Exxon is the former brand name of oil and natural resources company Exxon Corporation, prior to 1972 known as Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. In 1999, Exxon Corporation merged with Mobil to form ExxonMobil; the Exxon brand is still used by ExxonMobil's downstream operations as a brand for certain gas stations, motor fuel and related products. Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was one of the Seven Sisters that dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s. Exxon replaced the Esso and Humble brands in the United States in 1973; the Esso name was a trademark of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, attracted protests from other Standard Oil spinoffs because of its phonetic similarity to the acronym of the name of the parent company, Standard Oil. As a result, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was restricted from using Esso in the U. S. except in those states awarded to it in the 1911 Standard Oil antitrust settlement. In states where it was restricted from using the Esso name, the company marketed under the Humble or Enco brands.

The Humble brand was used at Texas stations for decades, as those operations were under the direction of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey affiliate Humble Oil & Refining Company. In the middle to late 1950s, use of the Humble brand spread to other southwestern states, including Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma. In 1959, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey secured full control of Humble Oil and restructured it into its U. S. marketing and refining division, to market nationwide under the Enco and Humble brands. Enco was created as an acronym for the phrase "Energy Company". Humble introduced the Enco brand in 1960 in Oklahoma and surrounding states, to replace Humble's subsidiary Oklahoma and Pate brands. Humble tried marketing under Enco in Ohio, but Standard Oil Company of Ohio protested that the Enco name and logo too resembled that of Esso. Stations in Ohio were rebranded as Humble, remained so until the Exxon brand came into use. After the Enco brand was discontinued in Ohio, it was moved to other non-Esso states.

In 1961, Humble stations in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas were rebranded to Enco. That same year, Enco appeared on former Carter stations in the Pacific Northwest. In 1963, Humble Oil and Tidewater Oil Company began negotiating a sale of Tidewater's West Coast refining and marketing operations; the sale would have given Humble Oil many existing Flying A stations and distributorships, as well as a refinery in California, the nation's fastest-growing gasoline market. However, the Justice Department objected to the sale on anti-trust grounds. Humble Oil continued to expand its West Coast operations, adding California to its marketing territory, building many new Enco stations and rebranding others. In 1967, Humble Oil purchased all remaining Signal stations from Standard Oil Company of California and rebranded them as Enco outlets increasing Enco's presence in California. In 1969, Humble Oil opened a new refinery in Benicia, California. In 1966, the U. S. Justice Department ordered Humble Oil to "cease and desist" from using the Esso brand at stations in several southeastern states, following protests from Standard Oil of Kentucky, a Standard Oil of California subsidiary in the process of rebranding its Standard stations to Chevron.

By 1967, Humble Oil's Esso stations in the Southeast were rebranded to Enco. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Humble Oil continued to have difficulties promoting itself as a nationwide marketer of petroleum products, despite a number of high-profile marketing strategies; these included the popular "Put a Tiger in Your Tank" advertising campaign and accompanying tiger mascot created by American illustrator Bob Jones, to promote Enco Extra and Esso Extra gasolines. Humble Oil used similar logotypes, use of the Humble name in all Enco and Esso advertising, uniform designs for all stations regardless of brand. In addition, Humble Oil was a major promoter and broadcast sponsor for college football in the Pacific-8 and Southwestern conferences, but Humble Oil still faced stiff competition from national brands such as Shell and Texaco, which at that time was the only company to market under one brand name in all 50 states. By the late 1960s, Humble officials realized that the time had come to develop a new brand name that could be used nationwide.

At first, consideration was given to rebranding all stations as Enco, but, shelved when it was learned that the word "Enco" is similar in pronunciation to the Japanese slang term enko, meaning "stalled car". In 1972, Exxon was unveiled as the unified brand name for all former Enco and Esso outlets. At the same time, the company changed its corporate name from Standard Oil of New Jersey to Exxon Corporation; the rebranding came after successful test-marketing of the Exxon name, under two experimental logos, in the fall and winter of 1971–1972. Along with the new name, Exxon settled on a rectangular logo using red lettering and blue trim on a white background, similar to the familiar color scheme on the old Enco and Esso logos; the company planned to change its name to "Exon", in keeping with the four-letter format of Enco and Esso. However, during the planning process, it was noted. Renaming the company after a sitting governor seemed ill-advised. George T. Piercy, a senior member of th

Step Afrika! is a dance company dedicated to the African-American tradition of "stepping". It is a non-profit organization that tours nationally and internationally, presents residencies and workshops worldwide, uses "stepping" as an educational tool, their dance style is a fusion of South African gumboot dance and African American stepping. Step Afrika! was founded in 1994 in South Africa through a collaboration between dancers from the United States and dancers from the Soweto Dance Theatre of Johannesburg, South Africa. The company moved to the United States in 1996, relocated to its current headquarters, in the Atlas Performing Arts Center, on H Street NE, in 2006. Since 2006, Step Afrika! has produced a Home Performance Series, in 2011 the Company designed a HPS themed along the lines of Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series. Stepping Gumboot dance Official website

Mina Loy was a British-born artist, poet, novelist, designer of lamps, bohemian. She was one of the last of the first-generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition, her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, Yvor Winters, among others; as stated by Nicholas Fox Weber in the New York Times, "This brave soul had the courage and wit to be original. Mina Loy may never be more than a vaguely familiar name, a passing satellite, but at least she sparkled from an orbit of her own choosing." Loy was born in London. She was the daughter of a Hungarian Jewish tailor, Sigmund Felix Lowry, who had moved to London to evade persistent antisemitism in Hungary, an English Protestant mother, Julia Bryan. Loy reflected on their relationship, the production of her identity, in great deal in her mock-epic Anglo-Mongrels of the Rose; the marriage of Lowry and Bryan was fraught. Unknown to Loy, as biographer Carolyn Burke records, her mother married her father under the pressure of disgrace as she was seven months pregnant with the child that would be Mina.

Lowry and Bryan had three daughters in total, with Mina being the oldest. As recorded extensively in both her poetry and writing, from Anglo-Mongrels of the Rose to late prose pieces, Loy describes her mother as overbearingly Evangelical Victorianism; as Burke records: "Like most Evangelicals, for whom the imagination was a source of sin, Julia distrusted her child's ability to invent." In reference to her mother, Loy recalled that she was troubled by the fact that "the author of my being, being author of my fear." Loy found it hard to identify with her mother, who not only punished her continually for her "sinfulness," but espoused fervent support of the British Empire, rampant antisemitism, nationalistic jingoism. Loy's formal education began late in 1897 at St. John's Wood School where she remained for about two years. In retrospect, Loy called it "the worst art school in London" and "a haven of disappointment". Loy's father pushed for her to go to the art school in the hope that it would make her more marriageable.

Around this time, Loy became fascinated with both Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, after much convincing was able to persuade her father to purchase her Dante's Complete Works and reproductions of his paintings as well as a red Moroccan leather-bound version of Christina's poems. She became passionate about the Pre-Raphaelites, starting first with the work of William Morris before turning to Edward Burne-Jones. Loy had to be careful as to. For example, Loy described that when her mother found a drawing she had done of the naked Andromeda bound to a rock her mother and disgusted, tore up the work and called her daughter "a vicious slut". In 1900 Loy attended the Munich Künstlerinnenverein, or the Society of Female Artists' School, connected with the fine art school of Munich University, it was there that she claimed she learned draughtsmanship. Upon returning to the stifling environment of her family home in London, after the relative freedom she found in Munich, Loy suffered from "headaches, respiratory problems, generalized weakness", diagnosed as neurasthenia – "a catch-all term for a variety of psychosomatic complaints suffered by artistic or intellectual women and a few sensitive men" during that time period.

Around the age of eighteen, Loy convinced her parents to allow her to continue her education in Paris with a chaperone – a woman called Mrs Knight. After much persuasion, she was allowed to move to Montparnasse, which in 1902 had not yet been urbanised, attend the Académie Colarossi as an art student. Unlike the segregated classes at the Munich Künstlerinnenverein, these art classes were mixed, it was here, through an English friend of a similar social standing named Madeline Boles, that Loy first came into contact with the English painter Stephen Haweis who Loy described as enacting the "parasitic drawing-out of one's vitality to recharge, as it were, his own deficient battery of life." According to Burke's biography, Haweis was unpopular with his fellow students, being considered a "poseur," and Boles in particular took him under her wing. Haweis, whose father was the well-known Reverend H. R. Haweis and his mother Mary Eliza Haweis a writer who wrote, amongst other things, Chaucer for Children: A Golden Key, was an aesthete of sorts and "despite being short he managed to condescend to his listeners from a height."

He began to exert himself over Loy, recognising her beauty and desirability, played the role of the misunderstood eccentric which led Loy to feel guilty for disliking him and distrusting him as he borrowed more and more money from her without paying her back. She would reflect that Haweis loomed over her and she became, in Loy's own words, "as sullenly involved as with my mother's sadistic hysterics." One night he convinced her to stay over and, in what she would describe as a state of hypnosis, she was seduced by him. Waking up next morning in his bed, semi-naked, Loy was repulsed. A few months after this, she realised that she was pregnant, something which terrified her as it bound her, as she described closer to "the being on earth whom she would have least chosen." Being only twenty-one, she faced a difficult situation and, fearing rejection from her family and disinher