Benjamin Henry Latrobe
Benjamin Henry Boneval Latrobe was a British neoclassical architect who emigrated to the United States. He was one of the first formally trained, professional architects in the new United States, drawing on influences from his travels in Italy, as well as British and French Neoclassical architects such as Claude Nicolas Ledoux. In his thirties, he emigrated to the new United States and designed the United States Capitol, on "Capitol Hill" in Washington, D. C. as well as the Old Baltimore Cathedral or The Baltimore Basilica. It is the first Roman Catholic Cathedral constructed in the United States. Latrobe designed the largest structure in America at the time, the "Merchants' Exchange" in Baltimore. With extensive balconied atriums through the wings and a large central rotunda under a low dome which dominated the city, it was completed in 1820 after five years of work and endured into the early twentieth century. Latrobe emigrated in 1796 settling in Virginia where he worked on the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond.
Latrobe moved to Philadelphia where he established his practice. In 1803, he was hired as Surveyor of the Public Buildings of the United States, spent much of the next fourteen years working on projects in the new national capital of Washington, D. C. where he served as the second Architect of the Capitol. He was responsible for the design of the White House porticos. Latrobe spent the years of his life in New Orleans, Louisiana working on a waterworks project, died there in 1820 from yellow fever. Latrobe has been called the "father of American architecture", he was the uncle of Charles La Trobe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria in Australia. Latrobe was born on May 1, 1764, at the Fulneck Moravian Settlement, near Pudsey in the city of Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, his parents were the Reverend Benjamin Latrobe, a leader of the Moravian Church, of Huguenot ancestry, Anna Margaretta Antes whose father was German father and whose maternal line was Dutch. Antes was born in the American colony of Pennsylvania, but was sent to England by her father, a wealthy landowner, to attend a Moravian school at Fulneck.
Latrobe's father, responsible for all Moravian schools and establishments in Britain, had an extensive circle of friends in the higher ranks of society. He stressed the importance of education and the value of social exchange. From a young age, Benjamin Henry Latrobe enjoyed drawing buildings, he was a brother of Moravian leader and musical composer Christian Ignatius Latrobe. In 1776, at the age of twelve, Latrobe was sent away to a Moravian School at Niesky in Upper Lusatia, near the border of the German principalities of Saxony and Prussia, where his brother was studying. At age eighteen, he spent several months traveling around Germany, joined the Royal Prussian Army, becoming close friends with a distinguished officer in the United States Army. Latrobe may have served in the Austrian Imperial Army, suffered some injuries or illness. After recovering, he embarked on a continental "Grand Tour", visiting eastern Saxony, Paris and other places. Through his education and travels, Latrobe mastered German, French and modern Greek, Latin.
He had some knowledge of Hebrew. Latrobe was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1815, his son, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, II worked as a civil engineer. In 1827, he joined the newly organized Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and designed the longest, most challenging bridge on its initial route: the curving Thomas Viaduct. Another son, John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe, was a noted civic leader, author, artist, inventor and social activist in Maryland. A grandson, Charles Hazlehurst Latrobe, Benjamin Henry Latrobe II's son, a Confederate soldier continued the tradition of architect and engineer, building bridges for the city and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Latrobe Park in south Baltimore is named for the family, as is Latrobe Park, New Orleans, in the French Quarter. Latrobe returned to England in 1784, was apprenticed to John Smeaton, an engineer known for designing Eddystone Lighthouse. In 1787 or 1788, he worked in the office of neoclassical architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell for a brief time.
In 1790, Latrobe was appointed Surveyor of the Public Offices in London, established his own private practice in 1791. Latrobe was commissioned in 1792 to design Hammerwood Lodge, near East Grinstead in Sussex, his first independent work, he designed nearby Ashdown House in 1793. Latrobe was involved in construction of the Basingstoke Canal in Surrey, together with engineers John Smeaton and William Jessop. In spring 1793, Latrobe was hired to plan improvements to the River Blackwater from Maldon to Beeleigh, so that the port of Maldon could compete with the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation, which bypassed the town; the project lasted until early 1795. Latrobe had problems getting payment for his work on the project, faced bankruptcy. In February 1790, Latrobe married Lydia Sellon, they lived a busy social life in London; the couple had a daughter and a son, before she died giving birth during November 1793. Lydia had inherited her father's wealth, which in
Wood engraving
Wood engraving is a printmaking and letterpress printing technique, in which an artist works an image or matrix of images into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using low pressure. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas; as a result, wood engravings deteriorate less than copper-plate engravings, have a distinctive white-on-black character. Thomas Bewick developed the wood engraving technique at the end of the 18th century, his work differed from earlier woodcuts in two key ways. First, rather than using woodcarving tools such as knives, Bewick used an engraver's burin. With this, he could create thin delicate lines creating large dark areas in the composition. Second, wood engraving traditionally uses the wood's end grain—while the older technique used the softer side grain.
The resulting increased. Wood-engraved blocks could be used on conventional printing presses, which were going through rapid mechanical improvements during the first quarter of the 19th century; the blocks were made the same height as, composited alongside, movable type in page layouts—so printers could produce thousands of copies of illustrated pages with no deterioration. The combination of this new wood engraving method and mechanized printing drove a rapid expansion of illustrations in the 19th century. Further, advances in stereotype let wood-engravings be reproduced onto metal, where they could be mass-produced for sale to printers. By the mid-19th century, many wood engravings rivaled copperplate engravings. Wood engraving was used to great effect by 19th-century artists such as Edward Calvert, its heyday lasted until the early and mid-20th century when remarkable achievements were made by Eric Gill, Eric Ravilious and others. Though less used now, the technique is still prized in the early 21st century as a high-quality specialist technique of book illustration, is promoted, for example, by the Society of Wood Engravers, who hold an annual exhibition in London and other British venues.
In 15th- and 16th-century Europe, woodcuts were a common technique in printmaking and printing, yet their use as an artistic medium began to decline in the 17th century. They were still made for basic printing press work such as almanacs; these required simple blocks that printed in relief with the text—rather than the elaborate intaglio forms in book illustrations and artistic printmaking at the time, in which type and illustrations were printed with separate plates and techniques. The beginnings of modern wood engraving techniques developed at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, with the works of Englishman Thomas Bewick. Bewick engraved harder woods, such as boxwood, rather than the woods used in woodcuts, he engraved the ends of blocks instead of the side. Finding a woodcutting knife not suitable for working against the grain in harder woods, Bewick used a burin, an engraving tool with a V-shaped cutting tip. From the beginning of the nineteenth century Bewick's techniques came into wider use in Britain and the United States.
Alexander Anderson introduced the technique to the United States. Bewick's work impressed him, so he reverse engineered and imitated Bewick's technique—using metal until he learned that Bewick used wood. There it was further expanded upon by his students, Joseph Alexander Adams, Besides interpreting details of light and shade, from the 1820s onwards, engravers used the method to reproduce freehand line drawings; this was, in many ways an unnatural application, since engravers had to cut away all the surface of the block to produce the printable lines of the artist's drawing. Nonetheless, it became the most common use of wood engraving. Examples include the cartoons of Punch magazine, the pictures in the Illustrated London News and Sir John Tenniel's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's works, the latter engraved by the firm of Dalziel Brothers. In the United States, wood-engraved publications began to take hold, such as Harper's Weekly. Frank Leslie, a British-born engraver who had headed the engraving department of the Illustrated London News, immigrated to the United States in 1848, where he developed a means to divide the labor for making wood engravings.
A single design was divided into a grid, each engraver worked on a square. The blocks were assembled into a single image; this process formed the basis for his Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, which competed with Harper's in illustrating scenes from the American Civil War. By the mid-19th century, electrotyping was developed, which could reproduce a wood engraving on metal. By this method, a single wood-engraving could be mass-produced for sale to printshops, the original retained without wear; until 1860, artists working for engraving had to paint or draw directly on the surface of the block and the original artwork was destroyed by the engraver. In 1860, the engraver Thomas Bolton invented a process for transferring a photograph onto the block. At about the same time, French engravers developed a modified technique in which cross-hatching was entirely eliminated. Instead, all tonal gradations were rendered by white lines of varying thickness and closeness, sometimes broken into dots for the darkest areas.
This technique appears in engravings from Gustave Doré's drawings. Towards the end of the 19th century, a combination of Bolton's'photo on wood' process and the increased t
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537, was a landmark decision of the U. S. Supreme Court issued in 1896, it upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality – a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation, passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction Era; the decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1, with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the lone dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. Plessy is regarded as one of the worst decisions in U. S. Supreme Court history. Despite its infamy, the decision itself has never been explicitly overruled. However, a series of subsequent decisions beginning with the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education—which held that Plessy's "separate but equal" doctrine is unconstitutional in the context of public schools and educational facilities—have weakened it to the point that it is considered to have been de facto overruled.
In 1890, the state of Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, which required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars. Concerned, a group of prominent black and white New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens dedicated to repeal the law or fight its effect, they persuaded a man of mixed race, to participate in an orchestrated test case. Plessy was born a free man and was an "octoroon". However, under Louisiana law, he was classified as black, thus required to sit in the "colored" car. On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket at the Press Street Depot and boarded a "Whites Only" car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans, bound for Covington, Louisiana; the railroad company, which had opposed the law on the grounds that it would require the purchase of more railcars, had been informed of Plessy's racial lineage, the intent to challenge the law. Additionally, the committee hired a private detective with arrest powers to detain Plessy, to ensure that he would be charged for violating the Separate Car Act, as opposed to a vagrancy or some other offense.
After Plessy took a seat in the whites-only railway car, he was asked to vacate it, sit instead in the blacks-only car. Plessy refused and was arrested by the detective; as planned, the train was stopped, Plessy was taken off the train at Press and Royal streets. Plessy was remanded for trial in Orleans Parish. In his case, Homer Adolph Plessy v; the State of Louisiana, Plessy's lawyers argued that the state law which required East Louisiana Railroad to segregate trains had denied him his rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, which provided for equal treatment under the law. However, the judge presiding over his case, John Howard Ferguson, ruled that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroad companies while they operated within state boundaries. Plessy was convicted and sentenced to pay a $25 fine. Plessy sought a writ of prohibition; the Committee of Citizens took Plessy's appeal to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, where he again found an unreceptive ear, as the state Supreme Court upheld Judge Ferguson's ruling.
In speaking for the court's decision that Ferguson's judgment did not violate the 14th Amendment, Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Charles Fenner cited a number of precedents, including two key cases from Northern states. The Massachusetts Supreme Court had ruled in 1849 — before the 14th amendment — that segregated schools were constitutional. In answering the charge that segregation perpetuated race prejudice, the Massachusetts court famously stated: "This prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law, cannot be changed by law." The law itself was repealed five years but the precedent stood. In a Pennsylvania law mandating separate railcars for different races the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stated: "To assert separateness is not to declare inferiority... It is to say that following the order of Divine Providence, human authority ought not to compel these separated races to intermix."Undaunted, the Committee appealed to the United States Supreme Court in 1896. Two legal briefs were submitted on Plessy's behalf.
One was signed by Albion W. Tourgée and James C. Walker and the other by Samuel F. Phillips and his legal partner F. D. McKenney. Oral arguments were held before the Supreme Court on April 13, 1896. Tourgée and Phillips appeared in the courtroom to speak on behalf of Plessy. Tourgée built his case upon violation of Plessy's rights under the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees the same rights to all citizens of the United States, the equal protection of those rights, against the deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Tourgée argued that the reputation of being a black man was "property", which, by the law, implied the inferiority of African Americans as compared to whites; the state legal brief was prepared by Attorney General Milton Joseph Cunningham of Natchitoches and New Orleans. Cunningham was a staunch supporter of white supremacy, who according to a laudatory 1916 obituary "worked so in restoring white supremacy in politics that he was arrested, with fifty-one other men of that community, tried by federal officials."On May 18, 1896, the Court ruled against Plessy in a 7–1 decision.
Justice David J. Brewer did not participate, as he had left Washington just before oral arguments to attend to the sudden death of h
Cemetery
A cemetery or graveyard is a place where the remains of dead people are buried or otherwise interred. The word cemetery implies that the land is designated as a burial ground and applied to the Roman catacombs; the term graveyard is used interchangeably with cemetery, but a graveyard refers to a burial ground within a churchyard. The intact or cremated remains of people may be interred in a grave referred to as burial, or in a tomb, an "above-ground grave", a mausoleum, niche, or other edifice. In Western cultures, funeral ceremonies are observed in cemeteries; these ceremonies or rites of passage differ according to religious beliefs. Modern cemeteries include crematoria, some grounds used for both, continue as crematoria as a principal use long after the interment areas have been filled. Taforalt cave in Morocco is the oldest known cemetery in the world, it was the resting place of at least 34 Iberomaurusian individuals, the bulk of which have been dated to 15,100 to 14,000 years ago. Neolithic cemeteries are sometimes referred to by the term "grave field".
They are one of the chief sources of information on ancient and prehistoric cultures, numerous archaeological cultures are defined by their burial customs, such as the Urnfield culture of the European Bronze Age. From about the 7th century, in Europe a burial was under the control of the Church and could only take place on consecrated church ground. Practices varied, but in continental Europe, bodies were buried in a mass grave until they had decomposed; the bones were exhumed and stored in ossuaries, either along the arcaded bounding walls of the cemetery or within the church under floor slabs and behind walls. In most cultures those who were vastly rich, had important professions, were part of the nobility or were of any other high social status were buried in individual crypts inside or beneath the relevant place of worship with an indication of their name, date of death and other biographical data. In Europe, this was accompanied by a depiction of their coat of arms. Most others were buried in graveyards again divided by social status.
Mourners who could afford the work of a stonemason had a headstone engraved with a name, dates of birth and death and sometimes other biographical data, set up over the place of burial. The more writing and symbols carved on the headstone, the more expensive it was; as with most other human property such as houses and means of transport, richer families used to compete for the artistic value of their family headstone in comparison to others around it, sometimes adding a statue on the top of the grave. Those who could not pay for a headstone at all had some religious symbol made from wood on the place of burial such as a Christian cross; some families hired a blacksmith and had large crosses made from various metals put on the place of burial. Starting in the early 19th century, the burial of the dead in graveyards began to be discontinued, due to rapid population growth in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, continued outbreaks of infectious disease near graveyards and the limited space in graveyards for new interment.
In many European states, burial in graveyards was outlawed altogether through government legislation. Instead of graveyards new places of burial were established away from populated areas and outside of old towns and city centers. Many new cemeteries became municipally owned or were run by their own corporations, thus independent from churches and their churchyards. In some cases, skeletons were moved into ossuaries or catacombs. A large action of this type occurred in 18th century Paris when human remains were transferred from graveyards all over the city to the Catacombs of Paris; the bones of an estimated 6 million people are to be found there. An early example of a landscape-style cemetery is Père Lachaise in Paris; this embodied the idea of state- rather than church-controlled burial, a concept that spread through the continent of Europe with the Napoleonic invasions. This could include the opening of cemeteries by joint stock companies; the shift to municipal cemeteries or those established by private companies was accompanied by the establishing of landscaped burial grounds outside the city.
In Britain the movement was driven by public health concerns. The Rosary Cemetery in Norwich was opened in 1819 as a burial ground for all religious backgrounds. Similar private non-denominational cemeteries were established near industrialising towns with growing populations, such as Manchester and Liverpool; each cemetery required a separate Act of Parliament for authorisation, although the capital was raised through the formation of joint-stock companies. In the first 50 years of the 19th century the population of London more than doubled from 1 million to 2.3 million. The small parish churchyards were becoming dangerously overcrowded, decaying matter infiltrating the water supply was causing epidemics; the issue became acute after the cholera epidemic of 1831, which killed 52,000 people in Britain alone, putting unprecedented pressure on the country's burial capacity. Concerns were raised about the potential public health hazard arising from the inhalation of gases generated from human putrefaction under the prevailing miasma theory of disease.
Legislative action was slow in coming, but in 1832 Parliament acknowledged the need for the establishment of large municipal cemeter
Andre Cailloux
Andre Cailloux was one of the first black officers in the Union Army to be killed in combat during the American Civil War. He died heroically during the unsuccessful first attack on the Confederate fortifications during the Siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana. Accounts of his heroism were reported in the press, became a rallying cry for the recruitment of African Americans into the Union Army, his reputation as a patriot and martyr long outlived him. In an 1890 collection of interviews, Civil War veteran Colonel Douglass Wilson said, "If patriotic heroism deserved to be honored in stately marble or in brass that of Captain Caillioux deserves to be, the American people will have never redeemed their gratitude to genuine patriotism until that debt is paid." Born a mixed-race slave in Louisiana in 1825, Cailloux lived his entire life in and around New Orleans. As a young man, Cailloux had been apprenticed in the cigar-making trade, he was owned by members of the Duvernay family until 1846. His petition at age 21 for manumission was supported by his master and was granted by an all-white police jury in the city of New Orleans.
There was an established community of free people of color in New Orleans, who were descended from both European and African Creoles. This group became established during the French colonial years and enjoyed some rights as a third class between the white colonists and the majority of enslaved Africans. In New Orleans culture under the plaçage system, white men took women of color as common-law wives. Sometimes they acknowledged their mixed-race children and paid for their education of sons, or arranged apprenticeships for adult skills. Sometimes they settled property on them. In 1847, Cailloux married a free Creole of color. Although born into slavery, she had been freed by her mother paying her purchase price to her master. Cailloux and Coulon had four children born free. Félicie's mother Feliciana had been an enslaved mulatto woman. For several years, after she had borne Félicie, she was held by and served as the common-law wife of her master Valentin Encalada, a white planter. Félicie was Encalada's "property" as the child of her mother.
Feliciana bought her daughter's freedom from Encalada in 1842. Upon gaining his freedom, Cailloux earned his living as a cigar maker. Prior to the beginning of the Civil War, he established his own cigar-making business. Though his financial circumstances were modest, Cailloux became recognized as a leader within the community of free people of color in New Orleans. An avid sportsman, Cailloux was admired as one of the best boxers in the city, he was an active supporter of the Institute Catholique, a school for orphaned black children. It taught the children of free people of color. After his manumission, Cailloux learned to read with the assistance of the teachers at the Institute Catholique, he became fluent in both French. By 1860, Cailloux was a well-respected member of the 10,000 "free men of color" community in New Orleans. At the time, New Orleans was the largest city in the South, the sixth-largest city in the United States, with a population of about 100,000. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Cailloux was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Native Guard, a Confederate regiment organized to defend the city of New Orleans.
Free men of color had participated in the local militia since the time of French colonial rule. He was one of the first black officers of any North American unit; the Native Guard was made up of free men of color who resided in and around New Orleans. Though the regiment was organized as a public relations move by the Confederate government of the state of Louisiana, which provided no allowances for uniforms or equipment, Cailloux took his responsibilities seriously, his unit was observed to be well trained. The Confederate Native Guard were never called to active duty. Needing more soldiers, the Confederate Congress passed a law to establish conscription and reassigned its white officers to newly formed white units, disbanding the Guard in February 1862. Two months Union Admiral David Farragut captured the city of New Orleans in April 1862. Union General Benjamin F. Butler, military commander of the Department of the Gulf, made his headquarters in New Orleans. In September 1862 he ordered the organizing of an all-black Union Army 1st Louisiana Native Guard regiment.
Unlike the Confederate unit, this regiment had a minority of free men of color. Andre Cailloux joined this regiment and was commissioned as captain of Company E, his company was considered one of the best drilled in the Native Guard. Cailloux earned the respect of Colonel Spencer Stafford, the white officer who commanded the regiment; when General Nathaniel P. Banks replaced Butler as Commander of the Department of the Gulf in December 1862, he brought with him an additional 30,000 troops, bringing the total troop strength under his command to 42,000, they were being fortified for the regional assault against Mississippi. By this time, the all-black Native Guard had grown to three regiments, as slaves continued to escape to Union lines to join the cause of fighting their former masters. Although the line officers were black, including future Governor P. B. S. Pinchback, a Company Commander of the 2nd Regiment, the commanding officers were white. Banks set out to replace all black officers with white ones, accomplished this with the 2nd and 3rd Regiment
Rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues abbreviated as R&B, is a genre of popular music that originated in African American communities in the 1940s. The term was used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. In the commercial rhythm and blues music typical of the 1950s through the 1970s, the bands consisted of piano, one or two guitars, drums, one or more saxophones, sometimes background vocalists. R&B lyrical themes encapsulate the African-American experience of pain and the quest for freedom and joy, as well as triumphs and failures in terms of relationships and aspirations; the term "rhythm and blues" has undergone a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s, it was applied to blues records. Starting in the mid-1950s, after this style of music contributed to the development of rock and roll, the term "R&B" became used to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music.
In the 1960s, several British rock bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Animals were referred to and promoted as being R&B bands. Their mix of rock and roll and R&B is now known as "British rhythm and blues". By the 1970s, the term "rhythm and blues" changed again and was used as a blanket term for soul and funk. In the 1980s, a newer style of R&B developed, becoming known as "contemporary R&B", it combines elements of rhythm and blues, soul, hip hop, electronic music. Popular R&B vocalists at the end of the 20th century included Prince, R. Kelly, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey. In the 21st century, R&B has remained a popular genre becoming more pop orientated and alternatively influenced with successful artists including Usher, Bruno Mars, Chris Brown, Justin Timberlake, The Weeknd, Frank Ocean and Khalid. Although Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine is credited with coining the term "rhythm and blues" as a musical term in the United States in 1948, the term was used in Billboard as early as 1943.
It replaced the term "race music", which came from within the black community, but was deemed offensive in the postwar world. The term "rhythm and blues" was used by Billboard in its chart listings from June 1949 until August 1969, when its "Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles" chart was renamed as "Best Selling Soul Singles". Before the "Rhythm and Blues" name was instated, various record companies had begun replacing the term "race music" with "sepia series". Writer and producer Robert Palmer defined rhythm & blues as "a catchall term referring to any music, made by and for black Americans", he has used the term "R&B" as a synonym for jump blues. However, AllMusic separates it from jump blues because of R&B's stronger gospel influences. Lawrence Cohn, author of Nothing but the Blues, writes that "rhythm and blues" was an umbrella term invented for industry convenience. According to him, the term embraced all black music except classical music and religious music, unless a gospel song sold enough to break into the charts.
Well into the 21st century, the term R&B continues in use to categorize music made by black musicians, as distinct from styles of music made by other musicians. In the commercial rhythm and blues music typical of the 1950s through the 1970s, the bands consisted of piano, one or two guitars, bass and saxophone. Arrangements were rehearsed to the point of effortlessness and were sometimes accompanied by background vocalists. Simple repetitive parts mesh, creating momentum and rhythmic interplay producing mellow and hypnotic textures while calling attention to no individual sound. While singers are engaged with the lyrics intensely so, they remain cool, in control; the bands dressed in suits, uniforms, a practice associated with the modern popular music that rhythm and blues performers aspired to dominate. Lyrics seemed fatalistic, the music followed predictable patterns of chords and structure; the migration of African Americans to the urban industrial centers of Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere in the 1920s and 1930s created a new market for jazz and related genres of music.
These genres of music were performed by full-time musicians, either working alone or in small groups. The precursors of rhythm and blues came from jazz and blues, which overlapped in the late-1920s and 1930s through the work of musicians such as the Harlem Hamfats, with their 1936 hit "Oh Red", as well as Lonnie Johnson, Leroy Carr, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, T-Bone Walker. There was increasing emphasis on the electric guitar as a lead instrument, as well as the piano and saxophone. In 1948, RCA Victor was marketing black music under the name "Blues and Rhythm". In that year, Louis Jordan dominated the top five listings of the R&B charts with three songs, two of the top five songs were based on the boogie-woogie rhythms that had come to prominence during the 1940s. Jordan's band, the Tympany Five, consisted of him on saxophone and vocals, along with musicians on trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano and drums. Lawrence Cohn described the music as "grittier than his boogie-era jazz-tinged blues". Robert Palmer described it as "urbane, jazz-based music with a heavy, insistent beat".
Jordan's music, along with that of Big Joe Turner, Roy Brown, Billy Wright, Wynonie Harris, is now referred to as jump blues. Paul Gayten, Roy Brown, others had had hits in the style now referred to as rhythm and blu
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina was an destructive and deadly Category 5 hurricane that made landfall on Florida and Louisiana the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas, in August 2005, causing catastrophic damage from central Florida to eastern Texas. Subsequent flooding, caused as a result of fatal engineering flaws in the flood protection system known as levees around the city of New Orleans, precipitated most of the loss of lives; the storm was the third major hurricane of the record-breaking 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, as well as the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane on record to make landfall in the United States, behind only the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, Hurricane Camille in 1969, Hurricane Michael in 2018. The storm originated over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005, from the merger of a tropical wave and the remnants of Tropical Depression Ten. Early on the following day, the tropical depression intensified into a tropical storm as it headed westward toward Florida, strengthening into a hurricane only two hours before making landfall at Hallandale Beach and Aventura on August 25.
After briefly weakening again to a tropical storm, Katrina emerged into the Gulf of Mexico on August 26 and began to intensify. The storm strengthened into a Category 5 hurricane over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico but weakened before making its second landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on August 29, over southeast Louisiana and Mississippi; as Katrina made landfall, its front right quadrant, which held the strongest winds, slammed into Gulfport, devastating it. Overall, at least 1,836 people died in the hurricane and subsequent floods, making Katrina the deadliest United States hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane. Severe property damage occurred in numerous coastal areas, such as Mississippi beachfront towns where boats and casino barges rammed buildings, pushing cars and houses inland; the total property damage was estimated at $125 billion four times the damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, tying Katrina with Hurricane Harvey of 2017 as the costliest Atlantic tropical cyclone on record.
Over fifty breaches in surge protection levees surrounding the city of New Orleans, Louisiana was the cause of the majority of the death and destruction during Katrina. 80% of the city, as well as large tracts of neighboring parishes, became flooded, the floodwaters lingered for weeks. Most of the transportation and communication networks servicing New Orleans were damaged or disabled by the flooding, tens of thousands of people who had not evacuated the city prior to landfall became stranded with little access to food, shelter or basic necessities; the scale of the disaster in New Orleans provoked massive national and international response efforts. Multiple investigations in the aftermath of the storm concluded that the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, which had designed and built the region's levees decades earlier, was responsible for the failure of the flood-control systems, though federal courts ruled that the Corps could not be held financially liable because of sovereign immunity in the Flood Control Act of 1928.
There were widespread criticisms and investigations of the emergency responses from federal and local governments, which resulted in the resignations of Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael D. Brown and New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Eddie Compass. Many other government officials were criticized for their responses New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, President George W. Bush. Several agencies including the United States Coast Guard, National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service were commended for their actions; the NHC was found to have provided accurate hurricane forecasts with sufficient lead time. Hurricane Katrina formed as Tropical Depression Twelve over the southeastern Bahamas on August 23, 2005, as the result of an interaction between a tropical wave and the remnants of Tropical Depression Ten; the storm strengthened into Tropical Storm Katrina on the morning of August 24. The tropical storm moved towards Florida and became a hurricane only two hours before making landfall between Hallandale Beach and Aventura on the morning of August 25.
The storm weakened over land, but it regained hurricane status about one hour after entering the Gulf of Mexico, it continued strengthening over open waters. On August 27, the storm reached Category 3 intensity on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, becoming the third major hurricane of the season. An eyewall replacement cycle disrupted the intensification but caused the storm to nearly double in size; the storm intensified after entering the Gulf, growing from a Category 3 hurricane to a Category 5 hurricane in just nine hours. This rapid growth was due to the storm's movement over the "unusually warm" waters of the Loop Current. Katrina attained Category 5 status on the morning of August 28 and reached its peak strength at 1800 UTC that day, with maximum sustained winds of 175 mph and a minimum central pressure of 902 mbar; the pressure measurement made Katrina the fifth most intense Atlantic hurricane on record at the time, only to be surpassed by Hurricanes Rita and Wilma in the season.
However, this record was broken by Hurricane Rita. The hurricane subsequently weakened due to another eyewall replacement cycle, Katrina made its second landfall at 1110 UTC on August 29, as a Category 3 hu
