#and then eventually included the companion support group at the end of his era

[bisexualamy]

Your take on Power of Three is sooo good and correct! Underrated ep!

Thank you! "Power of Three" is another ep where I believe that I could Fix Her with minimal rewrites. I really think it's remembered poorly because the villain is underwhelming and underdeveloped. I think if they'd just simplified the villain, or turned the episode into a non-antagonist episode like they did with "Twice Upon a Time", more people would give it the credit it deserves. The point of "Power of Three" is not the villain.

Power of Three is an episode primarily concerned with what happens after people leave the TARDIS. Modern Who did this earlier, with Sarah Jane in "School Reunion", Jack in The Utopia Arc and later in Torchwood, and pretty much all of the farewell sequence in "End of Time." Chibnall did it later as well with the companion support group. But I think "Power of Three" is unique in that its tone is markedly more positive than previous examples. It's a lovely slice of life episode and a lovely ode to Amy and Rory, who've at that point were our companions the longest anyone's been a companion in Modern Who.

We get the Team TARDIS domesticity that many of us love. We get glimpses of Amy and Rory's friends back home, and the joy they take in "boring" things like weddings and dinner parties. It has the introduction of Kate Stewart and a lovely homage to the Brig. It has my favorite scene with Amy and Eleven by the Thames, where two people who have such difficulty being emotionally direct and genuine are able to now, after years of growing together, admit plainly that they love each other and they're terrified of losing each other. The episode is full of references to how the Doctor's fingerprints are all of Earth and its history, some good and some bad, but ultimately he is loved. His impact isn't just dramatic, be that saving the Earth or bringing about terrible tragedy. The Doctor is Amy and Rory's friend. The Brigadier's friend. Kate's friend. That's it.

I love "Power of Three" because, for the first time since the revival, we're seeing companions who grow beyond the Doctor, whose relationship grows and changes to include the Doctor less or differently, without tragedy being the catalyst. Amy and Rory aren't traumatized like Martha. They don't have their memories wiped like Donna. They aren't forcibly ripped away like Rose. They just built a life they like, and as they're growing up they're finding a lot of joy in all the different ways they can live their life.

Amy has learned to appreciate a life that is slower and simpler. Rory has grown confident both in his relationship with Amy and his career. Amy and Eleven explain the episode's point right at the beginning:

AMY: To think it's been ten years. Not for you, or for Earth, but for us. Ten years older. Ten years of you, on and off. ELEVEN: Look at you now. All grown up.

This is Amy's character arc, and Amy/Eleven's relationship arc, in a nutshell. This is the end of their story. And as much as I love "Angels Take Manhattan", I feel like really, in "Power of Three", Amy and Rory demonstrate that they're already ready to move onto the next phase of their lives. Maybe it could've ended less tragically. Maybe the Doctor could've visited them for decades and decades in the future. But they were never going to travel again like they did back in Series 5 and 6. And that can be wonderful.

[cowperviolet]

A Guide to Medieval Childhood

Our popular imaginings and depictions of medieval childhood tend to be somehow both scarce and bleak. It’s often supposed that childhood as a category didn’t really exist until the twentieth century, and that even the highborn children before that blessed time were regarded as basically inconvenient mini-adults until they were old enough to fight or marry, respectively.

The sources we have tend to favour the royal families and the high aristocracy with some wealthy merchants thrown in the mix, so, unfortunately, the information below would mostly be concerned with these groups - although I’m going to do my best to include some facts about the lives of children from lower social strata, too.

Infantia, or infancy

As Maria von Trapp used to sing in technicolor meadows, let’s start at the very beginning - it is, after all, a very good place to start.  

A mother rarely gave birth unattended - and I’m not talking about medical professionals; more often than not, these would be represented by a sole midwife. However, having a close friend or a relative with you as you are waiting for the baby to arrive was a practice well-established by the early fourteenth century even among royal women, whose births, marriages and deaths alike were always ruled by strict ceremony.

In their case, as in the case of all great families of the land, the practice also had a purely pragmatic side - additional companions mean additional witnesses who would be able to swear, should a scandal arise, that the little heir really arrived in the lawful way and had not been, say, smuggled into the bedroom in a pan. (In the case of the British royal family this precaution eventually led to the Home Secretary being obliged to attend all royal births, and was only done away with in 1930, when the late Princess Margaret was born).

Of course, for all the companionable support, the birth was not without its risks - for the child even more so than for the mother. It was for that reason that, uniquely, the Church allowed the midwives to baptize newborn - or unborn - babies in case they don’t survive by the time the sacrament in question could be performed properly by a priest.

If everything went well, it was the time to prepare the child for an ‘official’ baptism in the local church, which was going to not only save his soul for the world to come, but to help his standing in this one - after all, being baptized in a particular church meant being integrated into the larger community of the parish. The mother could rest - she was not required to attend the christening (or, rather, she couldn’t, as she would only be able to enter a place of worship again after being purified via a brief ‘churching’ ceremony on the fortieth day after giving birth). The child’s godparents would have been there to stand in her stead.

In fact, many contemporaries considered that a woman needs at least a month to properly recover after birth. Nor was it supposed to be a time of solitude - receiving female visitors was both allowed and encouraged.

Meanwhile, the child would be transferred into the care of a wet-nurse. Breastfeeding your baby yourself usually signified that you simply cannot afford wet-nurse of good character. The good character part of the job description concerned itself both with the purely physical characteristics - the wet-nurse had to be a little below thirty, to have white teeth, sweet breath, and a child of her own not above eight months of age, otherwise her milk could be considered stale - and the moral ones. It was believed that virtues and vices both could be transmitted through milk, and thus it was imperative to choose a wet-nurse both sensible and respectable.

Once hired, she rarely left the baby’s side - contemporary writers acknowledged that leaving an infant to cry is harmful for the child’s health, both mental and physical, and therefore a nurse should always be at hand with either her breast or a lullaby. In the highest households of the land, such as that of the royal children of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, one or two women were also employed as specifically the child’s rockers, tasked with, well, rocking their little charge to sleep - though not too quickly or too harshly, ‘for fear of making the milk float in [her] stomach’.

Every medieval baby, regardless of his family’s income, was swaddled from birth and until he was about eight or nine months of age: not only would he be kept warm, the parents judged, but it’s also going to help his limbs grow straight. A ‘breechcloth’ – essentially, a premodern nappy - was a piece of easily-washable linen, doubled over and then fastened into place with pins. Then a linen shirt would be gently placed over the infant’s body, after which the swaddling bands proper – sometimes three yards long – would come out. They were long, narrow pieces of – you guessed it - linen.

This swaddling part was universal for everyone; however, even here, before the child could partake in any fashion proper, the class divides came out to play. Babies from wealthier families could sport crimson mantles and bands decorated with gold embroidery (sometimes coordinated with that on their mothers’ outfits, like on the famous Cholmondeley Ladies painting at the top of this post).

Another – perhaps, more familiar to us – sphere of baby-related conspicuous consumption was the cradle. When, in 1494, the son of Beatrice d’Este and Ludovico Sforza was born in Milan, the proud father presented his guests a four-poster cradle covered in white satin, where the little heir now lay. When Lucrezia Borgia gave the d’Este family an heir, she splashed out on the cradle for the little Ercole even more. According to contemporary witnesses, the cradle was located under tent-like Moorish-style silk draperies done in the Este colors. It was on a platform encased in a great carved and gilded canopy, six feet long and five feet wide. The cradle proper was curtained in white satin, with the sleeping baby covered with cloth-of-gold.

The weaning tended to come, by our standards, rather late: some contemporary arguments recommended three years for boys and two years for girls (the former, after all, were expected to lead more active lives, and thus needed their mother’s nutritious milk more). Even then, hard food was to be introduced gradually – starting, for instance, with a chicken leg the child could chew on.

Once out of swaddling, the boys were dressed in smocks, and the girls in gowns – not that there was much visual difference between the two, mind. Regardless of their parents’ social standing, they all also wore tight linen caps that bore the charmingly hobbit-y name of biggins.

Naturally, the higher one stood upon the social scale, the more ornamental these gowns and smocks tended to be. The toddler Princess Elizabeth, who was the daughter of Henry VII and thus the aunt of her much more famous namesake, was dressed on separate occasions in a green velvet gown edged with purple tinsel and lined with black buckram, a dress of black velvet edged with crimson, or a kirtle of tawny damask and black satin. Admittedly, these were mostly for ceremonial occasions, and in the privacy of her yellow ochre-coloured chambers even the princess probably tended to wear something more comfortable. In winter, she was kept warm with furred robes fastened with silver buttons and caps trimmed with peacock feathers, and, regardless of the time of the year, indulged with sweets made from sugars flavoured with rose and violet, as well as with fruits from sunnier climes like pomegranates, quinces, and almonds.

Royal families were never noted for modesty of consumption in any era, but even the middling merchants of Florence were often criticized for spoiling their children with fine clothes. Fra Dominici wrote scathingly about parents who dress their children in ‘fancy garments, stamped shoes, short waist-coats, tight and fine-knit hose’. Neither did he approve of toys like “little wooden horses, attractive cymbals, imitation birds, [and] gilded drums,” recommending instead more virtuous playthings like “a little altar or two, … little vestments … little candles … [and] little bells,”, so that the children could pretend they were acolytes or priests. Three guesses no prizes as to which category ended up being the more popular one.

Some types of toys would have been surprisingly familiar to us – for example, doll furniture. In Germany one could find whole doll kitchens with dishes, meat plates, cutlery and furniture since the 1550s at the latest. Wealthier girls were also bought so-called fashion dolls that showcased, you guessed it, the latest fashions in the land.

Of course, poorer children had to make do with dolls stuffed with straw, and play with such props as animal knucklebones or wooden wheels.  However, it doesn’t mean that their lives were completely devoid of fun. Contemporary paintings, such as Peter Brueghel’ Children’s Games (1560), show children playing blind man’s bluff, ‘paper, scissors, stone’, roll hoops and rock barrels.

Pueritia, or childhood

A child’s education started with learning his (or, rarer, her) letters. A rather charming contemporary advice recommends the parents to do it by carving each letter on a piece of fruit, and reward the child with the fruit in question if the letter is correctly identified. These kinds of basics could be learned at home (though, if you decided to choose the method above, better do it specifically in the kitchen) – however, once the rudimentary parts were done with, the paths of learning could branch wildly.

The wealthiest families hired tutors for their children, and these posts, prestigious and coveted as they were, could sometimes become subjects of competition. For example, when the future Elizabeth I grew old enough for her first lessons, it was assumed that these are going to be provided by her aunt and godmother, Lady Troy. However, the less highborn, but more ambitious Katherine Champernowne had other ideas; Henry VIII ended up being impressed by reports of her as a woman of good education, and appointed her to be his daughter’s governess in 1536. She held that post until 1544, when her precocious charge overgrew the standard highborn lady’s curriculum that consisted of reading, embroidery, music, riding, falconry, and chess. After that, the scholar William Grindal became the princess’ tutor, introducing her to classical authors such as Plato.

Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek literature was not exclusively the preserve of the upper-class education. The cathedral school of St. Paul’s, for instance, taught children from middling walks of life - such as one Geoffrey Chaucer, the son of a wine merchant - and placed a great emphasis on the learning of Latin. The recitation of the Latin alphabet started with the sign of the cross and ended with ‘Amen’: quite a sign of respect, coming from a religious institution. The school’s library was full of books on logic, law and medicine, as well as such still-popular classical hits as Aesop’s Fables.

The boys (unlike in the more flexible world of private education, school pupils were invariably male) also owned some books of their own: contrary to a common misconception, even before the invention of printing press books were not necessarily objects of luxury. For example, when in 1337 John Cobbledick left twenty-nine books to Oriel College, each of them was priced at about 6 shillings. Two centuries later, when William Chatsworth sent his beloved wife Bess of Hardwick gifts during his sojourn in London, he included some learning materials for their children: three French grammars, a copy of Cosmografie de Levant, and psalms in French.

Charitable institutions could sometimes take care of the education of poorer children: for instance, in 1542, the Alderman William Dauntsey of London directed in his will that his executors should build a charity school of eight chambers (one of them for the schoolmaster) in West Lavington, Wiltshire.

Boys who could boast some musical talent had an unusual route for both education and promotion: chapel choirs. Many noblemen - and noblewomen such as Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII - engaged in cultural patronage, supporting at times dozens of choristers. Margaret herself had hired a composer, Robert Cooper, who was entrusted with finding gifted boys for her chapel from ‘London, Wynesore and in the west country'. She also made sure that, apart from musical education, the boys in her choir received tuition in Latin: in January 1506 the same Cooper was responsible for purchasing five 'gramer bokes ... for the chyldryn of the chapell', costing 4s 3d. Their education ensured that, after growing out of their roles in the choir, the boys would be able to continue academic studies. One Thomas Freston left Margaret’s chapel at the age of 13 to attend Winchester College, while the 1460 statute of Tattershall College specified provision for ‘four poor boys’ who were 'teachable in song and reading, to help the choristers, each of whom is to have commons and clothing and all else that the choristers do'.

Girls could be educated in convent schools; some, though by no means all, later chose to enter these nunneries as actual novices (they couldn’t legally make such a decision until the age of twelve, however, just as they couldn’t legally consent to marriage). Within the convent walls, as outside them, their comforts depended a lot on their parents’ standing - if their entry fee was generous enough, the girls, whether they came as pupils or little novices, could count on having a bedroom to themselves, a generous provision of wood to burn in their fireplace, and rare foodstuffs for their tables. When Edward I’s daughter Mary entered the convent of Amesbury as a novice in 1285, at unusual (and frankly illegal) age of seven, her lifelong allowance included an annual provision of twenty tuns of wine from the Bordeaux claret merchants and forty oaks as kindling for her fireplace.

Convents were supposed to foster the life of prayer and quiet contemplation, which was even harder to get used to for her teenage novices than it were for the secular boarders, who weren’t,  after all, handled as strictly. However, even in a nunnery, there was a certain softening of the rules when it came to young girls. For example, at the Feast of St Nicholas, the patron saint of children, the youngest novice was named the Girl Abbess and allowed to lead the community in dancing and revelry.

Adolescentia, or adolescence

This stage of life was thought to start at about fourteen and end in one’s early twenties. Highborn children of both sexes were usually sent to foster at the homes of friends or relatives of equal standing, both to finish their education and to establish useful connections. When the teenage Jan of Brabant was sent for foster at the English court, he devoted his years there to perfecting the arts of jousting and hunting with falcons, as well as the less official, but nonetheless useful skills of party planning, people-charming, and careful gambling. His future bride Margaret of England, meanwhile, was improving on her feminine arts of weaving and embroidery, often spending substantial sums on gold thread and silks of different colours.

The machinery of altar diplomacy was already in full swing by the time they reached that age, even though marriage proper - with the consummation implied - was usually still a few years in the future. The fate of Margaret Beaufort, who gave birth to her first husband’s son at age thirteen, was considered grotesque and frankly unsafe; after all, it’s no coincidence that she could have no children after. For instance, Thomas Aquinas cautioned in his Mirror for Princes that consummation should be delayed until the woman had reached the age of eighteen, and the man twenty-one.   

The complicated diplomatic and legal negotiation process behind such agreements was left to the heads of the families and their respective employees, without the involvement of the betrothed ones themselves. After all, it included such charming tasks as drawing a complete summary of all villages, farms, rents, forests, and windmills belonging to the future groom’s family which would be able to provide the income for the bride’s dower, or widow portion, in case she outlives him - a pretty significant possibility, considering.

Lower down the social scale, marriage arrangements were not so pressing a concern - urban artisans, male or female, often married only in their mid-twenties. When their children reached adolescence, they usually worried about arranging an apprenticeship for them rather than a betrothal.

A child could be apprenticed to a master who practiced one of the trades regulated by the guilds of the town. These included mercers, grocers, fishmongers, drapers, tailors and even artists. The training usually took seven years, during which the master in question was obliged not only to educate the apprentice, but also to feed and clothe them and generally treat them like a member of their family (which usually also meant having them help around the house). This way, the future artisans spent their adolescence in a situation of indenture and completed their training in their early twenties. The ultimate dream after that was becoming a master in their own right and acquiring one’s own workshop; but, like people in their early twenties everywhere, most were too broke for that, and ended up working as journeymen in their master’s workshop for some more years - or sometimes for the rest of their lives.

Although the most prestigious trades, such as those of mercers or goldsmiths, only admitted men, others - the tailors, the bakers, the printers, the bakers, sometimes the painters - were open to apprentices of both sexes. Female artisans often ended up marrying their colleagues from the same guilds, and then keeping workshop together, but sometimes they kept their trade and conducted their business separately.

At this point, gaining the trappings of trade and marriage, they progressed into the adulthood, and thus beyond the scope of this post.

Sources:

Devices and Desires: Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England by Kate Hubbard

Daughters of Chivalry by Katie Wilson-Lee

The Lives of Tudor Women by Elizabeth Norton

Chaucer: A European Life by Marion Turner

Kisby, Fiona. “A Mirror of Monarchy: Music and Musicians in the Household Chapel of the Lady Margaret Beaufort, Mother of Henry VII.” Early Music History, vol. 16, 1997, pp. 203–234

The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400–1700: Objects, Spaces, Domesticities by Erin J. Campbell et al.

[readingsweetblueflowers]

Setting the stage

Before I get to the play Rokumeikan I think it’s useful to understand at least a bit of the historical context around it. The play is set in 1886 in the middle of the Meiji era (1868-1912), one of the most tumultuous and consequential periods in the history of Japan. The historical setting of Rokumeikan would be as familiar to modern Japanese schoolgirls like those at Fujigaya and Matsuoka as the Civil War period is to us in the U.S. (The first episode of the currently-airing anime Meiji Tokyo Renka, about a girl who time-travels back to the Meiji era, has a scene set at the Rokumeikan.)

Since this post is ultimately in the service of my commentary on Sweet Blue Flowers, I thought it appropriate to discuss the history of Meiji-era Japan and the Rokumeikan from the point of view of Sutematsu Yamakawa, Shige Nagai, and Ume Tsuda, the three ordinary girls whose extraordinary lives are documented in Janice Nimura’s book The Daughters of the Samurai. Sutematsu, the oldest of them, was born in 1860, only a few years after Commodore Matthew Perry and his “black ships” showed up in Tokyo harbor in 1853 demanding that Japan open its ports to the U.S.

With no navy and no national military the Tokugawa shogunate struggled to resist pressures from the U.S. and other countries, and in 1858 signed a series of “unequal treaties” that favored the various Western powers and impinged on Japanese sovereignty. Resentment of Western influence and long-standing grievances with the Tokugawas then led to a prolonged period of civil strife, ending in 1867-1868 with a civil war in which forces fighting in the name of the Emperor decisively defeated pro-government forces. Sutematsu, daughter of a mid-rank samurai on the losing side, was wounded by shrapnel in one of the final battles.

14-year-old Prince Mutsuhito became Emperor in 1867, with the new “Meiji” (”enlightened rule”) era proclaimed in 1868 with the fall of Edo (now Tokyo) and the formation of a new government populated by many energetic and relatively young mid-rank samurai. They embarked upon a crash course of importing Western knowledge, technology, and experts, with an eye towards making Japan a modern power as fast as possible.

One of those men, Kiyotaka Kuroda, had been impressed with American women while on a visit to the U.S., and conceived the fantastical idea of sending a group of Japanese girls to the U.S. for a ten-year stay in order to learn American ways and come back to educate a new generation of Japanese girls. After an initial recruitment effort failed, the government succeeded in finding five low-to-mid rank samurai families who had been on the losing side, were living in relative poverty, and were therefore willing to let their girls leave home so as not to have to support them.

The five girls left Japan in 1871 as part of the famous Iwakura mission along with a group of high-ranking government officials, scholars, and male students charged to visit foreign nations and bring back information of use to Japan. The oldest two of the girls returned to Japan due to ill health and homesickness, but Sutematsu Yamakawa (11 years old), Shige Nogai (10), and Ume Tsuda (6) found places with American families. They soon learned English, made close American friends, and became socialized in a manner typical of upper middle class American teenagers of the period.

While the girls were away Japan saw a blooming of intellectual discourse, the formation of grass-roots political movements, and the creation of nascent political parties, as elements within society and government contended over what political and cultural ideas and institutions were most appropriate for Japan.

The three girls returned in the early 1880s, Sutematsu Yamakawa having graduated from Vassar College (the first Japanese woman to receive an American college degree) and Shige Nogai having earned a certificate in music from Vassar. All three girls experienced severe culture shock, with Ume Tsuda having completely forgotten how to speak Japanese. They also found that foreign ideas were not quite as popular as when they left for America, as a conservative backlash was building.

Shige Nogai soon entered into a love match with a fellow Japanese student who had attended the U.S. Naval Academy, and went to work as a music teacher, continuing her career while bearing and raising her six children. (Some scholars contend that she’s depicted in the woodblock print above showing a dance at the Rokumeikan, the rightmost pianist to whom the other pianist seems to be looking for help in setting the tempo.) Her husband eventually became a Baron and Admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy, and she a Baroness.

Sutematsu Yamakawa struggled to find work suitable to her upbringing and education, and ended up accepting an offer of marriage from Iwao Ōyama, a general in the Imperial Japanese Army, twenty years her senior, who was looking for a wife who was familiar with Western ways and could assist him in his political and diplomatic activities. Her husband later became Minister of War and she became a pillar of the Japanese aristocracy, advising the Empress herself on Western culture and fashion.

As Countess (later Princess) Ōyama she became known as the “Lady of the Rokumeikan” for her role in hosting events there after its construction in 1883. She also introduced American-style  philanthropy to Japan, including a charity bazaar held at the Rokumeikan. (This event was memorialized in a woodblock print by Toyohara Chikanobu, also the artist of the print shown above. Sutematsu and her daughter Hisako are apparently depicted in the center of the print.)

One of the major beneficiaries of Sutematsu’s philanthropy was Ume Tsuda, who had the worst time adjusting to life in Japan. She first obtained employment as a private tutor to the children of Hirobumi Itō, soon to become Japan’s first Prime Minister. She then taught at the Peeresses’ School, which Itō set up (with assistance from Countess Ōyama) to educate the daughters of the Imperial family and Japanese nobility. (Prestigious girls schools like Fujigaya Womens Academy would later offer an equivalent experience for the daughters of Japan’s upper and upper middle classes.)

Tsuda became frustrated by the conservatism of the Peeresses’ School and the expectations of her family and others that she marry. Due to her youth she had not been able to attend college while in America, and hence she applied for and was granted permission and funding to go back to the U.S. to complete her education. She enrolled at the recently-opened Bryn Mawr College for women and graduated with a bachelors degree. She then returned to Japan, having also found time to (anonymously) assist a friend in writing a book, Japanese Girls and Women, critical of Japanese laws and educational policies relating to girls and women.

After returning to Japan, after some time and with assistance from Countess Ōyama, Ume Tsuda was able to realize her dream of opening her own school, the Women's Institute for English Studies (女子英学塾 Joshi Eigaku Juku), with the goal of training teachers for Japan’s newly-mandated middle schools for girls. She was soon joined by Anna Cope Hartshorne, her close friend from Bryn Mawr who became her companion in both work and life. (Like Nobuko Yoshiya and her partner, Tsuda and Hartshorne bought a cottage together in Kamakura.)

Tsuda spent the last years of her life in ill health, living in Kamakura with Anna Hartshorne. After her death in 1929 her school was renamed in her honor, eventually becoming Tsuda College and then (more recently) Tsuda University. Hartshorne herself left Japan in 1940 on the brink of war, never to return. She died in 1957, a year after the first production of Rokumeikan and almost a century after the start of the Meiji era.

The Rokumeikan itself was long gone by then. Its use had declined with the rise of conservative sentiment and anti-Western feeling, and it was sold in 1890 to become a private club for the aristocracy. The building fell into disuse and was eventually demolished in 1941, as Japan went to war with the Western powers whose diplomats it had once invited to dance at the Rokumeikan.

A final thought: There’s an intriguing parallel between the three main 21st-century girls of Sweet Blue Flowers and the three 19th-century girls of Daughters of the Samurai. Kyoko resembles Sutematsu Yamakawa, thwarted in her original desire and falling back on a marriage with an older man of higher social status. We can only hope that Kyoko will find happiness in such a marriage, as Sutematsu apparently did in hers.

Fumi resembles Ume Tsuda, even to having a somewhat similar sounding given name. It’s clear that she will remain unmarried, as Ume did (unless marriage equality comes to Japan). Our hope for Fumi is that like Ume she will also find someone, whether Akira or another, who will be her lifelong companion.

As for Akira, her fate is not yet clear---though I doubt she’ll have six children like Shige Nogai did. We can at least hope that if Akira does find someone to spend her life with that it will be a love match, just as Shige’s was.

[techymaster]

Christianity first came to China over one thousand years ago but it did not last long. Alopen, a Syrian monk, introduced Nestorian Christianity in the Tang Dynasty and founded several monasteries and churches. Nestorian Christianity reemerged in the Mongol era in the early 14th century.

Nestorian Christianity declined in China substantially in the mid-14th century. Roman Catholicism in China grew at the expense of the Nestorians during the late Yuan dynasty. Franciscan Bishop John of Montecorvino began his evangelization mission of the Mongols in Beijing, but his mission ceased with the end of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in 1368.

With the arrival of Jesuit missionaries, Matteo Ricci and his companions in Ming Dynasty worked until the early Qing Dynasty before the Rites Controversy caused the Chinese emperor to ban Christianity for one hundred years. Prior to the banning, Catholics enjoyed a high profile and respect in mainstream Chinese society, including government officers, royal family members and scholars. The number of Catholics increased.

After the second Opium War in 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing granted more privileges for Christian missions in the ports and eventually in other provinces and the Jesuits entered China for the second time with the political support of the French government. The first Jesuit arrivals were the intellectual leaders of Catholic Church and pioneers of East-West cultural and educational exchange. The second arrival of Jesuits and other missionaries faced a more complicated political, economic, and diplomatic situation that eventually intensified the relationship between Chinese people and foreign religious groups.

During the Republic period (1911 –1949), Catholicism contributed significantly to Chinese society in the areas of education, social service, charity, medical care and earned the respect of many Chinese people. From 1949 until China’s Opening Door policy in 1978, Catholicism faced different challenges and problems. In the 1990s to the end of last century, Catholicism in China became more dynamic and engaged in evangelization, services, and formation exchanges with foreign regions and countries. The younger generation of priests and nuns received a relatively good education compared to their previous generation of priests and nuns, and people flocked to church for Mass and other sacraments. As China moved quickly into the 21st century, the Catholic Church in China began to face new challenges.

[heliotrope-journey]

Trigger Warning for Trump Supporters!!! I repeat, Trigger Warning for Trump Supporters!!! If you’re still hung up about the election results this year and are reading this post, we highly recommend you see yourself out immediately.

Good evening, vampire hunters.

Before I discuss how this year’s results will affect Heliotrope Journey’s lore, I wish to say that the battle is won and 2020 has been given yet another upside. While we kept the darkness at bay by exercising our right to vote, it is only the beginning of making reparations with the people we've hurt and tackling the pandemic one day at a time. Our victory can be celebrated today, but the real work begins next year and remember, elections this significant are a quadrennial battle so let's keep up our fight to retain our freedom! :D

When I first turned eighteen, the thought of voting was uncomfortable for me because it was a big adjustment and it was during a period of time where I was vulnerable to manipulative information that slandered one candidate after another. It was harder for me to choose from right and wrong, but I eventually outgrew that when critical thinking became an essential skill to have when I typed scholar-worthy essays and presentations in college. I also read news articles almost exclusively from the BBC ever since the day my environmental science professor presented a list of news outlets that are categorized based on accuracy. What I can remember about that list precisely is that the BBC was ranked near the top just below the Vox and Yahoo! was ranked far beneath these outlets. I took the right to vote for granted back then, but nowadays, I appreciate it because it is how we are able to make our voices heard and determine the course of history that will be remembered for years to come.

I understand that a lot of gaming studios and entertainment companies are steering clear of politics and while I’ve never mentioned my beliefs explicitly, at the same time, I’m not going to be silent and say I’m fine with what the soon-to-be previous administration has done. If you’d rather support it and go along with everything they publish, that’s up to you. Just know that I’m never going to adjust the content in my series and this blog to satisfy your egos. I am not worth your energy and space so you’re free to unfollow/unsubscribe anytime you desire. For those of you that are still here and standing by me, thank you for letting me vent. I appreciate that you listened to me even if you may disagree with what I had to say. As long as we continue to get along nonetheless, that’s good enough for me. :)

And now, I present the following consequences that would have come true in the world of Heliotrope Journey had the soon-to-be former president won his re-election bid for the White House;

Vlad Dracula Tepes’s vast power would exceed Cthulhu-like levels during Michaela’s, Ruiseart’s, and Treyton’s battles against him in their respective eras. This is because he made the most of the increase of deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic and mankind’s desperation for a messiah in light of the Doomsday Clock nearing midnight. The reasons for that include but not limited to increasing setbacks in human rights, the rising threat of nuclear war, and global warming reaching a point of no return.

Due to the survival and escape of Einsam’s Satanist father in the year 2023, Michaela would have had to sacrifice her companion to access an enchanted chamber in her home city’s town hall. That chamber contains an enhanced variant of Sefriot that would bear the key to Vlad the Impaler’s defeat that fateful August.

Einsam’s soul would merge with the axe in question as a result of that sacrifice, allowing Michaela to effectively contain with a Cthulhu-powered Dracula, but at the cost of living with the guilt of killing an innocent life. Fortunately, Einsam had survived and his slain father had taken his place. This version of Sefriot wouldn’t be as powerful as it would be in the worse-case scenario, but it still gave Michaela a fighting chance against the Dark Lord.

Countless numbers of American LGBT+ witches and wizards in addition to detained orphans would have pledged their allegiance to the Veiled Nocturne or weaker vampire covens, putting Frederick and co. in a trickier position during their quest to quell the Veiled Nocturne’s influence in Europe during their era.

A disillusioned traitor in Frederick’s group would have seized power in the United States on Dracula’s behalf during Humanity’s Abnegation. The identity of this magic practitioner will remain a secret for now.

Many world leaders and their families would have been forced to gone into hiding indefinitely as of several months into the anarchy because most governments in the mortal world were too ill-prepared for civilians using their newfound magical abilities to add fuel to the violent unrests.

Major cities in the United States wouldn’t survive the anarchy, leaving them uninhabitable by the human race at the time of the fourth prototype episode.

The anarchy could have ended with so many causalities that mankind would have come extremely close to extinction. Key individuals in Ruiseart’s quest inside Dracula’s Castle and Treyton’s search for seven tainted bloodstones respectively would have been several of them.

Dialogue in the fourth pilot episode that described the United States prior to a curse placed on its soil would have contained a lot more vitriol.

The mere mention of the US would have instigated aggressive moods in Norsdale’s citizens. Many of them were either refugees that fled from Humanity’s Abnegation in the Americas or were descended from them.

London would have been far, far more vulnerable to an all-out invasion by Dracula’s remaining forces in Treyton’s era.

Other than these scenarios, the events that transpired during Frederick’s, Michaela’s, Ruiseart’s, and Treyton’s adventures will still play out the way we plan to shape them.

Health and happiness,

WN

[secondsightcinema]

Love Letters: Dear Thomas Mitchell

“I didn’t know I was that good” —what you said upon accepting your Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Stagecoach (1939)

Dear Tom, or Dear Kid Dabb (Only Angels Have Wings, 1939) …Diz Moore (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) …Doc Boone (Stagecoach, 1939) …Clopin (Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939) …Gerald O’Hara (GWTW, 1939) …and all the other unforgettable characters you wore as comfortably as an old cardigan,

For such a celebrated actor, there sure isn’t much ink on you.

I mean, researching you has been somewhat frustrating. Born in New Jersey in 1892, to Irish parents, with both your father and brother in the newspaper game, which you tried for a bit before ditching it for the theatuh. You were a Republican, apparently, though you don’t seem to have made much noise about it. You were an avid art collector. Otherwise, all I’ve found: obits, your Wiki, your entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Film, a YouTube of your appearance on a short-lived ’50s show (The Name’s the Same), a conversation with Gene Fowler in the last chapter of his book Minutes of the Last Meeting, his rumination on The Bundy Drive Gang, the hard-drinking circle of friends that included John Barrymore, W. C. Fields, John Carridine, and yes, you—though I perused the book in vain looking for you in some of the outrageous doings Fowler recalls so lovingly. These last two, along with an informative blog post at Immortal Ephemera, with your charmingly self-effacing line when you claimed your Oscar, provide about the only glimpses available of you as yourself.

The rest is your acting, and I gotta say, though I suspect you know, what both Academies (for film, and for television—the guys who present the Emmy Awards), the American Theatre Wing (who gave you your Tony in 1953, making you the first triple crown winner: Oscar, Emmy, Tony), along with directors including Howard Hawks, John Ford, George Cukor, Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, and the Who’s Who of actors you shared the screen with, know so well, so inarguably, that it’s just a fact: You were character actor royalty, one of the titans among names below the title. And you graced some of the very best movies Hollywood produced between 1937 and 1947. And while your movies aren’t all classics, a remarkable number of them are, a point demonstrated most impressively with your credit list from 1939, which includes five of that banner year’s greatest: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind, and Stagecoach. When people rhapsodize over the remarkable list of great movies from the year widely considered Hollywood’s greatest, you cut a wide swathe with some of the most memorable performances in some of the best movies ever made.

Doc Boone, cheroot clamped firmly, hanging onto the whisky sample case for dear life.

“I didn’t know I was that good” could be false modesty, but I believe it.

Your acting is unmannered and unfussy. It reminds me of what Anthony Hopkins said Katharine Hepburn told him when they were shooting The Lion in Winter—don’t act your lines, just speak them. If you know what you’re feeling and thinking, it will come through. No need to hoke it up.

After shooting Hunchback, you spoke of Laughton with great admiration. It must have been remarkable to witness him create that heartrending role by, per Laughton biographer Simon Callow, intensifying his own physical and mental suffering almost beyond endurance. Your own approach to acting appears radically different, or at least it produced a strikingly different effect. How did you work, Tom? How did you speak so simply and clearly from inside all those disparate characters, as if you were just being yourself?

Or maybe it’s all an act, and you’re just a common actor, mostly ego and vanity. You could pull it off. I’ve been rewatching some of your movies recently—specifically the five 1939 blockbusters, and I failed to find a single instant when you blink, when your mask slips.

Great acting is so mysterious, to me at least. To you, it’s probably not. Talent looks mysterious to those who ain’t got it. Maybe to you, the process of fully becoming someone else, someone whose presence has a totally different quality from your own, is a process of the most prosaic sort.

All I know is, it was so interesting to see you on The Name’s the Same, in 1954. In that few minutes, in which Robert Q. Lewis leads a panel including Arnold Stang and former Miss America Bess Myerson as they try to guess what you would like to do. They fail, because your wish was “to do nothing.” Watching you answer their questions, amiably and intelligently, gave me even more respect for the transformation you effect when you act, because your entire presence as Tom Mitchell was so very different from any of your roles.

You memorably played drunks, at least two of them doctors (in The Hurricane and Stagecoach), and your membership in good standing in the Bundy Drive Gang suggests that you at least enjoyed the company of hard drinkers, which almost certainly means you could enjoy the occasional binge yourself. But it would fall upon you to regale me with your misadventures in that celebrated liver-destroying brotherhood, because your own personal life is a black box—no arrests, no fights, none of the chaos or medical problems that mark the lives of alcoholic movie folk, who often ended up in the newspapers despite the best attempts of the studios’ publicity departments.

But watching you as Doc Boone in Stagecoach, happily and methodically drinking your way through Mr. Peacock the whisky drummer’s sample case as he repeatedly tries, ineffectually, to reclaim it, then your expression and kindly response when you are rebuked for smoking and sickening the pregnant Mrs. Mallory…. You play Boone’s drinking for laughs, as was the custom of the era, but Doc Boone is hardly a clown. He is an iconoclast, a reproach to convention and the judgment and rejection of the respectable. He’s sort of a conduit between the respectable and shady characters. Doc is unapologetically self-destructive and committed to drinking, but we see nothing morbid about it. He’s not killing himself out of some poorly concealed self-loathing. He is, he cheerfully tells his traveling companions, a fatalist, and he knows eventually some bullet or bottle will have his name on it. Being a Civil War veteran, he long ago faced his mortality. Doc Boone is philosophical; he rejects society’s judgment of him as a drunken failure, and when Mrs. Mallory goes into labor, he pulls himself together and  delivers her baby. This gives him evident satisfaction, and he immediately rewards himself. With a drink.

As Doc Boone, you are the most self-aware of the stagecoach’s passengers. In Stagecoach, respectability is window dressing for hypocrisy or, in one character’s case, outright criminality. The banker/embezzler, Gatewood, is a dreadful blowhard, bloviating his obnoxious grievances at top volume, too wrapped up in his tirade to see how his shouting is increasing Mrs. Mallory’s distress. Gatewood is perpetually outraged, always feels hard done by. He berates their army escort for following orders and leaving to deal with Apache attacks, and treats Dallas, the prostitute (Claire Trevor), as though she is beneath contempt (note: Gatewood’s wife is the leader of the citizens’ committee that forced Dallas and Doc Boone out of town). A couple of the other passengers treat Dallas like dirt, too. But we know Gatewood is a crook who hides behind his position, and that his wife’s civic group supports the cruelty of respectable society.

In a 1921 production of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World

When Dallas falls in love with the Ringo Kid (John Wayne, sigh), it’s you she turns to for advice. There’s something about you that makes you that guy, the one women trust with their most delicate problems. Jean Arthur confides in you in both Only Angels Have Wings and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In the first, she starts out as your competitor for Cary Grant’s attention but you end up becoming allies who both love him, and in the second, you’re in love with her, but when she falls for her un-wised-up boss, you support her all the way.

You often play deeply flawed characters, but you never reduce them to their flaws. I’m increasingly aware of a shared quality among some of my favorite actors: humanism. You give us whole human beings, messy but with some divine spark of inner life. We rarely know their backstory, but you somehow offer these characters to us without obscuring either their weaknesses or their beautiful qualities—courage, intelligence, kindness, compassion. Even in weakness or downright impotence, they often see underlying, painful realities that elude most of us. Seeing the truth can be a terrible burden, and it’s possible that Doc Boone and Dr. Kersaint, in The Hurricane, may drink partly to lighten that burden.

I don’t care about space travel, but time travel is something else—that I would do in a heartbeat, given a guaranteed safe return to my own time. Watching old movies is my preferred form of time travel. But alas, I cannot make my way back to Broadway to see you onstage. If I could, I’d buy a ticket to see you as Willy Loman in the 1949 national touring company of Death of a Salesman, in which you replaced Lee J. Cobb. What would you do with such an unsympathetic character? How did your compassion express itself in Willy? I just found your performance (audio only), along with Mildred Dunnock and Arthur Kennedy and the rest of the original cast, at the Internet Archive. So at least I’ve now heard your Loman, as close as I’ll ever get to seeing you in a play.

Shortly before you left us in 1962, you premiered the character Columbo onstage. Of course a few years later, Peter Falk would make Columbo his signature TV role. I’d love to see your version, though. And I’d love to see you in Hazel Flagg, the 1953 Broadway musical version of Nothing Sacred, William Wellman’s 1937 comedy. It would be wonderful to travel even further back, to 1913, to see you learning your craft as a young actor in Charles Coburn’s Shakespearean troupe. And also the plays you wrote, and it would be fascinating to see you direct.

In his Tony-winning turn in Hazel Flagg (1953), Jule Styne’s adaptation of Nothing Sacred (1937)

If we could sit down for a couple of cocktails, and you felt comfortable talking about personal stuff, I’d love to hear about your marriages—the two long ones to the same woman, Susan, separated by a rather brief one after the first divorce. She and your only child, daughter Anne M. Lange, were at your side when you left this world at your Beverly Hills home from cancer, aged 70, just two days after Laughton had succumbed to the same disease. I’d like to hear about your farm in Oregon, the one you described when you visited a Washington state navy hospital in 1944 (from the hospital’s newspaper, also at the Internet Archive). That article says you were best friends with Laughton. Is that true?

And I would say, as I signaled the bartender for two more of the same, You’re a writer. How come you didn’t write a memoir? Your career has been so interesting, and 56 years after your death, thanks to TCM, we’re still loving your work. You were a witness and participant in a huge chunk of Hollywood history, not to mention your long career on the stage and a shorter but vibrant one in television—but there is no full-length biography. And it’s your voice I want to hear.

I want to read your thoughts and observations. Not just about yourself, but all the people you worked with, your experiences making the films (my favorite!), and whatever of your personal life you felt comfortable sharing. How did you end up married three times, for a scant two years, sandwiched between two 20-year marriages to Susan, who was with you when you passed?

You wrote plays and screenplays, so you certainly could have written a memoir, and I bet it would have been a doozy. Oh, the stories you could tell, about making some of the most beloved movies of all time. Your recollections of Laughton, Cary Grant, Vivien Leigh, Jimmy Stewart, Maureen O’Hara, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, John Wayne, Gregg Toland, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter—oh yes, another doctor in your gallery is Doc Gibbs in Our Town (1940), with Bainter as Mrs. Gibbs. And the tales of your early career with Coburn’s Shakespeare company, and your stories of the Bundy Drive Gang….

As Diz Moore in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, showing up wet-behind-the-ears Senator Jeff Smith

Were you just so busy, what with movies, theater, and television, that you could luxuriate in a fantasy (“doing nothing”) that most actors could only envy? Maybe as a writer you knew how much work it would be, how much of your time it would consume, and it was only worth doing if you did it right. And maybe you preferred to let your work speak for you.

Seriously, Tom, why didn’t you write a memoir?

You gaze for a moment into your glass, that little smile playing across your face, that familiar mischievous glint in your eye, then you say you’re just an actor, and living life is so much more interesting than writing about it. Then you take a sip and start telling me about your art collection. And I am riveted.

This post was written for the 2018 edition of the What a Character! blogathon, hosted by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken and Freckled, and Paula’s Cinema Club. There’s lots of great posts, so get on over and start reading.

from Second Sight Cinema | https://ift.tt/2S4qzE1 via https://ift.tt/1om9FS6

[nishantwap]

A timeline of how we got to legalized sports betting

New Post has been published on https://www.hsnews.us/a-timeline-of-how-we-got-to-legalized-sports-betting/

A timeline of how we got to legalized sports betting

The prohibition of alcohol began January 17, 1920, when the 18th Amendment took effect, making the business of booze illegal.

Drinking initially declined, but was of course not eliminated. Those who indulged simply participated in the thriving, unregulated black market that was run by organized crime and bootleggers. Consumer protections were lacking. Industrial-strength alcohol, including the kind designed for fuel, was stirred into some batches of bathtub gin, causing people to go blind and killing many others.

The Prohibition Era lasted 13 years, before the 21st Amendment nullified the 18th Amendment on Dec. 5, 1933, repealing the ban on alcohol.

Another prohibition of an American pastime was put in place in 1992 and lasted twice as long as the alcohol ban.

For 26 years, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 made the business of bookmaking illegal in all but a handful of states, most notably Nevada. Much like with alcohol during the Prohibition Era, those interested in betting on sports outside of Nevada simply participated in a thriving black market that’s believed to handle an estimated $150 billion in bets annually.

On May 14, 2018, the sports betting prohibition era ended, with a resounding Supreme Court decision that struck down PASPA and set the country on a path to widespread legal sports betting.

Here is a look back at some memorable moments from the past three decades in American sports betting.

Aug. 24, 1989

Major League Baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti releases a 225-page report detailing Pete Rose’s gambling and bans the game’s all-time hits leader from baseball.

“The banishment for life of Pete Rose from baseball is the sad end of a sorry episode,” Giamatti says in the statement. “One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts. By choosing not to come to a hearing before me, and by choosing not to proffer any testimony of evidence contrary to the evidence and information contained in the report of the Special Counsel to the Commissioner, Mr. Rose has accepted baseball’s ultimate sanction, lifetime ineligibility.”

Jan. 3, 1991

Here is ESPN Chalk’s one-stop shop of all relevant content, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of New Jersey.

The Supreme Court ruled in New Jersey, opening the doors for states to introduce legislation for legalized sports betting. Ryan Rodenberg checks in on where each U.S. state (and Washington, D.C.) stands.

With every U.S. state now available to offer sports betting, professional sports owners are among the big winners. But what about Twitter, illegal bookmakers and the NCAA? We run through winners and losers.

2 Related

House Bill 74, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), is introduced in the House of Representatives. The companion bill, Senate Bill 474, is released the following February and is backed by prominent U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, a former NBA player, as well as the NCAA and major professional sports leagues.

“Athletes are not roulette chips, but sports gambling treats them as such,” Bradley writes in an academic paper. “If the dangers of state sponsored sports betting are not confronted, the character of sports and youngsters’ view of them could be seriously threatened.”

June 2, 1992

The U.S. Senate votes 88-5 in favor of passing PASPA. The House of Representatives follows with a voice vote — something that normally takes place after bills receive overwhelming support in the Senate — and sends the bill to President George H.W. Bush.

“It was very non-controversial,” recalled then-U.S. Rep. Tom McMillen, a former NBA player, who voted for PASPA. “It was right in the Pete Rose aftermath.”

Oct. 28, 1992

President George H.W. Bush signs the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act into law.

Feb. 20, 1993

A team of researchers at the University of Illinois introduce Mosaic, which eventually becomes Netscape, the first popular internet browser available to the public. Soon after, underground bookmaking operations gravitate to the internet, leading to the rise of the offshore sports betting industry that illegally serves U.S. bettors.

Dec. 31, 1993

One year after PASPA was put in place, Nevada’s regulated sports betting market takes an all-time high $2 billion in wagers for the year.

Jan. 27, 1994

Arizona State hosts Oregon State in a Pac-10 college basketball game. It is the first of four games later found to be fixed for gambling purposes by Sun Devils’ star guard Stevin “Hedake” Smith.

Stevin Smith was involved in fixing four Arizona State basketball games. J.D. Cuban/ALLSPORT

Aug. 3, 1996

President Bill Clinton establishes a commission to study the social and economic impacts of gaming in the United States.

“The Commission will help draw attention to the growth of the gambling industry and its consequences,” Clinton wrote in a statement announcing the commission. “Too often, public officials view gambling as a quick and easy way to raise revenues, without focusing on gambling’s hidden social, economic, and political costs. The Commission will report on all of the effects of gambling to the President and the Congress.”

The commission then issues the National Gambling Impact Study in 1999, noting that estimates of the scope of the illegal sports betting market in the U.S. ranged between $80 billion and $380 billion.

“Even when Americans understand the illegality of sports wagering, it is easy to participate in, widely accepted, very popular and, at present, not likely to be prosecuted,” the report states.

Earlier that year, the first online sportsbook to take bets from U.S. customers, Intertops, opened for business.

Oct. 26, 1996

Boston College, a 13.5-point underdog, loses to Syracuse 45-13. Two weeks later, Boston College suspends 13 players for placing bets on college and professional sports. Investigators allege that two of the players — reserves who didn’t play significant minutes — bet against the Eagles in the Syracuse game.

”We have found absolutely no evidence, no indication of any game, the outcome of any game, the score of any game … was influenced or compromised in any way by players for Boston College,” a local district attorney says at a news conference announcing the investigation.

March 27, 1998

Two former Northwestern basketball players, Kenneth Dion Lee and Dewey Williams, are indicted on charges that they took bribes to fix Big Ten games during the 1994-95 season. Prosecutors alleged that Lee and Williams were paid $4,000 to influence home games against Wisconsin and Penn State in an effort to make Northwestern lose by more than the point spread.

“Illegal sports wagering continues to grow and is believed to exist in one form or another on virtually every college campus in America,” National Collegiate Athletic Association’s anti-gambling representative Bill Saum told The New York Times regarding the scandal at Northwestern.

Feb. 10, 2001

UNLV hosts BYU in college basketball. It’s the first UNLV game that Nevada sportsbooks are allowed to accept bets on, ending a 40-plus-year ban on wagering on the state schools.

April 4, 2001

U.S. Senator John McCain introduces the Amateur Sports Integrity Act, a bill aimed at banning betting on college sports, including in Nevada. Facing stiff lobbying opposition from the gaming industry, the bill doesn’t make it out of committee and is defeated.

Dec. 21, 2005

Toledo running back Quinton Broussard fumbles late in the first half of the GMAC Bowl against UTEP. Years later, Broussard admitted in court that, in exchange for $500, he fumbled on purpose in attempt to manipulate the bowl game’s outcome. Six Toledo student-athletes, including three basketball players and three football players, were ultimately indicted on conspiracy to commit sports bribery charges.

Oct. 13, 2006

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) is put in place, targeting online gambling operations. With support from all the sports leagues, including the NCAA, UIGEA includes an exemption for fantasy sports.

March 30, 2007

Former New Jersey assemblyman and mayor of Union City Raul “Rudy” Garcia surrenders to authorities after a warrant for his arrest is issued in connection with a sports betting operation.

“Rudy, a friend and former colleague, was merely placing a bet for himself and a few friends,” retired New Jersey Sen. Raymond Lesniak said. “Charges were ultimately dropped, but it started my challenge to overturn the federal ban on sports betting.”

July 24, 2007

NBA commissioner David Stern holds a press conference regarding gambling allegations against referee Tim Donaghy. Weeks later, Donaghy pleads guilty to two felony counts, admitting that he passed information to professional gamblers and bet on games, including some of which he officiated.

“I feel betrayed by what happened on behalf of the sport regardless of how protective I’ve been,” Stern said. “This is not something that is anything other than an act of betrayal of what we know in sports as a sacred trust.”

NBA referee Tim Donaghy pled guilty to gambling allegations. Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images

March 23, 2009

Lobbying group Interactive Media Entertainment and Gaming Association (iMEGA), along with Sen. Lesniak and three New Jersey horsemen associations, file suit against the then-U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey Ralph J. Marra. The suit was ultimately dismissed due to lack of standing.

May 6, 2009

Six Toledo student-athletes are indicted on conspiracy to commit sports bribery.

“Today’s charges shine a light into the dark corner of illegal sports bookmaking and reveals the unfortunate consequences that the influence of money from betting can have on the integrity of both athletes and athletic contests,” U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg said in a statement announcing the indictment.

July 2, 2009

Daily fantasy operator FanDuel offers its first online money contest.

April 11, 2011

University of San Diego guard Brandon Johnson, the program’s all-time leading scorer, is arrested by the FBI and ultimately pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit sports bribery related to a handful of games during the 2009-10 season.

May 23, 2011

On a day known as “Blue Monday” in the gambling world, 10 online gambling domains, including multiple offshore sportbooks, are seized by the U.S. Department of Justice. Several of the sportsbooks simply changed the extension on their URL, moving, for example, from .com to .eu, and continued operating. However, one book — BetED.com — was forced to shut down, leaving players without their funds. The bust occurred after the Department of Justice indicted top executives from the major online poker sites serving the United States: PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker.

Nov. 9, 2011

New Jersey voters overwhelmingly support a referendum to legalize sports betting.

Jan. 17, 2012

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signs legislation which would legalize sports betting at the state’s racetracks and casinos.

Chris Christie signed legislation on sports betting in early 2012, starting a legal battle with sports leagues lasting over six years. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Aug. 7, 2012

The NCAA, NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball sue New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie over his legislation that would legalize sports betting at the state’s casinos and racetracks.

Oct, 25, 2012

Twenty-five people, including a Las Vegas sportsbook executive, are indicted in connection with an illegal sports betting ring. Owners of Curaco-based offshore sportsbook Pinnaclesports.com were named in the indictment. “The ramifications of this are huge,” an industry source told ESPN. “The guys involved had to be handling millions of dollars a week.”

Dec. 31, 2012

The Nevada sports betting market eclipses the $3 billion mark in handle in a year for the first time.

March 20, 2013

The Department of Justice indicts operators of offshore sportsbook Legendz Sports.

June 3, 2013

Auburn point guard Varez Ward is arrested on allegations he attempted to fix a 2012 game between the Tigers and Arkansas. Ward was accepted into a pre-trial diversion program and avoided conviction.

June 23, 2014

The Supreme Court declines to hear New Jersey’s first appeal in its sports betting effort.

Oct. 17, 2014

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signs new legislation, attempting again to legalize sports betting at the state’s casinos and racetracks.

Oct. 20, 2014

The NCAA, NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB again sue Christie, setting off another two-year legal battle.

Nov. 13, 2014

First-year NBA commissioner Adam Silver writes an op-ed in The New York Times, calling on Congress to create a federal framework that would allow states to legalize and regulate sports betting. The NBA’s shift in position with sports betting coincides with the league’s investment in daily fantasy sports operator FanDuel.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver was an integral part of the movement towards legalized sports betting. Justin Ford-USA TODAY Sports

Jan. 8, 2014

Three UTEP basketball players are kicked off the team after having been found to have bet on sports.

Feb. 5, 2015

New MLB commissioner Rob Manfred tells ESPN’s Outside the Lines that the legalization of sports betting needs “fresh consideration.”

“Gambling in terms of our society has changed its presence on legalization,” Manfred said, “and I think it’s important for there to be a conversation between me and the owners about what our institutional position will be.”

Weeks later, Manfred appears at the MIT Sloan Conference and says that he agrees with Adam Silver on the issue.

June 22, 2016

The NHL awards an expansion franchise to Las Vegas. The Vegas Golden Knights become the first major professional sports franchise to be located in Las Vegas.

March 27, 2017

NFL owners vote 31-1 in favor of allowing the Oakland Raiders to relocate to Las Vegas.

June 27, 2017

The Supreme Court decides to hear New Jersey’s second attempt to legalize sports betting.

Dec. 4, 2017

The Supreme Court hears opinions on New Jersey’s sports betting case.

May 14, 2018

The Supreme Court strikes down PASPA, the federal ban on sports betting.

“Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own,” the court writes in its opinion. “Our job is to interpret the law Congress has enacted and decide whether it is consistent with the Constitution. PASPA is not.”

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