Hopewell tradition
The Hopewell tradition describes the common aspects of the Native American culture that flourished along rivers in the northeastern and midwestern United States from 100 BCE to 500 CE, in the Middle Woodland period. The Hopewell tradition was not a single culture or society, but a dispersed set of related populations, they were connected by a common network of trade routes, known as the Hopewell exchange system. At its greatest extent, the Hopewell exchange system ran from the Crystal River Indian Mounds in modern-day Florida as far north as the Canadian shores of Lake Ontario. Within this area, societies participated in a high degree of exchange with the highest amount of activity along waterways; the Hopewell exchange system received materials from all over. Most of the items traded were exotic materials and were received by people living in the major trading and manufacturing areas; these people converted the materials into products and exported them through local and regional exchange networks.
The objects created by the Hopewell exchange system spread far and wide and have been seen in many burials outside the Midwest. Although the origins of the Hopewell are still under discussion, the Hopewell culture can be considered a cultural climax. Hopewell populations originated in western New York and moved south into Ohio, where they built upon the local Adena mortuary tradition. Or, Hopewell was said to have originated in western Illinois and spread by diffusion... to southern Ohio. The Havana Hopewell tradition was thought to have spread up the Illinois River and into southwestern Michigan, spawning Goodall Hopewell; the name "Hopewell" was applied by Warren K. Moorehead after his explorations of the Hopewell Mound Group in Ross County, Ohio, in 1891 and 1892; the mound group itself was named after Mordecai Hopewell, whose family who owned the earthworks at the time. What any of the various groups now defined as Hopewellian called themselves is unknown, it is used to describe a wide scattering of people who lived near rivers in temporary settlements of 1-3 households and practiced a mixture of hunting and crop growing.
The Hopewell inherited from their Adena forebears an incipient social stratification. This increased social stability and reinforced sedentism, social stratification, specialized use of resources, population growth. Hopewell societies cremated most of their deceased and reserved burial for only the most important people. In some sites, hunters received a higher status in the community because their graves were more elaborate and contained more status goods; the Hopewellian peoples had leaders, but they were not like powerful rulers who could command armies of slaves and soldiers. These cultures accorded certain families a special place of privilege; some scholars suggest that these societies were marked by the emergence of "big-men". These leaders acquired their position because of their ability to persuade others to agree with them on important matters such as trade and religion, they perhaps were able to develop influence by the creation of reciprocal obligations with other important members of the community.
Whatever the source of their status and power, the emergence of "big-men" was another step toward the development of the structured and stratified sociopolitical organization called the chiefdom. The Hopewell settlements were linked by extensive and complex trading routes, which doubled as communication networks, bring people together for important ceremonies. Today, the best-surviving features of the Hopewell tradition era are mounds built for uncertain purposes. Great geometric earthworks are one of the most impressive Native American monuments throughout American prehistory. Eastern Woodlands mounds have various geometric shapes and rise to impressive heights; the gigantic sculpted earthworks took the shape of animals, birds, or writhing serpents. The function of the mounds is still under debate. Due to considerable evidence and surveys, plus the good survival condition of the largest mounds, more information can be obtained. Several scientists, including Dr. Bradley T. Lepper, Curator of Archaeology, Ohio Historical Society, hypothesize that the Octagon earthwork at Newark, was a lunar observatory oriented to the 18.6-year cycle of minimum and maximum lunar risings and settings on the local horizon.
The Octagon covers the size of 100 football pitches. Dr. John Eddy completed an unpublished survey in 1978, proposed a lunar major alignment for the Octagon. Ray Hively and Robert Horn of Earlham College in Richmond, were the first researchers to analyze numerous lunar sightlines at the Newark Earthworks and the High Banks Works in Chillicothe, Ohio. Christopher Turner noted that the Fairground Circle in Newark, Ohio aligns to the sunrise on May 4, i.e. that it marked the May cross-quarter sunrise. In 1983, Turner demonstrated that the Hopeton earthworks encode various sunrise and moonrise patterns, including the winter and summer solstices, the equinoxes, the cross-quarter days, the lunar maximum events, the lunar minimum events due to their precise straight and parallel lines. William F. Romain has written a book on the subject of "astronomers and magicians" at the earthworks. Many of the mounds contain various types of burials. Precious burial good have been found in the mounds; these include objects of adornment made of copper and obsidian, imported to the region hundreds of miles away.
Stone and ceramics were fashioned into intricate shapes. The Hopewell created artwork of the Americas. Most of their works had some religious significance, their graves were filled with neck
Newark Earthworks
The Newark Earthworks in Newark and Heath, consist of three sections of preserved earthworks: the Great Circle Earthworks, the Octagon Earthworks, the Wright Earthworks. This complex, built by the Hopewell culture between 100 CE and 500 CE, contains the largest earthen enclosures in the world, was about 3,000 acres in total extent. Less than 10 percent of the total site has been preserved since European-American settlement, it is operated as a state park by the Ohio History Connection. A designated National Historic Landmark, in 2006 the Newark Earthworks was designated as the "official prehistoric monument of the State of Ohio."This is part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, one of 14 sites nominated in January 2008 by the U. S. Department of the Interior for potential submission by the US to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Built by the Hopewell culture between 100 CE and 500 CE, the earthworks were used by the indigenous Native Americans as places of ceremony, social gathering, trade and honoring the dead.
The primary purpose of the Octagon earthwork was believed to have been scientific. Scholars have demonstrated that the Octagon Earthworks comprise a lunar observatory for tracking the moon's orbit during its 18.6-year cycle. While limited, the Newark Earthwork site is the largest surviving Hopewell earthwork complex in North America; the culture built many earthen mounds. Over decades, they built what is the single largest earthwork enclosure complex in the Ohio River Valley; the earthworks cover several square miles. The complex was one of hundreds of Native American ancient monuments identified and surveyed for the Smithsonian Institution in the mid-nineteenth century by Ephraim G. Squier and E. H. Davis, from 1837-1847, their detailed and measured plan of the site is shown on this page. The 1,054-foot -wide Newark Great Circle is one of the largest circular earthwork in the Americas, at least in construction effort. A 5-foot deep moat is encompassed by walls. Researchers have used archaeogeodesy and archaeoastronomy to analyze the placements, alignments and site-to-site interrelationships of the earthworks.
This research has revealed that the prehistoric cultures in the area had advanced scientific understanding which they used as the basis of their complex construction. Today, the Great Circle Earthworks are preserved in a public park in Heath. Fifty acres total, the Octagon Earthworks consists of an Observatory Mound, Observatory Circle, the connected Octagon, which span nearly 3,000 feet in length, it has eight 550-foot -long walls, from 5 feet to 6 feet high. The Octagon Earthworks are joined by parallel walls to a circular embankment enclosing 20 acres. In 1982 researchers from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana concluded that the complex was a lunar observatory, designed to track motions of the moon, including the northernmost point of the 18.6-year cycle of the lunar orbit. When viewed from the observatory mound, the moon rises at that time within one-half of a degree of the octagon's exact center; the earthwork is twice as precise as the complex at Stonehenge. From 1892 to 1908, the state of Ohio used the Octagon Earthworks as a militia encampment.
After this, the Newark Board of Trade owned the property, until 1918. In 1910, they leased the property to Mound Builders Country Club, which developed the site as a golf course; as a result of a Licking County Common Pleas Court case, a trustee was named to manage the property from 1918 to 1933. In 1997 the Ohio Historical Society signed a lease until 2078 with the country club. MBCC maintains and provides some public access to the land; some citizens believe. There has been increasing public interest in the earthworks. Activists have pressed for more public access to the site to witness the moonrise, which observance was planned in the design and construction by the original native builders; the Wright Earthworks consist of a fragment of a geometrically near-perfect square enclosure and part of one wall that formed a set of parallel embankments, which led from the enclosure to a large oval yard. The Newark square's sides ranged from about 940 feet to 940 feet in length, enclosing a total area of about 20 acres.
Much of the square enclosure and its associated mounds was destroyed during nineteenth-century European-American development: construction related to building the Ohio Canal, as well as the streets and houses of the city of Newark. Clearing and cultivation of fields for farming destroyed much of the monument; the remaining segment of one wall of the square is less than 200 feet long. The Wright Earthworks are named in honor of Mrs. Frances Rees Wright, who donated the site in 1934 to the Ohio Historical Society. Color photos are of the Great Circle, located in Heath; the black-and-white photos of the Octagon Earthworks in Newark were taken from the air in the 1980s, showing the interposition of country club golf sand traps and greens with the surviving parts of the ancient circles, Observatory Circle and Octagon. Earthwork Fort Ancient Hopewell Culture National Historical Park List of Hopewell sites Mound builder List of National Historic Landmarks in Ohio Newark Earthworks, The Ancient Ohio Trail Official website from the Ohio Historical Society The Newark Earthworks Center, The Ohio State University Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks UNESCO World Heritage Nomination The Great Circle Earthwork, Ohio The Octagon
United States Department of the Interior
The United States Department of the Interior is the United States federal executive department of the U. S. government responsible for the management and conservation of most federal lands and natural resources, the administration of programs relating to Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, territorial affairs, insular areas of the United States. About 75% of federal public land is managed by the department, with most of the remainder managed by the United States Department of Agriculture's United States Forest Service; the department is administered by the United States Secretary of the Interior, a member of the Cabinet of the President. The current Secretary is David Bernhardt, who serves in an acting capacity, concurrently serves in the Department as Deputy Secretary; the Inspector General position is vacant, with Mary Kendall serving as acting Inspector General. Despite its name, the Department of the Interior has a different role from that of the interior ministries of other nations, which are responsible for police matters and internal security.
In the United States, national security and immigration functions are performed by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice secondarily. The Department of the Interior has been humorously called "The Department of Everything Else" because of its broad range of responsibilities. A department for domestic concern was first considered by the 1st United States Congress in 1789, but those duties were placed in the Department of State; the idea of a separate domestic department continued to percolate for a half-century and was supported by Presidents from James Madison to James Polk. The 1846–48 Mexican–American War gave the proposal new steam as the responsibilities of the federal government grew. Polk's Secretary of the Treasury, Robert J. Walker, became a vocal champion of creating the new department. In 1849, Walker stated in his annual report that several federal offices were placed in departments with which they had little to do, he noted that the General Land Office had little to do with the Treasury and highlighted the Indian Affairs office, part of the Department of War, the Patent Office, part of the Department of State.
Walker argued that these and other bureaus should be brought together in a new Department of the Interior. A bill authorizing its creation of the department passed the House of Representatives on February 15, 1849, spent just over two weeks in the Senate; the department was established on March 3, 1849, the eve of President Zachary Taylor's inauguration, when the Senate voted 31 to 25 to create the department. Its passage was delayed by Democrats in Congress who were reluctant to create more patronage posts for the incoming Whig administration to fill; the first Secretary of the Interior was Thomas Ewing. Many of the domestic concerns the department dealt with were transferred to other departments. For example, the Department of Interior was responsible for water pollution control prior to the creation of the EPA. Other agencies became separate departments, such as the Bureau of Agriculture, which became the Department of Agriculture; however and natural resource management, American Indian affairs, wildlife conservation, territorial affairs remain the responsibilities of the Department of the Interior.
As of mid-2004, the department managed 507 million acres of surface land, or about one-fifth of the land in the United States. It manages 476 dams and 348 reservoirs through the Bureau of Reclamation, 410 national parks, seashore sites, etc. through the National Park Service, 544 national wildlife refuges through the Fish and Wildlife Service. Within the Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs handles some federal relations with Native Americans, while others are handled by the Office of Special Trustee; the current acting Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs is Lawrence S. Roberts, an enrolled member of the Oneida Tribe in Wisconsin; the department has been the subject of disputes over proper accounting for Native American Trusts set up to track the income and distribution of monies that are generated by the Trust and specific Native American lands, which the government leases for fees to companies that extract oil, timber and other resources. Several cases have sought an accounting of such funds from departments within the Interior and Treasury, in what has been a 15-year-old lawsuit.
Some Native American nations have sued the government over water-rights issues and their treaties with the US. In 2010 Congress passed the Claims Settlement Act of 2010, which provided $3.4 billion for the settlement of the Cobell v. Salazar class-action trust case and four Native American water rights cases; the $3.4 billion will be placed in a still-to-be-selected bank and $1.4 billion will go to individuals in the form of checks ranging from $500 to $1,500. A small group, such as members of the Osage tribe who benefit from huge Oklahoma oil revenues, will get far more, based on a formula incorporating their 10 highest years of income between 1985 and 2009; as important, $2 billion will be used to buy trust land from Native American owners at fair market prices, with the government returning the land to tribes. Nobody can be forced to sell. Assistant Secretary for Policy and Budget Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance Office of International Affairs Office of Native Hawaiian Relations Office of Restoration and Damage Assessment Office of Policy Analysis National Invasive Species Council Deputy Assistant Secretary for Budget, Finance and Acquisiti
Cremation
Cremation is the combustion and oxidation of cadavers to basic chemical compounds, such as gases and mineral fragments retaining the appearance of dry bone. Cremation may serve as a funeral or post-funeral rite as an alternative to the interment of an intact dead body in a coffin or casket. Cremated remains, which do not constitute a health risk, may be buried or interred in memorial sites or cemeteries, or they may be retained by relatives and dispersed in various ways. Cremation is an alternative in other forms of disposal in funeral practices; some families prefer to have the deceased present at the funeral with cremation to follow. In many countries, cremation is done in a crematorium. However, in the Indian subcontinent, notably modern-day India and Nepal, different methods, such as open-air cremation, are preferred. Cremation dates from at least 42,000 years ago in the archaeological record, with the Mungo Lady, the remains of a cremated body found at Lake Mungo, Australia. Alternative death rituals emphasizing one method of disposal of a body—inhumation, cremation, or exposure—have gone through periods of preference throughout history.
In the Middle East and Europe, both burial and cremation are evident in the archaeological record in the Neolithic era. Cultural groups had their own prohibitions; the ancient Egyptians developed an intricate transmigration-of-soul theology, which prohibited cremation. This was widely adopted by Semitic peoples; the Babylonians, according to Herodotus, embalmed their dead. Early Persians practiced cremation. Phoenicians practiced both burial. From the Cycladic civilisation in 3000 BCE until the Sub-Mycenaean era in 1200–1100 BCE, Greeks practiced inhumation. Cremation appeared around the 12th century BCE, constituting a new practice of burial influenced by Anatolia; until the Christian era, when inhumation again became the only burial practice, both combustion and inhumation had been practiced, depending on the era and location. Romans practiced both, with cremation associated with military honors. In Europe, there are traces of cremation dating to the Early Bronze Age in the Pannonian Plain and along the middle Danube.
The custom became dominant throughout Bronze Age Europe with the Urnfield culture. In the Iron Age, inhumation again becomes more common, but cremation persisted in the Villanovan culture and elsewhere. Homer's account of Patroclus' burial describes cremation with subsequent burial in a tumulus, similar to Urnfield burials, qualifying as the earliest description of cremation rites; this may be an anachronism, as during Mycenaean times burial was preferred, Homer may have been reflecting the more common use of cremation at the time the Iliad was written, centuries later. Criticism of burial rites is a common form of aspersion by competing religions and cultures, including the association of cremation with fire sacrifice or human sacrifice. Hinduism and Jainism are notable for not only prescribing cremation. Cremation in India is first attested in the Cemetery H culture, considered the formative stage of Vedic civilization; the Rigveda contains a reference to the emerging practice, in RV 10.15.14, where the forefathers "both cremated and uncremated" are invoked.
Cremation remained common but not universal, in ancient Rome. According to Cicero, in Rome, inhumation was considered the more archaic rite, while the most honoured citizens were most cremated—especially upper classes and members of imperial families; the rise of Christianity saw an end to cremation, being influenced by its roots in Judaism, the belief in the resurrection of the body, following the example of Christ's burial. Anthropologists have been able to track the advance of Christianity throughout Europe with the appearance of cemeteries. By the 5th century, with the spread of Christianity, the practice of burning bodies disappeared from Europe. In early Roman Britain, cremation was usual but diminished by the 4th century, it reappeared in the 5th and 6th centuries during the migration era, when sacrificed animals were sometimes included with the human bodies on the pyre, the deceased were dressed in costume and with ornaments for the burning. That custom was very widespread among the Germanic peoples of the northern continental lands from which the Anglo-Saxon migrants are supposed to have been derived, during the same period.
These ashes were thereafter deposited in a vessel of clay or bronze in an "urn cemetery". The custom again died out with the Christian conversion of the Anglo-Saxons or Early English during the 7th century, when Christian burial became general. In parts of Europe, cremation was forbidden by law, punishable by death if combined with Heathen rites. Cremation was sometimes used by Catholic authorities as part of punishment for Protestant heretics, which included burning at the stake. For example, the body of John Wycliff was exhumed years after his death and burned to ashes, with the ashes thrown in a river, explicitly as a posthumous punishment for his denial of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation; the first to advocate for the use of cremation was the physician Sir Thomas Browne in 1658. Honoretta Brooks Pratt became the first recorded cremated European individual in modern times when she died on 26 September 1769 and was illegally cremated at the burial ground on Hanover Square in London.
The organized movement to reinstate cremation as a viable meth
Mound Builders
The various cultures collectively termed "Mound Builders" were inhabitants of North America who, during a circa 5,000-year period, constructed various styles of earthen mounds for religious, ceremonial and elite residential purposes. These included the pre-Columbian cultures of the Archaic period, Woodland period, Mississippian period. Since the 19th century, the prevailing scholarly consensus has been that the mounds were constructed by indigenous peoples of the Americas. Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers met natives living in a number of Mississippian cities, described their cultures, left artifacts. Research and study of these cultures and peoples has been based on archaeology and anthropology; the namesake cultural trait of the Mound Builders was the building of other earthworks. These burial and ceremonial structures were flat-topped pyramids or platform mounds, flat-topped or rounded cones, elongated ridges, sometimes a variety of other forms, they were built as part of complex villages.
The early earthworks built in Louisiana around 3500 BCE are the only ones known to have been built by a hunter-gatherer culture. The best-known flat-topped pyramidal structure, which at more than 100 ft tall is the largest pre-Columbian earthwork north of Mexico, is Monks Mound at Cahokia in present-day Collinsville, Illinois. At its maximum about CE 1150, Cahokia was an urban settlement with 20,000–30,000 people; some effigy mounds were constructed in the outlines of culturally significant animals. The most famous effigy mound, Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, ranges from 1 to just over 3 ft tall. 20 ft wide, more than 1,330 ft long, shaped as an undulating serpent. Many different tribal groups and chiefdoms, involving an array of beliefs and unique cultures over thousands of years, built mounds as expressions of their cultures; the general term, "mound builder", covered their shared architectural practice of earthwork mound construction. This practice, believed to be associated with a cosmology that had a cross-cultural appeal, may indicate common cultural antecedents.
The first mound building was an early marker of political and social complexity among the cultures in the Eastern United States. Watson Brake in Louisiana, constructed about 3500 BCE during the Middle Archaic period, is the oldest dated mound complex in North America, it is one of 11 mound complexes from this period found in the Lower Mississippi Valley. These mound builders were organized; the most complete reference for these earthworks is Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, written by Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin H. Davis, it was published in 1848 by the Smithsonian Institution. Since many of the features which the authors documented have since been destroyed or diminished by farming and development, their surveys and descriptions are still used by modern archaeologists. All of the sites which they identified as located in Kentucky came from the manuscripts of C. S. Rafinesque. Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador, who during 1540–1542, traversed what became the Southeast United States, encountered many different mound-builder peoples descendants of the great Mississippian culture.
The mound-building tradition still existed in the southeast during the mid-16th century. De Soto observed people living in fortified towns with lofty mounds and plazas, surmised that many of the mounds served as foundations for priestly temples. Near present-day Augusta, Georgia, de Soto encountered a mound-building group ruled by a queen, Cofitachequi, she told him. The artist Jacques le Moyne, who had accompanied French settlers to northeastern Florida during the 1560s noted many Native American groups using existing mounds and constructing others, he produced a series of watercolor paintings depicting scenes of native life. Although most of his paintings have been lost, some engravings were copied from the originals and published in 1591 by a Flemish company. Among these is a depiction of the burial of an aboriginal Floridian tribal chief, an occasion of great mourning and ceremony; the original caption reads: Maturin Le Petit, a Jesuit priest, met the Natchez people as did Le Page du Pratz, a French explorer.
Both observed them in the area that became Mississippi. The Natchez were devout worshippers of the sun. Having a population of some 4,000, they occupied at least nine villages and were presided over by a paramount chief, known as the Great Sun, who wielded absolute power. Both observers noted the high temple mounds which the Natchez had built so that the Great Sun could commune with God, the sun, his large residence was built atop the highest mound, from "which, every morning, he greeted the rising sun, invoking thanks and blowing tobacco smoke to the four cardinal directions". Explorers to the same regions, only a few decades after mound-building settlements had been reported, found the regions depopulated, the residents vanished, the mounds untended. Since little violent conflict with Europeans had occurred in that area during that period, the most plausible explanation is that infectious diseases from the Old World, such as smallpox
United States Army
The United States Army is the land warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the seven uniformed services of the United States, is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution; as the oldest and most senior branch of the U. S. military in order of precedence, the modern U. S. Army has its roots in the Continental Army, formed to fight the American Revolutionary War —before the United States of America was established as a country. After the Revolutionary War, the Congress of the Confederation created the United States Army on 3 June 1784 to replace the disbanded Continental Army; the United States Army considers itself descended from the Continental Army, dates its institutional inception from the origin of that armed force in 1775. As a uniformed military service, the U. S. Army is part of the Department of the Army, one of the three military departments of the Department of Defense; the U. S. Army is headed by a civilian senior appointed civil servant, the Secretary of the Army and by a chief military officer, the Chief of Staff of the Army, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It is the largest military branch, in the fiscal year 2017, the projected end strength for the Regular Army was 476,000 soldiers. S. Army was 1,018,000 soldiers; as a branch of the armed forces, the mission of the U. S. Army is "to fight and win our Nation's wars, by providing prompt, land dominance, across the full range of military operations and the spectrum of conflict, in support of combatant commanders"; the branch participates in conflicts worldwide and is the major ground-based offensive and defensive force of the United States. The United States Army serves as the land-based branch of the U. S. Armed Forces. Section 3062 of Title 10, U. S. Code defines the purpose of the army as: Preserving the peace and security and providing for the defense of the United States, the Commonwealths and possessions and any areas occupied by the United States Supporting the national policies Implementing the national objectives Overcoming any nations responsible for aggressive acts that imperil the peace and security of the United StatesIn 2018, the Army Strategy 2018 articulated an eight-point addendum to the Army Vision for 2028.
While the Army Mission remains constant, the Army Strategy builds upon the Army's Brigade Modernization by adding focus to Corps and Division-level echelons. Modernization, reform for high-intensity conflict, Joint multi-domain operations are added to the strategy, to be completed by 2028; the Continental Army was created on 14 June 1775 by the Second Continental Congress as a unified army for the colonies to fight Great Britain, with George Washington appointed as its commander. The army was led by men who had served in the British Army or colonial militias and who brought much of British military heritage with them; as the Revolutionary War progressed, French aid and military thinking helped shape the new army. A number of European soldiers came on their own to help, such as Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who taught Prussian Army tactics and organizational skills; the army fought numerous pitched battles and in the South in 1780–1781, at times using the Fabian strategy and hit-and-run tactics, under the leadership of Major General Nathanael Greene, hit where the British were weakest to wear down their forces.
Washington led victories against the British at Trenton and Princeton, but lost a series of battles in the New York and New Jersey campaign in 1776 and the Philadelphia campaign in 1777. With a decisive victory at Yorktown and the help of the French, the Continental Army prevailed against the British. After the war, the Continental Army was given land certificates and disbanded in a reflection of the republican distrust of standing armies. State militias became the new nation's sole ground army, with the exception of a regiment to guard the Western Frontier and one battery of artillery guarding West Point's arsenal. However, because of continuing conflict with Native Americans, it was soon realized that it was necessary to field a trained standing army; the Regular Army was at first small and after General St. Clair's defeat at the Battle of the Wabash, the Regular Army was reorganized as the Legion of the United States, established in 1791 and renamed the United States Army in 1796; the War of 1812, the second and last war between the United States and Great Britain, had mixed results.
The U. S. Army did not conquer Canada but it did destroy Native American resistance to expansion in the Old Northwest and it validated its independence by stopping two major British invasions in 1814 and 1815. After taking control of Lake Erie in 1813, the U. S. Army seized parts of western Upper Canada, burned York and defeated Tecumseh, which caused his Western Confederacy to collapse. Following U. S. victories in the Canadian province of Upper Canada, British troops who had dubbed the U. S. Army "Regulars, by God!", were able to capture and burn Washington, defended by militia, in 1814. The regular army, however proved they were professional and capable of defeating the British army during the invasions of Plattsburgh and Baltimore, prompting British agreement on the rejected terms of a status quo ante bellum. Two weeks after a treaty was signed, Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans and Siege of Fort St. Philip, became a national hero. U. S. troops and sailors captured HMS Cyane and Penguin in the final engagements of the war.
Per the treaty, both sides (the United S
British Museum
The British Museum, in the Bloomsbury area of London, United Kingdom, is a public institution dedicated to human history and culture. Its permanent collection of some eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence, having been sourced during the era of the British Empire, it documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. It was the first public national museum in the world; the British Museum was established in 1753 based on the collections of the Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It first opened in Montagu House, on the site of the current building, its expansion over the following 250 years was a result of expanding British colonisation and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881. In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997.
The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture and Sport, as with all national museums in the UK it charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions. Its ownership of some of its most famous objects originating in other countries is disputed and remains the subject of international controversy, most notably in the case of the Parthenon Marbles. Although today principally a museum of cultural art objects and antiquities, the British Museum was founded as a "universal museum", its foundations lie in the will of the Irish physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, a London-based doctor and scientist from Ulster. During the course of his lifetime, after he married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter, Sloane gathered a large collection of curiosities and, not wishing to see his collection broken up after death, he bequeathed it to King George II, for the nation, for a sum of £20,000. At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds including some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Sudan, Greece, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas.
On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his Royal Assent to the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum. The British Museum Act 1753 added two other libraries to the Sloane collection, namely the Cottonian Library, assembled by Sir Robert Cotton, dating back to Elizabethan times, the Harleian Library, the collection of the Earls of Oxford, they were joined in 1757 by the "Old Royal Library", now the Royal manuscripts, assembled by various British monarchs. Together these four "foundation collections" included many of the most treasured books now in the British Library including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf; the British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum – national, belonging to neither church nor king open to the public and aiming to collect everything. Sloane's collection, while including a vast miscellany of objects, tended to reflect his scientific interests; the addition of the Cotton and Harley manuscripts introduced a literary and antiquarian element and meant that the British Museum now became both National Museum and library.
The body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House, as a location for the museum, which it bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. The trustees rejected Buckingham House, on the site now occupied by Buckingham Palace, on the grounds of cost and the unsuitability of its location. With the acquisition of Montagu House, the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759. At this time, the largest parts of collection were the library, which took up the majority of the rooms on the ground floor of Montagu House and the natural history objects, which took up an entire wing on the second state storey of the building. In 1763, the trustees of the British Museum, under the influence of Peter Collinson and William Watson, employed the former student of Carl Linnaeus, Daniel Solander to reclassify the natural history collection according to the Linnaean system, thereby making the Museum a public centre of learning accessible to the full range of European natural historians.
In 1823, King George IV gave the King's Library assembled by George III, Parliament gave the right to a copy of every book published in the country, thereby ensuring that the museum's library would expand indefinitely. During the few years after its foundation the British Museum received several further gifts, including the Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts and David Garrick's library of 1,000 printed plays; the predominance of natural history and manuscripts began to lessen when in 1772 the museum acquired for £8,410 its first significant antiquities in Sir William Hamilton's "first" collection of Greek vases. From 1778, a display of objects from the South Seas brought back from the round-the-world voyages of Captain James Cook and the travels of other explorers fascinated visitors with a glimpse of unknown lands; the bequest of a collection of books, engraved gems, coins and drawings by Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode in 1800 did much to raise the museum's reputation. The museum's first notable addition towards its collection of antiquities, since its foundation, was by Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador to Naples, who sold his collection of Greek and Roman artefacts to
