ʼĒl is a Northwest Semitic word meaning "god" or "deity", or referring to any one of multiple major ancient Near Eastern deities. A rarer form, ʼila, represents the predicate form in Amorite; the word is derived from the Proto-Semitic archaic biliteral ʼ‑l, meaning "god". Specific deities known as ʼEl or ʼIl include the supreme god of the ancient Canaanite religion and the supreme god of East Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia’s Early Dynastic Period. Cognate forms are found throughout the Semitic languages, they include Ugaritic ʾilu, pl. ʾlm. In northwest Semitic use, Ēl was both a generic word for any god and the special name or title of a particular god, distinguished from other gods as being "the god". Ēl is listed at the head of many pantheons. In some Canaanite and Ugaritic sources, Ēl played a role of creation. However, because the word sometimes refers to a god other than the great god Ēl, it is ambiguous as to whether Ēl followed by another name means the great god Ēl with a particular epithet applied or refers to another god entirely.

For example, in the Ugaritic texts, ʾil mlk is understood to mean "Ēl the King" but ʾil hd as "the god Hadad". The Semitic root ʾlh may be ʾl with a parasitic h, ʾl may be an abbreviated form of ʾlh. In Ugaritic the plural form meaning "gods" is ʾilhm, equivalent to Hebrew ʾelōhîm "powers". In the Hebrew texts this word is interpreted as being semantically singular for "god" by biblical commentators; however the documentary hypothesis developed in the 1870s, identifies these that different authors – the Jahwist, Elohist and the Priestly source – were responsible for editing stories from a polytheistic religion into those of a monotheistic religion. Inconsistencies that arise between monotheism and polytheism in the texts are reflective of this hypothesis; the stem ʾl is found prominently in the earliest strata of east Semitic, northwest Semitic, south Semitic groups. Personal names including the stem ʾl are found with similar patterns in both Amorite and Sabaic – which indicates that already in Proto-Semitic ʾl was both a generic term for "god" and the common name or title of a single particular god.

The Egyptian god Ptah is given the title ḏū gitti'Lord of Gath' in a prism from Tel Lachish which has on its opposite face the name of Amenhotep II. The title ḏū gitti is found in Serābitṭ text 353. Cross points out that Ptah is called the Lord of eternity and thinks it may be this identification of ʼĒl with Ptah that lead to the epithet ’olam'eternal' being applied to ʼĒl so early and so consistently, yet another connection is seen with the Mandaean god Ptahil, whose name combines both the terms Ptah and Il. The name Raphael or Rapha-El, meaning'God has healed' in Ugarit, is attested to in 1350 BCE in one of the Amarna Letters EA333, found in Tell-el-Hesi from the ruler of Lachish to'The Great One' A Phoenician inscribed amulet of the seventh century BCE from Arslan Tash may refer to ʼĒl; the text was translated by Rosenthal as follows: However, Cross translated the text as follows: In some inscriptions, the name ’Ēl qōne ’arṣ meaning "ʼĒl creator of Earth" appears including a late inscription at Leptis Magna in Tripolitania dating to the second century.

In Hittite texts, the expression becomes the single name Ilkunirsa, this Ilkunirsa appearing as the husband of Asherdu and father of 77 or 88 sons. In a Hurrian hymn to ʼĒl, he is called ’il brt and ’il dn, which Cross takes as'ʼĒl of the covenant' and'ʼĒl the judge' respectively. Amorite inscriptions from Sam'al refer to numerous gods, sometimes by name, sometimes by title by such titles as Ilabrat'God of the people', ʾil abīka "God of your father", ʾil abīni "God of our father" and so forth. Various family gods are recorded, divine names listed as belonging to a particular family or clan, sometimes by title and sometimes by name, including the name ʾil "God". In Amorite personal names, the most common divine elements are ʾil "God", Hadad/Adad, Dagan, it is that ʾil is very the god called in Akkadian texts Amurru or ʾil ʾamurru. For the Canaanites and the ancient Levantine region as a whole, Ēl or Il was the supreme god, the father of mankind and all creatures, he fathered many gods, most Hadad and Mot, each sharing similar attributes to the Greco-Roman gods: Zeus and Hades respectively.

As recorded on the clay tablets of Ugarit, El is the husband of the goddess Asherah. Three pantheon lists found at Ugarit begin with the four gods ’il-’ib, Ēl, Ba’l Ṣapān. Though Ugarit had a large temple dedicated to Dagon and another to Hadad, there was no temple dedicated to Ēl. Ēl is called again Tôru ` Ēl. He is bātnyu binwāti, ’abū banī ’ili, ‘abū ‘adami, he is qāniyunu ‘ôlam, the epithet ‘ôlam appearing in Hebrew form in the Hebrew name of God ’ēl ‘ôlam "God Eternal" in Genesis 21.33. He is ḥātikuka. Ēl is the grey-bearded ancient one

Peyton Place is a 1956 novel by Grace Metalious. The novel describes how three women are forced to come to terms with their identity, both as women and as sexual beings, in a small, gossipy New England town, with recurring themes of hypocrisy, social inequities and class privilege in a tale that includes incest, adultery and murder, it sold 60,000 copies within the first ten days of its release and remained on The New York Times best seller list for 59 weeks. The novel spawned a franchise. Twentieth Century-Fox adapted it as a movie in 1957, Metalious wrote a follow-up novel, published in 1959, titled Return to Peyton Place, filmed in 1961 using the same title; the original 1956 novel was adapted again in 1964, in what became a wildly successful prime time television series for 20th Century Fox Television that ran until 1969, the term "Peyton Place" – an allusion to any small town or group that holds scandalous secrets – entered into the American lexicon. A daytime soap opera titled Return to Peyton Place ran from 1972 to 1974, the franchise was rounded out with two made-for-television movies: Murder in Peyton Place and Peyton Place: The Next Generation.

The story starts in 1937 and continues through the years following World War II. While never mentioned explicitly by name, the novel does make several references that suggest Peyton Place is located within the state of New Hampshire: Vermont can be seen from across the Connecticut River; the fictional Peyton Place appears to be a composite of several real New Hampshire towns: Metalious' hometown of Gilmanton, as well as Gilford, Laconia and Plymouth, where at least some of the work was written at the Plymouth Inn on Main Street. Grace Metalious and her husband George first considered Potter Place. Realizing their town should have a fictional name, they found Payton, they combined that with Place and changed the "a" to an "e". Thus, Peyton Place was created. Peyton Place. Peyton Place, New Hampshire. Peyton Place, New England. Peyton Place, USA. A composite of all small towns where ugliness rears its head, where the people try to hide all the skeletons in their closets." The main plot follows the lives of three women: lonely and repressed Constance MacKenzie, her illegitimate daughter Allison, her employee Selena Cross, a girl from across the tracks or "from the shacks."

Several characters and events were drawn from events in nearby towns and people that Metalious knew. Selena Cross was based on Barbara Roberts, a 16-year-old girl from the village of Gilmanton Ironworks, who murdered her father Sylvester after years of sexual abuse and buried his body under a sheep pen. In the novel, Selena kills her stepfather because incest was considered too taboo for readers at the time. Metalious' editor Kitty Messner made the change, much to the author's disapproval. Constance leaves Peyton Place for New York City at a young age and meets a man in the publishing business named Allison MacKenzie, married with children. Constance becomes pregnant with MacKenzie's child. MacKenzie dies a few years after his daughter named Allison, is born. Constance and her daughter adopt Allison's last name before returning to Peyton Place as a "widow" and child, Constance alters her daughter's birth date to make her appear legitimate. In Peyton Place, Nellie marries Lucas Cross shortly after their daughter Selena's birth, although Selena is not Lucas's child.

Paul, Lucas's son and Selena's stepbrother, left Peyton Place after accusing Lucas of stealing his money. Nellie and Lucas had a child together: Joey, who lives with the couple and Selena in "the shacks," a poor section of town; when Selena turned 14 years old, Lucas began to abuse her, impregnating her and leaving the local doctor in a troublesome situation in which he decided to perform an abortion. The doctor made Lucas leave town, after she discovered this, Nellie committed suicide by hanging. Leslie Harrington, the richest man in town, was shattered when he lost his only son, Rodney, in a car accident. Novelist Barbara Delinsky, author of the fictional Looking for Peyton Place, summarized the storyline of Peyton Place on her website: Peyton Place opens in 1937. With the introduction of the small New Hampshire town and its characters, the social strata are defined. Most noted among the well-to-do are Leslie Harrington, owner of the mill, his spoiled son Rodney, the good-hearted doctor Matthew Swain and upstanding Seth Buswell, owner of the newspaper.

The town's middle class is represented by the book's two main characters, Constance MacKenzie and her daughter Allison. The impoverished of the town are represented by her family; the town is a character itself, a seductively beautiful facade that hides a plethora of ills... Constance, who gave birth to Allison in New York after an affair with a married man and returned to Peyton Place pretending to be a widow, lives in fear that the truth of Allison's illegitimacy will come out. Allison, who has few friends, dreams alternately about her wonderful father and about being a famous writer. Meanwhile, Peyton Place's power elite gather to discuss ways of manipulating zoning laws to rid the tow

William Morgan Jackson is a Distinguished Research and Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at University of California, Davis. His work considers cometary astrochemistry and the development of laser photochemistry to understand planetary atmospheres, he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society. In 2019 he was awarded the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Arthur B. C. Walker II Award for his commitment to promoting diversity. Jackson was born in Alabama, he grew up in a segregated society and spent part of his childhood in Dynamite Hill, an area in Birmingham that the Ku Klux Klan bombed during the Civil rights movement. His father, a Tuskegee University graduate, owned the Apex Cab Company and taught auto mechanics at Parker High School, whilst his mother, a Santa Barbara Junior High School graduate, worked for the US Government. At the age of nine Jackson contracted. After completing tenth grade, Jackson joined Morehouse College as an early entrance student.

He was awarded a full scholarship. At first Jackson considered majoring in mathematics, but decided to study chemistry after meeting Henry Cecil McBay, he graduated in 1956 and applied to several graduate schools, including Northwestern University and Purdue University. He received a response from Northwestern, who said that they had fulfilled their three fellowships for African American students, he moved Washington, D. C. where he lived with his cousin. He studied at the Catholic University of America where he was awarded a postgraduate research fellowship. During his doctoral studies he worked in the Harry Diamond Laboratories, where he studied molten salt compounds. During the final year of his PhD, Jackson's wife became pregnant, Jackson took time out of graduate school to earn money. During this time he worked at the National Institute of Technology, he returned to the Catholic University of America. After earning his PhD in 1961 he joined the Lockheed Martin, where he worked on formaldehyde resins and ways to protect missiles as they reenter the Atmosphere of Earth.

He returned to the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a postdoctoral researcher, studying how radiant energy impacted chemical structures. He investigated. In 1964 Jackson joined the Goddard Space Flight Center, it was here. While at the Goddard Space Flight Center he proposed to use the International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite to look for comets. Using the Haystack Observatory, Jackson made measurements of water emission in comets, he joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1969, where he spent a year researching and teaching. At the University of Pittsburgh he worked with Wade Fite and Ted Brackman on the detection of electron impact on molecules using mass spectrometry. A year he returned to Goddard, where he developed a system to detect free radicals using laser beams. In 1974 one of Jackson's colleagues, a Professor of Chemistry at Howard University, died suddenly. Jackson agreed to teach his course for the rest of the term and was subsequently appointed to a joint position in chemistry and physics.

Here he began working on laser-induced fluorescence to study the rovibronic coupling in cyano radicals. He was the first person to demonstrate, he studied comets using satellites ground-based telescopes, using experimental data and theoretical predictions to establish how the free radicals inside comets form. Despite having left Goddard Space Flight Center, Jackson served as team leader for the International Ultraviolet Explorer telescope, which observed Halley's Comet, he joined University of California, Davis in 1985 and was promoted to Distinguished Professor in 1998. The Jackson laboratory developed tunable lasers which could be used to detect and characterise free radicals; these included nitrogen-pumped lasers and an Alexandrite laser. By building laser systems in the laboratory, Jackson helped to establish the excited states of molecules that are present in planetary atmospheres; the experiments consisted of one laser for the photodissociation of the parent molecule, another laser to excite the free radical into an excited state.

When the excited molecule fluoresced back to the ground state, the fluorescence was captured in a photomultiplier tube. He has investigated the photochemistry of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, his laser systems exploit resonant four-wave mixing, which allows them to photodissociate gases observed in planetary atmospheres. He showed that it is possible to ionise the resulting atomic fragments using a velocity imaging time-of-flight mass spectrometer. In 1996 The Planetary Society named asteroid 1081 EE37 as Billjackson in his honour, he served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry at University of California, Davis in 2000. He has continued to research and recruit students. In 2013 he was made the Emile A. Dickenson Professor at University of Davis. In 2019 the Journal of Physical Chemistry dedicated a special issue to Jackson. Jackson has campaigned for equity and inclusion in science since he started his career, he was one of the founders of the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers.

The organisation began to promote and award minority scientists and engineers, as well as encouraging high school students to consider studyi