Title	Europe
Area
Population	731,000,000 (2009, 3rd)
Density	70/km2 (181/sq mi)
Demonym	European
Countries	50
List countries	List of sovereign states and dependent territories in Europe|List of European countries
Languages	List of languages
Time	UTC to UTC+6
Internet	.eu (European Union)
Cities	List of metropolitan areas in Europe }}

Europe ( or ) is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting the Black and Aegean Seas. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean and other bodies of water to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Black Sea and connected waterways to the southeast. Yet the borders of Europe—a concept dating back to classical antiquity—are somewhat arbitrary, as the primarily physiographic term "continent" can incorporate cultural and political elements.

Europe is the world's second-smallest continent by surface area, covering about or 2% of the Earth's surface and about 6.8% of its land area. Of Europe's approximately 50 states, Russia is the largest by both area and population (although the country has territory in both Europe and Asia), while the Vatican City is the smallest. Europe is the third-most populous continent after Asia and Africa, with a population of 733 million or about 11% of the world's population.

Europe, in particular Ancient Greece, is the birthplace of Western culture. It played a predominant role in global affairs from the 16th century onwards, especially after the beginning of colonialism. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European nations controlled at various times the Americas, most of Africa, Oceania, and large portions of Asia. Both World Wars were largely focused upon Europe, greatly contributing to a decline in Western European dominance in world affairs by the mid-20th century as the United States and Soviet Union took prominence. During the Cold War, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain between NATO in the west and the Warsaw Pact in the east. European integration led to the formation of the Council of Europe and the European Union in Western Europe, both of which have been expanding eastward since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Definition

The use of the term "Europe" has developed gradually throughout history. In antiquity, the Greek historian Herodotus mentioned that the world had been divided by unknown persons into the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Libya (Africa), with the Nile and the River Phasis forming their boundaries—though he also states that some considered the River Don, rather than the Phasis, as the boundary between Europe and Asia. Europe's eastern frontier was defined in the 1st century by geographer Strabo at the River Don Flavius and the ''Book of Jubilees'' described the continents as the lands given by Noah to his three sons; Europe was defined as stretching from the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar, separating it from Africa, to the Don, separating it from Asia.

A cultural definition of Europe as the lands of Latin Christendom coalesced in the 8th century, signifying the new cultural condominium created through the confluence of Germanic traditions and Christian-Latin culture, defined partly in contrast with Byzantium and Islam, and limited to northern Iberia, the British Isles, France, Christianized western Germany, the Alpine regions and northern and central Italy. The concept is one of the lasting legacies of the Carolingian Renaissance: "Europa" often figures in the letters of Charlemagne's cultural minister, Alcuin. This division—as much cultural as geographical—was used until the Late Middle Ages, when it was challenged by the Age of Discovery. The problem of redefining Europe was finally resolved in 1730 when, instead of waterways, the Swedish geographer and cartographer von Strahlenberg proposed the Ural Mountains as the most significant eastern boundary, a suggestion that found favour in Russia and throughout Europe.

Europe is now generally defined by geographers as the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, with its boundaries marked by large bodies of water to the north, west and south; Europe's limits to the far east are usually taken to be the Urals, the Ural River, and the Caspian Sea; to the south-east, the Caucasus Mountains, the Black Sea and the waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Because of sociopolitical and cultural differences, there are various descriptions of Europe's boundary. For example, Cyprus is approximate to Anatolia (or Asia Minor), but is often considered part of Europe and currently is a member state of the EU. In addition, Malta was considered an island of Africa for centuries, while Iceland, though nearer to Greenland (North America), is also generally included in Europe.

Sometimes, the word 'Europe' is used in a geopolitically limiting way to refer only to the European Union or, even more exclusively, a culturally defined core. On the other hand, the Council of Europe has 47 member countries, and only 27 member states are in the EU. In addition, people living in insular areas such as Ireland, the United Kingdom, the North Atlantic and Mediterranean islands and also in Scandinavia may routinely refer to "continental" or "mainland" Europe simply as Europe or "the Continent".

Key: blue: states which straddle the border between Europe and Asia; green: states not geographically in Europe, but closely associated politically

Etymology

In ancient Greek mythology, Europa was a Phoenician princess whom Zeus abducted after assuming the form of a dazzling white bull. He took her to the island of Crete where she gave birth to Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon. For Homer, Europe (Greek: , ''''; see also List of Greek place names) was a mythological queen of Crete, not a geographical designation. Later, ''Europa'' stood for central-north Greece, and by 500 BC its meaning had been extended to the lands to the north.

The name of ''Europa'' is of uncertain etymology. One theory suggests that it is derived from the Greek roots meaning broad (εὐρ(υ)- ''eur(u)-'') and eye (ὤψ/ὠπ-/ὀπτ- ''ōps''/''ōp''-/''op(t)-''), hence '''', "wide-gazing", "broad of aspect" (compare with ''glaukōpis'' (γλαυκῶπις 'grey-eyed') Athena or ''boōpis'' (βοὠπις 'ox-eyed') Hera). ''Broad'' has been an epithet of Earth itself in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion. Another theory suggests that it is actually based on a Semitic word such as the Akkadian ''erebu'' meaning "to go down, set" (cf. Occident), cognate to Phoenician '' 'ereb'' "evening; west" and Arabic Maghreb, Hebrew ''ma'ariv'' (see also ''Erebus'', PIE ''*h₁regʷos'', "darkness"). However, M. L. West states that "phonologically, the match between Europa's name and any form of the Semitic word is very poor".

Most major world languages use words derived from "Europa" to refer to the "continent" (peninsula). Chinese, for example, uses the word '''' (歐洲), which is an abbreviation of the transliterated name '''' (歐羅巴洲); this term is also used by the European Union in Japanese-language diplomatic relations, despite the katakana '''' being more commonly used. However, in some Turkic languages the originally Persian name ''Frangistan'' (land of the Franks) is used casually in referring to much of Europe, besides official names such as ''Avrupa'' or ''Evropa''.

History

Prehistory

''Homo georgicus'', which lived roughly 1.8 million years ago in Georgia, is the earliest hominid to have been discovered in Europe. Other hominid remains, dating back roughly 1 million years, have been discovered in Atapuerca, Spain. Neanderthal man (named for the Neandertal valley in Germany) appeared in Europe 150,000 years ago and disappeared from the fossil record about 28,000 BCE, with this extinction probably due to climate change, and their final refuge being present-day Portugal. The Neanderthals were supplanted by modern humans (Cro-Magnons), who appeared in Europe around 43 to 40 thousand years ago.

The European Neolithic period—marked by the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock, increased numbers of settlements and the widespread use of pottery—began around 7000 BC in Greece and the Balkans, probably influenced by earlier farming practices in Anatolia and the Near East. It spread from South Eastern Europe along the valleys of the Danube and the Rhine (Linear Pottery culture) and along the Mediterranean coast (Cardial culture). Between 4500 and 3000 BC, these central European neolithic cultures developed further to the west and the north, transmitting newly acquired skills in producing copper artefacts. In Western Europe the Neolithic period was characterized not by large agricultural settlements but by field monuments, such as causewayed enclosures, burial mounds and megalithic tombs. The Corded Ware cultural horizon flourished at the transition from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic. During this period giant megalithic monuments, such as the Megalithic Temples of Malta and Stonehenge, were constructed throughout Western and Southern Europe. The European Bronze Age began in the late 3rd millennium BC with the Beaker culture.

The European Iron Age began around 800 BC, with the Hallstatt culture. Iron Age colonisation by the Phoenicians gave rise to early Mediterranean cities. Early Iron Age Italy and Greece from around the 8th century BC gradually gave rise to historical Classical antiquity.

Classical antiquity

Ancient Greece had a profound impact on Western civilisation. Western democratic and individualistic culture are often attributed to Ancient Greece. The Greeks invented the polis, or city-state, which played a fundamental role in their concept of identity. These Greek political ideals were rediscovered in the late 18th century by European philosophers and idealists. Greece also generated many cultural contributions: in philosophy, humanism and rationalism under Aristotle, Socrates and Plato; in history with Herodotus and Thucydides; in dramatic and narrative verse, starting with the epic poems of Homer; and in science with Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes. Another major influence on Europe came from the Roman Empire which left its mark on law, language, engineering, architecture, and government. During the ''pax romana'', the Roman Empire expanded to encompass the entire Mediterranean Basin and much of Europe.

Stoicism influenced Roman emperors such as Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, who all spent time on the Empire's northern border fighting Germanic, Pictish and Scottish tribes. Christianity was eventually legitimised by Constantine I after three centuries of imperial persecution.

Early Middle Ages

During the decline of the Roman Empire, Europe entered a long period of change arising from what historians call the "Age of Migrations". There were numerous invasions and migrations amongst the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Goths, Vandals, Huns, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Slavs, Avars, Bulgars and, later still, the Vikings and Magyars. Renaissance thinkers such as Petrarch would later refer to this as the "Dark Ages". Isolated monastic communities were the only places to safeguard and compile written knowledge accumulated previously; apart from this very few written records survive and much literature, philosophy, mathematics, and other thinking from the classical period disappeared from Europe.

During the Dark Ages, the Western Roman Empire fell under the control of various tribes. The Germanic and Slav tribes established their domains over Western and Eastern Europe respectively. Eventually the Frankish tribes were united under Clovis I. Charlemagne, a Frankish king of the Carolingian dynasty who had conquered most of Western Europe, was anointed "Holy Roman Emperor" by the Pope in 800. This led to the founding of the Holy Roman Empire, which eventually became centred in the German principalities of central Europe.

The predominantly Greek speaking Eastern Roman Empire became known in the west as the Byzantine Empire. Its capital was Constantinople. Emperor Justinian I presided over Constantinople's first golden age: he established a legal code, funded the construction of the Hagia Sophia and brought the Christian church under state control. Fatally weakened by the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, the Byzantines fell in 1453 when they were conquered by the Ottoman Empire.

Middle Ages

The economic growth of Europe around the year 1000, together with the lack of safety on the mainland trading routes, made possible the development of major commercial routes along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. In this context, the growing independence acquired by some coastal cities gave the Maritime Republics a leading role in the European scene.

The Middle Ages on the mainland were dominated by the two upper echelons of the social structure: the nobility and the clergy. Feudalism developed in France in the Early Middle Ages and soon spread throughout Europe. A struggle for influence between the nobility and the monarchy in England led to the writing of the Magna Carta and the establishment of a parliament. The primary source of culture in this period came from the Roman Catholic Church. Through monasteries and cathedral schools, the Church was responsible for education in much of Europe.

The Papacy reached the height of its power during the High Middle Ages. A East-West Schism in 1054 split the former Roman Empire religiously, with the Eastern Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire and the Roman Catholic Church in the former Western Roman Empire. In 1095 Pope Urban II called for a crusade against Muslims occupying Jerusalem and the Holy Land. In Europe itself, the Church organised the Inquisition against heretics. In Spain, the Reconquista concluded with the fall of Granada in 1492, ending over seven centuries of Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula. In the 11th and 12th centuries, constant incursions by nomadic Turkic tribes, such as the Pechenegs and the Kipchaks, caused a massive migration of Slavic populations to the safer, heavily forested regions of the north. Like many other parts of Eurasia, these territories were overrun by the Mongols. The invaders, later known as Tatars, formed the state of the Golden Horde, which ruled the southern and central expanses of Russia for over three centuries.

The Great Famine of 1315–1317 was the first crisis that would strike Europe in the late Middle Ages. The period between 1348 and 1420 witnessed the heaviest loss. The population of France was reduced by half. Medieval Britain was afflicted by 95 famines, and France suffered the effects of 75 or more in the same period. Europe was devastated in the mid-14th century by the Black Death, one of the most deadly pandemics in human history which killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe alone—a third of the European population at the time.

The plague had a devastating effect on Europe's social structure; it induced people to live for the moment as illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio in ''The Decameron'' (1353). It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church and led to increased persecution of Jews, foreigners, beggars and lepers. The plague is thought to have returned every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until the 18th century. During this period, more than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe.

Early modern period

The Renaissance was a period of cultural change originating in Florence and later spreading to the rest of Europe. in the 14th century. The rise of a new humanism was accompanied by the recovery of forgotten classical Greek and Arabic knowledge from monastic libraries, often re-translanted from Arabic into Latin. The Renaissance spread across Europe between the 14th and 16th centuries: it saw the flowering of art, philosophy, music, and the sciences, under the joint patronage of royalty, the nobility, the Roman Catholic Church, and an emerging merchant class. Patrons in Italy, including the Medici family of Florentine bankers and the Popes in Rome, funded prolific quattrocento and cinquecento artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Political intrigue within the Church in the mid-14th century caused the Great Schism. During this forty-year period, two popes—one in Avignon and one in Rome—claimed rulership over the Church. Although the schism was eventually healed in 1417, the papacy's spiritual authority had suffered greatly.

The Church's power was further weakened by the Protestant Reformation (1517–1648), initially sparked by the works of German theologian Martin Luther, a result of the lack of reform within the Church. The Reformation also damaged the Holy Roman Empire's power, as German princes became divided between Protestant and Roman Catholic faiths. This eventually led to the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), which crippled the Holy Roman Empire and devastated much of Germany, killing between 25 and 40 percent of its population. In the aftermath of the Peace of Westphalia, France rose to predominance within Europe. The 17th century in southern and eastern Europe was a period of general decline. Eastern Europe experienced more than 150 famines in a 200-year period between 1501 to 1700.

The Renaissance and the New Monarchs marked the start of an Age of Discovery, a period of exploration, invention, and scientific development. According to Peter Barrett, "It is widely accepted that 'modern science' arose in the Europe of the 17th century (towards the end of the Renaissance), introducing a new understanding of the natural world." In the 15th century, Portugal and Spain, two of the greatest naval powers of the time, took the lead in exploring the world. Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492, and soon after the Spanish and Portuguese began establishing colonial empires in the Americas. France, the Netherlands and England soon followed in building large colonial empires with vast holdings in Africa, the Americas, and Asia.

18th and 19th centuries

The Age of Enlightenment was a powerful intellectual movement during the 18th century promoting scientific and reason-based thoughts. Discontent with the aristocracy and clergy's monopoly on political power in France resulted in the French Revolution and the establishment of the First Republic as a result of which the monarchy and many of the nobility perished during the initial reign of terror. Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power in the aftermath of the French Revolution and established the First French Empire that, during the Napoleonic Wars, grew to encompass large parts of Europe before collapsing in 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo.

Napoleonic rule resulted in the further dissemination of the ideals of the French Revolution, including that of the nation-state, as well as the widespread adoption of the French models of administration, law, and education. The Congress of Vienna, convened after Napoleon's downfall, established a new balance of power in Europe centred on the five "Great Powers": the United Kingdom, France, Prussia, Habsburg Austria, and Russia.

This balance would remain in place until the Revolutions of 1848, during which liberal uprisings affected all of Europe except for Russia and the United Kingdom. These revolutions were eventually put down by conservative elements and few reforms resulted. In 1867, the Austro-Hungarian empire was formed; and 1871 saw the unifications of both Italy and Germany as nation-states from smaller principalities. Likewise, in 1878 the Congress of Berlin has conveyed formal recognition to the ''de facto'' independent principalities of Montenegro, Serbia and Romania.

The Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain in the last part of the 18th century and spread throughout Europe. The invention and implementation of new technologies resulted in rapid urban growth, mass employment, and the rise of a new working class. Reforms in social and economic spheres followed, including the first laws on child labour, the legalisation of trade unions, and the abolition of slavery. In Britain, the Public Health Act 1875 was passed, which significantly improved living conditions in many British cities. Europe’s population population increased from about 100 million in 1700 to 400 million by 1900. In the 19th century, 70 million people left Europe in migrations to various European colonies abroad and to the United States.

20th century to present

Two World Wars and an economic depression dominated the first half of the 20th century. World War I was fought between 1914 and 1918. It started when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip. Most European nations were drawn into the war, which was fought between the Entente Powers (France, Belgium, Serbia, Portugal, Russia, the United Kingdom, and later Italy, Greece, Romania, and the United States) and the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire). The War left more than 16 million civilians and military dead. Over 60 million European soldiers were mobilised from 1914–1918. Partly as a result of its defeat Russia was plunged into the Russian Revolution, which threw down the Tsarist monarchy and replaced it with the communist Soviet Union. Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire collapsed and broke up into separate nations, and many other nations had their borders redrawn. The Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I in 1919, was harsh towards Germany, upon whom it placed full responsibility for the war and imposed heavy sanctions.

Economic instability, caused in part by debts incurred in the First World War and 'loans' to Germany played havoc in Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s. This and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 brought about the worldwide Great Depression. Helped by the economic crisis, social instability and the threat of communism, fascist movements developed throughout Europe placing Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany, Francisco Franco of Spain and Benito Mussolini of Italy in power.

Up to eight million people may have died in the Soviet famine of 1932–33. Stalin's Great Terror began in December 1934. By the time the purges subsided in 1938, millions of Soviet citizens had been executed, imprisoned, or exiled. In 1933, Hitler became the leader of Germany and began to work towards his goal of building Greater Germany. Germany re-expanded and took back the Saarland and Rhineland in 1935 and 1936. In 1938, Austria became a part of Germany too, following the Anschluss. Later that year, following the Munich Agreement, Germany annexed the Sudetenland, which was a part of Czechoslovakia inhabited by ethnic Germans. At the time, Britain and France preferred a policy of appeasement.

Shortly afterwards, Poland and Hungary started to press for the annexation of parts of Czechoslovakia with Polish and Hungarian majorities. Hitler encouraged the Slovaks to do the same and in early 1939, the remainder of Czechoslovakia was split into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, controlled by Germany, and the Slovak Republic, while other smaller regions went to Poland and Hungary. With tensions mounting between Germany and Poland over the future of Danzig, the Germans turned to the Soviets, and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, prompting France and the United Kingdom to declare war on Germany on 3 September, opening the European theatre of World War II. The Soviet invasion of Poland started on 17 September and Poland fell soon thereafter.

On 24 September, the Soviet Union attacked the Baltic countries and later, Finland. The British hoped to land at Narvik and send troops to aid Finland, but their primary objective in the landing was to encircle Germany and cut the Germans off from Scandinavian resources. Nevertheless, the Germans knew of Britain's plans and got to Narvik first, repulsing the attack. Around the same time, Germany moved troops into Denmark, which left no room for a front except for where the last war had been fought or by landing at sea. The Phoney War continued.

In May 1940, Germany attacked France through the Low Countries. France capitulated in June 1940. However, the British refused to negotiate peace terms with the Germans and the war continued. By August Germany began a bombing offensive on Britain, but failed to convince the Britons to give up. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the ultimately unsuccessful Operation Barbarossa. On 7 December 1941 Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into the conflict as allies of the British Empire and other allied forces. After the staggering Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, the German offensive in the Soviet Union turned into a continual fallback. In 1944, British and American forces invaded France in the D-Day landings, opening a new front against Germany. Berlin finally fell in 1945, ending World War II in Europe. The war was the largest and most destructive in human history, with 60 million dead across the world. More than 40 million people in Europe had died as a result of the war by the time World War II ended, including between 11 and 17 million people who perished during the Holocaust. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, about half of all World War II casualties. By the end of World War II, Europe had more than 40 million refugees. Several post-war expulsions in Central and Eastern Europe displaced a total of about 20 million people.

World War I and especially World War II diminished the eminence of Western Europe in world affairs. After World War II the map of Europe was redrawn at the Yalta Conference and divided into two blocs, the Western countries and the communist Eastern bloc, separated by what was later called by Winston Churchill an "iron curtain". The United States and Western Europe established the NATO alliance and later the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe established the Warsaw Pact.

The two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, became locked in a fifty-year long Cold War, centred on nuclear proliferation. At the same time decolonisation, which had already started after World War I, gradually resulted in the independence of most of the European colonies in Asia and Africa. In the 1980s the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Solidarity movement in Poland accelerated the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the end of the Cold War. Germany was reunited, after the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the maps of Eastern Europe were redrawn once more.

European integration also grew after World War II. The Treaty of Rome in 1957 established the European Economic Community between six Western European states with the goal of a unified economic policy and common market. In 1967 the EEC, European Coal and Steel Community and Euratom formed the European Community, which in 1993 became the European Union. The EU established a parliament, court and central bank and introduced the euro as a unified currency. In 2004 and 2007, Eastern European countries began joining, expanding the EU to its current size of 27 European countries, and once more making Europe a major economical and political centre of power.

Geography

Europe makes up the western fifth of the Eurasian landmass. Land relief in Europe shows great variation within relatively small areas. The southern regions are more mountainous, while moving north the terrain descends from the high Alps, Pyrenees, and Carpathians, through hilly uplands, into broad, low northern plains, which are vast in the east. This extended lowland is known as the Great European Plain, and at its heart lies the North German Plain. An arc of uplands also exists along the north-western seaboard, which begins in the western parts of the islands of Britain and Ireland, and then continues along the mountainous, fjord-cut, spine of Norway.

This description is simplified. Sub-regions such as the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian Peninsula contain their own complex features, as does mainland Central Europe itself, where the relief contains many plateaus, river valleys and basins that complicate the general trend. Sub-regions like Iceland, Britain, and Ireland are special cases. The former is a land unto itself in the northern ocean which is counted as part of Europe, while the latter are upland areas that were once joined to the mainland until rising sea levels cut them off.

Climate

[[File:Vegetation Europe.png|frame|Biomes of Europe and surrounding regions: ]]

Europe lies mainly in the temperate climate zones, being subjected to prevailing westerlies.

The climate is milder in comparison to other areas of the same latitude around the globe due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is nicknamed "Europe's central heating", because it makes Europe's climate warmer and wetter than it would otherwise be. The Gulf Stream not only carries warm water to Europe's coast but also warms up the prevailing westerly winds that blow across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean.

Therefore the average temperature throughout the year of Naples is 16 °C (60.8 °F), while it is only 12 °C (53.6 °F) in New York City which is almost on the same latitude. Berlin, Germany; Calgary, Canada; and Irkutsk, in the Asian part of Russia, lie on around the same latitude; January temperatures in Berlin average around 8 °C (15 °F) higher than those in Calgary, and they are almost 22 °C (40 °F) higher than average temperatures in Irkutsk.

Geology

The Geology of Europe is hugely varied and complex, and gives rise to the wide variety of landscapes found across the continent, from the Scottish Highlands to the rolling plains of Hungary.

Europe's most significant feature is the dichotomy between highland and mountainous Southern Europe and a vast, partially underwater, northern plain ranging from Ireland in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. These two halves are separated by the mountain chains of the Pyrenees and Alps/Carpathians. The northern plains are delimited in the west by the Scandinavian Mountains and the mountainous parts of the British Isles. Major shallow water bodies submerging parts of the northern plains are the Celtic Sea, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea complex and Barents Sea.

The northern plain contains the old geological continent of Baltica, and so may be regarded geologically as the "main continent", while peripheral highlands and mountainous regions in the south and west constitute fragments from various other geological continents. Most of the older geology of Western Europe existed as part of the ancient microcontinent Avalonia.

Geological history

The geological history of Europe traces back to the formation of the Baltic Shield (Fennoscandia) and the Sarmatian craton, both around 2.25 billion years ago, followed by the Volgo-Uralia shield, the three together leading to the East European craton (≈ Baltica) which became a part of the supercontinent Columbia. Around 1.1 billion years ago, Baltica and Arctica (as part of the Laurentia block) became joined to Rodinia, later resplitting around 550 million years ago to reform as Baltica. Around 440 million years ago Euramerica was formed from Baltica and Laurentia; a further joining with Gondwana then leading to the formation of Pangea. Around 190 million years ago, Gondwana and Laurasia split apart due to the widening of the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, and very soon afterwards, Laurasia itself split up again, into Laurentia (North America) and the Eurasian continent. The land connection between the two persisted for a considerable time, via Greenland, leading to interchange of animal species. From around 50 million years ago, rising and falling sea levels have determined the actual shape of Europe, and its connections with continents such as Asia. Europe's present shape dates to the late Tertiary period about five million years ago.

Biodiversity

Having lived side-by-side with agricultural peoples for millennia, Europe's animals and plants have been profoundly affected by the presence and activities of man. With the exception of Fennoscandia and northern Russia, few areas of untouched wilderness are currently found in Europe, except for various national parks.

The main natural vegetation cover in Europe is mixed forest. The conditions for growth are very favourable. In the north, the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift warm the continent. Southern Europe could be described as having a warm, but mild climate. There are frequent summer droughts in this region. Mountain ridges also affect the conditions. Some of these (Alps, Pyrenees) are oriented east-west and allow the wind to carry large masses of water from the ocean in the interior. Others are oriented south-north (Scandinavian Mountains, Dinarides, Carpathians, Apennines) and because the rain falls primarily on the side of mountains that is oriented towards the sea, forests grow well on this side, while on the other side, the conditions are much less favourable. Few corners of mainland Europe have not been grazed by livestock at some point in time, and the cutting down of the pre-agricultural forest habitat caused disruption to the original plant and animal ecosystems.

Probably 80 to 90 per cent of Europe was once covered by forest. It stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arctic Ocean. Though over half of Europe's original forests disappeared through the centuries of deforestation, Europe still has over one quarter of its land area as forest, such as the taiga of Scandinavia and Russia, mixed rainforests of the Caucasus and the Cork oak forests in the western Mediterranean. During recent times, deforestation has been slowed and many trees have been planted. However, in many cases monoculture plantations of conifers have replaced the original mixed natural forest, because these grow quicker. The plantations now cover vast areas of land, but offer poorer habitats for many European forest dwelling species which require a mixture of tree species and diverse forest structure. The amount of natural forest in Western Europe is just 2–3% or less, in European Russia 5–10%. The country with the smallest percentage of forested area is Iceland (1%), while the most forested country is Finland (77%).

In temperate Europe, mixed forest with both broadleaf and coniferous trees dominate. The most important species in central and western Europe are beech and oak. In the north, the taiga is a mixed spruce–pine–birch forest; further north within Russia and extreme northern Scandinavia, the taiga gives way to tundra as the Arctic is approached. In the Mediterranean, many olive trees have been planted, which are very well adapted to its arid climate; Mediterranean Cypress is also widely planted in southern Europe. The semi-arid Mediterranean region hosts much scrub forest. A narrow east-west tongue of Eurasian grassland (the steppe) extends eastwards from Ukraine and southern Russia and ends in Hungary and traverses into taiga to the north.

Glaciation during the most recent ice age and the presence of man affected the distribution of European fauna. As for the animals, in many parts of Europe most large animals and top predator species have been hunted to extinction. The woolly mammoth was extinct before the end of the Neolithic period. Today wolves (carnivores) and bears (omnivores) are endangered. Once they were found in most parts of Europe. However, deforestation and hunting caused these animals to withdraw further and further. By the Middle Ages the bears' habitats were limited to more or less inaccessible mountains with sufficient forest cover. Today, the brown bear lives primarily in the Balkan peninsula, Scandinavia, and Russia; a small number also persist in other countries across Europe (Austria, Pyrenees etc.), but in these areas brown bear populations are fragmented and marginalised because of the destruction of their habitat. In addition, polar bears may be found on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago far north of Scandinavia. The wolf, the second largest predator in Europe after the brown bear, can be found primarily in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans, with a handful of packs in pockets of Western Europe (Scandinavia, Spain, etc.).

European wild cat, foxes (especially the red fox), jackal and different species of martens, hedgehogs, different species of reptiles (like snakes such as vipers and grass snakes) and amphibians, different birds (owls, hawks and other birds of prey).

Important European herbivores are snails, larvae, fish, different birds, and mammals, like rodents, deer and roe deer, boars, and living in the mountains, marmots, steinbocks, chamois among others.

The extinction of the dwarf hippos and dwarf elephants has been linked to the earliest arrival of humans on the islands of the Mediterranean.

Sea creatures are also an important part of European flora and fauna. The sea flora is mainly phytoplankton. Important animals that live in European seas are zooplankton, molluscs, echinoderms, different crustaceans, squids and octopuses, fish, dolphins, and whales.

Biodiversity is protected in Europe through the Council of Europe's Bern Convention, which has also been signed by the European Community as well as non-European states.

Political geography

The list below includes all entities falling even partially under any of the various common definitions of Europe, geographic or political. The data displayed are per sources in cross-referenced articles. The 27 European Union member states are highly integrated, economically and politically; the European Union itself forms part of the political geography of Europe.

! Name of country, with flag	List of countries by area>Area(km²)	List of countries by population>Population	List of countries by population density>Population density(per km²)	Capital (political)>Capital
				Tirana
				Andorra la Vella
				Yerevan
				Vienna
				Baku
				Minsk
				Brussels
				Sarajevo
				Sofia
				Zagreb
				Nicosia
				Prague
				Copenhagen
				Tallinn
				Helsinki
				Paris
				Tbilisi
				Berlin
				Athens
				Budapest
				Reykjavík
				Dublin
				Rome
				Astana
				Riga
				Vaduz
				Vilnius
				Skopje
				Valletta
				Chişinău
				Monaco
				Podgorica
				Amsterdam
				Oslo
				Warsaw
				Lisbon
				Bucharest
				Moscow
				Belgrade
				Bratislava
				Ljubljana
				Madrid
				Stockholm
				Bern
				Ankara
				Kiev
				London
				Vatican City
Total

Within the above-mentioned states are several de facto independent countries with limited to no international recognition. None of them are members of the UN:

! Name of territory, with flag	List of countries by area>Area(km²)	List of countries by population>Population(1 July 2002 est.)	List of countries by population density>Population density(per km²)	Capital (political)>Capital
				Sukhumi
				Pristina
				Stepanakert
				Nicosia
				Tskhinvali
				Tiraspol

Several dependencies and similar territories with broad autonomy are also found in Europe:

! Name of territory, with flag	List of countries by area>Area(km²)	List of countries by population>Population(1 July 2002 est.)	List of countries by population density>Population density(per km²)	Capital (political)>Capital
(Finland)				Mariehamn
(Denmark)				Tórshavn
(Bosnia)				Banja Luka
(UK)				Gibraltar
(UK)				St. Peter Port
(UK)
(UK)				Saint Helier
				Longyearbyen

Integration

European integration is the process of political, legal, economic (and in some cases social and cultural) integration of states wholly or partially in Europe. In the present day, European integration has primarily come about through the Council of Europe and European Union in Western and Central Europe and Commonwealth of Independent States in Eastern Europe and most of former Soviet countries.

Economy

As a continent, the economy of Europe is currently the largest on Earth and it is the richest region as measured by assets under management with over $32.7 trillion compared to North America's $27.1 trillion in 2008. In 2009 Europe remained the wealthiest region. Its $37.1 trillion in assets under management represented one-third of the world’s wealth. It was one of several regions where wealth surpassed its precrisis year-end peak. As with other continents, Europe has a large variation of wealth among its countries. The richer states tend to be in the West; some of the Eastern economies are still emerging from the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The European Union, an intergovernmental body composed of 27 European states, comprises the largest single economic area in the world. Currently, 16 EU countries share the euro as a common currency. Five European countries rank in the top ten of the worlds largest national economies in GDP (PPP). This includes (ranks according to the CIA): Germany (5), the UK (6), Russia (7), France (8), and Italy (10).

There is huge disparity between many European countries in terms of their income. The richest in terms of GDP per capita is Monaco with its US$172,676 per capita (2009) and the poorest is Moldova with its GDP per capita of US$1,631 (2010). Monaco is the richest country in terms of GDP per capita in the world according to the World Bank report.

Pre–1945: Industrial growth

Capitalism has been dominant in the Western world since the end of feudalism. From Britain, it gradually spread throughout Europe. The Industrial Revolution started in Europe, specifically the United Kingdom in the late 18th century, and the 19th century saw Western Europe industrialise. Economies were disrupted by World War I but by the beginning of World War II they had recovered and were having to compete with the growing economic strength of the United States. World War II, again, damaged much of Europe's industries.

1945–1990: The Cold War

After World War II the economy of the UK was in a state of ruin, and continued to suffer relative economic decline in the following decades. Italy was also in a poor economic condition but regained a high level of growth by the 1950s. West Germany recovered quickly and had doubled production from pre-war levels by the 1950s. France also staged a remarkable comeback enjoying rapid growth and modernisation; later on Spain, under the leadership of Franco, also recovered, and the nation recorded huge unprecedented economic growth beginning in the 1960s in what is called the Spanish miracle. The majority of Eastern European states came under the control of the USSR and thus were members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). The states which retained a free-market system were given a large amount of aid by the United States under the Marshall Plan. The western states moved to link their economies together, providing the basis for the EU and increasing cross border trade. This helped them to enjoy rapidly improving economies, while those states in COMECON were struggling in a large part due to the cost of the Cold War. Until 1990, the European Community was expanded from 6 founding members to 12. The emphasis placed on resurrecting the West German economy led to it overtaking the UK as Europe's largest economy.

1991–2007: Integration and reunification

With the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1991, the Eastern states had to adapt to a free market system. There were varying degrees of success with Central European countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia adapting reasonably quickly, while eastern states like Ukraine and Russia taking far longer.

After East and West Germany were reunited in 1990, the economy of West Germany struggled as it had to support and largely rebuild the infrastructure of East Germany. By the millennium change, the EU dominated the economy of Europe comprising the five largest European economies of the time namely Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain. In 1999 12 of the 15 members of the EU joined the Eurozone replacing their former national currencies by the common euro. The three who chose to remain outside the Eurozone were: the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden.

2008–2010: Recession

The Eurozone entered its first official recession in the third quarter of 2008, official figures confirmed in January 2009. While beginning in the United States the late-2000s recession spread to Europe rapidly and has affected much of the region. The official unemployment rate in the 16 countries that use the euro rose to 9.5% in May 2009. Europe's young workers have been especially hard hit. In the first quarter of 2009, the unemployment rate in the EU27 for those aged 15–24 was 18.3%.

In early 2010 fears of a sovereign debt crisis developed concerning some countries in Europe, especially Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. As a result, measures were taken especially for Greece by the leading countries of the Eurozone.

Demographics

Since the Renaissance, Europe has had a major influence in culture, economics and social movements in the world. The most significant inventions had their origins in the Western world, primarily Europe and the United States. In 1900, Europe's share of the world's population was 25%. Approximately 70 million Europeans died through war, violence and famine between 1914 and 1945. Some current and past issues in European demographics have included religious emigration, race relations, economic immigration, a declining birth rate and an aging population.

In some countries, such as Ireland and Poland, access to abortion is currently limited; in the past, such restrictions and also restrictions on artificial birth control were commonplace throughout Europe. Abortion remains illegal on the island of Malta where Catholicism is the state religion. Furthermore, three European countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland) and the Autonomous Community of Andalusia (Spain) have allowed a limited form of voluntary euthanasia for some terminally ill people.

In 2005, the population of Europe was estimated to be 731 million according to the United Nations, which is slightly more than one-ninth of the world's population. A century ago, Europe had nearly a quarter of the world's population. Among the continents, Europe has a relatively high population density, second only to Asia. The most densely populated country in Europe is the Netherlands, ranking third in the world after Bangladesh and South Korea. Pan and Pfeil (2004) count 87 distinct "peoples of Europe", of which 33 form the majority population in at least one sovereign state, while the remaining 54 constitute ethnic minorities. According to UN population projection, Europe's population may fall to about 7% of world population by 2050, or 653 million people (medium variant, 556 to 777 million in low and high variants, respectively). Within this context, significant disparities exist between regions in relation to fertility rates. The average number of children per female of child bearing age is 1.52. According to some sources, this rate is higher among Muslims in Europe. The UN predicts the steady population decline of vast areas of Eastern Europe. Russia's population is declining by at least 700,000 people each year. The country now has 13,000 uninhabited villages.

Europe is home to the highest number of migrants of all global regions at 70.6 million people, the IOM's report said. In 2005, the EU had an overall net gain from immigration of 1.8 million people, despite having one of the highest population densities in the world. This accounted for almost 85% of Europe's total population growth. The European Union plans to open the job centres for legal migrant workers from Africa. In 2008, 696,000 persons were given citizenship of an EU27 member state, a decrease from 707,000 the previous year. The largest groups that acquired citizenship of an EU member state were citizens of Morocco, Turkey, Ecuador, Algeria and Iraq.

Emigration from Europe began with Spanish settlers in the 16th century, and French and English settlers in the 17th century. But numbers remained relatively small until waves of mass emigration in the 19th century, when millions of poor families left Europe.

Today, large populations of European descent are found on every continent. European ancestry predominates in North America, and to a lesser degree in South America (particularly in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, while most of the other Latin American countries also have a considerable population of European origins). Australia and New Zealand have large European derived populations. Africa has no countries with European-derived majorities (or with the exception of Cabo Verde and probably São Tomé and Príncipe, depending on the context), but there are significant minorities, such as the White South Africans. In Asia, European-derived populations predominate in Northern Asia (specifically Russians), some parts of Northern Kazakhstan and Israel. Additionally, transcontinental and geographically Asian countries such as Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus and Turkey have populations historically closely related to Europeans, with considerable genetic and cultural affinity.

Language

European languages mostly fall within three Indo-European language groups: the Romance languages, derived from the Latin of the Roman Empire; the Germanic languages, whose ancestor language came from southern Scandinavia; and the Slavic languages;

Romance languages are spoken primarily in south-western Europe as well as in Romania and Moldova, in Central or Eastern Europe. Germanic languages are spoken in north-western Europe and some parts of Central Europe. Slavic languages are spoken in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.

Many other languages outside the three main groups exist in Europe. Other Indo-European languages include the Baltic group (that is, Latvian and Lithuanian), the Celtic group (that is, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton), Greek, Armenian, and Albanian. In addition, a distinct group of Uralic languages (Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian) is spoken mainly in Estonia, Finland, and Hungary, while Kartvelian languages (Georgian, Mingrelian, and Svan), are spoken primarily in Georgia. Maltese is the only Semitic language that is official within the EU, while Basque is the only European language isolate. Turkic languages include Azerbaijani and Turkish, in addition to the languages of minority nations in Russia.

Multilingualism and the protection of regional and minority languages are recognized political goals in Europe today. The Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the Council of Europe's European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages set up a legal framework for language rights in Europe.

Religion

Historically, religion in Europe has been a major influence on European art, culture, philosophy and law. The largest religion in Europe is Christianity as practiced by Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Churches. Following these is Islam concentrated mainly in the south east (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, Kazakhstan, North Cyprus, Turkey and Azerbaijan), and Tibetan Buddhism, found in Kalmykia. Other religions including Judaism and Hinduism are minority religions. Europe is a relatively secular continent and has an increasing number and proportion of irreligious, agnostic and atheistic people, actually the largest in the Western world, with a particularly high number of self-described non-religious people in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Sweden, Germany (East), and France.

Culture

The culture of Europe can be described as a series of overlapping cultures; cultural mixes exist across the continent. There are cultural innovations and movements, sometimes at odds with each other. Thus the question of "common culture" or "common values" is complex.

The foundation of European culture was laid by the Greeks, strengthened by the Romans, stabilised by Christianity, reformed by the 15th-century Renaissance and Reformation, modernised by the 18th century Age of Enlightenment and globalised by successive European empires between the 16th and 20th centuries.

See also

Communications in Europe

Continental Europe

Europa Nostra

Europe as a potential superpower

List of European television stations

;Politics

Eurodistrict

Euroregion

Euroscepticism

Flags of Europe

List of sovereign states by date of formation

Names of European cities in different languages

OSCE countries statistics

;Demographics

Area and population of European countries

Demographics of Europe

European American

European Union statistics

Largest cities of the EU

Largest urban areas of the European Union

List of cities in Europe

List of villages in Europe

List of metropolitan areas in Europe

;Economics

Economy of the European Union

Financial and social rankings of European countries

List of European countries by GDP (nominal)

The European Miracle

Notes

, Council on Foreign Relations , United States European Command , Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and www.worldatlas.com. The population and area figures include Georgian estimates for Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two regions that have declared and ''de facto'' achieved independence. International recognition, however, is limited.}}

References

National Geographic (2005). ''National Geographic Visual History of the World''. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society. ISBN 0-7922-3695-5.

External links

Council of Europe

European Union

Europe travel guide from Wikitravel

The Columbia Gazetteer of the World Online Columbia University Press

"Introducing Europe" from Lonely Planet Travel Guides and Information

Category:Continents Category:Cultural concepts

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name	Walt Disney
birth name	Walter Elias Disney
birth date	December 05, 1901
birth place	Hermosa, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
death date	December 15, 1966
death place	Burbank, California, U.S. Interred: Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California, U.S.
occupation	Film producer, Co-founder of The Walt Disney Company, formerly known as Walt Disney Productions
yearsactive	1920–1966
spouse	Lillian Bounds (1925–1966)
parents	Elias DisneyFlora Call Disney
relations	Herbert Arthur Disney (brother)Raymond Arnold Disney (brother)Roy Oliver Disney (brother)Ruth Flora Disney (sister)Ronald William Miller (son-in-law)Robert Borgfeldt Brown (son-in-law)Roy Edward Disney (nephew)
children	Diane Marie DisneySharon Mae Disney
religion	Christian (Congregationalist)
party	Republican
signature	Walt Disney Signature 2.svg }}

Walter Elias "Walt" Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O. Disney, he was co-founder of Walt Disney Productions, which later became one of the best-known motion picture producers in the world. The corporation is now known as The Walt Disney Company and has annual revenues of approximately USD $35 billion.

Disney is particularly noted as a film producer and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created some of the world's most well-known fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, for whom Disney himself provided the original voice. During his lifetime he received four honorary Academy Awards and won twenty-two Academy Awards from a total of fifty-nine nominations, including a record four in one year, giving him more awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney, Disneyland Paris, and Disneyland Hong Kong.

The year after his December 15, 1966 death from lung cancer in Burbank, California, construction began on Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. His brother Roy Disney inaugurated the Magic Kingdom on October 1, 1971.

1901–1937: Beginnings

Childhood

Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 2156 N. Tripp Avenue in Chicago's Hermosa community area to Irish-Canadian father Elias Disney and German-American mother Flora Call Disney. His great-grandfather, Arundel Elias Disney, had emigrated from Gowran, County Kilkenny, Ireland where he was born in 1801. Arundel Disney was a descendant of Robert d'Isigny, a Frenchman who had travelled to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. With the d'Isigny name anglicised as "Disney", the family settled in a village now known as Norton Disney, south of the city of Lincoln, in the county of Lincolnshire.

In 1878, Disney's father Elias had moved from Huron County, Ontario, Canada to the United States at first seeking gold in California before finally settling down to farm with his parents near Ellis, Kansas, until 1884. Elias worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and married Flora Call on January 1, 1888, in Acron, Florida. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1890, hometown of his brother Robert who helped Elias financially for most of his early life. In 1906, when Walt was four, Elias and his family moved to a farm in Marceline, Missouri, where his brother Roy had recently purchased farmland. In Marceline, Disney developed his love for drawing with one of the family's neighbors, a retired doctor named "Doc" Sherwood, paying him to draw pictures of Sherwood's horse, Rupert. His interest in trains also developed in Marceline, a town that owed its existence to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway which ran through it. Walt would put his ear to the tracks in anticipation of the coming train then try and spot his uncle, engineer Michael Martin, running the train.

The Disneys remained in Marceline for four years, before moving to Kansas City in 1911 where Walt and his younger sister Ruth attended the Benton Grammar School. At school he met Walter Pfeiffer who came from a family of theatre aficionados, and introduced Walt to the world of vaudeville and motion pictures. Before long Walt was spending more time at the Pfeiffers' than at home. As well as attending Saturday courses at the Kansas City Art Institute, Walt often took Ruth to Electric Park, 15 blocks from their home, which Disney would later acknowledge as a major influence of his design of Disneyland).

Teenage years

In 1917, Elias acquired shares in the O-Zell jelly factory in Chicago and moved his family back to the city, where in the fall Disney began his freshman year at McKinley High School and took night courses at the Chicago Art Institute. He became the cartoonist for the school newspaper, drawing patriotic topics and focusing on World War I. Despite dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen to join the army, Disney was rejected for being underage.

After his rejection by the army, Walt and a friend decided to join the Red Cross. Soon after joining he was sent to France for a year, where he drove an ambulance, but only after the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.

Hoping to find work outside the Chicago O-Zell factory, in 1919 Walt moved back to Kansas City to begin his artistic career. After considering whether to become an actor or a newspaper artist, he decided on a career as a newspaper artist, drawing political caricatures or comic strips. But when nobody wanted to hire him as either an artist or even as an ambulance driver, his brother Roy, then working in a local bank, got Walt a temporary job through a bank colleague at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio where he created advertisements for newspapers, magazines, and movie theaters. At Pesmen-Rubin he met cartoonist Ubbe Iwerks and when their time at the studio expired, they decided to start their own commercial company together.

In January 1920, Disney and Iwerks formed a short-lived company called, "Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists". However, following a rough start, Disney left temporarily to earn money at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, and was soon joined by Iwerks who was not able to run their business alone. While working for the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where he made commercials based on cutout animations, Disney became interested in animation, and decided to become an animator. The owner of the Ad Company, A.V. Cauger, allowed him to borrow a camera from work to experiment with at home. After reading the Edwin G. Lutz book ''Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development'', Disney considered cel animation to be much more promising than the cutout animation he was doing for Cauger. Walt eventually decided to open his own animation business, and recruited a fellow co-worker at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Fred Harman, as his first employee. Walt and Harman then secured a deal with local theater owner Frank L. Newman, arguably the most popular "showman" in the Kansas City area at the time, to screen their cartoons at his local theater, which they titled ''Laugh-O-Grams''.

Laugh-O-Gram Studio

Presented as "Newman Laugh-O-Grams", Disney's cartoons became widely popular in the Kansas City area and through their success, he was able to acquire his own studio, also called Laugh-O-Gram, for which he hired a vast number of additional animators, including Fred Harman's brother Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and his close friend Ubbe Iwerks. Unfortunately, studio profits were insufficient to cover the high salaries paid to employees. Unable to successfully manage money, Disney's studio became loaded with debt and wound up bankrupt whereupon he decided to set up a studio in the movie industry's capital city, Hollywood, California.

Hollywood

Disney and his brother Roy pooled their money and set up a cartoon studio in Hollywood where they needed to find a distributor for Walt's new Alice Comedies, which he had started making while in Kansas City but never got to distribute. Disney sent an unfinished print to New York distributor Margaret Winkler, who promptly wrote back to him that she was keen on a distribution deal for more live-action/animated shorts based upon ''Alice's Wonderland''.

Alice Comedies

Virginia Davis, the live-action star of ''Alice’s Wonderland'' and her family relocated from Kansas City to Hollywood at Disney's request, as did Iwerks and his family. This was the beginning of the Disney Brothers' Studio located on Hyperion Avenue in the Silver Lake district, where it remained until 1939. In 1925, Disney hired a young woman named Lillian Bounds to ink and paint celluloid. After a brief courtship, the pair married that same year.

The new series, ''Alice Comedies'', proved reasonably successful, and featured both Dawn O'Day and Margie Gay as Alice with Lois Hardwick also briefly assuming the role. By the time the series ended in 1927, its focus was more on the animated characters and in particular a cat named Julius who resembled Felix the Cat, rather than the live-action Alice.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

By 1927, Charles Mintz had married Margaret Winkler and assumed control of her business. He then ordered a new all-animated series to be put into production for distribution through Universal Pictures. The new series, ''Oswald the Lucky Rabbit'', was an almost instant success, and the character, Oswald — drawn and created by Iwerks — became a popular figure. The Disney studio expanded and Walt re-hired Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carman Maxwell, and Friz Freleng from Kansas City.

Disney went to New York in February 1928 to negotiate a higher fee per short and was shocked when Mintz told him that not only did he want to reduce the fee he paid Disney per short but also that he had most of his main animators, including Harman, Ising, Maxwell, and Freleng—but not Iwerks, who refused to leave Disney—under contract and would start his own studio if Disney did not accept the reduced production budgets. Universal, not Disney, owned the Oswald trademark, and could make the films without Walt. Disney declined Mintz's offer and as a result lost most of his animation staff whereupon he found himself on his own again.

It subsequently took his company 78 years to get back the rights to the Oswald character when in 2006 the Walt Disney Company reacquired the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from NBC Universal, through a trade for longtime ABC sports commentator Al Michaels.

Mickey Mouse

After losing the rights to Oswald, Disney felt the need to develop a new character to replace him, which was based on a mouse he had adopted as a pet while working in his Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City. Ub Iwerks reworked the sketches made by Disney to make the character easier to animate although Mickey's voice and personality were provided by Disney himself until 1947. In the words of one Disney employee, "Ub designed Mickey's physical appearance, but Walt gave him his soul." Besides Oswald and Mickey, a similar mouse-character is seen in the ''Alice Comedies'', which featured "Ike the Mouse". Moreover, the first Flip the Frog cartoon called Fiddlesticks showed a Mickey Mouse look-alike playing fiddle. The initial films were animated by Iwerks with his name prominently featured on the title cards. Originally named "Mortimer", the mouse was later re-christened "Mickey" by Lillian Disney who thought that the name Mortimer did not fit. Mortimer later became the name of Mickey's rival for Minnie – taller than his renowned adversary and speaking with a Brooklyn accent.

The first animated short to feature Mickey, ''Plane Crazy'' was a silent film like all of Disney's previous works. After failing to find a distributor for the short and its follow-up, ''The Gallopin' Gaucho'', Disney created a Mickey cartoon with sound entitled ''Steamboat Willie''. A businessman named Pat Powers provided Disney with both distribution and Cinephone, a sound-synchronization process. ''Steamboat Willie'' became an instant success, and ''Plane Crazy'', ''The Galloping Gaucho'', and all future Mickey cartoons were released with soundtracks. After the release of ''Steamboat Willie'', Disney successfully used sound in all of his subsequent cartoons, and Cinephone also became the new distributor for Disney's early sound cartoons. Mickey soon eclipsed Felix the Cat as the world's most popular cartoon character and by 1930, despite their having sound, cartoons featuring Felix had faded from the screen after failing to gain attention. Mickey's popularity would subsequently skyrocket in the early 1930s.

''Silly Symphonies''

Following in the footsteps of ''Mickey Mouse series'', a series of musical shorts titled, ''Silly Symphonies'' were released in 1929. The first, ''The Skeleton Dance'' was entirely drawn and animated by Iwerks, who was also responsible for drawing the majority of cartoons released by Disney in 1928 and 1929. Although both series were successful, the Disney studio was not receiving its rightful share of profits from Pat Powers, and in 1930, Disney signed a new distribution deal with Columbia Pictures. The original basis of the cartoons was their musical novelty with the first Silly Symphony cartoons featuring scores by Carl Stalling.

Iwerks was soon lured by Powers into opening his own studio with an exclusive contract, while Stalling would also later leave Disney to join Iwerks. Iwerks launched his ''Flip the Frog'' series with the first voiced color cartoon ''Fiddlesticks'', filmed in two-strip Technicolor. Iwerks also created two other cartoon series, ''Willie Whopper'' and the ''Comicolor''. In 1936, Iwerks shut down his studio in order to work on various projects dealing with animation technology. He would return to Disney in 1940 and go on to pioneer a number of film processes and specialized animation technologies in the studio's research and development department.

By 1932, although Mickey Mouse had become a relatively popular cinema character, ''Silly Symphonies'' was not as successful. The same year also saw competition increase as Max Fleischer's flapper cartoon character, Betty Boop, gained popularity among theater audiences. Fleischer, considered Disney's main rival in the 1930s, was also the father of Richard Fleischer, whom Disney would later hire to direct his 1954 film ''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea''. Meanwhile, Columbia Pictures dropped the distribution of Disney cartoons to be replaced by United Artists. In late 1932, Herbert Kalmus, who had just completed work on the first three-strip technicolor camera, approached Walt and convinced him to reshoot the black and white ''Flowers and Trees'' in three-strip Technicolor. ''Flowers and Trees'' would go on to be a phenomenal success and would also win the first 1932 Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons. After the release of ''Flowers and Trees'', all subsequent ''Silly Symphony'' cartoons were in color while Disney was also able to negotiate a two-year deal with Technicolor, giving him the sole right to use their three-strip process, a period eventually extended to five years. Through ''Silly Symphonies'', Disney also created his most successful cartoon short of all time, ''The Three Little Pigs'' (1933). The cartoon ran in theaters for many months, featuring the hit song that became the anthem of the Great Depression, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf".

First Academy Award

In 1932, Disney received a special Academy Award for the creation of "Mickey Mouse", a series which switched to color in 1935 and soon launched spin-offs for supporting characters such as Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto. Pluto and Donald became standalone cartoons in 1937, with Goofy following in 1939. Of all Mickey's partners, Donald Duck, who first teamed up with Mickey in the 1934 cartoon, ''Orphan's Benefit'', was arguably the most popular, going on to become Disney's second most successful cartoon character of all time.

Children

The Disneys' first attempt at pregnancy ended when Lillian miscarried. She became pregnant again and gave birth to a daughter, Diane Marie Disney, on December 18, 1933. The Disneys adopted Sharon Mae Disney (December 31, 1936 – February 16, 1993).

1937–1941: Golden age of animation

"Disney's Folly": ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs''

[[Image:Walt Disney Snow white 1937 trailer screenshot (13).jpg|left|thumb|Walt Disney introduces each of the Seven Dwarfs in a scene from the original 1937 ''Snow White'' theatrical trailer.]]

Following the creation of two cartoon series, in 1934 Disney began planning a full-length feature. The following year, opinion polls showed that another cartoon series, ''Popeye the Sailor'', produced by Max Fleischer, was more popular than Mickey Mouse. Nevertheless, Disney was able to put Mickey back on top as well as increase his popularity by colorizing and partially redesigning the character to become what was considered his most appealing design to date. When the film industry learned of Disney's plans to produce an ''animated'' feature-length version of ''Snow White'', they were certain that the endeavor would destroy the Disney Studio and dubbed the project "Disney's Folly". Both Lillian and Roy tried to talk Disney out of the project, but he continued plans for the feature, employing Chouinard Art Institute professor Don Graham to start a training operation for the studio staff. Disney then used the ''Silly Symphonies'' as a platform for experiments in realistic human animation, distinctive character animation, special effects, and the use of specialized processes and apparatus such as the multiplane camera – a new technique first used by Disney in the 1937 ''Silly Symphonies'' short ''The Old Mill''.

All of this development and training was used to increase quality at the studio and to ensure that the feature film would match Disney's quality expectations. Entitled ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'', the feature went into full production in 1934 and continued until mid-1937, when the studio ran out of money. To obtain the funding to complete ''Snow White'', Disney had to show a rough cut of the motion picture to loan officers at the Bank of America, who then gave the studio the money to finish the picture. The film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater on December 21, 1937 and at its conclusion the audience gave ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' a standing ovation. ''Snow White'', the first animated feature in America made in Technicolor, was released in February 1938 under a new distribution deal with RKO Radio Pictures. RKO had been the distributor for Disney cartoons in 1936, after it closed down the Van Beuren Studios in exchange for distribution. The film became the most successful motion picture of 1938 and earned over $8 million on its initial release.

Golden age of animation

Following the success of ''Snow White'', for which Disney received one full-size, and seven miniature Oscar statuettes, he was able to build a new campus for the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, which opened for business on December 24, 1939. ''Snow White'' was not only the peak of Disney's success, but also ushered in a period that would later be known as the Golden Age of Animation for the studio. Feature animation staff, having just completed ''Pinocchio'', continued work on ''Fantasia'' and ''Bambi'' as well as the early production stages of ''Alice in Wonderland'', ''Peter Pan'' and ''Wind in the Willows'' while the shorts staff carried on working on the ''Mickey Mouse'', ''Donald Duck'', ''Goofy'', and ''Pluto'' cartoon series, ending the ''Silly Symphonies'' at this time. Animator Fred Moore had redesigned Mickey Mouse in the late 1930s after Donald Duck overtook him in popularity among theater audiences.

''Pinocchio'' and ''Fantasia'' followed ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' into the movie theaters in 1940, but both proved financial disappointments. The inexpensive ''Dumbo'' was then planned as an income generator, but during production most of the animation staff went on strike, permanently straining relations between Disney and his artists.

1941–1945: World War II era

In 1941, the U.S. State Department sent Disney and a group of animators to South America as part of its Good Neighbor policy, at the same time guaranteeing financing for the resultant movie, ''Saludos Amigos''.

Shortly after the release of ''Dumbo'' in October 1941, the United States entered World War II. The U.S. Army contracted most of the Disney studio's facilities where the staff created training and instruction films for the military, home-front morale-boosting shorts such as ''Der Fuehrer's Face'' and the 1943 feature film ''Victory Through Air Power''. However, military films did not generate income, and the feature film ''Bambi'' underperformed on its release in April 1942. Disney successfully re-issued ''Snow White'' in 1944, establishing a seven-year re-release tradition for his features. In 1945, ''The Three Caballeros'' was the last animated feature released by the studio during the war.

In 1944, ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' publisher William Benton, entered into unsuccessful negotiations with Disney to make six to twelve educational films per annum. Disney was asked by the US Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), to make an educational film about the Amazon Basin, which resulted in the 1944 animated short, ''The Amazon Awakens''.

1945–1955: Post-war period

Disney studios also created inexpensive package films, containing collections of cartoon shorts, and issued them to theaters during this period. These included ''Make Mine Music'' (1946), ''Melody Time'' (1948), ''Fun and Fancy Free'' (1947) and ''The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad'' (1949). The latter had only two sections, the first based on ''The Wind in the Willows'' by Kenneth Grahame, and the second on ''The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'' by Washington Irving. During this period, Disney also ventured into full-length dramatic films that mixed live action and animated scenes, including ''Song of the South'' and ''So Dear to My Heart''. After the war ended, Mickey's popularity would also fade.

By the late 1940s, the studio had recovered enough to continue production on the full-length features ''Alice in Wonderland'' and ''Peter Pan'', both of which had been shelved during the war years. Work also began on ''Cinderella'', which became Disney's most successful film since ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs''. In 1948 the studio also initiated a series of live-action nature films, titled ''True-Life Adventures'', with ''On Seal Island'' the first. Despite its resounding success with feature films, the studio's animation shorts were no longer as popular as they once were, with people paying more attention to Warner Bros. and their animation star Bugs Bunny. By 1942, Leon Schlesinger Productions, which produced the Warner Bros. cartoons, had become the country's most popular animation studio. However, while Bugs Bunny's popularity rose in the 1940s, so did Donald Duck's, a character who would replace Mickey Mouse as Disney's star character by 1949.

During the mid-1950s, Disney produced a number of educational films on the space program in collaboration with NASA rocket designer Wernher von Braun: ''Man in Space'' and ''Man and the Moon'' in 1955, and ''Mars and Beyond'' in 1957.

Testimony before Congress

Disney was a founding member of the anti-communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. In 1947, during the early years of the Cold War, Disney testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he branded Herbert Sorrell, David Hilberman and William Pomerance, former animators and labor union organizers, Communist agitators. All three men denied the allegations and Sorrell went on to testify before the HUAC in 1946 when insufficient evidence was found to link him to the Communist Party.

Disney also accused the Screen Actors Guild of being a Communist front, and charged that the 1941 strike was part of an organized Communist effort to gain influence in Hollywood.

1955–1966: Theme parks and beyond

Planning Disneyland

On a business trip to Chicago in the late-1940s, Disney drew sketches of his ideas for an amusement park where he envisioned his employees spending time with their children. The idea for a children's theme park came after a visit to Children's Fairyland in Oakland, California. This plan was originally intended to be built on a plot located across the street to the south of the studio. These original ideas developed into a concept for a larger enterprise that would become Disneyland. Disney spent five years developing Disneyland and created a new subsidiary company, WED Enterprises, to carry out planning and production of the park. A small group of Disney studio employees joined the Disneyland development project as engineers and planners, and were dubbed Imagineers.

As Disney explained one of his earliest plans to Herb Ryman, who created the first aerial drawing of Disneyland presented to the Bank of America during fund raising for the project, he said, "Herbie, I just want it to look like nothing else in the world. And it should be surrounded by a train." Entertaining his daughters and their friends in his backyard and taking them for rides on his Carolwood Pacific Railroad had inspired Disney to include a railroad in the plans for Disneyland.

Disneyland grand opening

Disneyland officially opened on July 18, 1955. On Sunday, July 17, 1955, Disneyland hosted a live TV preview, among the thousands of people in attendance were Ronald Reagan, Bob Cummings and Art Linkletter, who shared cohosting duties, as well as the mayor of Anaheim. Walt gave the following dedication day speech:

Carolwood Pacific Railroad

During 1949, Disney and his family moved to a new home on a large piece of land in the Holmby Hills district of Los Angeles, California. With the help of his friends Ward and Betty Kimball, who already had their own backyard railroad, Disney developed blueprints and immediately set to work on creating a miniature live steam railroad for his backyard. The name of the railroad, Carolwood Pacific Railroad, came from his home's location on Carolwood Drive. The railroad's half-mile long layout included a long trestle bridge, loops, overpasses, gradients, an elevated berm, and a tunnel underneath his wife's flowerbed. He named the miniature working steam locomotive built by Disney Studios engineer Roger E. Broggie ''Lilly Belle'' in his wife's honor and had his attorney draw up right-of-way papers giving the railroad a permanent, legal easement through the garden areas, which his wife dutifully signed; however, there is no evidence of the documents ever recorded as a restriction on the property's title.

Expansion into new areas

As Walt Disney Productions began work on Disneyland, it also began expanding its other entertainment operations. In 1950, ''Treasure Island'' became the studio's first all-live-action feature, soon followed by ''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea'' (in CinemaScope, 1954), ''Old Yeller'' (1957), ''The Shaggy Dog'' (1959), ''Pollyanna'' (1960), ''Swiss Family Robinson'' (1960), ''The Absent-Minded Professor'' (1961), and ''The Parent Trap'' (1961). The studio produced its first TV special, ''One Hour in Wonderland'', in 1950. Disney began hosting a weekly anthology series on ABC entitled ''Disneyland'', after the park, on which he aired clips of past Disney productions, gave tours of his studio, and familiarized the public with Disneyland as it was being constructed in Anaheim. The show also featured a Davy Crockett miniseries, which started the "Davy Crockett craze" among American youth, during which millions of coonskin caps and other Crockett memorabilia were sold across the country. In 1955, the studio's first daily television show, ''Mickey Mouse Club'' debuted and would continue in various incarnations into the 1990s.

As the studio expanded and diversified into other media, Disney devoted less of his attention to the animation department, entrusting most of its operations to his key animators, whom he dubbed the Nine Old Men. Although he was spending less time supervising the production of the animated films, he was always present at story meetings.. During Disney's lifetime, the animation department created the successful ''Lady and the Tramp'' ( the first animated film in CinemaScope) in 1955, ''Sleeping Beauty'' ( the first animated film in Super Technirama 70mm) in 1959, ''One Hundred and One Dalmatians'' (the first animated feature film to use Xerox cels) in 1961, and ''The Sword in the Stone'' in 1963.

Production of short cartoons kept pace until 1956, when Disney shut down the responsible division although special shorts projects would continue for the remainder of the studio's duration on an irregular basis. These productions were all distributed by Disney's new subsidiary, Buena Vista Distribution, which had taken over all distribution duties for Disney films from RKO by 1955. Disneyland, one of the world's first theme parks, finally opened on July 17, 1955, and was immediately successful. Visitors from around the world came to visit Disneyland, which contained attractions based on a number of successful Disney characters and films.

After 1955, the ''Disneyland'' TV show was renamed ''Walt Disney Presents''. It switched from black-and-white to color in 1961 and changed its name to ''Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color'', at the same time moving from ABC to NBC, and eventually evolving into its current form as ''The Wonderful World of Disney''. The series continued to air on NBC until 1981, when it was picked up by CBS. Since then, it has aired on ABC, NBC, the Hallmark Channel and the Cartoon Network via separate broadcast rights deals. During its run, the Disney series offered some recurring characters, such as the newspaper reporter and sleuth "Gallegher" played by Roger Mobley with a plot based on the writings of Richard Harding Davis.

Disney had already formed his own music publishing division in 1949 and in 1956, partly inspired by the huge success of the television theme song The Ballad of Davy Crockett, he created a company-owned record production and distribution entity called Disneyland Records.

Early 1960s successes

By the early 1960s, the Disney empire had become a major success, and Walt Disney Productions had established itself as the world's leading producer of family entertainment. Walt Disney was the Head of Pageantry for the 1960 Winter Olympics.

After decades of pursuit, Disney finally acquired the rights to P.L. Travers' books about a magical nanny. ''Mary Poppins'', released in 1964, was the most successful Disney film of the 1960s and featured a memorable song score written by Disney favorites, the Sherman Brothers. The same year, Disney debuted a number of exhibits at the 1964 New York World's Fair, including Audio-Animatronic figures, all of which were later integrated into attractions at Disneyland and a new theme park project which was to be established on the East Coast.

Although the studio would probably have proved major competition for Hanna-Barbera, Disney decided not to enter the race and mimic Hanna-Barbera by producing Saturday morning TV cartoon series. With the expansion of Disney's empire and constant production of feature films, the financial burden involved in such a move would have proven too great.

Plans for Disney World and EPCOT

In early 1964, Disney announced plans to develop another theme park to be called Disney World a few miles west of Orlando, Florida. Disney World was to include "the Magic Kingdom", a larger, more elaborate version of Disneyland. It would also feature a number of golf courses and resort hotels. The heart of Disney World, however, was to be the Experimental Prototype City (or Community) of Tomorrow, known as EPCOT for short.

Mineral King Ski Resort

During the early to mid 1960s, Walt Disney developed plans for a ski resort in Mineral King, a glacial valley in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range. He brought in experts such as the renowned Olympic ski coach and ski-area designer Willy Schaeffler, who helped plan a visitor village, ski runs and ski lifts among the several bowls surrounding the valley. Plans finally moved into action in the mid 1960s, but Walt died before the actual work started. Disney's death and opposition from conservationists ensured that the resort was never built.

Death

In 1966, Disney was scheduled to undergo surgery to repair an old neck injury caused by many years of playing polo at the Riviera Club in Hollywood. On November 2, during pre-operative X-rays, doctors at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, across the street from the Disney Studio, discovered a tumor in his left lung. Five days later a biopsy showed the tumor to be malignant and to have spread throughout the entire left lung. After removal of the lung, doctors informed Disney that his life expectancy was six months to two years. After several chemotherapy sessions, Disney and his wife spent a short amount of time in Palm Springs, California. On November 30, Disney collapsed at his home. He was revived by fire department personnel and rushed to St. Joseph's where on December 15, 1966, at 9:30 a.m., ten days after his 65th birthday, Disney died of acute circulatory collapse, caused by lung cancer. The last thing he reportedly wrote before his death was the name of actor Kurt Russell, the significance of which remains a mystery, even to Russell.

Disney was cremated on December 17, 1966, and his ashes interred at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Roy O. Disney continued out with the Florida project, insisting that the name be changed to Walt Disney World in honor of his brother.

The final productions in which Disney played an active role were the animated features ''The Jungle Book'' and ''Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day'', as well as the live-action musical comedy ''The Happiest Millionaire'', both released in 1967. Songwriter Robert B. Sherman recalled of the last time he saw Disney: }}

A long-standing urban legend maintains that Disney was cryogenically frozen, and his frozen corpse stored beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. However, the first known cryogenic freezing of a human corpse did not occur until January 1967, more than a month after his death.

Legacy: 1967–present

Continuing Disney Productions

After Walt Disney's death, Roy Disney returned from retirement to take full control of Walt Disney Productions and WED Enterprises. In October 1971, the families of Walt and Roy met in front of Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom to officially open the Walt Disney World Resort.

After giving his dedication for Walt Disney World, Roy asked Lillian Disney to join him. As the orchestra played "When You Wish Upon a Star", she stepped up to the podium accompanied by Mickey Mouse. He then said, "Lilly, you knew all of Walt's ideas and hopes as well as anybody; what would Walt think of it [Walt Disney World]?". "I think Walt would have approved," she replied. Roy died from a cerebral hemorrhage on December 20, 1971, the day he was due to open the Disneyland Christmas parade. During the second phase of the "Walt Disney World" theme park, EPCOT was translated by Disney's successors into EPCOT Center, which opened in 1982. As it currently exists, EPCOT is essentially a living world's fair, different from the actual functional city that Disney had envisioned. In 1992, Walt Disney Imagineering took the step closer to Disney's original ideas and dedicated Celebration, Florida, a town built by the Walt Disney Company adjacent to Walt Disney World, that hearkens back to the spirit of EPCOT. EPCOT was also originally intended to be devoid of Disney characters which initially limited the appeal of the park to young children. However, the company later changed this policy and Disney characters can now be found throughout the park, often dressed in costumes reflecting the different pavilions.

The Disney entertainment empire

Today, Walt Disney's animation/motion picture studios and theme parks have developed into a multi-billion dollar television, motion picture, vacation destination and media corporation that carry his name. Among other assets The Walt Disney Company owns five vacation resorts, eleven theme parks, two water parks, thirty-nine hotels, eight motion picture studios, six record labels, eleven cable television networks, and one terrestrial television network. As of 2007, the company had annual revenues of over U.S. $35 billion.

Disney Animation

Walt Disney was a pioneer in character animation. He was one of the first people to move away from basic cartoons with just ''"impossible outlandish gags"'' and crudely drawn characters to an art form with heartwarming stories and characters the audience can connect to on an emotional level. The personality displayed in the characters of his films and the technological advancements remain influential when animating today. He was also considered by many of his colleagues to be a master storyteller and the animation department did not fully recover from his demise until the late 1980's in a period known as the Disney Renaissance. The most finacially and critically successful films produced during this time include Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994). In 1995 Walt Disney Pictures distributed Pixar's Toy Story, the first computer animated feature film. Walt Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney claimed that Walt would have loved ''Toy Story'' and that it was ''"his kind of movie"'' . With the rise of computer animated films a stream of financially unsuccessful Traditional hand-drawn animated features in the early 2000s emerged. This led to the company's controversial decision to close the traditional animation department. The two satellite studios in Paris and Orlando were closed, and the main studio in Burbank was converted to a computer animation production facility, firing hundreds of people in the process. In 2004, Disney released what was announced as their final "traditionally animated" feature film, ''Home on the Range''. However, since the 2006 acquisition of Pixar, and the resulting rise of John Lasseter to Chief Creative Officer, that position has changed with the largely successful 2009 film ''The Princess and the Frog''. This marked Disney's return to traditional hand-drawn animation and the studio hired back staff who had been laid-off in the past. Today Disney produces both traditional and computer animation.

CalArts

In his later years, Disney devoted substantial time to funding The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Formed in 1961 through a merger of the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and the Chouinard Art Institute, which had helped in the training of the animation staff during the 1930s, when Disney died, one-fourth of his estate went to CalArts, which helped in building its campus. In his will, Disney paved the way for the creation of several charitable trusts which included one for the California Institute of the Arts and other for the Disney Foundation. He also donated of the Golden Oaks ranch in Valencia for construction of the school. CalArts moved onto the Valencia campus in 1972.

In an early admissions bulletin, Disney explained: }}

Walt Disney Family Museum

In 2009, the Walt Disney Family Museum opened in the Presidio of San Francisco. Thousands of artifacts from Disney's life and career are on display, including 248 awards that he received.

Anti-Semitism accusations

Disney was long rumored to be anti-Semitic during his lifetime, and such rumors have persisted after his death. Disney biographer Neal Gabler, the first writer to gain unrestricted access to the Disney archives, concluded in 2006 that available evidence does not support such accusations. In a CBS interview Gabler summarized his findings: }} Disney eventually distanced himself from the Motion Picture Alliance in the 1950s.

The Walt Disney Family Museum acknowledges that Disney did have "difficult relationships" with some Jewish individuals, and that ethnic stereotypes common to films of the 1930s were included in some early cartoons, such as ''Three Little Pigs''. However, the museum points out that Disney employed Jews throughout his career and was named "1955 Man Of The Year" by the B'nai B'rith chapter in Beverly Hills.

Academy Awards

Walt Disney holds the record for both the most Academy Award nominations (59) and the number of Oscars awarded (22). He also earned four honorary Oscars while his last competitive Academy Award was posthumous.

1932: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Flowers and Trees (1932)

1932: Honorary Award for: creation of Mickey Mouse.

1934: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Three Little Pigs (1933)

1935: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: The Tortoise and the Hare (1934)

1936: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Three Orphan Kittens (1935)

1937: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: The Country Cousin (1936)

1938: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: The Old Mill (1937)

1939: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Ferdinand the Bull (1938)

1939: Honorary Award for ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' (1937) The citation read: ''"For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field"'' (the award was one statuette and seven miniature statuettes)

1940: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Ugly Duckling (1939)

1941: Honorary Award for: Fantasia (1940), shared with: William E. Garity and J.N.A. Hawkins. The citation for the certificate of merit read: ''"For their outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of ''Fantasia''"''

1942: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Lend a Paw (1941)

1943: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Der Fuehrer's Face (1942)

1949: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Seal Island (1948)

1949: Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award (Honorary Award)

1951: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Beaver Valley (1950)

1952: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Nature's Half Acre (1951)

1953: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Water Birds (1952)

1954: Best Documentary, Features for: The Living Desert (1953)

1954: Best Documentary, Short Subjects for: The Alaskan Eskimo (1953)

1954: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom (1953)

1954: Best Short Subject, Two-reel for: Bear Country (1953)

1955: Best Documentary, Features for: The Vanishing Prairie (1954)

1956: Best Documentary, Short Subjects for: Men Against the Arctic

1959: Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects for: Grand Canyon

1969: Best Short Subject, Cartoons for: Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day

Other honors

Walt Disney was the inaugural recipient of a star on the Anaheim walk of stars awarded in recognition of his significant contribution to the city of Anaheim and specifically Disneyland, which is now the Disneyland Resort. The star is located at the pedestrian entrance to the Disneyland Resort on Harbor Boulevard. Disney has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures and the other for his television work.

Walt Disney received the Congressional Gold Medal on May 24, 1968 (P.L. 90-316, 82 Stat. 130–131) and the Légion d'Honneur awarded by France in 1935. In 1935, Walt received a special medal from the League of Nations for creation of Mickey Mouse, held to be Mickey Mouse award. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on September 14, 1964. On December 6, 2006, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Walt Disney into the California Hall of Fame located at The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts.

A minor planet, 4017 Disneya, discovered in 1980 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina, is named after him.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California, opened in 2003, was named in his honor.

In 1993, HBO began development of a Walt Disney biopic directed by Frank Pierson and featuring Lawrence Turman but the project never materialized and was soon abandoned. However, ''Walt - The Man Behind the Myth'', a biographical documentary about Disney, was later made.

See also

Disney family

The Mickey Mouse Club

The Walt Disney Family Museum

Walt Disney anthology television series

Notes

References

Further reading

Barrier, Michael (1999). ''Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516729-5.

Broggie, Michael (1997, 1998, 2005). ''Walt Disney's Railroad Story''. Virginia Beach, Virginia. Donning Publishers. ISBN 1-56342-009-0

Eliot, Marc (1993). ''Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince''. Carol. ISBN 1-55972-174-X

Mosley, Leonard. ''Disney's World: A Biography'' (1985, 2002). Chelsea, MI: Scarborough House. ISBN 0-8128-8514-7.

Gabler, Neal. ''Walt Disney: The Triumph of American Imagination'' (2006). New York, NY. Random House. ISBN 0-679-43822-X

Schickel, Richard, and Dee, Ivan R. (1967, 1985, 1997). ''The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney''. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher. ISBN 1-56663-158-0.

Sherman, Robert B. and Sherman, Richard M. (1998) "Walt's Time: From Before to Beyond" ISBN 0-9646059-3-7

Watts, Steven, ''The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life'', University of Missouri Press, 2001, ISBN 0826213790

External links

Discusses Walt Disney's attitude towards unions and communism.

Walt Disney Family Museum

Neal Gabler, Inside Walt Disney

Interview with Robert Stack About Walt Disney's Involvement in Polo

Walt Disney Gravesite

Disney's Fantastic Voyage

History of Walt Disney

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Name	Barney Frank
Birth date	March 31, 1940
Birth place	Bayonne, New Jersey
State	Massachusetts
District	4th
Term start	January 3, 1981
Preceded	Robert Drinan
Succeeded	Incumbent
Party	Democratic
Office2	Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee
Term start2	January 4, 2007
Term end2	January 3, 2011
Preceded2	Mike Oxley
Succeeded2	Spencer Bachus
Office3	Member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives
Term start3	1973
Term end3	1981
Religion	Judaism
Alma mater	Harvard CollegeHarvard Law School
Occupation	Attorney, United States Representative
Residence	Newton, Massachusetts
Partner	Jim Ready
Committees	House Financial Services Committee
Website
Relations	Sister: Ann Lewis }}

Barney Frank (born March 31, 1940) is the U.S. Representative for (1981–present). A member of the Democratic Party, he is the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee (2007–2011) and is considered the most prominent gay politician in the United States.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Frank graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He worked as a political aide before winning election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1972. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1980 with 52 percent of the vote. He has been re-elected ever since by wide margins. In 1987 he came out as gay, becoming the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. From 2007 to 2011, Frank served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, where he remains the ranking Democrat.

Early life

Frank was born Barnett Frank to a Jewish family in Bayonne, New Jersey, one of four children of Sam and Elsie. Frank's father ran a Jersey City truck stop — a place Frank describes as "totally corrupt" — and served a year in prison, when Frank was 6 or 7, for refusing to testify to a grand jury against Frank's uncle. Frank was educated at Harvard College, where he resided in Matthews Hall his first year and then in Kirkland House and Winthrop House, graduating in 1962. Frank's undergraduate studies were interrupted by the death of his father, and Frank took a year off to help resolve the family's affairs prior to his graduation. He taught undergraduates at Harvard while studying for a Ph.D., but left in 1968 before completing the degree, to become Boston mayor Kevin White's Chief Assistant, a position he held for three years. He then served for a year as Administrative Assistant to Congressman Michael J. Harrington. Frank later graduated from Harvard Law School, in 1977, while serving as Massachusetts State Representative.

Career

In 1972 Frank was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives where he served for eight years. Frank made a name for himself in the mid-1970s as a political defender of the Combat Zone, Boston's notorious red light district. Neighborhoods in Frank's district bordered the Combat Zone. As a means of dealing with crime in the area (including violence, police corruption and the infiltration by organized crime), Frank introduced a bill into the Massachusetts General Court that would have legalized the sex-for-hire business but kept it quarantined in a red light district, which would have been moved to Boston's Financial District. The bill, which had the support of Boston's Police Commissioner, never came up for a vote. Later, when Frank was running for Congress, opponents erroneously portrayed him having attempted to permit red light districts in all Bay State communities.

While in state and local government, Frank taught part time at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Boston University. He published numerous articles on politics and public affairs, and in 1992 he published ''Speaking Frankly'', an essay on the role the Democratic Party should play in the 1990s.

In 1979, Frank was admitted to the bar in Massachusetts. A year later, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 4th congressional district, hoping to succeed Father Robert Drinan, who had left Congress following a call by Pope John Paul II for priests to withdraw from political positions. In the Democratic primary held on September 16, 1980, Frank won 51.3 percent of the vote in a four-candidate field. His nearest opponent, Arthur J. Clark, won 45.9 percent and finished almost 4,500 votes behind. As the Democratic nominee, Frank faced Republican Richard A. Jones in the general election and won narrowly, 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent.

For his first term, Frank represented a district in the western and southern suburbs of Boston, anchored by Brookline and Newton, Massachusetts. However, in 1982, redistricting forced him to run against Republican Margaret Heckler, who represented a district centered on the South Coast, including Fall River and New Bedford. Although the newly configured district retained Frank's district number — the 4th — it was geographically more Heckler's district. Frank focused on Heckler's initial support for President Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, and won by twenty percentage points. He has not faced significant opposition since, and has been reelected fifteen times.

In 1985 Frank was still closeted. That year he hired Steve Gobie for sex, a male prostitute, and they became friends more than sexual partners. Frank housed Gobie and hired him with personal funds as an aide, housekeeper and driver and paid for his attorney and court-ordered psychiatrist. In 1987 Frank kicked Gobie out after he was advised by his landlord that Gobie kept escorting despite the support and was doing so in the residence. Later that year Gobie's friends convinced him he had a gay male version of ''Mayflower Madam'', a TV movie they had been watching. In 1989 Gobie tried to initiate a bidding war for the story between WUSA-TV (Channel 9), the ''Washington Times'', and ''The Washington Post''. He then gave the story to ''The Washington Times'' for nothing, in hopes of getting a book contract. Amid calls for an investigation Frank asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate his relationship "in order to insure that the public record is clear." The Committee found no evidence that Frank had known of or been involved in the alleged illegal activity and dismissed all of Gobie's more scandalous claims; they recommended a reprimand for Frank using his congressional office to fix 33 of Gobie's parking tickets and for misstatements of fact in a memorandum relating to Gobie's criminal probation record. The House voted 408–18 to reprimand Frank. The attempts to censure and expel Frank were led by Republican Larry Craig, whom Frank later criticized for hypocrisy after Craig's own arrest in 2007 for lewd conduct while soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom. Frank won re-election that year with 66 percent of the vote, and has won by larger margins until the 2010 Mid-term elections when Frank only won by eleven points.

Committee assignments

Committee on Financial Services (Ranking Member)

Public perception

Frank is known for his quick wit. In one famous quip he said he was unable to complete his review of the Starr Report detailing President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, complaining that it was "too much reading about heterosexual sex". In 2004 and again in 2006, a survey of Capitol Hill staffers published in ''Washingtonian'' gave Frank the title of the "brainiest", "funniest", and "most eloquent" member of the House. In 2008 the same survey named him "brainiest", and runner up for "workhorse", and "most eloquent", in 2010 he was named "brainiest", "workhorse", and "funniest". He is also widely considered to be one of the most powerful members of Congress. In his book ''Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches'', Democratic speech writer Josh Gottheimer describes Frank as "one of the brightest and most energetic defenders of civil rights issues."

Political initiatives and positions

Domestic issues

Civil rights

In 1987, Frank was the Chair of the important House Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Law and Governmental Relations in the 100th Congress. In this position, he was one of the staunchest supporters of redress and reparations for Japanese American internment during World War II. In 2001 Frank co-sponsored an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to apply equal rights based on gender differences. In 2002 he co-sponsored the "Federal Agency Protection of Privacy Act" (H.R.4561) to require a "Privacy Impact Statement" on new federal rules. In 2002 he was scored at 93% by the American Civil Liberties Union on civil rights issues indicating a pro-civil rights voting record.

In 2006, Frank was one of three Representatives to oppose the Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act, which restricted protests (notably those of Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church) at soldiers' funerals. He opposed the bill, which passed unanimously in the Senate, on civil liberties and constitutional grounds. Frank said of the vote, "I think it's very likely to be found unconstitutional. It's true that when you defend civil liberties you are typically defending people who do obnoxious things... You play into their hand when you let them provoke you into overdoing it. I don't want these thugs to [make the] claim [that] America is hypocritical." The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People scored him at 100% in 2006 indicating a pro-affirmative-action stance.

In 2007 Frank co-sponsored the "Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act" (S.2521/H.R.4838) to "provide benefits to domestic partners of Federal employees". The same year he co-sponsored the "Equal Rights Amendment" (S.J.RES.10/H.J.RES.40) to "strengthen the ongoing efforts of women across the country to obtain equal treatment." In 2009 he signed bills recognizing the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and the 100th anniversary of the NAACP.

Drug issues and medical marijuana

In 2001 Frank authored of the States' Rights to Medical Marijuana Act (H.R. 2592), an attempt to stop federal government from preempting states' medical marijuana laws. He has consistently voted for the bipartisan Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment, annually proposed by Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), that would prohibit the United States Department of Justice from prosecuting medical marijuana patients. In March 2008, he proposed the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2008 (HR 5843), which would have decriminalized small amounts of the drug but died in committee during the 110th Congress. On June 18, 2009 he re-introduced the bill as the Personal Use of Marijuana by Responsible Adults Act of 2009 (HR 2943). Commenting on legislation to remove federal criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use, Frank stated "In a free society a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices." In 2003 he was rated "A" by Vote Hemp, indicating a pro-hemp voting record. In 2006 he was rated "+30" by NORML, indicating a pro-drug-reform stance. In 2007 he co-sponsored the "Drug Sentencing Reform & Kingpin Trafficking Act" ((S.1711) 07-S1711) to "target cocaine kingpins and address sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine". In 2008 Frank sponsored "Removing Impediments to Students Education" (RISE) ((H.R.5157) 08-HR5157) to allow rehabilitated drug offenders to get student loans.

In 2009 Frank signed the "Community AIDS and Hepatitis Prevention Act" (HR 179 2009-H179) to "use Federal funds for syringe exchange programs for purposes of reducing the transmission of bloodborne pathogens, including HIV and viral hepatitis" and the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009 (H.R.1866 2009-H1866) to "grant each state regulating authority for the growing and processing of industrial hemp."

Crime

In 2000 Frank was rated at 89% by Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants indicating pro-rehabilitation crime votes. He co-sponsored "Innocence Protection Act of 2001" (H.R. 912, S.486) to "reduce the risk that innocent persons may be executed [by examining DNA evidence more thoroughly]" and the "National Death Penalty Moratorium Act of 2001" (H.R.1038, S.233) to limit capital punishment until the National Commission on the Death Penalty reviewed the "fairness of the imposition of the death penalty". In 2001 he also co-sponsored the "Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act" (01-HR1343) to "provide Federal assistance to States and local jurisdictions to prosecute hate crimes." Frank co-sponsored the "Recidivism Reduction and Second Chance Act of 2007" to reducing recidivism. (this became Public Law No: 110-199).

Environment

In 1993 he co-sponsored "Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments" (H.R.3392) to regulate more contaminants under the Clean Water Act. In 2001 Frank co-sponsored the "National Forest Protection and Restoration Act" (H.R.1494) to "prohibiting commercial logging on Federal public lands". In 2003 he was rated 95% by the League of Conservation Voters indicating pro-environment votes. In 2007 he co-sponsored the "Great Cats and Rare Canids Act" (H.R.1464) to "provide financial resources and to foster international cooperation for promoting conservation of rare felids & canids". In the same year he co-sponsored the "Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement Act" (S.261/H.R.137) to "strengthen prohibitions against animal fighting".

Economic issues

Technology

Frank is a member of the Congressional Internet Caucus established in 1996 to "promoting growth and advancement of the Internet and advance the United States' world leadership in the digital world". In 2001 he co-sponsored the "Anti-Spamming Act" (01-HR718) to protect people and businesses from "unsolicited and unwanted electronic mail". In 2006 Frank voted for the "Communications, Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act" (Bill HR 5252 Amendment 987) to "establish "network neutrality" (non-tiered Internet)." In 2008 Frank voted against the "FISA Amendments Act" (Bill HR6304) which would give retroactive immunity for those involved in the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. The same year he co-sponsored overturning FCC approval of media consolidation (S.J.RES.28&H.J.RES.79 2008-SJR28).

===Social issues===

LGBT issues

Frank has been outspoken on many civil rights issues, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. In 1987, he publicly came out as gay. In 1990, Frank was instrumental in crafting the 1990 Immigration Act, which restated the reasons for which a person could be denied entry into the country. The act did not include "sexual preference exclusion[s]", reforming earlier immigration law which allowed persons to be excluded for a sexual deviance "afflict[ion]". He said in a 1996 interview: "I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority." In 1995, then-Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey famously referred to Frank as "Barney Fag" in a press interview. Armey apologized and said it was "a slip of the tongue". Frank did not accept Armey's explanation, saying "I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag." In 1998, Frank founded the National Stonewall Democrats, the national LGBT Democratic organization.

In 2006, Frank and incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were accused by Rep. John Hostettler (R-IN) of having a "radical homosexual agenda"; Frank responded "I do have things I would like to see adopted on behalf of LGBT people: they include the right to marry the individual of our choice; the right to serve in the military to defend our country; and the right to a job based solely on our own qualifications. I acknowledge that this is an agenda, but I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people's rights to get married, join the army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform." Frank's stance on outing gay Republicans has been called the "Frank Rule" whereby a closeted person who uses their power, position, or notoriety to hurt LGBT people can be outed. The issue became relevant during the Mark Foley scandal of 2006, during which Frank clarified his position on HBO's ''Real Time with Bill Maher'': "I think there's a right to privacy. But the right to privacy should not be a right to hypocrisy. And people who want to demonize other people shouldn't then be able to go home and close the door and do it themselves."

In February 2009, Frank was one of three openly gay members of Congress, along with Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Jared Polis of Colorado. In April 2009 Frank was named in the LGBT magazine ''Out'''s "Annual Power 50 List", landing at the top spot.

In 2006 the Human Rights Campaign scored him at 100% indicating a pro-gay-rights stance.

Online gambling

Frank has partnered with Ron Paul in support of online gambling rights. In 2006, both strongly opposed H.R. 4777, the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, and H.R. 4411, the Goodlatte-Leach Internet Gambling Prohibition Act. To restore online gambling rights, in 2007 Frank sponsored H.R. 2046, the Internet Gambling Regulation and Enforcement Act. This bill would have established licensing and regulation of online gaming sites. It provided for age verification and protections for compulsive gamblers. In 2008, he and Paul introduced H.R. 5767, the Payment Systems Protection Act, a bill that sought to place a moratorium on enforcement of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 while the United States Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve defined "unlawful Internet gambling". As a result of these efforts, Frank (who does not gamble) has been praised by poker players and online gamblers, including many Republicans.

Abortion

In 2009 Frank had a 100% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America indicating a pro-choice voting record. He voted against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, against the Unborn Victims of Violence Act and against restrictions on the transportation of minors across state lines by non-family members to circumvent local abortion laws. In 1993 Frank co-sponsored the "Freedom of Choice Act" (H.R.25) (1993-H25) to "protect the reproductive rights of women". In 2006 he co-sponsored the "Compassionate Assistance for Rape Emergencies Act" (S.3945) 06-S3945), a bill for "emergency contraception for rape victims". In 2007 his co-sponsored the "Compassionate Care for Servicewomen Act" (S.1800 & HR.2064) (07-HR2064) to "providing emergency contraception at military facilities"; the "Prevention First Act" (S.21&H.R.463 2009-S21) to "expand access to preventive health care services that help reduce unintended pregnancy, reduce abortions, and improve access to women's health care".

Military issues

In 1996 Frank co-sponsored the "Federal Law Enforcement Dependents Assistance Act" (H.R.4111. Became Public Law No: 104-238.) to "to provide educational assistance to the dependents of Federal law enforcement officials who are killed or disabled in the performance of their duties." In 2001 Frank co-sponsored "the MX Missile Stand-Down Act" (01-HR2718) to take fifty peacekeeper missiles off of high-alert status and he co-sponsored the Landmine Elimination and Victim Assistance Act (01-HR948). As of December 2003 Frank has a 89% rating by Peace Action, indicating a pro-peace voting record. In 2005 he co-sponsored "Rail Security Act" (S.1379/H.R.153) (05-S1379) giving higher priority to rail transportation security. In 2008 he co-sponsored the "Veterans Suicide Study Act" ( (S.2899/H.R.4204) 08-S2899) designed to study and address suicides among veterans. As of the 111th Congress, Frank is advocating a 25 percent reduction in the overall Military budget of the United States. "The math is compelling: if we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity...," wrote Frank. He claimed that such a significant reduction would have no effect on the United States' ability to defend itself. "If," he said, "beginning one year from now, we were to cut military spending by 25 percent from its projected levels, we would still be immeasurably stronger than any combination of nations with whom we might be engaged." Frank supports having fewer F-35 Joint Strike Fighter planes, but also supports a $3 billion backup engine project that the Pentagon does not want. Frank told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann that he actually wanted to cut the entire F-35 program, but as long as military spending continued he would fight for his district's share of it.

House Financial Services Committee

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

In 2003, while the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, Frank opposed a Bush administration proposal, in response to accounting scandals, for transferring oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from Congress and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to a new agency that would be created within the Treasury Department. The proposal, supported by the head of Fannie Mae, reflected the administration's belief that Congress "neither has the tools, nor the stature" for adequate oversight. Frank stated, "These two entities ...are not facing any kind of financial crisis ... The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing." In 2003, Frank also stated what has been called his "famous dice roll": "I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness [in the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] that we have in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidised housing."

Frank was criticized by conservative organizations for campaign contributions totaling $42,350 between 1989 and 2008. Bill Sammon, the Washington managing editor for Fox News Channel, claimed the donations from Fannie and Freddie influenced his support of their lending programs, and said that Frank did not play a strong enough role in reforming the institutions in the years leading up to the Economic crisis of 2008. In 2006 a Fannie Mae representative stated in SEC filings that they "did not participate in large amounts of these non-traditional mortgages in 2004 and 2005." In response to criticism, Frank said, "In 2004, it was Bush who started to push Fannie and Freddie into subprime mortgages, because they were boasting about how they were expanding homeownership for low-income people. And I said at the time, 'Hey — (a) this is going to jeopardize their profitability, but (b) it's going to put people in homes they can't afford, and they're gonna lose them.'"

In 2009 Frank responded to what he called "wholly inaccurate efforts by Republicans to blame Democrats, and [me] in particular" for the subprime mortgage crisis, which is linked to the financial crisis of 2007–2009. He outlined his efforts to reform these institutions and add regulations, but met resistance from Republicans, with the main exception being a bill with Republican Mike Oxley that died because of opposition from President Bush. The 2005 bill included Frank objectives, which were to impose tighter regulation of Fannie and Freddie and new funds for rental housing. Frank and Mike Oxley achieved broad bipartisan support for the bill in the Financial Services Committee, and it passed the House. But the Senate never voted on the measure, in part because President Bush was likely to veto it. "If it had passed, that would have been one of the ways we could have reined in the bowling ball going downhill called housing," Oxley told Frank. In an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence B. Lindsey, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote that Frank "is the only politician I know who has argued that we needed tighter rules that intentionally produce fewer homeowners and more renters." Once control shifted to the Democrats, Frank was able to help guide both the Federal Housing Reform Act (H.R. 1427) and the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act (H.R. 3915) to passage in 2007. Frank also said that the Republican-led Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 and removed the wall between commercial and investment banks, contributed to the financial meltdown. Frank further stated that "during twelve years of Republican rule no reform was adopted regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2007, a few months after I became the Chairman, the House passed a strong reform bill; we sought to get the [Bush] administration's approval to include it in the economic stimulus legislation in January 2008; and finally got it passed and onto President Bush's desk in July 2008. Moreover, "we were able to adopt it in nineteen months, and we could have done it much quicker if the [Bush] administration had cooperated."

Chair of the House Financial Services Committee

[[Image:Congressmen Ellison & Frank at Financial Services Field Hearing on Home Foreclosures in Minneapolis.jpg|thumb|Congressmen

Ellison & Frank at Financial Services Field Hearing on Home Foreclosures in Minneapolis.]] As former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, beginning in 2007, Frank was "at the center of power". Frank has been a critic of aspects of the Federal Reserve system, partnering with some Republicans in opposition to some policies. Frank says that he and Republican Congressman Ron Paul "first bonded because we were both conspicuous nonworshipers at the Temple of the Fed and of the High Priest Alan Greenspan."

Frank has been involved in mortgage foreclosure bailout issues. In 2008 Frank supported passage of the American Housing Rescue & Foreclosure Prevention Act, intended to protect thousands of homeowners from foreclosure. This law, , is considered one of the most important and complex issues on which he worked. In an August 2007 op-ed piece in ''Financial Times'', Frank wrote, "In the debate between those who believe in essentially unregulated markets and others who hold that reasonable regulation diminishes market excesses without inhibiting their basic function, the subprime situation unfortunately provides ammunition for the latter view." Frank was also instrumental in the passage of , the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights Act of 2008, a measure that drew praise from editorial boards and consumer advocates. In 2007 Frank co-sponsored legislation to reform the Section 202 refinancing program, which is for affordable housing for the elderly, and Section 811 disabled programs. Frank has been a chief advocate of the National Housing Trust Fund, which was created as part of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 and was the first affordable housing program to be enacted by the Congress since 1990.

During the subprime mortgage crisis, Frank was characterized as "a key deal-maker, an unlikely bridge between his party's left-wing base and [...] free market conservatives" in the Bush administration. Hank Paulson, the U.S. Treasury Secretary for the Bush administration, said he enjoyed Frank's penchant for brokering deals, "he is looking to get things done and make a difference, he focuses on areas of agreement and tries to build on those."

''The New York Times'' noted that the Federal Housing Administration's crucial role in the nation's housing market, providing low-down-payment mortgages during the crisis of 2007–2010 when no mortgages would otherwise have been available, "helped avert full-scale disaster" by helping people purchase or refinance homes and thereby putting a floor under falling home prices. However, due to the tighter flow of credit from the banks, total FHA loans in 2009 were four times that of 2006, raising concern that year that if the economy were to dip back into recession, more Fed funds could be required to keep those loans afloat. Frank's response was that the additional defaults — 2.2% more of the total portfolio in 2009 than the year before — were worth the economic stabilization of the broader policy, noting "It was an effort to keep prices from falling too fast." In that context, he opined, "I don't think it's a bad thing that the bad loans occurred." In fact, the unprecedented number of loans made since 2008 were noted to be performing far better than those in the prior two years.

Personal life

According to Stuart Weisberg's 2009 biography ''Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman'', Frank dated women in an effort to deny his homosexuality. His last romance with a woman was a nearly two-year long affair with Irish-American Catholic Kathleen Sullivan, the daughter of New England Patriots owner Billy Sullivan, that began in 1974. When the two split up, at Frank's instigation, he admitted to her that he was gay. He was still closeted publicly.

According to Frank, he "realized it was crazy" to try to have a romance with someone he cared for but was not compatible with due to his homosexuality. "That was the last effort to avoid being gay," Weisber quotes Frank as saying. Frank never again dated a woman.

Frank started coming out as gay to friends before he ran for Congress and came out publicly in 1987, "prompted in part by increased media interest in his private life" and the death of Stewart McKinney, "a closeted bisexual Republican representative from Connecticut"; Frank told ''The Washington Post'' after McKinney's death there was "An unfortunate debate about 'Was he or wasn't he? Didn't he or did he?' I said to myself, I don't want that to happen to me." Frank's announcement had little impact on his electoral prospects. Shortly after coming out, Frank met and began dating Herb Moses, an economist and LGBT activist; their relationship lasted for eleven years until an amicable break-up in July 1998. Moses, who was an executive at Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, was the first partner of an openly gay member of Congress to receive spousal benefits and the two were considered "Washington's most powerful and influential gay couple." , Frank's net worth is estimated by the Center for Responsive Politics at $1.88 to $4.74 million. His sister, Ann Lewis, served as a senior adviser in Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.

Books

Weisberg, Stuart ''Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman'', University of Massachusetts Press (2009), ISBN 978-1558497214

Bibliography

''Financing Foreign Aid: A Case Study in the Budgetary Process.'' (1962)

''Budget for a Strong America'' (1989)

''Speaking Frankly: What's Wrong with the Democrats and how to Fix it'' (1992)

Notes

References

External links

Congressman Barney Frank ''official U.S. House site''

Barney Frank for Congress ''official campaign site''

Profile at SourceWatch

Articles

Johansson, Warren & Percy, William A. ''Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence.'' Harrington Park Press, 1994. pp. 106, 139, 143, 154, 157, 188–9, 228, 231, 235, 291

A Liberal Wit Builds Bridges To the G.O.P., ''The New York Times'', May 13, 2008.

Congressman Frank defends trans-exclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act, ''The Bilerico Project'', September 28, 2007.

The Republicans' Democracy Disorder, ''In These Times'', 2006-02-04

Congressman Barney Frank: A Buzzflash Interview, ''Buzzflash'', July 22, 2003

Monumentally Frank: Interview with Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank ''Metro Weekly'', March 20, 2003.

Frank Discusses U.S. Policy, Attitude Regarding Gay Rights, ''The Hoya'', October 19, 2001.

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Name	James Madison
Office	4th President of the United States
Vicepresident	George ClintonElbridge Gerry
Term start	March 4, 1809
Term end	March 4, 1817
Predecessor	Thomas Jefferson
Successor	James Monroe
Office2	5th United States Secretary of State
President2	Thomas Jefferson
Term start2	May 2, 1801
Term end2	March 3, 1809
Predecessor2	John Marshall
Successor2	Robert Smith
State3	Virginia
District3	15th
Term start3	March 4, 1793
Term end3	March 3, 1797
Predecessor3	Constituency established
Successor3	John Dawson
State4	Virginia
District4	5th
Term start4	March 4, 1789
Term end4	March 3, 1793
Predecessor4	Constituency established
Successor4	George Hancock
Birth date	March 16, 1751
Birth place	Port Conway, Virginia Colony
Death date	June 28, 1836
Death place	Montpelier, Virginia, U.S.
Party	Democratic-Republican Party
Spouse	Dolley Todd
Children	John (Stepson)
Alma mater	Princeton University
Profession	Planter
Signature	James Madison sig.svg
Signature alt	Cursive signature in ink }}

James Madison, Jr. (March 16, 1751 – June 28, 1836) was an American statesman and political theorist. He was the fourth President of the United States (1809–1817) and is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution” for being the primary author of the United States Constitution and the author of the United States Bill of Rights.

His collaboration with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay produced the ''Federalist Papers'' (1788), which became the most influential explanation and defense of the Constitution after its publication. Madison's most distinctive belief as a political theorist was the principle of divided power. Madison believed that "parchment barriers" were not sufficient to protect the rights of citizens. Power must be divided, both between federal and state governments (federalism), and within the federal government (checks and balances) to protect individual rights from the tyranny of the majority.

Madison in 1789 became a leader in the new House of Representatives, drafting many basic laws. In one of his most famous roles, he drafted the first ten amendments to the Constitution and thus is known as the "Father of the Bill of Rights". Madison worked closely with the President George Washington to organize the new federal government. Breaking with Hamilton and what became the Federalist party in 1791, Madison and Thomas Jefferson organized what they called the Republican Party (later called by historians the Democratic-Republican Party) in opposition to key policies of the Federalists, especially the national bank and the Jay Treaty. He co-authored, along with Thomas Jefferson, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798 to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts.

As Jefferson’s Secretary of State (1801–1809), Madison supervised the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the nation’s size. As president, after the failure of diplomatic protests and an embargo, he led the nation into the War of 1812, in response to British encroachments on American rights. The war started badly but ended well, allowing Americans to celebrate a second war for independence. Madison was persuaded by his observations of the war to support a stronger national government and he called for a national bank of the sort he had long opposed.

Early life

James Madison was born at Belle Grove Plantation near Port Conway, Virginia on March 16, 1751, (March 5, 1751, Old Style, Julian calendar). He grew up as the oldest of twelve children, of whom nine survived. His father, James Madison, Sr., (1723–1801) was a tobacco planter who grew up on an estate in Orange County, Virginia, which he inherited on reaching maturity. He later acquired still more property and, with , became the largest landowner and leading citizen of Orange County. His mother, Nelly Conway Madison (1731–1829), was born at Port Conway, Virginia, the daughter of a prominent planter and tobacco merchant. Madison's parents married in 1743. Both parents had a significant influence over their most famous oldest son.

Madison had three brothers and three sisters who lived to maturity (by whom he had more than 30 nieces and nephews).

Education

From ages 11 to 16, A young "Jemmy" Madison studied under Donald Robertson, an instructor at the Innes plantation in King and Queen County, Virginia. Robertson was a Scottish teacher who flourished in the southern states. From Robertson, Madison learned mathematics, geography, and modern and ancient languages. He became especially proficient in Latin. Madison said that he owed his bent for learning "largely to that man (Robertson)."

At age 16, he began a two-year course of study under the Reverend Thomas Martin, who tutored Madison at Montpelier in preparation for college. Unlike most college-bound Virginians of his day, Madison did not choose the College of William and Mary because the lowland climate of Williamsburg might have strained his delicate health. Instead, in 1769 he enrolled at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).

Through diligence and long hours of study that may have damaged his health, Madison graduated in 1771. His studies there included Latin, Greek, science, geography, mathematics, rhetoric, and philosophy. Great emphasis also was placed on speech and debate. After graduation, Madison remained at Princeton to study Hebrew and political philosophy under university president John Witherspoon before returning to Montpelier in the spring of 1772. Afterwards, he knew Hebrew quite well. Madison studied law, but out of his interest in public policy, not with the intent of practicing law as a profession.

Marriage and family

James Madison married Dolley Payne Todd, a widow, on September 15, 1794, in what is now Jefferson County, West Virginia. Madison adopted Todd's one surviving son, John Payne Todd, after the marriage. Dolley Payne had been born May 20, 1768, at the New Garden Quaker settlement in North Carolina, where her parents, John Payne and Mary Coles Payne, lived briefly. Dolley's sister (Lucy Payne) had married George Steptoe Washington, a nephew of President Washington.

As a member of Congress, Madison had doubtless met the widow Todd at social functions in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital. In May 1794, he took formal notice of her by asking their mutual friend Aaron Burr to arrange a meeting. The encounter apparently went smoothly for a brisk courtship followed, and by August she had accepted his proposal of marriage. For marrying Madison, a non-Quaker, she was expelled from the Society of Friends.

Early political career

As a young man, Madison witnessed the persecution of Baptist preachers arrested for preaching without a license from the established Anglican Church. He worked with the preacher Elijah Craig on constitutional guarantees for religious liberty in Virginia. Working on such cases helped form his ideas about religious freedom. Madison served in the Virginia state legislature (1776–79) and became known as a protégé of Thomas Jefferson. He attained prominence in Virginia politics, helping to draft the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. It disestablished the Church of England and disclaimed any power of state compulsion in religious matters. He excluded Patrick Henry's plan to compel citizens to pay for a congregation of their own choice.

Madison's cousin, the Right Reverend James Madison (1749–1812), became president of the College of William & Mary in 1777. Working closely with Madison and Jefferson, Bishop Madison helped lead the College through the difficult changes involving separation from both Great Britain and the Church of England. He also led college and state actions that resulted in the formation of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia after the Revolution.

James Madison persuaded Virginia to give up its claims to northwestern territories—consisting of most of modern-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota—to the Continental Congress, which created the Northwest Territory in 1783. These land claims overlapped partially with other claims by Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and possibly others. All of these states ceded their westernmost lands, with the understanding that new states could be formed from the land, as they were. As a delegate to the Continental Congress (1780–83), Madison was considered a legislative workhorse and a master of parliamentary coalition building. He was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates for a second time from 1784 to 1786.

Father of the Constitution

The Constitution is significant not only as a founding charter of the United States, and as a bulwark of freedom, but also in that the underlying assumptions are different from what preceded it. In the case of the Magna Carta the barons went to the king and demanded that he grant them rights. In the Constitution, the assumption is that the people already have those rights. Madison and the other Founders referred to them as natural rights, in that they are inherent and universal to all men and not granted or conceded by the state or any other power.

“We the People” would found the government and specify exactly what powers it would have, not the other way around. This was upside down from what had been the norm in world history.

Prior to the Constitution, the 13 states were bound together by the Articles of Confederation, which was essentially a military alliance between them used to fight the Revolutionary War. It didn’t work particularly well, and after the war was over, it worked even less well. Congress had no power to tax, and as a result was not paying the debts left over from the Revolution. Madison and other leaders, such as Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were very concerned about this. They feared a break-up of the union and national bankruptcy.

As Madison wrote, “a crisis had arrived which was to decide whether the American experiment was to be a blessing to the world, or to blast for ever the hopes which the republican cause had inspired.” Largely at Madison’s instigation, a national convention was called in 1787. Madison was the only delegate to arrive with a comprehensive plan as to how to solve the problems of the Articles. His plan became known as the Virginia Plan. The Virginia Plan immediately became the focus of all debate, and is the basis of the U.S. Constitution today.

The key element of the Constitution is divided power. Having just fought an eight-and-a-half-year war (the Revolutionary War) to get rid of too much concentrated power (a king), the Framers had no interest in recreating that, even with an elected government. So, they divided power. They divided power between the federal government and the state governments. And, they divided power within the federal government, forming three branches.

The powers of Congress (in other words, federal powers) are enumerated (i.e., listed) in Article I, Section 8. All other powers are state powers or individual citizen powers. This is reiterated in the Bill of Rights (the 10th Amendment).

As Madison wrote, “The federal and state governments are in fact but different agents and trustees for the people, instituted with different powers, and designated for different purposes.”

Madison expressed the overall challenge the Framers faced in this way, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

Madison was the best-prepared delegate to come to the Constitutional Convention. In preparation for creating the Virginia Plan, he poured over crates of books that Jefferson sent him from France on every form of government ever tried. Historian Douglas Adair called Madison’s work “probably the most fruitful piece of scholarly research ever carried out by an American.”

Madison was a leader in initiating the Constitutional Convention, and he was the leading figure in it. Madison spoke over 200 times, and his fellow delegates rated him highly. For example, William Pierce wrote that “…every Person seems to acknowledge his greatness. In the management of every great question he evidently took the lead in the Convention … he always comes forward as the best informed Man of any point in debate.” Historian Clinton Rossiter regarded Madison’s performance as “a combination of learning, experience, purpose, and imagination that not even Adams or Jefferson could have equaled.”

Federalist Papers

The Constitution as it came out of the convention in Philadelphia was just a proposal. It would have no effect until ratified by “We the People.” It was not ratified by the state legislatures. It was ratified by special conventions called in each state to decide that sole question – do we want to adopt this document, or don’t we?

Madison was a leader in the ratification effort. He, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay wrote the ''Federalist Papers,'' which were a series of 85 newspaper articles which were published throughout the 13 states to explain how the proposed Constitution would work. They were also published in book form and became a virtual debater’s handbook for the supporters of the Constitution in the ratifying conventions.

Historian Clinton Rossiter called the ''Federalist Papers'' “the most important work in political science that ever has been written, or is likely ever to be written, in the United States.”

The ratification effort was not easy. Having just gotten rid to too much concentrated, centralized power, the states were leery of creating a powerful central government. Patrick Henry, who opposed the Constitution, feared that it would trample on the independence of the states and the rights of citizens. In the Virginia ratifying convention, Madison, who was a terrible public speaker, had to go up against Henry, who was the finest orator in the country.

Virginia was one of the largest and most populous states. If Virginia didn’t ratify the Constitution, it would not succeed. Even though Henry was by far the more powerful and dramatic speaker, Madison won the debate with facts. Madison pointed out that it was a limited government that would be created, and that the powers delegated ‘to the federal government are few and defined.”

Madison was given the honor of being called the “Father of the Constitution” by his peers in his own lifetime. However, he was modest, and he protested the title as being "a credit to which I have no claim... The Constitution was not, like the fabled Goddess of Wisdom, the offspring of a single brain. It ought to be regarded as the work of many heads and many hands".

He wrote Hamilton at the New York ratifying convention, stating his opinion that "ratification was ''in toto'' and 'for ever'". The Virginia convention had considered conditional ratification worse than a rejection.

Author of Bill of Rights

Initially Madison "adamantly maintained ... that a specific bill of rights remained unnecessary because the Constitution itself was a bill of rights." Madison had three main objections to a specific bill of rights: # It was unnecessary, since it purported to protect against powers that the federal government had not been granted; # It was dangerous, since enumeration of some rights might be taken to imply the absence of other rights; and # At the state level, bills of rights had proven to be useless paper barriers against government powers. However, the anti-Federalists demanded a bill of rights in exchange for their support for ratification. Madison initially opposed the idea for the reasons stated above, but won the day for the Constitution by promising to add a bill of rights, and he came to be the author of it.

A vengeful Patrick Henry used his power to keep the Virginia legislature from appointing Madison as one of the state’s senators. Henry even gerrymandered Madison’s home district, filling it with anti-federalists, in an attempt to prevent Madison from becoming a Congressman. Madison managed to win anyway, and became an important leader in Congress.

People submitted more than 200 amendment proposals from across the new nation. Some urged Madison to forget about creating a bill of rights now that the country was up and running, but he kept his promise. He synthesized the proposals into a list of 12 proposed amendments and even “hounded his colleagues relentlessly” to accept the proposed amendments.

Madison felt strongly that federal powers were limited by enumerating (making a list of) them (Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution). Anything not on the list was not a federal power. So then, by creating a bill of rights, the same would apply. Anything not on the list would be excluded.

However, he also felt, as other Founders did, that Americans have countless natural rights – too many to put on a list. For example, the right to travel freely throughout the country, the right to have children, the right to sign a contract, the right to own land, etc. (none of which are listed in the Bill of Rights). How then to respond to the public clamor for a bill of rights? There would not be enough paper to list them all.

Madison solved this dilemma with the 9th Amendment, which says that just because the Bill of Rights didn’t list them all does not mean that other rights of the people don’t exist.

By 1791, the last ten of Madison’s proposed amendments were ratified and became the Bill of Rights. Contrary to his wishes, the Bill of Rights was not integrated into the main body of the Constitution, and it did not apply to the states until the passages of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments restricted the powers of the states. The Second Amendment originally proposed by Madison (but not then ratified) was later ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution. The remaining proposal was intended to accommodate future increase in the members of the House of Representatives.

Opposition to Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton was a loose constructionist who said the Constitution was designed to enable a government to operate, using implied powers. Madison and Jefferson were strict constructionists who wanted the text of the document to be construed to give the federal government less power.

To Madison, the Constitution was written as a social compact in which “We the People” granted specific, limited powers to the federal government, as enumerated (i.e., listed) in Article I, Section 8. All other powers are reserved to the states or the people themselves.

Hamiltonians argued that the “general welfare” clause in the preamble was a general grant of power to the federal government for axrion to benefit the general welfare of the country. The Madisonians countered that it would be an absurdity to have bothered to write up a specific list of federal powers if the preamble was to be considered a general grant power. Also, the preamble’s words were taken from the Articles of Confederation, and no one had ever interpreted that to have been a general grant of power.

The Hamiltonians focused on the “necessary and proper” clause. For example, since Article I, Section 8 grants the federal government the power to tax, and a national bank would make it easier to collect taxes, then by the “necessary and proper” clause, a national bank was constitutional. The Madisonians said no--“necessary and proper,” was not “convenient and proper.” It may be more convenient to collect taxes with a national bank, but it is not necessary.

Both sides were inconsistent in the debates. Hamilton was consistently in favor of enlarging federal powers, and was more than willing to interpret the Constitution loosely to achieve this end.

Madison, had actually argued for additional federal powers in the Constitutional Convention, but was willing to live with the Constitution as adopted and ratified. He considered the Constitution to be a social compact between the people and their government, and that fidelity to that agreement was critical to preventing abuse by officeholders.

Ron Chernow finds Hamilton more consistent than Madison; Gary Rosen, find the opposite.

Some historians feel that the chief characteristic of Madison's time in Congress was his work to limit the power of the federal government. Wood (2006a) argued that Madison never wanted a national government that took an active role. He was horrified to discover that Hamilton and Washington were creating "a real modern European type of government with a bureaucracy, a standing army, and a powerful independent executive". Chernow argues that "for Madison, Hamilton was becoming the official voice of wealthy aristocrats who were grabbing the reins of federal power. Madison felt betrayed by Hamilton but it was Madison who had deviated from their former reading of the Constitution." Specifically, while Madison wrote in the ''Federalist'' number 44 that "No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power for doing it is included", he opposed Hamilton's attempts to use article 1, section 8 of the Constitution in this way.

Debates on foreign policy

When Britain and France went to war in 1793 the U.S. was caught in the middle. The 1778 treaty of alliance with France was still in effect, yet most of the new country's trade was with Britain. War with Britain seemed imminent in 1794, as the British seized hundreds of American ships that were trading with French colonies. Madison believed that Britain was weak and America was strong, and that a trade war with Britain, although risking a real war by the British government, probably would succeed, and would allow Americans to assert their independence fully. Great Britain, he charged, "has bound us in commercial manacles, and very nearly defeated the object of our independence." As Varg explains, Madison discounted the much more powerful British army and navy for "her interests can be wounded almost mortally, while ours are invulnerable." The British West Indies, Madison maintained, could not live without American foodstuffs, but Americans could easily do without British manufactures. This faith led him to the conclusion "that it is in our power, in a very short time, to supply all the tonnage necessary for our own commerce". However, George Washington avoided a trade war and instead secured friendly trade relations with Britain through the Jay Treaty of 1794. Madison threw his energies into fighting the Treaty--his mobilization of grass roots support helped form the First Party System. He failed in both Senate and House, and the Jay Treaty led to ten years of prosperous trade with Britain (and anger on the part of France leading to the Quasi-War) All across the land voters divided for and against the Treaty and other key issues, and thus became either Federalists or Jeffersonian Republicans.

First Party System

Hamilton built a nationwide network of Treasury supporters that became the Federalist Party and promoted a strong central government with a national bank. To oppose the Federalists, Madison and Jefferson organized the Republican Party. Madison led the unsuccessful attempt to block Hamilton's proposed Bank of the United States, arguing the new Constitution did not explicitly allow the federal government to form a bank. As early as May 26, 1792, Hamilton complained, "Mr. Madison cooperating with Mr. Jefferson is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration." On May 5, 1792, Madison told Washington, "with respect to the spirit of party that was taking place ...I was sensible of its existence".

Adams years

In 1798 under President John Adams the U.S. and France unofficially went to war--the Quasi War, that involved naval warships and commercial vessels battling in the Caribbean. The Federalists created a standing army and passed laws against French refugees engaged in American politics and against Republican editors. Congressman Madison and Vice President Jefferson were outraged. Madison secretly drafted a resolution for Virginia declaring the Alien and Sedition Acts to be unconstitutional and noted that "states, in contesting obnoxious laws, should 'interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.'" This, according to Chernow, "was a breathtaking evolution for a man who had pleaded at the Constitutional Convention that the federal government should possess a veto over state laws."

Some historians argue that Madison changed radically from a nationally oriented ally of Hamilton in 1787–88 to a states'-rights–oriented opponent of a strong national government by 1795 and then back to his original view while president. Madison started the first transition by opposing Hamilton;, Madison opposed legislation that to his mind was clearly unconstitutional, such as Hamilton's proposed National Bank. He also opposed the federal assumption of state debts and the Jay Treaty, which many (including Washington), considered to be poorly negotiated. Madison succeeded in blocking a proposal for high tariffs.

Most historians say that Madison abandoned strict constructionism in 1815, saying that it was not the text of the Constitution that mattered but the expressed will of the people. Despite attacks by "Quids" or "Old Republicans" such as John Randolph of Roanoke who still held to strict constructionism, Madison now favored a national bank, a standing professional army and a federal program of internal improvements as advocated by Henry Clay.

Chernow feels that Madison's politics remained closely aligned with Jefferson's until the experience of a weak national government during the War of 1812 caused Madison to appreciate the need for a strong central government to aid national defense. He then began to support a national bank, a stronger navy, and a standing army. However, other historians, such as Gary Rosen, Lance Banning and Gordon S. Wood, see Madison's views as being remarkably consistent over a political career spanning half a century.

United States Secretary of State 1801–1809

The main challenge which faced the Jefferson Administration was navigating between the two great empires of Britain and France, which were almost constantly at war. The first great triumph was the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, made possible when Napoleon realized he could not defend that vast territory, and it was to France's advantage that Britain not seize it.

Some historians, such as Ron Chernow, are quick to accuse Madison and President Jefferson of ignoring their "strict construction" view of the Constitution to take advantage of the opportunity. Jefferson would have preferred to have a constitutional amendment authorizing the purchase (in line with his strict-constructionist philosophy). However, Madison pointed out that it wasn't necessary, even under a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Countries acquire territory in one of two ways: by conquest or by treaty. The Louisiana Purchase is a treaty (in other words, a contract between nations). Presidents are specifically authorized by the Constitution to negotiate treaties (Article II, Section 2), which is what Jefferson did. Recognizing the Louisiana Purchase as the land bargain of the century, the Senate quickly ratified the treaty. The House, with equal alacrity, passed enabling legislation. Each branch of government performed its role as specified in the Constitution.

In the wars raging in Europe Madison tried to maintain neutrality between Britain and France, but at the same time insisted on the legal rights of the U.S. as a neutral under international law. Neither London nor Paris showed much respect, however. Madison and Jefferson decided on an embargo to punish Britain and France, forbidding Americans to trade with any foreign nation. The embargo failed as foreign policy, and instead caused massive hardships up and down the seaboard, which depended on foreign trade. The Federalist made a comeback in the Northeast by attacking the Embargo, which was allowed to expire just as Jefferson was leaving office.

At the start of his term as Secretary of State he was a party to the Supreme Court case Marbury v. Madison, in which the doctrine of judicial review was asserted by the high Court, much to the annoyance of the Jeffersonians who did not want an independent, powerful judiciary.

The party's Congressional Caucus chose presidential candidates, and Madison was selected in the election of 1808, easily defeating Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.

Presidency 1809–1817

Bank of the United States

The twenty-year charter of the first Bank of the United States was scheduled to expire in 1811, the second year of Madison's administration. Madison failed in blocking the Bank in 1791, and waited for its charter to expire. Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin said the bank was a necessity; when he had to finance the War of 1812 he discovered how difficult it was to finance the war without the Bank. Congress passed a bill chartering a second national bank in 1814, which Madison vetoed, because of the particulars of the legislation, rather than constitutional grounds.

The next year, in his annual address, Madison stated that a national bank might “deserve consideration.” Congress passed such legislation, which Madison signed. His strict-constructionist views were still firmly intact, but he acquiesced on the bank issue because it had “undergone ample discussions in its passage through the several branches of the Government. It had been carried into execution throughout a period of twenty years with annual legislative recognition…and with the entire acquiescence of all the local authorities, as well as of the nation at large; to all of which may be added, a decreasing prospect of any change in the public opinion adverse to the constitutionality of such an institution.”

Madison’s primary concern was that the Constitution would achieve the veneration he felt it deserved, and that the original understanding of its meaning by the ratifying conventions would be preserved. The Hamiltonians’ loose interpretation of the Constitution’s “general welfare clause” and “necessary and proper clause” had been the biggest threat to this.

However, time had passed, the Democratic-Republicans had occupied the White House for four terms (Jefferson for two, and Madison for two), and Alexander Hamilton was dead. Hamilton’s political party, the Federalist Party, was on its way out of existence. Madison felt he could safely sign the bank bill (creating the Second Bank of the United States) without causing a fundamental change in constitutional meaning.

War of 1812

British insults continued. Britain used her navy to prevent American ships from trading with France (with which Britain was at war). The United States, which was a neutral nation, considered this act to be against international law. Britain also armed Indian tribes in the Northwest Territory and encouraged them to attack settlers, even though Britain had ceded this territory to the United States by treaties in 1783 and 1794. Most insulting though was the impressment of seamen as the Royal Navy boarded American ships on the high seas. The United States looked upon this as no less an affront to American sovereignty than if the British had invaded American soil.

American diplomatic protests to Britain were ignored, and the embargo backfired, hurting the Americans more than the British. The insult to national honor was intolerable and Americans called for a "second war of independence" to restore honor and stature to the new nation. An angry public elected a “war hawk” Congress, led by such luminaries as Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. Madison asked Congress for a declaration of war, which passed along sectional and party lines, with intense opposition from the Federalists and the Northeast.

A panel of scholars in 2006 ranked Madison’s failure to avoid war as the sixth worst presidential mistake ever made.

Hurriedly Madison called on Congress to put the country “into an armor and an attitude demanded by the crisis,” specifically recommending enlarging the army, preparing the militia, finishing the military academy, stockpiling munitions, and expanding the navy. Congress voted to enlarge the army with five-year enlistments, which could not be obtained and refusedd to enlarge the navy. Madison had not made any serious war plans or built up the army. The senior command at the War Department and in the field proved incompetent or cowardly--the general at Detroit to a smaller British force without firing a shot. Gallatin at the Treasury discovered the war was almost impossible to fund since the national bank had been closed and major financiers in the Northeast refused to help. Madison believed the U.S. could easily seize Canada and thus cut off food supplies to the West Indies, making for a good bargaining ship at the peace talks. But the invasion efforts all failed. Madison had assumed the militia would rally to the flag and invade Canada, but the governors in the Northeast failed to cooperate and their militias either sat out the war or refused to leave the state.

Britain did not want war as it was heavily engaged in the Napoleonic Wars, most of the British Army was engaged in the Peninsular War (in Spain), and the Royal Navy was compelled to blockade most of the coast of Europe.Britain had only 6000 regulars in Canada, supplemented by local Canadian militia.

The war began badly for the Americans, as the British repulsed invasions of Canada and blockaded the coast (while trading extensively with disloyal elements in the Northeast). Economic hardship was severe, but entrepreneurs built factories that soon became the basis of the industrial revolution in America. The British raided Washington in 1814, as Madison headed a dispirited militia. Dolley Madison rescued White House valuables and documents in the nick of time, as the British burned the White House, the Capitol and other public buildings.

The British armed American Indians in the West, most notably followers of Tecumseh. However the British lost control of Lake Erie at the naval Battle of Lake Erie in 1813, and were forced to retreat. General William Henry Harrison caught up with them at the Battle of the Thames, destroyed the British and Indian armies, killed Tecumseh, and permanently destroyed Indian power in the Great Lakes region. Meanwhile General Andrew Jackson destroyed the Indian power in the Southeast. The Indians were the big losers in the war.

Madison faced formidable obstacles — a divided cabinet, a factious party, a recalcitrant Congress, obstructionist governors, and incompetent generals, together with militia who refused to fight outside their states. Most serious was lack of unified popular support. There were serious threats of disunion from New Britain, which engaged in massive smuggling to Canada and refused to provide financial support or soldiers. However, by 1813, the main Indian threats in the South and West had been destroyed by Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison, respectively.

Despite being a young nation without much of a military, going up against one of the superpowers of the day, the United States did better than might be expected. There were impressive naval successes by American frigates and other vessels, such as the USS ''Constitution'', USS ''United States'', USS ''Chesapeake'', USS ''Hornet'', USS ''Wasp'', and USS ''Essex''. In a famous three-hour battle with the HMS ''Java'', the USS ''Constitution'' earned her nickname, “Old Ironsides.”

The U.S. fleet on Lake Erie went up against a superior British force there and destroyed or captured the entire British Fleet on the lake. Commander Oliver Hazard Perry reported his victory with the simple statement, “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”

America had built up one of the largest merchant fleets in the world in the decade before the war. Many of these ships were authorized to become privateers in the war. They armed themselves and captured 1,800 British ships.

The courageous, successful defense of Ft. McHenry, which guarded the seaway to Baltimore, against one of the most intense naval bombardments in history (over 24 hours), led Francis Scott Key to write the poem which became the U.S. national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner.”

In New Orleans, Gen. Andrew Jackson put together a force of everyone he could find, including regular Army troops, militia, frontiersmen, Creoles, and even Jean Lafitte’s pirates. In the battle there, which took place two weeks after the peace treaty was signed (due to communication being slow), the Americans destroyed an entire British army.

The Treaty of Ghent ended the war in 1815, with no territorial gains on either side, but the Americans felt that their national honor had been restored in what has been called “the Second War of American Independence.”

Postwar

With peace finally established, the U.S. was swept by a sense that it had secured solid independence from Britain. The Federalist Party collapsed and eventually disappeared from politics, as an Era of Good Feelings emerged with a much lower level of political fear and vituperation, although political contention certainly continued.

Although Madison had accepted the necessity of a Hamiltonian national bank, an effective taxation system based on tariffs, a standing professional army and a strong navy, he drew the line at internal improvements as advocated by his Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. In his last act before leaving office, Madison vetoed on states' rights grounds the Bonus Bill of 1817 that would have financed "internal improvements," including roads, bridges, and canals:

Madison rejected the view of Congress that the General Welfare provision of the Taxing and Spending Clause justified the bill, stating:

Madison urged a variety of measures that he felt were "best executed under the national authority," including federal support for roads and canals that would "bind more closely together the various parts of our extended confederacy."

International

The Second Barbary War brought to a conclusive end the American practice of paying tribute to the pirate states in the Mediterranean and marked the beginning of the end of the age of piracy in that region.

Administration and cabinet

Clear	yes
Name	Madison
President	James Madison
President start	1809
President end	1817
Vice president	George Clinton
Vice president start	1809
Vice president end	1812
Vice president 2	Elbridge Gerry
Vice president start 2	1813
Vice president end 2	1814
State	Robert Smith
State start	1809
State end	1811
State 2	James Monroe
State start 2	1811
State end 2	1817
Treasury	Albert Gallatin
Treasury start	1809
Treasury end	1814
Treasury 2	George W. Campbell
Treasury date 2	1814
Treasury 3	Alexander J. Dallas
Treasury start 3	1814
Treasury end 3	1816
Treasury 4	William H. Crawford
Treasury start 4	1816
Treasury end 4	1817
War	William Eustis
War start	1809
War end	1813
War 2	John Armstrong, Jr.
War start 2	1813
War end 2	1814
War 3	James Monroe
War start 3	1814
War end 3	1815
War 4	William H. Crawford
War start 4	1815
War end 4	1816
Justice	Caesar A. Rodney
Justice start	1809
Justice end	1811
Justice 2	William Pinkney
Justice start 2	1811
Justice end 2	1814
Justice 3	Richard Rush
Justice start 3	1814
Justice end 3	1817
Navy	Paul Hamilton
Navy start	1809
Navy end	1813
Navy 2	William Jones
Navy start 2	1813
Navy end 2	1814
Navy 3	Benjamin W. Crowninshield
Navy start 3	1814
Navy end 3	1817 }}

Madison is the only president to have had two vice-presidents die while in office.

Judicial appointments

Supreme Court

Madison appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States: Gabriel Duvall 1811 Joseph Story 1812

Other courts

Madison appointed eleven other federal judges, two to the United States Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, and nine to the various United States district courts. One of those judges was appointed twice, to different seats on the same court.

States admitted to the Union

Louisiana April 30, 1812 Indiana December 11, 1816

Later life

When Madison left office in 1817, he retired to Montpelier, his tobacco plantation in Virginia; not far from Jefferson's Monticello. Madison was then 65 years old. Dolley, who thought they would finally have a chance to travel to Paris, was 49. As with both Washington and Jefferson, Madison left the presidency a poorer man than when he entered, due to the steady financial collapse of his plantation. Some historians speculate that his mounting debt was one of the chief reasons why he refused to allow his notes on the Constitutional Convention, or its official records which he possessed, to be published in his lifetime. "He knew the value of his notes, and wanted them to bring money to his estate for Dolley's use as his plantation failed—he was hoping for one hundred thousand dollars from the sale of his papers, of which the notes were the gem." Madison's financial troubles and deteriorating mental and physical health would continue to consume him.

In his later years, Madison also became extremely concerned about his legacy. He took to modifying letters and other documents in his possessions: changing days and dates, adding and deleting words and sentences, and shifting characters. By the time he had reached his late seventies, this "straightening out" had become almost an obsession. This can be seen by his editing of a letter he had written to Jefferson criticizing Lafayette: Madison not only inked out original passages, but went so far as to imitate Jefferson's handwriting as well. In Madison's mind, this may have represented an effort to make himself clear, to justify his actions both to history and to himself.

In 1826, after the death of Jefferson, Madison followed Jefferson as the second Rector ("President") of the University of Virginia. It would be his last occupation. He retained the position as college chancellor for ten years, until his death in 1836.

In 1829, at the age of 78, Madison was chosen as a representative to the constitutional convention in Richmond for the revising of the Virginia state constitution; this was to be Madison's last appearance as a legislator and constitutional drafter. The issue of greatest importance at this convention was apportionment. The western districts of Virginia complained that they were underrepresented because the state constitution apportioned voting districts by county, not population. Westerners' growing numbers thus did not yield growing representation. Western reformers also wanted to extend suffrage to all white men, in place of the historic property requirement. Madison tried to effect a compromise, but to no avail. Eventually, suffrage rights were extended to renters as well as landowners, but the eastern planters refused to adopt population apportionment. Madison was disappointed at the failure of Virginians to resolve the issue more equitably. "The Convention of 1829, we might say, pushed Madison steadily to the brink of self-delusion, if not despair. The dilemma of slavery undid him."

Although his health had now almost failed, he managed to produce several memoranda on political subjects, including an essay against the appointment of chaplains for Congress and the armed forces, because this produced religious exclusion, but not political harmony.

Madison lived on until 1836, increasingly ignored by the new leaders of the American polity. He died at Montpelier on June 28, the last of the Founding Fathers to die. He is buried in the Madison Family Cemetery at Montpelier.

Legacy

As historian Garry Wills wrote:

George F. Will once wrote that if we truly believed that the pen is mightier than the sword, our nation’s capital would have been called “Madison, D.C.”, instead of Washington, D.C.

Montpelier, his family's estate and his home in Orange, Virginia, is a National Historic Landmark

Many counties, several towns, cities, educational institutions, a mountain range and a river are named after Madison.

* Madison County - lists counties named for him

* Cities: e.g. Madison, Wisconsin

* The James Madison College of public policy at Michigan State University; James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia - its athletic teams are called the James Madison Dukes; the James Madison Institute was named in honor of his contributions to the Constitution.

The Madison Range was named in honor of the future President then U.S. Secretary of State by Meriwether Lewis as the Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled through Montana in 1805. The Madison River in southwestern Montana, named in 1805 by Lewis & Clark.

* Mount Madison in the Presidential Range of the White Mountains in New Hampshire is named after Madison.

* Two U.S. Navy ships have been named USS James Madison and three USS Madison.

Madison's portrait was on the U.S. $5000 bill.

Madison Cottage in New York City was named in his honor shortly after his death. It later became Madison Square, with its numerous landmarks.

See also

Report of 1800, produced by Madison to support the Virginia Resolutions

U.S. Presidents on U.S. postage stamps

Notes

Bibliography

Biographies

, the standard scholarly biography

Single volume condensation of his 6-vol biography

, recent scholarly biography

Rutland, Robert A. ed. ''James Madison and the American Nation, 1751–1836: An Encyclopedia'' (Simon & Schuster, 1994).

Rutland, Robert A., ''James Madison: The Founding Father'' (University of Missouri Press, 1987).

Short bio.

Analytic studies

Adams, Henry. ''History of the United States during the Administrations of James Madison'' (5 vol 1890–91; 2 vol Library of America, 1986). ISBN 0-940450-35-6 Table of contents

* Wills, Garry. ''Henry Adams and the Making of America'' (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). a close reading of Adams

Banning, Lance. ''Jefferson & Madison: Three Conversations from the Founding'' (Madison House, 1995).

Banning, Lance. ''The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic'' (Cornell Univ. Press, 1995). online ACLS History e-Book.

Brant, Irving. ''James Madison and American Nationalism''. (1968), short survey with primary sources

Elkins, Stanley M.; McKitrick, Eric. ''The Age of Federalism'' (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995); 925pp. most detailed analysis of the politics of the 1790s. online edition

Gabrielson, Teena, “James Madison’s Psychology of Public Opinion,” ''Political Research Quarterly,'' 62 (Sept. 2009), 431–44.

Kasper, Eric T. ''To Secure the Liberty of the People: James Madison's Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court's Interpretation'' (Northern Illinois University Press, 2010) online review

Kernell, Samuel, ed. ''James Madison: the Theory and Practice of Republican Government'' (Stanford U. Press, 2003).

Kester, Scott J. ''The Haunted Philosophe: James Madison, Republicanism, and Slavery'' (Lexington Books, 2008) 132 pp. isbn 978-0-7391-2174-0

Labunski, Richard. ''James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights'' (Oxford U. P. , 2006).

Matthews, Richard K. ''If Men Were Angels : James Madison and the Heartless Empire of Reason'' (U. Press of Kansas, 1995).

McCoy, Drew R. ''The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America'' (W.W. Norton, 1980). mostly economic issues.

McCoy, Drew R. ''The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy'' (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). JM after 1816.

Muñoz, Vincent Phillip. "James Madison's Principle of Religious Liberty," ''American Political Science Review'' 97,1(2003), 17–32. in JSTOR

Read, James H. ''Power versus Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson and Jefferson'' (University Press of Virginia, 2000).

Riemer, Neal. "The Republicanism of James Madison," ''Political Science Quarterly,'' 69,1(1954), 45–64 in JSTOR

Riemer, Neal. ''James Madison: Creating the American Constitution'' (Congressional Quarterly, 1986).

Rosen, Gary. ''American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding'' (University Press of Kansas, 1999).

Rutland, Robert A. ''The Presidency of James Madison'' (Univ. Press of Kansas, 1990). scholarly overview of his two terms.

Scarberry, Mark S. "John Leland and James Madison: Religious Influence on the Ratification of the Constitution and on the Proposal of the Bill of Rights," ''Penn State Law Review'', Vol. 113, No. 3 (April 2009), 733-800.

Sheehan, Colleen A. "The Politics of Public Opinion: James Madison's 'Notes on Government'," ''William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser.'' v49 #3 (1992), 609–627. in JSTOR

Sheehan, Colleen. "Madison and the French Enlightenment," ''William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser.'' v59#4 (Oct. 2002), 925–956. in JSTOR.

Sheehan, Colleen. "Madison v. Hamilton: The Battle Over Republicanism and the Role of Public Opinion," ''American Political Science Review'' 98,3(2004), 405–424. in JSTOR

Sheehan, Colleen."Madison Avenues," ''Claremont Review of Books'' (Spring 2004), online.

Sheehan, Colleen."Public Opinion and the Formation of Civic Character in Madison's Republican Theory," ''Review of Politics'' 67,1(Winter 2005), 37–48. in JSTOR

Sorenson, Leonard R. ''Madison on the "General Welfare" of America: His Consistent Constitutional Vision'' (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995).

Stagg, John C. A. "James Madison and the 'Malcontents': The Political Origins of the War of 1812," ''William and Mary Quarterly'' 3rd ser. 33,4(Oct. 1976), 557–585. in JSTOR

Stagg, John C. A. "James Madison and the Coercion of Great Britain: Canada, the West Indies, and the War of 1812," in ''William and Mary Quarterly'' 3rd ser. 38,1(Jan. 1981), 3–34. in JSTOR

Stagg, John C. A. ''Mr. Madison's War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American republic, 1783–1830'' (Princeton, 1983).

Stagg, John C. A. ''Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776-1821'' (2009)

Vile, John R. William D. Pederson, Frank J. Williams, eds. ''James Madison: Philosopher, Founder, and Statesman'' (Ohio University Press, 2008) 302 pp. ISBN 978-0-8214-1832-1 online review

Wood, Gordon S. "Is There a 'James Madison Problem'?" in Wood, ''Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different'' (Penguin Press, 2006a), 141–72.

Wood, Gordon S. "Without Him, No Bill of Rights: ''James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights'' by Richard Labunski", ''The New York Review of Books'' (November 30, 2006b). online

Primary sources

External links

Scholarly essays on Madison and each member of his cabinet and First Lady

James Madison: A Resource Guide from the Library of Congress

Quotations by James Madison at Liberty-Tree.ca

The James Madison Papers, 1723–1836 About 12,000 items captured in 72,000 images

James Madison at Online Library of Liberty

The Papers of James Madison from the Avalon Project

Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, 1785

Official White House page for James Madison

James Madison Museum

Montpelier-Home of James Madison

Alumni who changed America, and the world

''James Madison and the Social Utility of Religion: Risks vs. Rewards'', James Hutson, Library of Congress

''Memories of Montpelier: Home of James and Dolley Madison,'' a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan

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