. Griswold followed the obituary with a memoir in which he portrayed Poe as a drunken, womanizing madman with no morals and no friends. Griswold’s attacks were meant to cause the public to dismiss Poe and his works, but the biography had exactly the opposite effect and instead drove the sales of Poe’s books higher than they had ever been during the author’s lifetime.
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Poe's Life | Edgar Allan Poe Museum - 1 views
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Days after Poe’s death, his literary rival Rufus Griswold wrote a libelous obituary of the author in a misguided attempt at revenge for some of the offensive things Poe had said and written about him
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Two years later he heard that Frances Allan, the only mother he had ever known, was dying of tuberculosis and wanted to see him before she died. By the time Poe returned to Richmond she had already been buried. Poe and Allan briefly reconciled, and Allan helped Poe gain an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.
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Humiliated by his poverty and furious with Allan for not providing enough funds in the first place, Poe returned to Richmond and visited the home of his fiancée Elmira Royster, only to discover that she had become engaged to another man in Poe’s absence.
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Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families.
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“Panic of 1837,” Poe struggled to find magazine work and wrote his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
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The Galileo Project | Christianity | The Inquisition - 0 views
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The inquisitor questioned the accused in the presence of at least two witnesses.
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Penalties went from visits to churches, pilgrimages, and wearing the cross of infamy to imprisonment
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In 1231, Pope Gregory IX published a decree which called for life imprisonment with salutary penance for the heretic who had confessed and repented and capital punishment for those who persisted. The secular authorities were to carry out the execution.
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The accused had to testify against himself/herself and not have the right to face and question his/her accuser.
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This dissident poet says elections and the nuclear pact give him hope for Iran | Public... - 0 views
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The 44-year-old journalist and poet might have ended up dead, like some of his writer friends back home in Iran. Several of them were murdered in a series of political assassinations that began in the late 1990s.
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freedom of expression, the Islamic Republic of Iran is among the worst of the worst. The country is ranked 169th, out of a total of 180 countries, on the 2016 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders.
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Rafizadeh looks every bit the intellectual — glasses, leather jacket, cigarette. As a child, he would wake up early and recite Persian poetry out loud, annoying his father and his siblings.
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“The [Iranian] government intrudes into your personal life no matter who you are. That’s why, after the murders started happening, I decided to write political poems,” he says.
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“Other intellectuals were killed, too,” he says. “The Iranian regime was murdering innocent people just because they dared to call for political change and reform.”
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afizadeh managed to shine a light on the killings with his writings in the pages of pro-reformist newspapers. But only for a time. Eventually, Rafizadeh was arrested.“I spent 86 days in a cell that was 1.5 meters by 2 meters,” Rafizadeh says. “And I was tortured.”
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Even after he was released, pending trial, he says authorities threatened to harm his children if he didn’t make public statements saying he was treated well in prison and that his past writings were false.
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Rafizadeh says he did what he was being pressured to do. But he adds that, “the Iranian public knew who was lying and who was telling the truth.” “Other journalists besides me wrote about the human rights situation in Iran and we did have an impact,” Rafizadeh says. Nonetheless, he felt he had to leave the country after the courts sentenced him to 20 lashes and nine months in prison. He escaped into Turkey in 2005. Two years later, he got asylum in Canada.
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None of these political actors are entirely answerable to Iran’s elected government. That enabled the hardliners to launch a brutal crackdown against the pro-reform camp of then-president Mohammad Khatami and his supporters. The crackdown began in in the late '90s and continued into the early 2000s.
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“You can fight for rights and freedoms in the political space all you like, but if there is not judicial protection of them, that is a fundamental problem,” she says.