Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin was an English comic actor and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, "The Tramp", is considered one of the most important figures in the history of the film industry, his career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977, encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin's childhood in London was one of poverty and hardship, as his father was absent and his mother struggled financially, he was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine; when he was 14, his mother was committed to a mental asylum. Chaplin began performing at an early age, touring music halls and working as a stage actor and comedian. At 19, he was signed to the prestigious Fred Karno company, he began appearing in 1914 for Keystone Studios. He soon formed a large fan base, he directed his own films and continued to hone his craft as he moved to the Essanay and First National corporations.
By 1918, he was one of the best-known figures in the world. In 1919, Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists which gave him complete control over his films, his first feature-length film was The Kid, followed by A Woman of Paris, The Gold Rush, The Circus. He refused to move to sound films in the 1930s, instead producing City Lights and Modern Times without dialogue, he became political, his next film The Great Dictator satirized Adolf Hitler. The 1940s were a decade marked with controversy for Chaplin, his popularity declined rapidly, he was accused of communist sympathies, while he created scandal through his involvement in a paternity suit and his marriages to much younger women. An FBI investigation was opened, Chaplin was forced to leave the United States and settle in Switzerland, he abandoned the Tramp in his films, which include Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight, A King in New York, A Countess from Hong Kong. Chaplin wrote, produced, starred in, composed the music for most of his films.
He was a perfectionist, his financial independence enabled him to spend years on the development and production of a picture. His films are characterized by slapstick combined with pathos, typified in the Tramp's struggles against adversity. Many contain political themes, as well as autobiographical elements, he received an Honorary Academy Award for "the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century" in 1972, as part of a renewed appreciation for his work. He continues to be held in high regard, with The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator ranked on lists of the greatest films of all time. Charles Spencer Chaplin was born on 16 April 1889 to Charles Chaplin Sr.. There is no official record of his birth, although Chaplin believed he was born at East Street, Walworth, in South London, his mother and father had married four years at which time Charles Sr. became the legal guardian of Hannah's illegitimate son, Sydney John Hill. At the time of his birth, Chaplin's parents were both music hall entertainers.
Hannah, the daughter of a shoemaker, had a brief and unsuccessful career under the stage name Lily Harley, while Charles Sr. a butcher's son, was a popular singer. Although they never divorced, Chaplin's parents were estranged by around 1891; the following year, Hannah gave birth to a third son – George Wheeler Dryden – fathered by the music hall entertainer Leo Dryden. The child was taken by Dryden at six months old, did not re-enter Chaplin's life for 30 years. Chaplin's childhood was fraught with poverty and hardship, making his eventual trajectory "the most dramatic of all the rags to riches stories told" according to his authorised biographer David Robinson. Chaplin's early years were spent with his mother and brother Sydney in the London district of Kennington; as the situation deteriorated, Chaplin was sent to Lambeth Workhouse. The council housed him at the Central London District School for paupers, which Chaplin remembered as "a forlorn existence", he was reunited with his mother 18 months before Hannah was forced to readmit her family to the workhouse in July 1898.
The boys were promptly sent to another institution for destitute children. In September 1898, Hannah was committed to Cane Hill mental asylum – she had developed a psychosis brought on by an infection of syphilis and malnutrition. For the two months she was there and his brother Sydney were sent to live with their father, whom the young boys scarcely knew. Charles Sr. was by a severe alcoholic, life there was bad enough to provoke a visit from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Chaplin's father died two years at 38 years old, from cirrhosis of the liver. Hannah entered a period of remission but, in May 1903, became ill again. Chaplin 14, had the task of taking his mother to the infirmary, from where she was sent back to Cane Hill, he lived alone for several days, searching for food and sleeping rough, until Sydney – who had enrolled in the Navy two years earlier – returned. Hannah was released from the asylum eight months but in March 1905, her illness returned, this time permanently.
"There was nothing we could do but accept poor mother's fate", Chaplin wrote, a
Maxwell Anderson
James Maxwell Anderson was an American playwright, poet and lyricist. Anderson was born in Atlantic, the second of eight children to William Lincoln "Link" Anderson, a Baptist minister, Charlotte Perrimela Stephenson, both of Scots and Irish descent, his family lived on his maternal grandmother Sheperd's farm in Atlantic moved to Andover, where his father became a railroad fireman while studying to become a minister. They moved to follow their father's ministerial posts, Maxwell was sick, missing a great deal of school, he used his time sick in bed to read voraciously, both his parents and Aunt Emma were storytellers, which contributed to Anderson's love of literature. During a visit to his grandmother's house in Atlantic, at age 11, he met the first love of his life, Hallie Loomis, a older girl from a wealthier family, his autobiographical tale, Morning and Night told of rape and sadomasochism on the farm. It was published under John Nairne Michealson, to prevent offending family; the Andersons bounced between Andover, Richmond Center, Townville, Pa.
Edinboro, Pa. McKeesport, Pa. New Brighton, Pa. Harrisburg, Pa. to Jamestown, North Dakota in 1907, where Anderson attended Jamestown High School, graduating in 1908. As an undergraduate, he waited tables and worked at the night copy desk of the Grand Forks Herald, was active in the school's literary and dramatic societies, he obtained a BA in English Literature from the University of North Dakota in 1911. He became the principal of a high school in Minnewaukan, North Dakota teaching English there, but was fired in 1913 for making pacifist statements to his students, he entered Stanford University, obtaining an M. A. in English Literature in 1914. He became a high school English teacher in San Francisco: after three years he became chairman of the English department at Whittier College in 1917, he was fired after a year for public statements supporting Arthur Camp, a jailed student seeking status as a conscientious objector. Anderson moved to Palo Alto to write for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, but was fired for writing an editorial stating that it would be impossible for Germany to pay off its war debt.
So he moved to San Francisco to write for the San Francisco Chronicle, but was fired after contracting the Spanish flu and missing work. Alvin Johnson hired Anderson to move to New York City and write about politics for The New Republic in 1918, but he was fired after an argument with Editor-in-Chief Herbert David Croly. Anderson found work at The New York Globe, the New York World. In 1921, he founded The Measure: A Journal of a magazine devoted to verse, he wrote his first play, White Desert, in 1923. Afterwards he resigned from the World, his plays are in varying styles, Anderson was one of the few modern playwrights to make extensive use of blank verse. Some of these were adapted as movies, Anderson wrote the screenplays of other authors' plays and novels – All Quiet on the Western Front and Death Takes a Holiday – in addition to books of poetry and essays, his first Broadway hit was the 1924 World War I comedy-drama, What Price Glory, written with Laurence Stallings. The play made use of profanity.
But when the chief censor was found to have written far more obscene letters to General Chamberlaine, he was discredited: soldiers did speak that way. The only one of his plays that he himself adapted to the screen was Joan of Lorraine, which became the film Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman, with a screenplay by Anderson and Andrew Solt; when Bergman and her director changed much of his dialogue to make Joan "a plaster saint" he called her a "big, goddamn Swede!" Anderson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his political drama Both Your Houses, twice received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, for Winterset, High Tor. Anderson enjoyed great commercial success with a series of plays set during the reign of the Tudor family, who ruled England and Ireland from 1485 until 1603. One play in particular – Anne of the Thousand Days – the story of Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn – was a hit on the stage in 1948, but did not reach movie screens for 21 years, it opened on Broadway starring Rex Harrison and Joyce Redman, became a 1969 movie with Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold.
Margaret Furse won an Oscar for the film's costume designs. Another of his Tudor plays, Elizabeth the Queen opened in 1930 with Lynn Fontanne as Elizabeth and Alfred Lunt as Lord Essex, it was adapted to the screen as The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. Directed by John Ford, Mary of Scotland was an adaptation of his play of the same name involving Elizabeth I, starring Katharine Hepburn as Mary, Queen of Scots, Fredric March as the Earl of Bothwell, Florence Eldridge as Elizabeth; the original play had been a hit on Broadway starring Helen Hayes in the title role. His play The Wingless Victory was written in verse and premiered in 1936 with Broadway actress Katharine Cornell in the lead role, it received mixed reviews. Honorary awards include the Gold Medal in Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954, an honorary doctor of literature degree from Columbia University in 1946, an honorary doctor of humanities degree from the University
H. L. Mencken
Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. He commented on the social scene, music, prominent politicians and contemporary movements, his satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial" gained him attention. As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States; as an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of religion and representative democracy, the latter of which he viewed as systems in which inferior men dominated their superiors. Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress, was critical of osteopathic and chiropractic medicine, he was an ardent critic of economics. Mencken opposed both American entry into World War I and World War II, his diary indicates that he was a racist and antisemite, who used coarse language and slurs to describe various ethnic and racial groups.
Mencken at times seemed to show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism, though never in its American form. "War is a good thing," he once wrote, "because it is honest, it admits the central fact of human nature... A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid."His longtime home in the Union Square neighborhood of West Baltimore was turned into a city museum, the H. L. Mencken House, his papers were distributed among various city and university libraries, with the largest collection held in the Mencken Room at the central branch of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. Mencken was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 12, 1880, he was August Mencken, Sr. a cigar factory owner. He spoke German in his childhood; when Henry was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street facing Union Square park in the Union Square neighborhood of old West Baltimore. Apart from five years of married life, Mencken was to live in that house for the rest of his life. In his best-selling memoir Happy Days, he described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure and happy."When he was nine years old, he read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which he described as "the most stupendous event in my life".
He became determined to read voraciously. In one winter while in high school he read Thackeray and "proceeded backward to Addison, Pope, Swift and the other magnificos of the Eighteenth century", he became an ardent fan of Kipling and Thomas Huxley. As a boy, Mencken had practical interests and chemistry in particular, had a home chemistry laboratory in which he performed experiments of his own devising, some of them inadvertently dangerous, he began his primary education in the mid-1880s at Professor Knapp's School on the east side of Holliday Street between East Lexington and Fayette Streets, next to the Holliday Street Theatre and across from the newly constructed Baltimore City Hall. The site today is the War Memorial and City Hall Plaza laid out in 1926 in memory of World War I dead. At fifteen, in June 1896, he graduated as valedictorian from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, at the time a males-only mathematics and science-oriented public high school, he worked for three years in his father's cigar factory.
He disliked the work the sales aspect of it, resolved to leave, with or without his father's blessing. In early 1898 he took a writing class at the Cosmopolitan University; this was to be the entirety of Mencken's formal education in any other subject. Upon his father's death a few days after Christmas in the same year, the business reverted to his uncle, Mencken was free to pursue his career in journalism, he applied in February 1899 to the Morning Herald newspaper and was hired part-time, but still kept his position at the factory for a few months. In June he was hired as a full-time reporter. Mencken served as a reporter at the Herald for six years. Less than two and a half years after the Great Baltimore Fire, the paper was purchased in June 1906 by Charles H. Grasty, the owner and editor of The News since 1892, competing owner and publisher Gen. Felix Agnus, of the town's oldest and largest daily, The Baltimore American, they proceeded to divide the staff and resources of The Herald between them.
Mencken moved to The Baltimore Sun, where he worked for Charles H. Grasty, he continued to contribute to The Sun, The Evening Sun and The Sunday Sun full-time until 1948, when he stopped writing after suffering a stroke. Mencken began writing the editorials and opinion pieces. On the side, he wrote short stories, a novel, poetry, which he revealed. In 1908, he became a literary critic for The Smart Set magazine, in 1924 he and George Jean Nathan founded and edited The American Mercury, published by Alfred A. Knopf, it soon developed a national circulation and became influential on college campuses across America. In 1933, Mencken resigned as editor. In 1930, Mencken married Sara Haardt, a German American professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and an author eighteen years his junior. Haardt had led efforts in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment; the two met in 1923. The marriage made national headlines, many were surprised that Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and, well known for mocking relatio
Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Eugene Manlove Rhodes was an American writer, nicknamed the "cowboy chronicler". Rhodes was born in Tecumseh, Nebraska, to Hinman Rhodes and Julia Manlove who were wed 5 March 1868 at Rushville in Schuyler County, Illinois, he "fell in love" with the state. By age sixteen, he was an accomplished stonemason and road builder, he helped build the road from New Mexico, to Tularosa, New Mexico. Rhodes was an avid reader, he was self-educated in his youth. In 1888, he studied at the University of Pacific in California, he began publishing anonymous works in the college newspaper. In 1890, he was unable to continue his studies due to financial problems, his first non-anonymous work was the poem "Charlie Graham". In 1899, Rhodes married a widow with 2 sons, he spent the next two decades away from New Mexico at her home in New York. He published seven novels during this time, he and his wife returned to New Mexico in 1926. They spent less than a year living in Santa Fe. After that they lived in Alamogordo; when they could no longer afford rent there, Albert Bacon Fall gave them a house at White Mountain near Three Rivers, New Mexico.
His wife is buried in the Riverside Cemetery at Apalachin. In 1930, Rhodes's poor health forced him to move to California, he died four years and, per his request, he was buried in the San Andres Mountains. He published ten books between 1910 and 1934. Most of his works were published in newspapers and magazines before they were published individually. Despite his literary success, he was not financially successful. Alamogordo Public Library holds a collection of books, clippings and original manuscripts related to Rhodes; the library's Eugene Manlove Rhodes Room houses this collection and the library's other Southwest books. Rhodes is credited with inventing the phrase'Land of Enchantment.' In 1911, he published “A Number of Things,” a story in which he described the Socorro area in 1900 as “A land of mighty mountains, far seen, gloriously tinted, misty opal and amethyst. Those same opalescent hills, seen closer, are decked with barbaric colors—reds, yellows or pinks, brown or green or gray. <Saturday Evening Post> He used the phrase in the 1914 novelette "Bransford In Arcadia,"<Saturday Evening Post> and it was made the official state nickname of New Mexico.
In 1937 the New Mexico Tourist Bureau published a sixteen-page pamphlet Welcome to the Land of Enchantment. The nickname appeared on a road map that year, it had appeared earlier on Lilian Whiting’s The Land of Enchantment: From Pike’s Peak to the Pacific, published 1906, a dedication to Major John Wesley Powell, “the great explorer.” Good men and true. Illustrations by H. T. Dunn, 1910 Bransford in Arcadia. T. Dunn, 1916 West is West, 1917 Stepsons of light, 1921 Say now shibboleth, 1921 Copper Streak Trail 1922 Once in the saddle, Pasó por aquí, 1927 Trusty knaves, 1933 Penalosa, 1934 Beyond the desert, 1934 The Proud Sheriff, 1935 Little World Waddies, 1946 Best novels and stories. Introd. by J. Frank Dobie, 1949 Sunset Land, 1955 Bar Cross man. H. Hutchinson. 1956 Rhodes reader. Selected by W. H. Hutchinson, 1957 Recognition: the poems of Eugene Manlove Rhodes / illustrated by Martha Julian, 1997 "Inventory of the Eugene Manlove Rhodes Collection, 1916-1972". Rocky Mountain Online Archive. University of New Mexico, University Libraries, Center for Southwest Research.
2000. Retrieved 28 July 2009. Works by Eugene Manlove Rhodes at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Eugene Manlove Rhodes at Internet Archive Eugene Manlove Rhodes papers, MSS 859 at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University
Boxing
Boxing is a combat sport in which two people wearing protective gloves, throw punches at each other for a predetermined amount of time in a boxing ring. Amateur boxing is both an Olympic and Commonwealth Games sport and is a common fixture in most international games—it has its own World Championships. Boxing is overseen by a referee over a series of one- to three-minute intervals called rounds; the result is decided when an opponent is deemed incapable to continue by a referee, is disqualified for breaking a rule, or resigns by throwing in a towel. If a fight completes all of its allocated rounds, the victor is determined by judges' scorecards at the end of the contest. In the event that both fighters gain equal scores from the judges, professional bouts are considered a draw. In Olympic boxing, because a winner must be declared, judges award the content to one fighter on technical criteria. While humans have fought in hand-to-hand combat since the dawn of human history, the earliest evidence of fist-fighting sporting contests date back to the ancient Near East in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC.
The earliest evidence of boxing rules date back to Ancient Greece, where boxing was established as an Olympic game in 688 BC. Boxing evolved from 16th- and 18th-century prizefights in Great Britain, to the forerunner of modern boxing in the mid-19th century with the 1867 introduction of the Marquess of Queensberry Rules; the earliest known depiction of boxing comes from a Sumerian relief in Iraq from the 3rd millennium BC. Depictions from the 2nd millennium BC are found in reliefs from the Mesopotamian nations of Assyria and Babylonia, in Hittite art from Asia Minor. A relief sculpture from Egyptian Thebes shows both spectators; these early Middle-Eastern and Egyptian depictions showed contests where fighters were either bare-fisted or had a band supporting the wrist. The earliest evidence of fist fighting with the use of gloves can be found on Minoan Crete. Various types of boxing existed in ancient India; the earliest references to musti-yuddha come from classical Vedic epics such as the Ramayana and Rig Veda.
The Mahabharata describes two combatants boxing with clenched fists and fighting with kicks, finger strikes, knee strikes and headbutts. Duels were fought to the death. During the period of the Western Satraps, the ruler Rudradaman - in addition to being well-versed in "the great sciences" which included Indian classical music, Sanskrit grammar, logic - was said to be an excellent horseman, elephant rider and boxer; the Gurbilas Shemi, an 18th-century Sikh text, gives numerous references to musti-yuddha. In Ancient Greece boxing was enjoyed consistent popularity. In Olympic terms, it was first introduced in the 23rd Olympiad, 688 BC; the boxers would wind leather thongs around their hands. There were no boxers fought until one of them acknowledged defeat or could not continue. Weight categories were not used; the style of boxing practiced featured an advanced left leg stance, with the left arm semi-extended as a guard, in addition to being used for striking, with the right arm drawn back ready to strike.
It was the head of the opponent, targeted, there is little evidence to suggest that targeting the body was common. Boxing was a popular spectator sport in Ancient Rome. In order for the fighters to protect themselves against their opponents they wrapped leather thongs around their fists. Harder leather was used and the thong soon became a weapon; the Romans introduced metal studs to the thongs to make the cestus. Fighting events were held at Roman Amphitheatres; the Roman form of boxing was a fight until death to please the spectators who gathered at such events. However in times, purchased slaves and trained combat performers were valuable commodities, their lives were not given up without due consideration. Slaves were used against one another in a circle marked on the floor; this is. In AD 393, during the Roman gladiator period, boxing was abolished due to excessive brutality, it was not until the late 16th century. Records of Classical boxing activity disappeared after the fall of the Western Roman Empire when the wearing of weapons became common once again and interest in fighting with the fists waned.
However, there are detailed records of various fist-fighting sports that were maintained in different cities and provinces of Italy between the 12th and 17th centuries. There was a sport in ancient Rus called Kulachniy Boy or "Fist Fighting"; as the wearing of swords became less common, there was renewed interest in fencing with the fists. The sport would resurface in England during the early 16th century in the form of bare-knuckle boxing sometimes referred to as prizefighting; the first documented account of a bare-knuckle fight in England appeared in 1681 in the London Protestant Mercury, the first English bare-knuckle champion was James Figg in 1719. This is the time when the word "boxing" first came to be used; this earliest form of modern boxing was different. Contests in Mr. Figg's time, in addition to fist fighting contained fencing and cudgeling. On 6 January 1681, the first recorded boxing match took place in Britain when Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle engineered a bout between his butler and his butcher with the latter winning the prize.
Early fighting had no written rules. There were no weight divisions or round limits, no referee. In general, it was chaotic. An early article on boxing was published i
Rupert Hughes
Rupert Hughes was an American novelist, film director, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, military officer, music composer. He was the brother of Sr. and uncle of billionaire Howard R. Hughes, Jr.. His three-volume scholarly biography of George Washington broke new ground in demythologizing Washington and was well received by historians. A staunch anti-Communist, in the 1940s he served as president of the American Writers Association, a group of anti-Communist writers. Hughes was born on January 31, 1872, in Lancaster, the son of Jean Amelia and Judge Felix Moner Hughes, he spent his early years in the Lancaster area until age seven when the family moved to Keokuk, where his father established a successful law practice. Hughes first published a poem while still a child growing up in Lancaster. After receiving his basic public education in Keokuk and at a private military academy near St. Charles, Missouri, he attended Adelbert College in Ohio, earning a B. A. in 1892 and M. A. in 1894. Intending a career teaching English Literature, Hughes attended Yale University, earning a second M.
A. degree in 1899. By the time of his Yale degree, Hughes had given up the idea of a staid life in academia for a new career as an author, his first book, 1898's The Lakerim Athletic Club, came from a serialized magazine story for boys. Hughes blurred the lines of job description in his early years, working at various times as a reporter for the New York Journal and editor for various magazines including Current Literature, all the while continuing to write short stories and plays, his first published novel not serialized elsewhere was The Whirlwind, published in 1902. Believed to be influenced by wartime adventures of his father, the book was set in Civil War-era Missouri. Hughes moved to London, England in 1901 where he edited The Historians' History of the World returned to New York City to help edit the Encyclopædia Britannica from 1902 to 1905. Hughes' Musical Guide is notable for including a definition for zzxjoanw, a fictitious entry that fooled lexicographers for seventy years; some of Hughes' most notable early writing involved music.
His American Composers, Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Songs by Thirty Americans and Music Lovers' Cyclopedia were all well received by the public and critics alike. Hughes was a musician and composed several songs including ones for his first venture as a playwright, the musical comedy The Bathing Girl. In recognition of his musical efforts Hughes was elected an honorary member of the Alpha chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity at the New England Conservatory in Boston in 1917. In addition to novels, Hughes was a prolific writer of short stories, with varying numbers well over one hundred credited to him. In a Little Town allowed Hughes to draw on his small-town roots with fourteen short stories about fictionalized people around Keokuk. In 1920 Harper published Mama and other Unimportant People, a collection of short stories and novelettes which contained the critically acclaimed short story The Stick-in-the-Muds Also in the collection was The Father of Waters, which would be designated as, republished in, The World's 50 Best Short Novels, a ten-volume compilation published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1929.
Hughes endorsed the Technocracy movement. George WashingtonIn January 1926, Hughes was asked to speak at a meeting of the Sons of the American Revolution in Washington D. C.. During the speech he advocated for more truth in the portrayal of the nation's first President, pointing out such fables as chopping down a cherry tree, drawing from Washington's own diary to illustrate some of the man's more human, if less savory and activities; some in the crowd heckled Hughes during his speech and gave a disingenuous report of its content to a newspaper. The story spread across America, with the misquoted Hughes lambasted by everyone from newspaper editors to religious figures and temperance leaders coast-to-coast. Hughes began the first of a projected four-volume biography of Washington in October 1926. Based on extensive research, George Washington: The Human Being and the Hero covered his life up to the age of thirty. Volume two, George Washington: The Rebel and the Patriot, examined Washington's life prior to and in the early years of the American Revolution from 1762 to 1777.
The third volume, George Washington: Savior of the States, 1777–1781 further examined Washington as a military leader during some of the revolutions darkest days. Hailed by historians as a groundbreaking work, it repaired much of the damage done to Hughes' reputation. An intended fourth volume covering George Washington and his role as the first President of the USA was never completed. Hughes' first foray into the tough world of New York City theater was a failure. In 1895, with financial backing from his father, Hughes and a business partner staged the aforementioned The Bathing Girl at the Fifth Avenue Theater, it lasted only one performance. He persevered however, between 1902 and 1909 no less than six Hughes-penned plays were staged by touring companies across the United States and in London, England. Hughes cast his second wife, Adelaide Mould Bissell, alongside a young Douglas Fairbanks in his first New York theater role in the 1908 production All for a Girl, his 1909 play The Bridge, starring Guy Bates Post, ran in New York for a respectable thirty-three performances before going on tour for three years.
Hughes' next effort, 1910's Two Women, starring the famed stage actress Leslie Carter, made forty-seven performances before touring extensively. Excuse Me, a comedy
