A tom-tom drum (not to be confused with a tam-tam) is a cylindrical drum with no snare.

Although "tom-tom" is the British term for a child's toy drum, the name came originally from the Anglo-Indian and Sinhala; the tom-tom itself comes from Asian or Native American cultures. The tom-tom drum is also a traditional means of communication. The tom-tom drum was added to the drum kit in the early part of the 20th century.

Traditionally, drum kit sizes are expressed as depth x diameter, both in inches. More recently, many major manufacturers have begun instead to express the size as diameter x depth, again always in inches.

For a drum kit tom-tom, the more significant measurement is the diameter, so this article uses diameter x depth. Hence a 10" tom-tom of 8" depth is described as 10 x 8.

For a more detailed description of the conventions and their usage, see drum size conventions.

The first drum kit tom-toms had no rims; the heads were tacked to the shell.

As major drum manufacturers began to offer tunable tom-toms with hoops and tuning lugs, a 12 in (30 cm) drum 8 inches (20 cm) deep became standard, mounted on the left side of the bass drum. Later a 16 in (41 cm) drum (16 inches deep) mounted on three legs (a floor tom) was added. Finally, a second drum was mounted on the right of the bass drum, a 13 in (33 cm) diameter drum 9 inches (23 cm) deep. Together with a 14 in (36 cm) snare drum and a bass drum of varying size, these three made up the standard kit of five drums for most of the second half of the 20th century.

Air Marshal Sir Charles Ronald Steele KCB DFC (9 November 1897 – 14 February 1973) was a Royal Air Force officer who became Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief at RAF Coastal Command.

Educated at Oundle School and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Steele was commissioned into the Green Howards in 1916. He transferred into the Royal Flying Corps and became a flying ace credited with seven aerial victories. He transferred into the Royal Air Force after World War I and was granted a permanent commission on 1 August 1919. He was appointed Officer Commanding No. 18 Squadron in 1936 and served in World War II initially on the Air Staff at Headquarters No. 3 Group and then at the Rhodesian Air Training Group before being appointed Senior Air Staff Officer and then temporary Air Officer Commanding at No. 9 Group. He went on to be Air Officer Commanding No. 10 Group and then Air Officer Commanding No. 85 Group. He was made Senior Air Staff Officer at the Headquarters of the British Air Forces of Occupation in Germany in July 1945. He became Air Officer Commanding AHQ Malta in 1947 and Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief at RAF Coastal Command in 1950 before retiring in 1952.

Suzanne Nadine Vega (born July 11, 1959) is an American songwriter and singer known for her eclectic folk-inspired music.

Two of Vega's songs (both from her second album Solitude Standing, 1987) reached the top 10 of various international chart listings: "Luka" and "Tom's Diner". The latter was originally an a cappella version on Vega's album, which was then remade in 1990 as a dance track produced by the British dance production team DNA.

Vega was born July 11, 1959 in Santa Monica, California. Her mother, Pat Vega, is a computer systems analyst of German-Swedish heritage. Her father, Richard Peck, is of Scottish-English-Irish origin. They divorced soon after her birth. Her stepfather, Ed Vega, also known as Edgardo Vega Yunque, was a writer and teacher from Puerto Rico.

When Vega was two and a half, the family moved to New York City. She grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. At the age of nine she began to write poetry; she wrote her first song at age fourteen. Later she attended New York's prestigious High School of Performing Arts (now called LaGuardia High School). There she studied modern dance and graduated in 1977.

Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The phrase "Uncle Tom" has also become an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be a participant in the oppression of their own group.

At the time of the novel's initial publication in 1851 Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe's melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for White audiences by portraying Tom as a Christlike figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master because Tom refuses to betray the whereabouts of two women who escape from slavery. Stowe reversed the gender conventions of slave narratives by juxtaposing Uncle Tom's passivity against the daring of three African American women who escape from slavery.

The novel was both influential and commercially successful, published as a serial from 1851-1852 and as a book from 1852 onward. An estimated 500,000 copies had sold worldwide by 1853, including unauthorized reprints. Senator Charles Sumner credited Uncle Tom's Cabin for the election of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln himself reportedly quipped that Stowe had triggered the American Civil War.Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery". Despite Douglass's enthusiasm, an anonymous 1852 reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's publication The Liberator suspected a racial double standard in the idealization of Uncle Tom: