Allen Tate
John Orley Allen Tate, known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, social commentator, Poet Laureate from 1943 to 1944. Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky, to John Orley Tate, a businessman, Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. In 1916 and 1917 Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, he began attending Vanderbilt University in 1918. Warren and Tate were invited to join an informal literary group of young Southern poets under the leadership of John Crowe Ransom. Tate contributed to the group's magazine The Fugitive; the aim of the group, according to the critic J. A. Bryant, was "to demonstrate that a group of southerners could produce important work in the medium, devoid of sentimentality and crafted," and they wrote in the formalist tradition that valued the skillful use of meter and rhyme; when Robert Penn Warren left Rhodes College to accept a position at Louisiana State University, he recommended Tate to replace him. Tate accepted the position, spent 1934-36 as lecturer in English at Rhodes.
Tate joined Ransom to teach at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Some of his notable students there included the poets Randall Jarrell. Lowell's early poetry was influenced by Tate's formalist brand of Modernism. In 1924, Tate moved to New York City where he met poet Hart Crane, with whom he had been exchanging correspondence for some time. Over a four-year period, he worked freelance for The Nation, contributed to the Hound & Horn, Poetry magazine, others. To make ends meet, he worked as a janitor. During a summer visit with the poet Robert Penn Warren in Kentucky, he began a relationship with writer Caroline Gordon; the two lived together in Greenwich Village, but moved to "Robber Rocks", a house in Patterson, New York, with friends Slater Brown and his wife Sue, Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley. Tate married Gordon in New York in May 1925, their daughter Nancy was born in September. In 1928, along with others New York City friends, he went to Europe. In London, he visited with T. S. Eliot, whose poetry and criticism he admired, he visited Paris.
In 1928, Tate published his first book of poetry, Mr. Pope and Other Poems, which contained his most famous poem, "Ode to the Confederate Dead"; that same year, Tate published a biography Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier. Just before leaving for Europe in 1928, Tate described himself to John Gould Fletcher as "an enforced atheist", he told Fletcher, "I am an atheist, but a religious one — which means that there is no organization for my religion." He regarded secular attempts to develop a system of thought for the modern world as misguided. "Only God," he insisted, "can give the affair a genuine purpose." In his essay "The Fallacy of Humanism", he criticized the New Humanists for creating a value system without investing it with any identifiable source of authority. "Religion is the only technique for the validation of values," he wrote. Although he was attracted to Roman Catholicism, he deferred converting. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. observes that Tate may have waited "because he realized that for him at this time it would be only a strategy, an intellectual act".
In 1929, Tate published a second biography Jefferson Davis: Fall. After two years abroad, he returned to the United States, in 1930 was back in Tennessee. Here he took up residence at Riverview, an antebellum mansion with an 85-acre estate attached, bought for him by one of his brothers, "who had made a lot of northern money out of coal." He resumed his senior position with the Fugitives. Along with fellow Fugitives and Ransom, as well as nine other Southern writers, Tate joined the conservative political group known as the Southern Agrarians; the group was made up of 12 members who published essays on their political philosophy in the book I'll Take My Stand published in 1930. Tate contributed "Remarks on the Southern Religion" to I'll Take My Stand; this book was followed in 1938 by Who Owns America?, the Southern Agrarians' response to The New Deal. During this time, Tate became the de facto associate editor of The American Review, published and edited by Seward Collins. Tate believed, he objected to Collins's open support of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, condemned Fascism in an article in The New Republic in 1936.
Much of Tate's major volumes of poetry were published in the 1930s, the scholar David Havird describes this publication history in poetry as follows: By 1937, when he published his first Selected Poems, Tate had written all of the shorter poems upon which his literary reputation came to rest. This collection--which brought together work from two recent volumes, Poems: 1928-1931 and the printed The Mediterranean and Other Poems, as well as the early Mr. Pope--included "Mother and Son," "Last Days of Alice," "The Wolves," "The Mediterranean," "Aeneas at Washington," "Sonnets at Christmas," and the final version of "Ode to the Confederate Dead." In 1938 Tate published his only novel, The Fathers, which drew upon knowledge of his mother's ancestral home and family in Fairfax County, Virginia. Tate and Gordon were divorced in 1945 and remarried in 1946. Though devoted to one another for life, they could not get along and divorced again. Tate was a poet-in-residence at Princeton University until 1942.
He founded the Creative Writi
Martyr
A martyr is someone who suffers persecution and death for advocating, refusing to renounce, or refusing to advocate a belief or cause as demanded by an external party. This refusal to comply with the presented demands results in the punishment or execution of the martyr by the oppressor. Applied only to those who suffered for their religious beliefs, the term has come to be used in connection with people killed for a political cause. Most martyrs are considered holy or are respected by their followers, becoming symbols of exceptional leadership and heroism in the face of difficult circumstances. Martyrs play significant roles in religions. Martyrs have had notable effects in secular life, including such figures as Socrates, among other political and cultural examples. In its original meaning, the word martyr, meaning witness, was used in the secular sphere as well as in the New Testament of the Bible; the process of bearing witness was not intended to lead to the death of the witness, although it is known from ancient writers and from the New Testament that witnesses died for their testimonies.
During the early Christian centuries, the term acquired the extended meaning of believers who are called to witness for their religious belief, on account of this witness, endures suffering or death. The term, in this sense, entered the English language as a loanword; the death of a martyr or the value attributed. The early Christians who first began to use the term martyr in its new sense saw Jesus as the first and greatest martyr, on account of his crucifixion; the early Christians appear to have seen Jesus as the archetypal martyr. The word martyr is used in English to describe a wide variety of people. However, the following table presents a general outline of common features present in stereotypical martyrdoms. In the Bahá'í Faith, martyrs are those who sacrifice their lives serving humanity in the name of God. However, Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, discouraged the literal meaning of sacrificing one's life. Instead, he explained. Martyrdom was extensively promoted by the Kuomintang party in modern China.
Revolutionaries who died fighting against the Qing dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution and throughout the Republic of China period, furthering the cause of the revolution, were recognized as martyrs. In Christianity, a martyr, in accordance with the meaning of the original Greek martys in the New Testament, is one who brings a testimony written or verbal. In particular, the testimony is that of the Christian Gospel, or more the Word of God. A Christian witness is a biblical witness. However, over time many Christian testimonies were rejected, the witnesses put to death, the word martyr developed its present sense. Where death ensues, the witnesses follow the example of Jesus in offering up their lives for truth; the concept of Jesus as a martyr has received greater attention. Analyses of the Gospel passion narratives have led many scholars to conclude that they are martyrdom accounts in terms of genre and style. Several scholars have concluded that Paul the Apostle understood Jesus' death as a martyrdom.
In light of such conclusions, some have argued that the Christians of the first few centuries would have interpreted the crucifixion of Jesus as a martyrdom. In the context of church history, from the time of the persecution of early Christians in the Roman Empire, it developed that a martyr was one, killed for maintaining a religious belief, knowing that this will certainly result in imminent death; this definition of martyr is not restricted to the Christian faith. Though Christianity recognizes certain Old Testament Jewish figures, like Abel and the Maccabees, as holy, the New Testament mentions the imprisonment and beheading of John the Baptist, Jesus's possible cousin and his prophet and forerunner, the first Christian witness, after the establishment of the Christian faith, to be killed for his testimony was Saint Stephen, those who suffer martyrdom are said to have been "crowned." From the time of Constantine, Christianity was decriminalized, under Theodosius I, became the state religion, which diminished persecution.
As some wondered how they could most follow Christ there was a development of desert spirituality, desert monks, self-mortification, following Christ by separation from the world. This was a kind of white martyrdom, dying to oneself every day, as opposed to a red martyrdom, the giving of one's life in a violent death. In Christianity, death in sectarian persecution can be viewed as martyrdom. For example, there were martyrs recognised on both sides of the schism between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England after 1534, with two hundred and eighty Christians martyred for their faith by public burning between 1553 and 1558 by the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I in England leading to the reversion to the Church of England under Queen Elizabeth I in 1559 and three hundred Roman Catholics martyred by the Church authorities in England over the following hundred and fifty years in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More modern day accounts of martyrdom for Christ exist, depicted in books such as Jesus Freaks though the numbers are disputed.
There are claims that the numbers of Christians killed for their faith annually are exaggerated. Despite the promotion of ahimsa within Sanatana Dharma
Bishop of Chichester
The Bishop of Chichester is the ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester in the Province of Canterbury. The diocese covers the counties of West Sussex; the see is based in the City of Chichester where the bishop's seat is located at the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity. On 3 May 2012 the appointment was announced of Martin Warner, Bishop of Whitby, as the next Bishop of Chichester, his enthronement took place on 25 November 2012 in Chichester Cathedral. The bishop's residence is Chichester. Since 2015, Warner has fulfilled the diocesan-wide role of alternative episcopal oversight, following the decision by Mark Sowerby, Bishop of Horsham, to recognise the orders of priests and bishops who are women. From 1984 to 2013, the Bishop, in addition to being the diocesan had specific oversight of the Chichester Episcopal Area, which covered the coastal region of West Sussex along with Brighton and Hove; the episcopal see at Selsey was founded by Saint Wilfrid Bishop of the Northumbrians, for the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Sussex in the late 7th century.
He was granted land by Æthelwealh of Sussex to build a cathedral at Selsey. However, shortly afterwards Cædwalla of Wessex conquered the Kingdom of Sussex, but he confirmed the grant to Wilfrid; the bishop's seat was located at Selsey Abbey. Nine years after the Norman conquest, in 1075, the Council of London enacted that episcopal sees should be removed to cities or larger towns. Accordingly, the see at Selsey; some sources claim that Stigand, the last Bishop of Selsey, continued to use the title Bishop of Selsey until 1082, before adopting the new title Bishop of Chichester, indicating that the transfer took several years to complete. Archdeacon of Chichester Archdeacon of Hastings Archdeacon of Brighton and Lewes Heylyn, Peter. A Help to English History...etc.. London: Paul Wright. Kelly, S. E. 1998. Charters of Selsey. Anglo-Saxon Charters 6
Russell Kirk
Russell Amos Kirk was an American political theorist, historian, social critic, literary critic, known for his influence on 20th-century American conservatism. His 1953 book The Conservative Mind gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement, it traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. Kirk was considered the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism, he was an accomplished author of Gothic and ghost story fiction. Russell Kirk was born in Michigan, he was the son of Russell Andrew Kirk, a railroad engineer, Marjorie Pierce Kirk. Kirk obtained his B. A. at Michigan State University and a M. A. at Duke University. During World War II, he served in the American armed forces and corresponded with a libertarian writer, Isabel Paterson, who helped to shape his early political thought. After reading Albert Jay Nock's book, Our Enemy, the State, he engaged in a similar correspondence with him.
After the war, he attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1953, he became the only American to be awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters by that university. Kirk "laid out a post-World War II program for conservatives by warning them,'A handful of individuals, some of them quite unused to moral responsibilities on such a scale, made it their business to extirpate the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he resigned in 1959, after having become disenchanted with the rapid growth in student number and emphasis on intercollegiate athletics and technical training at the expense of the traditional liberal arts. Thereafter he referred to Michigan State as "Cow College" or "Behemoth University." He wrote that academic political scientists and sociologists were "as a breed—dull dogs". Late in life, he taught one semester a year at Hillsdale College, where he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities. Kirk published in two American conservative journals he helped found, National Review in 1955 and Modern Age in 1957.
He was the founding editor of the latter, 1957–59. He was made a Distinguished Fellow of the Heritage Foundation, where he gave a number of lectures. After leaving Michigan State, Kirk returned to his ancestral home in Mecosta, where he wrote the many books, academic articles and the syndicated newspaper column by which he exerted his influence on American politics and intellectual life. In 1963, Kirk married Annette Courtemanche, she and Kirk became known for their hospitality, welcoming many political and literary figures in their Mecosta house, giving shelter to political refugees and others. Their home became the site of a sort of seminar on conservative thought for university students. Piety Hill now houses the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. After his conversion to Catholicism Kirk was a founding board member of Una Voce America. Kirk declined to drive, calling cars "mechanical Jacobins", would have nothing to do with television and what he called "electronic computers". Kirk did not always maintain a stereotypically "conservative" voting record.
"Faced with the non-choice between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey in 1944, Kirk said no to empire and voted for Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party candidate." In the 1976 presidential election, he voted for Eugene McCarthy. In 1992 he supported Pat Buchanan's primary challenge to incumbent George H. W. Bush, serving as state chair of the Buchanan campaign in Michigan. Kirk was a contributor to Chronicles. In 1989, he was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Ronald Reagan; the Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, the published version of Kirk's doctoral dissertation, contributed materially to the 20th century Burke revival. It drew attention to: Conservative statesmen such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Fisher Ames, George Canning, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph of Roanoke, Joseph de Maistre, Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Balfour; the Portable Conservative Reader, which Kirk edited, contains sample writings by most of the above. Biographer Bradley J. Birzer argues that for all his importance in inspiring the modern conservative movement, not many of his followers agreed with his unusual approach to the history of conservatism.
As summarized by reviewer Drew Maciag: As Birzer's study demonstrates, Kirk's understanding of conservatism was so unique, transcendental, in certain respects premodern and European, that it bore little resemblance to political conservatism in the United States. Conservative Mind launched an intellectual challenge to postwar liberalism, but the variety of conservatism Kirk preferred found few takers within the American Right. Harry Jaffa wrote: "Kirk was a poor Burke scholar. Burke's attack on metaphysical reasoning related only to modern philosophy's atte
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot. Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of Ezra Pound, it was printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the time of its publication, Prufrock was considered outlandish, but is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th-century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism; the poem's structure was influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri and makes several references to the Bible and other literary works—including William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV Part II, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, the poetry of seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, the nineteenth-century French Symbolists. Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers.
The poem, described as a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action, said "to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment". Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, embarrassment, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, an awareness of mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature. Eliot wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" between February 1910 and July or August 1911. Shortly after arriving in England to attend Merton College, Eliot was introduced to American expatriate poet Ezra Pound, who deemed Eliot "worth watching" and aided the start of Eliot's career. Pound served as the overseas editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and recommended to the magazine's founder, Harriet Monroe, that Poetry publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", extolling that Eliot and his work embodied a new and unique phenomenon among contemporary writers.
Pound claimed that Eliot "has trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other, but never both." The poem was first published by the magazine in its June 1915 issue. In November 1915 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—along with Eliot's poems "Portrait of a Lady", "The Boston Evening Transcript", "Hysteria", "Miss Helen Slingsby"—was included in Catholic Anthology 1914–1915 edited by Ezra Pound and printed by Elkin Mathews in London. In June 1917 The Egoist, a small publishing firm run by Dora Marsden, published a pamphlet entitled Prufrock and Other Observations, containing twelve poems by Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was the first in the volume. Eliot was appointed assistant editor of the Egoist in June 1917. According to Eliot biographer Lyndall Gordon, when Eliot was writing the first drafts of Prufrock in his notebook in 1910–1911, he intentionally kept four pages blank in the middle section of the poem. According to the notebooks, now in the collection of the New York Public Library, Eliot finished the poem, published sometime in July and August 1911, when he was 22 years old.
In 1912, Eliot revised the poem and included a 38-line section now called "Prufrock's Pervigilium", inserted on those blank pages, intended as a middle section for the poem. However, Eliot removed this section soon after seeking the advice of his fellow Harvard acquaintance and poet Conrad Aiken; this section would not be included in the original publication of Eliot's poem but was included when published posthumously in the 1996 collection of Eliot's early, unpublished drafts in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917. This Pervigilium section describes the "vigil" of Prufrock through an evening and night described by one reviewer as an "erotic foray into the narrow streets of a social and emotional underworld" that portray "in clammy detail Prufrock's tramping'through certain half-deserted streets' and the context of his'muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.'" Its reception in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on 21 June 1917.
"The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is of the smallest importance to anyone to himself, they have no relation to poetry."The Harvard Vocarium at Harvard College recorded Eliot's reading of Prufrock and other poems in 1947, as part of their ongoing series of poetry readings by their authors. In his early drafts, Eliot gave the poem the subtitle "Prufrock among the Women." This subtitle was discarded before publication. Eliot called the poem a "love song" in reference to Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Love Song of Har Dyal", first published in Kipling's collection Plain Tales from the Hills. In 1959, Eliot addressed a meeting of the Kipling Society and discussed the influence of Kipling upon his own poetry: Traces of Kipling appear in my own mature verse where no diligent scholarly sleuth has yet observed them, but which I am myself prepared to disclose. I once wrote a poem called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": I am convinced that it would never have been called "Love Song" but for a title of Kipling's that stuck obstinately in my head: "The Love Song of Har Dyal".
However, the origin of the name Prufrock is not certain, Eliot never remarked on its origin other than to
Illuminated manuscript
An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented with such decoration as initials and miniature illustrations. In the strictest definition, the term refers only to manuscripts decorated with either gold or silver. Comparable Far Eastern and Mesoamerican works are described as painted. Islamic manuscripts may be referred to as illuminated, illustrated or painted, though using the same techniques as Western works; the earliest extant substantive illuminated manuscripts are from the period 400 to 600, produced in the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths and the Eastern Roman Empire. Their significance lies not only in their inherent artistic and historical value, but in the maintenance of a link of literacy offered by non-illuminated texts. Had it not been for the monastic scribes of Late Antiquity, most literature of Greece and Rome would have perished; as it was, the patterns of textual survivals were shaped by their usefulness to the constricted literate group of Christians. Illumination of manuscripts, as a way of aggrandizing ancient documents, aided their preservation and informative value in an era when new ruling classes were no longer literate, at least in the language used in the manuscripts.
The majority of extant manuscripts are from the Middle Ages, although many survive from the Renaissance, along with a limited number from Late Antiquity. The majority are of a religious nature. From the 13th century onward, an increasing number of secular texts were illuminated. Most illuminated manuscripts were created as codices. A few illuminated fragments survive on papyrus, which does not last nearly as long as parchment. Most medieval manuscripts, illuminated or not, were written on parchment, but most manuscripts important enough to illuminate were written on the best quality of parchment, called vellum. Beginning in the Late Middle Ages, manuscripts began to be produced on paper. Early printed books were sometimes produced with spaces left for rubrics and miniatures, or were given illuminated initials, or decorations in the margin, but the introduction of printing led to the decline of illumination. Illuminated manuscripts continued to be produced in the early 16th century but in much smaller numbers for the wealthy.
They are among the most common items to survive from the Middle Ages. They are the best surviving specimens of medieval painting, the best preserved. Indeed, for many areas and time periods, they are the only surviving examples of painting. Art historians classify illuminated manuscripts into their historic periods and types, including Late Antique, Carolingian manuscripts, Ottonian manuscripts, Romanesque manuscripts, Gothic manuscripts, Renaissance manuscripts. There are a few examples from periods; the type of book most heavily and richly illuminated, sometimes known as a "display book", varied between periods. In the first millennium, these were most to be Gospel Books, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells; the Romanesque period saw the creation of many large illuminated complete Bibles – one in Sweden requires three librarians to lift it. Many Psalters were heavily illuminated in both this and the Gothic period. Single cards or posters of vellum, leather or paper were in wider circulation with short stories or legends on them about the lives of saints, chivalry knights or other mythological figures criminal, social or miraculous occurrences.
The Book of Hours commonly the personal devotional book of a wealthy layperson, was richly illuminated in the Gothic period. Other books, both liturgical and not, continued to be illuminated at all periods; the Byzantine world produced manuscripts in its own style, versions of which spread to other Orthodox and Eastern Christian areas. The Muslim World and in particular the Iberian Peninsula, with their traditions of literacy uninterrupted by the Middle Ages, were instrumental in delivering ancient classic works to the growing intellectual circles and universities of Western Europe all through the 12th century, as books were produced there in large numbers and on paper for the first time in Europe, with them full treatises on the sciences astrology and medicine where illumination was required to have profuse and accurate representations with the text; the Gothic period, which saw an increase in the production of these artifacts saw more secular works such as chronicles and works of literature illuminated.
Wealthy people began to build up personal libraries. Up to the 12th century, most manuscripts were produced in monasteries in order to add to the library or after receiving a commission from a wealthy patron. Larger monasteries contained separate areas for the monks who specialized in the production of manuscripts called a scriptorium. Within the walls of a scriptorium were individualized areas where a monk could sit and work on a manuscript without being disturbed by his fellow brethren. If no scriptorium was available “separate little rooms were assigned to book copying.
Extravehicular activity
Extravehicular activity is any activity done by an astronaut or cosmonaut outside a spacecraft beyond the Earth's appreciable atmosphere. The term most applies to a spacewalk made outside a craft orbiting Earth, but has applied to lunar surface exploration performed by six pairs of American astronauts in the Apollo program from 1969 to 1972. On each of the last three of these missions, astronauts performed deep-space EVAs on the return to Earth, to retrieve film canisters from the outside of the spacecraft. Astronauts used EVA in 1973 to repair launch damage to Skylab, the United States' first space station. A "Stand-up" EVA is when an astronaut does not leave a spacecraft, but is reliant on the spacesuit for environmental support, its name derives from the astronaut "standing up" in the open hatch to record or assist a spacewalking astronaut. EVAs may be untethered. Untethered spacewalks were only performed on three missions in 1984 using the Manned Maneuvering Unit, on a flight test in 1994 of the Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue, a safety device worn on tethered U.
S. EVAs; the Soviet Union/Russia, the United States, China have conducted EVAs. NASA planners invented the term extravehicular activity in the early 1960s for the Apollo program to land men on the Moon, because the astronauts would leave the spacecraft to collect lunar material samples and deploy scientific experiments. To support this, other Apollo objectives, the Gemini program was spun off to develop the capability for astronauts to work outside a two-man Earth orbiting spacecraft. However, the Soviet Union was fiercely competitive in holding the early lead it had gained in manned spaceflight, so the Soviet Communist Party, led by Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the conversion of its single-pilot Vostok capsule into a two- or three-person craft named Voskhod, in order to compete with Gemini and Apollo; the Soviets were able to launch two Voskhod capsules before U. S. was able to launch its first manned Gemini. The Voskhod's avionics required cooling by cabin air to prevent overheating, therefore an airlock was required for the spacewalking cosmonaut to exit and re-enter the cabin while it remained pressurized.
By contrast, the Gemini avionics did not require air cooling, allowing the spacewalking astronaut to exit and re-enter the depressurized cabin through an open hatch. Because of this, the American and Soviet space programs developed different definitions for the duration of an EVA; the Soviet definition begins when the outer airlock hatch is open and the cosmonaut is in vacuum. An American EVA began; the USA has changed its EVA definition since. The first EVA was performed on March 18, 1965, by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who spent 12 minutes outside the Voskhod 2 spacecraft. Carrying a white metal backpack containing 45 minutes worth of breathing and pressurization oxygen, Leonov had no means to control his motion other than pulling on his 15.35 m tether. After the flight, he claimed this was easy, but his space suit ballooned from its internal pressure against the vacuum of space, stiffening so much that he could not activate the shutter on his chest-mounted camera. At the end of his space walk, the suit stiffening caused a more serious problem: Leonov had to re-enter the capsule through the inflatable cloth airlock, 1.2 m in diameter and 2.5 m long.
He improperly got stuck sideways. He could not get back in without reducing the pressure in his suit, risking "the bends"; this added another 12 minutes to his time in vacuum, he was overheated by 1.8 °C from the exertion. It would be four years before the Soviets tried another EVA, they misrepresented to the press how difficult Leonov found it to work in weightlessness and concealed the problems encountered until after the end of the Cold War. The first American spacewalk was performed on June 3, 1965, by Ed White from the second manned Gemini flight, Gemini 4, for 21 minutes. White was tethered to the spacecraft, his oxygen was supplied through a 25-foot umbilical, which carried communications and biomedical instrumentation, he was the first to control his motion in space with a Hand-Held Maneuvering Unit, which worked well but only carried enough propellant for 20 seconds. White found his tether useful for limiting his distance from the spacecraft but difficult to use for moving around, contrary to Leonov's claim.
However, a defect in the capsule's hatch latching mechanism caused difficulties opening and closing the hatch, which delayed the start of the EVA and put White and his crewmate at risk of not getting back to Earth alive. No EVAs were planned on the next three Gemini flights; the next EVA was planned to be made by David Scott on Gemini 8, but that mission had to be aborted due to a critical spacecraft malfunction before the EVA could be conducted. Astronauts on the next three Gemini flights, performed several EVAs, but none was able to work for long periods outside the spacecraft without tiring and overheating. Cernan attempted but failed to test an Air Force Astronaut Maneuvering Unit which included a self-contained oxygen system. On November 13, 1966, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first to work in space without tiring, on the Gemini 12 last flight. Aldrin worked outside the spacecraft for 2 hours and 6 minutes, in additio
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