1.
Fort Mason
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Fort Mason served as an Army post for more than 100 years, initially as a coastal defense site and subsequently as a military port facility. During World War II, it was the port for the Pacific campaign. Today it is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and it is a National Historic Landmark District with over 49 buildings of historic significance, spread over 1,200 acres. Fort Mason can be split into two distinct areas, the upper area, sometimes called Fort Mason, is situated on a headland and was the site of the original coastal fortifications. The lower area, Fort Mason Center, is situated close to level to the west of Upper Fort Mason. The Marina Green lies to the west of Fort Mason, while Aquatic Park is to the east, the nucleus of Fort Mason was a private property owned by John C. Frémont, the explorer of the US west, who also spearheaded the conquest of California from Mexico. Appointed a Major General in the Union army at the start of the Civil War, in 1863, the government seized the property without payment, by executive order of Lincoln, on the grounds it was needed for the war effort. Frémont would again contest the US presidency in 1864, running as the candidate of radical Republicans, the 1968 lawsuit was perhaps the last shot of a century-long legal struggle to obtain compensation for the seized realty. In 1870, the government returned property to 49 parties in the vicinity, but not to Frémont, but in 1968 the Frémont heirs complained it had failed to carry out this direction, with John Frémont then recently dead and his widow Jessie nearly 70 years old. The Civil War prompted the construction of coastal defense batteries located inside the Golden Gate. A breast-high wall of brick and mounts for six 10-inch Rodman cannons, excavation in the early 1980s uncovered the well-preserved remains of the western-half of the temporary battery, and it has now been restored to its condition during the Civil War. The fort was named Fort Mason in 1882, after Richard Barnes Mason, President Grover Cleveland established the Endicott Board in 1885 for the purpose of modernizing the nations coastal fortifications. Chaired by Secretary of War William Endicott, the board recommended new defenses at 22 U. S. seaports, as a result, an extensive series of forts, batteries, and guns were built on the harbor, including Fort Mason. The piers and sheds of Lower Fort Mason were originally built from 1912 to warehouse army supplies, by this time, the US Army began to build new bases in Hawaii, the Philippines, and various other Pacific islands. Most of the materiel for those bases was shipped through San Francisco, by 1915, the three piers together with their associated warehouse had been completed, and Fort Mason Tunnel driven under Upper Fort Mason to connect with the railroad network along the Embarcadero. With these new facilities, Fort Mason was transformed from a defense post into a logistical. The Army ferry USAT General Frank M. Coxe provided scheduled transportation from Fort Mason to the center at Fort McDowell on Angel Island up to eight times per day during the war
2.
San Francisco
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San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856, after three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines, San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, as of 2016, San Francisco is ranked high on world liveability rankings. The earliest archaeological evidence of habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7,1846, during the Mexican–American War, montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers, with their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Some of these approximately 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships, saloons and hotels, many were left to rot, by 1851 the harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships. By 1870 Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land, buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings. California was quickly granted statehood in 1850 and the U. S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate, silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush
3.
California
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California is the most populous state in the United States and the third most extensive by area. Located on the western coast of the U. S, California is bordered by the other U. S. states of Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona and shares an international border with the Mexican state of Baja California. Los Angeles is Californias most populous city, and the second largest after New York City. The Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nations second- and fifth-most populous urban regions, California also has the nations most populous county, Los Angeles County, and its largest county by area, San Bernardino County. The Central Valley, an agricultural area, dominates the states center. What is now California was first settled by various Native American tribes before being explored by a number of European expeditions during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish Empire then claimed it as part of Alta California in their New Spain colony. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821 following its war for independence. The western portion of Alta California then was organized as the State of California, the California Gold Rush starting in 1848 led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale emigration from the east and abroad with an accompanying economic boom. If it were a country, California would be the 6th largest economy in the world, fifty-eight percent of the states economy is centered on finance, government, real estate services, technology, and professional, scientific and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5 percent of the states economy, the story of Calafia is recorded in a 1510 work The Adventures of Esplandián, written as a sequel to Amadis de Gaula by Spanish adventure writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. The kingdom of Queen Calafia, according to Montalvo, was said to be a land inhabited by griffins and other strange beasts. This conventional wisdom that California was an island, with maps drawn to reflect this belief, shortened forms of the states name include CA, Cal. Calif. and US-CA. Settled by successive waves of arrivals during the last 10,000 years, various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000. The Indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct groups of Native Americans, ranging from large, settled populations living on the coast to groups in the interior. California groups also were diverse in their organization with bands, tribes, villages. Trade, intermarriage and military alliances fostered many social and economic relationships among the diverse groups, the first European effort to explore the coast as far north as the Russian River was a Spanish sailing expedition, led by Portuguese captain Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, in 1542. Some 37 years later English explorer Francis Drake also explored and claimed a portion of the California coast in 1579. Spanish traders made unintended visits with the Manila galleons on their trips from the Philippines beginning in 1565
4.
Stewart Brand
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Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and he is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline, An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. He studied biology at Stanford University, graduating in 1960 and he was married to Lois Jennings, an Ottawa Native American and mathematician. As a soldier in the U. S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills, Brand has lived in California since the 1960s. He and his wife live on Mirene, a 64-foot -long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a shipyard in Sausalito. He works in Mary Heartline, a fishing boat about 100 yards away. A favorite item of his is a table on which Otis Redding is said to have written “ The Dock of the Bay”, through engaging in scholarship and by visiting numerous Indian reservations, Brand familiarized himself with the Native Americans of the West. Native Americans have continued to be an important cultural interest, one which has continually re-emerged in Brands work in various ways, by the mid-1960s, Brand became associated with author Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. With his partner Zach Stewart, he produced the Trips Festival in San Francisco and this was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 hippies attended, and Haight-Ashbury soon emerged as a community, tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In 1966, Brand campaigned to have NASA release the satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He sold and distributed buttons for 25 cents each asking, Why havent we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet, during this campaign, Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help Brand with his projects. In 1967, a satellite, ATS-3, took the photo, Brand thought the image of our planet would be a powerful symbol. It adorned the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, later in 1968, a NASA astronaut took an Earth photo, Earthrise, from Moon orbit, which became the front image of the spring 1969 edition of the Catalog. 1970 saw the first celebration of Earth Day, during a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this blue, white, green. During the late 1960s and early 1970s about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally, Brand and his wife Lois travelled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California
5.
Brian Eno
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Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, RDI is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, writer, and visual artist. He is best known for his work in rock, ambient, pop. He has been described as one of musics most influential. Born in Suffolk, Eno studied painting and experimental music at art school in the late 1960s before joining glam rock group Roxy Music as synthesizer player in 1971. He took part in frequent collaborations with such as Robert Fripp, Cluster, David Bowie on his Berlin Trilogy. In subsequent decades, Eno continued to record albums, collaborate, and produce for other artists, including U2, Coldplay, Laurie Anderson, James, Grace Jones. He continues to release music, produce, and write, the unusual surname Eno, long established in Suffolk, derives from the French Huguenot surname Hennot. Maria had already had a daughter, and together William and Maria would have two children, Roger and Arlette. In school, Eno used a tape recorder as an instrument and experimented with his first, sometimes improvisational. From that collaboration, he involved in Cornelius Cardews Scratch Orchestra. The first released recording in which Eno played is the Deutsche Grammophon edition of Cardews The Great Learning, Another early recording was the Berlin Horse soundtrack, by Malcom Le Grice, a nine-minute,2 ×16 mm-double-projection, released in 1970 and presented in 1971. He then progressed to appearing on stage as a member of the group. He quit the band on completing the tour for the bands second album, For Your Pleasure, because of disagreements with lead singer Bryan Ferry. If Id walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, during his period with Roxy Music, and for his first three solo albums, he was credited on records only as Eno. Eno embarked on a career almost immediately. Between 1973 and 1977 he created four albums of electronically inflected art pop, Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain, Another Green World, and Before and After Science. Tiger Mountain contains the galloping Third Uncle, one of Enos best-known songs and these four albums were remastered and reissued in 2004 by Virgins Astralwerks label. Due to Enos decision not to add any extra tracks of the original material, in 1972, Eno and Robert Fripp developed the Frippertronics tape delay system, a year later, the pair released the proto-ambient album
6.
Roman numerals
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The numeric system represented by Roman numerals originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers in this system are represented by combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, Roman numerals, as used today, are based on seven symbols, The use of Roman numerals continued long after the decline of the Roman Empire. The numbers 1 to 10 are usually expressed in Roman numerals as follows, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, Numbers are formed by combining symbols and adding the values, so II is two and XIII is thirteen. Symbols are placed left to right in order of value. Named after the year of its release,2014 as MMXIV, the year of the games of the XXII Olympic Winter Games The standard forms described above reflect typical modern usage rather than a universally accepted convention. Usage in ancient Rome varied greatly and remained inconsistent in medieval, Roman inscriptions, especially in official contexts, seem to show a preference for additive forms such as IIII and VIIII instead of subtractive forms such as IV and IX. Both methods appear in documents from the Roman era, even within the same document, double subtractives also occur, such as XIIX or even IIXX instead of XVIII. Sometimes V and L are not used, with such as IIIIII. Such variation and inconsistency continued through the period and into modern times. Clock faces that use Roman numerals normally show IIII for four o’clock but IX for nine o’clock, however, this is far from universal, for example, the clock on the Palace of Westminster in London uses IV. Similarly, at the beginning of the 20th century, different representations of 900 appeared in several inscribed dates. For instance,1910 is shown on Admiralty Arch, London, as MDCCCCX rather than MCMX, although Roman numerals came to be written with letters of the Roman alphabet, they were originally independent symbols. The Etruscans, for example, used
7.
Palace of Fine Arts
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One of only a few surviving structures from the Exposition, it is still situated on its original site. It was rebuilt in 1965, and renovation of the lagoon, walkways, the Palace of Fine Arts was designed by Bernard Maybeck, who took his inspiration from Roman and Ancient Greek architecture in designing what was essentially a fictional ruin from another time. For a time the Palace housed an art exhibit, and during the Great Depression. Artists were commissioned to replace the decayed Robert Reid murals on the ceiling of the rotunda, from 1934 to 1942 the exhibition hall was home to eighteen lighted tennis courts. During World War II it was requisitioned by the military for storage of trucks, at the end of the war, when the United Nations was created in San Francisco, limousines used by the worlds statesmen came from a motor pool there. While the Palace had been saved from demolition, its structure was not stable, as a result of the construction and vandalism, by the 1950s the simulated ruin was in fact a crumbling ruin. In 1964, the original Palace was completely demolished, with only the structure of the exhibit hall left standing. The buildings were reconstructed in permanent, light-weight, poured-in-place concrete. All the decorations and sculpture were constructed anew, the only changes were the absence of the murals in the dome, two end pylons of the colonnade, and the original ornamentation of the exhibit hall. In 1969, the former Exhibit Hall became home to the Exploratorium interactive museum, in January 2013, the Exploratorium closed in preparation for its permanent move to the Embarcadero. Today, Australian eucalyptus trees fringe the eastern shore of the lagoon, many forms of wildlife have made their home there including swans, ducks, geese, turtles, frogs, and raccoons. Built around an artificial lagoon, the Palace of Fine Arts is composed of a wide,1,100 ft pergola around a central rotunda situated by the water. Ornamentation includes Bruno Louis Zimms three repeating panels around the entablature of the rotunda, representing The Struggle for the Beautiful, while Ulric Ellerhusen supplied the weeping women atop the colonnade and the sculptured frieze and allegorical figures representing Contemplation, Wonderment and Meditation. The underside of the Palace rotundas dome features eight large insets, four depicted the conception and birth of Art, its commitment to the Earth, its progress and acceptance by the human intellect, and four the golds of California. The Palace of Fine Arts was not the building from the exposition to survive demolition. The Japanese Tea House was purchased in 1915 by land baron E. D, swift and was transported by barge down the Bay to Belmont, California where it stands to this day. The Wisconsin and Virginia buildings were relocated to Marin County, the Ohio building was shipped to San Mateo County, where it survived until the 1950s. The Column of Progress stood for a decade after the close of the Exhibition, at the close of the exposition, the French government granted Alma Spreckels permission to construct a permanent replica of the French Pavilion, but World War I delayed the groundbreaking until 1921
8.
Clock
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A clock is an instrument to measure, keep, and indicate time. The word clock is derived from the Celtic words clagan and clocca meaning bell, a silent instrument missing such a striking mechanism has traditionally been known as a timepiece. In general usage today a clock refers to any device for measuring and displaying the time, Watches and other timepieces that can be carried on ones person are often distinguished from clocks. The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units, the day, the lunar month. Devices operating on several physical processes have been used over the millennia, a sundial shows the time by displaying the position of a shadow on a flat surface. There is a range of duration timers, an example being the hourglass. Water clocks, along with the sundials, are possibly the oldest time-measuring instruments, spring-driven clocks appeared during the 15th century. During the 15th and 16th centuries, clockmaking flourished, the next development in accuracy occurred after 1656 with the invention of the pendulum clock. A major stimulus to improving the accuracy and reliability of clocks was the importance of precise time-keeping for navigation, the electric clock was patented in 1840. The development of electronics in the 20th century led to clocks with no clockwork parts at all, the timekeeping element in every modern clock is a harmonic oscillator, a physical object that vibrates or oscillates at a particular frequency. This object can be a pendulum, a fork, a quartz crystal. Analog clocks usually indicate time using angles, Digital clocks display a numeric representation of time. Two numeric display formats are used on digital clocks, 24-hour notation. Most digital clocks use electronic mechanisms and LCD, LED, or VFD displays, for convenience, distance, telephony or blindness, auditory clocks present the time as sounds. There are also clocks for the blind that have displays that can be read by using the sense of touch, some of these are similar to normal analog displays, but are constructed so the hands can be felt without damaging them. The evolution of the technology of clocks continues today, the study of timekeeping is known as horology. The apparent position of the Sun in the sky moves over the course of a day, shadows cast by stationary objects move correspondingly, so their positions can be used to indicate the time of day. A sundial shows the time by displaying the position of a shadow on a flat surface, sundials can be horizontal, vertical, or in other orientations
9.
Civilization
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Historically, a civilization was a so-called advanced culture in contrast to more supposedly primitive cultures. As an uncountable noun, civilization also refers to the process of a society developing into a centralized, urbanized, stratified structure, Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings. The earlier neolithic technology and lifestyle was established first in the Middle East, and later in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins in China, similar pre-civilized neolithic revolutions also began independently from 7,000 BCE in such places as northwestern South America and Mesoamerica. These were among the six civilizations worldwide that arose independently, Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BCE, with civilizations developing from 6,500 years ago. Towards the end of the Neolithic period, various elitist Chalcolithic civilizations began to rise in various cradles from around 3300 BCE. Chalcolithic civilizations, as defined above, also developed in Pre-Columbian Americas and, despite an early start in Egypt, Axum and Kush, the English word civilization comes from the 16th-century French civilisé, from Latin civilis, related to civis and civitas. The fundamental treatise is Norbert Eliass The Civilizing Process, which traces social mores from medieval courtly society to the Early Modern period, in The Philosophy of Civilization, Albert Schweitzer outlines two opinions, one purely material and the other material and ethical. Adjectives like civility developed in the mid-16th century, the abstract noun civilization, meaning civilized condition, came in the 1760s, again from French. The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the pursuit of progress characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the French revolution, civilization was used in the singular, never in the plural and this is still the case in French. The use of civilizations as a noun was in occasional use in the 19th century. Only in this sense does it become possible to speak of a medieval civilization. Already in the 18th century, civilization was not always seen as an improvement, one historically important distinction between culture and civilization is from the writings of Rousseau, particularly his work about education, Emile. From this, a new approach was developed, especially in Germany, first by Johann Gottfried Herder and this sees cultures as natural organisms, not defined by conscious, rational, deliberative acts, but a kind of pre-rational folk spirit. Civilization, in contrast, though more rational and more successful in material progress, is unnatural and leads to vices of social life such as guile, hypocrisy, envy and avarice. In World War II, Leo Strauss, having fled Germany, argued in New York that this opinion of civilization was behind Nazism, Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe have named a number of traits that distinguish a civilization from other kinds of society. Andrew Nikiforuk argues that civilizations relied on shackled human muscle and it took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities and considers slavery to be a common feature of pre-modern civilizations. All civilizations have depended on agriculture for subsistence, grain farms can result in accumulated storage and a surplus of food, particularly when people use intensive agricultural techniques such as artificial fertilization, irrigation and crop rotation
10.
Looting
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The term is also used in a broader sense to describe egregious instances of theft and embezzlement, such as the plundering of private or public assets by governments. The proceeds of all these activities can be described as booty, loot, plunder, spoils, looting by a victorious army during war has been common practice throughout recorded history. For foot soldiers, it was viewed as a way to supplement their meagre income and was part of the celebration of victory. To rob them of their wealth, in other pre-modern societies, objects made of precious metals were the preferred target of war looting, largely because of their easy portability. In many cases looting was an opportunity to obtain treasures that otherwise would not have been obtainable, since the 18th century, works of art have increasingly become a popular target. In the 1930s and even more so during World War II, Nazi Germany engaged in large scale and organized looting of art, looting, combined with poor military discipline, has occasionally been an armys downfall. In other cases, for example the Wahhabi sack of Karbala, not all looters in wartime are conquerors, the looting of Vistula Land by its retreating defenders in 1915 was among the factors sapping the loyalty of Poland in World War I. Local civilians can also take advantage of a breakdown of order to loot public and private property, the novel War and Peace describes widespread looting by Moscows citizens before Napoleons troops enter the town, and looting by French troops elsewhere. Looting can also refer to antiquities formerly removed from countries by outsiders, other examples include the obelisks of Pharaoh Amenhotep II, in the, Pharaoh Ptolemy IX. In the aftermath of the Second World War Soviet forces systematically plundered the Soviet occupation zone of Germany and they sent valuable industrial equipment, infrastructure and whole factories to the Soviet Union. Especially during natural disasters, some find themselves forced to take what is not theirs in order to survive. How to respond to this, and where the line between unnecessary looting and necessary scavenging lies, is often a dilemma for governments, in other cases, looting may be tolerated or even encouraged by governments for political or other reasons. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 explicitly prohibits the looting of property during wartime. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 obliges military forces not only to avoid destruction of enemy property, theoretically, to prevent such looting, unclaimed property is moved to the custody of the Custodian of Enemy Property, to be handled until the return to its owner. Around the same time of the Hyksos invasion and occupation of Egypt, in Genesis 15,14, the despoliation is an act of justifiable vengeance upon the oppressors of Israel. Yet in Exodus, God uses the plagues as an act of mercy to bring a knowledge of himself to Israel, Pharaoh, the Egyptians, and to the ends of the earth. See Hyksos Iconoclasm and Genesis 13,2 and Genesis 15,14 and Exodus 12,36 Following the death of Valentinian III in 455, in 870 AD, the Byzantine city of Melite was captured by the Aghlabids under Sawāda Ibn Muḥammad. The city was destroyed, its churches looted and its population massacred, marble from the citys churches was used to build the castle of Sousse
