History
The first International Festival (and the first Edinburgh Festival Fringe, although it wasn't known as such until the following year) took place between 22 August and 11 September 1947, in the wake of the end of the Second World War, with an optimistic remit to "provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit" and enrich the cultural life of Scotland, Britain and Europe. The founders of the Festival included Rudolf Bing, the General Manager of Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Henry Harvey Wood, the Head of the British Council in Scotland, Sidney Newman, Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University, and a group of civic leaders from the City of Edinburgh, in particular the Lord Provost Sir John Falconer. Bing, the moving spirit behind the enterprise, had looked at several English cities before settling on Edinburgh. The Festival has since taken place every August.
Read more about this topic: Edinburgh International Festival
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)