The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. In 1386, Chaucer became Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace and, in 1389, Clerk of the King's work, it was during these years that Chaucer began working on The Canterbury Tales. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral; the prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. After a long list of works written earlier in his career, including Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls, The Canterbury Tales is near-unanimously seen as Chaucer's magnum opus, he uses the tales and descriptions of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, of the Church. Chaucer's use of such a wide range of classes and types of people was without precedent in English.

Although the characters are fictional, they still offer a variety of insights into customs and practices of the time. Such insight leads to a variety of discussions and disagreements among people in the 14th century. For example, although various social classes are represented in these stories and all of the pilgrims are on a spiritual quest, it is apparent that they are more concerned with worldly things than spiritual. Structurally, the collection resembles Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, which Chaucer may have read during his first diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372, it has been suggested that the greatest contribution of The Canterbury Tales to English literature was the popularisation of the English vernacular in mainstream literature, as opposed to French, Italian or Latin. English had, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer's time, several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, the Pearl Poet, Julian of Norwich—also wrote major literary works in English.

It is unclear to. While Chaucer states the addressees of many of his poems, the intended audience of The Canterbury Tales is more difficult to determine. Chaucer was a courtier, leading some to believe that he was a court poet who wrote for nobility; the Canterbury Tales is thought to have been incomplete at the end of Chaucer's life. In the General Prologue, some 30 pilgrims are introduced. According to the Prologue, Chaucer's intention was to write four stories from the perspective of each pilgrim, two each on the way to and from their ultimate destination, St. Thomas Becket's shrine. Although incomplete, The Canterbury Tales is revered as one of the most important works in English literature, it is open to a wide range of interpretations. The question of whether The Canterbury Tales is a finished work has not been answered to date. There are 84 manuscripts and four incunabula editions of the work, dating from the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, more than for any other vernacular literary text with the exception of The Prick of Conscience.

This is taken as evidence of the Tales' popularity during the century after Chaucer's death. Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought to have been complete, while 28 are so fragmentary that it is difficult to ascertain whether they were copied individually or as part of a set; the Tales vary in both major ways from manuscript to manuscript. Determining the text of the work is complicated by the question of the narrator's voice which Chaucer made part of his literary structure; the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Tales are not Chaucer's originals. The oldest is MS Peniarth 392 D, written by a scribe shortly after Chaucer's death. Another famous example is the Ellesmere Manuscript, a manuscript handwritten by one person with illustrations by several illustrators; the first version of The Canterbury Tales to be published in print was William Caxton's 1476 edition. Only 10 copies of this edition are known to exist, including one held by the British Library and one held by the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In 2004, Linne Mooney claimed that she was able to identify the scrivener who worked for Chaucer as an Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney a professor at the University of Maine and a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, said she could match Pinkhurst's signature, on an oath he signed, to his handwriting on a copy of The Canterbury Tales that might have been transcribed from Chaucer's working copy. Recent scholarship has cast severe doubt upon that identification. In the absence of consensus as to whether or not a complete version of the Tales exists, there is no general agreement regarding the order in which Chaucer intended the stories to be placed. Textual and manuscript clues have been adduced to support the two most popular modern methods of ordering the tales; some scholarly editions divide the Tales into ten "Fragments". The tales that make up a Fragment are related and contain internal indications of their order of presentation with one character speaking to and stepping aside for another character.

However, between Fragments, the connection is less obvious. Co

Sherman Army Airfield is an airport located at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in Leavenworth County, Kansas. Although the airport is within the confines of a United States Army Post, it has agreement with the city of Leavenworth, Kansas to permit civilian use at all hours, it derives its codes from Fort Leavenworth. While many facilities at Fort Leavenworth are named for the Command and General Staff College founder William Tecumseh Sherman the airfield is named for an early Army Aviation pioneer Major William Carrington Sherman who died in 1927 at Ft Leavenworth while there as an instructor. William Sherman wrote the Army's first airplane tactics manual -- "Air Tactics" as well as several other army airplane manuals and histories. Sherman AAF covers an area of 234 acres at an elevation of 772 feet above mean sea level, it has one runway designated. For the 12-month period ending September 30, 2008, the airport had 20,400 aircraft operations, an average of 55 per day: 94% general aviation and 6% military.

At that time there were 31 aircraft based at this airport: 3 % multi-engine. From its beginning, the primary and exclusive function of Sherman Army Airfield at Fort Leavenworth was to provide flying facilities for the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. Most of its use was for proficiency flights by pilots assigned to the school as students or instructors. In the early 1920s such flying was done at an old polo ground about three miles from Sherman. However, in the spring of 1926 an emergency strip, laid out on the present site in 1923, was converted into a permanent airfield. To run the field an Army Air Corps detachment was stationed there until 1 July 1937 when the detachment became the Third Staff Squadron; the base was located on low ground in a bend of the Missouri River one mile northeast of Fort Leavenworth near the Disciplinary Barracks. At first a sod surface was used; the largest of these had a length of 4,000 feet, after the entry of the United States into World War II they were further lengthened to 6,000 feet, a distance sufficient for most types of aircraft used in that war.

However, because in wet weather or when the river was high the ground was too sodden to be satisfactory for use by heavy aircraft, cement aprons were laid down late in 1944 at the ends of the main runways. Intersecting at one end and joined by a short cross-strip, the runways made a pattern like the letter "A." A hangar for the base was built in 1932. Badly damaged in 1934 by a fire which destroyed several planes, it was repaired and used for the next 20 years. Several temporary buildings, including barracks for enlisted men, were added during World War II. During much of World War II Sherman had the peculiar distinction of being directly under Headquarters, Army Air Forces. However, on 21 January 1944 it was assigned to Third Air Force under which it remained for the duration of the war; the Third Staff Squadron was inactivated on 29 April 1944, its personnel and equipment going to a new organization, the 355th Air Base Unit. Disbanded at that time and absorbed into the 355th were a medical detachment and the 344th Sub-Depot, in operation at Sherman since its activation on 1 May 1941.

About 50 men belonging to an airways communications detachment and a weather detachment remained outside the base unit, though attached to it for rations and quarters. Early in the war when bases were scarce Sherman AAF was pressed into service for training purposes. In September and October 1941 two National Guard units, the 124th and 127th Observation Squadrons, were sent there to train, they left in April 1942. Royal Netherlands Air Force cadets were given primary flight instruction there in 1942 by the 671st School Squadron. Otherwise the mission of the base continued to be to provide facilities for proficiency flying by faculty and students at the Command and General Staff School, for administrative flights, for transients; as late as May 1944 Sherman had only 25 planes, most of which were trainers and none models used in combat. However, an influx of pilots sent to study at Fort Leavenworth after gaining extensive combat experience on tours of duty overseas made it desirable to provide more and better planes for their use.

A batch of 15, including some P-40 Warhawks, arrived in June 1944, by the end of the war over 60 aircraft, at least ten of which were P-51 Mustangss, were based at Sherman. Traffic expanded until in July 1945, 868 local and 357 cross-country flights were made from the base. Over the years Sherman saw a dazzling array of visitors drawn there to transact business or attend ceremonies at Fort Leavenworth. Among them were in 1944 Gen. H. H. Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, in 1945 Lt. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton, Commanding General of Third Air Force, in 1946 the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Deputy Commander of the AAF, Lt. Gen. Ira C. Eaker. Came Gen. Jacob L. Devers, the commander of the Army Ground Forces, Lt. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, Commanding General of Strategic Air Command, Lt. Gen. Elwood R. Quesada, head of Tactical Air Command. Of many foreign dignitaries, the British general, Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, who attended graduation at Fort Leavenworth in 1953, was the most famous, but the most stared at was the only Soviet general seen in that area, Maj. Gen. Nicolai V. Slavin, who stopped off in 1944 on his way to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference.

In 1946 Sherman passed from Third Air Force to the newly created Tactical Air Command, under which it remained unt

Hanuman Prasad Poddar was an Indian freedom fighter, magazine editor and philanthropist. He was one of trustee of gita press by Ghanshyam Jalan and Jay Dayal ji Goeyendka-Sethji, his work in fostering pride among the people regarding India's glorious history and philosophic tradition earned him praise from Mahatma Gandhi. The Government of India issued a postage stamp in his memory in 1992. Hanuman Prasad Poddar was born in Shillong, he spent a considerable time in Ratangarh in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan into a Marwadi trading family belonging to the mercantile Agarwal caste. Born into a prosperous family of traditional outlook and culture, he received a rich traditional education and imbibed the culture and outlook of old India, his father was keen that he should learn English, because the family had begun trading in Kolkata and knowledge of English was a necessary skill for making a success there. While he was still a teenager, Poddar was married to a girl from his own community and background, chosen by his parents.

Around the same time, he began attending his father's office as an apprentice. He had the opportunity to travel over most of northern India by rail and bullock cart to advance his family's trading business. Once he had gained requisite experience and showed some ability, his father put him in charge of the Kolkata office, as had been the plan for him from an early age. Poddar, now in his 20s, made a success of this assignment and the family trading business flourished. Kolkata in those days was still the first city of the British Raj and the place where new ideas and awareness first made their appearance. At this time, four factors came together to produce a major impact on Poddar's personality; these were: his exposure to wider India. These four factors united to bring about within him an awareness of the pitiful state of India, the need to instill pride in Indians of their culture and value system, so that they could deal with the world on their own terms. During these years, his wife remained with his parents in Ratangarh, while Poddar lived in Kolkata in a community hostel with other young Marwadi men who were working in trade.

This arrangement was standard and typical of the Kolkata Marwadi ethos of that day. It was in this milieu that Poddar came into contact with some Bengali young men of a revolutionary bent. In those days, Bengal was the cradle of armed struggle against British rule, Kolkata was still the first city of India; the hostel in which Poddar lived began to be used as a safe house by certain revolutionary youth. Poddar had no involvement in these activities; when the police raided the hostel, he and every other young man living there was tarred with the same brush as the revolutionaries. Although he was not accused in court of having committed any violent act, the British authorities jailed him for several months, pending trial for having been in contact with the nationalist revolutionaries; this term in jail, for no actual offence, proved to be a turning point in Poddar's life. Although his family's business was flourishing, Poddar lost interest in pursuing trade. Instead, his inclination turned towards nationalism.

In 1918 he shifted to Bombay now Mumbai to work in share brokerage business with his cousin Srinivas Das Poddar owner of the Tarachand Ghanshyamdas firm a leading trading firm of India at the time however over the period of time he developed close relationship with Lokmanya Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahamana Madan Mohan Malviya & other leaders involved in the freedom struggle. Https://radhababaofgorakhpur.wordpress.com/bio/shri-bhaiji/ After being released from the jail he started publishing and editing ‘Kalyaan’ to reach the spiritual glory and high value oriented heroic deeds of heroes of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to the each Indian to feel them spiritually free and proud of their achievements in the past as a source of inspiration to fight for the freedom of India. He dedicated his life to make available great epics like the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas and the Upanishads translated in Hindi to the common people at affordable prices, he started publishing and editing ‘Kalyaan’ monthly Magazine from 1927 in Hindi with a view to ‘the betterment of life and the well- being of all’ This Magazine is dedicated to spirituality and gives wider exposure to the various aspects of Hindu religion.

‘Kalyan’ has published special issues on all Puranas, Upanishads and on many more subjects related to Hindu culture and religion. This magazine still continues to be in publication with 2,50,000 subscribers, he published and edited ‘Kalyaan – Kalpataru’ in English from 1934 and the book continues to be in publication Lovingly called as Bhaijee, he was a multifaceted personality. As an editor of the religious magazine'Kalyan', he is known for his untiring efforts to propagate and disseminate Hindu religion across the world, he wrote many books on value -- oriented subjects in Hindi and English. His translation of some Upanishads and Puranas in Hindi and English show his command over both languages. In these translations, he has taken care of the communicability of the language to the common people without causing any compromise with their poetic and philosophical heights and depths. A page from indianpost.com Jai radhe baba ji jai bhai ji ki