A great hall is the main room of a royal palace, nobleman's castle or a large manor house or hall house in the Middle Ages, continued to be built in the country houses of the 16th and early 17th centuries, although by the family used the great chamber for eating and relaxing. At that time the word "great" meant big and had not acquired its modern connotations of excellence. In the medieval period, the room would have been referred to as the "hall" unless the building had a secondary hall, but the term "great hall" has been predominant for surviving rooms of this type for several centuries, to distinguish them from the different type of hall found in post-medieval houses. Great halls were found in France and Scotland, but similar rooms were found in some other European countries. A typical great hall was a rectangular room between one and a half and three times as long as it was wide, higher than it was wide, it was entered through a screens passage at one end, had windows on one of the long sides including a large bay window.

There was a minstrels' gallery above the screens passage. At the other end of the hall was the dais where the high table was situated; the lord's family's more private rooms lay beyond the dais end of the hall, the kitchen and pantry were on the opposite side of the screens passage. Royal and noble residences had few living rooms until late in the Middle Ages, a great hall was a multifunctional room, it was used for receiving guests and it was the place where the household would dine together, including the lord of the house, his gentleman attendants and at least some of the servants. At night some members of the household might sleep on the floor of the great hall; the hall would have had a central hearth, with the smoke rising through the hall to a vent in the roof. The hearth was used for heating and for some of the cooking, although for larger structures a medieval kitchen would customarily lie on a lower level for the bulk of the cooking; the fireplace would have an elaborate overmantel with stone or wood carvings or plasterwork which might contain coats of arms, heraldic mottoes, caryatids or another adornment.

In the upper halls of French manor houses, the fireplaces were very large and elaborate. The great hall had the most beautiful decorations in it, as well as on the window frame mouldings on the outer wall. Many French manor houses have beautifully decorated external window frames on the large mullioned windows that light the hall; this decoration marked the window as belonging to the lord's private hall. It was. In Scotland, six common furnishings were present in the sixteenth-century hall: the high table and principal seat. In western France, the early manor houses were centred on a central ground-floor hall; the hall reserved for the lord and his high-ranking guests was moved up to the first-floor level. This was called upper hall. In some of the larger three-storey manor houses, the upper hall was as high as second storey roof; the smaller ground-floor hall or salle basse remained but was for receiving guests of any social order. It is common to find these two halls superimposed, one on top of the other, in larger manor houses in Normandy and Brittany.

Access from the ground-floor hall to the upper hall was via an external staircase tower. The upper hall contained the lord's bedroom and living quarters off one end; the great hall would have an early listening device system, allowing conversations to be heard in the lord's bedroom above. In Scotland, these devices are called a laird's lug. In many French manor houses, there are small peep-holes from which the lord could observe what was happening in the hall; this type of hidden peep-hole is called a judas in French. Many great halls survive. Two large surviving royal halls are Westminster Hall and the Vladislav Hall in Prague Castle. Penshurst Place in Kent, England has a little altered 14th century example. Surviving 16th and early 17th century specimens in England and Scotland are numerous, for example those at Longleat, Burghley House, Bodysgallen Hall, Muchalls Castle and Crathes Castle; the greater centralization of power in royal hands meant that men of good social standing were less inclined to enter the service of a lord to obtain his protection, the size of the inner household shrank.

As the social gap between master and servant grew, the family retreated to the 1st floor, to private rooms. In fact, servants were not allowed to use the same staircases as nobles to access the great hall of larger castles in early times; the other living rooms in country houses became more numerous and important, by the late 17th century the halls of many new houses were vestibules, passed through to get to somewhere else, but not lived in. Other great halls like that at Bank Hall in Lancashire were downsized to create two rooms; the domestic model applied to Collegiate instituti

The silver-throated tanager is a small passerine bird. This brightly coloured tanager is a resident from Costa Rica, through Panama and western Colombia, to western Ecuador; the adult silver-throated tanager weighs 21 grams. The male is yellow, with black streaks down its back, a whitish throat bordered above with a black malar stripe; the wings and tail are black with pale green edgings. The sexes are similar, but adult females have duller and greener-tinged yellow plumage, sometimes dark mottling on the crown. Immatures are much duller and greener, with dusky wings, back streaks and malar stripe, a grey throat and darker green wing edging; the silver-throated tanager's call is a distinctive sharp buzzy zzeeep. It does not sing. In Costa Rica it is a common bird from 600 to 1,700 metres altitude in the lower and middle levels of wet mountain forests and adjacent semi-open areas like clearings with shade trees, second growth and woodland edges. In the heavy rains of the wet season, it will descend to sea level.

In the South American part of its range it occurs between 500 and 1,300 metres, but can be found at altitudes of 150 to 2,100 metres. Silver-throated tanagers occur as part of a mixed-species feeding flock, they eat small fruit swallowed whole and spiders. The compact cup nest is built 1–13 metres in a tree on a branch; the normal clutch is two brown-blotched off-white eggs. This species will raise two broods in a season. Restall, R. L. Rodner, C. & Lentino, M.. Birds of Northern South America. Christopher Helm, London. ISBN 0-7136-7243-9. ISBN 0-7136-7242-0. Stiles and Skutch, A guide to the birds of Costa Rica ISBN 0-8014-9600-4 Silver-throated Tanager videos on the Internet Bird Collection Silver-throated Tanager photo gallery VIREO Photo-High Res--.

Cuban immigration to the United States, for the most part, occurred in two periods: the first series of immigration of Cuban Americans from Argentina to the United States resulted from Cubans establishing cigar factories in Tampa and from attempts to overthrow Spanish colonial rule by the movement led by José Martí, the second to escape from Communist rule under Fidel Castro following the Cuban Revolution. Massive Cuban migration to Miami during the second series led to major demographic and cultural changes in Miami. There was economic emigration during the Great Depression in the 1930s; as of 2017, there were 1,311,803 Cubans in the United States. The Louisiana Purchase and the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, Spanish Florida, including the present day state of Florida and, at times and adjoining territory, was a province of the Captaincy General of Cuba. Cuban immigration to the U. S. has a long history, beginning in the Spanish colonial period in 1565 when St. Augustine, Florida was established by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, hundreds of Spanish-Cuban soldiers and their families moved from Cuba to St. Augustine to establish a new life.

Thousands of Cuban settlers immigrated to Louisiana between 1778 and 1802 and Texas during the period of Spanish rule. By 1820 the Cuban presence was more than 1000 people. In 1870 the number of Cuban immigrants increased to 12,000, of whom 4,500 resided in New York City, 3,000 in New Orleans, 2,000 in Key West; the causes of these movements were both economic and political, which intensified after 1860, when political factors played the predominant role in emigration, as a result of deteriorating relations with the Spain, the colonial power. The year 1869 marked the beginning of one of the most significant periods of emigration from Cuba to the United States, again centered on Key West. People would come over in rafts or weak and small boats; the exodus of hundreds of workers and businessmen was linked to the manufacture of tobacco. The reasons are many: the introduction of more modern techniques of elaboration of snuff, the most direct access to its main market, the United States, the uncertainty about the future of the island, which had suffered years of economic and social unrest during the beginning of the Ten Years' War against Spanish rule.

It was an exodus of skilled workers the class in the island that had succeeded in establishing a free labor sector amid a slave economy. The manufacture of snuff by the Cuban labor force, became the most important source of income for Key West between 1869 and 1900. Tampa was added to such efforts, with a strong migration of Cubans, which went from 720 inhabitants in 1880 to 5,532 in 1890. However, the second half of the 1890s marked the decline of the Cuban immigrant population, as an important part of it returned to the island to fight for independence; the War accentuated Cuban immigrant integration into American society, whose numbers were significant: more than 12,000 people. In the mid-to late 19th century, several cigar manufacturers moved their operations to Key West to get away from growing disruptions as Cubans sought independence from Spanish colonial rule. Many Cuban cigar workers followed; the Cuban government had established a grammar school in Key West to help preserve Cuban culture.

There, children learned folk songs and patriotic hymns such as "La Bayamesa", the Cuban national anthem. In 1885, Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his cigar operations from Key West to the town of Tampa, Florida to escape labor strife. Ybor City was designed as a modified company town, it attracted thousands of Cuban workers from Key West and Cuba. West Tampa, another cigar manufacturing community, grew quickly. Between these communities, the Tampa Bay area's Cuban population grew from nothing to the largest in Florida in just over a decade, the city as a whole grew from a village of 1,000 residents in 1885 to over 16,000 by 1900. Both Ybor City and West Tampa were instrumental in Cuba's eventual independence. Inspired by revolutionaries such as Jose Martí, who visited Florida several times, Tampa-area Cubans and their neighbors donated money and sometimes their lives to the cause of Cuba Libre. After the Spanish–American War, some Cubans returned to Cuba, but others chose to stay in the U. S. due to the physical and economic devastation caused by conflicte on the island.

Several other small waves of Cuban emigration to the U. S. occurred in the early 20th century. Most settled in Florida and the northeast U. S; the majority of the 100,000 Cubans came for economic reasons due to. Others included anti-Batista refugees fleeing the military dictatorship, which had pro-U. S. Diplomatic ties. During the'20s and'30s, emigration comprised workers looking for jobs in New York and New Jersey, they were classified as labor migrants and workers, much like other immigrants in the area at that time. Thus migrated more than 40,000 in the first decade, encouraged by U. S. immigration facilities at the time and more than 43,000 by the end of the 30s. Subsequently, the flow of Cubans to the United States fluctuated, due to both the domestic situation in the 40s and 50s in Cuba, U. S. immigration policies, plus intermittent anti-immigrant sentiment. Cuban migration in those years included persons who could afford to leave the country and live abroad; the Cuban population registered in the United States for 1958 was around 125,000 people, including descendants.

Of these, more than 50,000 remained in the United States after the revolution of 1959. After the Cuban revolution led by F