who wrote an important biography of daniel boone creating america's first action hero

Like John Filson, Timothy Flint also interviewed Boone, and his Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky (1833) became one of the best-selling biographies of the 19th century. Flint greatly embellished Boone's adventures, doing for Boone what Parson Weems did for George Washington. In Flint's book, Boone fought hand-to-paw with a bear, escaped from Indians by swinging on vines (as Tarzan would later do), and so on. Although Boone's family thought the book was absurd, Flint greatly influenced the popular conception of Boone, since these tall tales were recycled in countless dime novels and books aimed at young boys.[56]

Daniel Boone

Daniel Boone (November 2, 1734 [O.S. October 22] – September 26, 1820) was an American pioneer, explorer, woodsman, and frontiersman, whose frontier exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. Boone is most famous for his exploration and settlement of what is now Kentucky, which was then part of Virginia but on the other side of the mountains from the settled areas. As a young adult, Boone supplemented his farm income by hunting and trapping game, and selling their pelts in the fur market. Through this occupational interest, Boone first learned the easy routes to the area. Despite some resistance from American Indian tribes such as the Shawnee, in 1775, Boone blazed his Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains from North Carolina and Tennessee into Kentucky. There, he founded the village of Boonesborough, Kentucky, one of the first American settlements west of the Appalachians. Before the end of the 18th century, more than 200,000 Americans migrated to Kentucky/Virginia by following the route marked by Boone.[2]

Boone was a militia officer during the Revolutionary War (1775â€“83), which, in Kentucky, was fought primarily between the American settlers and the British-aided Indians. Boone was captured by Shawnee warriors in 1778. He escaped and alerted Boonesborough that the Shawnees were planning an attack. Although heavily outnumbered, Americans repelled the Shawnee warriors in the Siege of Boonesborough. Boone was elected to the first of his three terms in the Virginia General Assembly, during the Revolutionary War, and fought in the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782. Blue Licks, a Shawnee victory over the Patriots, was one of the last battles of the Revolutionary War, coming after the main fighting ended in October 1781.[3]

Following the war, Boone worked as a surveyor and merchant, but fell deeply into debt through failed Kentucky land speculation. Frustrated with the legal problems resulting from his land claims, in 1799, Boone emigrated to eastern Missouri, where he spent most of the last two decades of his life (1800â€“20).

Boone remains an iconic figure in American history. He was a legend in his own lifetime, especially after an account of his adventures was published in 1784 by John Filson, making him famous across Europe as the typical all-American frontiersman. An American edition made him equally famous across the United States. After his death, he was frequently the subject of heroic tall tales and works of fiction. His adventures—real and legendary—were influential in creating the archetypal Western hero of American folklore. In American popular culture, he is remembered as one of the foremost early frontiersmen. The epic Daniel Boone mythology often overshadows the historical details of his life.[4]

Daniel Boone was of English and Welsh ancestry. Because the Gregorian calendar was adopted during his lifetime, Boone's birth date is sometimes given as November 2, 1734 (the "New Style" date), although Boone used the October date.[5] The Boone family belonged to the Religious Society of Friends, called "Quakers", and were persecuted in England for their dissenting beliefs. Daniel's father, Squire (his first name, not a title) Boone (1696â€“1765) emigrated from the small town of Bradninch, Devon (near Exeter) to Pennsylvania in 1713, to join William Penn's colony of dissenters. Squire Boone's parents, George Boone III and Mary Maugridge, followed their son to Pennsylvania in 1717, and in 1720 built a log cabin at Boonecroft.[6]

In 1720, Squire Boone, who worked primarily as a weaver and a blacksmith, married Sarah Morgan (1700â€“77). Sarah's family were Quakers from Wales, and had settled in 1708 in the area which became Towamencin Township of Montgomery County. In 1731, the Boones moved to Exeter Township in the Oley Valley of Berks County, near the modern city of Reading. There they built a log cabin, partially preserved today as the Daniel Boone Homestead. Daniel Boone was born there, November 2, 1734, the sixth of eleven children.[7] The Daniel Boone Homestead is just four miles from the Mordecai Lincoln House, making the Squire Boone family neighbors of Mordecai Lincoln, the great, great grandfather of future President Abraham Lincoln. Mordecai's son, also named Abraham, married Ann Boone, a first cousin of Daniel.

Daniel Boone spent his early years on what was then the edge of the frontier. Several Lenape Indian villages were nearby. The pacifist Pennsylvania Quakers had good relations with the Native Americans, but the steady growth of the white population compelled many Indians to move further west. Boone was given his first rifle at the age of 12. He learned to hunt from both local settlers and the Lenape. Folk tales have often emphasized Boone's skills as a hunter. In one story, the young Boone was hunting in the woods with some other boys, when the howl of a panther scattered all but Boone. He calmly cocked his rifle and shot the predator through the heart just as it leaped at him. The validity of this claim is contested, but the story was told so often that it became part of his popular image.[8]

In Boone's youth, his family became a source of controversy in the local Quaker community when two of the oldest children married outside the endogamous community, in present-day Lower Gwynedd Township, Pennsylvania. In 1742, Boone's parents were compelled to publicly apologize after their eldest child, Sarah, married John Willcockson, a "worldling" (non-Quaker). Because the young couple had "kept company", they were considered "married without benefit of clergy". When the Boones' oldest son Israel married a "worldling" in 1747, Squire Boone stood by him. Both men were expelled from the Quakers; Boone's wife continued to attend monthly meetings with their younger children.

In 1750, Squire Boone sold his land and moved the family to North Carolina. Daniel Boone did not attend church again. He identified as a Christian and had all of his children baptized. The Boones eventually settled on the Yadkin River, in what is now Davie County,[9] about two miles (3Â km) west of Mocksville. This was in the western backwoods area.[10]

Because he grew up on the frontier, Boone had little formal education, but deep knowledge of the woods. According to one family tradition, a schoolteacher once expressed concern over Boone's education, but Boone's father said, "Let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting." Boone received some tutoring from family members, though his spelling remained unorthodox. The historian John Mack Faragher cautions that the folk image of Boone as semiliterate is misleading, and argues that he "acquired a level of literacy that was the equal of most men of his times." Boone regularly took reading material with him on his hunting expeditionsâ€”the Bible and Gulliver's Travels were favorites. He was often the only literate person in groups of frontiersmen. Boone would sometimes entertain his hunting companions by reading to them around the evening campfire.[11]

After the French and Indian War (1754â€“1763) broke out between the French and British, and their respective Indian allies, North Carolina Governor Matthew Rowan called up a militia, into whose service Daniel volunteered. He served under Captain Hugh Waddell on the North Carolina frontier. Waddell's unit was assigned to serve in the command of General Edward Braddock in 1755, and Boone acted as a wagoner, along with his cousin Daniel Morgan, who would later be a key general in the American Revolution.[12] In the Battle of the Monongahela, the denouement of the campaign and a bitter defeat for the British, Boone narrowly escaped death when the baggage wagons were assaulted by Indian troops. Boone remained critical of Braddock's blunders for the rest of his life.

While on the campaign, Boone met John Finley, a packer who worked for George Croghan in the trans-Appalachian fur trade. Finley first interested Boone in the abundance of game and other natural wonders of the Ohio Valley. Finley took Boone on his first fateful hunting trip to Kentucky 12 years later.[13]

Boone returned home and on August 14, 1756, he married Rebecca Bryan, a neighbor in the Yadkin River Valley whose brother married one of Boone's sisters. The couple initially lived in a cabin on his father's farm. They eventually had 10 children.[14] His son, Nathan Boone, was the first white man born in Kentucky.[15]

Boone supported his growing family in these years as a market hunter and trapper, collecting pelts for the fur trade. Almost every autumn, Boone would go on "long hunts", extended expeditions into the wilderness lasting weeks or months. Boone went alone or with a small group of men, accumulating hundreds of deer skins in the autumn, and trapping beaver and otter over the winter. The hunt followed a network of bison migration trails, known as the Medicine Trails. When the long hunters returned in the spring, they sold their take to commercial fur traders.[17]

Such frontiersmen often carved messages on trees or wrote their names on cave walls, and Boone's name or initials have been found in many places. One on a tree in present Washington County, Tennessee reads "D. Boon Cilled a. Bar on tree in the year 1760". A similar carving, preserved in the museum of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, reads "D. Boon Kilt a Bar, 1803." The inscriptions may also be among numerous forgeries of the famous trapper, part of a long tradition of phony Boone relics.[18]

In 1758, a conflict erupted between the British forces and the Cherokee, their allies in the French and Indian War (which continued in other parts of the continent). After the Yadkin River Valley was raided by Cherokee, the Boones and many other families fled north to Culpeper County, Virginia. Boone served in the North Carolina militia during this "Cherokee Uprising". His militia expeditions went deep into Cherokee territory beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains and he was separated from his wife for about two years.

In 1762, Boone, his wife and four children moved back to the Yadkin River Valley from Culpeper. By the mid-1760s, with peace made with the Cherokee, colonial immigration into the area increased. The competition of new settlers decreased the amount of game available. Boone had difficulty making ends meet; he was often taken to court for nonpayment of debts. He sold his land to pay off creditors. After his father's death in 1765, Boone traveled with his brother Squire and a group of men to Florida, which had become British territory after the end of the war, to look into the possibility of settling there. According to a family story, Boone purchased land near Pensacola, but Rebecca refused to move so far away from her friends and family. The Boones moved to a more remote area of the Yadkin River Valley, and Boone began to hunt westward into the Blue Ridge Mountains.[19]

Boone first reached Kentucky in the fall of 1767 while on a long hunt with his brother Squire Boone, Jr. Boone's first steps in Kentucky were near present-day Elkhorn City.[20] While on the Braddock expedition years earlier, Boone had heard about the fertile land and abundant game of Kentucky from fellow wagoner John Findley, who had visited Kentucky to trade with American Indians. Boone and Findley happened to meet again, and Findley encouraged Boone with more tales of Kentucky. At the same time, news had arrived about the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the Iroquois had ceded their claim to Kentucky to the British. This, as well as the unrest in North Carolina due to the Regulator Movement, likely prompted Boone to extend his exploration.[21]

On May 11, 1769, he began a two-year hunting expedition in Kentucky. On December 22, 1769, Boone and a fellow hunter, Benjamin Cutbirth, were captured by a party of Shawnees, who confiscated all of their skins and told them to leave and never return. The Shawnees had not signed the Stanwix treaty, and since they regarded Kentucky as their hunting ground, they considered white hunters there to be poachers. Boone, however, continued hunting and exploring Kentucky until his return to North Carolina in 1771, and returned to hunt there again in the autumn of 1772.

On July 5, 1773, Boone packed up his family and, with a group of about 50 immigrants, began the first attempt by British colonists to establish a settlement in Kentucky. Boone was still an obscure hunter and trapper at the time; the most prominent member of the expedition was William Russell, a well-known Virginian and future brother-in-law of Patrick Henry. On October 9, Boone's eldest son James and a small group of men and boys who had left the main party to retrieve supplies were attacked by a band of Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokees. Following the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, American Indians in the region had been debating what to do about the influx of settlers. This group had decided, in the words of historian John Mack Faragher, "to send a message of their opposition to settlement". James Boone and William Russell's son Henry were captured and gruesomely tortured to death. The brutality of the killings sent shock waves along the frontier, and Boone's party abandoned its expedition.[22]

The massacre was one of the first events in what became known as Dunmore's War, a struggle between Virginia and, primarily, Shawnees of the Ohio Country for control of what is now West Virginia and Kentucky. In the summer of 1774, Boone volunteered to travel with a companion to Kentucky to notify surveyors there about the outbreak of war. The two men journeyed more than 800 miles (1,300Â km) in two months to warn those who had not already fled the region. Upon his return to Virginia, Boone helped defend colonial settlements along the Clinch River, earning a promotion to captain in the militia, as well as acclaim from fellow citizens. After the brief war, which ended soon after Virginia's victory in the Battle of Point Pleasant in October 1774, the Shawnees relinquished their claims to Kentucky.[23]

Following Dunmore's War, Richard Henderson, a prominent judge from North Carolina, hired Boone to travel to the Cherokee towns in present North Carolina and Tennessee and inform them of an upcoming meeting. In the 1775 treaty, Henderson purchased the Cherokee claim to Kentucky to establish a colony called Transylvania. Afterwards, Henderson hired Boone and Cutbirth to blaze what became known as the Wilderness Road, which went through the Cumberland Gap and into central Kentucky. Along with a party of about 30 workers, Boone and Cutbirth marked a path to the Kentucky River, where they founded Boonesborough. Other settlements, notably Harrodsburg, were also established at this time. Despite occasional Indian attacks, Boone returned to the Clinch Valley and brought his family and other settlers to Boonesborough on September 8, 1775.[24]

Violence in Kentucky increased with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War (1775â€“1783). Native Americans who were unhappy about the loss of Kentucky in treaties saw the war as a chance to drive out the colonists. Isolated settlers and hunters became the frequent target of attacks, convincing many to abandon Kentucky. By late spring of 1776, fewer than 200 colonists remained in Kentucky, primarily at the fortified settlements of Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan's Station.[25]

On July 5, 1776, Boone's daughter Jemima and two other teenaged girls were captured outside Boonesborough by an Indian war party, who carried the girls north towards the Shawnee towns in the Ohio country. Boone and a group of men from Boonesborough followed in pursuit, finally catching up with them two days later. Boone and his men ambushed the Indians while they were stopped for a meal, rescuing the girls and driving off their captors. The incident became the most celebrated event of Boone's life. James Fenimore Cooper created a fictionalized version of the episode in his classic novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826).[26]

In 1777, Henry Hamilton, British Lieutenant Governor of Canada, began to recruit American Indian war parties to raid the Kentucky settlements. On April 24, Shawnee Indians led by Chief Blackfish attacked Boonesborough. Boone was shot in the ankle while outside the fort, but he was carried back inside amid a flurry of bullets by Simon Kenton, a recent arrival at Boonesborough.[27] Kenton became Boone's close friend, as well as a legendary frontiersman in his own right.[28]

While Boone recovered, Shawnees kept up their attacks outside Boonesborough, destroying the surrounding cattle and crops. With the food supply running low, the settlers needed salt to preserve what meat they had, so in January 1778, Boone led a party of 30 men to the salt springs on the Licking River.[29] On February 7, when Boone was hunting meat for the expedition, he was surprised and captured by warriors led by Blackfish. Because Boone's party was greatly outnumbered, Boone returned the next day with Blackfish and persuaded his men to surrender rather than put up a fight.[30]

Blackfish wanted to continue to Boonesborough and capture it, since it was now poorly defended, but Boone convinced him that the women and children were not hardy enough to survive a winter trek. Instead, Boone promised that Boonesborough would surrender willingly to the Shawnees the following spring. Boone did not have an opportunity to tell his men that he was bluffing to prevent an immediate attack on Boonesborough, however. Boone pursued this strategy so convincingly that many of his men concluded that he had switched his loyalty to the British.[31]

Boone and his men were taken to Blackfish's town of Chillicothe, where they were made to run the gauntlet. As was their custom, the Shawnees adopted some of the prisoners into the tribe to replace fallen warriors; the remainder were taken to Hamilton in Detroit. Boone was adopted into a Shawnee family at Chillicothe, perhaps into the family of Chief Blackfish himself, and given the name Sheltowee (Big Turtle). On June 16, 1778, when he learned Blackfish was about to return to Boonesborough with a large force, Boone eluded his captors and raced home, covering the 160 miles (260Â km) to Boonesborough in five days on horseback and, after his horse gave out, on foot.[32]

During Boone's absence, his wife and children (except for Jemima) had returned to North Carolina, assuming he was dead. Upon his return to Boonesborough, some of the men expressed doubts about Boone's loyalty, since after surrendering the salt-making party, he had apparently lived quite happily among the Shawnees for months. Boone responded by leading a preemptive raid against the Shawnees across the Ohio River, and then by helping to successfully defend Boonesborough against a 10-day siege led by Blackfish, which began on September 7, 1778.

After the siege, Captain Benjamin Logan and Colonel Richard Callaway—both of whom had nephews who were still captives surrendered by Boone—brought charges against Boone for his recent activities. In the court-martial that followed, Boone was found "not guilty", and was even promoted after the court heard his testimony. Despite this vindication, Boone was humiliated by the court martial, and he rarely spoke of it.[33]

After the trial, Boone returned to North Carolina to bring his family back to Kentucky. In the autumn of 1779, a large party of emigrants came with him, including (according to tradition) the family of Abraham Lincoln's grandfather.[34] Rather than remain in Boonesborough, Boone founded the nearby settlement of Boone's Station. He began earning money at this time by locating good land for other settlers. Transylvania land claims had been invalidated after Virginia created Kentucky County, so settlers needed to file new land claims with Virginia. In 1780, Boone collected about $20,000 in cash from various settlers and traveled to Williamsburg to purchase their land warrants. While he was sleeping in a tavern during the trip, the cash was stolen from his room. Some of the settlers forgave Boone the loss; others insisted he repay the stolen money, which took him several years to do.

A popular image of Boone which emerged in later years is that of the backwoodsman who had little affinity for "civilized" society, moving away from places like Boonesborough when they became "too crowded". In reality, however, Boone was a leading citizen of Kentucky at this time. When Kentucky was divided into three Virginia counties in November 1780, Boone was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the Fayette County militia. In April 1781, he was elected as a representative to the Virginia General Assembly, which was held in Richmond. In 1782, he was elected sheriff of Fayette County.[35]

Meanwhile, the American Revolutionary War continued. Boone joined General George Rogers Clark's invasion of the Ohio country in 1780, fighting in the Battle of Piqua on August 7. In October, when Boone was hunting with his brother Ned, Shawnees shot and killed Ned. Apparently thinking that they had killed Daniel Boone, the Shawnees beheaded Ned and took the head home as a trophy. In 1781, Boone traveled to Richmond to take his seat in the legislature, but British dragoons under Banastre Tarleton captured Boone and several other legislators near Charlottesville. The British released Boone on parole several days later. During Boone's term, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, but the fighting continued in Kentucky unabated. Boone returned to Kentucky and in August 1782 fought in the Battle of Blue Licks, in which his son Israel was killed. In November 1782, Boone took part in another Clark expedition into Ohio, the last major campaign of the war.

After the Revolution, Boone resettled in Limestone (renamed Maysville, Kentucky in 1786), then a booming Ohio River port. In 1787, he was elected to the Virginia state assembly as a representative from Bourbon County. In Maysville, he kept a tavern and worked as a surveyor, horse trader, and land speculator. He was initially prosperous, owning seven slaves by 1787, a relatively large number for Kentucky at the time.[36] Boone became a celebrity while living in Maysville. In 1784, on his 50th birthday, historian John Filson published The Discovery, Settlement And present State of Kentucke, a book which included a chronicle of Boone's adventures.[36]

The Revolutionary War had ended, but the border war with American Indians north of the Ohio River resumed with the Northwest Indian War. In September 1786, Boone took part in a military expedition into the Ohio Country led by Benjamin Logan. Back in Limestone, Boone housed and fed Shawnees who were captured during the raid, and helped to negotiate a truce and prisoner exchange. Although the war escalated and would not end until the American victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the 1786 expedition was the last time Boone saw military action.[37]

Boone began to have financial troubles while living in Maysville. According to the later folk image, Boone the trailblazer was too unsophisticated for the civilization which followed him and which eventually defrauded him of his land. Boone was not the simple frontiersman of legend, however: he engaged in land speculation on a large scale, buying and selling claims to tens of thousands of acres. The land market in frontier Kentucky was chaotic, and Boone's ventures ultimately failed because his investment strategy was faulty and because his sense of honor made him reluctant to profit at someone else's expense. According to Faragher, "Boone lacked the ruthless instincts that speculation demanded."[38]

Frustrated with the legal hassles that went with land speculation, in 1788, Boone moved upriver to Point Pleasant, Virginia (now West Virginia). There he operated a trading post and occasionally worked as a surveyor's assistant. When Virginia created Kanawha County in 1789, Boone was appointed lieutenant colonel of the county militia.[39] In 1791, he was elected to the Virginia legislature for the third time.[40] He contracted to provide supplies for the Kanawha militia, but his debts prevented him from buying goods on credit, so he closed his store and returned to hunting and trapping.[41]

In 1795, Rebecca and he moved back to Kentucky, living in present Nicholas County on land owned by their son Daniel Morgan Boone. The next year, Boone applied to Isaac Shelby, the first governor of the new state of Kentucky, for a contract to widen the Wilderness Road into a wagon route, but the contract was awarded to someone else.[42] Meanwhile, lawsuits over conflicting land claims continued to make their way through the Kentucky courts. Boone's remaining land claims were sold off to pay legal fees and taxes, but he no longer paid attention to the process. In 1798, a warrant was issued for Boone's arrest after he ignored a summons to testify in a court case, although the sheriff never found him.[43] That same year, the Kentucky assembly named Boone County in his honor.[44]

Having endured legal and financial setbacks, Boone sought to make a fresh start by leaving the United States.[44] In 1799, he moved his extended family to what is now St. Charles County, Missouri, but was then part of Spanish Louisiana.[45] The Spanish, eager to promote settlement in the sparsely populated region, did not enforce the official requirement that all immigrants had to be Roman Catholic. The Spanish governor appointed Boone "syndic" (judge and jury) and commandant (military leader) of the Femme Osage district.[46] The many anecdotes of Boone's tenure as syndic suggest he sought to render fair judgments rather than to strictly observe the letter of the law.[47]

Boone served as syndic and commandant until 1804, when Missouri became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase. Because Boone's land grants from the Spanish government had been largely based on verbal agreements, he once again lost his land claims. In 1809, he petitioned Congress to restore his Spanish land claims, which was finally done in 1814. Boone sold most of this land to repay old Kentucky debts. When the War of 1812 came to Missouri, Boone's sons Daniel Morgan Boone and Nathan Boone took part, but by that time Boone was much too old for militia duty.[48]

Boone spent his final years in Missouri, often in the company of children and grandchildren, where he continued to hunt and trap as much as his health and energy levels permitted. According to one story, in 1810 or later, Boone went with a group on a long hunt as far west as the Yellowstone River, a remarkable journey at his age, if true. In 1816, a United States officer at Fort Osage, on the Missouri, wrote:

We have been honored by a visit from Colonel Boon, the first settler of Kentucky; he lately spent two weeks with us.... He left this for the river Platt, some distance above. Col Boon is eighty-five years of age, five feet seven inches high, stoutly made, and active for one of his years; is still of vigorous mind, and is pretty well informed. He has taken part in all the wars of America, from before Braddock's war to the present hour.[49]

Stories were told of Boone making one last visit to Kentucky to pay off his creditors, although some or all of these tales may be folklore. American painter John James Audubon claimed to have gone hunting with Boone in the woods of Kentucky around 1810. Years later, Audubon painted a portrait of Boone, supposedly from memory, although skeptics have noted the similarity of this painting to the well-known portraits by Chester Harding. Boone's family insisted he never returned to Kentucky after 1799, although some historians believe Boone visited his brother Squire near Kentucky in 1810 and have therefore reported Audubon's story as factual.[50]

Daniel Boone died of natural causes (other sources say from acute indigestion) on September 26, 1820, at Nathan Boone's home on Femme Osage Creek, 2-1/2 months short of his 86th birthday. His last words were, "I'm going now. My time has come." He was buried next to Rebecca, who had died on March 18, 1813. The graves, which were unmarked until the mid-1830s, were near Jemima (Boone) Callaway's home on Tuque Creek, about two miles (3Â km) from the present-day Marthasville, Missouri. In 1845, the Boones' remains were supposedly disinterred and reburied in a new cemetery, Frankfort Cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky. Resentment in Missouri about the disinterment grew over the years, and a legend arose that Boone's remains never left Missouri. According to this story, Boone's tombstone in Missouri had been inadvertently placed over the wrong grave, but no one had ever corrected the error. Boone's relatives in Missouri, displeased with the Kentuckians who came to exhume Boone, kept quiet about the mistake, and they allowed the Kentuckians to dig up the wrong remains. No contemporary evidence indicates this actually happened, but in 1983, a forensic anthropologist examined a crude plaster cast of Boone's skull made before the Kentucky reburial and announced it might be the skull of an African American. Black slaves had also been buried at Tuque Creek, so it is possible the wrong remains were mistakenly removed from the crowded graveyard. Both the Frankfort Cemetery in Kentucky and the Old Bryan Farm graveyard in Missouri claim to have Boone's remains.[51]

Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures are related of me which exist only in the regions of fancy. With me the world has taken great liberties, and yet I have been but a common man.

Daniel Boone remains an iconic figure in American history, although his status as an early American folk hero and later as a subject of fiction have tended to obscure the actual details of his life. Several places in the United States are named for him, including the Daniel Boone National Forest, the Sheltowee Trace Trail, the town of Boone, North Carolina, various settlements carrying the name of "Boonville", and seven counties: Boone County, Illinois, Boone County, Indiana, Boone County, Nebraska, Boone County, West Virginia, Boone County, Missouri, Boone County, Arkansas, and Boone County, Kentucky. Schools across the United States are named for Daniel Boone, including schools in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, Douglassville, Pennsylvania, Richmond, Kentucky, Wentzville, Missouri, Warrenton, Missouri, Gray, Tennessee, and Chicago.

Daniel Boone was honored with a 6-cent stamp in the American Folklore Series on September 26, 1968, at Frankfort, Kentucky, where he was buried. He was a famous frontiersman in the development of Virginia, Kentucky and the trans-Appalachian west. A wall of roughly-hewn boards displays the tools of Boone's tradeâ€”a Pennsylvania rifle, a powder horn, and a knife. The pipe tomahawk represents that the Shawnees had adopted Boone. His name and birth date were carved on the wall.[53]

The U.S. Navy's James Madison-class Polaris submarine USS Daniel Boone (SSBN-629), was named after Boone.

Boone emerged as a legend in large part because of land speculator John Filson's "The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon", part of his book The Discovery, Settlement And present State of Kentucke. First published in 1784, Filson's book was a pamphlet primarily intended to popularize Kentucky to immigrants.[54] It was soon translated into French and German, and made Boone famous in America and Europe. Based on interviews with Boone, Filson's book contained a mostly factual account of Boone's adventures from the exploration of Kentucky through the American Revolution. However, because the real Boone was a man of few words, Filson invented florid, philosophical dialogue for this "autobiography". Subsequent editors cut some of these passages and replaced them with more plausible—but still spurious—ones. Often reprinted, Filson's book established Boone as one of the first popular heroes of the United States.[55]

Thanks to Filson's book, in Europe, Boone became a symbol of the "natural man" who lives a virtuous, uncomplicated existence in the wilderness. This was most famously expressed in Lord Byron's epic poem Don Juan (1822), which devoted a number of stanzas to Boone, including this one:

Byron's poem celebrated Boone as someone who found happiness by turning his back on civilization. In a similar vein, many folk tales depicted Boone as a man who migrated to more remote areas whenever civilization crowded in on him. In a typical anecdote, when asked why he was moving to Missouri, Boone supposedly replied, "I want more elbow room!" Boone rejected such an interpretation of his life, however. "Nothing embitters my old age," he said late in life, like "the circulation of absurd stories that I retire as civilization advances..."[58]

Existing simultaneously with the image of Boone as a refugee from society was, paradoxically, the popular portrayal of him as civilization's trailblazer. Boone was celebrated as an agent of Manifest Destiny, a pathfinder who tamed the wilderness, paving the way for the extension of American civilization. In 1852, critic Henry Tuckerman dubbed Boone "the Columbus of the woods", comparing Boone's passage through the Cumberland Gap to Christopher Columbus's voyage to the New World. In popular mythology, Boone became the first to explore and settle Kentucky, opening the way for countless others to follow. In fact, other Americans had explored and settled Kentucky before Boone, as debunkers in the 20th century often pointed out, but Boone came to symbolize them all, making him what historian Michael Lofaro called "the founding father of westward expansion".[59]

In the 19th century, when Native Americans were being displaced from their lands and confined on reservations, Boone's image was often reshaped into the stereotype of the belligerent, Indian-hating frontiersman which was then popular. In John A. McClung's Sketches of Western Adventure (1832), for example, Boone was portrayed as longing for the "thrilling excitement of savage warfare." Boone was transformed in the popular imagination into someone who regarded Indians with contempt and had killed scores of the "savages". The real Boone disliked bloodshed, however. According to historian John Bakeless, there is no record that Boone ever scalped Indians, unlike other frontiersmen of the era. Boone once told his son Nathan that he was certain of having killed only one Indian, during the battle at Blue Licks, although he believed others might have died from his bullets in other battles. Even though Boone had lost two sons in wars with Indians, he respected Indians and was respected by them. In Missouri, Boone often went hunting with the very Shawnees who had captured and adopted him decades earlier. Some 19th-century writers regarded Boone's sympathy for Indians as a character flaw and therefore altered his words to conform to contemporary attitudes.[60]

Boone's adventures, real and mythical, formed the basis of the archetypal hero of the American West, popular in 19th-century novels and 20th-century films. The main character of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, the first of which was published in 1823, bore striking similarities to Boone; even his name, Nathaniel Bumppo, echoed Daniel Boone's name. As mentioned above, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Cooper's second Leatherstocking novel, featured a fictionalized version of Boone's rescue of his daughter. After Cooper, other writers developed the Western hero, an iconic figure which began as a variation of Daniel Boone.[61]

In the 20th century, Boone was featured in numerous comic strips, radio programs, and films, such as the 1936 film Daniel Boone, with George O'Brien playing the title role.

Daniel Boone was the subject of a TV series that ran on NBC from 1964 to 1970. In the popular theme song for the series, Boone was described as a "big man" in a "coonskin cap", and the "rippin'est, roarin'est, fightin'est man the frontier ever knew!"[62] This did not describe the real Daniel Boone, who was not a big man and did not wear a coonskin cap. Boone was portrayed this way because Fess Parker, the tall actor who played Boone, was essentially reprising his role as Davy Crockett from an earlier TV series. That Boone could be portrayed the same way as Crockett, another American frontiersman with a very different persona, was another example of how Boone's image could be reshaped to suit popular tastes.[63]

Boone's descendants have been part of a 3 generational talent in Major League Baseball starting with Ray Boone, his son Bob Boone, followed by Ray's grandchildren Brett Boone and Aaron Boone. [64]


what does emc in dell emc stand for

EMC, founded in 1979 by Richard Egan, Roger Marino & John Curly (the E, M & C in EMC),[15] introduced its first 64-kilobyte memory boards for the Prime Computer in 1981[16][17] and continued with the development of memory boards for other computer types. In the mid-1980s the company expanded beyond memory to other computer data storage types and networked storage platforms. EMC began shipping its flagship product, the Symmetrix, in 1990. Symmetrix was the main reason for EMC's rapid growth in the 1990s, both in size and value, from a company valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars to a multi-billion company.[18]

Dell EMC

Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, United States.[2][3] Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other products and services that enable organizations to store, manage, protect, and analyze data. Dell EMC's target markets include large companies and small- and medium-sized businesses across various vertical markets.[4][5] The company's stock (as EMC Corporation) was added to the New York Stock Exchange on April 6, 1986,[6] and was also listed on the S&P 500 index.

EMC had over 70,000 employees and was the world’s largest provider of data-storage systems by market share, competing against NetApp, IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Hitachi Data Systems (arranged in descending order of external data-storage market share).[7] Joseph M. Tucci had served as EMC's chief executive since January 2001 and chairman of the board of directors since January 2006; he joined the company in 2000 as president and chief operating officer.[8] Tucci was also chairman of the board of VMware Corporation[8] and chairman of the board of Pivotal Software, which are partially owned by EMC.[9] On October 12, 2015, Dell Inc. announced that it would acquire EMC in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $67 billion—the largest-ever acquisition in the technology industry.[10][11][12] The merger closed on September 7, 2016. EMC has been renamed to Dell EMC as a result of the merger.[13] The EMC stands for the founders Egan, Marino & Curly. [14].

Michael Ruettgers joined EMC in 1988 and served as CEO from 1992 until January 2001.[19] Under Ruettgersâ€™ leadership, EMC revenues grew from $120 million to nearly $9 billion 10 years later, and the company shifted its focus from memory boards to storage systems.[20] Ruettgers was named one of BusinessWeek's "World's Top 25 Executives"; one of the "Best Chief Executive Officers in America" by Worth magazine; and one of Network World's "25 Most Powerful People in Networking".[20]

In 2001, Joe Tucci was named chief executive officer of EMC.[21] He has been credited with transforming EMC's business model from a focus on high-end storage platforms to a portfolio of platforms, software, and services that enable organizations to deliver IT as a service through cloud computing.[21] Under Tucci's leadership, EMC grew to $21.7 billion in revenues in 2012.[22]

In 2009, EMC and Cisco, with investments from VMware and Intel, formed a joint venture called VCE to develop products and services for the converged infrastructure and cloud computing markets.[23]

EMC announced its 450,000 square foot Center of Excellence (COE) in Durham, North Carolina in 2011.[24] The COE houses a virtualized data center and includes 130,000 square feet of global research and development labs. The company also has COEs in India, China, Egypt, Israel, Ireland, Russia and Draper, Utah, USA which perform engineering, research and development, customer, and translation services for EMC business units.[24]

In 2013, EMC launched a new company named Pivotal.[25] Led by Paul Maritz, the organization combines technologies from VMware and EMC and is focused on delivering Platform-as-a-Service products.[25]

EMC has been growing in part through aggressively making acquisitions of small companies, and starting to bring those products to market.[26]

On October 12, 2015, Dell Inc. announced its intent to acquire EMC in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $67 billion, which has been considered the largest-ever acquisition in the technology sector. Dell CEO Michael Dell explained that the purchase was meant to "evolve the company into the most relevant areas where IT is moving," combining Dell's enterprise server, personal computer, and mobile businesses with EMC's enterprise storage business. The deal is structured so that Dell will pay $24.05 per share of EMC, and $9.05 per share of tracking stock in VMware.[27][28][29]

In addition to those of the majority-owned VMware and Pivotal companies, EMC sells products and services designed to allow IT departments to move to a cloud computing model and to analyze big data.

The following table includes the listing and timeline of EMC Corporation's major acquisitions of other companies since 1996.

In 2012, EMC sponsored The Human Face of Big Data,[100] a globally crowd-sourced media project focusing on the ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data in real time. The Human Face of Big Data, produced by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt, includes “a number of fascinating stories…(that) represent some of the most innovative applications of data that are shaping our future.”[101]

EMC sponsors The Digital Universe, a study by IDC “measuring and characterizing all the digital data created, replicated, and consumed worldwide in a single year.”[102] The Digital Universe 2012 report anticipates that "during the next eight years, the amount of digital data produced will exceed 40 zettabytes, which is the equivalent of 5,200 GB of data for every man, woman and child on Earth. To hit that figure, all data is expected to double every two years through 2020."[103]

In 2015, EMC was ranked no. 2 on Fortune’s list of the World’s Most Admired Computer Companies for the fifth consecutive year.[104] EMC was included on the 2012 Thomson Reuters Top 100 Global Innovators list.[105] In 2013, four EMC and RSA channel executives were named CRN’s 2013 Channel Chiefs for “trying to make sure their company’s partners succeed."[106]

EMC has ranked on several global best places to work lists. EMC was ranked the 19th Best Multinational Workplace in Europe by Great Places to Work in 2012.[107] EMC was included on Crain’s 2012 Best Places to Work in New York City,[108] The Boston Globe’s 2012 Top Places to Work,[109] and Washington's Best Workplaces 2012.[110] EMC has also been recognized for diversity and inclusion as one of Careers & the disABLED Magazine’s 2013 Top 50 employers[111] and received a score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign 2013 Corporate Equality Index.[112]

EMC supports a variety of corporate responsibility initiatives around the world, and in 2012 EMC ranked 47th on Corporate Responsibility Magazine's 100 Best Corporate Citizens List.[113] EMC was named the 43rd Greenest Company Globally on Newsweekâ€™s Green Rankings 2012.[114] EMC sponsors programs in the United States that strive to improve education for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM).[115] More than 80,000 students have taken EMC Information Storage and Management courses since the program launched in 2006.[116]

EMC's Academic Alliance program, a collaboration with colleges and universities worldwide, sells curriculum-based education on technology topics such as virtualization, cloud computing, big data analytics, and information storage and management.[117] The global program is geared towards arming students with the knowledge necessary to differentiate themselves in the job market and improve their competitive advantage.[118]

RSA Security, the security division of EMC, has received widespread criticism for accepting $10 million in a secret deal with NSA in 2004 to make Dual_EC_DRBG the default cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator in its prominent BSAFE cryptography library, and for continuing to use it until 2013.[119] Dual_EC_DRBG had been suspected since 2007 of containing a kleptographic backdoor designed by NSA. This was confirmed in a 2013 New York Times article following the Snowden leak.[120] The standard FIPS version of Dual_EC_DRBG (which RSA Security implemented) was theoretically and empirically shown to be insecure in 2006 and 2007 (even aside from the backdoor); following discoveries by Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson in 2007, prominent security expert Bruce Schneier published an article in Wired magazine titled "Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard?".[121] Though Dual_EC_DRBG was highly suspect after 2007, its usage in EMC's BSAFE was not widely known until the 2013 New York Times article brought it back into the spotlight. At the 2014 RSA Conference, RSA Security Executive Chairman Art Coviello defended RSA Security's choice to keep using Dual_EC_DRBG until NIST issued new guidance in 2013. He claimed that NIST only issued the guidance to stop using the algorithm "when it became possible that concerns raised in 2007 might have merit".[122]


where was the movie the talented mr ripley filmed

The Guardian reported in 2000 that Leonardo DiCaprio declined the offer to play Ripley before Damon was cast in the role.[2] Apart from the beginning scenes filmed in New York City, the movie was shot entirely on location in Italy. The cliffside resort town of Positano and various villages on the islands of Ischia and Procida, near Naples, were used to represent the fictional town of "Mongibello".[3] The scenes taking place in San Remo were actually filmed in Anzio, a resort-town near Rome. Famous locations included the Piazza Navona, the Spanish Steps and Piazza di Spagna in Rome, and the Caffè Florian in the Piazza San Marco, Venice.[3]

The Talented Mr. Ripley (film)

The Talented Mr. Ripley is a 1999 American psychological thriller film written for the screen and directed by Anthony Minghella. An adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel of the same name, the film stars Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf, Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge Sherwood and Cate Blanchett as Meredith Logue.

The novel was previously filmed as Plein Soleil in 1960.

Tom Ripley is a young man struggling to make a living in 1950s New York City. While working at a party, he is approached by the wealthy shipbuilder Herbert Greenleaf, who mistakenly believes that Ripley attended Princeton with and knew his son, Dickie. Greenleaf recruits Ripley, for $1,000, to travel to Italy to persuade Dickie to return home.

In the seaside town of Mongibello ("Mongi"), Ripley presents himself to Dickie, who confusedly accepts him as an old acquaintance though he doesn't remember him. Ripley is able to charm himself into the lives of Dickie and his fiancÃ©e, Marge, partly through pretending to be a fellow jazz lover. Dickie's friend, Freddie Miles, comes to visit and treats Ripley with contempt.

When a local woman is impregnated by Dickie, he rejects her and she drowns herself. Only Ripley knows about the two. Dickie begins to tire of Ripley, though Ripley has become infatuated with Dickie and his lifestyle. When Dickie tells Ripley that he has worn out his welcome, Ripley convinces him to go on a final trip to San Remo before they part. They take a boat out, but Dickie becomes angry, accusing Ripley of mooching. The two fight, and Ripley beats Dickie to death with an oar. Ripley scuttles the boat in a nearby cove.

Realizing that people easily mistake him for Dickie, Ripley decides to impersonate him. He forges a letter to Marge, convincing her that Dickie has left her to live in Rome. He creates the illusion that Dickie is still alive by checking into one Roman hotel as Dickie and another as himself, creating an exchange of communications between the two. He also strikes up a friendship with an American socialite, Meredith Logue, pretending to be Dickie. Through forgery, he is able to draw on Dickie's allowance, which allows him to live lavishly. His ruse is threatened when Marge arrives in Rome, so that Ripley must break it off with Meredith to prevent being discovered.

Freddie visits Dickie and finds Ripley; he is suspicious because Dickie's apartment is uncharacteristically palatial. When the landlady addresses Ripley as "Signor Greenleaf", Freddie realizes the fraud but Ripley beats him to death with a stone bust. After disposing of the body, Ripley is forced into a cat-and-mouse existence between the Italian police and Marge. Realizing that the police suspect Dickie of murdering Freddie, Ripley forges a suicide note to dispose of the Dickie persona once and for all. He then travels to Venice, where he becomes intimate with Marge's friend, Peter Smith-Kingsley.

Herbert Greenleaf travels to Italy to meet with the police, bringing along a private detective, Alvin MacCarron. Ripley nearly kills Marge when she discovers Dickie's rings in Ripley's possession, which convinces her that he murdered Dickie. Mr. Greenleaf rejects this, and MacCarron reveals to Ripley that the police are convinced that Dickie murdered Freddie, before killing himself. Herbert also believes this, because Dickie had a history of violent behavior. MacCarron further indicates that out of appreciation for Tom's loyalty to Dickie, Greenleaf intends to make over much of Dickie's trust fund to Ripley.

With his crimes successfully behind him, Ripley boards a ship with Peter to Greece. He is surprised to encounter Meredith, who knows him as Dickie. Realizing he must kill either Meredith or Peter to prevent being exposed as an impostor, he smothers Peter to death.

To prepare for the role of Ripley, Damon lost 30 pounds and learned to play the piano.[4] Jude Law gained weight and learned to play the saxophone for his character; he also broke a rib when he fell backward while filming the murder scene in the boat.[5]

Critical reaction was positive, and the film has a rating of 83% on Rotten Tomatoes.[6]

Roger Ebert gave the film four-out-of-four stars, calling it "an intelligent thriller" that is "insidious in the way it leads us to identify with Tom Ripley... He's a monster, but we want him to get away with it".[7] In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised Law's performance: "This is a star-making role for the preternaturally talented English actor Jude Law. Beyond being devastatingly good-looking, Mr. Law gives Dickie the manic, teasing powers of manipulation that make him ardently courted by every man or woman he knows".[8] Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A-" rating, and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote: "Damon is at once an obvious choice for the part and a hard sell to audiences soothed by his amiable boyishness... the facade works surprisingly well when Damon holds that gleaming smile just a few seconds too long, his Eagle Scout eyes fixed just a blink more than the calm gaze of any non-murdering young man. And in that opacity we see horror".[9]

Charlotte O'Sullivan of Sight and Sound wrote, "A tense, troubling thriller, marred only by problems of pacing (the middle section drags) and some implausible characterisation (Meredith's obsession with Ripley never convinces), it's full of vivid, miserable life".[10] Time named it one of the ten best films of the year and called it a "devious twist on the Patricia Highsmith crime novel".[11] James Berardinelli gave the film two and a half stars out of four, calling it "a solid adaptation" that "will hold a viewer's attention", but criticized "Damon's weak performance" and "a running time that's about 15 minutes too long."[12] Berardinelli compared the film unfavorably with the previous adaptation, Purple Noon, which he gave four stars.[13] He wrote, "The remake went back to the source material, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. The result, while arguably truer to the events of Highsmith's book, is vastly inferior. To say it suffers by comparison to Purple Noon is an understatement. Almost every aspect of René Clément's 1960 motion picture is superior to that of Minghella's 1999 version, from the cinematography to the acting to the screenplay. Matt Damon might make a credible Tom Ripley, but only for those who never experienced Alain Delon's portrayal."[14]

In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, "On balance, The Talented Mr. Ripley is worth seeing more for its undeniably delightful journey than its final destination. Perhaps wall-to-wall amorality and triumphant evil leave too sour an aftertaste even for the most sophisticated anti-Hollywood palate".[15] In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, "The Talented Mr. Ripley begins as an ingenious exposition of the great truth about charming people having something to hide: namely, their utter reliance on others. It ends up as a dismayingly unthrilling thriller and bafflingly unconvincing character study".[16] In her review for the Village Voice, Amy Taubin criticized Minghella as a "would-be art film director who never takes his eye off the box office, doesn't allow himself to become embroiled in such complexity. He turns The Talented Mr. Ripley into a splashy tourist trap of a movie. The effect is rather like reading The National Enquirer in a cafÃ© overlooking the Adriatic".[17] Damon was apparently unhappy with the film's departures from Highsmith's novel, telling an interviewer shortly after the film was released, "I'd like to make the whole film all over again with the same cast and same title but make it completely like the book."[18]


the idea for international solar alliance was proposed by which country

The International Solar Alliance (ISA) is an alliance of more than 121 countries, most of them being sunshine countries, which lie either completely or partly between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The primary objective of the alliance is to work for efficient exploitation of solar energy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. This initiative was first proposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a speech in November 2015 at Wembley Stadium, in which he referred to sunshine countries as Suryaputra ("Sons of the Sun").[1] The alliance is a treaty-based inter-governmental organization. Countries that do not fall within the Tropics can join the alliance and enjoy all benefits as other members, with the exception of voting rights.[2]

International Solar Alliance

The initiative was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the India Africa Summit, and a meeting of member countries ahead of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in November 2015.[3][4] The framework agreement of the International Solar Alliance opened for signatures in Marrakech, Morocco in November 2016, and 121 countries have joined.

It is to be headquartered in India.[5] In January 2016, Narendra Modi, and the French President François Hollande jointly laid the foundation stone of the ISA Headquarters and inaugurated the interim Secretariat at the National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE) in Gwalpahari, Gurugram, India. The Indian government has dedicated five acres of land on the NISE campus for its future headquarters; it also has contributed ₹1.75 billion (US$27 million) to the fund to build a campus and for meeting expenditures for the first five years.[6]

The alliance is also called International Agency for Solar Policy and Application (IASPA).[7]

The focus is on solar power utilization. The launching of such an alliance in Paris also sends a strong signal to the global communities about the sincerity of the developing nations towards their concern about climate change and to switch to a low-carbon growth path. India has pledged a target of installing 100GW by 2022 and reduction in emission intensity by 33â€“35% by 2030 to let solar energy reach to the most unconnected villages and communities and also towards creating a clean planet.[8] India's pledge to the Paris summit offered to bring 40% of its electricity generation capacity (not actual production) from non-fossil sources (renewable, large hydro, and nuclear) by 2030.[9] it is based on world co operation.

The area of Earth located in between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn is called the tropical (torrid) zone. The points on the Tropic of Cancer are the northernmost points up to which the Sun can pass directly overhead. Similarly, the southernmost points are on the Tropic of Capricorn which follow the same criteria. Location at the north of the Tropic of Cancer shows the Sun appearing at the south of the zenith.[10] The sunniest countries of the world are on the African continent, ranging from Somalia- Horn of Africa-, east to Niger, west and north to Egypt.[11]

For India, the possible additional benefit from the alliance can be the strengthening ties and with the major African countries increase goodwill for India among them.[12][13]

The alliance is a treaty-based inter-governmental organization.[5] The framework agreement of the International Solar Alliance opened for signatures in Marrakech, Morocco in November 2016, on the sidelines of the Marrakech Climate Change Conference (the twenty-second session of the Conference of the Parties, or COP 22). On its first day (15 November), sixteen countries signed the Agreement: India, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Dominican Republic, the Republic of Guinea, Mali; Nauru; Niger; Tanzania; Tuvalu; Cambodia; Ethiopia; Burkina Faso; Bangladesh and Madagascar.[5] By 17 November, Guinea Bissau, Fiji, France,[14] On November 6, 2017 India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj held a meeting with Guinea’s Foreign Minister, Mamady Toure. During the course of this meeting, Mamady Toure handed over Guinea’s Instrument of Accession to the India-initiated International Solar Alliance (ISA). Vanuatu and Liberia also signed the agreement.[2]

Subsequently, an additional 107 countries joined the agreement, including all major countries that lie between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, including Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, India, Australia, New Zealand, and China. A conclave started from 30 November 2015 for the sunshine grouping, called the InSPA (International Agency for Solar Policy & Application).[15]

The alliance has partnered with World Bank to launch Global Solar Atlas at an ISA event at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. Global Solar Atlas is a free online tool that displays annual average solar power potential at any location in the world and thus identify potential sites for solar power generation. World Bank announced "This tool will help governments save millions of dollars on their own research and provide investors and solar developers with an easily accessible and uniform platform to compare resource potential between sites in one region or across multiple countries."[16]

Riccardo Puliti, Senior Director and Head of the World Bank’s Energy & Extractives Global Practice said “The World Bank is seeing a surge of interest from our clients in solar power as a result of the dramatic cost decreases over the past few years. We hope that the Global Solar Atlas will help inform the crucial planning and investment decisions that will need to be taken over the next decade to shift to more sustainable forms of energy.” Piyush Goyal, Power Minister of India said “This new tool will assist governments and investors to obtain an initial indication of solar resource potential before carrying out their own more detailed analysis.”

India, with the support of France, has invited nations to facilitate infrastructure for implementation of solar projects. The alliance has been committed $1 tn as investment, and it is committed to making the costs of solar power more affordable for remote and inaccessible communities. The alliance will endorse India in achieving its goal of generating 100GW of solar energy and 175GW of renewable energy by 2022. The countries shall support each other in research and development as well as other high level activities.[17]

It is also seen as an alliance by the developing countries to form a united front and to undertake research and development for making solar power equipment within developing countries.[18]

On June 30, 2016, the alliance entered into an understanding with the World Bank for accelerating mobilization of finance for solar energy. The Bank will have a major role in mobilizing more than US $1000 billion in investments that will be needed by 2030, to meet ISAâ€™s goals for the massive deployment of affordable solar energy.[19] Till date 48 countries have signed and 26 countries have ratified the Framework Agreement of the ISA. With ratifications by 15 countries, the ISA will become a treaty based inter-governmental international organisation and it will be recognize by UN legally to become fully functionable.

At the World Future Energy Summit (WFES) held in Abu Dhabi in January 2018, the government of India announced the establishment of a $350 million solar development fund to enable financing of solar projects.


when do new episodes of hells kitchen air

As of December 15, 2017[update], 260 episodes of Hell's Kitchen have aired.

List of Hell's Kitchen episodes

Hell's Kitchen is an American reality television cooking competition (based on the British series of the same name) broadcast on Fox and premiered on May 30, 2005. It is hosted by celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.


who pays for most of the scientific research done in the us

In the United States, the most recent data from 2003[5] suggest that about 94 billion dollars were provided for biomedical research in the United States. The National Institutes of Health and pharmaceutical companies collectively contribute 26.4 billion dollars and 27.0 billion dollars, respectively, which constitute 28% and 29% of the total, respectively. Other significant contributors include biotechnology companies (17.9 billion dollars, 19% of total), medical device companies (9.2 billion dollars, 10% of total), other federal sources, and state and local governments. Foundations and charities, led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, contributed about 3% of the funding.

Medical research

Biomedical research (or experimental medicine) encompasses a wide array of research from "basic research" (also called bench science or bench research),[1] involving the explanation of more fundamental scientific principles, to clinical research, which is distinguished by the involvement of patients. Within this spectrum is applied research, or translational research conducted to aid and support the development of knowledge in the field of medicine, and pre-clinical research, for example involving animals.

Both clinical and pre-clinical research phases exist in the pharmaceutical industry's drug development pipelines, where the clinical phase is denoted by the term clinical trial. However, only part of the clinical or pre-clinical research is oriented towards a specific pharmaceutical purpose. The need for fundamental and mechanistic understanding, diagnostics, medical devices and non-pharmaceutical therapies means that pharmaceutical research is only a small part of medical research.

The increased longevity of humans over the past century can be significantly attributed to advances resulting from medical research. Among the major benefits of medical research have been vaccines for measles and polio, insulin treatment for diabetes, classes of antibiotics for treating a host of maladies, medication for high blood pressure, improved treatments for AIDS, statins and other treatments for atherosclerosis, new surgical techniques such as microsurgery, and increasingly successful treatments for cancer. New, beneficial tests and treatments are expected as a result of the Human Genome Project. Many challenges remain, however, including the appearance of antibiotic resistance and the obesity epidemic.

Most of the research in the field is pursued by biomedical scientists, however significant contributions are made by other biologists, as well as chemists and physicists. Medical research, done on humans, has to strictly follow the medical ethics as sanctioned in the Declaration of Helsinki and elsewhere. In all cases, the research ethics has to be respected.

Areas tackled in the most fundamental parts of medical research include cellular and molecular biology, medical genetics, immunology, neuroscience, and psychology. Researchers, mainly in universities or government-funded research institutes, aim to establish an understanding of the cellular, molecular and physiological mechanisms underpinning human health and disease.[2]

Since many organisms share a common evolutionary history with humans and hence common features and systems, the basic end of medical research these days shades into basic biology.

Pre-clinical research covers research that prepares the ground for clinical research with patients. Typically the work requires no ethical approval (though work with animals does), is supervised by scientists rather than medical doctors, and is carried out in a university or company rather than a hospital.

Clinical research is carried out with patients. It is generally supervised by doctors in a medical setting such as a hospital and requires ethical approval.

Research funding in many countries derives from research bodies and private organizations which distribute money for equipment and salaries. In the United Kingdom, funding bodies such as the Medical Research Council derive their assets from UK tax payers, and distribute this to institutions in a competitive manner. The Wellcome Trust is the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research and provides over Â£600 million per year in grants to scientists and funds for research centres.[4]

In Australia, in 2000/01 (the most recent data available), about $1.7B was spent on biomedical research,[6] with just under half ($800M, 47%) sourced from the Commonwealth government (all sources). About $540M came from business investments/funding and a further $220M from private or not-for-profit organisations (totalling 44%). The balance was from state and local governments. Since then there has been a significant in government funding through the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), whose expenditure on research was nearly A$700 million in 2008â€“09.[7]

The enactment of orphan drug legislation in some countries has increased funding available to develop drugs meant to treat rare conditions, resulting in breakthroughs that previously were uneconomical to pursue.

Since the establishment of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the mid-1940s, the main source of U.S. Federal support of biomedical research, investment priorities and levels of funding have fluctuated. From 1995 to 2010, NIH support of biomedical research increased from 11 billion to 27 billion [8] Despite the jump in federal spending, advancements measured by citations to publications and the number of drugs passed by the FDA along with other measures of scientific achievement remained stagnant over the same time span.[9] Financial projections indicate federal spending will remain constant in the near future.[9]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the agency that is responsible for management of the lion's share of federal funding of biomedical research.[8] Over the past century there were two notable periods of NIH support. From 1995 to 1996 funding increased from $8.877 billion to $9.366 billion,[10] years which represented the start of what is considered the "doubling period" of rapid NIH support.[8] The second notable period started in 1997 and ended in 2010, a period where the NIH moved to organize research spending for engagement with the scientific community.[10] In 1997 Applications were added and in 2000 Awards had been added.[10] These changes were coupled with increasing support; funding rose from $13 billion in 1997 to approximately $27 billion in 2010.[10] The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 should also be noted in this history of NIH funding of biomedical research as it committed further funds in the midst of the great recession.[10]

Estimating Long-Term Economic Returns of NIH Funding on Output in the Biosciences published in August, 2012 describes the latest trends of NIH organization. In recent years, the NIH has started to publish medical research trials Success Rates per dollar spent, an initiative which illustrates that research efficiency is viewed as a significant issue both by the public and policy makers.[10]

Since 1980 the share of biomedical research funding from industry sources has grown from 32% to 62%,[11] which has resulted in the development of numerous life-saving medical advances. The relationship between industry and government-funded research in the US has seen great movement over the years. The 1980 Bayh Dole Act was passed by Congress to foster a more constructive relationship between the collaboration of government and industry funded biomedical research. The Bayh Doyle Act gave private corporations the option of applying for government funded grants for biomedical research which in turn allowed the private corporations to license the technology.[12] Both government and industry research funding increased rapidly from between the years of 1994â€“2003; industry saw a compound average annual growth rate of 8.1% a year and slowed only slightly to a compound average annual growth rate of 5.8% from 2003 to 2008.[13]

The funding from industry for pharmaceutical research, a large part of all industry funded research, has slowed since 1994 due to multiple perceptions, lower approval rates from the FDA, increased costs with clinical trials due to more stringent regulation and longer anticipation for return on investment. A 2004 study showed that to bring a drug to market, drug development requires an average of 12â€“15 years and can reach costs up to $1.7 billion.[12]

"Conflict of interest" in the field of medical research has been defined as "a set of conditions in which professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as a patients welfare or the validity of research) tends to be unduly influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain)."[14]

In the early 1900s private companies such as the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company,[15] Mrs. Winlow's Soothing Syrup[16] among other snake medicine remedies were solicited around the world and were the cause of many deaths due to misinformation. Information was not readily available to consumers nor was it required of the pharmaceutical producers to inform their customers of the ingredients that they were consuming. Samuel Hopkins Adams was an investigator to uncover the wide corruption and falsehoods that existed within the American pharmaceutical industry. He is quoted saying: "Gullible America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud."[15]

Regulation on industry funded biomedical research has seen great changes since Samuel Hopkins Adams declaration. In 1906 congress passed the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906.[16] In 1912 Congress passed the Shirley Amendment to prohibit the wide dissemination of false information on pharmaceuticals.[16] The Food and Drug Administration was formally created in 1930 under the McNarey Mapes Amendment to oversee the regulation of Food and Drugs in the United States.[16] In 1962 the Kefauver-Harris Amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act made it so that before a drug was marketed in the United States the FDA must first approve that the drug was safe.[16] The Kefauver-Harris amendments also mandated that more stringent clinical trials must be performed before a drug is brought to the market.[15] The Kefauver-Harris amendments were met with opposition from industry due to the requirement of lengthier clinical trial periods that would lessen the period of time in which the investor is able to see return on their money. In the pharmaceutical industry patents are typically granted for a 20-year period of time, and most patent applications are submitted during the early stages of the product development.[15] According to Ariel Katz on average after a patent application is submitted it takes an additional 8 years before the FDA approves a drug for marketing.[15] As such this would leave a company with only 12 years to market the drug to see a return on their investments. After a sharp decline of new drugs entering the US market following the 1962 Kefauver-Harris amendments economist Sam Petlzman concluded that cost of loss of innovation was greater than the savings recognized by consumers no longer purchasing ineffective drugs.[15] In 1984 the Hatch-Waxman Act or the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984 was passed by congress.[16] The Hatch-Waxman Act was passed with the idea that giving brand manufacturers the ability to extend their patent by an additional 5 years would create greater incentives for innovation and private sector funding for investment.[17]

The relationship that exists with industry funded biomedical research is that of which industry is the financier for academic institutions which in turn employ scientific investigators to conduct research. A fear that exists wherein a project is funded by industry is that firms might negate informing the public of negative effects to better promote their product.[15] A list of studies show that public fear of the conflicts of interest that exist when biomedical research is funded by industry can be considered valid after a 2003 publication of "Scope and Impact of Financial Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research" in The Journal of American Association of Medicine. This publication included 37 different studies that met specific criteria to determine whether or not an academic institution or scientific investigator funded by industry had engaged in behavior that could be deduced to be a conflict of interest in the field of biomedical research. Survey results from one study concluded that 43% of scientific investigators employed by a participating academic institution had received research related gifts and discretionary funds from industry sponsors.[11] Another participating institution surveyed showed that 7.6% of investigators were financially tied to research sponsors, including paid speaking engagements (34%), consulting arrangements (33%), advisory board positions (32%) and equity (14%).[11] A 1994 study concluded that 58% out of 210 life science companies indicated that investigators were required to withhold information pertaining to their research as to extend the life of the interested companies' patents.[11] Rules and regulations regarding conflict of interest disclosures are being studied by experts in the biomedical research field to eliminate conflicts of interest that could possibly affect the outcomes of biomedical research.

The earliest narrative describing a medical trial is found in the Book of Daniel, which says that Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar ordered youths of royal blood to eat only red meat and wine for three years, while another group of youths ate only beans and water.[18] The experiment was intended to determine if a diet of vegetables and water was healthier than a diet of wine and red meat. At the experiment endpoint, the trial accomplished its prerogative: the youths who ate only beans and water were noticeably healthier.[18] Scientific curiosity to understand health outcomes from varying treatments has been present for centuries, but it was not until the mid-19th century when an organizational platform was created to support and regulate this curiosity. In 1945, Vannevar Bush said that biomedical scientific research was "the pacemaker of technological progress", an idea which contributed to the initiative to found the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1948, a historical benchmark that marked the beginning of a near century substantial investment in biomedical research.[19] The NIH provides more financial support for medical research that any other agency in the world to date and claims responsibility for numerous innovations that have improved global health.[19] The historical funding of biomedical research has undergone many changes over the past century. Innovations such as the polio vaccine, antibiotics and antipsychotic agents, developed in the early years of the NIH lead to social and political support of the agency. Political initiatives in the early 1990s lead to a doubling of NIH funding, spurring an era of great scientific progress.[20] There have been dramatic changes in the era since the turn of the 21st century to date; roughly around the start of the century, the cost of trials dramatically increased while the rate scientific discoveries did not keep pace.[20]

Biomedical research spending increased substantially faster than GDP growth over the past decade in the US, between the years of 2003 and 2007 spending increased 14% per year, while GDP growth increased 1% over the same period (both measures adjusted for inflation).[21] Industry, not-for-profit entities, state and federal funding spending combined accounted for an increase in funding from $75.5 billion in 2003 to $101.1 billion in 2007.[21] Due to the immediacy of federal financing priorities and stagnant corporate spending during the recession, biomedical research spending decreased 2% in real terms in 2008.[21] Despite an overall increase of investment in biomedical research, there has been stagnation, and in some areas a marked decline in the number of drug and device approvals over the same time period.[21]

Today, industry sponsored research accounts for 58% of expenditures, NIH for 27% of expenditures, state governments for 5% of expenditures, non NIH-federal sources for 5% of expenditures and not-for-profit entities accounted for 4% of support.[21] Federally funded biomedical research expenditures increased nominally, 0.7% (adjusted for inflation), from 2003 to 2007.[21] Previous reports showed a stark contrast in federal investment, from 1994 to 2003, federal funding increased 100% (adjusted for inflation).[21]

The NIH manages the lions-share, over 85%, of federal biomedical research expenditures.[21] NIH support for biomedical research decreased from $31.8 billion in 2003, to $29.0 billion in 2007, a 25% decline (in real terms adjusted for inflation), while non-NIH federal funding allowed for the maintenance of government financial support levels through the era (the 0.7% four-year increase). Spending from industry-initiated research increased 25% (adjusted for inflation) over the same time period of time, from 2003 to 2007, an increase from $40 billion in 2003, to $58.6 billion in 2007.[21] Industry sourced expenditures from 1994 to 2003 showed industry sponsored research funding increased 8.1%, a stark contrast to 25% increase in recent years.[21]

Of industry sponsored research, pharmaceutical firm spending was the greatest contributor from all industry sponsored biomedical research spending, but only increased 15% (adjusted for inflation) from 2003 to 2007, while device and biotechnology firms accounted for the majority of the spending.[21] The stock performance, a measure that can be an indication of future firm growth or technological direction, has substantially increased for both predominantly medical device and biotechnology producers.[21] Contributing factors to this growth are thought to be less rigorous FDA approval requirements for devices as opposed to drugs, lower cost of trials, lower pricing and profitability of products and predictable influence of new technology due to a limited number of competitors.[21] Another visible shift during the era was a shift in focus to late stage research trials; formerly dispersed, since 1994 an increasingly large portion of industry-sponsored research was late phase trials rather than early-experimental phases now accounting for the majority of industry sponsored research.[21] This shift is attributable to a lower risk investment and a shorter development to market schedule.[21] The low risk preference is also reflected in the trend of large pharmaceutical firms acquiring smaller companies that hold patents to newly developed drug or device discoveries which have not yet passed federal regulation (large companies are mitigating their risk by purchasing technology created by smaller companies in early-phase high-risk studies).[21] Medical research support from Universities increased from $22 billion in 2003 to $27.7 billion in 2007, a 7.8% increase (adjusted for inflation).[21] In 2007 the most heavily funded institutions received 20% of HIN medical research funding, and the top 50 institutions received 58% of NIH medical research funding, the percent of funding allocated to the largest institutions is a trend which has increased only slightly over data from 1994.[21] Relative to federal and private funding, health policy and service research accounted for a nominal amount of sponsored research; health policy and service research was funded $1.8 billion in 2003, which increased to $2.2 billion in 2008.[21]

Stagnant rates of investment from the US government over the past decade, may be in part attributable to challenges that plague the field. To date only two-thirds of published drug trial findings have results that can be re-produced,[22] which raises concerns from a US regulatory standpoint where great investment has been made in research ethics and standards, yet trial results remain inconsistent. Federal agencies have called upon greater regulation to address these problems; a spokesman from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, an agency of the NIH, stated that there is "widespread poor reporting of experimental design in articles and grant applications, that animal research should follow a core set of research parameters, and that a concerted effort by all stakeholders is needed to disseminate best reporting practices and put them into practice".[22]

Two laws which are both still in effect, one passed in 2006 and the other in 2010, were instrumental in defining funding reporting standards for biomedical research, and defining for the first time reporting regulations that were previously not required. The 2006 Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act mandates that all entities receiving over $25,000 in federal funds must report annual spending reports, including disclosure of executive salaries.[23] The 2010 amendment to the act mandates that progress reports be submitted along with financial reporting.[23] Data from the federal mandate is managed and made publicly available on usaspending.gov.[23] Aside from the main source, usaspending.gov, other reporting mechanisms exist: Data specifically on biomedical research funding from federal sources is made publicly available by the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA), data on health services research, approximately 0.1% of federal funding on biomedical research, is available through the Coalition of Health Services Research, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Veterans Health Administration.[21]

Currently there are not any funding reporting requirements for industry sponsored research, but there has been voluntary movement toward this goal.[24] In 2014, major pharmaceutical stakeholders such as Roche and Johnson and Johnson have made financial information publicly available and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the most prominent professional association for biomedical research companies, has recently begun to provide limited public funding reports.[24]

Medical research is very highly regulated. National regulatory authorities are appointed in almost every country worldwide to oversee and monitor medical research, such as for the development and distribution of new drugs. In the US the Food and Drug Administration oversees new drug development, in Europe the European Medicines Agency (see also EudraLex), and in Japan the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (Japan). The World Medical Association develops the ethical standards for the medical profession, involved in medical research. The most fundamental of them is the Declaration of Helsinki. The International Conference on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) works on the creation of rules and guidelines for the development of new medication, such as the guidelines for Good Clinical Practice (GCP). All ideas of regulation are based on a country's ethical standards code. This is why treatment of a particular disease in one country may not be allowed, but is in another.

A major flaw and vulnerability in biomedical research appears to be the hypercompetition for the resources and positions that are required to conduct science. The competition seems to suppress the creativity, cooperation, risk-taking, and original thinking required to make fundamental discoveries. Other consequences of today's highly pressured environment for research appear to be a substantial number of research publications whose results cannot be replicated, and perverse incentives in research funding that encourage grantee institutions to grow without making sufficient investments in their own faculty and facilities.[25][26][27][28][29] Other risky trends include a decline in the share of key research grants going to younger scientists, as well as a steady rise in the age at which investigators receive their first funding.[30]

Fields of biomedical research include: