subduction zone. This fascinating phenomenon contributes to the formation of the world’s deepest trenches, the occurrence of the most powerful earthquakes, and even massive volcanic eruptions!
Recommended Video for you:
What Are Tectonic Plates?
Before diving into the science of subduction zones, let’s first take a look at what the theory of Plate Tectonics is all about.
According to this theory, the outer shell of the earth, known as the lithosphere, is composed of broken slabs or plates of rock. These slabs of rocks are called tectonic plates. The plates exist somewhat like puzzle pieces. What is even more interesting, however, is that these plates are in continuous motion as they float on the asthenosphere.
The asthenosphere is the layer of the earth that lies directly under the lithosphere. It is viscous and fluid in nature.
Plate boundaries are actually the peripheral areas of a tectonic plate. A tectonic plate can come in two types, based on its density. It can either be an oceanic plate or a continental plate. A characteristic feature of a continental plate is that it’s comparatively lightweight, as it is composed of granitic material. On the other hand, an oceanic plate is much denser and heavier, which can be attributed to its basaltic composition.
Now, if the plates are in motion, what happens? Primarily, every structure or disturbance, such as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, is caused by this geologic activity. The plates either converge with each other or they diverge away from each other. However, if a plate is converging at one point, then it must undoubtedly be diverging from another!
What Are Subduction Zones?
Even though the plate boundaries are absolutely invisible from the surface of the earth, they are definitely still there. These boundaries can also be mapped through certain satellites.
It was found that when two plate boundaries floating on the asthenosphere converge towards each other, the denser one subducts beneath the lighter one. This can be understood by taking the example of two boats.
Consider a boat carrying many boxes of goods. If this boat collides with an empty one, which one do you think would submerge? Of course, the boat with the goods, because it is significantly heavier!
When an oceanic plate collides with a continental plate, the oceanic plate (being heavier) bends and slides beneath the continental plate. When this plate is forced to bend downwards, the process is called subduction. The process of subduction results in the formation of a zone called a subduction zone. The plate that bends usually curves down into the mantle. After curving, it forms a v-shaped zone in the ocean that is very narrow. This curving also gives rise to a series of stunning phenomena, such as the formation of trenches, the occurrence of earthquakes and even volcanic eruptions!
What Do Subduction Zones Create?
As mentioned above, subduction zones form oceanic trenches. At the region where the oceanic crust bends and curves into the mantle, a v-shaped region is formed. This region results in the formation of a deep trench. An oceanic trench is a depression in the seafloor that is very narrow in width. The famous Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean is a classic example of this phenomenon in action!
Subduction zones are also responsible for volcanic eruptions. As the plate slides into the hot mantle, the fluids trapped in the plate are released. These hot fluids rise up and partially melt the overlying crust. This results in the formation of magma, which rises up through varying landmasses and is released through a volcanic eruption. A very popular example of this activity is the region where the Pacific Ring of Fire lies. This area is composed of three active plates, namely the Eurasian Plate, the Pacific Plate and the Indo-Australian Plate.
Aside from the trenches and volcanic eruptions, subduction zones also cause earthquakes. When two massive crustal plates collide, the energy that is stored is also enormous. When this energy is released, earthquakes occur. Sometimes these are major, causing severe destruction, while at other times, they can be felt in terms of mild tremors. A graph of such tremors would show something that looks like a medical CT scan!
As we know, what is visible from the top might be caused by a number of underlying reasons. Subduction zones, being the case in hand, are responsible for many catastrophic events that we witness on a daily basis. Earth is truly a place of ever-expanding wonder, isn’t it? | <urn:uuid:318b2ff5-29cd-44e3-85cf-05c41e613b14> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/what-are-subduction-zones.html | 2025-01-13T20:55:37Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362172.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20250113185921-20250113215921-00800.warc.gz | en | 0.953512 | 1,190 | 4.28125 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
July 5-14, 1779 at Connecticut
In July, Major General William Tryon and 2,600 men embarked onto a Royal Navy fleet led by Admiral George Collier, and raided the Connecticut ports of New Haven, Fairfield and Norwalk. Military and public stores, supply houses, and ships were destroyed, as were private homes, churches and other public buildings. The raids were ineffectually resisted by militia forces.
The raid was part of a larger strategy designed by the British commander-in-chief, Lieutenant General Henry Clinton, to draw General George Washington's Continental Army on to terrain where it might be more effectively engaged. The strategy failed, and both sides criticized Tryon for the severity of his action.
Although the raid had economic ramifications, and affected military supplies, Clinton's efforts had no long-term strategic impact.
The raid was part of the Northern Theater 1778-82.
Following France's entry into the Revolutionary War in 1778, British forces in New York City were primarily concerned with defending the city and its harbor. The military activity in the northern states was reduced significantly, and the armies of Gen. George Washington and Gen. Henry Clinton watched each other warily in the New York area. Washington based his defense in New Jersey and at West Point, where he guarded critical communications and supply links.
In 1779, Lt. Gen. Clinton hatched a plan that he hoped would convince General Washington to move his army so that he might be engaged in a "general and decisive action". He first launched an expedition in late May that seized Stony Point, New York and Verplanck's Point, opposite sides of a key crossing point over the Hudson River. Although Washington did move additional troops into the New York highlands, Clinton felt the position too strong to attack. He then decided to dispatch Maj. Gen. William Tryon, who organized an expedition to raid the coastal communities of Connecticut. Simultaneously, Clinton staged a body of troops at Mamaroneck, New York, that would go after Washington when he moved troops to oppose the raids, and also attack Continental Army positions in New Jersey.
Tryon assembled a force of 2,600 men, and embarked them on a fleet commanded by Sir George Collier. One division, led by Brigadier General George Garth, consisted of the 54th Regiment along with several companies of Royal Fusiliers, foot guards, and Hessian jägers. The second division, led by Tryon, consisted of the Hessian Landgrave Regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and the King's American Regiment, the latter being a provincial regiment of Loyalists raised by Yale College graduate Edmund Fanning.
On July 3, the fleet sailed from New York and reached New Haven two days later. Immediately disembarking, Garth's division rapidly gained control of New Haven, and went to work. Although Tryon had given orders that included burning the town, Garth did not do this; he limited his activities to destroying public stores, and seizing or destroying the town's armaments and ships in the harbor.
Tryon's division landed in East Haven, Connecticut, where it met spirited resistance from a band of local militia, but managed to take Black Rock Fort. In addition to destroying barns filled with grain, Tryon had local manor houses put to the torch. By the time the British withdrew, over 1,000 militia had mustered from the surrounding towns.
On July 6, the expedition reembarked on the fleet in the afternoon, after spending the night in armed camps. It sailed for Fairfield, Connecticut, arriving two days later. There the inhabitants fled upon the fleet's arrival, and Tryon's force, with little or no opposition, went on a destructive rampage.
In addition to destroying 54 barns and 47 storehouses, they burned 83 homes, two churches, and municipal buildings including a schoolhouse, the courthouse and the local jail. After another night ashore, the expedition sailed across Long Island Sound, where it spent two days resting and resupplying in Huntington, New York.
On July 11, the fleet arrived at Norwalk, Connecticut, late in the day. The troops did not finish landing until 3:00 AM on July 12, so they rested until daybreak. The two divisions, which had landed on opposite sides of the harbor, were weakly opposed by about 50 local militia, which were easily dispersed.
The destruction then began, with most of the village and its commercial infrastructure destroyed. The fleet returned to Huntington, where Tryon received orders to return to New York on July 14.
Tryon reported losses of 26 killed, 90 wounded, and 32 missing. Historian Charles Hervey Townshend compiled a list of 23 Americans killed, 15 wounded, and 12 captured in the New Haven raid; a contemporary news account reported 27 killed and 19 wounded.
Clinton's plan was an utter failure. Washington, on hearing of the invasion, immediately ordered the entire Connecticut division, stationed near West Point to move with all possible speed to counter the invasion. But they arrived after Tryon had sailed, and missed the opportunity to defend their own state. Washington however, may have benefited from Clinton's weakening of the garrison at Stony Point in order to provide men for Tryon's expedition.
On July 15–16, a picked force under the command of Brigadier General Anthony Wayne successfully captured the outpost. Although Clinton reoccupied Stony Point, the failure of the 1779 raids to accomplish anything of substance led him to abandon it later in the year.
Tryon was pilloried by both Patriots and Loyalists for the raid. Washington accused him of making war against women and children, and Silas Deane called the raids acts of "barbarity" and "almost beyond description". John Pownall, a colonial administrator in London, wondered "what could have induced our friend Tryon to countenance [...] the wanton severities".
Clinton insisted on a written report justifying the burnings, and complained of the raiding he had been reduced to ordering, "I have been a buccaneer already too long; I detest that sort of war." | <urn:uuid:18aa365b-2e17-4d1f-9ef0-594ed29081b7> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://revolutionarywar.us/year-1779/tryons-raid/ | 2025-01-15T02:58:47Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362214.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20250115010435-20250115040435-00700.warc.gz | en | 0.972965 | 1,262 | 3.59375 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
Anna Wójcik: Why is the principle of mutual trust between Member States fundamental for the European Union? How does a State earn trust?
Koen Lenaerts: The Member States are all committed to the values referred to in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union. These include respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, the rule of law and human rights in a society characterised by pluralism, tolerance and justice. These values are further explained in many other provisions of the Treaties and in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU.
All Member States are required to adhere to those common values in their domestic legal orders, which is why they can trust each other. In order to trust someone, you need to be more or less able to predict how that person will behave. This does not mean that the other person must do exactly the same thing as you. Within a relationship of trust there is room for freedom to make one’s own choices. This is also true among Member States. Each one makes its own policy choices. But these choices must reach a common minimum threshold, in terms of values and of rules, that applies to all Member States.
The argument that ‘the EU is interfering with national competences’ misses the point. States can only trust each other within the EU if they are confident that they are all equally committed to the values of pluralism, tolerance and democracy, that democracy being built, moreover, on fundamental freedoms and the principle of solidarity. Provided that they respect this common foundation, Member States can make their own choices in matters falling under national competences. Mutual trust therefore means that Member States may make different choices, but also that they must be able to trust each other because they share common values.
For instance, behaviour that constitutes a criminal offence in Belgium may not be punishable under criminal law in the Netherlands, Poland, or Portugal. But the criminal proceedings in all Member States of the EU must be conducted before fully independent, impartial courts, according to fair trial rules, with the rights of the defence being respected and appropriate rules on the administration of evidence observed. There is thus a basket of rules that need to be respected in order for a judge in one Member State to put trust in proceedings before a court in another Member State, which are governed by rules reflecting different legislative choices made in that Member State. It is very important to distinguish this basic level of commonality of values and meta-constitutional principles from the choices that each State makes within this common framework.
AW: Imagine there is a hypothetical country where disciplinary proceedings are launched against judges who refer questions for a preliminary reference to the Court of Justice of the EU. Can such a country be trusted in the EU legal space?
KL: Due to various cases currently pending before the Court of Justice, I cannot answer your question.
AW: Are you aware that there are more than one thousand one hundred disciplinary proceedings pending against judges in Poland at the moment?
KL: I am of course aware that there are disciplinary proceedings against judges in Poland, because a lot of that information has been made public and, crucially, there are also cases pending before the CJEU where parties provide factual information in that regard that is, moreover, sometimes contradictory. But again, I cannot say anything more while those cases are pending.
AW: Why is judicial independence crucial for the EU legal space?
KL: I can answer that question in detail and fully, because there is relevant case law on this matter. These are, by the way, old cases, not involving Poland.
There was the very famous Wilson case (C-506/04) involving the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg. Mr. Wilson was a British barrister who wanted to register as a lawyer in Luxembourg. Although he intended to work only in English and French, his request was dismissed because he did not know Luxembourgish and German. The Bar Council informed Mr. Wilson that he could appeal that decision before a Disciplinary and Administrative Committee which consisted, at first instance exclusively, and on appeal principally, of lawyers registered at the Luxembourg Bar. Instead, Mr. Wilson appealed to the Luxembourgish Administrative Courts, which asked the CJEU whether such a body, essentially consisting of stakeholders – members of the professional group whose decision was being challenged – was an independent court within the meaning of EU law. Unsurprisingly, the answer was ‘no’. The CJEU provided here for the first time a detailed explanation of what judicial independence involves.
That judgment was given in 2006. The CJEU ruled that effective judicial protection is a general principle of Community – now Union – law stemming from the constitutional traditions common to the Member States and enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. It requires national courts to be independent and impartial.
Independence is, in the first place, freedom from all forms of external pressure. Not only from the pressure of the ruling party and the legislative and executive powers, but also from financial groups, technology industry giants, trade unions and any other pressure groups. Judges should be fully insulated from any sort of pressure.
There is also an internal dimension to independence, meaning that judges must be and must remain at an equal distance from all the parties to the dispute. A judge must not have even the slightest personal interest in one party winning the case or losing it. The only interest that a judge may have in the outcome of the case must be his or her professional interest in the correct application of the law. And the correct application of the law can only be verified within the framework of the judicial process itself, that is by bringing an appeal or a final cassation appeal or a final appeal before the constitutional court, as it is possible in certain Member States. To coin a well-known phrase: by exhausting the remedies within the judicial system. That equal distance is also a matter of perception: none of the parties should entertain any reasonable doubt as to the judge’s impartiality.
AW: There is a tendency in Poland and possibly also in some other Member States to see the CJEU as pronouncing on judicial independence issues in relation to current political disputes.
KL: As I explained, judicial independence is an important legal issue. There is case law of both the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the Court of Justice of the European Union on that issue, which is over 50 years old and was developed in cases relating to the six original Member States.
AW: In public debates, there are many misconceptions about what a judge should do in the case of a conflict between national law and EU law. Could you briefly explain this?
KL: When national law is in conflict with EU law, there is no possible misconception as to the principle that EU law prevails. Why? A populist way of presenting this is often that Europe is somehow ‘crushing’ the Member States. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Member States are the European Union.
What is the unity, the uniformity of Union law? It is very simple. It is the ultimate guarantee of equality. That principle is breached when, for example, taxpayers in one Member State do not effectively benefit from the rights that they derive from Union law concerning, say, free movement of capital or the freedom of establishment. Or when, for instance, consumers are not protected against unfair contractual terms. Or, and I refer here to the Wilson case that I mentioned previously, when a British barrister does not enjoy an effective judicial remedy before an independent court in Luxembourg, whereas his colleague, who would like to register at the Paris Bar or the Frankfurt Bar, does benefit from such protection. In all those examples, the problem is ultimately a breach of equality between citizens of the Union. And EU law cannot accept this.
National courts are at the forefront in terms of applying EU law. The CJEU is, in a sense, a helpdesk for interpreting that law. A national court that refers a question is responsible for applying EU law on the basis of the interpretation that the CJEU provides because national courts are subject to the principle of supremacy of EU law. Accordingly, they must apply that law and must decide, where necessary, that a provision of national law is to be set aside in a particular case.
Indeed, all Member States have agreed to transfer competences to the European Union and provided that the EU has correctly exercised those competences in adopting appropriate legislation, the law of the EU is the ‘law of the land’ in all EU Member States. The latter must therefore respect it. Member States are bound by their commitment to confer certain competences to the EU. Provided that the EU exercises those competences in compliance with the EU Treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, the EU act at issue prevails over national law.
Judges in all Member States refer questions to the CJEU on the correct interpretation of Union law, precisely in order to be able to set aside any conflicting provisions of national law. That is the essence of the direct effect and the supremacy of EU law – principles established in 1963 in van Gend and Loos, a Dutch case, and in 1964 in Costa v ENEL, an Italian case. Those principles apply equally to all EU Member States.
AW: Again, in the public debate, there has been some disagreement concerning the limits of the activity of judges. Can judges participate in demonstrations or express their concerns in matters of public interest?
KL: Judges should not express themselves, through whatever medium, in a manner which adversely affects the public perception of their impartiality. This does, however, not prevent them from explaining the basic requirements of the rule of law.
There is in this respect an important judgment of the European Court of Human Rights from 2016 in Baka v Hungary. In this judgment, one can read that judges enjoy freedom of expression related to the basic values of the EU legal order, such as democracy, the rule of law, fundamental rights, etc. Having said that, the traditions of Member States differ significantly within the EU, and the same is true across the world, if one looks at it globally.
I am Belgian, so if I take the Belgian example, judges in Belgium cannot participate in political activities. That being said, according to the Baka judgment of the ECtHR, they cannot be prevented from speaking out on the values I mentioned before. For instance, it is acceptable for a Belgian judge to give a public lecture explaining what, in his or her view, the requirements of the rule of law entail for the independence and impartiality of courts, a fair trial, rights of the defence, the adversarial nature of proceedings, fairness and presentation of evidence. He or she may also speak publicly on judicial policy regarding such matters.
But suppose that a judge were to argue publicly that nuclear power plants should be reopened in Belgium. That would be more problematic. It is important for a judge to exercise self-restraint in his or her judicial office.
AW: What should be done to avoid conflicts and splits among the professional legal community?
KL: I understand your question as referring to the way judges are appointed.
Major conflicts on this issue within the professional legal community in a Member State are of course undesirable. Such conflicts absolutely have to be resolved. There are Member States where that sort of conflict resolution in the legal field works well, thanks to a few very simple rules.
For instance, there is nothing wrong with Parliament making judicial appointments, as long as there is a requirement of a qualified majority, for example a 2/3 majority. That is, in itself, usually a guarantee of coalition building. On the contrary, requiring a bare majority for such appointments is a source of potential conflict. Take for example Germany. Candidates for the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the Federal Constitutional Court, are proposed by the political parties. However, a 2/3 majority in Parliament is needed to elect them as judges. Thus, the system is geared towards building consensus. Once judges are appointed, they have a single non-renewable term of office of 12 years and can act fully independently. The requirement of a 2/3 majority means that every judge’s appointment is almost consensual. A judge proposed by one party also has to be accepted by other parties in the Parliament to achieve the 2/3 majority. Consensus building thus starts as soon as the proposal is made.
That reflects a political culture of what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls ‘deliberative’ democracy. The parties may be in opposition to one another in the democratic debate, but they are not enemies; they work together towards the common good.
In the Kingdom of Belgium, the law requires that half the members of the constitutional court must be former politicians. However, in order to be appointed, a candidate needs to obtain a 2/3 parliamentary majority. Furthermore, a requirement for consent from both the Francophone and Flemish communities must also be met. Thus, all judges are elected with a 2/3 majority by Parliament and they also need to have a simple majority in both linguistic groups. This means that all francophone judges must be accepted by a simple majority in the Flemish group in the Parliament, and vice versa. It works perfectly well.
AW: Politicians do not like consensus building, they like polarisation. In Poland, they spark polarisation by attacking judges and advocates general of the Court of Justice of the European Union. What is your role as the President of the CJEU in countering such attacks?
KL: My role is to explain, very openly, what we do. And to remind the politicians that the European Union is their Union.
There are representatives of every Member State in all EU institutions and they are doing good work.
The Court of Justice of the EU, with its judges and advocates general, acts as a bridge between the EU institutions and bodies, on the one hand, and national authorities, on the other hand. It is entrusted with the task of ensuring that the domestic legal orders of the Member States and the common legal order of the EU operate harmoniously and in concert.
The EU is a common governance structure and an autonomous source of law. That legal space produces rules that are common to all Member States. ‘Common’ means: the same across the entire Union. A fortiori the principles and values upon which those rules are based are also common. The CJEU is the common judicial body which explains those rules through interpretation in its judgments and ensures that all Member States are placed on an equal footing. It is a question of equality of all Member States and their legal systems before Union law.
The CJEU interprets existing rules. However, if politicians consider that certain EU rules are inadequate, they should act in an appropriate way at EU level. Politicians have many tools at their disposal. They can initiate new legislative acts or amendments to existing ones. A more extreme option is the possibility for the Member States, as “masters of the Treaties”, to modify the latter. That said, they can by no means alter the common, core values shared by all members of the club.
Imagine you are in the alumni club of your university and certain members are disregarding the core values of the club. In such a situation, you would not like to be associated with those other members. The same is true within the EU. When a State is a member of the EU, it needs to be seen as having the same core values as the other Member States. It is not a matter of a power grab or of singling out any particular Member States for criticism. It is simply a matter of making the system work.
AW: Isn’t the CJEU, in a way, our protector against the current threats?
KL: Yes, it is, but with an important caveat. The CJEU never takes a case on its own initiative. This is self-evident for lawyers. Some people however speak of the CJEU as though it were choosing to pick up on certain problems and then make judgments on them. This is totally wrong. The CJEU can only decide on cases when they are submitted to it by instances that are entitled to do so: the European Commission, a Member State or a national court, for example.
Even where the CJEU is seized by one of those instances, the Court’s competence is not without limits. For instance, certain references for a preliminary ruling are referred to the Court by a national court and yet are not admissible. That said, it is for the CJEU alone to decide that, and not for any national body. The CJEU thus has a monopoly on deciding whether a reference made by a national court is admissible or not since this is a matter of interpretation of EU law. That system has been in force since the 1950s, when the preliminary reference mechanism was created.
The CJEU plays its part loyally. Sometimes, it declares a preliminary reference inadmissible. That does not mean that there is no problem with the national legislation as such. It simply means that the conditions for delivering a preliminary ruling are not met in that particular case.
It is important for the CJEU to preserve its own legitimacy. The Treaties circumscribe its jurisdiction and the CJEU must therefore ascertain in every single case whether that case falls within the limits of that jurisdiction. The reasoning set out in the judgment must be transparent.
When a reference for a preliminary ruling is declared inadmissible, no one is to blame and certainly not the referring court. Lawyers know perfectly well that there are borderline cases, where one can make arguments in both directions. A lawyer who loses a case is not a poor lawyer. The same is true of a judge whose reference for a preliminary ruling was found to be inadmissible. It is of utmost importance in all Member States that judges have the exclusive right to engage in judicial dialogue with the CJEU.
This interview will be published in Polish in OKO.press and republished in Gazeta Wyborcza. The English version appears simultaneously on the Rule of Law in Poland blog. | <urn:uuid:e2acb31b-45a0-4ea5-817b-69f996132c4f> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://verfassungsblog.de/judges-should-be-fully-insulated-from-any-sort-of-pressure/ | 2025-01-15T03:39:37Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362214.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20250115010435-20250115040435-00700.warc.gz | en | 0.968832 | 3,710 | 3.5625 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
The Right to Freedom
The U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights contain the rights of a free people, but they do not guarantee freedom explicitly. The Thirteenth Amendment does. Designed to fulfill the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, it outlawed slavery — “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude. . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” — and, by implication, it also established freedom as a fundamental American right. Freedom has had many meanings for Americans, but at its core, the definition has always been set against slavery, the opposite of what freedom promised, which was the liberty to choose and act without coercion or restraints.
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued his proclamation abolishing slavery in regions not under Union control, but in fact the document did not free a single slave. Americans at the time recognized its limited effect: the Emancipation Proclamation had no legal status. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, remedied this problem by making emancipation part of the nation’s fundamental law. Debated then and now was the question of whether the amendment went beyond merely freeing the slaves. Did it promise, in addition, a full measure of freedom for all Americans?
Efforts to define freedom began with the European settlement of North America, but the struggle was most fierce during the Civil War and its aftermath of Reconstruction. Until then, Americans usually defined freedom in relationship to the African slavery they knew—slaves were not free, and free men were not slaves. By abolishing slavery, the war destroyed this assumption. It also changed the way Americans thought about the Constitution. In the decades leading to the Civil War, the Constitution had become an increasingly sacred text. Americans rarely considered changing it; after the Bill of Rights, it had been amended only twice, the last time in 1804. They especially avoided changing the founding generation’s language on slavery, but the debate over abolition forced Americans to view the framers’ work as imperfect and incomplete. It also provided them an opportunity to build on the founders’ commitment to liberty. In this sense, the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment represented a transforming moment when the nation redefined freedom and made it part of its fundamental law. Americans were reconstructing the nation to create a more perfect Union and to extend its promise of liberty to all people.
Adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment came after a long political struggle as first Congress and then the state ratification conventions debated what its words meant. Its champions believed the amendment proclaimed not only the end of slavery and its vestiges, or traces, but also guaranteed former slaves all the rights that defined freedom. “Mere exemption from servitude is a miserable idea of freedom,” a legislator from Massachusetts argued. Others did not favor extending a full complement of rights to African Americans but recognized that slavery was incompatible with the nation’s claims of liberty. Opponents objected to the broad enforcement power granted to the federal government in Section 2, arguing that it undermined federalism, the division of power between state and central governments.
In this view, opponents were correct. The amendment altered the American constitutional order. For the first time, a national law significantly limited the power of the states to define the status of its residents.
The amendment quickly spawned two statutes under its enforcement authority—the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Freedmen’s Bureau Act. The bureau bill extended equal rights to state laws and enforced them through military courts when states failed to do so. Readmission of states into the Union would end the military courts, however, so the civil rights law declared that blacks were citizens and guaranteed them legal equality throughout the nation. They were entitled to the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property” as whites enjoyed. Both measures asserted broad national authority to define rights essential to freedom and provided for enforcement of these rights, if necessary, in federal courts. These acts, and others that followed, depended in part on the enforcement power given to Congress under the Thirteenth Amendment. Tolerating discrimination, one senator explained, “would be perpetuating that lingering prejudice growing out of a race having been slaves which it is as much our duty to remove as it was to abolish slavery.” It was necessary to remove these vestiges for the guarantee of freedom to have any meaning.
This view failed to receive support from the Supreme Court, which tended to ignore the Thirteenth Amendment. The justices conceded that the amendment guaranteed freedom from slavery, and not simply for blacks. Although “[N]egro slavery alone was in the mind of the Congress,” the Court noted in its 1873 decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases, “if Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie labor system shall develop slavery of the Mexican or Chinese race . . . this amendment may safely be trusted to make it void.” The Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) also suggested that the enforcement section gave Congress the authority to outlaw “badges and incidents” of slavery. But the justices defined these badges and incidents narrowly. They ruled, for example, that the amendment did not give Congress the power to enact laws against private discrimination or to prohibit racial discrimination in public accommodations, such as railroads. Finally, in 1906, the Court struck its strongest blow against the amendment when it declared that state courts alone could decide when violations of the amendment had occurred.
With this history, it is not surprising that much of the twentieth century’s civil rights legislation relied not on the Thirteenth Amendment but on the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868. The latter amendment forbade states from abridging the rights of citizenship or denying citizens due process and equal protection of the laws. In the late 1960s, however, the Thirteenth Amendment did emerge suddenly and dramatically as a constitutional guarantee of freedom. This outcome was not on the minds of a mixed-race couple from St. Louis in 1965, however. They simply wanted to buy a nice house in a quiet suburb, but discovered they could not.
Joseph Lee Jones and his wife, Barbara, both federal employees in Missouri, read an advertisement in 1965 for the Paddock Woods subdivision then being developed in St. Louis County. The new suburb sounded ideal. It would house around one thousand people and boasted all the amenities needed for a comfortable lifestyle, including a country club. But when they made an offer on a home, they were told they could not buy it. Joseph Jones was an African American, and the agent explained that the developer, the Alfred H. Mayer Company, did not sell to blacks as a matter of policy. It believed whites would not buy lots if blacks were their neighbors. The fear was based in an unfortunate reality: the vast majority of Americans in the 1960s lived in residentially segregated neighborhoods.
In 1948, the Supreme Court had ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that state enforcement of such restrictive covenants, or legal restrictions forbidding blacks to purchase property, was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Joneses could have used this decision to challenge the Mayer Company’s policy. But the company, in anticipation, claimed that it was operating solely as a private company; it had developed the subdivision solely on its own, without any state involvement. So the Joneses relied instead on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which Congress had passed to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment. The company’s actions, they argued, violated a surviving remnant of this act that promised “all citizens of the United States shall have the same right, in every State and Territory, as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof, to purchase real property.” Joseph and Barbara Jones were asking the justices to do something the Court had refused to do ever since the Thirteenth Amendment passed—declare that the amendment outlawed private discrimination as a violation of the rights of free citizens. The Supreme Court agreed with the Joneses, by a vote of 7 to 2, that the Thirteenth Amendment abolished the “incidents and badges of slavery” as well as slavery itself. This concept was not new to the Court; it had used the language in its 1883 decision in the Civil Rights Cases, but with a different result.
Then, it interpreted the incidents and badges of slavery narrowly to exclude private acts of discrimination; now, it viewed these acts as impermissible. “Just as the Black Codes, enacted after the Civil War . . . were substitutes for the slave system, so the exclusion of Negroes from white communities became a substitute for the Black Codes. And when racial discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin, then it too is a relic of slavery,” the Court determined.
The real issue at stake was the meaning of freedom itself. During the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Senator Lyman Trumbull from Illinois, who led the fight to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment, warned that measures such as the Black Codes threatened the freedom won for all Americans on the battlefields of the Civil War: “The trumpet of freedom that we have been blowing throughout the land has given an ‘uncertain sound,’ and the promised freedom is a delusion,” he claimed. In Jones v. Alfred Mayer Co., the justices answered his concern. “At the very least,” the majority opinion stated, “the freedom that Congress is empowered to secure under the Thirteenth Amendment includes the freedom to buy whatever a white man can buy, the right to live wherever a white man can live. If Congress cannot say that being a free man means at least this much, then the Thirteenth Amendment made a promise the Nation cannot keep.”
With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, Americans had reimagined their Constitution. This first Reconstruction amendment established freedom as a condition of U.S. citizenship, but its meaning was uncertain. As the nation’s attention turned away from the conditions of ex-slaves in the 1870s, the Thirteenth Amendment faded into relative obscurity—until the decision in Jones v. Alfred Mayer Co.
Although dormant for many decades, the amendment was never entirely forgotten. On numerous occasions, especially in the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court struck down various laws on peonage (forced labor for payment of debts) as violations of the ban on involuntary servitude. But memory of the amendment’s promise rested largely with African Americans, who viewed it in both a negative and positive light. For many blacks in segregated America, freedom still was more hope than reality, though the amendment was also a symbol of how far they had come. Many African-American communities, for example, celebrated February 1, the date in 1865 when Abraham Lincoln signed the Thirteenth Amendment, as Freedom Day. When Congress in 1947 established the date as an annual celebration, the man who lobbied most for the new National Freedom Day, an ex-slave from Georgia, said the amendment “not only freed the black man legally, but laid the groundwork for the white man’s [freedom] as well.”
What this freedom entailed was open to debate, but increasingly in the twentieth century a variety of causes invoked the amendment’s promise. Since the 1960s, legal scholars have argued that the Thirteenth Amendment should protect exploited workers, abused women, neglected children, and all other victims of relationships that bore the vestiges of slavery or involuntary servitude. In a 1969 case concerning major league baseball, a star player, Curt Flood, challenged league rules against free agency, or the ability to negotiate his own contract, as a violation of the amendment’s guarantee of freedom. He lost his case (although baseball owners later abandoned their restrictive rules), but what was important was a renewed debate about what defines freedom.
The struggle over the amendment’s meaning is far from over. In this sense, the first part of the Constitution to establish freedom as a right of all Americans is not unlike the more well-known amendment, the Fourteenth, that followed it. With the Fourteenth Amendment, the questions that begged answers centered on the rights included in its elusive phrases of “due process” and “equal protection.” The Court over time has interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to include many of the rights outlined in the Bill of Rights. The Thirteenth Amendment cannot claim this constitutional legacy, but it does not need to. Its contribution is different but complementary. With its passage, Americans understood that the Constitution was not written on tablets of stone, with their rights engraved for all times and incapable of change. Each generation has the ability to challenge and enlarge on the work of previous generations. Rights can be expanded and created, not simply accepted. Freedom can be evaluated and redefined, not simply celebrated. Both freedom and the Constitution that protects the rights that accompany freedom are living achievements, not relics of a dead past. The Thirteenth Amendment made freedom part of our constitutional birthright; it also invited us all to continue the debate over what freedom means.
After the Civil War, Congress passed two civil rights acts (1866 and 1875) that sought to secure the rights of freed slaves and to enforce the provisions of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The 1875 act especially sought to prohibit private discrimination against blacks in such matters as access to inns and public transportation. One of the central issues that emerged was whether the Thirteenth Amendment allowed Congress to outlaw “vestiges of slavery,” or the discrimination that resulted from African Americans’ previous status as noncitizens.
In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, Justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote for an 8-to-1 majority of the Supreme Court, which interpreted the Thirteenth Amendment narrowly and ruled that it did not authorize Congress to outlaw discrimination.
It is true that slavery cannot exist without law any more than property in lands and goods can exist without law, and therefore the thirteenth amendment may be regarded as nullifying all state laws which establish or uphold slavery. . . . We must not forget that the province and scope of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments are different: the former simply abolished slavery: the latter prohibited the states from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, from depriving them of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and from denying to any the equal protection of the laws. The amendments are different, and the powers of congress under them are different . . . Under the thirteenth amendment, it has only to do with slavery and its incidents . . . Under the thirteenth amendment the legislation, so far as necessary or proper to eradicate all forms and incidents of slavery and involuntary servitude, may be direct and primary, operating upon the acts of individuals, whether sanctioned by state legislation or not. . . . When a man has emerged from slavery, . . . there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected . . . Mere discriminations on account of race or color were not regarded as badges of slavery.
Justice John Marshall Harlan registered a strong dissent in the Civil Rights Cases. His view was later adopted by the court in Jones v. Alfred Mayer Co. (1968).
The thirteenth amendment. . . did something more than to prohibit slavery as an institution, resting upon distinctions of race, and upheld by positive law . . . [I]t established and decreed universal civil freedom throughout the United States. But did the freedom thus established involve nothing more than exemption from actual slavery? . . . Was it the purpose of the nation simply to destroy the institution, and then remit the race. . . to the several states for such protection, in their civil rights, necessarily growing out of freedom, as those states, in their discretion, choose to provide? Were the states, against whose solemn protest the institution was destroyed, to be left perfectly free. . . to make or allow discriminations against that race, as such, in the enjoyment of those fundamental rights that inhere in a state of freedom? . . .
That there are burdens and disabilities which constitute badges of slavery and servitude, and that the express power delegated to congress to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the thirteenth amendment, may be exerted by legislation of a direct and primary character, for the eradication, not simply of the institution, but of its badges and incidents, are propositions which ought to be deemed indisputable.
I do hold that since slavery. . . was the moving or principal cause of the adoption of that [thirteenth] amendment, and since that institution rested wholly upon the inferiority, as a race, of those held in bondage, their freedom necessarily involved immunity from, and protection against, all discrimination against them, because of their race, in respect of such civil rights as belong to freemen of other races.
Military historians agree that the Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point of the Civil War. It also marked the time when the abolition of slavery, rather than preservation of the Union, began to emerge as a goal of the war. On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, to dedicate the battlefield. The short speech signaled this new goal when he spoke about “a new birth of freedom.” The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery when it was ratified after the war, guaranteed freedom to all Americans.
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. | <urn:uuid:89a08902-f709-4147-82b0-a7560f64d399> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/resource/our-rights/rights-chapter-2-right-freedom/ | 2025-01-15T03:47:48Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362214.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20250115010435-20250115040435-00700.warc.gz | en | 0.967834 | 3,965 | 4.625 | 5 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
Discover the Plesiosaurus - an extinct marine reptile that lived over 66 million years ago during the Mesozoic Era. Known for its long neck and four flippers, this fascinating creature was a skilled predator that roamed the ancient oceans. With up to 76 vertebrae in its neck, the Plesiosaurus fossils could move its head in a wide range of directions, making it a formidable hunter. Its sharp teeth were well-suited for catching fish and other small marine animals. Plesiosaurus likely lived in groups and may have cared for its young. Despite its extinction, the Plesiosaurus remains a remarkable and intriguing creature of the ancient world.
- Plesiosaurus was categorized as an extinct marine reptile that lived during the Mesozoic Era.
- It lived approximately 205 to 66 million years ago.
- Plesiosaurus had a small head, a long neck, and four flippers.
- Its neck was made up of up to 76 vertebrae, allowing it to move its head in a wide range of directions.
- Paleontologists predict Plesiosaurus fossils could grow up to 11 meters in length.
- It was a carnivore, feeding on fish and other small marine animals.
- Plesiosaurus likely lived in groups and was classified as an aquatic dinosaur.
- Its teeth were sharp and pointed, well-suited for catching prey.
- Plesiosaurus lived in a variety of marine environments, from shallow coastal waters to deeper offshore areas.
- Despite its extinction, Plesiosaurus remains a fascinating and intriguing creature of the ancient world.
The Anatomy Of Plesiosaurus
Plesiosaurus had a unique anatomy that allowed it to thrive in the ancient oceans during the Mesozoic Era. However, this allowed the Plesiosaurus to move its head in a wide range of directions, making it a skilled hunter. Its neck was also flexible enough to allow it to make quick strikes at prey, making it a formidable predator.
The body of Plesiosaurus was also unique, with four flippers that were used for propulsion, steering, and stability in the water. The flippers were positioned at the sides of the body and were used in a rowing motion to move through the water. This gave Plesiosaurus a smooth and efficient swimming style, allowing it to move quickly and gracefully through the water.
In addition to its long neck and flippers, Plesiosaurus had a small head that was well-suited for catching fish and other small marine animals. Its teeth were sharp and pointed, allowing it to easily pierce through the flesh of its prey. Unlike some other marine reptiles, such as ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurus did not have a streamlined body shape. Instead, it had a more rounded body shape that allowed it to be more maneuverable in the water.
The anatomy of Plesiosaurus fossils was perfectly adapted for life in the ancient oceans. Its long neck, four flippers, and a small head with sharp teeth made it a skilled predator that could move quickly and efficiently through the water.
The Plesiosaurus Teeth Structure
The Plesiosaurus Teeth Structure was one of the key features that made it a skilled predator in the ancient oceans. Its sharp, pointed teeth were perfectly suited for catching fish and other small marine animals. Plesiosaurus was a carnivore, and its teeth were its primary tool for hunting and feeding.
Unlike many other animals, Plesiosaurus did not have a continuous supply of replacement teeth. Once a tooth fell out, it was not replaced, which meant that the Plesiosaurus had to rely on its remaining teeth to last throughout its lifetime. This made the teeth of Plesiosaurus particularly important, as any damage or loss of teeth could have a significant impact on its ability to hunt and feed.
The Plesiosaurus Teeth were well-adapted for their role as hunting tools. They were sharp and pointed, with serrated edges that allowed them to easily pierce through the flesh of prey. The teeth were also curved slightly backward, which helped to prevent prey from escaping once caught.
Despite their effectiveness as hunting tools, the teeth of Plesiosaurus were not indestructible. Over time, they could become worn down or damaged, which would make hunting and feeding more difficult. In some cases, Plesiosaurus may have resorted to feeding on softer prey or using other hunting techniques to compensate for lost or damaged teeth.
Further, the Plesiosaurus Teeth structure played a crucial role in its survival as a predator in the ancient oceans. Its sharp, pointed teeth were well-suited for catching fish and other small marine animals, but the lack of replacement teeth meant that they had to last throughout its lifetime. Despite this challenge, Plesiosaurus was able to thrive and dominate the waters during the Mesozoic Era, leaving behind a fascinating legacy that continues to captivate scientists and enthusiasts alike.
The Behaviour Of Plesiosaurus
Plesiosaurus was a fascinating creature with a unique set of behaviors that allowed it to thrive in the ancient oceans. As a skilled swimmer, Plesiosaurus was able to move through the water quickly and efficiently, using its four flippers to propel itself forward and steer in different directions. Its long neck was also a key feature that allowed it to hunt prey in a distinctive way.
Plesiosaurus likely hunted by using its long neck to sneak up on prey and then striking quickly with its sharp teeth. Plesiosaurus fossils, as speculated by the paleontologist, a formidable predator that could strike from many angles, making it difficult for prey to escape.
In addition to its hunting abilities, Plesiosaurus is believed to have been a social animal that lived in groups. Fossil evidence suggests that Plesiosaurus may have traveled in groups and even cared for its young. This social behavior would have allowed Plesiosaurus to better protect itself and its young from predators, as well as increase its chances of finding food.
The behavior of Plesiosaurus was well-suited for life in the ancient oceans. Its unique swimming abilities and hunting techniques allowed it to thrive as a predator, while its social behavior helped to ensure its survival as a species.
Paleoecology Of Plesiosaurus
Plesiosaurus lived in a diverse range of marine environments during the Mesozoic Era, from shallow coastal waters to deeper offshore areas. Plesiosaurus was a carnivore and likely fed on a variety of fish and other small marine animals, using its sharp teeth and hunting abilities to catch prey.
According to research on Plesiosaurus fossils, these creatures come in the category of skilled predator; it was also potentially preyed upon by larger marine predators such as ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs. These creatures were also apex predators in the ancient oceans and would have posed a significant threat to Plesiosaurus. However, fossil evidence suggests that Plesiosaurus may have been able to defend itself against these predators, but it is also possible that it fell victim to their attacks.
Despite the potential threats from other predators, Plesiosaurus was a successful species that thrived in the ancient oceans. Its unique anatomy, swimming abilities, and hunting techniques allowed it to survive and dominate its environment for millions of years.
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In this blog, we have covered various aspects of the Plesiosaurus Fossils. We dived into the details of identifying the authentic dinosaur fossils to keep you safe from scammers that sell counterfeit products in lieu of leveraging money. Fossils from Fossil Age Minerals are authentic and carefully preserved, so you get your favorite dinosaurs in the best condition. We have a reputation for offering high-quality fossils at an affordable price. If you are curious about the pricing or inventory, you can call us to explore more information. Our collection ensures commitment to customer satisfaction for your educational and collection purposes. | <urn:uuid:2d0e1ba0-0cea-47b7-901a-d95ea7985c08> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.fossilageminerals.com/blogs/news/an-adventure-with-plesiosaurus-is-a-journey-to-another-time-and-place | 2025-01-15T01:55:39Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362214.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20250115010435-20250115040435-00700.warc.gz | en | 0.972631 | 1,618 | 3.890625 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
World War II was a very important period in the history of U.S. conscientious objectors. When the draft was activated, it was the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, beginning before U.S. entry into the war. For the first time in a U.S. war, COs were permitted to serve their country not by being drafted into the military, but by engaging in alternative service called Civilian Public Service, or CPS. Also during World War II, the definition of CO was expanded to include religious persons who were not members of the three historic peace churches (Friends, Mennonites, and Brethren). The passion of the World War II COs to serve their country in nonviolent ways during wartime continues to have an impact today.
A conscientious objector was any person who refused to participate in war because of his conscience. In legal terms, a CO qualified under the IV-E (now I-O or I-A-O) section of the Selective Service, which exempted men from combat service.
There are three main types of conscientious objectors. Noncombatants are those who will serve in the military but will not serve in fighting positions. Conscientious objectors also include people who will not serve in the military at all but will accept required alternative service. Finally, “absolutists” are those COs (not recognized by law) who will not register for the draft, not serve in any position in the military, nor accept alternative service.
During the 1940s, many factors influenced a person’s decision to become a conscientious objector. Some people found that they could no longer fight after experiencing combat firsthand. More commonly, families influenced many COs. Some COs in World War II, such as Steve Cary and Asa Watkins, both well-known Quakers, were directly influenced by their fathers in their decisions to become pacifists. Steve Cary’s father refused to work in a company making weapons, and Asa Watkins’ father refused to own a gun although it was the norm in their southern culture.
Another major influence on conscientious objectors was their churches. Members of the three historic peace churches were often raised with an understanding and expectation of pacifism. Some members of religious groups, including the Amish, may have felt pressured to register as COs because their church would otherwise have “disfellowshiped” them.
For some African Americans, such as Bill Sutherland and Bayard Rustin, pacifism, combined with a strong sense of the injustice suffered by blacks in the United States, helped influence them to declare themselves conscientious objectors in World War II. Bayard Rustin wrote a letter to his local draft board in 1943 explaining why he could not serve: “Segregation, separation, according to Jesus, is the basis of continuous violence. . . . Racial discrimination in the armed forces is morally indefensible.”
Throughout U.S. history, there have always been men who have refused to fight in wars because their consciences would not permit them to kill another person. Because religious principles figured strongly in the founding of the United States, there have always been people here whose religious beliefs prevented them from entering the military. Beginning with the Revolutionary War, military officers and the government have had to manage the issue of how to deal with those who would not fight.
During the Revolutionary War, Quakers were among the first conscientious objectors in the history of this country. COs did not support the war at all and indeed many remained politically neutral, siding with neither the British nor the Patriots. Quakers were absolutists who would not accept office on either side, refused to serve in the military, refused to pay someone else to take their place, and refused to pay a fine or a fee to the government. In addition, these war resisters refused to pay taxes to fund the war.
As the number of conscientious objectors increased during the Revolutionary War, the colonies imposed new penalties on them. A penalty of four months in prison was imposed on COs who refused to serve. Some COs were forced to serve in the army against their will. Some resisters were humiliated by being forced to march with rifles strapped to their backs. COs who refused to eat army rations went hungry. George Washington personally released some of these COs when they were brought to him at his home.
There were also conscientious objectors during the Civil War. In the South, COs were suspected of opposing both the war and slavery, and were viewed by some as “double traitors.” Many Quakers endured jail and threats of death for refusing to fight in the war. Only 20 COs asked for noncombatant positions in the army.
As an alternative to fighting, Quakers worked to change society. Quakers were concerned with helping people escape slavery. They helped found the Underground Railroad, provided food and shelter to needy African Americans, opened schools for children, and assisted adults in need.
The First World War offered better alternatives for conscientious objectors than the Civil War, but it still provided a challenge to them. Unlike during the Civil War, where most men accepted jail sentences instead of noncombatant service, 20,873 men were granted noncombatant classification by their draft boards. This was in addition to 4,000 conscientious objectors who were members of the historic peace churches and therefore exempted from fighting for their country.
In the early postwar years of World War I, many pacifists worked in Europe with American Friends Service Committee, providing relief to German war victims. During the interwar period, there was a growing peace movement in the United States, in part influenced by the activities of Mohandas Gandhi. Meanwhile, many U.S. citizens believed that there could never be another terrible war. There was a strong isolationist movement in the belief that this would protect the United States from another devastating war.
By 1940, U.S. views about isolationism were beginning to change. The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 (the Burke-Wadsworth Bill) created the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Prior to the start of this peacetime draft, Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren worked together to negotiate the provisions of the pending Selective Service law. They requested a national register of COs, a civilian agency to administer the program, an alternative service option under civilian control, a national board of appeal, and a complete exemption for absolutists. The final law didn’t go that far, but it did expand the definition of a CO from members of the historic peace churches to anyone who could not fight because of religious training and belief. It offered the option for COs to perform work “of national importance” under civilian direction, an appeal process available under the Justice Department, and the right for violators to be tried under civilian courts rather than military court martial.
Since there was no national register of conscientious objectors, the total number is unknown, but 37,000 were classified by Selective Service as COs; 43,000 served as non-combatants; within the larger group of COs, 12,000 men served in Civilian Public Service; and 6,000 went to jail.
As alternative service, COs worked in forestry, as human testers, as firefighters, in farm work, and as hospital attendants in psychiatric hospitals. No matter what the job was, COs were always under the control of someone else, and had to work without pay. For many COs, their work was boring, depressing, and unrewarding in that the U.S. public did not appreciate their jobs.
Many COs were in forestry, mostly under the control of the U.S. Forestry Service. It was the COs’ job to build dams, levees, and reservoirs; dig ditches; clear channels; and sod gullies. COs were also responsible for a large amount of trail-clearing in national parks.
Because a war was going on, farmers needed help to produce their products and asked Selective Service to allow COs to help them. While most COs worked on dairy farms, others planted crops, picked vegetables, husked corn, dug potatoes, and pruned fruit trees, all for no pay. Veterans’ groups protested that farming was too easy an alternative to military service and, as a result, stricter rules were set. For example, COs could not work within 100 miles of a family member.
Steve Cary, a Quaker World War II CO, said, “There is no doubt in my mind . . . that the greatest contribution which we made in that era was in the whole field of mental health.” Some COs thought that working on farms was not work “of national importance,” so they requested work in mental hospitals. In many cases they replaced workers who had enlisted or left these jobs due to the bad working conditions and low salaries. COs learned that the conditions in mental hospitals were appalling, and they committed themselves to establishing new standards for patients in mental hospitals.
All together, 3,000 COs worked in psychiatric hospitals, as ward attendants, mechanics, kitchen helpers, technicians, clerks, and outdoor laborers. These jobs of COs were sometimes dangerous. Some patients took their anger out on the COs by attacking them with knives. Despite these threats, COs felt that it was their responsibility to improve conditions in hospitals, and find nonviolent ways to deal with patients.
One of the most dangerous jobs for COs was that of a human tester. These COs (about 500 COs volunteered) perhaps wanted to show their courage by offering themselves for hazardous experiments. The volunteers tested new drugs, extreme temperatures, and the effects of diseases such as jaundice, malaria, and pneumonia.
One of the experiments was a test seeking the mental effects of extreme diet deprivation of food and water. Thirty-six COs were tested for a 24-week semi-starvation experiment. They were limited to a calorie intake that was less than half of the 3,300-calorie diet given to a regular soldier, and were required to maintain their normal physical activity. Overall the COs’ weight dropped by 22 percent. The CO human testing was kept a secret and almost no photos were allowed of the experimentations. Robert Wixom, one of the CO human guinea pigs, said, “We were there to do our duty and serve in a constructive, nonviolent manner.”
Another service option for conscientious objectors was that of being a smokejumper who fought forest fires by jumping from planes. Many COs wanted to smoke jump, perhaps to demonstrate their bravery in the service to their country. Of the many COs who volunteered, only 240 were accepted for this dangerous job. During the fire season, these smokejumpers moved out West to camps where they waited until a forest fire started.
Noncombatant military service was another option for conscientious objectors in World War II who did not choose or were denied the opportunity for alternative service. Noncombatants were soldiers, but were exempted from using weapons, enabling them to receive military pay and benefits. Most of the 43,000 noncombatants were initially denied CO status by their local draft boards and then accepted non-combat positions. Some felt that being a noncombatant was a justifiable compromise. Most noncombatants were willing to be trained to use guns, but they just didn’t use them. “Noncombatancy was also undeniably the service of choice for those who wanted to promote American victory, believed in the justness of the Allied cause, but felt constrained to nonviolence themselves,” wrote scholar Cynthia Eller.
The last alternative for conscientious objectors was to serve time in prison. The lawmakers who created the Selective Service Act hoped that its provisions would mean fewer COs in prison than during World War I, but instead the number actually increased. The COs who went to jail were either denied CO status, refused to serve in a CPS camp, or never registered (only 300 were in prison because they didn’t register). Jehovah’s Witnesses accounted for the largest percentage of imprisoned COs. They requested CO status not because of an opposition to violence, but because they believed that the government had no right to draft them; they were denied. The maximum sentence for a CO was ten years and a $10,000 fine. Once out of jail, COs were at risk of being drafted and imprisoned again.
Conscientious objectors were often persecuted for their efforts in World War II. John F. Kennedy acknowledged this when he said, “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.” World War II COs endured verbal abuse and vandalism of their homes, were refused service in restaurants, had to witness being hung in effigy, dealt with efforts to prevent them from voting, and were socially ostracized.
Conscientious objectors and their families also suffered economically. When the men of the family were in CPS, they were not paid. Many COs went on strike, and some called the workcamps “American Slave Camps.” Families relied on the women to provide financial support. Also, families had to pay for COs to go into the CPS (about $35 a month). Finally, there were fewer job opportunities for the family members of COs because most of them would not accept employment that included working in war industries, and some employers refused to hire family members of COs.
Many CO families were separated while family members served in the workcamps or on farms. Some families disagreed with COs and were ashamed of what their relatives believed. In some instances, parents and spouses even threatened to commit suicide. The worry over persecution, loss of pay, and separation took over the lives of many COs’ families.
Conscientious objectors also experienced delayed release from the Selective Service. Because veterans’ groups objected to COs being released before people in active military service, the point system designed for fairness in determining terms of service in the military was not applied to COs. It was not until March 1947 that the last 360 COs in CPS were released, six years after the first CPS camp opened.
The contributions of WWII COs have had a lasting impact. Their efforts made positive changes in healthcare, in psychiatric institutions and prisons, and in the U.S. infrastructure. COs became leaders in U.S. social movements. They also played a large role in public health. From the experiments in which they participated, improvements have been made in the treatment of malaria, influenza, pneumonia, and jaundice. The starvation experiments offered information about the food and water needs of soldiers and refugees.
Conscientious objectors working in mental hospitals created new standards for the treatment of patients with mental illness. By exposing conditions in U.S. psychiatric facilities, COs were able to inform the public, which generated a demand for humane treatment of the mentally ill. Their efforts resulted in the establishment of the National Mental Health Foundation, which still exists to advocate for the rights of the mentally ill.
According to Austin Reiger, a Mennonite conscientious objector who was imprisoned, “The U.S. prison system is more in need of rehabilitation than all mental hospitals.” Conscientious objectors worked against solitary confinement in prisons. Their efforts also contributed to the desegregation of federal prisons.
The concrete improvements conscientious objectors made to the U.S. infrastructure included their work to build highways, dams, and levees to control rivers, and to construct bridges.
Many people throughout history have seen COs as a nuisance, but their impact has been great. This is especially true for COs in World War II. This group of men clearly established that nonviolent alternative service is a patriotic substitute for war. During World War II, the public recognized that moral objection to government policy was acceptable. World War II COs were tolerated as expressions of democracy. The beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement and the acceptance of Gandhi’s nonviolence originated at least in part among World War II conscientious objectors in the United States.
COs became leaders of modern-day U.S. social movements. Steve Cary became clerk of American Friends Service Committee, president of Haverford College, and a leader of the peace movement. Bayard Rustin was an organizer of the March on Washington, was an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., and is now an inspiration to African American gay men. Conscientious objectors in World War II who served their time in jail helped end segregation in U.S. prisons. Desegregation in the U.S. armed forces can also be credited in part to the efforts of World War II COs. These COs paved the way for the many draft resisters during the Vietnam War and for tax resisters of recent years. As Rosa Packard, a contemporary Quaker tax resister, says, “The example and influence of World War II conscientious objectors helped clear this path for me.” The example of these men and their commitment to nonviolence will inspire me to become a proud, patriotic conscientious objector. | <urn:uuid:55380697-a22b-48fe-b1ba-15c1b4209da3> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.friendsjournal.org/u-s-conscientious-objectors-world-war-ii/ | 2025-01-15T02:10:15Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362214.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20250115010435-20250115040435-00700.warc.gz | en | 0.983388 | 3,557 | 3.828125 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
This stretch of coastline is located in Dorset on the South coast of England. It is known for being part of the Jurassic coast, characterised by its many fossils along the coastline.
In general, weathering processes are responsible for weakening the structure of rocks along the coast, which in turn can amplify the effects of other processes, specifically erosional processes. For example, the mechanical/physical weathering processes of freeze-thaw and wetting and drying cause some rock to loosen from a cliff face. Following this, it becomes easier for erosional processes like hydraulic action and abrasion to make this loosened rock come away from the cliff. As all these combined processes happen more and more over time, it can lead to quite an extent of cliff retreat, but this varies with rock type. Along the Swanage coastline, this has particular effect because of the differing rock types along the coast. Softer rocks, like the clay and sands, are more easily weathered and eroded than the harder chalk and limestone, so with the combined processes occurring along this particular stretch of coastline, the clays and sands retreat more quickly than the chalk and limestone, meaning the shape of the coastline becomes made up of headlands (hard rock) and bays (soft rock).
This idea also supports the development of the features at Old Harry Rocks. This is a headland reaching out into the sea, as well as a stack (Old Harry) and a stump (Old Harry’s wife). This part of the coastline is made up of chalk (Ballard Point). Weathering processes, particularly carbonation, causes the chalk to weaken a lot. The carbonation process does this by involving a reaction. Rainwater becomes slightly acidic as carbonic acid because carbon dioxide dissolves in it. When it comes into contact with the chalk, the carbonic acid reacts with the calcium carbonate in the rock and produces calcium bicarbonate, which dissolves easily in water, meaning the chalk becomes a lot weaker. Erosional processes then exploit the weaknesses created by the weathering processes, to produce the landforms. In the case of Old Harry Rocks, the stack was once attached to the headland by a natural arch. Carbonation would have weakened the top of the arch, making it easier for it then to break away becoming a stack.
Further west to Old Harry is Lulworth Cove, a location of fascinating geography and geology. It is a small inlet of water by the village of West Lulworth, which probably began forming at the end of the last Ice Age. The theory is that a stream ran over the top layer of Portland limestone, eventually breaching it – this may have happened as a result of weathering to some extent, like the hydration process whereby water is added to rock minerals causing expansion and stress, making it weaker and more susceptible to other types of weathering. The following layers of rock, Purbeck beds and Wealden clays, were also broken through by the stream, eventually forming what can now be seen as the cove. Weathering and erosional processes are responsible for forming the entrance to the cove, by creating a narrow gap in the limestone bands. As well as processes such as hydration, carbonation may have been involved as well, as this works well on limestone. The carbonic acid reacts with the calcium carbonate, forming calcium bicarbonate, leading to weaknesses developing in the rock, which can then be exploited by further weathering or erosional processes.
This stretch of coast is located in the North of England, running between Spurn Point (by Humber Estuary) and Flamborough Head, a total of around 61km. It is known for being one of the fastest retreating coastlines in Europe, as a result of the great erosion, weathering and mass movement which works on the coastline.
Geologically, there are bands of rock perpendicular to the sea (making it a stretch of discordant coastline), with chalk in the North, around Flamborough Head, then clay/till south of that. The clay is weaker than the chalk, so is more prone to succumbing to erosional and weathering processes, which can then lead to mass movement. Mappleton is a town along the Holderness coastline, which has experienced a significant extent of mass movement. When there is lots of precipitation, hydration, a type of chemical weathering can occur. Essentially, this is just the addition of water to the rock. The clay minerals absorb the water, causing expansion of the rock, resulting in stress. It weakens the rock, so it may become more susceptible to other forms of chemical weathering. In addition, when this stretch of clay is succumbed to a great amount of water, it leads to slumping, which is the main form of mass movement experienced at Mappleton. The water saturates the clay, so it becomes very lubricated and prone to slipping. The overlying weight from rock above forces down on the clay so it starts moving seawards.
At Flamborough Head there are coastal features on the headland such as caves and arches. These partially form as a result of weathering processes. The headland is made up of chalk, a relatively resistant rock. However, weathering processes still weaken it to some extent. Carbonation, a chemical weathering process, is particularly prominent in chalk. Rainwater has some dissolved carbon dioxide in, so becomes mildly acidic as carbonic acid. Chalk contains calcium carbonate, which reacts strongly with carbonic acid, so when rain reaches the chalk, they react to make calcium bicarbonate which dissolves quickly in water. This weakens the chalk significantly, so when erosional processes act on the headland, like hydraulic action and abrasion, it takes less to then form the caves and arches, as the rock has already been weakened by the weathering processes.
Along the Holderness bolder clay cliffs, the action of processes like hydration significantly weakens the rock, meaning sediment is more likely to come away from the cliff (it is amplified further after erosional processes). Wetting and drying is another physical weathering process which can contribute to this process. It is particularly active on clay, and involves the expansion of the rock when it is wet, and contraction when it dries. The constant changes cause cracks and weaknesses to develop, making it more prone to other kinds of weathering, like freeze-thaw, as well as erosional processes. This loosened sediment can then be transported up the beach in the longshore drift process. Over many years, this has led to the formation of Spurn Head, a large recurved spit. If weathering processes on the clay, like hydration and wetting and drying, the weakening of the rock would be more limited, so sediment transportation may also be limited due to slightly less sediment being removed from the cliffs. | <urn:uuid:7ab3021c-cb8c-4dda-9426-8a5844d5efe1> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://astarrevision.com/aqa_geopraphy/how-does-weathering-and-mass-movement-shape-the-coastline/ | 2025-01-16T09:04:10Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362293.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20250116071218-20250116101218-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.962737 | 1,415 | 4 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
Salvador Dalí: A Journey Through Success, Failure, and Resilience
Salvador Dalí, one of the most iconic figures in the world of art, was a man of contradictions. Renowned for his surrealistic masterpieces and eccentric personality, Dalí's life was a tapestry woven with threads of immense success, personal challenges, and moments of profound failure. Even in the face of adversity, including a devastating fire later in his life, Dalí's spirit remained indomitable, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire artists and dreamers around the world.
Early Life and Artistic Beginnings
Born on May 11, 1904, in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech grew up in a middle-class family. From a young age, Dalí exhibited an extraordinary artistic talent. Encouraged by his mother, who recognized his potential, he began formal art training at the Municipal Drawing School in Figueres. His father, though initially skeptical of Dalí's artistic ambitions, eventually supported his endeavors.
Dalí's precociousness was evident even as a child. His early works reflected a deep fascination with Impressionism, but he was also influenced by the avant-garde movements emerging in Europe at the time. At the age of 17, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, where his flamboyant personality and unique style began to take shape.
Rise to Stardom: The Surrealist Icon
Dalí's artistic journey took a transformative turn in the 1920s when he encountered the Surrealist movement in Paris. Inspired by the works of André Breton, Max Ernst, and others, Dalí began to explore the unconscious mind, dreams, and Freudian psychoanalysis. His surrealist masterpieces, such as The Persistence of Memory (1931), with its iconic melting clocks, captured the imagination of audiences worldwide.
Dalí’s collaboration with the Surrealists brought him both fame and controversy. His eccentric behavior, combined with his ability to challenge societal norms, made him a polarizing figure within the movement. Despite his eventual expulsion from the group due to ideological differences, Dalí declared, "I am Surrealism," cementing his position as a leader in the genre.
Personal Life: Love and Controversies
Dalí’s personal life was as colorful as his art. In 1929, he met Gala Éluard, a Russian immigrant and muse who would become his lifelong partner and greatest supporter. Gala’s influence on Dalí’s work was profound; she not only managed his career but also became the subject of many of his paintings.
However, Dalí's relationship with his family suffered due to his unconventional lifestyle and provocative art. His father disapproved of Dalí's association with Surrealism and his controversial works, leading to a permanent estrangement. Despite these personal challenges, Dalí’s career flourished, with exhibitions around the world and collaborations with notable figures such as Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney.
The Downturn: Failures and Isolation
As Dalí aged, his career faced setbacks. Critics began to question the originality of his later works, accusing him of commercialism and self-parody. Some saw his flamboyant public persona as overshadowing his artistic contributions.
The 1960s and 1970s marked a period of isolation for Dalí. He and Gala retreated to their castle in Púbol, Spain, where they lived reclusively. Gala’s death in 1982 devastated Dalí, leaving him emotionally shattered and physically frail.
The Fire Incident: A Turning Point
In 1984, a fire broke out in Dalí's bedroom at his residence in Púbol, leaving the artist with severe burns. The cause of the fire remains a subject of speculation, with some suggesting it was accidental and others suspecting a suicide attempt. Regardless of its origin, the incident marked a significant decline in Dalí’s health.
Despite his injuries, Dalí’s resilience shone through. He continued to create art, albeit at a slower pace, and remained involved in the construction of the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, a project he had envisioned as a "permanent surrealist monument."
Legacy and Impact
Salvador Dalí passed away on January 23, 1989, at the age of 84. His death marked the end of an era, but his influence on art, culture, and imagination endures. The Dalí Theatre-Museum, where he is buried, stands as a testament to his genius, attracting millions of visitors each year.
Dalí’s life was a kaleidoscope of triumphs and tribulations. From his meteoric rise to fame as a surrealist icon to the challenges he faced in his later years, he remained true to his vision of pushing the boundaries of art and reality. His story serves as a reminder of the complexities of human creativity and the resilience needed to overcome life's adversities.
In celebrating Salvador Dalí, we celebrate not just his art but his unyielding spirit. His journey from success to failure, and his ability to rise from the ashes—literally and metaphorically—continues to inspire generations to dream, create, and persevere.
Article Published By Gerry Martinez A Landscape Art Painting Artist | <urn:uuid:9faeb0d9-e6b2-44ad-9e6b-0a024df2f354> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.artmindz.com/2024/12/salvador-dalis-success-failure-and-fire.html | 2025-01-16T09:51:21Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362293.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20250116071218-20250116101218-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.973911 | 1,128 | 3.59375 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), or autism as it’s usually known, is a condition that usually develops in childhood. It covers a wide range of difficulties, typically related to behavior and understanding in social settings, causing difficulty with communication and ability to relate to others. It can affect intellect and language in some, leading to mild, moderate or severe learning disabilities. A minority are unable to verbalize.
More research recently has added to understanding of the condition: people with autism see, hear and feel the world differently than others. While the world can be a confusing place, and they are often misunderstood unless certain accommodations are put in place, there is a growing body of evidence that they may have skillsets better suited to certain tasks or ways of thinking than non-autistic people.
Asperger’s syndrome used to be a term given to autism in individuals with average or above-average intelligence, but this term is now considered to be outdated, and the term ASD incorporates all types of autism. Some people prefer to keep this term.
About 1 in 44 children are diagnosed in the US with ASD, and there are more males than females, ranging from 3:1 to 5:1. It’s thought that women and girls may be under-diagnosed as they can cover up difficulties to better fit in with social expectations and norms.
Doctors are seeing more people requesting an assessment for autism as adults, as they have read up on it, and symptoms seem to apply to them. Some may appear high-functioning and successful, but they feel something is amiss either in their personal or work relationships or that they do not quite fit in. It may get to the point of failed relationships or marriages, being unable to work, and being unable to live independently.
Specific examples that point towards ASD include: careful planning before doing something; being meticulous about timing, numbers, and following rules; getting bogged down in small details and missing the bigger picture; and feeling uncomfortable if people get too close; others may notice you get too close; are rigid in routines and resistant to change; and have difficulty regulating some emotions. High sensitivity to touch, certain textures, sounds, and smells can also be featured. And – more difficult to describe – feeling that you miss social etiquette or rules that others take for granted, such as offending people when asked for an opinion, carefully correcting people, or talking over them, all of which seems to cause tension. These examples apply to work situations, family life, friendships, and romantic relationships.
Those with ASD are more vulnerable to mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but they are also less likely to seek medical help.
If you suspect you may have autism, book an appointment with your doctor, who will ask about your concerns and symptoms. You may have family, partners, or employers who have made observations, adding to the clinical picture. You may be asked to complete a questionnaire, which helps identify those that would benefit from further assessment.
If your doctor feels a diagnosis of ASD is possible, they will refer you to a psychiatrist or specialist autism team to conduct a more in-depth assessment. There is no specific test for autism, it’s a process of assessment and clinical opinion. By nature of a spectrum, it covers a wide array of presentations and difficulties.
Before you embark on a process of seeking assessment, think about what you wish to gain from any diagnosis. Will it make things better or worse? Some people feel reassured that they can understand themselves better, that they can put a name to it and find out more. They may even be able to connect with others with autism and find common experiences and solutions. Your employer, college, or university may be able to put certain accommodations in place to help you do your job or studies to the best of your ability. It may help you to access appropriate services and benefits.
Others fear a diagnosis brings stigma that could hold them back in their career or relationships. Or, by focusing on the negatives or deficits of their way of being, looking for things to "fix," this brings a negative outlook on life when perhaps they feel fairly content or confident in who they are.
Make sure you look after your general health – those with ASD are less likely to consult their doctor, and their general health suffers. People with ASD have a reduced life expectancy of 16 years, even in those with no intellectual disability, although multiple causes contribute to this.
If you are diagnosed, your specific needs will be assessed by the specialist autism team, and they will liaise with your usual doctor. Together they aim to look after your personal, social, and emotional well-being, as well as your physical health. Ongoing clinical involvement is provided depending on needs, but your doctor will examine you at least once a year and get updates from your local autism team.
Your team will look to offer psychosocial interventions such as programs to improve social interaction or anger management and/or to improve employment prospects. Mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, and OCD should be addressed.
The National Autism Association is one of a number of organizations providing information, advice, and support for those with ASD and for their families or caregivers. It offers information on the condition and helpful tools for families.
What can you find here? | <urn:uuid:dfe2411e-6eac-4a4d-b0db-2bc476cb329a> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://www.healthwords.ai/us/explore/article/general-health/autism-diagnosis-as-an-adult-825 | 2025-01-16T09:10:23Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362293.70/warc/CC-MAIN-20250116071218-20250116101218-00600.warc.gz | en | 0.969949 | 1,100 | 3.96875 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
Roughly two billion people worldwide suffer from some form of undernutrition, raising debates among researchers and policymakers on how to improve diets and nutrition among vulnerable populations.
A new study published in the journal Nature Food is challenging the conventional wisdom that the production of crop diversity by farmers (food production diversity or FPD) is the primary path to addressing nutritional deficiencies.
So what’s the link between dietary diversity and the nutrition of individuals and households? And will access to markets address undernutrition?
What does the new study say?
The study by the Center for Development Research (ZEF) at the University of Bonn, Germany – a first of its kind – collected data on nearly 90,000 households in Africa between 2008 and 2022 in Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.
It recommends that building better roads that give access to markets in local towns and cities can better address nutritional deficiencies.
“We show that regional production diversity matters and can substitute for individual farm production diversity in many situations,” Professor Matin Qaim, from ZEF, told Al Jazeera.
“This is good news because it is much easier to ensure that additional crop and livestock species are produced somewhere in the region (and then distributed via local markets) than pushing every individual small farm to produce more and more species,” he explained.
The researchers studied the variety of crops and animal species maintained by farmers, as well as detailed data on the types of food consumed within each household. The study uses the household dietary diversity score (HDDS) to measure the nutritional variety of a family’s diet by tallying the distinct food groups consumed within a week-long period. This metric provides insight into the range and quality of foods accessed by households, offering a snapshot of their dietary habits and nutritional status.
Many of the farmers studied were small-scale growers, known as smallholders or agricultural producers who operate on a limited scale.
The main questions that researchers wanted to answer were whether producing a diversity of crops and animal species among smallholders is the most effective way to address undernutrition, and whether households that have access to these farms have a more balanced diet.
Unfortunately, the results are mixed, as shown in the research.
“Producing too many different things on each farm means that farmers would be pushed into subsistence and could not benefit from any division of labour. But we also show that market access – for example, improved infrastructure – matters a lot,” Qaim said.
What are the limitations of older studies on food diversity?
The existing body of research examining the relationship between food production diversity and dietary diversity suffers from several limitations.
As referenced in the Nature Food study, the narrow focus on farm-level production diversity or single-country focus overlooks the potential influence of diversity at a broader scale on household dietary patterns across different countries.
Addressing these shortcomings may help researchers better understand the complex interplay between agricultural production and nutritional outcomes. Although local farm diversity did result in a more balanced diet for some households, it had a minor effect.
“Small-scale agricultural production in Africa tends to be highly diverse anyway. Ensuring good access to local and regional markets is more important than further improving the diversity on every single farm,” said ZEF researcher Thanh Tung Nguyen, who carried out the study together with Qaim.
“These markets not only allow farmers to sell their surplus food, but also enable them to purchase those foods that they are lacking,” he said in a public statement.
Inadequate infrastructure remains a significant obstacle, as poorly maintained roads can result in prolonged travel times, causing products to deteriorate or sustain damage during transportation.
The proximity to urban centres, which serves as an indicator of market accessibility costs in rural Africa, had a negative effect across all six countries. According to the study, the average household is located roughly 31km (19 miles) away from the next urban centre.
How can we better solve food insecurity?
The research suggests that the ability of local farmers to produce the right crops and raise the right animals, known as FPD, is part of the problem. However, FPD is not the only challenge for households’ diets as measured by the household dietary diversity score (HDDS).
“Weather shocks – defined as the occurrence of a drought, flood, hurricane or related extreme event over the last 12 months – are negatively associated with the HDDS,” the study says.
“Several other socio-economic characteristics are positively associated with the HDDS. The production of non-food cash crops – such as cotton, coffee, tea or tobacco – on own farms seems to contribute to higher household dietary diversity through positive cash income effects.”
Qaim, the researcher, says: “Issues of nutritional resilience against climate shocks and other types of shocks, and the role of own production versus markets in this connection, are not yet sufficiently understood.”
Researchers said that the seasonality of certain fruits and vegetables deserves more attention. To maximise agricultural efficiency and economic potential, farmers should prioritise cultivating crops that thrive in their specific region and soil conditions, optimising both productivity and profitability, the study recommended.
Presently, there are efforts to address the infrastructure food accessibility problem. In 2016, the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), dedicated to implementing humanitarian and development projects, started a $55m (44 million British pound) feeder roads project in South Sudan to improve trade and food security.
In November, Nyamlel Bridge was handed over to Sudan with 44km (27 miles) of feeder roads, including clean drinking water stations and sanitation systems in Northern and Western Bahr el Ghazal States. The construction of the bridge impacted – and aimed to help – 1.2 million people in the region. | <urn:uuid:c216713c-440c-475f-9e57-6f41c1834b22> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://guyanainquirer.com/the-secret-to-a-balanced-diet-better-roads-say-scientists/ | 2025-01-17T14:08:23Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362327.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20250117131806-20250117161806-00500.warc.gz | en | 0.953855 | 1,202 | 3.609375 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
Modern medicine has produced many kinds of high-tech miracles, among them gene therapy to correct malfunctioning genes, electrical stimulation devices to restore significant function after traumatic spinal cord injury, surgery performed using robots, and a wearable, postage-stamp-size ultrasound patch that can take real-time images of the heart and monitor its performance.
Another sector of medicine that desperately needs breakthroughs is the transplantation of solid organs, which are in severely short supply. Currently, more than 100,000 Americans are waiting for transplants, and due to a shortage of hearts, lungs, livers, and kidneys, at least 17 die each day. Donor organs — from a living person or cadaver — must match the rejection recipient's tissue type and size; they are often not perfect. By one estimate, approximately half of transplanted organs are rejected by recipients' bodies within 10-12 years, despite a constantly expanding understanding of what causes rejection. Another obstacle is that the organ procurement system in the U.S. is inefficient, inconsistent, and unaccountable – in short, a mess that causes preventable deaths.
We are making progress, but too slowly. Two new high-tech approaches to providing organs for transplantation might ultimately both eliminate the need for organ donors and reduce the risk of tissue rejection. And there is also a low-tech approach that would require only a tweak in healthcare policy.
Organs produced by 3D bioprinting
The first of the high-tech approaches is three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting, which uses "bio-ink," a printable material made from a patient's own cells, to print layer upon layer, creating tissue the recipient will not reject. But in progressing from tissue to a complex organ, one critical challenge has been creating blood flow to keep the cells alive; researchers have devised several approaches, which include threading tiny channels through the organ, where blood vessels develop when implanted in animals, or seeding channels with the endothelial cells lining the inside blood vessels.
An exciting advance was reported by a Swedish research group attempting to create human lungs by 3D printing. According to the lead author of the study,
We started small by fabricating small tubes, because this is a feature found in both airways and in the vasculature of the lung. By using our new bioink with stem cells isolated from patient airways, we were able to bioprint small airways which had multiple layers of cells and remained open over time.
The fabrication of other organs presents additional, more imposing obstacles. The liver and kidneys produce hormone-like substances that modulate physiological processes such as blood coagulation, blood pressure, and removing toxins from the bloodstream. It is difficult to see how these closely regulated functions could be incorporated into 3D-printed organs.
Credit: Centromere121 via CC-BY-SA-3.0
In addition to the daunting technical challenges, healthcare executive Daniel Troy has described the regulatory lassitude at the FDA as one that has discouraged commercial interest in the field. He observed that while the FDA is accustomed to evaluating the safety and efficacy of mass-produced therapies and medical devices, "bioprinted organs are one-of-a-kind creations, tailor-made for each patient," and the agency's long-promised regulatory guidance for such products has not materialized.
Organs from genetically modified pigs
A second approach to providing a sufficient supply of organs for transplantation is genetically engineering animals — most often, pigs (because they are an appropriate size) — so their transplanted organs will not be rejected. In effect, it uses genetic engineering to grow "humanized" tissues and organs in animals. There was a breakthrough with this approach in 2018 when scientists used gene editing to create hybrid embryos containing both human and sheep cells.
Another milestone occurred in December 2020 when the FDA "approved a first-of-its-kind intentional genomic alteration (IGA) in a line of domestic pigs" called GalSafe, which may be used for food or human therapeutics. The IGA in the animals eliminates the gene that makes α-Gal, a sugar molecule found naturally on the surface of porcine cells. It is the source of allergy in some people when they consume certain meats, and it is also involved in tissue or organ rejection after transplantation into humans. That was the first IGA in an animal approved by the FDA for both human food consumption and as a potential source for therapeutic uses.
There is considerable research underway to create lines of pigs for transplantation, but there is also controversy about the extent of genetic modification necessary to both avoid rejection and ensure the absence of harmful pathogens. Two separate, very small clinical trials blazed the trail – a pig heart transplanted into a patient with terminal heart disease and a pig kidney implanted in a brain-dead patient. The heart transplant patient died two months post-transplant, and the kidneys worked well until the experiment was terminated after three days.
In March, a gene-edited pig kidney, created using "CRISPR-Cas9" technology, was transplantedinto a living 62-year-old man. The donor pig's genome had 69 edits. Some of the changes disabled genes in the pig that could otherwise lead to immune rejection of the organ in the human recipient. Other edits introduced human genes that promoted circulation and removed pathogenic porcine viruses. It was reported on May 12 that the patient had died; the cause was not revealed.
Around the same time as the kidney transplant, researchers transplanted the liver of a pig with three genes disabled and three human ones added to prevent immune rejection into a clinically dead patient. During the 10-day experiment, the liver produced bile, and there was no sign of immune rejection.
The low-tech policy approach
Although friends and relatives and even the occasional "good Samaritan" donor can donate kidneys, they must be given without compensation. Under section 301(a) of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA), it is a federal crime for "any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation if the transfer affects interstate commerce." Therefore, we propose a federal tax credit for living donors willing to save the life of a stranger. The value of the reward should be between $50,000 and $100,000, which physicians and others who endorse donor compensation believe would be sufficient to address the organ shortage. An economic analysis published in 2022 estimated that a reward of $77,000 could encourage sufficient donations to save 47,000 patients annually.
The credit would be universally available—refundable in cash for people who do not owe income tax, not phased out at high-income levels, and available under the alternative minimum tax. NOTA's restriction on payments by organ recipients and other private individuals and organizations would not change—it would still be illegal for recipients to buy organs.
Credit: Rmarlin via CC-BY-SA-4.0
A qualified organ donation would be subject to stringent safeguards. As all donors are now, prospective compensated donors would be carefully screened for physical and emotional health. A minimum six-month waiting period before the donation would filter out impulsive donors and donations by financially desperate individuals seeking instant cash.
In addition to saving lives, the credit would save the government money, perhaps as much as $14 billion per year, by reducing expenditures on dialysis. Thus, donors would receive financial compensation from the government for contributing to the public good and bearing the risk of a surgical operation to remove the organ.
This would be a compassionate and pragmatic policy. Moreover, it could be implemented immediately, rapidly clearing much of the backlog of Americans waiting for organs in advance of the longer-term high-tech approaches.
The organ shortage kills thousands of Americans every year. We must do all we can to alleviate it now.
Henry Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Glenn Swogger Distinguished Fellow at the American Council on Science and Health. He was the founding director of the FDA's Office of Biotechnology. Follow Henry on Twitter @henryimiller
Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a kidney recipient. She and economist Alan Viard developed the tax proposal in depth. Follow Sally on Twitter @slsatel
An earlier version of this article previously appeared on the Genetic Literacy Project on February 23, 2024. | <urn:uuid:4640ea0b-4684-4612-8924-2a602b65f75d> | CC-MAIN-2025-05 | https://henrymillermd.org/27775/we-urgently-need-more-organs-for-transplantation | 2025-01-17T14:40:33Z | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2025-05/segments/1736703362327.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20250117131806-20250117161806-00500.warc.gz | en | 0.957666 | 1,736 | 3.640625 | 4 | CC-MAIN-2025-05 |
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in Data Studio
YAML Metadata Warning: empty or missing yaml metadata in repo card (https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/datasets-cards)
FineWeb-Edu Highest Quality Dataset (2025 Collection)
Dataset Summary
This dataset contains 4.17 billion tokens of the highest quality educational content, carefully filtered from the FineWeb-Edu dataset's 2025 Common Crawl snapshots. This represents the cream of the crop - only the top ~2% of documents that meet strict quality criteria.
Key Statistics
- Total Tokens: 4,176,738,951
- Total Documents: 1,477,151
- Average Tokens per Document: 2,827
- Storage Size: ~11 GB (compressed parquet)
- Source Snapshots: 6 CC-MAIN-2025 snapshots
Quality Filtering Criteria
Each document in this dataset meets ALL of the following strict criteria:
- Token Length: ≥ 1,000 tokens (ensures substantial, detailed content)
- Educational Score: ≥ 3.5 out of 5 (top 15% educational quality)
- Language Score: ≥ 0.95 confidence (ensures high-quality English)
Filtering Impact
| Metric | Original | Filtered | Retention Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Documents | ~84M | 1.47M | 1.75% |
| Tokens | ~108B | 4.17B | 3.86% |
This aggressive filtering ensures every document is:
- Educationally valuable
- Well-written and coherent
- Substantial in length
- Grammatically correct
Source Data
Data sourced from HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu, specifically these 2025 snapshots:
| Snapshot | Original Rows | Filtered Tokens |
|---|---|---|
| CC-MAIN-2025-26 | 14M | 589M |
| CC-MAIN-2025-21 | 15.6M | 661M |
| CC-MAIN-2025-18 | 17.3M | 731M |
| CC-MAIN-2025-13 | 16.8M | 702M |
| CC-MAIN-2025-08 | 16.1M | 678M |
| CC-MAIN-2025-05 | 19.3M | 815M |
Dataset Structure
Fields
text(string): The main text contentid(string): Unique identifierdump(string): Source CC-MAIN snapshoturl(string): Original URLdate(string): Crawl datefile_path(string): Original S3 pathlanguage(string): Detected language (always 'en')language_score(float): Language detection confidence (≥0.95)token_count(int): Number of tokens (≥1000)score(float): Educational quality score (≥3.5)int_score(int): Integer educational score (4 or 5)source_snapshot(string): CC-MAIN snapshot identifier
File Format
- Format: Parquet with Snappy compression
- Files: Multiple parquet files for easy streaming
- Naming:
{snapshot}_{batch_number}.parquet
Intended Use
This dataset is ideal for:
- Pre-training smaller language models (1B-7B parameters)
- Fine-tuning existing models for educational tasks
- Continued pre-training to improve educational capabilities
- Research on high-quality educational text
Quality Examples
The filtering process ensures content like:
- Detailed technical tutorials
- Comprehensive educational articles
- Well-structured explanations
- Academic discussions
- Professional documentation
Processing Pipeline
- Download: Raw CC-MAIN snapshots from FineWeb-Edu
- Filter: Apply strict quality criteria (score ≥3.5, tokens ≥1000, language ≥0.95)
- Compress: Save as Snappy-compressed Parquet
- Validate: Verify all quality thresholds maintained
- Merge: Combine batches with source tracking
Comparison with Other Datasets
| Dataset | Tokens | Quality Filter | Avg Doc Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| This Dataset | 4.17B | Very High (top 2%) | 2,827 tokens |
| The Pile | 825B | Mixed | Variable |
| RedPajama | 1.2T | Medium | ~2,000 tokens |
| FineWeb-Edu (full) | 1.3T | Medium | ~1,100 tokens |
Citation
If you use this dataset, please cite:
@misc{fineweb-edu-highest-quality-2025,
title={FineWeb-Edu Highest Quality Dataset (2025 Collection)},
author={Yxanul},
year={2025},
publisher={HuggingFace},
howpublished={\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yxanul/fineweb-edu-highest-quality-2025}}
}
Also cite the original FineWeb-Edu:
@software{penedo2024fineweb-edu,
author = {Penedo, Guilherme and Kydlíček, Hynek and Cappelli, Alessandro and Sasko, Mario and Wolf, Thomas},
title = {FineWeb-Edu: A openly accessible multilingual dataset for educational content},
month = May,
year = 2024,
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu}
}
License
This dataset inherits the license from FineWeb-Edu. Please refer to the original dataset for licensing information.
Acknowledgments
- Thanks to HuggingFace FineWeb team for the original dataset
- Filtered using custom scripts optimized for highest educational quality
- Processing supported by local compute resources
Contact
For questions or issues, please open a discussion on the HuggingFace dataset page.
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