Mary Ann McCracken

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Mary Ann McCracken
Mary-Ann-and-Maria-Miniature-500x500.jpeg
McCracken (l) and her niece Maria, miniature from about 1801
Born8 July 1770 (1770-07-08)
Belfast
Died26 July 1866 (1866-07-27) (aged 96)
Belfast
EducationDavid Manson's school, Belfast
OccupationSocial activist, abolitionist

Mary Ann McCracken (8 July 1770 – 26 July 1866) was a social activist and campaigner in Belfast, Ireland, whose extensive correspondence is cited as an important chronicle of her times. Born to a prominent liberal Presbyterian family, she combined entrepreneurship in Belfast's growing textile industry with support for the democratic programme of the United Irishmen; advocacy for women; the organising of relief and education for the poor; and, in a town that was heavily engaged in trans-Atlantic trade, a lifelong commitment to the abolition of slavery.

Early years and influences[]

McCracken was born in Belfast on 8 July 1770. Her father, Captain John McCracken, a devout Presbyterian of Scottish descent, was a prominent shipowner and a partner in the building in 1784 of the town's first cotton mill.

Her mother Ann Joy, came from a French Huguenot family, which made its money in the linen trade and founded the Belfast News Letter. Unusually, before her marriage she had run her own milliner's shop and subsequently managed a small business manufacturing muslin.[1] From the publication of Common Sense (1776), Ann Joy was an ardent admirer of Thomas Paine (and remained so until, in 1796, with Age of Reason he turned his invective from aristocracy to religion)[2]

Along with children of other enlightened Presbyterian families, Mary Ann and her elder brother Henry Joy ("Harry") attended David Manson's progressive "play school" in Donegall Street. In classrooms from which he sought to banish "drudgery and the fear of the rod", Manson offered "young ladies" the "same extensive education as the young gentlemen".[3][4] Mary Ann developed a love of mathematics and of literature.[5]

The McCrackens were a political household in a town agitated by the American Revolution and by the low-level tenant insurgency of the surrounding countryside (in the year of her birth, the Hearts of Steel entered the town, besieged the barracks, burned the house of the wealthy merchant and land speculator, Waddell Cunningham, and sprung one of their number from prison).[6] The family's minister at the Third Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street, Sinclair Kelburn was a strong supporter of the Volunteer movement. On the pretext of securing the Kingdom against the French in the American War, the volunteer militia or "National Guard" as it was later styled, allowed Presbyterians to arm, drill and convene independently of the Anglican Ascendancy. Kelburn preached in his uniform with his musket leaning against the pulpit door, and at Volunteer conventions urged the case for Catholic Emancipation and parliamentary reform.[7] Unable to "approve of hereditary legislators, because wisdom is not hereditary", Kelburn did not disguise his democratic and republican sympathies.[8]

McCracken's niece, Anna McCleery relates that "reared among such influences," Mary Ann was "from her early years intensely interested in politics, and various political incidents, in which some of her relatives were concerned, became indelibly imprinted on her memory".[9]

Businesswoman and employer[]

In the 1790s, following their mother's example, McCracken and her sister Margaret started a small business that pioneered the production of patterned and checked muslin.[10] Initially a small scale operation employing workers in their own homes, by 1809 it had moved into factory production.

In 1815, amidst the post-war collapse in demand, they were obliged to close. But during earlier downturns in trade, the sisters had distinguished themselves as employers by refusing to cuts costs at the expense of their employees, among them young female embroiderers and apprentices.[11] Mary Ann "could not think of dismissing our workers, because nobody would give them employment".[12] The "sphere of woman's industry", she complained, "is so confined, and so few roads open to her, and those so thorny".[13]

At the same time, while fearful of unemployment, McCracken believed machinery opened the possibility of escape from the endless drudgery that generally provided the only means by which the poor can earn their bread. With automation she perceived the longer-term prospect of workers enjoying greater time for leisure and education.[14]

Interest in Irish music[]

From 1784, the musician and collector Edward Bunting was thirty years a lodger with the McCrackens. Mary Ann and Harry attended the Harpist Festival Bunting staged for the benefit of the Belfast Charitable Society in July 1792. In 1808, with her friend the poetess Mary Balfour, Mary Ann became a founding member of the Belfast Harp Society and continued to support Bunting. She acted as his unofficial secretary and contributed anonymously to the second volume of his work The Ancient Music of Ireland in 1809.[15]

The Belfast "renaissance of Irish music" has been seen as "the precursor by a century of the Irish Gaelic Revival".[16] Advertised as an appeal to those "wishing to preserve from oblivion the few fragments which have been permitted to remain, as monuments to the refined taste and genius of their ancestors", Bunting's patriotic festival may have been more antiquarian than revivalist.[17] But there was an interest in the command of the language: Mary Ann is known to have studied from Charles Vallency's Irish grammar.[18][19]

United Irishwoman, her brother's execution[]

It is almost certain that Mary Ann McCracken took the United Irish pledge to "form a brotherhood of affection among Irishmen of every religious persuasion", and "to obtain an equal, full and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland",[20] possibly with Harry in March 1795 but not later than March 1797. She wrote then to her brother of her hopes that the good example of their school friend, the botanist John Templeton in taking the "test" would soon be followed by the Templeton sisters. McCracken's biographer, Mary McNeill, notes, it would have been "out of keeping with her character" for McCracken "to expect others to undertake responsibilities which she would not shoulder herself".[21] This was at time when, with the King at war with revolutionary France (whose early triumphs the Volunteers had celebrated in Belfast) and the Dublin Castle administration entrusted to Lord Camden, a decided opponent of Catholic emancipation and of all other concessions, the thinking in the democratic party was turning increasingly to the prospect of a French-assisted insurrection.[22]

McCracken assured her brother that she did not shrink from the prospect of political violence, accepting that "the complete Union of Ireland" might "demand the blood of some of her best Patriots to cement”. Neither was she averse to deceiving the authorities and concealing guns.[23] Her sole reservation was in opposing political assassination and the killing of informers: "what is morally wrong can never be politically right".[24] Meanwhile, she seemed confident of the French, noting that "almost everybody in Belfast" was learning the language.[25]

When her brother was committed to Newgate in 1796 and there fell out with his fellow prisoner Samuel Neilson, McCracken wrote to him appealing fist and foremost to the interests of the movement:[26]

Is it not injurious to the cause of [Irish] Union when two men, who, from the first went hand in hand endeavouring to promote it, are thus at variance? Would not such an example of disunion betwixt themselves, and that without any serious breach of friendship, afford a triumph to your enemies, and occasion vexation to your friends? Will they point at each of you as you pass? ‘See, there goes a promoter of union who could not agree with his bosom friend'.

In the absence of a French landing, the movement's northern leaders hesitated when the call came from the United Irish directory in Dublin for a nationwide insurrection on 23 May 1798. Her brother, only just released from more than a year and a half's detention in Kilmainham, seized the initiative taking county command in Antrim. Henry Joy McCracken's proclamation on 6 June of the "First Year of Liberty" triggered widespread local musters. But before they could coordinate, the issue had been decided. Commanding a body of four to six thousand rebels, Henry Joy McCracken failed, with heavy losses, to seize Antrim Town.

In the weeks that followed, McCracken assisted her brother and other fugitives with money, food, and clothing. She was arranging for a ship to take him to America when on 7 July 1798 Harry was recognised and seized in Carrickfergus. With great difficulty she managed to obtain an interview with him the same evening and the following morning, through his cell window, to take from his hand a ring that had “a green shamrock on the outside and the words, ‘Remember Orr’ on the inside.”[27] William Orr was the celebrated United Irish martyr hanged in Carrickfergus the year before. With her father McCracken was present at his court martial in Belfast on the 17th, and walked with her brother, the same afternoon, to foot of the gallows erected in front of the Market House in High Street. There he spurned spurned a final offer to spare his life in return for betraying his confederates.[28]

Bond with Thomas Russell and James Hope[]

McCracken and her sister Margaret met Thomas Russell, then an outlaw, when in July 1803 he came north in the hope of advancing the plans of Robert Emmet and Anne Devlin for a renewed insurrection. The sisters would not have contradicted the advice given to Russell by their eldest brother Francis and by Samuel Neilson that there was no appetite for a further rising.[29] This Russell himself confirmed when news of Emmet's precipitous attempt in Dublin persuaded him to nonetheless raise the United Irish standard in County Down.[30] James (Jemmy) Hope was to find the same in Antrim: former United men were convinced the cause was hopeless.[31]

After his arrest, McCracken helped pay for Russell's defence and then, after attempting to secure his release with the help of a substantial bribe, for his burial and the support of his destitute sister in Dublin.[32] McCracken described Russell to her friend, the early historian of the United Irishmen Richard Robert Madden, as "a model of manly beauty" with a grace "which nothing but superiority of intellect can give."[33] It may that she found him "overwhelmingly attractive",[34] but the relationship (never, it seems, intimate) embraced a common commitment to social justice. With Russell, McCracken shared her alarm at the unemployment and distress caused by the continental war and the recession in trade.[35] While other United men were ambivalent about what their paper, the Northern Star, reported as a "bold and daring spirit of combination" appearing among skilled workers in Belfast and surrounding districts,[36] Russell wished to extend unions not only to artisans, but also to labourers and cottiers.[37]

The same was true of McCracken's close friendship with "Jemmy" Hope, sustained until his death in 1847. Hope, who had laboured and organised among journeymen and weavers, regarded her late brother (after whom he named his first child) as being, with Russell, one of the few United Irish leaders who "perfectly" understood the real causes of social disorder and conflict: "the conditions of the labouring class".[38]

Embrace of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women[]

As had other women associated with the United Irish movement (Martha McTier, Jane Greg, Mary Anne Holmes and Margaret King), McCracken had read Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) (reviewed and commended in the Northern Star).[39] Writing in 1797 to her brother in Kilmainham she repeated Wollstonecraft's insistence that women had to reject "their present abject and dependent situation" so as to secure the liberty without which they could "neither possess virtue or happiness". She reasoned that if woman was created for a companion for man, "she must of course be his equal in understanding, as without equality of mind, there can be no friendship, and without friendship, there can be no happiness in society."[40]

Of separate female societies within the republican movement (with which in Belfast the names of Martha McTier.[41] and Jane Greg[42] have been linked) she was skeptical. No women, she believed, with "rational ideas of liberty and equality for themselves" could consent to a separate organisation. Keeping women separate could have but one purpose: to keep them "in the dark" and make "tools of them".[40]

"Is it not almost time", she asked her brother, "for the clouds of error and prejudice to disperse and that the female part of Creation as well as the male should throw off the fetter with which they have so long been bound ...?" Might it not be "reserved for the Irish nation to strike out something new and to shew an example of candour, generosity, and justice superior to that of any that have gone before".[43]

Although a prominent loyalist critic, the Rev. William Bruce, argued that complete equality for women was a logical implication of their "theory of human rights",[44] the United Irish societies avoided pronouncing on the rights of women. Their press did, nonetheless, appeal to women "as members of a critically-debating public",[45] and in laying out the commitment to universal male franchise, William Drennan allowed that until women exercise the same rights as men, "neither women nor reason should have their full and proper influence in the world".[46]

There is no indication from her correspondence that McCracken later read the more radical programme for women's equality circulating in Ireland from the late 1820s. Published under the name of the William Thompson, but declared by him to be a "joint property" with the Irish writer Anna Wheeler, the Appeal of One-Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to retain them in Political and Thence Civil and Domestic Slavery (1825)[47] called for absolute equality between the sexes based on "labour by mutual cooperation" and the collective education and upbringing of children. McCracken, influenced by the more measured democratic spirit of her orthodox Presbyterianism, remained focussed on what she considered practical reform.[48][49]

Social reformer[]

McCracken retained a lifelong interest in improving the living and working conditions of the Belfast working class. Already as a child she had helped raise funds and provide clothes for the children sheltered by the Belfast Charitable Society in Clifton House.

Following a meeting organised in 1827 by the visiting Quaker social reformer Elizabeth Fry, McCracken formed the Ladies Committee of the Belfast Charitable Society which she was to serve variously as treasurer, secretary and chair. Thanks to the efforts of the committee, and over objections of more conservative subscribers to the Society, a school and nursery were set up for the Poorhouse children.[50]

McCracken was not content to have the children merely taught or minded: she was concerned with their education in the widest sense. Nothing "enraged her more than any suggestion that, out of a sense of gratitude for charity, the inmates of the Poorhouse, young or old, should willingly accept disadvantage or indignity". Drawing on her own "play school" experience with David Manson, she insisted on teachers of high quality and special ability and on play hours in which children would have free use of their time.[51]

She took issue with the male board of governors who opposed allowing the Poorhouse inmates to individually "derive some little advantage" from their own labour. She protested that they were asking more of the inmates than of "the highest and best-educated classes" who invariably require "some additional stimulus to exertion, besides a sense of duty and public good".[52]

In her late eighties, McCracken's correspondence continued to refer to "my out of door avocations": visitor to an industrial school for girls (established in the Famine year of 1847), collecting funds for the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick, and preventing "the use of climbing boys for chimney sweeping".[13] She believed it better "to wear out than rust out".[53]

Abolitionist[]

Among other Belfast merchants, McCracken's father, Captain John McCracken, did a brisk business supplying rough linen clothing and salted provisions to the sugar plantations of the West Indies. But when in 1786, Waddell Cunningham and Thomas Greg (his partner in a plantation they called "Belfast" on Dominica) proposed to commission ships for the Middle Passage,[54] Thomas McCabe, a friend of the McCrackens in the Third Presbyterian, rallied opinion in the town against them. The successful opposition was capped by the visit to Belfast in 1791 of the celebrated escaped slave and author, Olaudah Equiano,[55]

Wearing the famous Wedgewood brooches adorned with slave and slogan "Am I not a man and brother" (1787),[56] and boycotting sugar, McCracken became a lifelong and active abolitionist.[57] The arguments with which she contended for the slavery of Africans, she noted, were no different from those produced for her own enslavement as a woman.[40]

Following a visit to Belfast (in the footsteps of Equiano) by Fredrick Douglass, in late 1845 McCracken helped establish the Ladies Anti-Slavery Association. The original declaration of the Association suggests McCracken influence in both its tone and style:[58] "We feel especially anxious that emigrants be prepared, by a thorough acquaintance with the true nature of this [abolitionist] question, to withstand the corrupting exhalations from slavery that have filled even the Northern States with prejudices against the negro and his abolitionist friends. Let us if possible, enlist in this righteous cause the sympathies of childhood as well as age, of poor as well as the rich, and not relax our efforts ...". The association maintained a steady correspondence with the abolitionist movement in the United States, and collected locally-made items to be shipped and sold at the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar.[58][59]

In 1859, after being the Association's driving spirit for more than a decade, McCracken was "both ashamed and sorry" to report to Madden, that Belfast "once so celebrated for its love of liberty", had "so sunk in the love of filthy lucre that there are but 16 or 17 female anti-slavery advocates". Save herself, "an old woman within 17 days of 89," there were none to hand out abolitionist tracts on the quayside to emigrants bound for the (ante-bellum) United States where the issue of slavery was still to be decided.[60]

The Union and the Famine[]

Mary Ann McCracken did not share in the patriotic outrage over the government's move, following the rebellion, to abolish the Parliament in Dublin and bring Ireland under the Crown at Westminster. There had, she noted, ‘"always been such an union between England and this country, as there is between husband and wife by which the former has the right to oppress the latter".[61] Why the vehemence now? Would a formal union (the creation of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland), "increase the sufferings of the poor? - of those especially who are entitled to our commiseration? ... the wretched cottagers of the south, whose labour can scarcely procure them a single meal of potatoes in the day, and whose almost total want of clothing make them fly the approach of strangers".[61]

For McCracken a fight to retain or restore an Ascendancy parliament in which two-thirds of the Commons were the effective nominees of Ireland's greatest landlords had no appeal.[62] In the wake of the Acts of Union (1801) and the blasting of hopes of a United Irish revival, she displayed a quite different pre-occupation: writing to the Belfast News Letter she addressed "the Proprietors of Cotton Mills, and other Factories", admonishing them to attend to the health and safety of their operatives, and reminding them of the "serious responsibility" they assume in employing children.[63]

By the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, McCracken was persuaded that "a better day" had dawned. Looking forty years back, she wrote of how "those who were gone" would have been "delighted" at "the political changes that have taken place – which could not possibly in their day have been anticipated, by peaceful means…” [64] Presumably she refers to the delivery of promises denied at the Act of Union: Catholic Emancipation (1829) and parliamentary reform (1832). She might also have been thinking of Britain's final abolition of slavery in her colonies (1833), and of the Factory Act (1833), the first regulation of child labour. Although there continued to be "many evils under which we live", McCracken expressed herself content "to wait with patience till the great Ruler of all events hall bring about a change through the progress of public opinion".[65]

How far this relative optimism under the Union survived the realisation of what would have been her worst fears for Ireland's "wretched cottagers", the country's dispossessed, is unknown. In 1844, on the eve of the catastrophe she asked "how is it possible for people to be contented who are in a state of starvation in the midst of plenty".[66] But nothing McCracken wrote during the years of the Great Famine [1845-1852] survives.[67] There is record of her relief efforts: collector for the Belfast Ladies Association for the Relief of Irish Destitution, a Presbyterian church initiative but determined "to skink all doctrinal distinction... for the one benevolent purpose of alleviating distress", and visitor to "the first ragged school in Ireland", The Ladies Industrial School which, again, was determinedly opposed to "Souperism", the exploitation of want and despair for proselytising advantage.[68][59]

Daniel O'Connell and Repeal[]

Despite his own reservations about O'Connellism, in his last years McCracken's close friend Jemmy Hope chaired meetings of the Repeal Association in Belfast,[69] a town from which loyalist mobs had driven Daniel O'Connell when he had visited in 1844.[70] McCracken was not alone, even among his Repeal allies, in describing O'Connell as "tyrannically despotic and viciously abusive to those who differed from him in opinion".[71] She may have been thinking of Thomas Davis, who O'Connell reduced to tears by responding to the Young Irelander's protest against church-controlled education with a charge of anti-Catholic bigotry (Davis had pleaded that "reasons for separate education [of Catholics and Protestants] are reasons for [a] separate life").[72] All McCracken's educational endeavours were resolutely "mixed" and non-sectarian. She had become a visitor to Belfast's first Lancastrian school (Frederick Street). In applying his system (which in important respects had been anticipated by that of McCracken's own schoolmaster, David Manson),[73] Joseph Lancaster stipulated that pupils should never be asked whether they belonged to "Church, Meeting, or Chapel".[74]

McCracken did acknowledge the achievement of Daniel O'Connell in drawing the Catholic masses onto the political stage: the "great moral regeneration" this had wrought in the Irish people entitled him, she believed, to "the lasting gratitude of all true philanthropists". She only wished that The Liberator had devoted the energies of a national movement to the abolition of tithes (levied atop rack-rents on behalf of the Established Church) rather than to the still distant object of repealing the Acts of Union.[75]

The welfare of dispossessed and working people remained her overriding concern. On their behalf she advocated policies "with implications far beyond the dimensions of either Union or Repeal or mere philanthropy".[66] While conceding it was "too just a principle to be approved in the present state of society by the very rich", she proposed that all indirect taxes (which bear disproportionately on the poor) be replaced with an "income tax or property tax".[71]

Such welfarist thinking, however, did not entail her reassessing the decision made a half century before to press for a democratic and national government in Ireland. While she hoped that his history of the United Irishmen would be "instructive in shewing the certain evil, and uncertain good of attempting political change by force of arms", she could assure Madden: "I never once wished that my beloved brother had taken any other part than that which he did".[76][77]

Death and legacy[]

Mary Ann McCracken circa 1860

After the execution of her brother in 1798, McCracken learned that Harry had a four-year-old illegitimate daughter, Maria, for whom, to his great distress, he had been unable to make provision. McCracken took Maria in, determined to raise as her niece as "an only affectionate daughter". Nothing in her correspondence suggests that McCracken had considered for herself the prospect of marriage and a family. (Her one disappointment with Mary Wollstonecraft was that, for all the "contempt" she had expressed for matrimony, she had married William Godwin. "How does it happen", she had asked Harry, "that people do not act according to their reasoning").[78]

McCracken's sister Margaret also remained single. Together with their niece Maria, they lived in the house of their brother Francis at 62 Donegall Street (it is here that the Ulster History Circle has placed a blue plaque in her memory).[79] Maria later took her failing aunt into her married home,[80] where, on 26 July 1866, she died at the age of 96 years. Mary Ann McCracken is buried in grave number 35 in Clifton Street Cemetery,[81] a graveyard in which the remains of her niece and eventually (in 1909) those of her executed brother were also interred.[82][83]

The writer Alice Milligan (1866-1953) claimed as a profound influence upon her a family servant who had previously cared for Mary Ann McCracken (presumably in Maria's household).[84] In Belfast, Milligan was to be a leading figure in organising the centenary commemoration of 1798, and in the pages of her monthly The Shan Van Vocht, and in her fiction, celebrated what she understood as the United Irishmen's appeal to nation above both creed and class.[85]

McCracken collaborated with Madden on The United Irishmen, their lives and times (1842-1860, 11 Vols.).[86] Madden's memoir of Henry Joy McCracken was written, he gratefully acknowledged, by Mary Ann herself. But her concern was not alone with the recollection of her brother. McNeill notes that "no detail in the tangled story of the United Irishmen was too small for her consideration. James Hope, Israel Milliken [printer of the movement's paper, the Northern Star], Lady [Letitia] Emerson-Tennent [daughter of William Tennent, who served with Harry on the Northern executive] and anyone who could supply information were written to, or visited".[87] Madden work remains the standard reference

In January 2021, the Belfast Charitable Society launched The Mary Ann McCracken Foundation in recognition of her work as a social campaigner. The Foundation has two main objectives: "to advance education of the public about the life and works of Mary Ann McCracken as a leading social reformer and philanthropist" and "in the spirit of the legacy and work of Mary Ann McCracken; to advance education, to prevent or relieve poverty, to advance human rights and promote equality".[88] Speaking at its launch, historian and broadcaster Prof David Olusoga commented on society's “…inaction and moral passivity”, believing this “…would surprise and disappoint women like Mary Ann”.[89]

In May 2021, Belfast City Council agreed to erect a statue of Mary Ann McCracken in the grounds of Belfast City Hall. In proposing the motion, Councillor Michael Long (Alliance) said:

Mary Ann McCracken is a perfect example of the need to showcase the diverse nature of Belfast and how not everyone can be placed into a simple descriptive box. She was a Presbyterian but also an Irish republican who loved traditional Irish music. A campaigner for women being able to vote, she also was a successful business person at a time when females often didn't have those opportunities.[90]

References[]

  1. ^ Edna, Fitzhenry (1936). Henry Joy McCracken. Dublin: Talbot Press. p. 41.
  2. ^ McNeill, Mary (1960). The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866. Dublin: Allen Figgis & Co. p. 115.
  3. ^ Drennan, William (February 1811). "Biographical Sketches of Distinguished Persons: David Manson". The Belfast Monthly. 6: 126–132.
  4. ^ Metscher, Priscilla (1989). "Mary Ann McCracken : A Critical Ulsterwoman within the Context of her Times". Études irlandaises. 14 (2): (143–158) 146. doi:10.3406/irlan.1989.2552.
  5. ^ Courtney, Roger (2013). Dissenting Voices: Rediscovering the Irish Progressive Presbyterian Tradition. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation. p. 131. ISBN 9781909556065.
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  40. ^ Jump up to: a b c McNeill(1960), pp.126–127
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  42. ^ Catriona Kennedy (2004), What Can Women Give But Tears: Gender, Politics and Irish National Identity in the 1790s (Submitted for the degree of PhD University of York, Department of History), p. 159. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/10974/1/425459.pdf
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Biographies[]

  • The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken 1770 – 1866: A Belfast Panorama. Mary McNeill, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, (1960) 2019.
  • Mary Ann McCracken 1770-1866: Feminist, Revolutionary and Reformer, John Gray, Belfast: Reclaim the Enlightenment, 2020.

External links

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