Irish Americans
Irish Americans are an ethnic group comprising Americans who have full or partial ancestry from Ireland those who identify with that ancestry, along with their cultural characteristics. About 33 million Americans — 10.5% of the total population — reported Irish ancestry in the 2013 American Community Survey conducted by the U. S. Census Bureau; this compares with a population of 6.7 million on the island of Ireland. Three million people separately identified as Scotch-Irish, whose ancestors were Ulster Scots and Anglo-Irish Protestant Dissenters who emigrated from Ireland to the United States. However, whether the Scotch-Irish should be considered Irish is disputed. Half of the Irish immigrants in the colonial era came from the Irish province of Ulster while the other half came from the other three provinces of Ireland. While scholarly estimates vary, the most common approximation is that 250,000 migrated to the United States from 1717 to 1775. By 1790 400,000 people of Irish birth or ancestry lived in the United States.
These early immigrants were overwhelmingly members of the Protestant minority in Ireland who descended from Scottish and English colonists and colonial administrators who had settled the Plantations of Ireland, the largest of, the Plantation of Ulster. In Ireland, they are referred to as the Ulster Scots and the Anglo-Irish and while they intermarried to some degree, they never intermarried with the native Irish Catholic population, in turn, the Irish Catholics never converted to Protestant churches during the Reformation. Of the 250,000 immigrants from Ireland to the United States between 1717 and 1775 10,000 were Catholics. By 1800, the number of Irish Catholics who had immigrated had increased in absolute terms to 20,000, but had declined in proportional terms, as one-sixth of the white population in the United States by that time was composed of those of Scotch-Irish descent. Like most Catholics in the United States at the time, these Irish Catholics settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania.
In 1700, the estimated population of Maryland was 29,600, about one-tenth of, Catholic. By 1756, the number of Catholics in Maryland had increased to 7,000, which increased further to 20,000 by 1765. In Pennsylvania, there were 3,000 Catholics in 1756 and 6,000 by 1765. By the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, there were 24,000 to 25,000 Catholics in the United States out of a total population of 3 million. However, most of the Catholic population in the United States during the colonial period came from England and France, not Ireland. Most descendants of the Protestant Irish today identify their ancestry as "American" or "Irish"; the terms "Scotch-Irish" and "Scots-Irish" were utilized in the 19th century to differentiate between Protestant Irish and the later-arriving Catholic Irish. The Scots Irish were tenant farmers, settled in Ireland by the British government during the 17th-century Plantation of Ulster; the Scots-Irish settled in the colonial "back country" of the Appalachian Mountain region, became the prominent ethnic strain in the culture that developed there.
The descendants of Scots-Irish settlers had a great influence on the culture of the Southern United States in particular and the culture of the United States in general through such contributions as American folk music and western music, stock car racing, which became popular throughout the country in the late 20th century. Irish immigrants of this period participated in significant numbers in the American Revolution, leading one British major general to testify at the House of Commons that "half the rebel Continental Army were from Ireland." Historiographer Michael J. O'Brien examined many of the muster rolls from the Revolutionary War and found quintessential native Irish surnames and possible Anglicized Irish surnames, he estimated that some 38% of those in the revolutionary army were Irish. Irish Americans signed the foundational documents of the United States—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and, beginning with Andrew Jackson, served as President; the early Ulster immigrants and their descendants at first referred to themselves as "Irish," without the qualifier "Scotch."
It was not until more than a century following the surge in Irish immigration after the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, that some descendants of the Protestant Irish began to refer to themselves as "Scots-Irish" to distinguish them from the predominantly Catholic, destitute, wave of immigrants from Ireland in that era. However, most descendants of the Scots-Irish continued to consider themselves "Irish" or "American" rather than Scots-Irish; the two groups had little initial interaction in America, as the 18th-century Ulster immigrants were predominantly Protestant and had become settled in upland regions of the American interior, while the huge wave of 19th-century Catholic immigrant families settled in the Northeast and Midwest port cities such as Boston, New York, Buffalo, or Chicago. Ho
Raoul Walsh
Raoul A. Walsh was an American film director, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the brother of the silent screen actor George Walsh, he was known for portraying John Wilkes Booth in the silent classic The Birth of a Nation and for directing such films as The Big Trail, starring John Wayne, High Sierra, starring Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart. He directed his last film in 1964. Walsh was born in New York as Albert Edward Walsh to Elizabeth T. Bruff, the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, Thomas W. Walsh, an Englishman. Like his younger brother, he was part of Omega Gamma Delta in high school. Growing up in New York, Walsh was a friend of the Barrymore family. In life he lived in Palm Springs, California, he was buried at Ventura County, California. Walsh was educated at Seton Hall College, he began acting in 1909, first as a stage actor in New York City and as a film actor. In 1914 he became an assistant to D. W. Griffith and made his first full-length feature film, The Life of General Villa, shot on location in Mexico with Pancho Villa playing the lead and with actual ongoing battles filmed in progress as well as recreations.
Walsh played John Wilkes Booth in Griffith's epic The Birth of a Nation and served as an assistant director. This was followed by the critically acclaimed Regeneration in 1915 the earliest feature gangster film, shot on location in Manhattan's Bowery district. Walsh served as an officer in the United States Army during World War I, he directed The Thief of Bagdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks and Anna May Wong, Laurence Stallings' What Price Glory?, starring Victor McLaglen and Dolores del Río. In Sadie Thompson, starring Gloria Swanson as a prostitute seeking a new life in Samoa, Walsh starred as Swanson's boyfriend in his first acting role since 1915, he was hired to direct and star in In Old Arizona, a film about O. Henry's character the Cisco Kid. While on location for that film Walsh was in a car crash when a jackrabbit jumped through the windshield as he was driving through the desert, he never acted again. Warner Baxter won an Oscar for the role Walsh was slated to play. Walsh would wear an eyepatch for the rest of his life.
In the early days of sound with Fox, Walsh directed the first widescreen spectacle, The Big Trail, an epic wagon train western shot on location across the West. The movie starred John Wayne unknown, whom Walsh discovered as prop boy Marion Morrison and renamed after the Revolutionary War general Mad Anthony Wayne. Walsh directed The Bowery, featuring George Raft, Fay Wray and Pert Kelton. An undistinguished period followed with Paramount Pictures from 1935 to 1939, but Walsh's career rose to new heights after he moved to Warner Brothers, with The Roaring Twenties, featuring James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. Walsh's contract at Warners expired in 1953, he directed several films afterwards, including three with Clark Gable: The Tall Men, The King and Four Queens and Band of Angels. Walsh retired in 1964, he died of a heart attack in 1980. Some of Walsh's film-related material and personal papers are contained in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, to which scholars and media experts from around the world may have full access.
Walsh replaced director Bretaigne Windust, who fell ill, on The Enforcer and shot over half the film, but refused to take screen credit. The Conqueror The Big Trail Captain Horatio Hornblower R. N; the Lawless Breed Esther and the King The Men Who Made the Movies: Raoul Walsh Himself Moss. Marilyn Ann. Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director. University Press of Kentucky. Smith, Renee D.. The Films of Raoul Walsh: A Critical Approach excerpt and text search Paolo Bachmann. Raoul Walsh. Turin: Quaderni del Movie Club di Torino. Jean-Louis Comolli. "L'esprit d'aventure". Cahiers du cinéma, no. 154, April. Toni D'Angela, Toni. Raoul Walsh o dell'avventura singolare, Rome: Bulzoni. "Trafic", no. 28, Winter 1998. "La furia umana", no. 1. 2009. Http://www.lafuriaumana.it Raoul Walsh on IMDb Raoul Walsh at AllMovie Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database Raoul Walsh at Virtual History
Rockliffe Fellowes
Rockliffe Fellowes, born Rockliffe St. Patrick Fellowes, was a Canadian actor born in Ottawa, Canada. After following a business career for some years, he gave it up to go onto the stage in 1907 and made his entry into films as the redemptive hero of Raoul Walsh's 1915 silent gangster film Regeneration, he appeared in silent films and is best known today for his role as gangster Joe Helton in Monkey Business starring the Marx Brothers. At one time he was married to the stage actress Lucile Watson, he retired from acting in 1934. Fellowes died in Los Angeles, California in 1950 at the age of 66. Rockliffe Fellowes on IMDb Rockliffe Fellowes at the Internet Broadway Database Rockcliffe Fellowes portraits
Lost film
A lost film is a feature or short film, no longer known to exist in any studio archives, private collections, or public archives, such as the U. S. Library of Congress. During most of the 20th century, U. S. copyright law required at least one copy of every American film to be deposited at the Library of Congress, at the time of copyright registration, but the Librarian of Congress was not required to retain those copies: "Under the provisions of the act of March 4, 1909, authority is granted for the return to the claimant of copyright of such copyright deposits as are not required by the Library." Of American silent films, far more have been lost than have survived, of American sound films made from 1927 to 1950 half have been lost. The phrase "lost film" can be used in a literal sense for instances where footage of deleted scenes and alternative versions of feature films are known to have been created, but can no longer be accounted for. Sometimes, a copy of a lost film is rediscovered. A film that has not been recovered in its entirety is called a lost film.
For example, the 1922 film Sherlock Holmes was discovered, but some of the footage is still missing. Most film studios had a still photographer with a large-format camera working on the set during production, taking pictures for potential publicity use; the high-quality photographic paper prints that resulted – some produced in quantity for display use by theaters, others in smaller numbers for distribution to newspapers and magazines – have preserved imagery from many otherwise lost films. In some cases, such as London After Midnight, the surviving coverage is so extensive that an entire lost film can be reconstructed scene by scene in the form of still photographs. Stills have been used to stand in for missing footage when making new preservation prints of lost films. Most lost films are from the silent film and early talkie era, from about 1894 to 1930. Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that more than 90% of American films made before 1929 are lost, the Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films are lost forever.
The largest cause of silent film loss was intentional destruction, as silent films were perceived as having little or no commercial value after the end of the silent era by 1930. Film preservationist Robert A. Harris has said, "Most of the early films did not survive because of wholesale junking by the studios. There was no thought of saving these films, they needed vault space and the materials were expensive to house."Many other early motion pictures are lost because the nitrate film used for nearly all 35 mm negatives and prints made before 1952 is flammable. When in badly deteriorated condition and improperly stored, nitrate film can and will spontaneously combust. Fires have destroyed entire archives of films. For example, a storage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Pictures' pre-1935 films; the 1965 MGM vault fire resulted in the loss of early talkies. Nitrate film is chemically unstable and over time can decay into a sticky mass or a powder akin to gunpowder.
This process can be unpredictable: some nitrate film from the 1890s is still in good condition today, while some much nitrate had to be scrapped as unsalvageable when it was 20 years old. Much depends on the environment. Ideal conditions of low temperature, low humidity, adequate ventilation can preserve nitrate film for centuries, but in practice, the storage conditions were far from ideal; when a film on nitrate base is said to have been "preserved", this always means that it has been copied onto safety film or, more digitized. Eastman Kodak introduced a nonflammable 35 mm film stock in spring 1909. However, the plasticizers used to make the film flexible evaporated too making the film dry and brittle, causing splices to part and perforations to tear. By 1911, the major American film studios were back to using nitrate stock. "Safety film" was relegated to sub-35 mm formats such as 16 mm and 8 mm until improvements were made in the late 1940s. Some pre-1931 sound films made by Warner Bros. and First National have been lost because they used a sound-on-disc system with a separate soundtrack on special phonograph records.
If some of a film's soundtrack discs could not be found in the 1950s when 16 mm sound-on-film reduction prints of early "talkies" were being made for inclusion in television syndication packages, that film's chances of survival plummeted: many sound-on-disc films have survived only by way of those 16 mm prints. Before the eras of sound film and home video, films were viewed as having little future value when their theatrical runs ended. Thus, many were deliberately destroyed to save the cost of storage. Many Technicolor two-color negatives from the 1920s and 1930s were thrown out when the studios refused to reclaim their films, still being held by Technicolor in its vaults; some used prints were sold to scrap dealers and cut up into short segments for use with small, hand-cranked 35 mm movie projectors, which were sold as a toy for showing brief excerpts from Hollywood movies at home. As a consequence of this widespread lack of care, the work of many early filmmakers and performers has made its way to the present in fragmentary form.
A high-profile example is the case of Theda Bara. One of the best-known actresses of the early silent era, she made 40 films, but only six are now known to exist. Clara Bow was celebrated in her heyday, but 20 of her 57 films are lost, another five are inc
PS General Slocum
The PS General Slocum was a sidewheel passenger steamboat built in Brooklyn, New York, in 1891. During her service history, she was involved in a number of mishaps, including multiple groundings and collisions. On June 15, 1904, General Slocum sank in the East River of New York City. At the time of the accident, she was on a chartered run carrying members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church to a church picnic. An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board died; the General Slocum disaster was the New York area's worst disaster in terms of loss of life until the September 11, 2001 attacks. It is the worst maritime disaster in the city's history, the second worst maritime disaster on United States waterways; the events surrounding the General Slocum fire have been explored in a number of books and movies. General Slocum was built by Divine Burtis, Jr. a Brooklyn boatbuilder, awarded the contract on February 15, 1891. Her keel was 235 feet long and the hull was 37.5 feet wide constructed of white oak and yellow pine.
General Slocum measured 1,284 tons gross, had a hull depth of 12.3 feet. General Slocum was constructed with three decks, three watertight compartments, 250 electric lights. General Slocum was powered by a single-cylinder, surface-condensing vertical-beam steam engine with a 53-inch bore and 12-foot stroke, built by W. & A. Fletcher Company of Hoboken, New Jersey. Steam was supplied by two boilers at a working pressure of 52 psi. General Slocum was a sidewheel boat; each wheel was 31 feet in diameter. Her maximum speed was about 16 knots; the ship was manned by a crew of 22, including Captain William H. Van Schaick and two pilots. General Slocum was named for New York Congressman Henry Warner Slocum, she operated in the New York City area as an excursion steamer for the next 13 years under the same ownership. General Slocum experienced a series of mishaps following her launch in 1891. Four months after her launching, she ran aground off Rockaway. Tugboats had to be used to pull her free. A number of incidents occurred during 1894.
On July 29, while returning from Rockaway with about 4,700 passengers, General Slocum struck a sandbar with enough force that her electrical generator went out. The next month, General Slocum ran aground off Coney Island during a storm. During this grounding, the passengers had to be transferred to another ship. In September 1894, General Slocum collided with the tug R. T. Sayre in the East River, with General Slocum sustaining substantial damage to her steering. In July 1898, another collision occurred. On August 17, 1901, while carrying what was described as 900 intoxicated anarchists from Paterson, New Jersey, some of the passengers started a riot on board and tried to take control of the vessel; the crew kept control of the ship. The captain docked the ship at the police pier, 17 men were taken into custody by the police. In June 1902, General Slocum ran aground with 400 passengers aboard. With the vessel unable to be freed, the passengers had to camp out overnight while the ship remained stuck.
General Slocum worked as a passenger ship. On Wednesday, June 15, 1904, the ship had been chartered for $350 by St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Little Germany district of Manhattan; this was an annual rite for the group, which had made the trip for 17 consecutive years, a period when German settlers moved out of Little Germany for the Upper East and West Sides. Over 1,400 passengers women and children, boarded General Slocum, to sail up the East River and eastward across the Long Island Sound to Locust Grove, a picnic site in Eatons Neck, Long Island; the ship got underway at 9:30 a.m. As it was passing East 90th Street, a fire started in the Lamp Room in the forward section caused by a discarded cigarette or match, it was fueled by the straw, oily rags, lamp oil strewn around the room. The first notice of a fire was at 10 a.m.. Captain Van Schaick was not notified until 10 minutes after the fire was discovered. A 12-year-old boy was not believed. Although the captain was responsible for the safety of passengers, the owners had made no effort to maintain or replace the ship's safety equipment.
The fire hoses had been allowed to rot, fell apart when the crew tried to put out the fire. The crew had never practiced a fire drill, the lifeboats were tied up and inaccessible. Survivors fell apart in their hands. Desperate mothers placed life jackets on their children and tossed them into the water, only to watch in horror as their children sank instead of floating. Most of those on board were children who, like most Americans of the time, could not swim, it has been suggested that the manager of the life preserver manufacturer placed iron bars inside the cork preservers to meet minimum weight requirements at the time. Many of the life preservers had been filled with cheap and less effective granulated cork and brought up to proper weight by the inclusion of the iron weights. Canvas covers, rotted with age and scattered the powdered cork. Managers of the company were indicted but not convicted; the life preservers had been manufactured in 1891 and had hung
Museum of Modern Art Department of Film
The Museum of Modern Art Department of Film, based in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, United States, founded in 1935, contains works of international cinema, focusing on the art and history of the film medium. The collection comprises 4 million film stills; the department's public film screenings are held at the Museum's 53rd Street building. The Celeste Bartos International Film Study Center at the 53rd Street building, maintains scholarly resources on film and has facilities for viewing films from the collection for research purposes; the film and film stills collections are stored at the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center in Hamlin, Pennsylvania. The department operates a circulating film and video library. Biograph Studio Collection The Country Doctor Edison Company Collection Judith of Bethulia Blind Husbands Tol'able David The Call of the Wild The Marriage Circle Moana The Man Who Laughs Empire Museum of Modern Art website National Film Preservation Foundation
Gangster
A gangster is a criminal, a member of a gang. Some gangs are considered to be part of organized crime. Gangsters are called mobsters, a term derived from mob and the suffix -ster. Gangs provide a level of organization and resources that support much larger and more complex criminal transactions than an individual criminal could achieve. Gangsters have been active for many years in countries around the world; some gangsters, such as Al Capone have become infamous. Gangsters are the subject of many novels and films from the period between 1920 and 1990; some contemporary criminals refer to themselves as "gangsta" in reference to non-rhotic black American pronunciation. In today's usage, the term "gang" is used for a criminal organization, the term "gangster" invariably describes a criminal. Much has been written on the subject of gangs, although there is no clear consensus about what constitutes a gang or what situations lead to gang formation and evolution. There is agreement that the members of a gang have a sense of common identity and belonging, this is reinforced through shared activities and through visual identifications such as special clothing, tattoos or rings.
Some preconceptions may be false. For example, the common view that illegal drug distribution in the United States is controlled by gangs has been questioned. A gang may be a small group of people who cooperate in criminal acts, as with the Jesse James gang, which ended with the leader's death in 1882, but a gang may be a larger group with a formal organization. The Chicago Outfit created by Al Capone outlasted its founder's imprisonment and death, survived into the 21st century. Large and well structured gangs such as the Mafia, drug cartels, Triads or outlaw motorcycle gangs can undertake complex transactions that would be far beyond the capability of one individual, can provide services such as dispute arbitration and contract enforcement that parallel those of a legitimate government; the term "organized crime" is not synonymous. A small street gang that engages in sporadic low-level crime would not be seen as "organized". An organization that coordinates gangs in different countries involved in the international trade in drugs or prostitutes may not be considered a "gang".
Although gangs and gangsters have existed in many countries and at many times in the past, they have played more prominent roles during times of weakened social order or when governments have attempted to suppress access to goods or services for which there is a high demand. The Sicilian Mafia, or Cosa Nostra is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in Sicily, Italy, it is a loose association of criminal groups that share common organizational structure and code of conduct. The origins lie in the upheaval of Sicily's transition out of feudalism in 1812 and its annexation by mainland Italy in 1860. Under feudalism, the nobility owned most of the land and enforced law and order through their private armies. After 1812, the feudal barons sold off or rented their lands to private citizens. Primogeniture was abolished, land could no longer be seized to settle debts, one fifth of the land was to become private property of the peasants. Organized crime has existed in Russia since the days of Imperial Russia in the form of banditry and thievery.
In the Soviet period Vory v Zakone emerged, a class of criminals that had to abide by certain rules in the prison system. One such rule was. During World War II some prisoners made a deal with the government to join the armed forces in return for a reduced sentence, but upon their return to prison they were attacked and killed by inmates who remained loyal to the rules of the thieves. In 1988 the Soviet Union legalized private enterprise but did not provide regulations to ensure the security of market economy. Crude markets emerged, the most notorious being the Rizhsky market where prostitution rings were run next to the Rizhsky Railway Station in Moscow; as the Soviet Union headed for collapse many former government workers turned to crime, while others moved overseas. Former KGB agents and veterans of the Afghan and First and Second Chechen Wars, now unemployed but with experience that could prove useful in crime, joined the increasing crime wave. At first, the Vory v Zakone played a key role in arbitrating the gang wars that erupted in the 1990s.
By the mid-1990s it was believed that "Don" Semion Mogilevich had become the "boss of all bosses" of most Russian Mafia syndicates in the world, described by the British government as "one of the most dangerous men in the world". More criminals with stronger ties to big business and the government have displaced the Vory from some of their traditional niches, although the Vory are still strong in gambling and the retail trade; the Albanian Mafia is active in Albania, the United States, the European Union countries, participating in a diverse range of criminal enterprises including drug and arms trafficking. The people of the mountainous country of Albania have always had strong traditions of family and clan loyalty, in some ways similar to that of southern Italy. Ethnic Albanian gangs have grown since 1992 during the prolonged period of instability in the Balkans after the collapse of Yugoslavia; this coincided with large scale migration to the United States and Canada. Although based in Albania, the gangs handle international transactions such as trafficking in economic migrants and other contraband, weapons.
Other criminal organizations that emerged in the Balkans around this time are popularly called the Serbian Mafia, Bosnian Mafia, Bu
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