Albert Wein

 Albert W. Wein was an American sculptor.

Wein was born in New York City on July 27, 1915. His mother, Elsa Meher Wein was a portrait painter and it was through her that Wein was first introduced to art. He began his art studies at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts at the age of twelve, where his mother taught. In 1929 he and his family moved to New York City, where he continued his studies at the National Academy of Design he studied with painter Ivan Olinsky. In 1932 he enrolled at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. He also studied with Hans Hofmann.

In 1932, he joined the WPA and created numerous works in this stylization. A 1942 wood relief titled "Growth" was installed at the U.S. Post Office (Frankfort, New York) under the auspices of the Treasury Department's, Section of Fine Arts.

In 1938, he married Toby Gold and they had a son named Jack Wein who was born on March 31, 1939. The marriage was short lived and ended in divorce.

In 1947 he won the Rome Prize scholarship to the American Academy in Rome, where he would stay for two years. During that period he traveled through Europe, exposing himself to Greek and Roman sculptural precedents.

Wein was one of 250 sculptors who exhibited in the 3rd Sculpture International held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the summer of 1949.

He returned to the United States and in 1950 joined the National Sculpture Society. As many of the other sculptors of his era Wein was adept at creating monumental, architectural, garden, memorial sculpture. He was also accomplished at bas-relief and produced work for the Steuben Glass Company as well as being a member of the Society of Medallists.

In 1955 Wein moved to California where, besides creating sculpture for numerous synagogues and for private collections, he drew upon his experience in New York Theatre and designed sets for television studios including working as art director for the Ernie Kovacs Show. Wein experimented with a vast range of media, materials and explored figurative abstraction in both his sculpture and painting, from cubist to free-form while on the west coast. He had a number of one-man exhibitions in California and had numerous radio and television interviews. During this period he also produced a number of fine erotic sculptures. Some of these were used by a psychiatrist to help his patients.

He was also artist-in-residence at both Brandeis University and the University of Wyoming.

In the late sixties he moved back to New York and settled in Westchester County. He became a fellow of the National Sculpture Society and was elected to Academician of the National Academy of Design. His attention returned to a more representation of the figure and as he said "modernizing the classical tradition" which continued until his death.

Wein's ten-foot limestone statue of "Phryne Before the Judges" was commissioned by Anna Hyatt Huntington and is located in Brookgreen Gardens.

In 1975, he was commissioned to create North America's largest granite relief; A 27 ft x 27 ft. granite relief on Libby Dam which is located in Montana. His design was picked unanimously by the judges for its wonderfully designed and clear image which could still be seen from afar. Albert and his wife Deyna lived in Vermont during the carving of the 75 ton monument which was dedicated by President Gerald Ford. The work took several years to complete.

In the 1980s he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant for study in Bellagio, Italy.

During his career he won every award that a sculptor could win. Few artists have experimented and been able to marry both the Classicism and Modernism so wonderfully.

In 1987, he was commissioned by The Gardens Mall, located in the City of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, to create a bronze life-size sculptural composition of the Greek Myth huntress Diana. The sculpture's complex composition yet fluid movement is an excellent example of how Wein could manipulate shape and form into three-dimensional magic.

Wein said that "every good work of art is a good abstract composition" or could at least be represented by one. That the subject, devoid of details and pared down to only what is necessary to convey the "essence" of the composition is what really mattered in an artistic work.

Wein created over 500 sculptures and 300 painting and drawings. Many of these works have been sold, but many have never been seen by the public and are still available directly from the Albert Wein Estate.

He died in March 1991.

Philip E. High

Philip Empson High was an English science fiction author.

Philip Empson High was born on April 28, 1914 in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. He saw service in the Royal Navy during World War II.

His writing career spanned more than 50 years before his death in Canterbury, Kent on 9 August 2006. He published 14 novels and numerous short stories.

High first became well known during the 1950s with a series of short stories for various magazines including Authentic Science Fiction, New Worlds Science Fiction and Nebula Science Fiction, and was voted "top discovery" by the Nebula readers' poll for 1956 (the "Guinea Prize").

His first novel, The Prodigal Sun, was published in 1964 and was followed by 13 more, ending in 1979 with Blindfold from the Stars. A collection of his earlier short stories, The Best of Philip E. High, was published in 2002 along with a collection of new stories Step to the Stars (2004).

High died on August 9, 2006. 

Habib Tanvir

Habib Tanvir was one of the most popular Indian Urdu, Hindi playwrights, a theatre director, poet and actor.

He was born on September 1, 1923 in Raipur, Chhattisgarh to Hafiz Ahmed Khan, who was from Peshawar. He passed his matriculation from Laurie Municipal High School, Raipur, and later completed his B.A. from Morris College, Nagpur in 1944. Thereafter he studied M.A. for a year at Aligarh Muslim University. Early in life, he started writing poetry using his pen name Takhallus. Soon after, he assumed his name, Habib Tanvir.

In 1945, he moved to Bombay, and joined All India Radio (AIR) Bombay as a producer. While in Bombay, he wrote songs for Urdu and Hindi films and even acted in a few of them. He also joined the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA) and became an integral part of Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) as an actor. Later, when most of the prominent IPTA members were imprisoned for opposing the British rule, he was asked to take over the organisation.

In 1954, he moved to New Delhi, and worked with Qudsia Zaidi's Hindustani Theatre, and also worked with Children's theatre, where he authored many plays. Later in the same year, he produced his first significant play Agra Bazar based on the works and times of the plebeian 18th-century Urdu poet, Nazir Akbarabadi, an older poet in the generation of Mirza Ghalib. For this play he brought together local residents and folk artistes from Okhla village in Delhi and students of Jamia Millia Islamia creating a palette never seen before in Indian theatre. Additionally, the play was not staged in a confined space, rather a bazaar, a marketplace. After this, he continued to work with non-trained actors and folk artistes like the folk artists of Chhattisgarh.

In 1955, when he was in his 30s, Habib moved to England. There, he trained in Acting at Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) (1955) and in Direction at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (1956). For the next two years, he travelled through Europe, watching various theatre activities. One of the highlights of this period, was his eight-month stay in Berlin in 1956, during which he got to see several plays of Bertolt Brecht, produced by Berliner Ensemble, just a few months after Brecht's death. This proved to have a lasting influence on him, as in the coming years, he started using local idioms in his plays, to express trans-cultural tales and ideologies. This, over the years, gave rise to a "theatre of roots", which was marked by an utter simplicity in style, presentation and technique, yet remaining eloquent and powerfully experiential.

A deeply inspired Habib returned to India in 1958 and took to directing full-time. He produced Mitti ki Gaadi a post-London play, based on Shudraka's Sanskrit work, Mrichakatika. It became his first important production in Chhattisgarhi. This was the result of the work he had been doing since his return – working with six folk actors from Chhattisgarh. He went on to found "Naya Theatre", a theatre company in 1959.

In his exploratory phase, i.e. 1970–73, he broke free from one more theatre restriction – he no longer made the folk artistes, who had been performing in all his plays, speak Hindi. Instead, the artistes switched to Chhattisgarhi, a local language they were more accustomed to. Later, he even started experimenting with "Pandavani", a folk singing style from the region and temple rituals. This made his plays stand out amidst the gamut of plays which still employed traditional theatre techniques like blocking movements or fixing lights on paper. Spontaneity and improvisation became the hallmark of his new theatre style, where the folk artistes were allowed greater freedom of expression.

His next venture with Chhattisgarhi Nach style, saw another breakthrough in 1972, with a staging of the play titled Gaon Ka Naam Sasural, Mor Naam Damaad. This was based on a comic folk tale, where an old man falls in love with a young woman, who eventually elopes with another young man.

By the time he produced his seminal play, Charandas Chor in 1975, the technique became popular. This play immediately established a whole new idiom in modern India theatre; whose highlight was Nach – a chorus that provided commentary through song. He also brought in Govind Ram Nirmalkar, a noted Nacha artist who would later go on to win Padma Shri and Sangeet Natak Akademi Awards, to play the lead role. Later, he collaborated with Shyam Benegal, when he adapted the play to a feature-length film, by the same name, starring Smita Patil and Lalu Ram. He was awarded the prestigious Jawarharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1979 for research on Relevance of Tribal Performing Arts and their Adaptability to A changing Environment. In 1980, he directed the play Moti Ram ka Satyagraha for Janam (Jan Natya Manch) on the request of Safdar Hashmi.

During his career, Habib has acted in over nine feature films, including Richard Attenborough's film, Gandhi (1982), Black and White and in a yet-to-be-released film on the Bhopal gas tragedy.

His first brush with controversy came about in the 1990s, with his production of a traditional Chhattisgarhi play about religious hypocrisy, Ponga Pandit. The play was based on a folk tale and had been created by Chhattisgarhi theatre artists in the 1930s. Though he had been producing it since the sixties, in the changed social climate after the Babri Masjid demolition, the play caused quite an uproar amongst Hindu fundamentalists, especially the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), whose supporters disrupted many of its shows, and even emptied the auditoriums, yet he continued to show it all over.

His Chhattisgarhi folk troupe, surprised again, with his rendition of Asghar Wajahat's Jisne Lahore Nahin Dekhya in 1992. Then in 1993 came Kamdeo Ka Apna Basant Ritu Ka Sapna, Tanvir's Hindi adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1995, he was invited to the United States by the Chicago Actors Ensemble, where he wrote his only English language play, The Broken Bridge. In 2002, he directed Zahareeli Hawa, a translation of Bhopal by the Canadian-Indian playwright Rahul Varma, based on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. During his illustrious career he brought works from all genres to stage, from ancient Sanskrit works by Shudraka, Bhasa, Vishakhadatta and Bhavabhuti; to European classics by Shakespeare, Molière and Goldoni; modern masters Brecht, Garcia, Lorca, Gorky, and Oscar Wilde; Tagore, Asghar Wajahat, Shankar Shesh, Safdar Hashmi, Rahul Varma, stories by Premchand, Stefan Zweig and Vijaydan Detha, apart from an array of Chhattisgarhi folk tales.]

Tanvir died on June 8, 2009.

Richard Macksey

Richard Allen Macksey was Professor of Humanities and Co-founder and longtime Director of the Humanities Center (now the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature) at The Johns Hopkins University, where he taught critical theory, comparative literature, and film studies.

Macksey was born on July 25, 1931. He was educated at Johns Hopkins, earning his B.A. in 1953 and his Ph.D. in 1957. He taught at Johns Hopkins (both the school of Arts & Sciences as well as the Medical School) since 1958. He was the longtime Comparative Literature editor of MLN (Modern Language Notes), published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He was a recipient of the Hopkins Distinguished Alumnus Award. Dr. Macksey also presided over one of the largest private libraries in Maryland, with over 70,000 books and manuscripts. An image of the room overspilling with books has been a popular internet meme in the 2010s and 2020s. 

As Director for the Humanities Center, Macksey, with funding from the Ford Foundation, organized the influential international literary theory symposium, "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," which featured prominent academics such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, and where Derrida presented his lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", credited with "tear[ing] down the temple of structuralism." These lectures were collected as The Structuralist Controversy, the most recent version of which was published in 2005.

In 1999 the Richard A. Macksey Professorship for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities was established by a former student Edward T. Dangel III and his wife, Bonni Widdoes. The professorship is currently held by Alice McDermott.

He died on July 22, 2019.

Alan Hunter

Alan Hunter was an English author of crime fiction, writing 46 novels featuring Inspector George Gently.

Initially a farmer, he became an antiquarian bookseller before writing his first novel.

Hunter was born on June 25, 1922 at Hoveton, Norfolk and went to school across the River Bure in Wroxham. He left school at 14 and worked on his father's farm near Norwich. He enjoyed dinghy sailing on the Norfolk Broads, wrote natural history notes for the local newspaper, and wrote poetry, some of which was published while he was in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.

He married, in 1944, Adelaide Cubitt, who survived him with their daughter. After the war he managed the antiquarian books department of Charles Cubitt in Norwich. Four years later, in 1950, he established his own bookshop on Maddermarket in the city.

He retired to Brundall in Norfolk where he continued his interests in local history, natural history, and sailing.

From 1955 to 1998 he published a George Gently detective novel nearly every year. The majority are set in Norfolk.

He died on February 26, 2005.

István Bárczy

István Bárczy was a Hungarian politician and jurist.

He was born on October 3, 1866. He was the Mayor of Budapest between 1906 and 1918 and later served as Lord Mayor of Budapest (the representative of the Hungarian government in the capital city until 1945). He served as Minister of Justice between 1919 and 1920. He was a member of the Diet of Hungary from 1920 to 1931.

He died on June 1, 1943.

Josef Hilmar Jørgensen

 

Josef Hilmar Jørgensen was a Norwegian organ builder.

Jørgensen was the owner of the J. H. Jørgensen organ company. The company was originally called Olsen & Jørgensen from 1892 to 1925 (Jørgensen's partner Olsen had already withdrawn from work at the company in 1912).

Jørgensen was born on March 28, 1892 in Oslo, the son of the organ builder Jens Henrik Jørgensen (1864–1946) and his wife Marie Guldbrandsen (1869–1911). On May 16, 1922 he married Annette Wirstad (1894–1991), the daughter of the wholesaler Ole Olsen Wirstad (1846–1923) and Karen Hansen (1855–?). The couple's daughter Anne Marie Jørgensen is married to the politician Kåre Willoch. 

Jørgensen died on November 2, 1961 in Oslo.

Joe Dominguez

Joe Dominguez was a former Wall Street stock-market analyst who quit the rat race and co-wrote the best seller "Your Money or Your Life," a bible of the living-simply movement.

Mr. Dominguez was born in New York City in 1938, attended Bronx High School of Science and City College of New York. In 1969, he had a sufficient nest egg to quit his paid employment.

"Your Money or Your Life," with co-author Vicki Robin, was published in 1992 and outlined a nine-step program for changing attitudes about earning and spending money. The book has sold more than half-a-million copies in English, has been translated into Dutch and soon will be available in German, Spanish and French.

At the time of his death, Mr. Dominguez was living on about $6,000 a year.

Mr. Dominguez died on January 11, 1997 at his Seattle home of lymphoma. He was not married and had no surviving relatives.

Robert Zachary

 

Robert ‘Zack’ Zachary was born in Anniston, Alabama, both chronologically and geographically close to the onset of the great Civil Rights Movement.  His hometown was the site of several conflicts over the three decades.  His life long commitment to activism began at 11 when he entered the Civil Rights Movement. Zack had the extreme honor of meeting Martin L. King Jr at age fifteen. He continued his studies on freedom through college, in the military and throughout Europe.

Zack is an Independent Chaplain, an Inspirational Poet, Storyteller, Vocalist, Visionary and Activist. He endeavors to  combine life, music, poetry, history and storytelling in his presentations, lectures and concerts; with a positive and holistic perspective on how we will win our fight for freedom, justice and peace. Zack established the Healing Love Institute to be a worldwide community collective of like-minded people for the purpose of mentoring and encouraging development of these subjects into purpose and reality. He presently lives between Asheville and Atlanta

Raymond Williams

Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism.

Williams was born on August 31, 1921 in Pandy, just north of Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny, Wales, Williams was the son of a railway worker in a village where all of the railwaymen voted Labour, while the local small farmers mostly voted Liberal. It was not a Welsh-speaking area: he described it as "Anglicised in the 1840s". There was, nevertheless, a strong Welsh identity. "There is the joke that someone says his family came over with the Normans and we reply: 'Are you liking it here?'"

Williams attended King Henry VIII Grammar School in Abergavenny. His teenage years were overshadowed by the rise of Nazism and the threat of war. His father was secretary of the local Labour Party, but Raymond declined to join, although he did attend meetings around the 1935 general election. He was 14 when the Spanish Civil War broke out, and was conscious of what was happening through his membership of the local Left Book Club. He also mentions the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, originally published in Britain by the Left Book Club.

At this time, he was supported the League of Nations, attending a League-organised youth conference in Geneva in 1937. On the way back, his group visited Paris and he went to the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition. There he bought a copy of The Communist Manifesto and read Karl Marx for the first time.

In July 1939, he was involved in the Monmouth by-election, helping with an unsuccessful campaign by the Labour candidate, Frank Hancock, who was a pacifist. Williams was also a pacifist at this time, having distributed leaflets for the Peace Pledge Union.

Williams won a state scholarship to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1939. While at Cambridge, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Along with Eric Hobsbawm, he was given the task of writing a Communist Party pamphlet about the Russo-Finnish War. He says in (Politics and Letters) that they "were given the job as people who could write quickly, from historical materials supplied for us. You were often in there writing about topics you did not know very much about, as a professional with words".

At the time, the British government was keen to support Finland in its war against the Soviet Union, while still being at war with Nazi Germany. He took a second (division two) in part one of the tripos in 1941, and, after returning from war service, achieved first-class honours in part two in 1946. He graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA degree in 1946: as per tradition, his BA was promoted to a Master of Arts (MA Cantab) degree. He was later awarded a higher doctorate by Cambridge; the Doctor of Letters (LittD) degree in 1969.

Williams interrupted his education to serve in the Second World War. He enlisted in the British Army in late 1940, but stayed at Cambridge to take his exams in June 1941, the month when Germany invaded Russia. Joining the military was against the Communist party line at the time. According to Williams, his Communist Party membership lapsed without him formally resigning.

When Williams joined the army, he was assigned to the Royal Corps of Signals, which was a typical assignment for university undergraduates. He received initial training in military communications, but was reassigned to artillery and anti-tank weapons. He was chosen to serve as an officer in the Anti-Tank Regiment of the Guards Armoured Division in 1941–1945, being sent into early fighting in the Invasion of Normandy after the D-Day Normandy Landings. He writes in Politics and Letters, "I don't think the intricate chaos of that Normandy fighting has ever been recorded." He commanded a unit of four tanks and mentions losing touch with two of them while fighting against Waffen-SS Panzer forces in the Bocage.

Williams took part in the fighting from Normandy in 1944 and through Belgium and the Netherlands to Germany in 1945.  He was shocked to find that Hamburg had suffered saturation bombing by the Royal Air Force, not just military targets and docks, as they had been told. He was expecting to be sent to Burma, but as his studies had been interrupted by the war, was instead granted Class B release, which meant immediate demobilisation. He returned to Cambridge, where he found that the student culture had changed from 1941, with the left-wing involvement much diminished.

Williams received his BA from Cambridge in 1946, and then served as a tutor in adult education at Oxford University's Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies (1946-1961). Moving to Seaford, Sussex, he gave Workers' Educational Association evening classes in East Sussex in English literature, drama, and later culture and environment. This allowed Williams to write in the mornings, beginning work on novels and what would become cultural studies.

In 1946, he founded the review Politics and Letters, a journal which he edited with Clifford Collins and Wolf Mankowitz until 1948. Williams published Reading and Criticism in 1950; he joined the Editorial Board of the new journal Essays in Criticism. In 1951, he was recalled to the army as a reservist to fight in the Korean War. He refused to go, registering as a conscientious objector. He expected to be jailed for a month, but the Appeal Tribunal panel, which included a professor of classics, was convinced by his case and discharged him from further military obligations in May 1951.

Between 1946 and 1957, he was involved with the film-maker Michael Orrom, whom he had known in Cambridge. They co-wrote Preface to Film, published in 1954, and Williams wrote the script for an experimental film, The Legend, in 1955. This was rejected in July 1956 and he parted company with Orrom shortly afterwards. He wrote a number of novels in this period, but only one, Border Country, would be published.

Inspired by T.S. Eliot's 1948 publication Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Williams began exploring the concept of culture. He first outlined his argument that the concept emerged with the Industrial Revolution in the essay "The Idea of Culture", which resulted in the widely successful book Culture and Society, published in 1958. This was followed in 1961 by The Long Revolution. Williams's writings were taken up by the New Left and received a wide readership. He was also well known as a regular book reviewer for The Manchester Guardian newspaper. His years in adult education were an important experience and Williams was always something of an outsider at Cambridge University. Asked to contribute to a book called My Cambridge, he began his essay by saying: "It was not my Cambridge. That was clear from the beginning."

On the strength of his books, Williams was invited to return to Cambridge in 1961, where he was elected a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He eventually achieved an appointment in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, first as Reader in Drama (1967–1974), and then as the University's first Professor of Drama (1974–1983). He was a visiting professor of political science at Stanford University in 1973, an experience he used to effect in his still useful book Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974).

A committed socialist, he was interested in the relations between language, literature and society, and published many books, essays and articles on these and other issues. Among the main ones is The Country and the City (1973), where chapters on literature alternate with chapters on social history. His tightly written Marxism and Literature (1977) is mainly for specialists, but also sets out his approach to cultural studies, which he called cultural materialism. The book was in part a response to structuralism in literary studies and pressure on Williams to make a more theoretical statement of his position, against criticisms that it was a humanist Marxism, based on unexamined assumptions about lived experience. He makes much use of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, though the book is uniquely Williams's and written in his characteristic voice. For a more accessible version, see Culture (1981-1982), which develops an argument about cultural sociology, which he hoped would become "a new major discipline". Introducing the US edition, Bruce Robbins identifies it as "implicit self-critique" of Williams's earlier ideas, and a basis on which "to conceive the oppositionality of the critic in a permanently fragmented society".

Williams was keen to establish the changing meanings of the vocabulary used in discussions of culture. He began with the word culture itself; his notes on 60 significant, often difficult words were to have appeared as an appendix to Culture and Society in 1958. This was not possible, and so an extended version with notes and short essays on 110 words appeared as Keywords in 1976. Those examined included "aesthetic", "bourgeois", "culture", "hegemony", "isms", "organic", "romantic", "status", "violence" and "work". A revised version in 1983 added 21 new words, including "anarchism", "ecology", "liberation" and "sex". Williams wrote that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) "is primarily philological and etymological," whilst his work was on "meanings and contexts".[26] In 1981, Williams published Culture, where the term, discussed at length, is defined as "a realized signifying system" and supported by chapters on "the means of cultural production, and the process of cultural reproduction".

Williams wrote critically of Marshall McLuhan's writings on technology and society. This is the background to a chapter in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) called "The Technology and the Society", where Williams defended his visions against technological determinism, focusing on the prevalence of social over technological in the development of human processes. Thus "Determination is a real social process, but never (as in some theological and some Marxist versions)... a wholly controlling, wholly predicting set of causes. On the contrary, the reality of determination is the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures, within which variable social practices are profoundly affected but never necessarily controlled."

His book Modern Tragedy may be read as a response to The Death of Tragedy by the conservative literary critic George Steiner. Later, Williams was interested in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, although he found it too pessimistic about the possibilities for social change.

Williams joined the Labour Party after he moved to Cambridge in 1961, but resigned in 1966 after the new majority Labour government had broken the seafarers' strike and introduced public expenditure cuts. He joined the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and wrote the May Day Manifesto (published 1967), along with Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall. It has been claimed that Williams later became a Plaid Cymru member and a Welsh nationalist. He retired from Cambridge in 1983 and spent his last years in Saffron Walden. While there he wrote Loyalties, a novel about a fictional group of upper-class radicals attracted to 1930s Communism.

Williams was working on People of the Black Mountains, an experimental historical novel about people who lived or might have lived around the Black Mountains, his own part of Wales, told through flashbacks featuring an ordinary man in modern times, looking for his grandfather, who has not returned from a hill-walk. He imagines the region as it was and might have been. The story begins in the Paleolithic, and would have come up to modern times, focusing on ordinary people. He had completed it to the Middle Ages by the time he died in 1988. The whole work was prepared for publication by his wife, Joy Williams, then published in two volumes with a postscript briefly describing what the remainder would have been. Almost all the stories were complete in typescript, mostly revised many times by the author. Only "The Comet" was left incomplete and needed small additions for a continuous narrative.

In the 1980s, Williams made important links to debates on feminism, peace, ecology and social movements, and extended his position beyond what might be recognised as Marxism. He concluded that with many different societies in the world, there would be not one, but many socialisms. Influenced partly by critical readings of Sebastiano Timpanaro and Rudolf Bahro, he called for convergence between the labour movement and what was then called the ecology movement.

Williams died on January 26, 1988. 

The Raymond Williams Society was founded in 1989 "to support and develop intellectual and political projects in areas broadly connected with Williams's work". Since 1998 it has published Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, which is "committed to developing the tradition of cultural materialism" he originated. The Raymond Williams Centre for Recovery Research opened at Nottingham Trent University in 1995. The Raymond Williams Foundation (RWF) supports activities in adult education; it was originally formed in 1988 as the Raymond Williams Memorial Fund. A collaborative research project building on Williams's investigation of cultural keywords called the "Keywords Project", initiated in 2006, is supported by Jesus College, University of Cambridge, and the University of Pittsburgh. Similar projects building on Williams's legacy include the 2005 publication, New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by the cultural-studies scholars Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, and the Keywords series from New York University Press including Keywords for American Cultural Studies.

In 2007 a collection of Williams's papers was deposited at Swansea University by his daughter Merryn, herself a poet and author.

Asher Ben-Natan

Asher Ben-Natan was an Israeli diplomat and a key figure in the country's defense and diplomacy fields. Ben-Natan led the search for Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was captured in 1960. He became the Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Defense from 1959 until 1965. Ben-Natan then served as the first Israeli Ambassador to Germany (then West Germany) from August 1965 until 1970. Ben-Natan was then appointed as Israel's Ambassador to France from 1970 until his retirement in 1974.

Asher Ben-Natan was born Arthur Piernikartz in Vienna, Austria, on February 15, 1921. His father, Natan Piernikartz, operated a clothing business in the Austrian capital. He attended a Hebrew High School and was a member of the Young Macabbi. His father bought five-acres of land in Mandatory Palestine in 1934 in response to the emergence of Nazi Germany and the growth of Antisemitism. The family drew up plans to flee to Palestine in 1938 following the Anschluss of Austria. Asher Ben-Natan fled Austria first. He boarded a Panamanian-registered ship in Piraeus, Greece, from which he sailed to Palestine. The ship dropped the passengers off at Tantura, where he swam to the beach. He found work at a kibbutz and changed his name to Asher Ben-Natan, honor of his father. His parents and sister arrived in Palestine from Austria a few months after his own arrival. Asher Ben-Natan married his wife, Erika, 1940.

In 1978, he unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Tel Aviv.

He died on June 17, 2014.

Martin Donnelly

Martin Paterson Donnelly was a New Zealand-born sportsman who played Test cricket for New Zealand and rugby union for England. He worked for Courtaulds in England and Sydney.

Donnelly was born on October 17, 1917 in Ngāruawāhia, New Zealand, Donnelly's twin brother Maurice died in the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. Donnelly's maternal great-grandfather, William Butler was a British Army veteran in the 20th Regiment of Foot later renamed the Lancashire Fusiliers and settled in Howick, New Zealand in 1847 as part of the Royal New Zealand Fencible Corps.

Donnelly's sporting talent emerged quickly and Donnelly became known for his batting and fielding skills, as well as his prowess at Rugby Union. While still a student at New Plymouth Boys' High School, Donnelly made 49 for Taranaki against the touring MCC side in January 1936. This led to his first-class debut in January 1936 for Wellington in a Plunket Shield match against Auckland, in which he made 22 and 38.

Aged only 19, Donnelly was a surprise selection for the 1937 New Zealand tour of England, having played only one first-class match. After showing more promise than results in the warm up matches, the selectors showed patience and Donnelly made his Test debut in the 1st Test at Lord's. He made a duck and 21, but remained in the team to make 4 and 37*, and 58 and 0 in the following two Tests. He achieved greater success against the county sides, finishing second in the batting averages, and earned praise from Wisden, which called him "a star in the making".

Returning to New Zealand, Donnelly moved to Christchurch in 1938 to attend the University of Canterbury and play for Canterbury. While there, he won the Redpath Cup as the best batsman in the Plunket Shield in 1939. He also played rugby for Canterbury University, the Canterbury Provincial XV, and for New Zealand Universities.

At the completion of his degree, Donnelly returned to Wellington but played only one more first-class match before enlisting in the New Zealand Army in 1940. Commissioned in 1941, he served as a tank commander in northern Africa and Italy, rising to the rank of Major. While in Cairo, he purchased what would become his lucky cap, an old multi-striped number, that he would wear whenever he took the field in his post-war cricketing career.

At war's end, Donnelly was a member of the Dominions side that played an England XI at Lord's in 1945, making 133, including a six hit onto the roof of the pavilion, before going up to Worcester College, Oxford, to read history. He played cricket for Oxford University in 1946, scoring six centuries, and then as captain in 1947. He headed the Oxford batting averages each year, gained a reputation as the best left-hander in the world, and won selection as Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1948.

Following his graduation from Oxford, Donnelly commenced working for Courtaulds while playing cricket for Warwickshire. In 1948, playing for Warwickshire against Middlesex, he was bowled by left-arm spinner Jack Young from the wrong side of the stumps, the ball having bounced off his foot and over his head before landing behind the stumps and spinning back to dislodge the bails.

He continued to impress observers with his attacking style of play, including former champion C B Fry, who believed Donnelly to be the best left-handed batsman he had seen. On this form, Donnelly was chosen for the 1949 New Zealand tour of England, where he continued to enhance his reputation, making 462 runs in the Test series at 77.00, including scores of 64, 206, 75 and 80. Donnelly's 206 at Lord's was the first Test double century by a New Zealander and remained the highest New Zealand Test score until Bert Sutcliffe's 230 not out against India at Delhi in 1955–56.

The 1949 series would prove to be the end of Donnelly's Test career. In all, Donnelly played just seven Tests, all in England, making 582 runs at 52.90.

A short man (his nickname was "Squib"), Donnelly is one of only two cricketers (along with Percy Chapman) to have scored centuries at Lord's in each of the three "classic matches": Test matches (206 for New Zealand against England in 1949), Gentlemen versus Players (scoring 162 for the Gentlemen in 1947) and the University Match (scoring 142 for Oxford against Cambridge in 1946).

In 1960, Neville Cardus expressed the opinion that Donnelly was the finest left-handed foreign batsman to play in England since World War II. Donnelly's favourite shot, a legside flick off the pads, often had spectators gasping in admiration, while some commentators suggested he was the best cover-point of all time.

Donnelly also played rugby for the Oxford University team, achieving success as a fly half, and, less successfully, as centre in the English national rugby side for their match against Ireland at Lansdowne Road in Dublin in 1947.

After four first-class matches in 1950, Courtaulds transferred the newly married Donnelly to their Sydney office to assume a managerial role. He developed a preference for fishing over cricket.

Despite having played only 13 of his 131 first-class matches in New Zealand, and in only seven Test matches, none of which were in New Zealand, he was elevated to the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame in 1990. He died in Sydney on October 22, 1999, survived by his wife, three sons and one daughter.

William R. Burkett

William R. Burkett, Jr. is an author known for his legendary science fiction novel, Sleeping Planet. 

Other novels include Blood Sport, Blood Lines, A Matter of Logistics, Skook, After August, and Mean Grey Old Morning. He is also the author of The Duck Hunter Diaries. He lives in the Pacific Northwest where "the duck hunting is good." He has a dog named Hunter.

Check out more on Bill Burkett on his site.

https://billburkett.medium.com/

Robert Jordan

James Oliver Rigney Jr., better known by his pen name Robert Jordan, was an American author of epic fantasy. 

He is known best for his series The Wheel of Time (finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death) which comprises 14 books and a prequel novel. He is one of several writers to have written original Conan the Barbarian novels; his are considered by fans to be some of the best of the non-Robert E. Howard efforts. Jordan also published historical fiction using the pseudonym Reagan O'Neal, a western as Jackson O'Reilly, and dance criticism as Chang Lung.

Jordan was born on October 17, 1948 in Charleston, South Carolina. He went to Clemson University after high school, but dropped out after one year and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War as a helicopter gunner. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with oak leaf cluster, the Bronze Star with "V" and oak leaf cluster, and two Vietnamese Gallantry Crosses with palm.

After returning from Vietnam in 1970, Jordan studied physics at The Citadel. He graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science degree and began working for the U.S. Navy as a nuclear engineer. He began writing in 1977.

Jordan was a history buff and enjoyed hunting, fishing, sailing, poker, chess, pool, and pipe-collecting. He described himself as a "High Church" Episcopalian and received communion more than once a week. He lived with his wife, Harriet McDougal, who was Jordan's editor in a house built in 1797.

On March 23, 2006, Jordan disclosed that he had been diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis and that, with treatment, his median life expectancy was four years. He encouraged his fans not to worry about him and stated that he intended to have a long and creative life.

He began chemotherapy at Mayo Clinic during early April 2006. He participated in a study of the drug Revlimid, which had been approved recently for multiple myeloma but not yet tested for primary amyloidosis.

Jordan died on September 16, 2007, from complications stemming from Multiple Myeloma.

Lee Hollander

Lee Milton Hollander was an American philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies. Hollander was for many years head of the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin. He is best known for his research on Old Norse literature.

Lee M. Hollander was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 8, 1880, the son of Samuel Hollander and Amelia Herstein. The family was Jewish. His parents were both born in Baltimore to German-born parents, and the family maintained strong links to Germany. His grandfather had emigrated from Germany in 1848. Samuel Hollander ran a furniture factory as a family business.

Upon the death of Hollander's father in 1886, his mother decided to take Lee and his older brother Charles Samuel to Germany to live with their relatives in Frankfurt, where he attended primary school from 1886 to 1897. Hollander left the Obersekunda of the Realgymnasium at the age of seventeen to return to the United States. Returning to Baltimore, he enrolled at the College at Johns Hopkins University, where he obtained a B.A. in 1901 with a major in Germanic Philology, and a minor in English and Comparative Philology. Hollander then gained his Ph.D. in 1905 under the supervision of Henry Wood. His thesis on the prefixal s- in Germanic was subsequently published at the personal encouragement of Hermann Collitz.

Hollander made a long trip to Norway, Denmark and Sweden, where he learned the Scandinavian languages and developed a strong interest in Scandinavian literature, particularly the works of Petter Dass. In 1906, Aftenposten printed an article by Hollander on Dass, which was instrumental in ensuring the restoration of Dass' home in Alstahaug.

While on his Scandinavian journey, Hollander visited many prominent scholars. He listed to Otto Jespersen and Moltke Moe, and attended the seminar of Sophus Bugge on the Edda at the University of Oslo. Through the efforts of outstanding scholars such as Magnus Olsen and Carl Marstrander, Oslo was at the time a pre-eminent center on Germanic philology. Hollander also spent his time liberally at the university libraries of Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen, devoting special time and attention to the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection.

Returning to the United States in 1907, Hollander became an instructor of German at the University of Michigan. At this time he also taught Norwegian. Combined with his teaching duties, he published a series of translations in Poet Lore. In 1910, Hollander transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where he again taught German and Norwegian. During this time he carried out substantial research, particularly on Scandinavian literature, and his subsequent articles were published in several publications, including Modern Language Notes, Scandianvian Studies, Arkiv för nordisk filologi, amongst others.

Anti-German sentiment became rampant when the United States declared war against Germany in 1917, and Hollander lost his position as an instructor at Wisconsin as a result. However, unlike most of his colleagues, many of whom were bilingual and suspected of double allegiance, he was not fired from Wisconsin altogether. The university librarian wanted someone to compile files of clippings about the war from major newspapers in England, Germany and the United States, and Hollander performed this task although he hated it. During this time, he developed a strong interest in geology. He would eventually teach introductory courses on the subject, and worked up reports on parts of Wisconsin. Throughout the rest of his life Hollander collected rocks, geodes and mineral specimens.

In 1920, when American anti-German sentiment had significantly cooled off, Johannes Lassen Boysen hired Hollander as Associate Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin. In subsequent years, the University grew rapidly, and he was appointed Professor. While in Oslo, Hollander had become familiar with the works of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and wrote a translation of Kierkegaard's writings upon his return to the United States. These translations were eventually published at the suggestion of Howard Mumford Jones in 1923, and upon the reprint of this work by Doubleday in 1960, Hollander was recognized as a pioneer translator of Kierkegaard into the English language.

In 1929, Hollander was promoted to Chairman of the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas. In this capacity, he oversaw major growth of his department, while simultaneously carrying out pioneering research. Under his leadership, the University of Texas became a leading institution on Germanic studies. His greatest scholarly passion was Old Norse literature and mythology.

Combined with his duties at the University of Texas, Hollander published a number of influential works and translations, including The Poetic Edda (1928) and Old Norse Poems (1936). In his translations, he aimed at recreating the tone of the original in his very personal style and diction. He contended that many works of Old Norse literature had not been adequately translated, because the translators were not sufficiently proficient in Old Norse, and that texts had been bowdlerized because the translators found contents morally objectionable. Hollander became an internationally renowned authority on Scandinavian and particularly Old Norse studies. He was recognized as America's leading authority on Skaldic poetry. Edgar C. Polomé referred to Hollander as "the Nestor of Scandinavian studies in the United States".

Upon reaching the age limit in 1941, Hollander retired from his administrative duties at the University of Texas. Five years later, he had to go on modified service, but was nevertheless as active as ever both as a teacher and as a researcher. He continued teaching and guiding students in Germanic studies, and published numerous influential translations and works on Old Norse studies. Works published by Hollander in these later years include The Skalds (1946), The Saga of the Jomsvikings (1955), A Bibliography of Skaldic Studies, and Heimskringla (1965).

The Sjörup Runestone in Sjörup, Sweden, is generally associated with the Jomsviking attack on Uppsala. Hollander was the translator of numerous works of Old Norse literature, including the Jómsvíkinga saga.

Hollander was in frequent correspondence with other international authorities on Germanic studies, including Otto Höfler, Werner Betz and Walter Baetke. He was an enthusiastic member of the Fortnightly Club at the University of Texas, where university scholars met to discuss their papers. He led the Department of Germanic Languages, Journal Club, which invited scholars from all over the world to present their papers. Hollander had been President of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies in 1919, of which he was a founding member, and served as President once again from 1959 to 1960. He was also Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Modern Language Association and the Linguistic Society of America, Honorary Life Member of the Viking Society for Northern Research, and a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Falcon.

In honor of the 85th birthday of Hollander, Polomé organized an international symposium on Old Norse literature and mythology, whose speakers included Gabriel Turville-Petre, Margaret Arent Madelung, Einar Haugen, Paul Schach, Erik Wahlgren, Winfred P. Lehmann and Polomé himself. A celebrated volume edited by Polomé, Old Norse Literature and Mythology (1969), was published as a result. When Hollander turned 90, Polomé commemorated the occasion with a lecture entitled "Approaches to Germanic Mythology", and Hollander's former Department produced a festschrift in his honor, which was edited by John Weinstock and published by Pemberton Press.

Hollander continued researching and teaching at the University of Texas towards the end of his life. He retired from teaching 1968. Víga-Glúm's Saga and The Story of Ögmund Dytt (1972) was his final work. He died in Austin on October 19, 1972, and was buried at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Alfred Sturtevant

Alfred Henry Sturtevant was an American geneticist. 

Sturtevant constructed the first genetic map of a chromosome in 1911. Throughout his career he worked on the organism Drosophila melanogaster with Thomas Hunt Morgan. By watching the development of flies in which the earliest cell division produced two different genomes, he measured the embryonic distance between organs in a unit which is called the sturt in his honor. In 1967, Sturtevant received the National Medal of Science.

Alfred Henry Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, United States on November 21, 1891, the youngest of Alfred Henry and Harriet Sturtevant's six children. His grandfather Julian Monson Sturtevant, a Yale University graduate, was a founding professor and second president of Illinois College, where his father taught mathematics.

When Sturtevant was seven years old, his father quit his teaching job and moved the family to Alabama to pursue farming. Sturtevant attended a one-room schoolhouse until entering high school in Mobile. In 1908, he enrolled at Columbia University. During this time, he lived with his older brother Edgar, a linguist, who taught nearby. Edgar taught Alfred about scholarship and research.

As a child, Sturtevant had created pedigrees of his father's horses. While in college, he read about Mendelism, which piqued Sturtevant's interest because it could explain the traits expressed in the horse pedigrees. He further pursued his interest in genetics under Thomas Hunt Morgan, who encouraged him to publish a paper of his pedigrees shown through Mendelian genetics. In 1914, Sturtevant completed his doctoral work under Morgan as well.

After earning his doctorate, Sturtevant stayed at Columbia as a research investigator for the Carnegie Institution of Washington. He joined Morgan's research team in the "fly room", in which huge advances were being made in the study of genetics through studies of the fruit fly Drosophila. In 1922, he married Phoebe Curtis Reed, and the couple subsequently had three children, the eldest of whom was William C. Sturtevant.

In 1928, Sturtevant moved to Pasadena to work at the California Institute of Technology, where he became a Professor of Genetics and remained for the rest of his career, except for one year when he was invited to teach in Europe. He taught an undergraduate course in genetics at Caltech and wrote a textbook with George Beadle. He became the leader of a new genetics research group at Caltech, whose members included George W. Beadle, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Sterling Emerson, and Jack Schultz. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949.[1] Sturtevant was awarded the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 1965 .[2] In 1967, he received the National Medal of Science for his longtime work on the genetics of Drosophila and other organisms.

Sturtevant was interested in taxonomy as well as genetics. He loved solving all kinds of puzzles and saw genetics as a puzzle for him to decipher. He was widely read, interested in politics, newspapers, scientific journals across many subjects and crossword puzzles. He had an impressive memory and composed and edited papers in his head before writing them down from memory. He enjoyed a long and prosperous career in genetics until his death on April 5, 1970. He died in Pasadena, California at the age of 78.

John Fraser Hart

John Fraser Hart is an American geographer. Over the course of his career he published over 150 scholarly papers, over a dozen books, and taught over 50,000 university students in his 65 years of teaching from 1949 until his retirement in 2015.

Hart was born on April 5, 1924 in Staunton, Virginia, and spent his childhood summers on his grandfather’s farm. From these summer months roaming the area around the farm, he developed an early interest in the countryside. The family moved to New York City in 1933 for his father to complete a doctoral degree at Columbia University through the end of 1934. Hart described it as a difficult year for them all especially in the time of the Great Depression. Once he had completed high school, Hart began taking college classes at Hampden–Sydney College, the same place his father had begun teaching at, but they moved in 1940 in the middle of his sophomore year to Atlanta. Instead of returning to school immediately, he spent a year working to get together enough money to attend Emory University, from which he received his Bachelor's of Arts degree in classical languages, Latin and Greek, in 1943.

Directly after graduating he joined the Navy to fight in WWII and spent three and a half years as a Navy intelligence officer during his Pacific Ocean tours. Aboard an aircraft carrier, one of his jobs was to spot returning aircraft in order to confirm them as allies rather than enemies. He also trained other sailors how to do the same, often using model aircraft in his teachings, models which he "midnight requisitioned" when his tour was completed. During his time at sea, he took notice of the intelligence reports he was working with and that he knew so little about geography. This led to him desiring to take classes on the geography of the Pacific, which he frequently lamented never occurred among his numerous other geography courses.

After the end of the war in 1945, Hart took several geography classes at the University of Georgia and met the head of the geography department Merle Charles Prunty who tutored him on the subject once a week. He also sent Hart to take some statistics courses because he knew that geographical knowledge needed to become more quantitative in the future. After a year of this, Hart went on to Northwestern University and studied under Malcolm Jarvis Proudfoot for his Master of Arts degree, which he completed in 1949, and then his Ph.D. in 1950 from the same university.

As he was completing his Ph.D., Hart was asked by Prunty to return and work as a faculty member at the University of Georgia, which he agreed to in 1949 and stayed there until 1955. Under Prunty, he worked alongside other famous geographers, including Eugene Cotton Mather and Wilbur Zelinsky. Hart especially worked with the former on a series of publications to various journals, along with an excursion through the Southern United States in 1952 as a geographical reviewing job for the International Geographical Congress. This resulted in them jointly publishing a report titled the Southeastern Excursion Guidebook, among other works. Several years later, Hart moved on to teach at Indiana University from 1955 to 1967. Afterwards, he made a final teaching position change to the University of Minnesota in 1967, where he continued to work for nearly 50 years. He retired from the University of Minnesota in 2015 at the age of 91. He did not plan on completely retiring from geographical work, however, as he noted his intention to continue progress on his next book, Fossils on the Prairie.

Hart became an executive officer for the American Association of Geographers from 1965 to 1966, before becoming an editor for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers journal from 1970 to 1975. He then became second vice-president of the organization in 1977. A collection of Hart's writing was published in the book A Love of the Land: Selected Writings of John Fraser Hart that was edited by John C. Hudson. In total during his life, as of 2015, Hart has published 15 books and has taught more than 50,000 university students. He is noted by his students and colleagues to be unique in his lack of computer use of any kind, with a secretary managing his emails from his students that are printed out and a reply typed by Hart on an electric typewriter, before being retyped as a reply email by his secretary.

The Meritorious Contributions award from the American Association of Geographers was given to Hart in 1969. Hart was presented, in 1971, with the Teaching of Geography at the College Level award by the National Council for Geographic Education. In 1982, Hart was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for his geographical accomplishments. He received the 1987 Southeastern Division of the American Association of Geographers (SEDAAG) Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, he was awarded the Paul P. Vouras Medal from the American Geographical Society. The 2005 Lifetime Achievement Honors from the American Association of Geographers was presented to Hart. The Association of American Geographers' Rural Geography Specialty Group named their annual award The John Fraser Hart Award for Research Excellence to honor Hart. The award recognizes scholars in the fields of agricultural and/or rural geography research.

Hart lives in Edina, Minnesota, with his wife Meredith.

Joseph H. Ogura

Joseph H. Ogura was born in San Francisco, California on May 25, 1915. He received his Medical Degree from the University of California in 1941, began as a resident in Pathology and Medicine from 1941-1942 and completed his residency in Medicine at Cincinnati General Hospital, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1945. He fulfilled an Otolaryngology residency at Barnes Hospital & McMillan Hospital in 1948 and then joined the Otolaryngology faculty at the School of Medicine and became Head of the Department of Otolaryngology from 1966 until his death in 1983. He developed many surgical techniques in head and neck cancer surgery, especially conservation surgery of the larynx. He was active in laryngeal and nasopulmonary research for many years and won top research awards at national otolaryngology meetings. Dr. Ogura was much honored for his achievements as he was only the third physician in the history of the American Laryngological Association to receive its coveted “triple crown:” the James Newcomb Award in 1967 for laryngeal research, the Casselberry Award in 1968 for nasopulmonary work, and the deRoaldes Gold Medal in 1979 for career accomplishment. The Ogura Learning Center is now named for him, along with the prestigious annual Ogura Head and Neck Lectureship, established in 1977.

He died on April 13, 1983.

Art Okun

Arthur Melvin "Art" Okun was an American economist.

He was born on November 28, 1928 in Jersey City, New Jersey.  He attended Yale University studying in the field of Macroeconomics. His Doctoral advisor was Arthur F. Burns. He was a professor at Yale University and, afterwards, was a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1968 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He served as the 7th chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers between 1968 and 1969.

Okun is known in particular for promulgating Okun's law, an observed relationship that states that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate, a country's GDP will be roughly an additional 2.5% lower than its potential GDP. He is also known as the creator of the misery index and the analogy of the deadweight loss of taxation with a leaky bucket. 

He died on March 23, 1980 of a heart attack.

Cosmas Desmond

Cosmas Desmond was a Catholic priest, an activist and an author who lived in England and South Africa. He is particularly well known for his opposition to forced removals in South Africa under the system of apartheid.

Born Patrick Anthony Desmond, he was the seventh of eleven children to a family of Irish Catholics in London's East End. His father worked as a fumigator.

Desmond received scholarships from several Catholic schools and became a Franciscan missionary, travelling to South Africa at the age of 21. He was assigned to a mission in KwaZulu-Natal. There he witnessed a number of forced removals of black residents under the Group Areas Act, which sought to preserve racial segregation along geographic lines. In 1969, Desmond traveled to Johannesburg to speak out against the practice. In the city, he befriended a number of black militants, including Steve Biko.

In 1970, he published a book on forced removals under the titled The Discarded People. In its preface, British ambassador Hugh Foot, Baron Caradon described it as "an account of callous contempt for human suffering, the ugliness of systematic cruelty, and the self-righteousness of the oppressor" and a book that could change the course of history. The book triggered a wave of international attention to forced removals, including a documentary film titled Last Grave in Dimbaza.

The book was soon banned in South Africa, and Desmond himself was subject to house arrest under the Suppression of Communism Act. Amnesty International named him a prisoner of conscience. As the church hierarchy disapproved of his activism, Desmond resigned from the priesthood in 1973. He later married human rights activist Snoeks Desmond, with whom he had three sons, but remained a Catholic.

He left South Africa in 1978 after the assassination of Richard Turner and returned to London where he worked for Amnesty International, heading its British section. After eighteen months, he was fired in a "power struggle" between volunteers and staff. He returned to South African in 1991 and in 1994 stood for parliament as a Pan Africanist Congress candidate, but was not elected.

After the end of apartheid, Desmond continued to advocate for the welfare of the poor, arguing that apartheid had not truly ended but had "a makeover and bought some new clothes". He felt that the leaders of post-apartheid South Africa had betrayed the trust of the anti-apartheid movement, particularly by failing to redistribute land on a large scale. Late in life, he headed the human rights branch of the NGO Children First, editing the organization's journal.

He died of Alzheimer's complications on March 31, 2012 in Durban.