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Walter Bendix Schonflies Benjamin (German: ['valta 'benjami:n]; 15 July 1892 - 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism.
Theses on the Philosophy of History is often cited as Benjamin's last complete work, having been completed, according to Adorno, in the spring of 1940. The Institute for Social Research, which had relocated to New York, published Theses in Benjamin's memory in 1942. Margaret Cohen writes in the Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin:  In the "Concept of History" Benjamin also turned to Jewish mysticism for a model of praxis in dark times, inspired by the kabbalistic precept that the work of the holy man is an activity known as tikkun. According to the kabbalah, God's attributes were once held in vessels whose glass was contaminated by the presence of evil and these vessels had consequently shattered, disseminating their contents to the four corners of the earth. Tikkun was the process of collecting the scattered fragments in the hopes of once more piecing them together. Benjamin fused tikkun with the Surrealist notion that liberation would come through releasing repressed collective material, to produce his celebrated account of the revolutionary historiographer, who sought to grab hold of elided memories as they sparked to view at moments of present danger.  In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis struggles to reconcile the Idea of Progress in the present with the apparent chaos of the past:  A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.  The final paragraph about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a harrowing final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up the interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, to try to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."
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What's important about the Theses on the Philosophy of History?

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Theses on the Philosophy of History is often cited as Benjamin's last complete work, having been completed, according to Adorno, in the spring of 1940.


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Born in Scotland on 15 June 1792, he was son of John Mitchell of Carron Works and was brought up from childhood by his uncle, Thomas Livingstone of Parkhall, Stirlingshire. On the death of his uncle, he joined the British army in Portugal as a volunteer, at the age of sixteen. On 24 June 1811, at the age of nineteen, he received his first commission as 2nd Lieutenant in the 1st Battalion 95th Rifles (later the Rifle Brigade / Royal Green Jackets). Utilising his skills as a draughtsman of outstanding ability, he was occasionally employed in the Quartermaster-General's department under Sir George Murray.
In 1831 a runaway convict named George Clarke, who had lived with Aborigines in the area for several years, claimed that a large river called Kindur flowed north-west from the Liverpool ranges in New South Wales to the sea. Charles Sturt believed that the Murray-Darling system formed the main river system of New South Wales and Mitchell wanted to prove Sturt wrong. Mitchell formed an expedition consisting of himself, assistant surveyor George Boyle White and 15 convicts who were promised remission for good conduct. Mitchell took 20 bullocks, three heavy drays, three light carts and nine horses to carry supplies, and set out on 24 November 1831 to investigate the claim. On reaching Wollombi in the Hunter Valley, the local assistant surveyor, Heneage Finch, expressed a desire to join the expedition. He had established his credentials by surveying a route from Sydney to Wollombi, so Mitchell approved his request, provided he obtained extra supplies and men, and he followed along later.  The expedition continued northward, climbed the Liverpool Range on 5 December, and made Quirindi on 8 December. Shortly afterwards Finch arrived but inexplicably had not brought provisions, so Mitchell immediately sent him back to get them. By 11 December the expedition had reached Wallamoul Station near Tamworth, the northern extent of white settlement at the time.  Mitchell continued his northward push into new territory, taking local Kamilaroi people to assist in finding water and to express his peaceful intentions. By early January 1832 he was in the vicinity of the present town of Narrabri, reached the Gwydir River in mid-January, and found the Barwon by the end of the month, where he set up camp. Mitchell left the main party and made a reconnaissance down the Barwon until he found its junction with the Gwydir. After Mitchell returned to the main camp, Finch arrived with tragic news. He had been travelling with three convicts and provisions but, because of a shortage of water, the group had separated. He left two men behind while he attempted to locate the main expedition. Having failed to do that, on the second day he returned to the campsite to discover that it had been ransacked. Supplies were scattered and beneath the wreckage were two dead men. The immediate effect was that Mitchell decided to abandon the expedition and return south. The party reached the Gwydir on 8 February and was near the site of the attack on 17 February. Mitchell buried the two bodies and salvaged some equipment. Once back at Wallamoul, Mitchell placed White in charge of the main party, while he returned hastily to Sydney. He was satisfied that there was no truth about the river Kindur claimed by Clarke. Fourteen years after the attack, Mitchell revealed that the convicts had indulged in sexual relations with Aboriginal women.
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Where was Mitchell's first expedition?

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Mitchell formed an expedition consisting of himself, assistant surveyor George Boyle White and 15 convicts who were promised remission for good conduct.