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While most contemporary militaries have relegated music to a largely ceremonial role, historically it has proven to be an integral part of war making. In addition to inspiring soldiers in combat, music has served a vital communications function in variety of military activities—from drilling soldiers and organizing the daily ritual of military life to coordinating movements in battle.

*Papeetee (pah-pay-AY-tay). Principal city and colonial capital of Tahiti. Papeetee (now generally spelled Papeete) provides the setting for the first half of Omoo. Its deep, spacious harbor is well protected by reefs, making it one of the South Pacific’s most valuable anchorages for both commercial and military purposes. Melville’s narrator duly notes the harbor’s activity in a steady stream of whaling ships and trading brigs. He also delineates the city’s role as a colonial catspaw, or pawn, used by the British and French.

Although the line of Tibetan kings, or tsenpos, begins with the legendary Nyatri in 127 b.c.e., a reliable historical record of the dynasty begins in the seventh century c.e. with the reign of Songtsen Gampo (r. 627-650), who consolidated the petty states of the Tibetan plateau under a single monarchy based in Lhasa. The first of the nation’s three Dharma kings (Buddhist warrior-rulers who for three hundred years led Tibet to a material and spiritual golden age), Songtsen extended Tibet’s influence across Central Asian and China through military conquest and strategic marriage alliances. He also shifted the focus away from the native shamanistic Bon religion to the Indian-based Buddhism. For the new religion, he built the Jokhang and Ramoche Temples (in honor of his Nepalese and Chinese queens, respectively), as well as the Potala Palace. He also authorized the creation of a Tibetan alphabet based on Sanskrit in order to translate key Buddhist texts.

Donald Davie was born in Barnsley in Yorkshire, England. His father, a deacon in the Baptist Church, operated a shop in a working-class neighborhood. His mother, ambitious for her son, introduced him at an early age to the British literary canon, for which he maintained a healthy respect over his long career. He attended Cambridge University, where he became a student of F. R. Leavis, whose close reading of poetry and attention to a poem’s moral implications profoundly influenced Davie’s career as poet and critic. In the 1950’s he became identified with The Movement, a British literary movement that included Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin. The Movement, dominated by poets from Northern England, sought to recover the Britishness of British literature—its traditional forms, provincial language, and English values—which had been displaced by the internationalism and moral relativism of literary modernism. Davie supported his wife and daughter through a successful career as a college professor in both England and the United States. Though he maintained a residence in his beloved “shires” region of England, he spent the last twenty-five years of his teaching career in the United States, and a sense of displacement, both physical and spiritual, imbues much of his poetry written from the mid-1960’s to his death. Although he joined the Anglican Church, he maintained a strong interest in the dissenting voices of Christian literature—perhaps hearkening back to his own Baptist roots.

Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy,” the major British Victorian poet’s central poem, anticipates the crisis of the modernist period. The poem is testament to Arnold’s preoccupation as a poet and a cultural critic: “this strange disease of modern life.” Arnold returns to this theme throughout his work, including in his poetic masterpieces Thyrsis (1866) and “Dover Beach” (1867) and in his major work of prose criticism, Culture and Anarchy (1869). “The Scholar-Gipsy” serves as a template for Arnold’s poetic and intellectual career and epitomizes his paradoxical combination of Victorian vigor and social progressivism with a protomodernist sense of dissociation arising from religious doubt, social fragmentation, and ennui.

Indirectly regulated by the Federal Communications Commission Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates the radio, the recording industry is largely self-censored—often leading to confused and arbitrary policies. Commercial sound recordings have generally been difficult to censor. The recording industry is a network of independent producers, record labels, distributors, retailers, broadcasters, and artists. There has been no one point at which to halt the flow of controversial product. In fact, a ban on broadcast of a particular song or album has often translated into retail sales. This type of success has been commonplace in popular music. A radio ban on the Rolling Stones Rolling Stones, the ’ 1965 single “Satisfaction” seemed only to have lifted sales and to have prompted the band to repeat the tactic, less successfully, with their 1966 release “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Even a ban imposed by large retailers cannot prevent the flow of controversial product. In 1992 retail giants Wal-Mart[Wal Mart] Wal-Mart and Kmart[Kmart] Kmart refused to stock Nirvana Nirvana’s In Utero In Utero[In Utero] , whose cover art pictured human fetuses; nevertheless, the album entered the Billboard charts at number one. Recording industry

Tradition attributes The Great Learning to Zengzi (b. 505 b.c.e.), one of the most influential of Confucius's original seventy-seven disciples. Zengzi is frequently quoted in Confucius's Lunyu (late sixth or early fifth century b.c.e.; Analects, 1861), usually in clarification of the master's statements. Although the Analects portrays Zengzi as the ultimate figure of Confucian orthodoxy, some critics have accused him of overemphasizing the concept of filial piety--in effect transforming Confucius's scattered admonitions on the subject into a fundamental principle of the Confucian creed.

The authorship of The Doctrine of the Mean is problematic. Tradition ascribes the work to Kong Ji, more commonly known as Zi Si (or Chu Hsi, 483-402 b.c.e.), the grandson and disciple of Confucius. Zi Si is credited with founding one of eight schools of Confucianism in the wake of Confucius's death and is said to have served as mentor to Mencius, the so-called second sage of Confucianism.

Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, argues that a medium is best understood, from a functional perspective, as a technological “extension” of a human sense. Thus, the medium of radio extends the sense of hearing, and the medium of the printed book extends the visual sense into the once predominantly oral-aural realm of language. For McLuhan, even clothing (or fashion) becomes a medium, extending the tactile sense of the skin. Even a light bulb is a medium: a technological advancement upon the candle, which is itself a medium or tool that extends human vision into the dark.

Strictly speaking, “folk music” is that music which is orally transmitted within particular communities or cultures. Most such music has culture significance that goes beyond its immediate entertainment value, and it has often been incorporated into secular communication, as well as sacred rituals. Modern folk music also has a popular, if less precise, definition: songs written by musicians who are inspired by authentic oral traditions, or who have displayed an empathy for the working class. Folk music Music

The Chunqiu (Ch’un-ch’iu; The Ch’un Ts’ew with the Tso Chuen, 1872; commonly known as Spring and Autumn Annals) is the earliest complete chronicle extant in China. Attributed to Confucius, it records events in his home state of Lu during the Zhou Dynasty (Chou; 1066-256 b.c.e.). The work’s title (literally, spring, autumn) is derived from its format, which contains references to a season for most entries. The entries themselves tend to be brief, at times gnomic; they record everything from affairs of state, wars, and matters of dynastic succession to astronomical signs and even sightings of a lin (purported to be a Chinese unicorn). The work covers a span of some twelve rulers, from 722 to 476 b.c.e., an epoch in Chinese history often referred to as the Spring and Autumn Period in honor of the work. Although it deals primarily with events in the tiny state of Lu and its more powerful neighbors, the work suggests the general atmosphere of change and uncertainty during the middle Zhou period and prefigures the dynasty’s disintegration during the subsequent Warring States Period (475-221 b.c.e.). The work’s title has become symbolic as it records the “rise-and-fall” of Zhou culture as illustrated by the vicissitudes of Lu.

Military uniforms are specialized clothing used to indicate military allegiance. Traditionally, they have imparted a wide variety of information about their wearers, from military rank and social status to ethnicity and religious affiliation. Arising from the practical need for combatants to identify friend and foe in battle, they also fulfill the psychological function of reinforcing unity and hierarchy within military organizations.

Scorsese emerged with the group of new American directors of the 1970s that included Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Altman. Combining Italian neorealism’s preoccupation with place and class with the French New Wave’s innovations in camera work and editing, Scorsese developed a personal cinematic style while working in a broad variety of film genres. He also developed the Scorsese antihero, a person tormented by existential doubt at the validity of their culture’s values and who achieves ambiguous redemption in a violent act of self-immolation.

In 1958, the Anti-Defamation League asked Senator John F. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize winner for Profiles in Courage (1955), to write an essay advocating reform of U.S. immigration policy. Politically, Kennedy hoped to ensure support from Jewish and other immigrant communities for his 1960 bid for the presidency. He used the occasion to compose a meditation on the United States as “a nation of immigrants.”

Pleasant Hill. Buchan family plantation in Virginia’s Fairfax County. Because author Allen Tate sees people and place as interconnected, his narrator, Lacy Buchan, explains how his father identifies his family as the “Buchans of Fairfax County” to underscore their roots and generational connection to the land. In contrast to magnificent opulence of many antebellum romances, the Buchan family home is depicted more as genteel farmhouse than mansion. From its peeling paint to its tobacco-depleted soil, Pleasant Hill’s elegant shabbiness reflects the Buchan family’s gradual decline in the face of modern mercantile society, which is represented by Lacy Buchan’s brother-in-law George Posey. Tate locates the plantation near the first Battle of Manassas (also known as the Battle of Bull Run)—which is dramatized at the novel’s end—to make it a microcosm of the causes of the Civil War and its long-lasting political, social, and moral effects.

William Blake was born in London to a working-class family. His father, a hosier, provided for his training in drawing and engraving, practical skills which he would use to support himself and his wife Catherine for the rest of his life. One of six children, Blake claimed to have received angelic visitations and other visionary experience even as a child. After his brother Robert’s death, William said that Robert often appeared to him, providing him with practical information such as an acid-wash engraving system that William used to produce his “illuminated,” or illustrated, works, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Never financially successful as an artist or writer, he was often reduced to drudge work, such as engraving drawings for the catalog of the Wedgwood China Company. From 1800 to 1803, Blake received the patronage of minor poet William Hayley; however, the experience proved bitter and demeaning to the independent-minded Blake. During this period, the fiery-tempered Blake was also accused of treason after evicting a drunken soldier from his garden with the epithet “God d—— the King!” Blake, who was eventually acquitted of the charge, transmuted the twin ordeal of patronage and accusation into his masterpieces Vala: Or, The Four Zoas (wr. 1795-1804, pb. 1963; best known as The Four Zoas) and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-1820).

During the time of the establishment of the Shang Dynasty in China (c. 1500 b.c.e.), the first wave of seafaring colonists left the island of Formosa (now Taiwan) to settle the islands of Southeast Asia. Although they probably bypassed the Philippines initially, they settled large islands such as Papua New Guinea and smaller islands to the southwest such as the Solomons and the Bismarck Achipelago. In many cases, the settlers, a light-skinned people of Mongoloid descent, inhabited the coastal regions of islands already inhabited by dark-skinned Negroid peoples, ancestors of modern Melanesian peoples. These original inhabitants had populated these islands for as long as 30,000 years—most likely arriving on foot during ice-age periods that left land-bridge routes from Southeast Asia into what is modern Indonesia and Australia. However, they developed neither seafaring navigation nor the advanced material culture of the light-skinned newcomers.

Mardi. Fictional archipelago located in the west-central Pacific Ocean. Melville’s narrator Taji places the islands about sixty degrees west of the Galápagos Islands and to the north of the Ellice, Marshall, and Kingsmill Islands of what is now Kiribati. Taji happens upon the previously undiscovered islands after jumping ship from a whaler and experiencing a series of increasingly improbable high seas adventures. Eventually, he lands on an island ruled by Media, a philosopher-king who represents Herman Melville’s ideal platonic ruler. A search for the abducted maiden Yillah takes Taji and Media throughout the islands, on which they observe the variety of “Mardian” customs and discourse at length upon the philosophic, aesthetic, and moral implications of what they see. Mardi serves as a microcosm of world cultures and a convenient mechanism for Melville to sally forth on ideas ranging from such political questions as New World slavery to such philosophic issues as free will versus determinism. By the end of the novel, with a deconstructive stroke, Melville identifies the seemingly endless fictional Mardi islands with his own vast, unfolding fictional text Mardi.

Fuzuli (also known as Fuduli or Fizuli) was born Mehmed bin Süleyman Fuzuli in central Iraq around 1495. No less than six cities, including Baghdad and Karbala, have claimed him as a native son. He was descended from the Turkomans, and his immediate ancestors migrated to Iraq from what is now Azerbaijan. One tradition claims that his father was a mufti, or scholar of Islamic law.

After Michelangelo completed The Last Judgment , his final fresco for the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, in 1541, the work shocked papal conservatives. It upset them not only because of the human nudity it depicted but also because of its portrayals of members of the papal court—including an aide to the pope himself—as damned souls. Seventeen years later Pope Paul IV put a partial end to the controversy by commanding Daniele de Volterra to paint drapery over the exposed genitalia in the painting. For his part in this famous, and enduring, instance of art censorship, Volterra was nicknamed “the britches-maker” by his fellow artists. Nevertheless, his additions to the fresco survived intact until the painting was restored in 1990.

Japanese writer, poet, and playwright. Ihara Saikaku (ee-hah-rah si-kah-kew) was born Hirayama Tōgo to a merchant family in Ōsaka, one of the chief commercial centers in Japan in the Genroku period (1688-1704). His family were probably sword makers and belonged to Ōsaka’s chōnin, or townspeople class. He was brought up in the family business and eventually took it over. He married and is said to have sired a daughter who was blind. (Another tradition speaks of multiple daughters.)

John Prine was born the third of four sons of Bill and Verna Prine, who migrated from rural western Kentucky to Maywood, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago. His father was a machinist by trade. The family frequently visited Kentucky, and its music, language and lore made a lasting impression on Prine.

Spanish poet. Luis de Góngora y Argote (lew-EES day GAWNG-eh-rah ee ahr-GOH-tay) was born to a patrician family in Córdoba, one of the principal towns of Andalusia, the coastal Mediterrean region of Spain. Built by the Romans, Córdoba had been conquered in the Middle Ages by the Islamic Moors. Though Spanish Christians under Ferdinand III had reconquered Córdoba in 1236, the city retained the flavor of its Moorish past, including a vibrant oral tradition of poetry and song that synthesized Arab, Berber, and Spanish elements. While still a boy, Góngora composed his first poems and songs in imitation of oral tradition. At the same time, he became became steeped in classical Greek, Latin, and Italian literatures—thanks in large part to his father’s ample library.