Itza people

The Itza are a Guatemalan people of Maya affiliation. They inhabit the Petén department of Guatemala in and around the city of Flores on the Lake Petén Itzá.

Numbers of ethnic group members and Itza speakers

According to the census of 2002, there are 1,983 ethnic Itza, who retain some aspects of their indigenous culture. However, the Itza language is now almost extinct. Data taken from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) suggest there were only twelve fluent Itza speakers left in 1986 and 60 non-fluent speakers in 1991. According to the census of 2002, however, there are still 1094 speakers. The Mayan word itza means 'enchanted waters' and may have been adopted from the name of the lake itself.

In Yucatán

The Itza were descended from the Ah Itzá Yucatecan Maya lineage; historically they were an important Mesoamerican people who dominated the Yucatán peninsula in the Post-classic period. The Itza may have originated from the Classic Period city of Motul de San José near lake Peten Itza in Guatemala, migrating to Yucatán during the Maya collapse at the end of the Classic Period. From their capital at Chichén Itzá, Mexico they established a trade empire reaching as far south as Naco in Honduras. Chichen Itza means 'at the mouth of the well of the Itza' in the Itza' language.

Chichen Itza

Chichen Itza (/tʃiːˈtʃɛn iːˈtsɑː/,Spanish: Chichén Itzá [tʃiˈtʃen iˈtsa], from Yucatec Maya: Chi'ch'èen Ìitsha' [tɕʰiʔtɕʼèːn ìːtsʰaʔ]; "at the mouth of the well of the Itza") was a large pre-Columbian city built by the Maya people of the Terminal Classic period. The archaeological site is located in Tinúm Municipality, Yucatán State, Mexico.

Chichen Itza was a major focal point in the Northern Maya Lowlands from the Late Classic (c. AD 600–900) through the Terminal Classic (c. AD 800–900) and into the early portion of the Postclassic period (c. AD 900–1200). The site exhibits a multitude of architectural styles, reminiscent of styles seen in central Mexico and of the Puuc and Chenes styles of the Northern Maya lowlands. The presence of central Mexican styles was once thought to have been representative of direct migration or even conquest from central Mexico, but most contemporary interpretations view the presence of these non-Maya styles more as the result of cultural diffusion.

Jim Jones

James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American cult leader. Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, infamous due to the mass murder-suicide in November 1978 of 918 of its members in Jonestown, Guyana, the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan, and the ordering of four additional Temple member deaths in Georgetown, the Guyanese capital. Nearly three-hundred children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning. Jones died from a gunshot wound to the head; it is suspected his death was a suicide.

Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple there in the 1950s. He later moved the Temple to California in the mid-1960s, and gained notoriety with the move of the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Early life

Jones was born in a rural area of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones (1887–1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (1902–1977). Lynetta reportedly believed she had given birth to a messiah. He was of Irish and Welsh descent. Jones later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, though according to his maternal second cousin Barbara Shaffer, this is likely untrue. Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to Lynn, Indiana, in 1934, where he grew up in a shack without plumbing.

National Geographic

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See also

The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by English author Rudyard Kipling. The stories were first published in magazines in 1893–94. The original publications contain illustrations, some by Rudyard's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Kipling was born in India and spent the first six years of his childhood there. After about ten years in England, he went back to India and worked there for about six-and-a-half years. These stories were written when Kipling lived in Vermont. There is evidence that it was written for his daughter Josephine, who died in 1899 aged six, after a rare first edition of the book with a poignant handwritten note by the author to his young daughter was discovered at the National Trust's Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire in 2010.

The tales in the book (and also those in The Second Jungle Book which followed in 1895, and which includes five further stories about Mowgli) are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. The verses of The Law of the Jungle, for example, lay down rules for the safety of individuals, families, and communities. Kipling put in them nearly everything he knew or "heard or dreamed about the Indian jungle." Other readers have interpreted the work as allegories of the politics and society of the time. The best-known of them are the three stories revolving around the adventures of Mowgli, an abandoned "man cub" who is raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. The most famous of the other four stories are probably "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", the story of a heroic mongoose, and "Toomai of the Elephants", the tale of a young elephant-handler. As with much of Kipling's work, each of the stories is followed by a piece of verse.