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Zen, Chinese Chan, Korean Sŏn, also spelled Seon, Vietnamese Thien, important school of East Asian Buddhism that constitutes the mainstream monastic form of Mahayana Buddhism in China, Korea, and Vietnam and accounts for approximately 20 percent of the Buddhist temples in Japan. The word derives from the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning "meditation." Central to Zen teaching is the belief that awakening can be achieved by anyone but requires instruction in the proper forms of spiritual cultivation by a master. In modern times, Zen has been identified especially with the secular arts of medieval Japan (such as the tea ceremony, ink painting, and gardening) and with any spontaneous expression of artistic or spiritual vitality regardless of context. In popular usage, the modern non-Buddhist connotations of the word Zen have become so prominent that in many cases the term is used as a label for phenomena that lack any relationship to Zen or are even antithetical to its teachings and practices.
Origins and nature
Compiled by the Chinese Buddhist monk Daoyun in 1004, Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (Chingde chongdeng lu) offers an authoritative introduction to the origins and nature of Zen Buddhism. The work describes the Zen school as consisting of the authentic Buddhism practiced by monks and nuns who belong to a large religious family with five main branches, each branch of which demonstrates its legitimacy by performing Confucian-style ancestor rites for its spiritual ancestors or patriarchs. The genealogical tree of this spiritual lineage begins with the seven buddhas, consisting of six mythological Buddhas of previous eons as well as Siddhartha Gautama, or Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha of the current age. The spiritual awakening and wisdom realized by these buddhas then was transmitted from master to disciple across 28 generations of semi-historical or mythological Buddhist teachers in India, concluding with Bodhidharma, the monk who supposedly introduced true Buddhism to China in the 5th century. This true Buddhism held that its practitioners could achieve a sudden awakening to spiritual truth, which they could not accomplish by a mere reading of Buddhist scriptures. As Bodhidharma asserted in a verse attributed to him,
A special transmission outside the scriptures, not relying on words or letters; pointing directly to the human mind, seeing true nature is becoming a Buddha.
From the time of Bodhidharma to the present, each generation of the Zen lineage claimed to have attained the same spiritual awakening as its predecessors, thereby preserving the Buddha's "lamp of wisdom." This genealogical ethos confers religious authority on present-day Zen teachers as the legitimate heirs and living representatives of all previous Buddhas and patriarchs. It also provides the context of belief for various Zen rituals, such as funeral services performed by Zen priests and ancestral memorial rites for the families of laypeople who patronize the temples.
The Zen ethos that people in each new generation can and must attain spiritual awakening does not imply any rejection of the usual forms of Buddhist spiritual cultivation, such as the study of scriptures, the performance of good deeds, and the practice of rites and ceremonies, image worship, and ritualized forms of meditation. Zen teachers typically assert rather that all of these practices must be performed correctly as authentic expressions of awakening, as exemplified by previous generations of Zen teachers. For this reason, the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp attributes the development of the standard format and liturgy of the Chinese Buddhist monastic institution to early Zen patriarchs, even though there is no historical evidence to support this claim. Beginning at the time of the Song dynasty (960–1279), Chinese monks composed strict regulations to govern behaviour at all publicly recognized Buddhist monasteries. Known as "rules of purity" (Chinese: qinggui; Japanese: shingi), these rules were frequently seen as unique expressions of Chinese Zen. In fact, however, the monks largely codified traditional Buddhist priestly norms of behaviour, and, at least in China, the rules were applied to residents of all authorized monasteries, whether affiliated with the Zen school or not.
Zen monks and nuns typically study Buddhist scriptures, Chinese classics, poetics, and Zen literature. Special emphasis traditionally has been placed on the study of "public cases" (Chinese: gongan; Japanese: kōan), or accounts of episodes in which Zen patriarchs reportedly attained awakening or expressed their awakening in novel and iconoclastic ways, using enigmatic language or gestures. Included in the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp and in other hagiographic compendia, the public cases are likened to legal precedents that are designed to guide the followers of Zen.
Historical development
Although Zen Buddhism in China is traditionally dated to the 5th century, it actually first came to prominence in the early 8th century, when Wuhou (625–705), who seized power from the ruling Tang dynasty (618–907) to become empress of the short-lived Zhou dynasty (690–705), patronized Zen teachers as her court priests. After Empress Wuhou died and the Tang dynasty was restored to power, rival sects of Zen appeared whose members claimed to be more legitimate and more orthodox than the Zen teachers who had been associated with the discredited empress. These sectarian rivalries continued until the Song dynasty, when a more inclusive form of Zen became associated with almost all of the official state-sponsored Buddhist monasteries. As the official form of Chinese Buddhism, the Song dynasty version of Zen subsequently spread to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
During the reign of the Song, Zen mythology, Zen literature, and Zen forms of Buddhist spiritual cultivation underwent important growth. Since that time, Zen teachings have skillfully combined the seemingly opposing elements of mythology and history, iconoclasm and pious worship, freedom and strict monastic discipline, and sudden awakening (Sanskrit: bodhi; Chinese: wu; Japanese: satori) and long master-disciple apprenticeships.
During the Song dynasty the study of public cases became very sophisticated, as Zen monks arranged them into various categories, wrote verse commentaries on them, and advocated new techniques for meditating on their key words. Commentaries such as The Blue Cliff Record (c. 1125; Chinese: Biyan lu; Japanese Heikigan roku) and The Gateless Barrier (1229; Chinese: Wumen guan; Japanese: Mumon kan) remain basic textbooks for Zen students to the present day. The public-case literature validates the sense of liberation and freedom felt by those experiencing spiritual awakening while, at the same time, placing the expression of those impulses under the supervision of well-disciplined senior monks. For this reason, Zen texts frequently assert that genuine awakening cannot be acquired through individual study alone but must be realized through the guidance of an authentic Zen teacher.
During Japan's medieval period (roughly the 12th through 15th centuries), Zen monks played a major role in introducing the arts and literature of Song-dynasty China to Japanese leaders. The Five Mountain (Japanese: Gozan) Zen temples, which were sponsored by the Japanese imperial family and military rulers, housed many monks who had visited China and had mastered the latest trends of Chinese learning. Monks from these temples were selected to lead trade missions to China, to administer governmental estates, and to teach neo-Confucianism, a form of Confucianism developed under the Song dynasty that combined cultivation of the self with concerns for social ethics and metaphysics. In this way, wealthy Zen monasteries, especially those located in the Japanese capital city of Kyōto, became centres for the importation and dissemination of Chinese techniques of printing, painting, calligraphy, poetics, ceramics, and garden design—the so-called Zen arts, or (in China) Song-dynasty arts.
Apart from the elite Five Mountain institutions, Japanese Zen monks and nuns founded many monasteries and temples in the rural countryside. Unlike their urban counterparts, monks and nuns in rural Zen monasteries devoted more energy to religious matters than to Chinese arts and learning. Their daily lives focused on worship ceremonies, ritual periods of "sitting Zen" (Japanese: zazen) meditation, the study of public cases, and the performance of religious services for lower-status merchants, warriors, and peasants. Rural Zen monks helped to popularize many Buddhist rituals now common in Japan, such as prayer rites for worldly benefits, conferment of precept lineages on lay people, funerals, ancestral memorials, and exorcisms. After the political upheavals of the 15th and 16th centuries, when much of the city of Kyōto was destroyed in a widespread civil war, monks from rural Zen lineages came to dominate all Zen institutions in Japan, including the urban ones that formerly enjoyed Five Mountain status.
After the Tokugawa rulers of the Edo period (1603–1867) restored peace, Zen monasteries and all other religious institutions in Japan cooperated in the government's efforts to regulate society. In this new political environment, Zen monks and other religious leaders taught a form of conventional morality (Japanese: tsūzoku dōtoku) that owed more to Confucian than to Buddhist traditions; indeed, Buddhist teachings were used to justify the strict social hierarchy enforced by the government. Many Confucian teachers in turn adapted Zen Buddhist meditation techniques to "quiet sitting" (Japanese: seiza), a Confucian contemplative practice. As a result of these developments, the social and religious distinctions between Zen practice and Confucianism became blurred.
When the Ming dynasty (1368–1661) in China began to collapse, many Chinese Zen monks sought refuge in Japan. Their arrival caused Japanese Zen monks to question whether their Japanese teachers or the new Chinese arrivals had more faithfully maintained the traditions of the ancient buddhas and patriarchs. The resultant search for authentic Zen roots prompted the development of sectarianism, not just between Japanese and Chinese Zen leaders but also within the existing Japanese Zen community. Eventually sectarian rivalry led to the emergence of three separate Japanese Zen lineages: Ōbaku (Chinese: Huanbo), Rinzai (Chinese: Linji), and Sōtō (Chinese: Caodong). Ignoring their similarities, each lineage exaggerated its distinctive features. Thus, both Rinzai and Sōtō emphasized their adherence to certain Song-dynasty practices, in contrast to the Ōbaku monasteries, which favoured Ming traditions, especially in such areas as ritual language, musical instruments, clothing, and temple architecture. People affiliated with Sōtō, by far the largest of the Japanese Zen lineages, stressed the accomplishments of their patriarch Dōgen (1200–53), whose chief work, Shōbōgenzō (1231–53; "Treasury of the True Dharma Eye"), is widely regarded as one of the great classics of Japanese Buddhism.
Modern developments
During the first half of the 20th century, D.T. Suzuki (1870–1966), a Japanese Buddhist scholar and thinker, wrote numerous essays and books in English to introduce Zen ideals to Western audiences. Suzuki was born just after Japan began to adopt Western technology in an effort to catch up with Europe and America. He was strongly influenced by 19th-century Japanese Buddhist reformers who sought to cast off what they saw as the feudal social structures of the Tokugawa period and who advocated a more modern vision of Buddhism that could compete successfully with Christianity. Suzuki spent 11 years in the United States (1897–1908) as an assistant to Paul Carus (1852–1919), a German who had earned a doctorate in theology and philosophy before emigrating to America. Carus published a magazine to promote what he called the "Science of Religion," a new religion compatible with science. During this period, Suzuki was also influenced by contemporary intellectual currents, such as the ideas of the German Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who had identified irrational intuition and feeling as the essence of religion, and of the American philosopher William James (1842–1910), who posited the possibility of nondualistic knowledge via "pure experience" as overcoming the dualism inherent in empiricism.
Suzuki interpreted the episodes of spiritual awakening depicted in Zen public cases as proof of humankind's ability to suddenly break through the boundaries of common, everyday, logical thought to achieve a nondualistic, pure experience in which distinctions such as self/other and right/wrong disappear. He characterized this experience as an expression of the irrational intuition that underlies all religions and all acts of artistic creation, regardless of culture or historical period, and that achieved its highest expression in the secular arts of Japan. Suzuki, therefore, interpreted Zen not as a form of Buddhism but as a Japanese cultural value with universal relevance. His use of Western theological and philosophical concepts to explain the Zen experience in modern ways influenced Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and other members of the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy. In the early 20th century, many Japanese intellectuals described Zen as the underlying essence of Japanese culture or as the unique form of Japanese spirituality. As Japanese society became increasingly militaristic during the 1930s and '40s, descriptions of Zen became more warlike, frequently invoking loyalty to the state, fearlessness, and mental tranquillity in the face of death. In 1938, for example, Suzuki described Zen as "a religion of will power" and identified Zen training with Bushido (the code of conduct of the Japanese warrior class) and Japanese swordsmanship.
When Suzuki's books were reprinted after World War II, they found a ready audience in the United States and Britain among ex-servicemen who had acquired an interest in Japanese culture and among youths dissatisfied with postwar society. In particular, members of the new American literary and artistic movement known as the Beats looked to Zen for inspiration. In popular culture the word Zen became an adjective used to describe any spontaneous or free-form activity. Since the heyday of the Beat movement in the 1950s, however, academic studies of Zen have grown in complexity and sophistication, examining the role of Zen practices and Zen institutions in the religious lives of Buddhists in East Asia. In 1953 the Chinese Nationalist historian and diplomat Hu Shih (1891–1962) published an important essay on the history of Zen in China, in which he challenged Suzuki's characterization of Zen as irrational and beyond logical understanding. Hu argued that Zen must be understood as a human institution and that scholarly descriptions of it must be based on verifiable historical evidence, not on psychological interpretations of the religious stories found in Zen's public cases.
Since 1953 a new generation of scholars has completely rewritten the history of Zen. They have made major strides both in documenting the historical development of the Zen school in East Asia and in understanding the religious and cultural contexts within which Zen literature, such as public cases, functioned as guides to spiritual truth. During the 1980s and '90s, some Zen scholars and Zen priests in Japan advocated what they called "Critical Buddhism" in an effort to denounce any connection between Zen and illogical thought and any association between Zen institutions and social problems such as religious discrimination, cultural chauvinism, and militarism. Regardless of the ultimate fate of Critical Buddhism, it is clear that efforts to create a new Zen compatible with the demands of modern society will continue.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
Buddhism: Dhyana (Chan/Zen)The Dhyana (Sanskrit: "Meditation"; Chinese: Chan; Japanese: Zen) school of Buddhism emphasizes meditation as the way to awareness of ultimate reality, an important practice of Buddhism from its origin in India and one found in other Indian schools, such as Yogachara. Chan, which was…
China: The influence of Buddhism…anti-textual, antimetaphysical southern Chan (Zen) school, which had strong roots in Daoism. The popular preaching of the salvationist Pure Land sect was also important. After the rebellion of An Lushan, a nationalistic movement favouring Confucianism appeared, merging with the efforts of Tiantai Buddhism to graft Buddhist metaphysics onto Classical…
China: Buddhism…came from the Chan (Zen) sect (a discipline focused on meditation). Their high intellectuality and refined aestheticism, however, did not appeal to the Mongols, who felt more attracted by the mixture of magic practices, rather nebulous metaphysics, and impressive symbolism in the visual arts of Tibetan Buddhism. Kublai Khan…
Japan: Kamakura culture: the new Buddhism and its influenceBy contrast, the Zen school sought to open the way to insight by self-effort (
jiriki); hence, it met with a ready response, satisfying the demands of many samurai. At the same time, scholarship and the arts were still deeply linked with the Tendai and Shingon sects of esoteric…
Japan: Religious attitudes…sects of Jōdo, Jōdo Shin, Zen, and Nichiren made striking advances during the Edo period, if only because their temples were guaranteed privileged status by the implementation of the
terauke("temple certificate") system of the bakufu. Besides their previous roles conducting funeral rites and other more strictly "religious" functions, they…
More About Zen45 references found in Britannica articles
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- In martial art
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- study by Nichiren
- tea ceremony
- In tea ceremony
- Chan painting


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Sheikha Mozah and FSTC at Royal launch in London
Sheikha Mozah and FSTC at Royal launch in London
London, 9th June 2011: Her Highness Sheikha Mozah of Qatar and British Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, were guests of honour at the launch of an eye-opening new exhibition at The Royal Society in London today. Arabick Roots is a new display highlighting surprising connections between the scientific pioneers of Muslim Civilisation and seventeenth century Britain's greatest scholars and scientists.
The exhibition displays rare books, scientific instruments and correspondence, showing how science and culture from the Muslim Civilisation influenced and inspired key figures such as Edmund Halley and Robert Boyle. Early Fellows of the Royal Society eagerly pursued works in Arabic and Persian as well as communicating with their intellectual contemporaries in the Arabic-speaking world. At a time when international collaboration is increasingly important to the advancement of science, Arabick Roots reveals the rich and often surprising history of scientific communication between two very different cultures.
Prof. Salim Al-Hassani (Chairman of FSTC and 1001 Inventions - pictured left) and Dr. Rim Turkmani (Curator and FSTC Fellow - pictured right) present a signed copy of the 1001 Inventions book to Sir Paul Nurse (President of the Royal Society - centre).
Speaking at the launch event, Her Highness Sheikha Mozah said: "Today we open an exhibition about science in the Islamic world from centuries ago. However, we have a desperate need to repeat history. Only through beautiful minds, like the ones that we can see on display here today, can we achieve that. Collaborationh6 between East and West is the key to repeating that history."
Exhibition Curator Dr Rim Turkmani said: "This exhibition uncovers the never-before told story of the connections between the early Royal Society and contemporary and classical Arabic learning, and how they were used to solve some of the most pressing problems of the day."
"This was a time when British society as a whole was largely ignorant of the cultural achievements of the Arabic world – yet we find that the early Royal Society's group of 'ingenious and curious gentlemen' included three Fellows from the Arabic world. This forgotten history reveals a rich tradition of communication between two very different cultures, and shows that then – just like today – collaboration across linguistic and cultural boundaries can lead to great results."
Dr. Rim Turkmani gives HH Sheikha Mozah a tour of the Arabick Roots exhibition.
The Arabick Roots exhibition is sponsored by the Qatar Foundation. The research for Arabick Roots has been sponsored by the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation (FSTC) and the exhibition curator is FSTC Fellow Dr. Rim Turkmani. FSTC also created the internationally renowned and award-winning 1001 Inventions exhibition that was recently opened by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in California.
Also present at the launch event was former British Foreign Office Minister for the Middle East, Baroness Symons, who said: "Congratulations to FSTC on this excellent exhibition. It is superb. Like many other people, I had no idea how extraordinarily innovative the Arab scientists were and how much contact there was between this country and the Arab nations on science."
Arabick Roots will be open 9am - 5pm in the week of the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition (5 - 10 July, 2011); at all other times guided tours are by appointment (call +44 20 7451 2597). Entrance is free. The exhibition runs until November 2011, after which it will transfer to Doha.
The exhibition catalogue can be downloaded as a PDF file by clicking here.
Dr. Rim Turkmani gives HH Sheikha Mozah a tour of the Arabick Roots exhibition.
"The early Fellows of the Royal Society constantly amaze us with their ingenuity and dedication to accurate scientific experiment and observation. Now we learn from a wonderful exhibition that has just opened at the Royal Society, Arabick Roots, just how aware they were of the scientific discoveries made in the Arabic and Islamic world. Some went so far as to learn Arabic so that they could read firsthand the important treatises. The Royal Society has been delighted to open its archives and work with the Qatar Foundation and FSTC to produce this outstanding exhibition." Prof Lorna A. Casselton FRS, Foreign Secretary & Vice President, The Royal Society
Smallpox Inoculation
The surprising history behind one of the most significant medical advances of all time will be revealed in Arabick Roots. Famously, vaccination against infectious diseases was pioneered by Edward Jenner in the last years of the eighteenth century. However, Arabick Roots shows how thinkers from the Arabic and Muslim world helped to pave the way for Jenner's great breakthrough and other key advances in astronomy, medicine and other disciplines.
When London was devastated by a smallpox epidemic in the mid-eighteenth century, Fellows of the Royal Society turned to their counterparts in the Arabic world to help them understand this terrible disease. In letters seen publicly for the very first time in this exhibition, the Ambassador to Tripoli at the time, Cassem Algiada Aga, describes the practice of inoculation, which had been taking place for centuries in North Africa and the Middle East.
Aga's letters provided valuable first-hand reassurance about the safety of inoculation at a time when there was serious public fear and mistrust of this life saving practice in Europe, and he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, joining two existing Arab Fellows, Mohammed Ibn Haddu and Ben Ali Abgali.
Inoculation practices from Muslim Civilisation paved the way for the development of a Smallpox vaccination
1. The Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation (FSTC) is the creator of the global initiative 1001 Inventions. FSTC is a British not-for-profit, non-political, and non-religious academic organisation founded in 1999 by a group of philanthropic historians, scientists, engineers and social scientists. It is dedicated to researching and popularising the history of pre-Renaissance civilisations, especially the Muslim civilisation, that have had an impact upon the scientific, technological and cultural heritage of our modern world. See www.fstc.org.uk for more details.
2. Dr Rim Turkmani is a Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civlisation (FSTC). She works at the Astrophysics group at the Imperial College London. She also specialises in the impact of the Arabic science on the scientific revolution, and has conducted original research in this area which was developed into the 'Arabick Roots' exhibition. Having studied and worked as a scientist in many countries, including her home Syria, she has particular appreciation of cultural diversity in science and the importance of dialogue in the making of modern science.
Artefacts in the exhibition demonstrate the connections between the early Royal Society and Muslim Civilisation
3. The Royal Society is the UK's national academy of science. Founded in 1660, the Society has three roles, as a provider of independent scientific advice, as a learned Society, and as a funding agency. Its expertise is embodied in the Fellowship, which is made up of the finest scientists from the UK and beyond.
The Royal Society's goals are to:
- Invest in future scientific leaders and in innovation
- Influence policymaking with the best scientific advice
- Invigorate science and mathematics education
- Increase access to the best science internationally
- Inspire an interest in the joy, wonder and excitement of scientific discovery
For further information please visit www.royalsociety.org
The Royal Society Charter Book, with signatures of the Arab members, who joined more than 300 years ago
The Royal Society's annual Summer Science Exhibition showcases the most exciting cutting-edge science and technology research. It provides a unique opportunity for members of the public to interact with scientists and ask them questions about their work. This year's Summer Science Exhibition 2011 will be held from 5 - 10 July at the Royal Society's main premises in central London and is free to attend. The Exhibition is the Society's main public event of the year and is open to members of the general public as well as students and teachers, scientists, policymakers and the media. Click here for more details.
4. The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) aims to support Qatar on its journey from a carbon economy to a knowledge economy by unlocking human potential. It was established in 1995 by His Highness the Amir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani. His wife, Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, is the organization's chairperson and driving force. See www.qf.org.qa for more details.
'Arabick Roots' exhibition launch at the Royal Society
Press Coverage
|25/07/11 The Guardian
|25/07/11 Eureka Science
|07/07/11 Irtiqa
|05/07/11 Colourful_Radio (Mp3)
|05/07/11 Finchannel
|05/07/11 Dubai Chronicle
|02/07/11 The Lancet
|21/06/11 Asharq Al Awsat
|20/06/11 Wired
|19/06/11 Passion Islam
|19/06/11 Al Bawaba
|18/06/11 Al Arabiya
|17/06/11 Science Magazine
|15/06/11 Noblesse et Royautes
|14/06/11 Womens Lens
|13/06/11 Inside Science
|13/06/11 Arabs Today
|13/06/11 The Asians
|12/06/11 Nam News Network
|11/06/11 The Peninsula
|11/06/11 Libya Business Info
|11/06/11 Egypt Commercial
|11/06/11 Doha Inside
|11/06/11 Business Intelligence ME
|11/06/11 Saudi Gazette
|10/06/11 Asian Image
|10/06/11 Modern Ghana
|10/06/11 Middle East Online
|10/06/11 Journomania
|10/06/11 History Today
|10/06/11 Gulf Times
|10/06/11 BBC R4 Today (Mp3)
|09/06/11 Sudan Commerce
|01/06/11 Visit London
|31/05/11 History of Science
|More Media Coverage
Resources and Related Links
- Video Remarks For 1001 Inventions
- California Exhibition
- Best Touring Exhibition
- New York to Los Angeles
- New York Exhibition
- Istanbul Exhibition
- London Exhibition
- Media and Press Coverage
- 1001 Inventions Central Website
More Websites
- FSTC WEBSITE: www.fstc.org.uk
- 1001 INVENTIONS: www.1001inventions.com
- CE4CE WEBSITE: www.ce4ce.org
- TURKISH WEBSITE: www.1001icat.com
- YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/1001inventions
- TWITTER: www.twitter.com/1001inventions
- FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/1001inventions

subset: commoncrawl


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Care for Garage door sensors better than ever!
No matter how much you overlook the Garage door sensors, the truth prevails that they do care for your family and pets by avoiding sudden closure of the door. Using an electric sensor, the door is prevented for shutting down, should there be something in the glide path. Of course, this is a clever invention, but as a home owner, you have to make sure that Garage door sensors work perfectly. Many times one may realize the sensors aren't aligned or may need replacement, and that's where you would call the experts of Garage Door.
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So the RPT was groaning when I chucked all the names in. When he got going he picked Janna
Well done Janna, if you email Linnie she'll sort you out your prize.
So this week we have a super sketch drawn by the fabulous Pinky! Its a lovely sketch and the team have made some lovely cards from it.
So here is...
The Sketch
Super huh?
So remember to enter via Mr Linky linking to your entry if Mr Linky's not here please pop back when he is ;))


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Andrew Anderson & Emma May (Tillman) Smalley
Norway Cemetery, near Mrytle Point, Coos County, Oregon
Andrew was born April 3, 1853 in Falls Township, Wyoming County, Pennsylvania. He died March 12, 1943 at Mast Hospital in Myrtle Point, Coos County, Oregon. He was the son of Benjamin L. Smalley and Hannah M. Dunlap. Benjamin L. Smalley is a "brick wall" and cannot find an original record on him.
Emma May was born August 26, 1856 in Tunkhannock, Wyoming County, Pennsylvania. She died February 26, 1923 in Coos County, Oregon. She was the daughter of David H. Tillman and Elizabeth Detrick. I submitted a blog post regarding Emma May with a picture of her at about 13 years old and you can read about it here.
This couple was married May 30, 1873 in Wyoming County and had a total of 14 children. My Paternal Grandmother, Etta Mae Smalley was their youngest child.
Andrew's parents are somewhat of a mystery to me and I will blog about this in detail in a future post.


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Surveys are a powerful and cost-effective way to gather information, identify and diagnose problems, and uncover new and emerging opportunities. However, one of the biggest challenges that many companies face in conducting surveys is getting the right mix of people to take their surveys and also getting a high enough response rate to ensure that their survey results are accurate.
Survey response rates can vary widely depending on whether you are conducting your survey via phone, email, a paper survey, etc., what industry you're in, and whether your survey is going to customers or employees. Although there is no single way to improve your response rates, the following are some easy steps, identified by Allegiance, Inc., a feedback management company, that you can take that, when combined, will help you improve your survey response rates.
The Top Nine Challenges of Growing a Business and How to Tackle Them Once you've got your start-up off the ground, the daunting task of growing your business to the next level must begin.
Help Wanted: Competition for Tech Talent Heats Up In many states, there are more tech jobs than candidates to fill them.
Nine Best Practices for Efficient Database Archiving Archiving can be an effective approach to ILM if you follow these best practices.
Related Topics : A Big Market for Big Data Jobs, Midmarket CIO, IT Management Automation, SharePoint, Technology Markets
The gig economy is clearly disrupting the tech industry, both in positive and negative ways. ... More >>
Is fake news a security issue? Some say yes, as it can be used as a social engineering tool to spread disinformation and conceivably to get unsuspecting users to click on malicious links. ... More >>
Executives at several top tech firms outline the skills they need now and in the near future, including IaaS and IoT security expertise. Other skills listed may surprise you. ... More >>


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The UK economy is a known mess.
In Q2, the economy shrank 0.7%.
Not only is the country back into a double-dip recession, but the economy is even growing slower than the Eurozone, where Q2 GDP only shrank 0.2%.
A big culprit is the austerity agenda of Prime Minister David Cameron, who came into office in 2010. Cameron cut government spending, with the aim of restoring confidence and unleashing the private sector.
The path has been such a flop that economists who supported David Cameron when he came into office are now urging him to back off, and re-pursue an agenda of infrastructure-driven growth.
But in the eyes of Cisco CEO John Chambers, Cameron has successfully pursued a pro-growth agenda.
After Cisco earnings came out, Chambers was on CNBC with Maria Bartiromo, and he said the following:
MARIA BARTIROMO: In terms of the US, we have so many issues that we're talking about whether it be the fiscal cliff, and certainly the unemployment story. What do you think it will take to shake up things in the U.S. in terms of getting growth moving again?
JOHN CHAMBERS: I think it's simple. Regardless of who is President, we have to see what they did in the United Kingdom or Canada. The governments had a very pro-growth environment working with businesses saying what do we do to create jobs, getting consumer and business confidence up and that means predictability. We have to be a great business nation and we will add head count and go. that's exactly what Mr. Cameron is doing. We can learn a lot from both them them.
Later in the segment, Chambers delved a little more into what he likes about the UK, and it mainly seemed to have to do with favorable tax treatment. The UK doesn't tax overseas repatriated cash the way the US does. This is a big issue for global tech giants, like Cisco, which have epic piles of cash, most of which is overseas.
Still, the idea of Cameron being very "pro-growth" is not only theoretically wrong (Cameron advocated a policy of contraction) it's actually wrong: The UK economy is an experiment gone awry.
Also in the interview, Chambers says he's a pretty big Romney supporter, but mostly he sounded a ton like a lot of the Fortune 500 leaders you hear, talking about bringing back confidence, restoring certainty, and just being more "pro-growth."
But if his definition of pro-growth is an economy contracting 0.7% and doing worse than the Eurozone, but having tax policy that's favorable to Cisco, then it's a pretty big warning that when CEOs give policy advice they should be taken with a big grain of salt. If this is the advice he's getting, it's probably smart that Obama isn't meeting with his jobs council.
Here's the video. We've set it to start right at the part above.
Get the latest Cisco stock price here.
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How the DSN helps engineers navigate the spacecraft during cruise
During cruise, the Deep Space Network antennas pick up signals from the spacecraft that tell navigators where the spacecraft are located. Engineers cannot physically see the spacecraft with the naked eye or a telescope, and they rely on radio "tracking" to know where the spacecraft are at any given time. Like a game of "Marco-Polo," the DSN listens for signals from outer space and can detect where the spacecraft is from where the sound comes from.
This navigation service is called "tracking coverage" and it includes Doppler, ranging and delta differential one-way ranging, or "Delta DOR."
Doppler Data
In order to calculate the speed that a spacecraft is flying, engineers use Doppler data to plot velocity along the line of sight between Earth and the spacecraft.
Most people are familiar with the phenomenon of a car horn or train whistle changing its frequency as it moves towards or away from them. Electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light waves or radio signals) also experience this effect. The size of the frequency shift, or "Doppler shift," depends on how fast the light source is moving relative to the observer. Astronomers often refer to the "redshift" and "blueshift" of visible light, where the light from an object coming towards us is shifted to the blue end of the spectrum (higher frequencies), and light from an object moving away is shifted towards the red (lower frequencies).
The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft commmunicates with controllers on the ground by radio signals. Ground controllers know the frequency of the signal that is emitted from the spacecraft. However, since the spacecraft is moving away from (or towards) us, this frequency is being Doppler shifted to a different frequency. So, engineers (or, more accurately, computers) compare the received frequency with the emitted frequency to get the Doppler shift. It´s then straightforward to find the velocity that would cause the resulting Doppler shift.
Ranging is sending a code to the spacecraft, having the spacecraft receive that code and immediately send it back out the spacecraft´s own antenna, and finally receiving that code back on Earth. The time between sending the code and receiving the code, minus the delay in turning the signal around on the spacecraft, is twice the light time to the spacecraft. So that time, divided by two and multiplied by the speed of light, is the distance from the DSN station to the spacecraft. This distance is accurate to about 16-33 feet (five to ten meters), even though the spacecraft may be 200 billion meters away!
Delta Dor
Delta DOR is similar to ranging, but it also takes in a third signal from a naturally occurring radio source in space, such as a quasar, and this additional source helps scientists and engineers gain a more accurate location of the spacecraft.
Quasars are a few billion light years away and a few billion years in the past. Quasars are used as extremely well known positions in the sky to provide a calibration for the same measurements made within a few tens of minutes of each other on a spacecraft. Being able to do quasar and spacecraft ranging near the same time and subtracting the answers cancels a lot of errors that are the same in both measurements from the atmosphere and the equipment.
The "ranging" is not really ranging, but differenced ranging. What is measured is the difference in the distance to the source between two complexes on Earth (for example, Goldstone and Madrid or Goldstone and Canberra). From that an angle in the sky can be determined relative to the stations. The angle for the quasar is subtracted from the angle of the spacecraft, giving the angular separation of the quasar and the spacecraft. That angle is accurate to about five to ten nanoradians, which means when the spacecraft is near Mars, say 200 million kilometers away, it can determine the position of the spacecraft to within one kilometer (0.6 miles).


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Jan. 21, 2006
DAVIS, Calif. - UCSB was able to start of the meet with a big win in the 400 Medley Relay (Cruzat, Freeman, Yamamoto, and Dwidar) against UC Davis but that was not enough to keep the momentum going to win the dual meet Friday January 21, 2006 at Schaal Aquatics Center.
Freshman Erin Yamamoto and teammate Jen Schwalb took first and second in the 200 fly, 2:02.85 and 2:03.81, respectively. Following that event freshman Jenisse Demeulenaere won the 100 free with a time of 52.16. Nadia Dwidar took third, 52.38 and Josefa Carlin took fifth, 53:36 in that event. To complete the freshman trio Jessica Cruzat took first in the 200 back with a time of 2:04.78. Danielle Taylor placed third in the backstroke event with a time of 2:09.25.
Senior Jen Schwalb who took first in the 200 IM with a time of 2:05.55 also took second in the 500 free with a time of 5:05.09. Ashley Yamahata took third in the 500 free with a time of 5:10.14.
The Gauchos took second and third in the 200 breast, Freeman with a time of 2:21.71 and Dickinson with a time of 2:24.20.As the meet came to an end the Gauchos were able to steal a second place finish in the 400 free relay.
The Gauchos head back into the water to face University of the Pacific in their home pool Saturday, January 21, 2006.


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-First one caught July 16 currently raising several pupae. Formica sp
-9 caught Aug 12 last weekend around 6-7pm, currently 2 queens laying eggs.
-Another 12 caught yesterday Aug 19 same time.
All queens have shedded their wings, some have even seemed to have munched on them. Witnessed a majority cleaning themselves includomg the end of their gaster. So far, good signs from what I've read, and understand
As soon as the first nanitics come I'd like to start finding these girls good homes. (Of course I'll be keeping a few for myself )
Pics soon!!
St. Peter, MN. 22 un-ID'd queens
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Founding Fathers
The Founding Fathers are the leaders who founded the United States, especially the 40 dignitaries who signed the U.S. Constitution at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. Historians consider the most important founders to include John Adams, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Washington is known for his leadership and honesty; Hamilton for his brilliance; John Adams for his morality; Franklin for his inventiveness; Madison for his scholarship; and Jefferson for his egalitarianism.
The 55 initial participants—all of whom would be considered "Founders" in the broad sense of the term—wrote 15,000 articles, books and other materials. A study found that the Bible comprised 34% of their direct quotations. They particularly liked quoting the Book of Deuteronomy.
The last surviving member of the signers of the Declaration was Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and the last surviving Founding Father was James Madison.[1][2]
The Founding Fathers sought "Honor"—freedom from corruption, and a positive devotion to civic virtue. These were key elements of Republicanism, and the Founding Fathers made republicanism the core values of the American system of government.
Corruption was the great evil the Founding Fathers confronted. When Britain showed too much corruption, it was time to break free with the American Revolution. To overcome the temptations of corruption—such as luxury and bribery—in their own lives, the Founding Fathers cultivated the virtue of disinterestedness. That is, the made a conscious effort to not be the creature of his financial interests, and not give any sign to the public that they sought luxury or bribes. The goal was to be impartial, concerned only for the public good, not the advancement of friends or, still less, of party.
Even personal shame and humiliation was preferable to a tarnished honor or the hint of corruption. When Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton was accused of corruption for making secret payments to a man named James Reynolds, Hamilton revealed he had been set up and was paying blackmail to Reynolds following an affair with Mrs. Reynolds. Duels over honor were common in the era—Hamilton was killed in one, as was Hamilton's son.
Signatories of the Declaration of Independence
Signatories of the Articles of Confederation
Signatories of the United States Constitution
Other Founding Fathers
Further reading
- Ellis, Joseph J. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2002), good overview of leading figures by top scholar excerpt and text search
- McClanahan, Brion. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers (2009), popular book by conservative writer. excerpt and text search
- Wood, Gordon. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (2007), very good overview by leading conservative scholar excerpt and text search
See also
- Founding Fathers quotes that mention God
- Gallery of American Heroes
- David Ramsay
- Hero: Gallery of American Heroes
- Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Remembrance Day
- Vow
External links
- The National Archives
- The National Archives - Historical Documents
- The Patriot Post - Historical Documents
- The Constitution from the National Archives
- The Constitution of the United States of America
Founding Fathers Quotes
- Mark's Quotes: Founding Fathers Quotes
- USDOJ & Government Watch: Spirit of America Liberty Quotes
- Eads Home Ministries: Founding Fathers Quotes


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Handling Specialty is a member of The Canadian Association of Railway Suppliers. The Canadian Association of Railway Suppliers (CARS) has been representing companies selling products and services to railways and transits domestically and internationally.
Handling Specialty is a major supplier of railway materials handling equipment such as Electric Jacks, Drop Tables, Car Hoists, Body Supports, Turntables, Transfer Tables, Split Rail Systems, Gantry, Manually Guided Vehicles (MGV), electric railcar movers (Zephir), scissor lifts and other custom engineered solutions.
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UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN River Falls
Welcome to the Communication and Media Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls! Communication and Media Studies, in the College of Arts and Sciences, is dedicated to providing quality instruction for students seeking careers in:
- Print Media
- Broadcast Media
The mission of the Communication and Media Studies department is to.
Our degree program, an undergraduate degree in journalism, is designed to prepare students to work in a converged media setting.
Journalism's academic program is grounded in the liberal arts curriculum of UWRF's College of Arts and Sciences, placing the study of journalism within diverse cultural contexts.
Our commitment to diversity is strong; we welcome and support diversity in all its forms. Faculty and staff value a climate that is open and accepting, and make every effort to provide students with a learning environment that is free of harassment and discrimination.
Our facilities consist of a student-operated radio station, WRFW-FM and newspaper, The Student Voice. All are located on the third floor of North Hall. An entrance ramp and elevator provide accessibility.


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Kills flying and crawling insect pests including mosquitoes, flies, moths and spiders. This is long-Lasting, round-the-clock protection. Simply remove from the package to begin controlling action.
EPA Reg. No. 5481-338-47000
Not registered for sale in AK, CT, MA, MT, NY, UT, and PR
This item is sold individually. The case size is listed for your convenience for instances where you wish to order in case quantities.
— Ships from H: WA, CA, CO, MI, TN, PA, FL USA.


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ANALYSIS: Rivalry over Next DVD Format Moving into Market
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, Sony Corp and their allies will release the first "Blu-ray" DVD recorders in late July, challenging the camp led by Toshiba Corp, which established the current DVD format and which now advocates the "HD DVD" standard.
Matsushita's June 30 press conference announcing its Blu-ray DVD recorder was modest because the product does not completely follow Blu-ray standards and may not be able to play future pre-recorded Blu-ray discs.
Production goals are also modest at 2,000 units per month priced at about 300,000 yen. Even so, offering the model nationwide at the top of its Panasonic "DIGA" line, which accounts for about 40% of the DVD recorder market in Japan, will raise name recognition for Blu-ray and move the format ahead of HD DVD.
Matsushita and Sony, which once competed over video formats with VHS and Beta, joined hands to promote the Blu-ray format in February 2002 after six months of preparatory talks, mainly between then Matsushita senior managing director Sukeichi Miki and then Sony vice chairman Minoru Morio.
The two reportedly realized that they could not afford a competition in Japan while companies in the rest of Asia are racing to catch up. Working together to develop an industry standard would also cost less.
The pact also likely stemmed from Matsushita's recent poor performance and Sony's frustration at a dearth of hit electronic products lately.
Shinichi Tanaka, head of Matsushita's Media Control System Development Center and inventor of a technology to bind DVD substrates, emphasizes the structural supremacy of Blu-ray. "The storage layer at 0.1mm beneath the disc surface best expands storage capacity, and we agreed with Sony on this," Tanaka said.
Looking back on the video-format rivalry, "The more recording time a medium offered, the more consumer support it received," said Sony Managing Director Kiyoshi Nishitani, who is credited with convincing blue LED maker Nichia Corp. to exchange patent information with Sony.
Nishitani is confident about Blu-ray's prospects. "The more makers release products, the more confidence consumers will have," he said.
Hitachi, Ltd, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, Dell Computer Corp and Hewlett Packard Co have signed on to Blu-ray.
Toshiba Chief Fellow of Technology Hisashi Yamada has approached the challenge with confidence as well. In establishing the current DVD format against a partnership by Sony and Philips Electronics NV, he led an alliance of many companies in the computer and film industries, and was given the nickname, "the father of DVD."
Working with NEC Corp, whose research on optical discs is known to be the most advanced in the industry, Yamada is targeting cost-conscious film-production companies in Hollywood as major customers for HD DVD discs.
Yamada's strategy is to keep the storage layer at the current position, 0.6mm from the surface, so existing disc production machinery can be used. HD DVD recorders will likely hit the market in mid-2005.
Led by proud engineers, competition to establish control with a new DVD format remains open.
From The Nikkei Business Daily


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Photos excerpted from Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, by Ron Schick, to be published this month by Little, Brown and Company; © 2009 by the author. Except where noted, all photographs reprinted by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. AllSaturday Evening Post illustrations licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, Indiana. All rights reserved.
Take a close look at Saying Grace, one of Norman Rockwell's best-known works. In a crowded railway-station diner, an old woman and a little boy bow their heads in prayer before eating. A pair of young men regard them at close range, forced by the diner's busyness to share their table with the pious twosome; only a centerpiece condiment tray separates the parties.
The onlookers' faces betray curiosity, even a slight sense of bemusement, but not a hint of mockery or contempt. Zoom out a bit farther and you'll notice two more observers taking in the scene: a hardened middle-aged man standing off to the left (waiting for a table?) and a seated fellow in the foreground, winding up his meal with coffee and a cigar. Amid all the evident cacophony in the restaurant, these men surely couldn't have been alerted by their ears to the woman's and boy's murmurings; more likely, they caught sight of this strange tableau while idly scanning the room, their heads abruptly stopping mid-swivel, their thoughts somewhere along the lines of "Well, I'll be goddamned."
Much has been made of this image since it first appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, in November 1951. It has been upheld as a brave and righteous affirmation of the need for religious faith in an increasingly godless society. It has been dismissed as a ghastly specimen of sentimental kitsch. Most commonly, though, it has been celebrated as an affecting snapshot of Americans at their best: jumbled together, disparate of background, yet coexisting peacefully.
This last interpretation is exactly what Rockwell, a non-churchgoer, intended as the takeaway from Saying Grace. In his view, the painting was not about the woman and boy but about the reaction they engendered. "The people around them were staring, some surprised, some puzzled, some remembering their own lost childhood, but all respectful," the artist wrote in his memoir, the italics his.
In a readers' poll conducted in 1955, Saying Grace was selected as the most popular of Rockwell's Post covers, which would total more than 300 by the time he parted ways with the magazine, eight years later. This was an especially neat trick considering that the theme of Saying Grace—tolerance—was not as inherently warm and fuzzy as that of, say, Doctor and Doll (1929, the one with the kindly old pediatrician holding a stethoscope to a concerned little girl's dolly), or Christmas Homecoming (1948, the one with a college boy, his back to us, being received exuberantly by his extended family).
Rockwell had a knack for the direct hit, the image that would connect with the widest possible audience. The mise en scène of Saying Grace was cunningly conceived, not only in its arrangement of figures but in its telling details. It mattered that the diner was shabby, that it was raining outside, and that the rail yard visible through the window was drab and sooty, the kind endemic to a mid-level industrial city where life wasn't easy but the locals were good folk. For Americans still recuperating from the strains and privations of World War II, it was natural to react to the *Post'*s cover by thinking, I know that place.
What Is an American?
As it happens, that place looks more familiar now than it might have just a few years ago—and it looks more inviting too. In our current climate of remorseful post-affluence—in our collective pondering of the question "What were we thinking?"—Rockwell's painted vignettes draw us back to the quotidian, dialed-down pleasures of American life before it got so out of whack.
His Going and Coming (1947), a two-panel portrait of a family en route to and from a summertime trip to a lake, is a veritable primer on the lost art of unostentatious living. An ancient sedan—no doubt the only car the family owns—is loaded up with Dad, Mom, four young kids, the family dog, and dour old Grandma in the back. Lashed to the roof are a weathered rowboat (with its name, skippy, on the hull), its oars, and a tatty beach umbrella. Some folding chairs are tenuously roped to the car's side, and a fishing pole sticks out a window. No on-site rentals or impulse purchases from the nearest L. L. Bean outlet for this crew; everything, Grandma included, seems to have been pulled from a mildewy storage space. The picture's very premise suggests modest means: absent a home pool or a posh weekend place to escape to, this elaborate recreational production on wheels will have to do. And yet the story is essentially one of contentment: of a fulfilling (if frazzling) day out.
The newfound resonance of Rockwell's art has not been lost on those keen to uphold his legacy. A traveling retrospective of his career, "American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell," has been pulling in crowds at every museum it has visited—most recently, over the springtime, at the Detroit Institute of Arts, in a city especially racked with longing for better days. "American Chronicles" just spent the summer at its home base, the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which this year is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and the exhibition moves on to the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on November 14. Meanwhile, a second traveling retrospective, "Norman Rockwell: American Imagist," is making the rounds under the auspices of the National Museum of American Illustration (which is in Newport, Rhode Island), and the Smithsonian Institution is planning yet another major Rockwell exhibition, for 2010, this one built around the private collections of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
Then there is Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, a wonderful new book by Ron Schick (photos from which accompany this article) that lifts the curtain on Rockwell's working methods, revealing how profoundly labor-intensive and thoughtfully imagined they were. From the mid-1930s onward, Rockwell orchestrated elaborate photo shoots of his models in various poses and setups, resulting in images that, though they were meant only to be studies, are compelling in their own right.
Next month, in conjunction with the book's publication, the Rockwell Museum will unveil Projectnorman, a new section of its Web site (nrm.org) that will allow users to view the more than 18,000 photographs that Schick has sifted through, all newly digitized and catalogued according to their "parent" painting. Select Saying Grace, for example, and you'll be able to see that Rockwell had considered including a little girl as well as a little boy; that he himself acted out the old woman's solemn pose for his model's benefit; that he had brought Horn & Hardart Automat tables and chairs into his studio for the occasion; that one of the two young toughs eyeballing the grace sayers was played by the artist's eldest son, Jarvis; that Rockwell posed two chubby Maytag-repairman types as an alternate to the two young toughs; and that he ventured far afield from his New England studio for multiple reference photos of a dreary rail yard (in Rensselaer, New York) just to make sure he got the details at the very back of the painting right.
In his own behind-the-scenes book from 1949, How I Make a Picture—Rockwell always referred to his works as "pictures," like a movie director, rather than "illustrations" or "paintings"—he documented an exhaustive creative "system" in which photography was only the midpoint. First came brainstorming and a rough pencil sketch, then the casting of the models and the hiring of costumes and props, then the process of coaxing the right poses out of the models (Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera is rife with priceless shots of the artist pulling faces and hamming it up to demonstrate the effect he wants), then the snapping of the photo, then the composition of a fully detailed charcoal sketch, then a painted color sketch that was the exact size of the picture as it would be reproduced (for instance, the size of a Post cover), and then, and only then, the final painting.
The complexity of Rockwell's process belies the "simplicity" often ascribed to his finished products. But then, this is an artist with a history of being patronized, mischaracterized, and dismissed as "merely" an illustrator whose pictures, which were intended for mass reproduction, cannot stand on their own as paintings. The last time the Rockwell Museum mounted a big traveling retrospective, its arrival at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in late 2001—two months after 9/11—was taken as a sign of the apocalypse by a Village Voice critic named Jerry Saltz, who castigated the Guggenheim for "trashing the reputation won for it by generations of artists" by allowing ol' Norm's literalist canvases to hang on its curvy walls. Quoting Flash Art American editor Massimiliano Gioni, Saltz wrote: "For the art world to fall for this simple vision now—especially now—is … 'like confessing in public that deep down inside we are, after all, right-wing. … It's simply reactionary. It scares me.'"
Yet Rockwell was no more a man of simple vision than he was the house artist of the right wing. While his approach was calculatedly upbeat, it was never shallow or jingoistic, and his work, taken as a whole, is a remarkably thoughtful and multifaceted engagement with the question "What does it mean to be an American?" This was implicitly the case in his Post years, when he was painting soldiers and schoolgirls and old codgers playing musical instruments in the back room of a barbershop, and it became explicit in his later period at Look magazine, when he forsook the genial apoliticism of his earlier career for an embrace of J.F.K.-style New Frontiersmanship, devoting himself to pictures about the civil-rights movement, the Peace Corps, and the United Nations.
Photo prep and finished illustrations for Breakfast Table Political Argument (1948), Girl at Mirror (1954), and The Runaway (1958).
You could make the argument, in fact, that Barack Obama is the perfect bridge between these two Rockwell eras: a gangly, jug-eared solid-citizen type with a formidable wife, two adorable girls, a dog, and a live-in mother-in-law (all these things being leitmotifs in Rockwell's work, the jug ears especially) … who also happens to be the first black American president. While the Obamas are a bit too polished and urbane to take the places of the Going and Coming family in their clapped-out jalopy, it's not hard to transpose the First Family into Easter Morning (1959), in which a suburban dad, still in his pajamas, slumps sheepishly in a wing chair with a cigarette and the Sunday paper while his immaculately dressed wife and children march primly off to church.
A fresh look at Rockwell's work in the context of our times, in which we face many of the same circumstances that he painted through—war, economic hardship, cultural and racial divides—reveals a smarter and shrewder artist than a lot of us have given him credit for being. It also yields further rewards, such as an appreciation of his compositional brilliance (witness the old-codger jam session from 1950, Shuffleton's Barbershop, in which a shaft of back-room light illuminates the whole painting, 80 percent of which is taken up by the unoccupied but cluttered front room) and of his acuity as a storyteller (witness Saying Grace, whose action-packed single panel suggests at least half a dozen more plotlines beyond the central one).
It has taken a while, but the nose-holding ambivalence with which educated people have been conditioned to treat Rockwell—He's good in a corny, backward, non-art sort of way—is giving way to outright admiration. As Stephanie Plunkett, the chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum, says, "There are a lot more people who feel totally comfortable with liking Norman Rockwell." And there's nothing reactionary or scary about that at all. "I Wasn't a Country Boy"
Rockwell would have been the first to tell you that the pictures he painted were not meant to be taken as a documentary history of American life during his time on earth, and least of all as a record of his life. He was a realist in technique, but not in ethos. "The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be," he wrote in 1960, in his book My Adventures as an Illustrator. To miss this distinction, to take Rockwell's paintings absolutely literally as "America the way it was," is as misbegotten as taking the Bible absolutely literally. (And it's usually done by the same people.)
Rockwell did not himself have a remotely Rockwell-esque childhood. Though his tweedy self-presentation as an adult suggested a man raised in hardy, ascetic small-town New England with maple syrup running through his veins, he was, in actuality, a product of New York City. It's jarring to hear him speak in old TV interviews, to reconcile that chinless, David Souter–ish face with the gravelly voice that declares, "I was born on a-Hundred-and-Thoid and Amsterdam Avenue." But he was indeed a child of Manhattan's Upper West Side, born there in 1894 and raised in a series of apartments as the younger son of a downwardly mobile couple. His father, Waring, was the office manager at a textile firm, and his mother, Nancy, was an invalid and probable hypochondriac. Neither of them had much time for Norman and his older brother, Jarvis (not to be confused with the son Rockwell would later give that name), and Rockwell flatly stated later in his life that he was never close to his parents, nor could he even remember much about them.
While young Norman got up to the same high jinks as other city kids at the turn of the century—climbing telegraph poles, playing on stoops—neither at the time nor in retrospect did he find urban life idyllic. What he remembered, he said, were "the sordidness, the filth, the drunks" and an incident that forever spooked him, in which he witnessed an inebriated vagrant woman beating her male companion to a pulp in a vacant lot. His family moved for a spell to the village of Mamaroneck, in suburban Westchester County, but then returned to the city, this time to a boardinghouse, because his by then far-gone mother could no longer abide housework. The boarders with whom the adolescent Rockwell was forced to take his meals, a motley collection of frowsy malcontents and shady transients, were almost as traumatizing to him as the vacant-lot vagrants.
However, Rockwell had nothing but pleasant memories of the modest vacations his family went on in his early childhood, which were spent upstate on farms whose owners took in summer boarders to earn a little extra money. While the adult guests simply played croquet or sat on porches breathing in the country air, the children befriended their farm-boy and farm-girl cou nterparts and embarked on a whirlwind tour of bucolia's greatest hits: helping out with the milking, riding and grooming the horses, splashing in swimming holes, fishing for bullheads, and trapping turtles and frogs.
These summer escapes made a deep impression on Rockwell, blurring into "an image of sheer blissfulness" that never left his mind. He ascribed to the country a magical ability to rewire his brain and make him, temporarily at least, a better person: "In the city we kids delighted to go up on the roof of our apartment house and spit down on the passers-by in the street below. But we never did things like that in the country. The clean air, the green fields, the thousand and one things to do … got somehow into us and changed our personalities as much as the sun changed the color of our skins."
Reflecting on the lasting impact of those vacations some 50-odd years after he'd taken them, Rockwell wrote in his memoir:
I sometimes think we paint to fulfill ourselves and our lives, to supply the things we want and don't have.…
Maybe as I grew up and found that the world wasn't the perfectly pleasant place I had thought it to be I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it—pictures in which there were no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers, in which, on the contrary, there were only Foxy Grandpas who played baseball with the kids and boys [who] fished from logs and got up circuses in the back yard.…
The summers I spent in the country as a child became part of this idealized view of life. Those summers seemed blissful, sort of a happy dream. But I wasn't a country boy, I didn't really live that kind of life. Except (heads up, here comes the point of the whole digression) later on in my paintings.
Pictures Rockwell staged for Saying Grace (1951).
This is the essence of the whole Norman Rockwell ethos. From a fleeting experience of life at the closest it would ever get to perfect, he extrapolated an entire world. It was an atypical world for an artist to inhabit, since it focused on the positive to the near exclusion of the negative—an inversion of the outlook favored by the art-crit hegemony of his day, which tended to be more kindly disposed toward artists whose work depicted the turbulence and pain of the human condition. But if it was perfectly valid for the brilliant Norwegian miserablist Edvard Munch to profess, "For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety, which I have tried to express in my art"—with no penalty due for failing to look on the bright side of life—then it was no less valid for Rockwell to infuse his art with all the feelings wrought by his "happy dream."
Rising to the Top
The other saving grace of Rockwell's youth, along with his summer trips upstate, was his artistic ability. From an early age, he had impressed his friends with his knack for drawing. He also harbored deep hero worship for the great illustrators of the adventure books he read, chief among them Howard Pyle (1853–1911), whose vivid, historically faithful pictures of swashbuckling pirates and Arthurian knights had made him a nationally known figure. In those days, illustrators occupied a more exalted place in the United States than they do now, roughly analogous to today's star photographers, with perhaps a smidgen of auteur-director status thrown in. It wasn't eccentric for a young boy to dream of becoming the next Howard Pyle—indeed, Pyle ran his own school of illustration in Pennsylvania, with N. C. Wyeth among his star pupils—and Rockwell, as soon as he was old enough, abandoned high school for art school, enrolling at the Art Students League of New York.
For all his chronic self-deprecation and genuine niceness—that "sort of 'Oh gosh' flavor," as one of his Saturday Evening Post editors, Ben Hibbs, later put it—Rockwell was a determined and doggedly competitive kid who knew he was good. At the Art Students League, he quickly rose to the top of the anatomy-and-life-drawing class taught by the estimable artist and instructor George B. Bridgman, who literally wrote the book on the subject (Constructive Anatomy, still in print). Thereafter, Rockwell never really endured anything like professional struggle. By 1913, before he was out of his teens, he had landed the position of art director of Boys' Life, the Scouting magazine, in which capacity he earned $50 a month and was allowed to give himself assignments. Just three years later, when he was 22 years old, he placed his first Post cover.
The Post was at the time the leading weekly magazine in America. Its editor was George Horace Lorimer, a square-jawed avatar of traditional family values who, since taking over the publication in 1899, had transformed it from a sleepy, money-losing vestige of the 19th century into a middlebrow powerhouse, avidly read for its illustrated fiction, light features, and innocuous humor. Screwing up his courage in March of 1916, Rockwell toted some of his paintings and sketches to Penn Station and took a train down to Philadelphia, where the offices of Curtis Publishing, the *Post'*s parent company, were located. He had no appointment, but the magazine's art director, Walter Dower, agreed to look at the young artist's work, liked what he saw, and showed it to the boss. Lorimer purchased two finished paintings on the spot. One of them, Boy with Baby Carriage—depicting a youth dressed for church, grumpily pushing along an infant sibling in a pram while being razzed by two friends in baseball uniforms—was Rockwell's Post debut, published on May 20 of that year.
Up to that point, the *Post'*s leading cover artist had been J. C. Leyendecker, another of Rockwell's illustrator idols. Twenty years Rockwell's senior, Leyendecker was the Bruce Weber of his day, equally adept at sparklingly wholesome scenes of Americana and glorious, nearly deific renderings of supplely muscled Ivy League–jock types. (Whether intentionally so or not, Leyendecker's summer-cover portraits of lifeguards and rowers were stunningly subversive: unabashed homoerotica slipped right under Lorimer's—and America's—nose.) A master iconographer when Rockwell was still in short pants, Leyendecker had created the first sex symbol in print advertising, the Arrow Collar Man (modeled on his live-in companion, a Canadian hunk named Charles Beach), and had invented the popular image of Baby New Year, the bare-naked cherub whose annual appearance on the *Post'*s cover heralded the departure of one year and the arrival of the next.
Rockwell's early work for the Post, and for such other clients as Country Gentleman and Ladies' Home Journal, was conspicuously derivative of Leyendecker's—gamboling boys, girls with big ribbons in their hair, merrie Yuletide scenes out of Victorian England. Yet over time he developed a sensibility quite apart from Leyendecker's, even as the two men became friends and neighbors in the Westchester commuter town of New Rochelle, then the home of a number of illustrators and cartoonists.
Whereas Leyendecker's football players filled out their uniforms like superheroes and had manly Cary Grant side partings, the teenage subject of Rockwell's Football Hero (1938) was too skinny for his uniform, wore his hair in a mussed, utilitarian buzz cut, had two adhesive bandages on his face, and seemed flustered by the cheerleader pressing her hands against his chest as she sewed a varsity letter onto his jersey. Leyendecker's gift was for the grabby, seductive, burnished-to-a-fare-thee-well image; Rockwell's, it transpired, was for the everyday scene with narrative ballast and the common touch.
As the years progressed, the public came to appreciate the latter over the former. In their 2008 monograph on Leyendecker, Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler, the founders of the National Museum of American Illustration, suggest that Rockwell had something of a Single White Female complex about the elder artist, moving near him, befriending him, pumping him for contacts in the biz (which "the shy Leyendecker … naïvely revealed"), and "ultimately supplant[ing] his idol as the best-known cover artist for the Saturday Evening Post." Whether or not Rockwell was really so coldly mercenary, he did indeed eclipse Leyendecker. By 1942, the year the Post abandoned its hand-lettered, cover-spanning italicized logo underscored by two thick lines in favor of a plainer typeset logo shunted to the top left, Leyendecker's day was all but done, and he died in 1951 a virtually forgotten man. (Though it must be said that Rockwell was one of the five people who turned up at his funeral. The others, in Rockwell's recollection, were Leyendecker's sister, Augusta; his companion, Beach; and a cousin who came with her husband.)
The Sweet Spot
In 1939, Rockwell moved from New Rochelle to the rural township of Arlington, Vermont, eager to put a complicated chapter of his life behind him. Not long after he'd sold his first Post cover, he had impetuously married a pretty young schoolteacher named Irene O'Connor. The union lasted nearly 14 years but was loveless, if relatively uncontentious. The Rockwells lived a blithe, empty Roaring 20s existence, cocktailing on the social circuit and falling into the beds of extramarital lovers with each other's tacit approval. After he and O'Connor divorced, Rockwell visited friends in Southern California and fell for another pretty young schoolteacher, an Alhambra girl named Mary Barstow. Norman and Mary married in 1930, and by the time of the move to Arlington they had three sons—Jarvis, Tom, and Peter—and Norman found himself hankering for "sweet pastoral peace."
The Vermont years, which lasted until 1953, are the sweet spot in the Rockwell canon, the period that gave us his most richly narrative work, including Saying Grace, Going and Coming, Shuffleton's Barbershop, Christmas Homecoming, and his "Four Freedoms" series from 1943 (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear), a traveling tour of which raised more than $100 million in U.S. war bonds.
Something about Vermont set Rockwell's mind whizzing and further sharpened his observational and storytelling skills. Every last detail of Rob Shuffleton's barbershop in East Arlington animated him: "where Rob hung his combs, his rusty old clippers, the way the light fell across the magazine rack, his moth-eaten push broom leaning against the display cases of candy and ammunition, the cracked leather seat of the barber chair with the stuffing poking through along the edges over the nickel-plated frame." Bob Benedict's grubby auto-repair shop was similarly irresistible and so became the setting for Homecoming Marine (1945), in which a young mechanic, just returned from the Pacific theater, sets himself down on a crate and recounts his war experiences to a rapt audience of fellow employees, two boys, and a cop. (The Marine and the auto-shop guys were the real deal, the cop was played by the Arlington town clerk, and the boys were Jarvis and Peter.)
Rockwell's "life as I would like it to be" took firm shape as a plausible ideal—not a fantastical world like C. S. Lewis's Narnia or Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom, but a place that looked just like everyday America, only nicer. Crucial to its appeal (and instructive to us now) is how accessible and wealth-free this place was. The dogs were invariably mutts, the restaurants usually diners, the kitchens familiarly cramped, and the people decidedly unmodelish in appearance: knob-nosed, jut-jawed, jug-eared, cowlicked, excessively freckled, awkward of posture. Even if someone was bona fide attractive, he or she was never forbiddingly so.
Rockwell's best model from this period, the impishly expressive little Mary Whalen, went through the paces of girlhood as parents hoped their own daughters would: intrepid enough to spend a day swimming, biking, going to the movies, and attending a birthday party (Day in the Life of a Little Girl, 1952), rascally and tough enough to get a charge out of a shiner earned in a classroom fistfight (Girl with Black Eye, 1953), and tender enough to be conflicted about incipient puberty (the extraordinary Girl at Mirror, 1954, begun in Arlington but completed and published after Rockwell moved to Stockbridge).
From where we stand today, the appeal of these pictures transcends nostalgia or any wishful thinking that we can teleport "back" into scenes that were exhaustively posed and staged in the first place. It's the thought behind them that counts: What does it mean to be an American? What virtues are ours to uphold? What are we like in our best moments? For Rockwell, the answers to these questions lay in the idea, as he put it, "that everybody has a responsibility to everybody else." His pictures were about family, friendships, community, and society. Solo scenes were rare, and individual self-interest was anathema. To the concept of "the town," he devoted himself as zealously as a groom does to a bride: for better (the workman saying his piece at a town meeting in Freedom of Speech) and for worse (the 15 nosy Yankees through whom a scandalous rumor circulates in 1948's very funny The Gossips), but never with any doubt in the sacredness of the institution.
As we soul-search our way out of a troubled epoch, Rockwell's vignettes offer succor and food for thought. The striking thing about Christmas Homecoming, for example, is its absence of the usual advertiser-friendly trappings (gaudy decorations, stockings hung over a fireplace, gingerbread houses, new toys, snow, Santa) and the joy taken in the actual homecoming: Mother (Mary Rockwell) swallows up her son (Jarvis) in a hug while a further 16 people (including Norman, Tom, Peter, and—why not?—Grandma Moses) await their turn.
Disturbing Masterpiece
Peter Rockwell, now a sculptor who lives in Italy, is emphatic in urging Rockwell fans "never to confuse an artist with his art," especially in his father's case. But he advises a long look at Triple Self-Portrait, a high-water mark of his father's Stockbridge period, painted in late 1959 and published on the *Post'*s cover early the following year. The artist, with his back to us, leans to his left to take a gander at himself in the mirror while partway through painting his face on a large canvas (onto which are tacked small reproductions of self-portraits by Rembrandt, van Gogh, Dürer, and Picasso). While Norman the painter, as seen in the mirror, is grayed and vaguely glum of expression, with his pipe sagging downward from his lips and his eyes blanked out by the reflected glare of sunlight on his glasses, Norman the painted is chipper and lovable, with the pipe jutting upward and a glint in his (unobscured) eyes.
In Triple Self-Portrait (1959) Rockwell reveals himself to be clear-eyed about his illusions. "In some ways it's his most mature painting," says Rockwell's son Peter.
"In some ways it's his most mature painting," says Peter. "You can see what he's doing in the painting within the painting is an idealized version of himself, in stark contrast to the reality." Norman Rockwell reveals himself to be a "closet intellectual" (in his son's words) who, like the Post-Impressionist van Gogh or the Cubist-period Picasso, is fully aware that he is working on several levels—the real, the ideal, and the state of interplay between the two.
Still, it seems like just a light, playful exercise until you learn that Rockwell painted Triple Self-Portrait shortly after his wife died, unexpectedly, of heart failure, when she was just 51 years old. For all the considerable thought he put into his pictures for the American people, Rockwell was neglectful on the home front. What precipitated the family's move from Vermont to Stockbridge in 1953 was the fact that the Massachusetts town was (and remains) the home of the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric-care facility. The pressure and burden of not only being Mrs. Norman Rockwell but managing all his business affairs took its toll on Mary, sending her into a tailspin of alcoholism and depression. By moving closer to Austen Riggs, Mary could get intensive treatment, and Rockwell, too, went to a therapist.
"He was not necessarily a very good father or husband—a workaholic who never took vacations, so he never took us on vacations," says Peter Rockwell. "He was also a naïf. He couldn't think maturely enough to realize that, because of the success and size of his career, he needed to hire an accountant, a manager, and a secretary. So all that fell to my mother, and it was too much."
Rockwell was sincere in his desire to get his wife help but perplexed by the situation, emotionally ill-equipped to handle it. Mary's death was a shock—and an impetus to change his ways. So, too, was his subsequent marriage, in 1961, to Molly Punderson, a Stockbridge woman who had retired from her job teaching English and history at the Milton Academy, a boarding school outside of Boston. (A serial teacher-marrier, Rockwell clearly wanted the women in his life to have all the answers.)
This was the happiest of Rockwell's three marriages, seeing him out until his death, in 1978. Molly, of liberal and activist bent, urged her husband to take on the issues of the day, a mission supported by his new editors at Look, to which he decamped in 1963 after the Post had begun its slide into irrelevance. While Rockwell never plunged headlong into the messiness of the hippie and anti-war movements—the closest he ever got to painting a contemporarily long-haired male was his inclusion of Ringo Starr in a 1966 illustration for a McCall's short story about a lonely girl who fantasizes about celebrities—he was inspired by the civil-rights movement.
His very first illustration for Look, published in January 1964, was The Problem We All Live With, based on the real-life story of Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old girl who, in 1960, had become the first African-American child to integrate an all-white school in New Orleans. It was a radical departure from the Rockwell that America knew and loved: an uncompromisingly disturbing scene of a pigtailed little innocent in a white dress walking straight ahead, preceded and trailed by pairs of faceless federal marshals (their bodies cropped off at shoulder height to emphasize the girl's ultimate aloneness), all set against a backdrop of an institutional concrete wall defaced with a graffito of the word nigger and the gory splatter of a tomato that someone has hurled the girl's way.
For a man who in the 1930s had been too timid to challenge George Horace Lorimer's edict that black people could be depicted only in service-industry jobs (a policy that Leyendecker, incidentally, had been courageous enough to flout), this was a belated and powerful acknowledgment of a part of American life that he had long ignored. It was also his last truly great, masterful piece of narrative painting.
Rockwell's passion for the subject came through in his brushwork; the finished art packs a wallop at its full 36 by 58 inches at the Rockwell Museum, the juice streaks and viscera of the tomato suggesting the horrible fate of previous generations of African-Americans. (Projectnorman will let you look at the multiple photo studies Rockwell undertook to get this effect right.) In the years to follow, Rockwell would produce more fine work in this vein—such as New Kids in the Neighborhood (1967), which captures the pregnant pause before three white children initiate conversation with two black children whose family's belongings are in the process of being unloaded from a moving truck—but he would never scale such heights again.
Beyond the Myth
By the 1970s and 80s, Rockwell's imagery had become so ingrained in American popular culture that it was, at best, taken for granted, and, at worst, dismissed, ridiculed, and flat-out denigrated. To an extent, this couldn't be helped: it was one thing to experience Rockwell's Post covers in real time as they came out on newsstands, to really feel their impact, and quite another to be sitting impatiently in a pediatrician's office, waiting for your name to be called while staring for the umpteenth time at a sun-faded, sputum-splotched reproduction of Before the Shot (1958)—one of Rockwell's hokier efforts, in which a little boy is shown lowering his trousers and studying his doctor's framed diploma while the good doc preps an enormous syringe.
To baby-boomers who had been reared on Rockwell and then grown into frisky, cynical young adults, he was ripe for parody—not an enemy, necessarily, but a great big American square with "a style and ethos just begging to be polluted," in the words of the writer and humorist Tony Hendra, a contributor to the satirical National Lampoon from its inception, in 1970, and its co–editor in chief from 1975 to 1978. Many times in the 70s—including no fewer than eight times in 1979 alone—the Lampoon ran covers mocking the style of the man they called "Normal" Rockwell, inevitably to naughty effect (e.g., a "wholesome" baseball scene in which the male catcher is too busy ogling a female batter's pendulous breasts to notice the ball speeding toward his head).
But with time and perspective has come appreciation, both from such boomer standard-bearers as Steven Spielberg, who has expressed his admiration for Rockwell's "portraitures of America and Americans without cynicism," and such art-world figures as the curator and art historian Robert Rosenblum, a late-in-life convert who, seven years before his 2006 death, wrote, "Now that the battle for modern art has ended in a triumph that took place in another century, the twentieth, Rockwell's work may become an indispensable part of art history. The sneering, puritanical condescension with which he was once viewed by serious art lovers can be swiftly turned into pleasure."
Even an enthusiast like Rosenblum, though, felt the need to call Rockwell a "myth-maker." Likewise, Peter Rockwell is adamant that what his father painted was "a world that never existed." But don't these views sell both Norman Rockwell and the American people a little short? For one thing, as Triple Self-Portrait shows, this was a smart, crafty artist, not a softheaded gent who painted simple pictures. He may have traded in a sweetened, idealized version of American life, but, compared with the forms of heightened reality to which we've been exposed of late—"real" housewives, "fortunes" built on Ponzi schemes, "wealth" built on borrowing—his was rather more noble and credible.
More important, it's simply not true that the America of Rockwell's pictures is mythical. The visions of tolerance, fortitude, and decency in Saying Grace, The Problem We All Live With, and Marine Homecoming may not be scenes of the everyday, but nor are they the stuff of fantasy, no more so than Rockwell's blissful and formative childhood summers were. What these scenes show us are Americans at their best—the better versions of our usual selves that, while only ever fleetingly realized, are nonetheless real.
David Kamp is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.


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Did ACOG (finally!) Take Their Meds?
If you haven't already heard the screaming in the streets, let me be one of the first (thousand!) to let you know that this afternoon, the American Congress of Obstetricians & Gynecologists released guidelines that aim to lower the repeat cesarean rate as well as saying that women having a VBAC after 2 cesareans or who are carrying twins or women with an undocumented previous incision ALL should be permitted/encouraged to TOLAC (trial of labor after cesarean).
"In keeping with past recommendations, most women with one previous cesarean delivery with a low-transverse incision are candidates for and should be counseled about VBAC and offered a TOLAC. In addition, 'The College [sic] guidelines now clearly say that women with two previous low-transverse cesarean incisions, women carrying twins, and women with an unknown type of uterine scar are considered appropriate candidates for a TOLAC,' said Jeffrey L. Ecker, MD, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and immediate past vice chair of the Committee on Practice Bulletins-Obstetrics who co-wrote the document with William A. Grobman, MD, from Northwestern University in Chicago. " (emphasis mine)
Am I dreaming?! Could ACOG have actually said something that aligns itself with facts? Beyond stunning.
Also, "Approximately 60-80% of appropriate candidates who attempt VBAC will be successful. (!!!!!!!!!) A VBAC avoids major abdominal surgery, lowers a woman's risk of hemorrhage and infection, and shortens postpartum recovery. It may also help women avoid the possible future risks of having multiple cesareans such as hysterectomy, bowel and bladder injury, transfusion, infection, and abnormal placenta conditions (placenta previa and placenta accreta)."
When the old guidelines were put into place in 2004, a monumental shift occurred that forced hundreds of thousands of women to endure, by force even, a repeat cesarean. The two criteria quoted here, whipped the insurance and hospital admin industry into an apoplectic frenzy.
"…a physician (must be) immediately available throughout active labor who is capable of monitoring labor and performing an emergency cesarean delivery; and the availability of anesthesia and personnel for emergency cesarean delivery."
Because of these few words, an entire mindshift occurred regarding VBACs and the last six years have been HELL for far too many women.
In March 2010, the National Institutes of Health had a symposium to explore the VBAC "problem" and to try and find solutions. For two-and-a-half days, expert after expert, from OBs to mothers, shared data… scientific data… proving the appropriateness of offering VBAC. I wrote a post, What I Learned Watching the NIH Conference, if you're interested in reading another perspective of the symposium. I know I am not alone in thinking the words of that conference were inside soap bubbles and would drift away and pop over the ocean somewhere, drowning out any of the positive ideas that were presented.
But, apparently, somebody was listening!
ACOG says, "Women and their physicians may still make a plan for a TOLAC in situations where there may not be 'immediately available' staff to handle emergencies, but it requires a thorough discussion of the local health care system, the available resources, and the potential for incremental risk. 'It is absolutely critical that a woman and her physician discuss VBAC early in the prenatal care period so that logistical plans can be made well in advance,' said Dr. Grobman. And those hospitals that lack 'immediately available' staff should develop a clear process for gathering them quickly and all hospitals should have a plan in place for managing emergency uterine ruptures, however rarely they may occur, Dr. Grobman added."
One of the most heinous aspects of the VBAC Wars has been when women have been forced, by law and/or physical force to have a repeat cesarean. Women have been cut open even as they screamed "I refuse consent!" One of my own clients had a baby at +2 station, shoved back up so she "could" have a cesarean. I tell the story in "Forced Cesarean." I still get sick to my stomach remembering the experience; nothing like what the mom feels, I'm sure. Addressing this issue, ACOG says:
"The College says that restrictive VBAC policies should not be used to force women to undergo a repeat cesarean delivery against their will if, for example, a woman in labor presents for care and declines a repeat cesarean delivery at a center that does not support TOLAC. On the other hand, if, during prenatal care, a physician is uncomfortable with a patient's desire to undergo VBAC, it is appropriate to refer her to another physician or center."
Or a MIDWIFE. I'll take her.
Even as the print was barely dry, commentaries around the Net had begun. The International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN) says:
"However, more than a revision of the VBAC Practice Bulletin is required to reverse the over a decade long trend of increasing cesarean rates and decreasing VBAC rates. ICAN challenges ACOG to take an active role in educating both women and practitioners about healthy childbirth practices; practices that not only encourage VBAC but discourage the overuse of primary cesareans."
The LA Times says:
"The National Institutes of Health report combined with ACOG's new guidelines have the potential to usher in a new era of childbirth in the United States, returning it to a more natural, less-invasive event. Women's health experts nationwide have long agreed that one-third of all births by surgery is unnecessarily high. But, no matter what the medical evidence says, whether the attitudes of doctors and women will change to favor a less-invasive and medicalized — as well as slower and less convenient — approach to childbirth remains to be seen."
I know many more commentaries will be born in the next couple of days.
I am absolutely shocked to read the new guidelines. I know many women don't believe one word ACOG says, but I can't help but pray/dream that this statement might actually cause a seismic shift in maternity care.
I'm crossing my fingers, but not holding my breath.