The Hero with a Thousand Faces
The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell. In this book, Campbell discusses his theory of the mythological structure of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world myths. Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theory has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. Filmmaker George Lucas acknowledged Campbell's theory in mythology, its influence on the Star Wars films; the Joseph Campbell Foundation and New World Library issued a new edition of The Hero with a Thousand Faces in July 2008 as part of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series of books and video recordings. In 2011, Time placed the book in its list of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since the magazine was founded in 1923. Campbell explores the theory that mythological narratives share a fundamental structure; the similarities of these myths brought Campbell to write his book in which he details the structure of the monomyth.
He calls the motif of the archetypal narrative, "the hero's journey". In a well-known quote from the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell summarizes the monomyth: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. In laying out the monomyth, Campbell describes a number of steps along this journey. "The hero's journey". He must depart from the ordinary world. With the help of a mentor, the hero will cross a guarded threshold, leading him to a supernatural world, where familiar laws and order do not apply. There, the hero will embark on a road of trials; the archetypal hero is sometimes assisted by allies. As the hero faces the ordeal, he encounters the greatest challenge of the journey. Upon rising to the challenge, the hero will receive boon. Campbell's theory of the monomyth continues with the inclusion of a metaphorical death and resurrection.
The hero must decide to return with this boon to the ordinary world. The hero faces more trials on the road back. Upon the hero's return, the boon or gift may be used to improve the hero's ordinary world, in what Campbell calls, the application of the boon. While many myths do seem to follow the outline of Campbell's monomyth, there is some variance in the inclusion and sequence of some of the stages. Still, there is an abundance of literature and folklore that follows the motif of the archetypal narrative, paralleling the more general steps of "Departure", "Initiation", "Return". "Departure" deals with the hero venturing forth on the quest, including the call to adventure. "Initiation" refers to the hero's adventures. The last part of the monomyth is the "Return". Campbell studied mythological and literary classics including the stories of Osiris, the Buddha, Moses and Jesus. Campbell's book cites the similarities of the stories, references them as he breaks down the structure of the monomyth.
The book includes a discussion of "the hero's journey" by using the Freudian concepts popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Campbell's theory incorporates a mixture of Jungian archetypes, unconscious forces, Arnold van Gennep's structuring of rites of passage rituals to provide some illumination. "The hero's journey" continues to influence artists and intellectuals in contemporary arts and culture, suggesting a basic usefulness for Campbell's insights beyond mid-20th century forms of analysis. Campbell used the work of early 20th century theorists to develop his model of the hero, including Freud, Carl Jung, Arnold Van Gennep. Van Gennep contributed the concept of there being three stages of The Rites of Passage. Campbell translated this into Separation and Return, he looked to the work of psychologist Otto Rank and ethnographers James George Frazer and Franz Boas. Campbell was a noted scholar of James Joyce, having co-authored A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake with Henry Morton Robinson. Campbell borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
In addition, Joyce's Ulysses was highly influential in the structuring of the archetypal motif. The book was published by the Bollingen Foundation through Pantheon Press as the seventeenth title in the Bollingen Series; this series was taken over by Princeton University Press, who published the book through 2006. Issued in 1949 and revised by Campbell in 1968, The Hero with a Thousand Faces has been reprinted a number of times. Reprints issued after the release of Star Wars in 1977 used the image of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker on the cover. Princeton University Press issued a commemorative printing of the second edition in 2004 on the occasion of the joint centennial of Campbell's birth and the Press's founding with an added foreword by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. A third edition, compiled by the Joseph Campbell Foundation and published by New World Library, was released as the twelfth title in the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell series in July 2008; the Hero with a Thousand Faces has been translated into over twenty languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Turkish, Greek, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Russian, Hungarian and Hebrew, has sold wel
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space-opera media franchise created by George Lucas. The franchise began with the eponymous 1977 film and became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon; the first film subtitled Episode IV – A New Hope, was followed by two successful sequels, Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back and Episode VI – Return of the Jedi. A subsequent prequel trilogy, consisting of Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Episode II – Attack of the Clones and Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, completed what Lucas called the "tragedy of Darth Vader". A sequel trilogy began with Episode VII – The Force Awakens, continued with Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, will end with Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker in 2019; the first eight films were commercially successful. Together with the theatrical spin-off films Rogue One and Solo, the series has a combined box office revenue of over US$9 billion, is the second-highest-grossing film franchise; the film series has spawned into other media, including television series, video games, comics, theme park attractions and themed areas, resulting in a detailed fictional universe.
Star Wars holds a Guinness World Records title for the "Most successful film merchandising franchise". In 2018, the total value of the Star Wars franchise was estimated at US$65 billion, it is the fifth-highest-grossing media franchise of all time; the Star Wars franchise depicts the adventures of characters "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." in which many species of aliens co-exist with droids who may assist them in their daily routines, space travel between planets is common due to hyperspace technology. The rises and falls of different governments are chronicled throughout the saga: the democratic Republic is corrupted and overthrown by the Galactic Empire, fought by the Rebel Alliance; the Rebellion gives rise to the New Republic and rebuilds society, but the remnants of the Empire reform as the First Order and attempt to destroy the Republic. Heroes of the former rebellion lead the Resistance against the oppressive dictatorship. A mystical power known as "the Force" is described in the original film as "an energy field created by all living things... binds the galaxy together."
Those whom "the Force is strong with" have quick reflexes. The Force is wielded by two major knighthood orders at conflict with each other: the Jedi, who act on the light side of the Force through non-attachment and arbitration, the Sith, who use the dark side through fear and aggression; the latter's members are intended to be limited to two: their apprentice. The Star Wars film series centers on a trilogy of trilogies, they were produced non-chronologically, with Episodes IV–VI being released between 1977 and 1983, Episodes I–III being released between 1999 and 2005, Episodes VII–IX, the first Star Wars films to be made without Lucas's direct involvement, being released between 2015 and 2019. Each trilogy focuses on a generation of the Force-sensitive Skywalker family; the original trilogy depict the heroic development of Luke Skywalker, the prequels tell of his father Anakin's fall from grace, the sequels introduce Luke's nephew and Anakin's grandson, Kylo Ren. A theatrical animated film, The Clone Wars, was released as a pilot to a TV series of the same name.
They were among the last projects overseen by George Lucas before the franchise was sold to Disney in 2012. An anthology series set between the main episodes entered development in parallel to the production of the sequel trilogy, described by Disney CFO Jay Rasulo as origin stories; the first entry, Rogue One, tells the story of the rebels who steal the Death Star plans directly before Episode IV. Solo: A Star Wars Story focuses on Han Solo's backstory featuring Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian. Two spin-off trilogies have been announced: one by Episode VIII's director Rian Johnson and the other by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Prequel trilogy Original trilogy Sequel trilogy In 1971, George Lucas wanted to film an adaptation of the Flash Gordon serial, but couldn't obtain the rights, so he began developing his own space opera. After directing American Graffiti, he wrote a two-page synopsis titled Journal of the Whills, which 20th Century Fox decided to invest in. By 1974, he had expanded the story into the first draft of a screenplay.
The subsequent movie's success led Lucas to make it the basis of an elaborate film serial. With the backstory he created for the sequel, Lucas decided that the series would be a trilogy of trilogies. Most of the main cast would return for the two additional installments of the original trilogy, which were self-financed by Lucasfilm. Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977 and first called Episode IV – A New Hope in the 1979 book The Art of Star Wars. Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back was released on May 21, 1980 achieving wide financial and critical success; the final film in the trilogy, Episode VI – Return of the Jedi was released on May 25, 1983. The story of the original trilogy focuses on Luke Skywalker's quest to become a Jedi, his struggle with the evil Imperial agent Darth Vader, the struggle of the Rebel Alliance to free the galaxy from the clutches of the Empire. According to producer Gary Kurtz, lo
Horus
Horus is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities. He was worshipped from at least the late prehistoric Egypt until the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt. Different forms of Horus are recorded in history and these are treated as distinct gods by Egyptologists; these various forms may be different manifestations of the same multi-layered deity in which certain attributes or syncretic relationships are emphasized, not in opposition but complementary to one another, consistent with how the Ancient Egyptians viewed the multiple facets of reality. He was most depicted as a falcon, most a lanner falcon or peregrine falcon, or as a man with a falcon head; the earliest recorded form of Horus is the tutelary deity of Nekhen in Upper Egypt, the first known national god related to the ruling pharaoh who in time came to be regarded as a manifestation of Horus in life and Osiris in death. The most encountered family relationship describes Horus as the son of Isis and Osiris, he plays a key role in the Osiris myth as Osiris's heir and the rival to Set, the murderer of Osiris.
In another tradition Hathor is sometimes as his wife. Horus served many functions, most notably being a god of the sky. Horus is recorded in Egyptian hieroglyphs as ḥr.w "Falcon". Additional meanings are thought to have been "the distant one" or "one, above, over"; as the language changed over time, it appeared in Coptic varieties variously as hoːɾ or ħoːɾ and was adopted into ancient Greek as Ὧρος Hōros. It survives in Late Egyptian and Coptic theophoric name forms such as Siese "son of Isis" and Harsiese "Horus, Son of Isis". Nekheny may have been another falcon god worshipped at Nekhen, city of the falcon, with whom Horus was identified from early on. Horus may be shown as a falcon on the Narmer Palette, dating from about the 31st century BC; the Pyramid Texts describe the nature of the pharaoh in different characters as both Horus and Osiris. The pharaoh as Horus in life became the pharaoh as Osiris in death, where he was united with the other gods. New incarnations of Horus succeeded the deceased pharaoh on earth in the form of new pharaohs.
The lineage of Horus, the eventual product of unions between the children of Atum, may have been a means to explain and justify pharaonic power. The gods produced by Atum were all representative of terrestrial forces in Egyptian life. By identifying Horus as the offspring of these forces identifying him with Atum himself, identifying the Pharaoh with Horus, the Pharaoh theologically had dominion over all the world; the notion of Horus as the pharaoh seems to have been superseded by the concept of the pharaoh as the son of Ra during the Fifth Dynasty. Horus was born to the goddess Isis after she retrieved all the dismembered body parts of her murdered husband Osiris, except his penis, thrown into the Nile and eaten by a catfish, or sometimes depicted as instead by a crab, according to Plutarch's account used her magic powers to resurrect Osiris and fashion a phallus to conceive her son. After becoming pregnant with Horus, Isis fled to the Nile Delta marshlands to hide from her brother Set, who jealously killed Osiris and who she knew would want to kill their son.
There Isis bore Horus. Since Horus was said to be the sky, he was considered to contain the sun and moon, it became said that the sun was his right eye and the moon his left, that they traversed the sky when he, a falcon, flew across it. The reason that the moon was not as bright as the sun was explained by a tale, known as The Contendings of Horus and Seth. In this tale, it was said that Set, the patron of Upper Egypt, Horus, the patron of Lower Egypt, had battled for Egypt brutally, with neither side victorious, until the gods sided with Horus; as Horus was the ultimate victor he became known as ḥr.w wr "Horus the Great", but more translated "Horus the Elder". In the struggle, Set had lost a testicle, Horus' eye was gouged out. Horus was shown in art as a naked boy with a finger in his mouth sitting on a lotus with his mother. In the form of a youth, Horus was referred to as nfr ḥr.w "Good Horus", transliterated Neferhor, Nephoros or Nopheros. The Eye of Horus is an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection and royal power from deities, in this case from Horus or Ra.
The symbol is seen on images of Horus' mother, on other deities associated with her. In the Egyptian language, the word for this symbol was "wedjat", it was the eye of one of the earliest of Egyptian deities, who became associated with Bastet and Hathor as well. Wadjet was a solar deity and this symbol began as her all-seeing eye. In early artwork, Hathor is depicted with this eye. Funerary amulets were made in the shape of the Eye of Horus; the Wedjat or Eye of Horus is "the central element" of seven "gold, faience and lapis lazuli" bracelets found on the mummy of Shoshenq II. The Wedjat "was intended to ward off evil. Egyptian and Near Eastern sailors would paint the symbol on the bow of their vessel to ensure safe sea travel. Horus was told by his mother, Isis, to protect the people of Egypt from Set, the god of the desert, who had killed Horus' father, Osiris. Horus had many battles with Set, not only to avenge his father, but to choose the rightful ruler of Egypt. In these battles, Horus came to be associated with Lower Egypt, became its patron.
According to The Contendings of Horus and Seth, Set is depicted
Chief Seattle
Chief Seattle was a Suquamish and Duwamish chief. A leading figure among his people, he pursued a path of accommodation to white settlers, forming a personal relationship with "Doc" Maynard; the city of Seattle, in the U. S. state of Washington, was named after him. A publicized speech arguing in favor of ecological responsibility and respect of Native Americans' land rights had been attributed to him; the name Seattle is an Anglicization of the modern Duwamish conventional spelling Si'ahl, equivalent to the modern Lushootseed spelling siʔaɫ IPA:. He is known as Sealth, Seathl, or See-ahth. Seattle's mother Sholeetsa was Dkhw ` Duw ` Absh and. Seattle was born some time between 1780 and 1786 near Blake Island, Washington. One source cites his mother's name as Wood-sho-lit-sa; the Duwamish tradition is that Seattle was born at his mother's village of Stukw on the Black River, in what is now the city of Kent and that Seattle grew up speaking both the Duwamish and Suquamish dialects of Lushootseed.
Because Native descent among the Salish peoples was not patrilineal, Seattle inherited his position as chief of the Duwamish Tribe from his maternal uncle. Seattle earned his reputation at a young age as a leader and a warrior and defeating groups of tribal enemy raiders coming up the Green River from the Cascade foothills. In 1847 he helped lead a Suquamish attack upon the Chimakum people near Port Townsend, which wiped out the Chimakum. Like many of his contemporaries, he owned slaves captured during his raids, he was broad, standing nearly six feet tall. He was known as an orator. Chief Seattle took wives from the village of Tola'ltu just southeast of Duwamish Head on Elliott Bay, his first wife La-Dalia died after bearing a daughter. He had four daughters with his second wife, Olahl; the most famous of his children was his first, Princess Angeline. Seattle was converted to Christianity by French missionaries, was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, with the baptismal name Noah in 1848 near Olympia, Washington.
For all his skill, Seattle was losing ground to the more powerful Patkanim of the Snohomish when white settlers started showing up in force around 1850. When his people were driven from their traditional clamming grounds, Seattle met Doc Maynard in Olympia. Persuading the settlers at the white settlement of Duwamps to rename their town Seattle, Maynard established their support for Chief Seattle's people and negotiated peaceful relations with the tribes. Seattle kept his people out of the Battle of Seattle in 1856. Afterwards, he was unwilling to lead his tribe to the reservation established, since mixing Duwamish and Snohomish was to lead to bloodshed. Maynard persuaded the government of the necessity of allowing Seattle to remove to his father's longhouse on Agate Passage,'Old Man House' or Tsu-suc-cub. Seattle frequented the town named after him, had his photograph taken by E. M. Sammis in 1865, he died June 1866, on the Suquamish reservation at Port Madison, Washington. The speech or "letter" attributed to Chief Seattle has been cited as a "powerful, bittersweet plea for respect of Native American rights and environmental values".
But this document, which has achieved widespread fame thanks to its promotion in the environmental movement, is of doubtful authenticity. The evolution of the text of Chief Seattle's speech, from a flowery Victorian paean to peace and territorial integrity, into a much briefer environmentalist credo, has been chronicled by several historians; the first attempt to reconstruct this history was a 1985 essay in the U. S. National Archives' Prologue magazine. A more scholarly essay by a German anthropologist followed in 1987. In 1989, a radio documentary by Daniel and Patricia Miller resulted in the uncovering of no fewer than 86 versions of Chief Seattle's speech; this prompted a new discussion, first in the Seattle Weekly and in Newsweek. The historian Albert Furtwangler undertook to analyze the evolution of Chief Seattle's speech in a full-length book, Answering Chief Seattle. More Eli Gifford has written another full-length book, The Many Speeches of Chief Seattle, which assembles further elements of the story, gives accurate transcriptions of 11 versions of the speech, explores possible motivations for manipulating the words in each case.
The oldest extant record of this document is a transcript published in the Seattle Sunday Star in 1887, in a column by Henry A. Smith, a poet and early white settler of the Seattle area. Smith provides a transcript of a speech made by Chief Seattle 30 years earlier, which Smith had attended and taken notes from; the occasion of the speech was a visit by Isaac Stevens. The governor's visit to a council of local tribal chiefs that year is corroborated by the historical record. Chief Seattle was the most influential chief in the area, so it is he would have been in attendance; however the date, the location, the actual words of Chief Seattle's speech are disputed. For instance, Smith's article in the Seattle Sunday Star claims that the purpose of Governor
Hardcover
A hardcover or hardback book is one bound with rigid protective covers. It has a sewn spine which allows the book to lie flat on a surface when opened. Following the ISBN sequence numbers, books of this type may be identified by the abbreviation Hbk. Hardcover books are printed on acid-free paper, they are much more durable than paperbacks, which have flexible damaged paper covers. Hardcover books are marginally more costly to manufacture. Hardcovers are protected by artistic dust jackets, but a "jacketless" alternative is becoming popular: these "paper-over-board" or "jacketless hardcover" bindings forgo the dust jacket in favor of printing the cover design directly onto the board binding. If brisk sales are anticipated, a hardcover edition of a book is released first, followed by a "trade" paperback edition the next year; some publishers publish paperback originals. For popular books these sales cycles may be extended, followed by a mass market paperback edition typeset in a more compact size and printed on shallower, less hardy paper.
This is intended to, in part, prolong the life of the immediate buying boom that occurs for some best sellers: After the attention to the book has subsided, a lower-cost version in the paperback, is released to sell further copies. In the past the release of a paperback edition was one year after the hardback, but by the early twenty-first century paperbacks were released six months after the hardback by some publishers, it is unusual for a book, first published in paperback to be followed by a hardback. An example is the novel The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal, which had its revised edition of 1961 first published in paperback, in hardcover. Hardcover books are sold at higher prices than comparable paperbacks. Books for the general public are printed in hardback only for authors who are expected to be successful, or as a precursor to the paperback to predict sale levels. Hardcovers consist of a page block, two boards, a cloth or heavy paper covering; the pages are sewn together and glued onto a flexible spine between the boards, it too is covered by the cloth.
A paper wrapper, or dust jacket, is put over the binding, folding over each horizontal end of the boards. Dust jackets serve to protect the underlying cover from wear. On the folded part, or flap, over the front cover is a blurb, or a summary of the book; the back flap is. Reviews are placed on the back of the jacket. Many modern bestselling hardcover books use a partial cloth cover, with cloth covered board on the spine only, only boards covering the rest of the book. Bookbinding Paperback
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Jacqueline Lee Kennedy Onassis was an American socialite and First Lady of the United States during the presidency of John F. Kennedy from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. Bouvier was born in Southampton, New York, to Wall Street stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier III and his wife, Janet Lee Bouvier, in 1929. In 1951, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in French literature from George Washington University and went on to work for the Washington Times-Herald as an inquiring photographer. In 1952, Bouvier met then-Congressman John F. Kennedy at a dinner party in Washington. Following his election to the Senate in 1952, the couple married on September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island, they had four children. Following her husband's election to the presidency in 1960, Jacqueline was known for her publicized restoration of the White House and emphasis on arts and culture, as well as for her style and grace, she was 31 years old when her husband was inaugurated and was the youngest first lady since Frances Folsom Cleveland Preston.
On November 22, 1963, Jacqueline was riding with her husband in a presidential motorcade in Dallas, when he was assassinated. Following his funeral and her children withdrew from public view. In 1968, she married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Following Onassis's death in 1975, she had a career as a book editor in New York City, she died on May 19, 1994, of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, aged 64. During her lifetime, Jacqueline Kennedy was regarded as an international fashion icon, her famous ensemble of a pink Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat that she wore in Dallas has become a symbol of her husband's assassination. After her death, she ranks as one of the most popular and recognizable First Ladies and was listed as one of Gallup's Most-Admired Men and Women of the 20th century in 1999. Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929, at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital in Southampton, New York, to Wall Street stockbroker John Vernou "Black Jack" Bouvier III and socialite Janet Norton Lee.
Bouvier's mother was of Irish descent, her father had French and English ancestry. Named after her father, Bouvier was baptized at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan, her sister Lee was born in 1933. Bouvier spent her early childhood years in Manhattan and at Lasata, the Bouviers' country estate in East Hampton on Long Island, she idolized her father, who favored her over her sister, calling his elder child "the most beautiful daughter a man had". Biographer Tina Flaherty pointed out Jackie's early confidence in herself, seeing a link to her father's praise and positive attitude to her, her sister Lee has stated that she would not have gained her "independence and individuality" had it not been for the relationship she had with their father and paternal grandfather, John Vernou Bouvier Jr. From an early age, Bouvier was an enthusiastic equestrienne and competed in the sport, she took ballet lessons, was an avid reader, excelled at learning languages, with French being emphasized in her upbringing.
In 1935, Bouvier was enrolled in Manhattan's Chapin School, which she attended for grades 1–6. She was a bright student but misbehaved. Bouvier's mother attributed her daughter's behavior to the way that she finished her assignments ahead of classmates and acted out in boredom, her behavior improved after the headmistress warned her that none of her positive qualities would matter if she did not behave. The marriage of Bouvier's parents was strained by her father's extramarital affairs, they separated in 1936 and divorced four years with the press publishing intimate details of the split. According to her cousin John H. Davis, Bouvier was affected by the divorce and subsequently had a "tendency to withdraw into a private world of her own"; when her mother married Standard Oil heir Hugh Dudley Auchincloss, Jr. Bouvier and her sister did not attend the ceremony, because it was arranged and travel was restricted due to World War II. Bouvier gained three step-siblings from Auchincloss' two previous marriages, Hugh "Yusha" Auchincloss III, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, Nina Gore Auchincloss.
The marriage produced two more children, Janet Jennings Auchincloss in 1945 and James Lee Auchincloss in 1947. After the remarriage, Auchincloss' Merrywood estate in McLean, became the Bouvier sisters' primary residence, although they spent time at his other estate, Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island, in their father's homes in New York City and Long Island. Although she retained a relationship with her father, Bouvier regarded her stepfather as a close paternal figure, he gave her a stable environment and the pampered childhood she never would have experienced otherwise. While Bouvier adjusted to her mother's remarriage, she sometimes felt like an outsider in the WASP social circle of the Auchinclosses, attributing the feeling to her being Catholic as well as being a child of divorce, not common in that social group at that time. After six years at Chapin, Bouvier attended the Holton-Arms School in Northwest Washington, D. C. from 1942 to 1944, Miss Porter's School in Farmington, from 1944 to 1947.
She chose Miss Porter's because it was a boarding school that allow
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, is one of the largest natural history museums in the world. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 28 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library; the museum collections contain over 33 million specimens of plants, fossils, rocks, human remains, human cultural artifacts, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time, occupies more than 2 million square feet. The museum has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, averages about five million visits annually; the one mission statement of the American Museum of Natural History is: "To discover and disseminate—through scientific research and education—knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, the universe." Before construction of the present complex, the museum was housed in the Arsenal building in Central Park.
Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. the father of the 26th U. S. President, was one of the founders along with John David Wolfe, William T. Blodgett, Robert L. Stuart, Andrew H. Green, Robert Colgate, Morris K. Jesup, Benjamin H. Field, D. Jackson Steward, Richard M. Blatchford, J. P. Morgan, Adrian Iselin, Moses H. Grinnell, Benjamin B. Sherman, A. G. Phelps Dodge, William A. Haines, Charles A. Dana, Joseph H. Choate, Henry G. Stebbins, Henry Parish, Howard Potter; the founding of the museum realized the dream of naturalist Dr. Albert S. Bickmore. Bickmore, a one-time student of zoologist Louis Agassiz, lobbied tirelessly for years for the establishment of a natural history museum in New York, his proposal, backed by his powerful sponsors, won the support of the Governor of New York, John Thompson Hoffman, who signed a bill creating the American Museum of Natural History on April 6, 1869. In 1874, the cornerstone was laid for the museum's first building, now hidden from view by the many buildings in the complex that today occupy most of Manhattan Square.
The original Victorian Gothic building, opened in 1877, was designed by Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould, both closely identified with the architecture of Central Park; the original building was soon eclipsed by the south range of the museum, designed by J. Cleaveland Cady, an exercise in rusticated brownstone neo-Romanesque, influenced by H. H. Richardson, it extends 700 feet with corner towers 150 feet tall. Its pink brownstone and granite, similar to that found at Grindstone Island in the St. Lawrence River, came from quarries at Picton Island, New York; the entrance on Central Park West, the New York State Memorial to Theodore Roosevelt, completed by John Russell Pope in 1936, is an overscaled Beaux-Arts monument. It leads to a vast Roman basilica, where visitors are greeted with a cast of a skeleton of a rearing Barosaurus defending her young from an Allosaurus; the museum is accessible through its 77th street foyer, renamed the "Grand Gallery" and featuring a suspended Haida canoe. The hall leads into the oldest extant exhibit in the hall of Northwest Coast Indians.
Since 1930, little has been added to the exterior of the original building. The architect Kevin Roche and his firm Roche-Dinkeloo have been responsible for the master planning of the museum since the 1990s. Various renovations to both the interior and exterior have been carried out. Renovations to the Dinosaur Hall were undertaken starting in 1991, the museum restored the mural in Roosevelt Memorial Hall in 2010. In 1992 the Roche-Dinkeloo firm designed the eight-story AMNH Library. However, the entirety of the master plan was not realized, by 2015, the museum consisted of 25 separate buildings that were poorly connected; the museum's south façade, spanning 77th Street from Central Park West to Columbus Avenue was cleaned, repaired and re-emerged in 2009. Steven Reichl, a spokesman for the museum, said that work would include restoring 650 black-cherry window frames and stone repairs; the museum's consultant on the latest renovation is Wiss, Elstner Associates, Inc. an architectural and engineering firm with headquarters in Northbrook, Illinois.
In 2014, the museum published plans for a $325 million, 195,000-square-foot annex, the Richard Gilder Center for Science and Innovation, on the Columbus Avenue side. Designed by Studio Gang, Higgins Quasebarth & Partners and landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand, the new building's pink Milford granite facade will have a textural, curvilinear design inspired by natural topographical elements showcased in the museum, including "geological strata, glacier-gouged caves, curving canyons, blocks of glacial ice," as a striking contrast to the museum's predominance of High Victorian Gothic, Richardson Romanesque and Beaux Arts architectural styles; the interior itself would contain a new entrance from Columbus Avenue north of 79th Street. This expansion was supposed to be located to the south of the existing museum, occupying parts of Theodore Roosevelt Park; the expansion was relocated to the west side of the existing museum, its footprint was reduced in size, due to opposition to construction in the park.
The annex would instead replace three existing buildings along Columbus Avenue's east side, with more than 30 connections to the existing museum, it would be six stories high, the same height as the existing buildings. The plans for the expansion wer
