Anna Baright Curry
Anna Baright Curry was a noted educator and the founder of Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. Anna Baright was born on June 1854, to a Quaker family in Poughkeepsie, New York. Most of her family members were art lovers. After graduating from Cook's Collegiate Institute in 1873, she worked as a teacher in New York state taught elocution at Milwaukee Female College. In 1875 she enrolled in Boston University's School of Oratory, where one of her teachers was Alexander Graham Bell. At B. U. she was described by one of her professors as "the greatest woman reader in the country." This was a significant compliment in an era of oratory when speakers such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain were paid thousands to read lengthy pieces of their work. Baright graduated with honors in 1877. After graduation she was appointed First Assistant to Lewis Baxter Monroe, Dean of the School of Oratory. In 1879, she and Monroe were planning to open a summer school for oratory on Martha's Vineyard when Monroe died.
Rather than cancel, Baright ran the five-week program herself. It was the first summer school of its kind in the country; that fall, Samuel Silas Curry took over the leadership of the Boston University School of Oratory. Encouraged by Boston University's first president, William F. Warren, Baright started her own school in downtown Boston that fall; the School of Elocution and Expression offered a two-year program modeled after that of the B. U. oratory school. Baright based her teaching on Monroe's principle that "expression is the outward manifestation of that, in the consciousness." Professor J. W. Churchill called her "the greatest woman teacher of elocution in the country."In 1882, Baright married Samuel Silas Curry and became Anna Baright Curry. In 1885, the school was renamed the School of Expression, Samuel Silas Curry became the head of the school with Anna Baright Curry serving as Dean. Former Boston University School of Oratory professor and telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell became the school's first chancellor from 1907 until his death in 1922.
The Currys ran the school until their respective deaths in 1921 and 1924. Years the school was renamed Curry College in their honor. Baright and Curry married on May 31, 1882; the couple had six children. Baright Curry was a member of the New England Women's Club, the Cantabrigia Club, the Boston Browning Society, she died in Boston in 1924. Fryer, Paul. Women in the Arts in the Belle Epoque: Essays on Influential Artists and Performers. McFarland. ISBN 9781476601021. Howe, Julia Ward. Representative Women of New England. New England Historical Publishing Company. "History". Curry College. Pinney, Amy. Archiving Anna Baright Curry: Performances of Evidence and Evidentiary Performances. Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Gordon College (Massachusetts)
Gordon College is a non-denominational Christian college of the liberal arts and sciences in Wenham, Massachusetts. The college offers 38 majors, 42 concentrations, 11 interdisciplinary and pre-professional minors as well as graduate programs in education and music education. Gordon has an undergraduate enrollment of 1,700 students representing more than 50 Christian denominations. In 1889 Adoniram Judson Gordon founded the school, Boston Missionary Training Institute, in the Fenway–Kenmore neighborhood of Boston at the Clarendon Street Baptist Church to train Christian missionaries for work in what was the Belgian Congo. Progressive at its inception in 1889, the school admitted both women of various ethnicities, it was renamed Gordon Bible College in 1916 and expanded to Newton Theological Institution facilities along the Fenway, into a facility donated by Martha Frost in 1919. Frost, a widowed Bostonian with several properties in the city, provided a significant philanthropic gift. In 1921, the school was renamed Gordon College of Missions.
In the early 1950s, a Gordon student named James Higginbotham approached Frederick H. Prince about selling his 1,000-acre estate to the College after learning of recent property viewings by the United Nations and Harvard University. In 1955, Gordon developed into a liberal arts college with a graduate theological seminary and moved to its present several-hundred-acre Wenham campus north of Boston. Gordon sold its Boston campus on Evans Way to Wentworth Institute of Technology; the Prince Memorial Chapel on the Wenham campus was named for Frederick Prince, the Prince residence was named Frost Hall after Martha Frost. In 1958, Gordon College instituted a Core Curriculum. In the 1950s it launched its first study European Seminar. In 1962, the school changed its name to Divinity School. In 1970, the Gordon Divinity School separated from the College to merge with the Conwell School of Theology, once part of Temple University, to form the Gordon–Conwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts.
Barrington College, founded in 1900 as the Bethel Bible Institute in Spencer, Massachusetts relocated to Dudley, to Providence, Rhode Island. It took the name Barrington after the campus was moved to Barrington, Rhode Island, in 1959. Barrington merged with Gordon College in 1985, forming a United College of Barrington. In April 2017, a public rift between the faculty and senior administrators widened when all seven members of the college's senate faculty resigned over "ongoing disagreement with the administration over shared governance in the processes of approving faculty promotion." On July 1, 2014, Gordon College President D. Michael Lindsay was one of 14 leaders of religious and civic organizations who signed a letter to U. S. President Barack Obama about an executive order he was contemplating that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity; the letter asked the President to include language that would exempt religious organizations from the executive order's requirements, suggesting he "find a way to respect diversity of opinion... in a way that respects the dignity of all parties".
They suggested the exemption be based on language the U. S. Senate had added as an amendment to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Obama did not use the ENDA amendment's language when he issued his order on July 21, but left in place a narrower exemption established with respect to federal contractors in 2002 by President George W. Bush's Executive Order 13279. In response, on July 9, Massachusetts, Mayor Kimberley Driscoll ended Gordon College's contract to manage and maintain the city's Old Town Hall, citing a city ordinance that prohibits Salem from contracting with entities that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Gordon's contract with the city would otherwise have expired on September 1. For similar reasons, in August, the Lynn Public Schools ended its relationship with the College, which had provided students to work without pay in the schools as part their training toward degrees in education and social work. In late July, the Peabody Essex Museum ended its academic relationship with the Gordon's museum studies program.
A museum official said: "We don't want to do anything that hurts the college or hurts their museum studies program. It's just as simple as not being able to collaborate with an institution whose core values conflict with our own." The museum withdrew its support for Gordon's grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities that aimed at funding an expansion of its museum studies program. In mid-September the New England Association of Schools and Colleges gave the college a year to report on how its non-discrimination policies met the organization's standards for accreditation. At its April 2015 meeting, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges affirmed that Gordon's accreditation remained in good standing, with no further action required by the Commission at that time. Conservative legal organizations have offered to represent the college in lawsuits that would argue that severing ties to the school constituted retaliation for the exercise of free speech and the practice of religion.
Lindsay declined those offers and said he would not have signed the letter had he anticipated the reaction and the impact on Gordon. The school subsequently reviewed its code of conduct which, in addition to banning sex outside of marriage, bans homosexual practice. Based on that review, Lindsay announced that "its policy barring student or faculty sex out of heterosexual marriage will remain as is." In addition, Gordon College rolled out several initiatives aimed at preventing bul
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball game played between two opposing teams who take turns batting and fielding. The game proceeds when a player on the fielding team, called the pitcher, throws a ball which a player on the batting team tries to hit with a bat; the objectives of the offensive team are to hit the ball into the field of play, to run the bases—having its runners advance counter-clockwise around four bases to score what are called "runs". The objective of the defensive team is to prevent batters from becoming runners, to prevent runners' advance around the bases. A run is scored when a runner advances around the bases in order and touches home plate; the team that scores the most runs by the end of the game is the winner. The first objective of the batting team is to have a player reach first base safely. A player on the batting team who reaches first base without being called "out" can attempt to advance to subsequent bases as a runner, either or during teammates' turns batting; the fielding team tries to prevent runs by getting batters or runners "out", which forces them out of the field of play.
Both the pitcher and fielders have methods of getting the batting team's players out. The opposing teams switch forth between batting and fielding. One turn batting for each team constitutes an inning. A game is composed of nine innings, the team with the greater number of runs at the end of the game wins. If scores are tied at the end of nine innings, extra innings are played. Baseball has no game clock. Baseball evolved from older bat-and-ball games being played in England by the mid-18th century; this game was brought by immigrants to North America. By the late 19th century, baseball was recognized as the national sport of the United States. Baseball is popular in North America and parts of Central and South America, the Caribbean, East Asia in Japan and South Korea. In the United States and Canada, professional Major League Baseball teams are divided into the National League and American League, each with three divisions: East and Central; the MLB champion is determined by playoffs. The top level of play is split in Japan between the Central and Pacific Leagues and in Cuba between the West League and East League.
The World Baseball Classic, organized by the World Baseball Softball Confederation, is the major international competition of the sport and attracts the top national teams from around the world. A baseball game is played between two teams, each composed of nine players, that take turns playing offense and defense. A pair of turns, one at bat and one in the field, by each team constitutes an inning. A game consists of nine innings. One team—customarily the visiting team—bats in the top, or first half, of every inning; the other team -- customarily the home team -- bats in second half, of every inning. The goal of the game is to score more points than the other team; the players on the team at bat attempt to score runs by circling or completing a tour of the four bases set at the corners of the square-shaped baseball diamond. A player bats at home plate and must proceed counterclockwise to first base, second base, third base, back home to score a run; the team in the field attempts to prevent runs from scoring and record outs, which remove opposing players from offensive action until their turn in their team's batting order comes up again.
When three outs are recorded, the teams switch roles for the next half-inning. If the score of the game is tied after nine innings, extra innings are played to resolve the contest. Many amateur games unorganized ones, involve different numbers of players and innings; the game is played on a field whose primary boundaries, the foul lines, extend forward from home plate at 45-degree angles. The 90-degree area within the foul lines is referred to as fair territory; the part of the field enclosed by the bases and several yards beyond them is the infield. In the middle of the infield is a raised pitcher's mound, with a rectangular rubber plate at its center; the outer boundary of the outfield is demarcated by a raised fence, which may be of any material and height. The fair territory between home plate and the outfield boundary is baseball's field of play, though significant events can take place in foul territory, as well. There are three basic tools of baseball: the ball, the bat, the glove or mitt: The baseball is about the size of an adult's fist, around 9 inches in circumference.
It wound in yarn and covered in white cowhide, with red stitching. The bat is a hitting tool, traditionally made of a solid piece of wood. Other materials are now used for nonprofessional games, it is a hard round stick, about 2.5 inches in diameter at the hitting end, tapering to a narrower handle and culminating in a knob. Bats used by adults are around 34 inches long, not longer than 42 inches; the glove or mitt is a fielding tool, made of padded leather with webbing between the fingers. As an aid in catching and holding onto the ball, it takes various shapes to meet the specific needs of differ
Plymouth, Massachusetts
Plymouth is a town in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. The town holds a place of great prominence in American history and culture, is known as "America's Hometown." Plymouth was the site of the colony founded in 1620 by the Mayflower Pilgrims, where New England was first established. It is one of the oldest in the United States; the town has served as the location of several prominent events, one of the more notable being the First Thanksgiving feast. Plymouth served as the capital of Plymouth Colony from its founding in 1620 until the colony's merger with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691, it is named after England where the Mayflower set sail for America. Plymouth is located 40 miles south of Boston, Massachusetts in a region known as the South Shore. Throughout the 19th century, the town thrived as a center of rope making and shipping, was home to the Plymouth Cordage Company the world's largest rope making company, it continues to be an active port. The town is served by Plymouth Municipal Airport and contains Pilgrim Hall Museum, the oldest continually operating museum in the United States.
It is the largest municipality in Massachusetts by area. The population was 58,271 as of the 2014 U. S. Census, it is one of two county seats of the other being Brockton. Prior to the arrival of the Pilgrims, the location of Plymouth was a village of the Wampanoag tribe called Patuxet; the region was visited twice by European explorers prior to the establishment of Plymouth Colony. In 1605, Samuel de Champlain sailed to Plymouth Harbor. Captain John Smith was a leader of the colony at Jamestown, he explored parts of Cape Cod Bay and is credited with naming the region "New Plimouth."Two plagues afflicted coastal New England in 1614 and 1617, killing between 90% and 95% of the local Wampanoag inhabitants. The near disappearance of the tribe from the site left their cornfields and cleared areas vacant for the Pilgrims to occupy. Plymouth played a important role in American colonial history, it was the final landing site of the first voyage of the Mayflower and the location of the original settlement of Plymouth Colony.
Plymouth was established in December 1620 by English separatist Puritans who had broken away from the Church of England, believing that the Church had not completed the work of the Protestant Reformation. Today, these settlers are much better known as a term coined by William Bradford; the Mayflower first anchored in the harbor of Provincetown, Massachusetts on November 11, 1620. The ship was headed for the mouth of the Hudson River near Manhattan, part of the Colony of Virginia at the time, but it did not go beyond Cape Cod; the Pilgrim settlers realized that they did not have a patent to settle in the region, so they signed the Mayflower Compact prior to disembarking. They explored various parts of Cape Cod and sought a suitable location for a permanent settlement to the westward in Cape Cod Bay, they discovered the sheltered waters of Plymouth Harbor on December 17, the protected bay led to a site for the new settlement after three days of surveying. The settlers disembarked on December 21, 1620.
It is traditionally said that the Pilgrims first set foot in America at the site of Plymouth Rock, though no historical evidence can prove this claim. They named their settlement "Plimouth" after the major port city in Devon, England from which the Mayflower sailed. Plymouth faced many difficulties during its first winter, the most notable being the risk of starvation and the lack of suitable shelter. From the beginning, the assistance of Native Americans was vital. One colonist's journal reports: We marched to the place we called Cornhill, where we had found the corn before. At another place we had seen before, we dug and found some more corn, two or three baskets full, a bag of beans.... In all we had about ten bushels, it is with God's help that we found this corn, for how else could we have done it, without meeting some Indians who might trouble us. During their earlier exploration of the Cape, the Pilgrims had come upon a Native American burial site which contained corn, they had taken the corn for future planting.
On another occasion, they found an unoccupied house and had taken corn and beans, for which they made restitution with the occupants about six months later. Greater assistance came from Samoset and Tisquantum, a Native American sent by Wampanoag Tribe Chief Massasoit as an ambassador and technical adviser. Squanto had been sold in Málaga, Spain, he learned English, escaped slavery, returned home in 1619. He taught the colonists how to farm corn and how to catch fish, other helpful skills for the New World, he was instrumental in the survival of the settlement for the first two years. Squanto and another guide sent by Massasoit in 1621 named Hobomok helped the colonists set up trading posts for furs. Chief Massasoit formed a Peace Treaty with the Pilgrims. Upon growing a plentiful harvest in the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims gathered with Squanto, Samoset and ninety other Wampanoag men in a celebration of thanksgiving to God for their plentiful harvest; this celebration is known today as the First Thanksgiving, is still commemorated annually in downtown Plymouth with a parade and a reenactment.
Since 1941, Thanksgiving has been observed as a federal holiday in the United States. Plymouth served as the capital of Plymouth Colony (which consisted of modern-day
Boston Red Sox
The Boston Red Sox are an American professional baseball team based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Red Sox compete in Major League Baseball as a member club of the American League East division; the Red Sox have won nine World Series championships, tied for the third-most of any MLB team, they have played in 13. Their most recent appearance and win was in 2018. In addition, they won the 1904 American League pennant, but were not able to defend their 1903 World Series championship when the New York Giants refused to participate in the 1904 World Series. Founded in 1901 as one of the American League's eight charter franchises, the Red Sox' home ballpark has been Fenway Park since 1912; the "Red Sox" name was chosen by the team owner, John I. Taylor, circa 1908, following the lead of previous teams, known as the "Boston Red Stockings", including the forerunner of the Atlanta Braves. Boston was a dominant team in the new league, defeating the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series in 1903 and winning four more championships by 1918.
However, they went into one of the longest championship droughts in baseball history, dubbed the "Curse of the Bambino" after its alleged inception due to the Red Sox' sale of Babe Ruth to the rival New York Yankees two years after their world championship in 1918, an 86-year wait before the team's sixth World Championship in 2004. The team's history during that period was punctuated with some of the most memorable moments in World Series history, including Enos Slaughter's "mad dash" in 1946, the "Impossible Dream" of 1967, Carlton Fisk's home run in 1975, Bill Buckner's error in 1986. Following their victory in the 2018 World Series, they became the first team to win four World Series trophies in the 21st century, including championships in 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018. Red Sox history has been marked by the team's intense rivalry with the Yankees, arguably the fiercest and most historic in North American professional sports; the Boston Red Sox are owned by Fenway Sports Group, which owns Liverpool F.
C. of the Premier League in England. The Red Sox are one of the top MLB teams in average road attendance, while the small capacity of Fenway Park prevents them from leading in overall attendance. From May 15, 2003 to April 10, 2013, the Red Sox sold out every home game—a total of 820 games for a major professional sports record. Both Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline", The Standells's "Dirty Water" have become anthems for the Red Sox; the name Red Sox, chosen by owner John I. Taylor after the 1907 season, refers to the red hose in the team uniform beginning in 1908. Sox had been adopted for the Chicago White Sox by newspapers needing a headline-friendly form of Stockings, as "Stockings Win!" in large type did not fit in a column. The team name "Red Sox" had been used as early as 1888 by a'colored' team from Norfolk, Virginia; the Spanish language media sometimes refers to the team as Medias Rojas, a translation of "red socks". The official Spanish site uses the variant "Los Red Sox"; the Red Stockings nickname was first used by a baseball team by the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who were members of the pioneering National Association of Base Ball Players.
Managed by Harry Wright, Cincinnati adopted a uniform with white knickers and red stockings and earned the famous nickname, a year or two before hiring the first professional team in 1869. When the club folded after the 1870 season, Wright was hired by Boston businessman Ivers Whitney Adams to organize a new team in Boston, he did, bringing three teammates and the "Red Stockings" nickname along; the Boston Red Stockings won four championships in the five seasons of the new National Association, the first professional league. When a new Cincinnati club was formed as a charter member of the National League in 1876, the "Red Stockings" nickname was reserved for them once again, the Boston team was referred to as the "Red Caps". Other names were sometimes used before Boston adopted the nickname "Braves" in 1912. In 1901, the upstart American League established a competing club in Boston. For seven seasons, the AL team had no official nickname, they were "Boston", "Bostonians" or "the Bostons". Their 1901–1907 jerseys, both home, road, just read "Boston", except for 1902 when they sported large letters "B" and "A" denoting "Boston" and "American."
Newspaper writers of the time used other nicknames for the club, including "Somersets", "Plymouth Rocks", "Beaneaters", the "Collinsites"", "Pilgrims." For years many sources have listed "Pilgrims" as the early Boston AL team's official nickname, but researcher Bill Nowlin has demonstrated that the name was used, if at all, during the team's early years. The origin of the nickname appears to be a poem entitled "The Pilgrims At Home" written by Edwin Fitzwilliam, sung at the 1907 home opener; this nickname was used during that season because the team had a new manager and several rookie players. John I. Taylor had said in December 1907 that the Pilgrims "sounded too much like homeless wanderers." The National League club in Boston, though called the "Red Stockings" anymore, still wore red trim. In 1907, the Nat
Lacrosse
Lacrosse is a team sport played with a lacrosse stick and a lacrosse ball. Players use the head of the lacrosse stick to carry, pass and shoot the ball into the goal; the sport has four versions that have different sticks, fields and equipment: field lacrosse, women's lacrosse, box lacrosse and intercrosse. The men's games, field lacrosse and box lacrosse, are contact sports and all players wear protective gear: helmet, shoulder pads, elbow pads; the women's game is played outdoors and does not allow body contact but does allow stick to stick contact. The only protective gear required for women players is eyegear, while goalies wear helmets and protective pads. Intercrosse is a mixed-gender non-contact sport played indoors that uses an all-plastic stick and a softer ball; the sport is governed by the Federation of International Lacrosse. Lacrosse is part of the cultural tradition of the Iroquois people, inhabiting what is now New York and Pennsylvania. Lacrosse may have been developed as early as 1100 AD among indigenous peoples in North America.
By the seventeenth century, it was well-established and was documented by Jesuit missionary priests in the territory of present-day Canada. In the traditional aboriginal Canadian version, each team consisted of about 100 to 1,000 men on a field that stretched from about 500 m to 3 km long; these games lasted from sunup to sundown for two to three days straight and were played as part of ceremonial ritual, a kind of symbolic warfare, or to give thanks to the Creator or Master. Lacrosse played a significant role in the community and religious life of tribes across the continent for many years. Early lacrosse was characterized by deep spiritual involvement, befitting the spirit of combat in which it was undertaken; those who took part did so in the role of warriors, with the goal of bringing glory and honor to themselves and their tribes. The game was said to be played "for the Creator" or was referred to as "The Creator's Game." The French Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf saw Huron tribesmen play the game during 1637 in present-day Ontario.
He called it la "the stick" in French. The name seems to be originated from the French term for field hockey, le jeu de la crosse. James Smith described in some detail a game being played in 1757 by Mohawk people "wherein now they used a wooden ball, about 7.6 cm in diameter, the instrument they moved it with was a strong staff about 1.5 m long, with a hoop net on the end of it, large enough to contain the ball."Anglophones from Montreal noticed the game being played by Mohawk people and started playing themselves in the 1830s. In 1856, William George Beers, a Canadian dentist, founded the Montreal Lacrosse Club. In 1860, Beers codified the game, shortening the length of each game and reducing the number of players to 12 per team; the first game played under Beers' rules was at Upper Canada College in 1867. The new sport proved to be popular and spread across the English-speaking world; the women's game was introduced by Louisa Lumsden in Scotland in 1890. The first women's club in the United States was started by Rosabelle Sinclair at Bryn Mawr School in 1926.
In the United States, lacrosse during the late 1800s and first half of the 1900s was a regional sport centered around the Mid-Atlantic states New York and Maryland. However, in the last half of the 20th century, the sport spread outside this region, can be found in most of the United States. According to a survey conducted by US Lacrosse in 2016, there are over 825,000 lacrosse participants nationwide and lacrosse is the fastest-growing team sport among NFHS member schools. Field lacrosse is the men's outdoor version of the sport. There are ten players on each team: three attackmen, three midfielders, three defensemen, one goalie; each player carries a lacrosse stick. A short stick is used by attackmen and midfielders. A maximum of four players on the field per team may carry a long stick, between 52 and 72 inches long and is used by the three defensemen and sometimes one defensive midfielder; the goalie uses a stick with a head as wide as 12 inches that can be between 72 inches long. The field of play is 110 by 60 yards.
The goals are 80 yd apart. Each goal sits inside a circular "crease", measuring 18 ft in diameter; the goalie has special privileges within the crease to avoid opponents' stick checks. Offensive players or their sticks may not enter into the crease at any time; the mid-field line separates the field into an defensive zone for each team. Each team must keep four players in its defensive zone and three players in its offensive zone at all times, it does not matter which positional players satisfy the requirement, although the three attackmen stay in the offensive zone, the three defensemen and the goalie stay in the defensive zone, the three middies play in both zones. A team that violates this rule is offsides and either loses possession of the ball if they have it or incurs a technical foul if they do not; the regulation playing time of a game is 60 minutes, divided into four periods of 15 minutes each. Play is started after each goal with a face-off. During a face-off, two players lay their sticks on the ground parallel to the mid-line, the two heads of their sticks on opposite sides of the ball.
At the whistle, the face-off-men scrap for the ball by "clamping" it under their stick and fl
Indianapolis 500
The Indianapolis 500-Mile Race is an automobile race held annually at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Speedway, United States, an enclave suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana. The event is held over Memorial Day weekend in late May, it is contested as part of the IndyCar Series, the top level of American Championship Car racing, an open-wheel open-cockpit formula colloquially known as "Indy Car Racing". The name of the race is shortened to Indy 500, the track itself is nicknamed "the Brickyard", as the racing surfacing was paved in brick in the fall of 1909; the event, billed as The Greatest Spectacle in Racing, is considered part of the Triple Crown of Motorsport, which comprises three of the most prestigious motorsports events in the world including the Monaco Grand Prix and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The official attendance is not disclosed by Speedway management, but the permanent seating capacity is upwards of 250,000, infield patrons raise the race-day attendance to 300,000; the inaugural race was won by Ray Harroun.
The event celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2011, the 100th running was held in 2016. Will Power is the current champion; the most successful drivers are A. J. Foyt, Al Unser Sr. and Rick Mears, each of whom have won the race four times. The active driver with the most victories is Hélio Castroneves, with three. Rick Mears holds the record for most career pole positions with six; the most successful car owner is Roger Penske, owner of Team Penske, which has 17 total wins and 17 poles. The event is steeped in tradition, in pre-race ceremonies, post-race celebrations, race procedure; the most noteworthy and most popular traditions are the 33-car field, the annual singing of "Back Home Again in Indiana," and the victory lane bottle of milk. The Indianapolis 500 is held annually at a 2.5-mile oval circuit. Technically, the track is a unique rounded-rectangle, with four distinct turns of identical dimensions, connected by four straightaways. Drivers race 200 laps, counter-clockwise around the circuit, for a distance of 500 miles.
Since its inception in 1911, the race has always been scheduled around Memorial Day. Since 1974, the race has been scheduled for the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend; the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend is considered one of the most important days on the motorsports calendar, as it is the day of the Indianapolis 500, Coca-Cola 600, the Monaco Grand Prix. Practice and time trials are held in the two weeks leading up to the race, while other preliminary testing is held as early as April. Traditionally, the field consists of 33 starters, aligned in a starting grid of eleven rows of three cars apiece; the event is contested by "Indy cars", a formula of professional-level, single-seat, open cockpit, open-wheel, purpose-built race cars. As of 2018, all entrants utilize 2.2 L V6, twin-turbocharged engines, tuned to produce a range of 550–700 horsepower. Chevrolet and Honda are the current engine manufacturers involved in the sport. Dallara is at present the sole chassis supplier to the series. Firestone, which has a deep history in the sport, dating back to the first 500, is the exclusive tire provider.
The race is the most prestigious event of the IndyCar calendar, one of the oldest and most important automobile races. It has been avouched to be the largest single-day sporting event in the entire world; the Indianapolis Motor Speedway itself is regarded as the world's largest sporting facility in terms of capacity. The total purse exceeded $13 million in 2011, with over $2.5 million awarded to the winner, making it one of the richest cash prize funds in sports. Similar to NASCAR's Daytona 500, the Indianapolis 500 is held early in the IndyCar Series season; that is unique to most sports where major events are at the end of the respective season. The Indy 500 is the sixth event of the 17-race IndyCar schedule. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Indianapolis was the second or third race of the season, as late as the 1950s, it was sometimes the first championship event of the year. Due to the high prestige of the Indianapolis 500—rivaling or surpassing the season championship—it is not uncommon for some teams and drivers to concentrate on preparation for the 500 during the early part of the season, not focus on the championship battle until after Indy.
The traditional 33-car starting field at Indianapolis is larger than the fields at the other IndyCar races. The field at Indy consists of all of the full-time IndyCar Series entries, along with 10–15 part-time or "Indy-only" entries; the "Indy-only" entries popularly called "One-Offs", may be an extra car added to an existing full-time team, or a part-time team altogether that does not enter any of the other races. The "Indy-only" drivers may come from a wide range of pedigrees, but are experienced Indy car drivers that either lack a full-time ride, are former full-time drivers that have elected to drop down to part-time status, or occasional one-off drivers from other racing disciplines, it is not uncommon for some drivers, to quit full-time driving during the season, but race at Indy singly for numerous years afterwards before entering full retirement. Due to safety issues such as aquaplaning, the race is not held in wet conditions. In the event of a rain delay, the race will be postponed until rain showers cease, the track is sufficiently dried.
If rain falls during the race, officials can end the race and declare the results official if more than half of the scheduled distance (i.e. 101 lap
