Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America referred to as the Confederacy, was an unrecognized country in North America that existed from 1861 to 1865. The Confederacy was formed by seven secessionist slave-holding states—South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Texas—in the Lower South region of the United States, whose economy was dependent upon agriculture cotton, a plantation system that relied upon the labor of African-American slaves; each state declared its secession from the United States, which became known as the Union during the ensuing civil war, following the November 1860 election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the U. S. presidency on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Before Lincoln took office in March, a new Confederate government was established in February 1861, considered illegal by the government of the United States. States volunteered militia units and the new government hastened to form its own Confederate States Army from scratch overnight.
After the American Civil War began in April, four slave states of the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina—also declared their secession and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy accepted Missouri and Kentucky as members, although neither declared secession nor were they largely controlled by Confederate forces; the government of the United States rejected the claims of secession and considered the Confederacy illegally founded. The War began with the Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, a Union fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. No foreign government recognized the Confederacy as an independent country, although Great Britain and France granted it belligerent status, which allowed Confederate agents to contract with private concerns for arms and other supplies. In early 1865, after four years of heavy fighting which led to 620,000–850,000 military deaths, all the Confederate forces surrendered and the Confederacy vanished; the war lacked a formal end.
By 1865 Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America for the duration of the civil war, lamented that the Confederacy had "disappeared". On February 22, 1862, the Confederate Constitution of seven state signatories – Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Texas – replaced the Provisional Constitution of February 8, 1861, with one stating in its preamble a desire for a "permanent federal government". Four additional slave-holding states – Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina – declared their secession and joined the Confederacy following a call by U. S. President Abraham Lincoln for troops from each state to recapture Sumter and other seized federal properties in the South. Missouri and Kentucky were represented by partisan factions adopting the forms of state governments without control of substantial territory or population in either case; the antebellum state governments in both maintained their representation in the Union. Fighting for the Confederacy were two of the "Five Civilized Tribes" – the Choctaw and the Chickasaw – in Indian Territory and a new, but uncontrolled, Confederate Territory of Arizona.
Efforts by certain factions in Maryland to secede were halted by federal imposition of martial law. A Unionist government was formed in opposition to the secessionist state government in Richmond and administered the western parts of Virginia, occupied by Federal troops; the Restored Government recognized the new state of West Virginia, admitted to the Union during the war on June 20, 1863, re-located to Alexandria for the rest of the war. Confederate control over its claimed territory and population in congressional districts shrank from 73% to 34% during the course of the American Civil War due to the Union's successful overland campaigns, its control of the inland waterways into the South, its blockade of the southern coast. With the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the Union made abolition of slavery a war goal; as Union forces moved southward, large numbers of plantation slaves were freed. Many joined the Union lines, enrolling in service as soldiers and laborers; the most notable advance was Sherman's "March to the Sea" in late 1864.
Much of the Confederacy's infrastructure was destroyed, including telegraphs and bridges. Plantations in the path of Sherman's forces were damaged. Internal movement became difficult for Southerners, weakening the economy and limiting army mobility; these losses created an insurmountable disadvantage in men and finance. Public support for Confederate President Jefferson Davis's administration eroded over time due to repeated military reverses, economic hardships, allegations of autocratic government. After four years of campaigning, Richmond was captured by Union forces in April 1865. A few days General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant signalling the collapse of the Confederacy. President Davis was captured on May 10, 1865, jailed in preparation for a treason trial, never held; the initial Confederacy was established in the Montgomery Convention in February 1861 by seven states (South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana
Battle of Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought July 1–3, 1863, in and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, by Union and Confederate forces during the American Civil War. The battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war and is described as the war's turning point. Union Maj. Gen. George Meade's Army of the Potomac defeated attacks by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, halting Lee's invasion of the North. After his success at Chancellorsville in Virginia in May 1863, Lee led his army through the Shenandoah Valley to begin his second invasion of the North—the Gettysburg Campaign. With his army in high spirits, Lee intended to shift the focus of the summer campaign from war-ravaged northern Virginia and hoped to influence Northern politicians to give up their prosecution of the war by penetrating as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or Philadelphia. Prodded by President Abraham Lincoln, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker moved his army in pursuit, but was relieved of command just three days before the battle and replaced by Meade.
Elements of the two armies collided at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, as Lee urgently concentrated his forces there, his objective being to engage the Union army and destroy it. Low ridges to the northwest of town were defended by a Union cavalry division under Brig. Gen. John Buford, soon reinforced with two corps of Union infantry. However, two large Confederate corps assaulted them from the northwest and north, collapsing the hastily developed Union lines, sending the defenders retreating through the streets of the town to the hills just to the south. On the second day of battle, most of both armies had assembled; the Union line was laid out in a defensive formation resembling a fishhook. In the late afternoon of July 2, Lee launched a heavy assault on the Union left flank, fierce fighting raged at Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, Devil's Den, the Peach Orchard. On the Union right, Confederate demonstrations escalated into full-scale assaults on Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill. All across the battlefield, despite significant losses, the Union defenders held their lines.
On the third day of battle, fighting resumed on Culp's Hill, cavalry battles raged to the east and south, but the main event was a dramatic infantry assault by 12,500 Confederates against the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, known as Pickett's Charge. The charge was repulsed at great loss to the Confederate army. Lee led his army on a torturous retreat back to Virginia. Between 46,000 and 51,000 soldiers from both armies were casualties in the three-day battle, the most costly in US history. On November 19, President Lincoln used the dedication ceremony for the Gettysburg National Cemetery to honor the fallen Union soldiers and redefine the purpose of the war in his historic Gettysburg Address. Shortly after the Army of Northern Virginia won a major victory over the Army of the Potomac at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Robert E. Lee decided upon a second invasion of the North; such a move would upset U. S. plans for the summer campaigning season and reduce the pressure on the besieged Confederate garrison at Vicksburg.
The invasion would allow the Confederates to live off the bounty of the rich Northern farms while giving war-ravaged Virginia a much-needed rest. In addition, Lee's 72,000-man army could threaten Philadelphia and Washington, strengthen the growing peace movement in the North. Thus, on June 3, Lee's army began to shift northward from Virginia. Following the death of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, Lee reorganized his two large corps into three new corps, commanded by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell, Lt. Gen. A. P. Hill; the Cavalry Division remained under the command of Maj. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart; the Union Army of the Potomac, under Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, consisted of seven infantry corps, a cavalry corps, an Artillery Reserve, for a combined strength of more than 100,000 men; the first major action of the campaign took place on June 9 between cavalry forces at Brandy Station, near Culpeper, Virginia. The 9,500 Confederate cavalrymen under Stuart were surprised by Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton's combined arms force of two cavalry divisions and 3,000 infantry, but Stuart repulsed the Union attack.
The inconclusive battle, the largest predominantly cavalry engagement of the war, proved for the first time that the Union horse soldier was equal to his Southern counterpart. By mid-June, the Army of Northern Virginia was poised to enter Maryland. After defeating the Union garrisons at Winchester and Martinsburg, Ewell's Second Corps began crossing the river on June 15. Hill's and Longstreet's corps followed on June 24 and 25. Hooker's army pursued, keeping between the U. S. capital and Lee's army. The Union army crossed the Potomac from June 25 to 27. Lee gave strict orders for his army to minimize any negative impacts on the civilian population. Food and other supplies were not seized outright, although quartermasters reimbursing Northern farmers and merchants with Confederate money were not well received. Various towns, most notably York, were required to pay indemnities in lieu of supplies, under threat of destruction. During the invasion, the Confederates seized some 40 northern African Americans.
A few of them were escaped fugitive slaves.
Television in the United States
Television is one of the major mass media of the United States. As of 2011, household ownership of television sets in the country is 96.7%, with 114,200,000 American households owning at least one television set as of August 2013. The majority of households have more than one set; the peak ownership percentage of households with at least one television set occurred during the 1996–97 season, with 98.4% ownership. As a whole, the television networks that broadcast in the United States are the largest and most distributed in the world, programs produced for U. S.-based networks are the most syndicated internationally. Due to a recent surge in the number and popularity of critically acclaimed television series during the 2000s and the 2010s to date, many critics have said that American television is undergoing a modern golden age. In the United States, television is available via broadcast – the earliest method of receiving television programming, which requires an antenna and an equipped internal or external tuner capable of picking up channels that transmit on the two principal broadcast bands high frequency and ultra high frequency, in order to receive the signal – and four conventional types of multichannel subscription television: cable, unencrypted satellite, direct-broadcast satellite television and IPTV.
There are competing video services on the World Wide Web, which have become an popular mode of television viewing since the late 2000s with younger audiences as an alternative or a supplement to the aforementioned traditional forms of viewing television content. Individual broadcast television stations in the U. S. transmit on either VHF channels 2 through 13 or UHF channels 14 through 51. During the era of analog television, broadcast stations transmitted on a single universal channel; the UHF band spanned from channels 14 to 83, though the Federal Communications Commission has twice rescinded the high-end portions of the band from television broadcasting use for emergency and other telecommunications purposes in 1983 and 2009. As in other countries, television stations require a license to broadcast and must comply with certain requirements in order to retain it. Free-to-air and subscription television networks, are not required to file for a license to operate. Over-the-air and free-to-air television do not necessitate any monthly payments, while cable, direct broadcast satellite, IPTV and virtual MVPD services require monthly payments that vary depending on the number of channels that a subscriber chooses to pay for in a particular package.
Channels are sold in groups, rather than singularly. Most conventional subscription television services offer a limited basic tier, a minimum base package that includes only broadcast stations within the television market where the service is located, public and government access cable channels. Elevated programming tiers start with an expanded basic package, offering a selection of subscription channels intended for wide distribution. A la carte subscription services in the U. S. are limited to pay television channels that are offered as add-ons to any programming package that a customer of a multichannel video programming distributor can subscribe to for an additional monthly fee. The United States has a "decentralized", market-oriented television system in regard to broadcast television; the nation has a national publi
The Hitch-Hiker (The Twilight Zone)
"The Hitch-Hiker" is episode sixteen of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It aired on January 22, 1960 on CBS, it is based on Lucille Fletcher's The Hitch-Hiker. It is considered by some to be among the series' greatest episodes. Nan Adams, 27, on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Los Angeles, gets a flat tire on U. S. Route has an accident. A mechanic puts a spare tire on her car, comments that he's surprised she survived the accident, saying "you shouldn't've called for a mechanic, somebody shudda called for a hearse" and directs her to follow him to the nearest town to fix it properly. Just before she leaves, Nan notices a shabby and strange-looking man hitchhiking, but the mechanic doesn't see him when she mentions it. Unnerved, she drives away; as she continues her trip, Nan sees the same hitchhiker thumbing for a ride again in Virginia at several other points on her journey. She grows frightened of him; when she sees him on the other side of a railroad crossing, she tries to drive away but gets stuck on the tracks and is nearly hit by a train.
She becomes convinced. She continues becoming more and more afraid, stopping only when necessary; every time she stops, the hitchhiker is there. Nan gets stranded when she runs out of gas, she reaches a gas station on foot but it's closed, the proprietor refusing to reopen and sell her gas due to how late it is. She gets startled by a sailor on his way back to San Diego from leave. Eager for protection from the hitchhiker, she offers to drive the sailor to San Diego; the sailor persuades the gas station attendant to provide gas. As they drive together and discuss their mutual predicaments, she sees the hitchhiker on the road and swerves toward him; the sailor, who can't see him, questions her driving, she admits she was trying to run over the hitchhiker. The sailor begins to fear for his safety and leaves her, despite her efforts to have him stay offering to go out with him. In Arizona, Nan stops to call her mother; the woman who answers the phone says Mrs. Adams is in the hospital, having suffered a nervous breakdown after finding out that her daughter, died in Pennsylvania six days ago when the car she was driving blew a tire and overturned.
Nan realizes the truth: she never survived the accident in Pennsylvania and the hitchhiker is none other than personification of death and persistently waiting for her to realize that she has been dead all along. She loses all concern, feeling empty. Nan looks in the vanity mirror on the visor. Instead of her reflection, she sees in her place the hitchhiker, who says, "I believe you're going...my way?" Inger Stevens as Nan Adams Leonard Strong as The Hitch-Hiker Adam Williams as Sailor Russ Bender as Counterman Lew Gallo as Mechanic George Mitchell as Gas Station Man Eleanor Audley as Mrs. Whitney In the original radio play by Lucille Fletcher, the character of Nan was a man named Ronald Adams; the Hitch-Hiker was first presented on The Orson Welles Show, Philip Morris Playhouse and The Mercury Summer Theater. All of these radio productions starred Orson Welles as Ronald Adams. Serling named his character "Nan", after one of his daughters. Nan's car is a light-colored 1959 Mercury Montclair four-door hardtop that had the inside rear-view mirror and front door vent windows removed.
However, in the scene where Nan swerved toward the hitch-hiker, the car shown is a black 1957 Ford two-door sedan. When the teleplay was adapted for radio on The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas in 2002, the role of Nan Adams was played by Kate Jackson. DeVoe, Bill.. Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0 Grams, Martin.. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0 "The Hitch-Hiker" on IMDb "The Hitch-Hiker" at TV.com Suspense — The Hitch-Hiker
Time Enough at Last
"Time Enough at Last" is the eighth episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. The episode was adapted from a short story written by Lynn Venable; the short story appeared in the January 1953 edition of the science fiction magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction about seven years before the television episode first aired. "Time Enough at Last" became one of the most famous episodes of the original Twilight Zone and has been parodied since. It is "the story of a man who seeks salvation in the rubble of a ruined world" and tells of Henry Bemis, played by Burgess Meredith, who loves books, yet is surrounded by those who would prevent him from reading them; the episode follows Bemis through the post-apocalyptic world, touching on such social issues as anti-intellectualism, the dangers of reliance upon technology, the difference between aloneness and loneliness. Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but, conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock.
But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself... without anyone. Henpecked, far sighted bank teller and avid bookworm Henry Bemis works at his window in a bank, while reading David Copperfield, which causes him to shortchange an annoyed customer. Bemis's angry boss, his nagging wife, both complain to him that he wastes far too much time reading "doggerel"; as a cruel joke, his wife asks him to read poetry from one of his books to her. Seconds she destroys the book by ripping the pages from it, much to Henry's dismay; the next day, as usual, Henry takes his lunch break in the bank's vault, where his reading will not be disturbed. Moments after he sees a newspaper headline, which reads "H-Bomb Capable of Total Destruction", an enormous explosion outside the bank violently shakes the vault, knocking Bemis unconscious. After regaining consciousness and recovering the thick glasses required for him to see, Bemis emerges from the vault to find the bank demolished and everyone in it dead.
Leaving the bank, he sees that the entire city has been destroyed, realizes that a nuclear war has devastated Earth, but that his being in the vault has saved him. Seconds, hours, they crawl by on hands and knees for Mr. Henry Bemis, who looks for a spark in the ashes of a dead world. A telephone connected to nothingness. A neighborhood bar, a movie, a baseball diamond, a hardware store, the mailbox of what was once his house and is now a rubble, they lie at his feet as battered monuments to what is no more. Mr. Henry Bemis on an eight-hour tour of a graveyard. Finding himself alone in a shattered world with canned food to last him a lifetime and no means of leaving to look for other survivors, Bemis succumbs to despair; as he prepares to commit suicide using a revolver he has found, Bemis sees the ruins of the public library in the distance. Investigating, he finds that the books are still legible, his despair gone, Bemis contentedly sorts the books he looks forward to reading for years to come, with no obligations to get in the way.
Just as he bends down to pick up the first book, he stumbles, his glasses fall off and shatter. In shock, he picks up the broken remains of the glasses he is blind without, says, "That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was—was all the time I needed…! It's not fair! It's not fair!" and bursts into tears, surrounded by books he now can never read. The best laid plans of mice and men... and Henry Bemis... the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis... in the Twilight Zone. "Time Enough at Last" was one of the first episodes written for The Twilight Zone. It introduced Burgess Meredith to the series, he narrated for the 1983 film Twilight Zone: The Movie, which made reference to "Time Enough at Last" during its opening sequence, with the characters discussing the episode in detail. Footage of the exterior steps of the library was filmed several months after production had been completed.
These steps can be seen on the exterior of an Eloi public building in MGM's 1960 version of The Time Machine. John Brahm was nominated for a Directors Guild award for his work on the episode; the book that Bemis was reading in the vault and that flips open when the bomb explodes is A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving. Although the overriding message may seem to "be careful what you wish for, you just might get it", there are other themes throughout the episode as well. Paramount among these is the question of solitude versus loneliness, as embodied by Bemis' moment of near-suicide. Additionally, the portrayal of societal attitudes towards books speaks to the contemporary decline of traditional literature and how, given enough time, reading may become a relic of the past. At the same time, the ending "punishes Bemis for his antisocial behavior, his greatest desire is thwarted". Rod Serl
Rod Serling
Rodman Edward Serling was an American screenwriter, television producer, narrator known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his science-fiction anthology TV series, The Twilight Zone. Serling was active in politics, both on and off the screen, helped form television industry standards, he was known as the "angry young man" of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues including censorship and war. Serling was born on December 1924, in Syracuse, New York, to a Jewish family, he was the second of two sons born to Samuel Lawrence Serling. Serling's father had worked as a secretary and amateur inventor before having children, but took on his father-in-law's profession as a grocer to earn a steady income. Sam Serling became a butcher after the Great Depression forced the store to close. Rod had Robert J. Serling, their mother was a homemaker. Serling spent most of his youth 70 miles south of Syracuse in the city of Binghamton after his family moved there in 1926.
His parents encouraged his talents as a performer. Sam Serling built a small stage in the basement, where Rod put on plays, his older brother, writer Robert, recalled that, at the age of six or seven, Rod entertained himself for hours by acting out dialogue from pulp magazines or movies he had seen. Rod talked to people around him without waiting for their answers. On a two-hour trip from Binghamton to Syracuse, the rest of the family remained silent to see if Rod would notice their lack of participation, he did not. In elementary school, Serling was seen as the class clown and dismissed by many of his teachers as a lost cause. However, his seventh-grade English teacher, Helen Foley, encouraged him to enter the school's public speaking extracurriculars, he was a speaker at his high school graduation. He began writing for the school newspaper, in which, according to the journalist Gordon Sander, he "established a reputation as a social activist", he was interested in sports and excelled at tennis and table tennis.
When he attempted to join the varsity football team, he was told. Serling was interested in writing at an early age, he was an avid radio listener interested in thrillers and horror shows. Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin were two of his favorite writers, he "did some staff work at a Binghamton radio station... tried to write... but never had anything published." He was accepted into college during his senior year of high school. However, the United States was involved in World War II at the time, Serling decided to enlist rather than start college after he graduated from Binghamton Central High School in 1943; as editor of his high school newspaper, Serling encouraged his fellow students to support the war effort. He wanted to leave school before graduation to join the fight but his civics teacher talked him into graduating. "War is a temporary thing," Gus Youngstrom told him. "It ends. An education doesn't. Without your degree, where will you be after the war?" Serling enlisted in the U. S. Army the morning after high school graduation, following his brother Robert.
Serling began his military career in 1943 at Camp Toccoa, under General Joseph May "Joe" Swing and Col. Orin D. "Hard Rock" Haugen and served in the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 11th Airborne Division. He reached the rank of Technician Fourth Grade. Over the next year of paratrooper training and others began boxing to vent aggression, he competed as a flyweight and had 17 bouts, rising to the second round of the division finals before being knocked out. He was remembered for berserker style and for "getting his nose broken in his first bout and again in last bout." He tried his hand with little success. On April 25, 1944, Serling saw that he was being sent west to California, he knew. This disappointed him. On May 5, his division headed to the Pacific, landing in New Guinea, where it would be held in reserve for a few months. In November 1944, his division first saw combat; the 11th Airborne Division would not be used as paratroopers, but as light infantry during the Battle of Leyte. It helped mop up after the five divisions.
For a variety of reasons, Serling was transferred to the 511th's demolition platoon, nicknamed "The Death Squad" for its high casualty rate. According to Sergeant Frank Lewis, leader of the demolitions squad, "He screwed up somewhere along the line, he got on someone's nerves." Lewis judged that Serling was not suited to be a field soldier: "he didn't have the wits or aggressiveness required for combat." At one point, Lewis and others were in a firefight, trapped in a foxhole. As they waited for darkness, Lewis noticed. Serling sometimes went exploring on his own, against orders, got lost. Serling's time in Leyte political views for the rest of his life, he saw death every day while in the Philippines, at the hands of his enemies and his allies, through freak accidents such as that which killed another Jewish private, Melvin Levy. Levy was delivering a comic monologue for the platoon as they rested under a palm tree when a food crate was dropped from a plane above, decapitating him. Serling placed a Star of David over his grave.
Serling la
