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12775 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20Frideric%20Handel | George Frideric Handel | George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (; baptised , ; 23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759) was a German-British Baroque composer well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. Handel received his training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a new style into English church music. He is consistently recognized as one of the greatest composers of his age.
Handel started three commercial opera companies to supply the English nobility with Italian opera. In 1737, he had a physical breakdown, changed direction creatively, and addressed the middle class and made a transition to English choral works. After his success with Messiah (1742), he never composed an Italian opera again. His orchestral Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks remain steadfastly popular. One of his four coronation anthems, Zadok the Priest, has been performed at every British coronation since 1727. Almost blind, he died in 1759, a respected and rich man, and was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey.
Handel composed more than forty opera serias over a period of more than thirty years. Since the late 1960s, interest in Handel's music has grown. The musicologist Winton Dean wrote that "Handel was not only a great composer; he was a dramatic genius of the first order." His music was admired by Classical-era composers, especially Mozart and Beethoven.
Early years
Family
Handel was born in 1685 (the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti) in Halle, Duchy of Magdeburg (then part of Brandenburg-Prussia). His parents were Georg Händel, aged sixty-three, and Dorothea Taust. His father was an eminent barber-surgeon who served the court of Saxe-Weissenfels and the Margraviate of Brandenburg.
Halle was a relatively prosperous city, home of a salt-mining industry and centre of trade (and member of the Hanseatic League). The Margrave of Brandenburg became the administrator of the archiepiscopal territories of Mainz, including Magdeburg when they converted, and by the early 17th century held his court in Halle, which attracted renowned musicians. Even the smaller churches all had "able organists and fair choirs", and humanities and the letters thrived (Shakespeare was performed in the theatres early in the 17th century). The Thirty Years' War brought extensive destruction to Halle, and by the 1680s it was impoverished. However, since the middle of the war the city had been under the administration of the Duke of Saxony, and soon after the end of the war he would bring musicians trained in Dresden to his court in Weissenfels.
The arts and music, however, flourished only among the higher strata (not only in Halle but throughout Germany), of which Handel's family was not a member. Georg Händel (senior) was born at the beginning of the war and was apprenticed to a barber in Halle at the age of 14 after his father died. When he was 20, he married the widow of the official barber-surgeon of a suburb of Halle, inheriting his practice. With this, Georg determinedly began the process of becoming self-made; by dint of his "conservative, steady, thrifty, unadventurous" lifestyle, he guided the five children he had with Anna who reached adulthood into the medical profession (except his youngest daughter, who married a government official). Anna died in 1682. Within a year Georg married again, this time to the daughter of a Lutheran minister, Pastor Georg Taust of the Church of St. Bartholomew in Giebichenstein, who himself came from a long line of Lutheran pastors. Handel was the second child of this marriage; the first son was stillborn. Two younger sisters were born after the birth of George Frideric: Dorthea Sophia, born 6 October 1687, and Johanna Christiana, born 10 January 1690.
Early education
Early in his life Handel is reported to have attended the Gymnasium in Halle, where the headmaster, , was reputed to be an ardent musician. Whether Handel remained there, and if he did for how long, is unknown, but many biographers suggest that he was withdrawn from school by his father, based on the characterization of him by Handel's first biographer, John Mainwaring. Mainwaring is the source for almost all information (little as it is) of Handel's childhood, and much of that information came from J.C. Smith, Jr., Handel's confidant, and copyist. Whether it came from Smith or elsewhere, Mainwaring frequently relates misinformation. It is from Mainwaring that the portrait comes of Handel's father as implacably opposed to any musical education. Mainwaring writes that Georg Händel was "alarmed" at Handel's very early propensity for music, "took every measure to oppose it", including forbidding any musical instrument in the house and preventing Handel from going to any house where they might be found. This did nothing to dampen young Handel's inclination; in fact, it did the reverse. Mainwaring tells the story of Handel's secret attic spinet: Handel "found means to get a little clavichord privately convey'd to a room at the top of the house. To this room he constantly stole when the family was asleep". Although both John Hawkins and Charles Burney credited this tale, Schoelcher found it nearly "incredible" and a feat of "poetic imagination" and Lang considers it one of the unproven "romantic stories" that surrounded Handel's childhood. But Handel had to have had some experience with the keyboard to have made the impression in Weissenfels that resulted in his receiving formal musical training.
Musical education
Sometime between the ages of seven and nine, Handel accompanied his father to Weissenfels where he came under the notice of one whom Handel thereafter always regarded throughout life as his benefactor, Duke Johann Adolf I. Somehow Handel made his way to the court organ in the palace chapel of the Holy Trinity, where he surprised everyone with his playing. Overhearing this performance and noting the youth of the performer caused the Duke, whose suggestions were not to be disregarded, to recommend to Georg Händel that Handel be given musical instruction. Handel's father engaged the organist at the Halle parish church, the young Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, to instruct Handel. Zachow would be the only teacher that Handel ever had. Because of his church employment, Zachow was an organist "of the old school", reveling in fugues, canons, and counterpoint. But he was also familiar with developments in music across Europe and his own compositions "embraced the new concerted, dramatic style". When Zachow discovered the talent of Handel, he introduced him "to a vast collection of German and Italian music, which he possessed, sacred and profane, vocal and instrumental compositions of different schools, different styles, and of every master". Many traits considered "Handelian" can be traced back to Zachow's music. At the same time Handel continued practice on the harpsichord, learned violin and organ, but according to Burney his special affection was for the hautbois (oboe). Schoelcher speculates that his youthful devotion to the instrument explains the large number of pieces he composed for oboe.
With respect to instruction in composition, in addition to having Handel apply himself to traditional fugue and cantus firmus work, Zachow, recognising Handel's precocious talents, systematically introduced Handel to the variety of styles and masterworks contained in his extensive library. He did this by requiring Handel to copy selected scores. "I used to write like the devil in those days", Handel recalled much later. Much of this copying was entered into a notebook that Handel maintained for the rest of his life. Although it has since disappeared, the notebook has been sufficiently described to understand what pieces Zachow wished Handel to study. Among the chief composers represented in this exercise book were Johann Krieger, an "old master" in the fugue and prominent organ composer, Johann Caspar Kerll, a representative of the "southern style" after his teacher Frescobaldi and imitated later by Handel, Johann Jakob Froberger, an "internationalist" also closely studied by Buxtehude and Bach, and Georg Muffat, whose amalgam of French and Italian styles and his synthesis of musical forms influenced Handel.
Mainwaring writes that during this time Zachow had begun to have Handel assume some of his church duties. Zachow, Mainwaring asserts, was "often" absent, "from his love of company, and a cheerful glass", and Handel, therefore, performed on organ frequently. What is more, according to Mainwaring, Handel began composing, at the age of nine, church services for voice and instruments "and from that time actually did compose a service every week for three years successively." Mainwaring ends this chapter of Handel's life by concluding that three or four years had been enough to allow Handel to surpass Zachow, and Handel had become "impatient for another situation"; "Berlin was the place agreed upon." Carelessness with dates or sequences (and possibly imaginative interpretation by Mainwaring) makes this period confused.
After the death of Handel's father
Handel's father died on 11 February 1697. It was German custom for friends and family to compose funeral odes for a substantial burgher like Georg, and young Handel discharged his duty with a poem dated 18 February and signed with his name and (in deference to his father's wishes) "dedicated to the liberal arts." At the time Handel was studying either at Halle's Lutheran Gymnasium or the Latin School.
Mainwaring has Handel travelling to Berlin the next year, 1698. The problem with Mainwaring as an authority for this date, however, is that he tells of how Handel's father communicated with the "king" during Handel's stay, declining the Court's offer to send Handel to Italy on a stipend and that his father died "after his return from Berlin." But since Georg Händel died in 1697, either the date of the trip or Mainwaring's statements about Handel's father must be in error. Early biographers solved the problem by making the year of the trip 1696, then noting that at the age of 11 Handel would need a guardian, so they have Handel's father or a friend of the family accompany him, all the while puzzling over why the elder Handel, who wanted Handel to become a lawyer, would spend the sum to lead his son further into the temptation of music as a career. Schoelcher for example has Handel travelling to Berlin at 11, meeting both Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti in Berlin and then returning at the direction of his father. But Ariosti was not in Berlin before the death of Handel's father, and Handel could not have met Bononcini in Berlin before 1702. Modern biographers either accept the year as 1698, since most reliable older authorities agree with it, and discount what Mainwaring says about what took place during the trip or assume that Mainwaring conflated two or more visits to Berlin, as he did with Handel's later trips to Venice.
University
Perhaps to fulfill a promise to his father or simply because he saw himself as "dedicated to the liberal arts," on 10 February 1702 Handel matriculated at the University of Halle. That university had only recently been founded. In 1694, the Elector of Brandenburg Frederick III (later Prussian King Frederick I) created the school, largely to provide a lecture forum for the jurist Christian Thomasius who had been expelled from Leipzig for his liberal views. Handel did not enroll in the faculty of law, although he almost certainly attended lectures. Thomasius was an intellectual and academic crusader who was the first German academic to lecture in German and also denounced witch trials. Lang believes that Thomasius instilled in Handel a "respect for the dignity and freedom of man's mind and the solemn majesty of the law," principles that would have drawn him to and kept him in England for half a century. Handel also there encountered theologian and professor of Oriental languages August Hermann Francke, who was particularly solicitous of children, particularly orphans. The orphanage he founded became a model for Germany, and undoubtedly influenced Handel's own charitable impulse, when he assigned the rights of Messiah to London's Foundling Hospital.
Shortly after commencing his university education, Handel (though Lutheran) on 13 March 1702 accepted the position of organist at the Calvinist Cathedral in Halle, the Domkirche, replacing J.C. Leporin, for whom he had acted as assistant. The position, which was a one-year probationary appointment showed the foundation he had received from Zachow, for a church organist and cantor was a highly prestigious office. From it he received 5 thalers a year and lodgings in the run-down castle of Moritzburg.
Around this same time, Handel made the acquaintance of Telemann. Four years Handel's senior, Telemann was studying law at Leipzig and was assisting cantor Johann Kuhnau (Bach's predecessor at the Thomaskirche there). Telemann recalled forty years later in an autobiography for Mattheson's Grundlage: "The writing of the excellent Johann Kuhnau served as a model for me in fugue and counterpoint; but in fashioning melodic movements and examining them Handel and I were constantly occupied, frequently visiting each other as well as writing letters."
Halle compositions
Although Mainwaring records that Handel wrote weekly when assistant to Zachow and as probationary organist at Domkirche part of his duty was to provide suitable music, no sacred compositions from his Halle period can now be identified. Mattheson, however, summarised his opinion of Handel's church cantatas written in Halle: "Handel in those days set very, very long arias and sheerly unending cantatas which, while not possessing the proper knack or correct taste, were perfect so far as harmony is concerned."
Early chamber works do exist, but it is difficult to date any of them to Handel's time in Halle. Many historians until recently followed Chrysander and designated the six trio sonatas for two oboes and basso continuo as his first known composition, supposedly written in 1696 (when Handel was 11). Lang doubts the dating based on a handwritten date of a copy (1700) and stylistic considerations. Lang writes that the works "show thorough acquaintance with the distilled sonata style of the Corelli school" and are notable for "the formal security and the cleanness of the texture." Hogwood considers all of the oboe trio sonatas spurious and even suggests that some parts cannot be performed on oboe. That authentic manuscript sources do not exist and that Handel never recycled any material from these works makes their authenticity doubtful. Other early chamber works were printed in Amsterdam in 1724 as opus 1, but it is impossible to tell which are early works in their original form, rather than later re-workings by Handel, a frequent practice of his.
From Hamburg to Italy
Handel's probationary appointment to Domkirche expired in March 1703. By July Handel was in Hamburg. Since he left no explanation for the move biographers have offered their own speculation. Burrows believes that the answer can be found by untangling Mainwaring's confused chronology of the trip to Berlin. Burrows dates this trip to 1702 or 1703 (after his father's death) and concluded that since Handel (through a "friend and relation" at the Berlin court) turned down Frederick's offer to subsidise his musical education in Italy (with the implicit understanding that he would become a court musician on his return), Handel was no longer able to expect preferment (whether as a musician, lawyer or otherwise) within Brandenburg-Prussia. And since he was attracted to secular, dramatic music (by meeting the Italians Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti and through the influence of Telemann), Hamburg, a free city with an established opera company, was the logical choice. The question remains, however, why Handel rejected the King's offer, given that Italy was the centre of opera. Lang suggests that influenced by the teachings of Thomasius, Handel's character was such that he was unable to make himself subservient to anyone, even a king. Lang sees Handel as someone who could not accept class distinctions that required him to regard himself as a social inferior. "What Handel craved was personal freedom to raise himself out of his provincial milieu to a life of culture." Burrows notes that like his father, Handel was able to accept royal (and aristocratic) favours without considering himself a court servant. And so given the embarrassed financial condition of his mother, Handel set off for Hamburg to obtain experience while supporting himself.
In 1703, he accepted a position as violinist and harpsichordist in the orchestra of the Hamburg Oper am Gänsemarkt. There he met the composers Johann Mattheson, Christoph Graupner and Reinhard Keiser. His first two operas, Almira and Nero, were produced in 1705. He produced two other operas, Daphne and Florindo, in 1708. It is unclear whether Handel directed these performances.
According to Mainwaring, in 1706 Handel travelled to Italy at the invitation of Ferdinando de' Medici. (Other sources say Handel was invited by Gian Gastone de' Medici, whom Handel had met in 1703–1704 in Hamburg.) Ferdinando, who had a keen interest in opera, was trying to make Florence Italy's musical capital by attracting the leading talents of his day. In Italy, Handel met librettist Antonio Salvi, with whom he later collaborated. Handel left for Rome and since opera was (temporarily) banned in the Papal States, composed sacred music for the Roman clergy. His famous Dixit Dominus (1707) is from this era. He also composed cantatas in pastoral style for musical gatherings in the palaces of duchess Aurora Sanseverino (whom Mainwaring called "Donna Laura") one of the most influential patrons from the Kingdom of Naples, and cardinals Pietro Ottoboni, Benedetto Pamphili and Carlo Colonna. Two oratorios, La resurrezione and Il trionfo del tempo, were produced in a private setting for Ruspoli and Ottoboni in 1709 and 1710, respectively. Rodrigo, his first all-Italian opera, was produced in the Cocomero theatre in Florence in 1707. Agrippina was first produced in 1709 at Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice, owned by the Grimanis. The opera, with a libretto by Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani, ran for 27 nights successively. The audience, thunderstruck with the grandeur and sublimity of his style, applauded for Il caro Sassone ("the dear Saxon" – referring to Handel's German origins).
In London
Arrival
In June 1710, Handel became Kapellmeister to German prince George, the Elector of Hanover, but left at the end of the year. It is likely he was also invited by Charles Montagu the former ambassador in Venice to visit England. He visited Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici and her husband in Düsseldorf on his way to London. With his opera Rinaldo, based on La Gerusalemme Liberata by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, Handel enjoyed great success, although it was composed quickly, with many borrowings from his older Italian works. This work contains one of Handel's favourite arias, Cara sposa, amante cara, and the famous Lascia ch'io pianga.
Handel went back to Halle twice to attend the wedding of his sister and the baptism of her daughter but decided to settle permanently in England in 1712. In the summer of 1713, he lived at Mr. Mathew Andrews' estate in Barn Elms, Surrey. He received a yearly income of £200 from Queen Anne after composing for her the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate, first performed in 1713.
One of his most important patrons was the 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, a young and extremely wealthy member of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family. While living in the mansion of Lord Burlington, Handel wrote Amadigi di Gaula, a "magic" opera, about a damsel in distress, based on the tragedy by Antoine Houdar de la Motte.
The conception of an opera as a coherent structure was slow to capture Handel's imagination and he composed no operas for five years. In July 1717 Handel's Water Music was performed more than three times on the River Thames for King George I and his guests. It is said the compositions spurred reconciliation between Handel and the king, supposedly annoyed by the composer's abandonment of his Hanover post.
At Cannons (1717–19)
In 1717, Handel became house composer at Cannons in Middlesex, where he laid the cornerstone for his future choral compositions in the Chandos Anthems. Romain Rolland wrote that these anthems (or Psalms) stood in relation to Handel's oratorios, much the same way that the Italian cantatas stood to his operas: "splendid sketches of the more monumental works." Another work, which he wrote for The 1st Duke of Chandos, the owner of Cannons, was Acis and Galatea: during Handel's lifetime, it was his most performed work. Winton Dean wrote, "the music catches breath and disturbs the memory".
In 1719, the Duke of Chandos became one of the composer's important patrons and main subscribers to his new opera company, the Royal Academy of Music, but his patronage declined after Chandos lost money in the South Sea bubble, which burst in 1720 in one of history's greatest financial cataclysms. Handel himself invested in South Sea stock in 1716, when prices were low and sold before 1720. In 1720, Handel invested in the Royal African Company, the main slave-trading company in Great Britain: it was again run by the Duke of Chandos. The slave trade involved trafficking Africans to the Americas and then forcing them to cultivate rice, tobacco, sugar and other luxury products to send back to Britain, thus boosting the economy at home through shipping activities, trade and manufacturing.
Royal Academy of Music (1719–34)
In May 1719, The 1st Duke of Newcastle, the Lord Chamberlain, ordered Handel to look for new singers. Handel travelled to Dresden to attend the newly built opera. He saw Teofane by Antonio Lotti, and engaged members of the cast for the Royal Academy of Music, founded by a group of aristocrats to assure themselves a constant supply of baroque opera or opera seria. Handel may have invited John Smith, his fellow student in Halle, and his son Johann Christoph Schmidt, to become his secretary and amanuensis. By 1723 he had moved into a Georgian house at 25 Brook Street, which he rented for the rest of his life. This house, where he rehearsed, copied music, and sold tickets, is now the Handel House Museum. During twelve months between 1724 and 1725, Handel wrote three successful operas, Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano and Rodelinda. Handel's operas are filled with da capo arias, such as Svegliatevi nel core. After composing Silete venti, he concentrated on opera and stopped writing cantatas. Scipio, from which the regimental slow march of the British Grenadier Guards is derived, was performed as a stopgap, waiting for the arrival of Faustina Bordoni.
In 1727, Handel was commissioned to write four anthems for the Coronation ceremony of King George II. One of these, Zadok the Priest, has been played at every British coronation ceremony since. The words to Zadok the Priest are taken from the King James Bible. In 1728, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, which made fun of the type of Italian opera Handel had popularised in London, premiered at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre and ran for 62 consecutive performances, the longest run in theatre history up to that time. After nine years the Royal Academy of Music ceased to function but Handel soon started a new company.
The Queen's Theatre at the Haymarket (now Her Majesty's Theatre), established in 1705 by architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, quickly became an opera house. Between 1711 and 1739, more than 25 of Handel's operas premièred there. In 1729, Handel became joint manager of the theatre with John James Heidegger.
Handel travelled to Italy to engage new singers and also composed seven more operas, among them the comic masterpiece Partenope and the "magic" opera Orlando. After two commercially successful English oratorios Esther and Deborah, he was able to invest again in the South Sea Company. Handel reworked his Acis and Galatea which then became his most successful work ever. Handel failed to compete with the Opera of the Nobility, who engaged musicians such as Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicolo Porpora and the famous castrato Farinelli. The strong support by Frederick, Prince of Wales caused conflicts in the royal family. In March 1734 Handel composed a wedding anthem This is the day which the Lord hath made, and a serenata Parnasso in Festa for Anne, Princess Royal.
Despite the problems the Opera of the Nobility was causing him at the time, Handel's neighbour in Brook Street, Mary Delany, reported on a party she invited Handel to at her house on 12 April 1734 where he was in good spirits:I had Lady Rich and her daughter, Lady Cath. Hanmer and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Percival, Sir John Stanley and my brother, Mrs. Donellan, Strada [star soprano of Handel's operas] and Mr. Coot. Lord Shaftesbury begged of Mr. Percival to bring him, and being a profess'd friend of Mr. Handel (who was here also) was admitted; I never was so well entertained at an opera! Mr. Handel was in the best humour in the world, and played lessons and accompanied Strada and all the ladies that sang from seven o'clock till eleven. I gave them tea and coffee, and about half an hour after nine had a salver brought in of chocolate, mulled white wine, and biscuits. Everybody was easy and seemed pleased.
Opera at Covent Garden (1734–41)
In 1733, the Earl of Essex received a letter with the following sentence: "Handel became so arbitrary a prince, that the Town murmurs." The board of chief investors expected Handel to retire when his contract ended, but Handel immediately looked for another theatre. In cooperation with John Rich he started his third company at Covent Garden Theatre. Rich was renowned for his spectacular productions. He suggested Handel use his small chorus and introduce the dancing of Marie Sallé, for whom Handel composed Terpsicore. In 1735, he introduced organ concertos between the acts. For the first time, Handel allowed Gioacchino Conti, who had no time to learn his part, to substitute arias. Financially, Ariodante was a failure, although he introduced ballet suites at the end of each act. Alcina, his last opera with a magic content, and Alexander's Feast or the Power of Music based on John Dryden's Alexander's Feast starred Anna Maria Strada del Pò and John Beard.
Early 1737 he had produced Arminio and Giustino, completed Berenice, revived Partenope, and continued with Il Parnasso in Festa, Alexander's Feast, and the revised The Triumph of Time and Truth which premiered on March 23. In April Handel suffered a mild stroke, or rheumatic palsy, resulting in temporary paralysis in his right hand and arm. After brief signs of a recovery, he had a relapse in May, with an accompanying deterioration in his mental capacities. He had strong competition from John Frederick Lampe; The Dragon of Wantley was first performed at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in London on May 16, 1737. It was a parody of the Italian opera seria.
In Autumn 1737 the fatigued Handel reluctantly followed the advice of his physicians and went to take the cure in the spa towns of Royal Tunbridge Wells, Aix-la-Chapelle (Burtscheid) in September. All the symptoms of his "disorder" vanished by November. On Christmas Eve Handel finished the score of Faramondo, but its composition was interrupted by that of the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline. On Boxing Day he began the composition of Serse, the only comic opera that Handel ever wrote and worked with Elisabeth Duparc.
The harp and organ concerto (HWV 294) and Alexander's Feast were published in 1738 by John Walsh. He composed music for a musical clock with a pipe organ built by Charles Clay; it was bought by Gerrit Braamcamp and was in 2016 acquired by the Museum Speelklok in Utrecht. Deidamia, his last opera, a co-production with the Earl of Holderness, was performed three times in 1741. Handel gave up the opera business, while he enjoyed more success with his English oratorios.
Oratorio
Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, an allegory, Handel's first oratorio was composed in Italy in 1707, followed by La resurrezione in 1708 which uses material from the Bible. The circumstances of Esther and its first performance, possibly in 1718, are obscure. Another 12 years had passed when an act of piracy caused him to take up Esther once again. Three earlier performances aroused such interest that they naturally prompted the idea of introducing it to a larger public. Next came Deborah, strongly coloured by the coronation anthems and Athaliah, his first English Oratorio. In these three oratorios Handel laid the foundation for the traditional use of the chorus which marks his later oratorios. Handel became sure of himself, broader in his presentation, and more diverse in his composition.
It is evident how much he learned from Arcangelo Corelli about writing for instruments, and from Alessandro Scarlatti about writing for the solo voice; but there is no single composer who taught him how to write for chorus. Handel tended more and more to replace Italian soloists by English ones. The most significant reason for this change was the dwindling financial returns from his operas. Thus a tradition was created for oratorios which was to govern their future performance. The performances were given without costumes and action; the singers appeared in their own clothes.
In 1736, Handel produced Alexander's Feast. John Beard appeared for the first time as one of Handel's principal singers and became Handel's permanent tenor soloist for the rest of Handel's life. The piece was a great success and it encouraged Handel to make the transition from writing Italian operas to English choral works. In Saul, Handel was collaborating with Charles Jennens and experimenting with three trombones, a carillon and extra-large military kettledrums (from the Tower of London), to be sure "...it will be most excessive noisy". Saul and Israel in Egypt both from 1739 head the list of great, mature oratorios, in which the da capo aria became the exception and not the rule. Israel in Egypt consists of little else but choruses, borrowing from the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline. In his next works, Handel changed his course. In these works he laid greater stress on the effects of orchestra and soloists; the chorus retired into the background. L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato has a rather diverting character; the work is light and fresh.
During the summer of 1741, The 3rd Duke of Devonshire invited Handel to Dublin, capital of the Kingdom of Ireland, to give concerts for the benefit of local hospitals. His Messiah was first performed at the New Music Hall in Fishamble Street on 13 April 1742, with 26 boys and five men from the combined choirs of St Patrick's and Christ Church cathedrals participating. Handel secured a balance between soloists and chorus which he never surpassed.
In 1747, Handel wrote his oratorio Alexander Balus. This work was produced at Covent Garden Theatre in London, on 23 March 1748, and to the aria Hark! hark! He strikes the golden lyre, Handel wrote the accompaniment for mandolin, harp, violin, viola, and violoncello. Another of his English oratorios, Solomon, was first performed on 17 March 1749 at the Covent Garden Theatre. Solomon contains a short and lively instrumental passage for two oboes and strings in act 3, known as "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba".
The use of English soloists reached its height at the first performance of Samson. The work is highly theatrical. The role of the chorus became increasingly important in his later oratorios. Jephtha was first performed on 26 February 1752; even though it was his last oratorio, it was no less a masterpiece than his earlier works.
Later years
In 1749, Handel composed Music for the Royal Fireworks; 12,000 people attended the first performance. In 1750, he arranged a performance of Messiah to benefit the Foundling Hospital, a children's home in London. The performance was considered a great success and was followed by annual concerts that continued throughout his life. In recognition of his patronage, Handel was made a governor of the Hospital the day after his initial concert. He bequeathed a copy of Messiah to the institution upon his death. His involvement with the Foundling Hospital is today commemorated with a permanent exhibition in London's Foundling Museum, which also holds the Gerald Coke Handel Collection. In addition to the Foundling Hospital, Handel also gave to a charity that assisted impoverished musicians and their families.
In August 1750, on a journey back from Germany to London, Handel was seriously injured in a carriage accident between The Hague and Haarlem in the Netherlands. In 1751, one eye started to fail. The cause was a cataract which was operated on by the great charlatan Chevalier Taylor. This did not improve his eyesight but possibly made it worse. He was completely blind by 1752. He died in 1759 at home in Brook Street, at age 74. The last performance he attended was of Messiah. Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey. More than three thousand mourners attended his funeral, which was given full state honours.
Handel never married and kept his personal life private. His initial will bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his niece Johanna, however, four codicils distributed much of his estate to other relations, servants, friends and charities.
Handel owned an art collection that was auctioned posthumously in 1760. The auction catalogue listed approximately seventy paintings and ten prints (other paintings were bequeathed).
Works
Overview
Handel's compositions include 42 operas, 25 oratorios, more than 120 cantatas, trios and duets, numerous arias, odes and serenatas, solo and trio sonatas, 18 concerti grossi, and 12 organ concertos. His most famous work, the oratorio Messiah with its "Hallelujah" chorus, is among the most popular works in choral music and has become the centrepiece of the Christmas season. The Lobkowicz Palace in Prague holds Mozart's copy of Messiah, complete with handwritten annotations. Among the works with opus numbers published and popularised in his lifetime are the Organ concertos Op. 4 and Op. 7, together with the Opus 3 and Opus 6 Concerti grossi; the latter incorporates an earlier organ concerto The Cuckoo and the Nightingale in which birdsong is imitated in the upper registers of the organ. Also notable are his 16 keyboard suites, especially The Harmonious Blacksmith.
Catalogues
The first published catalogue of Handel's works appeared as an appendix to Mainwaring's Memoirs. Between 1787 and 1797 Samuel Arnold compiled a 180-volume collection of Handel's works—however, it was far from complete. Also incomplete was the collection produced between 1843 and 1858 by the English Handel Society (founded by Sir George Macfarren).
The 105-volume Händel-Gesellschaft ("Handel Society") edition was published between 1858 and 1902 – mainly due to the efforts of Friedrich Chrysander. For modern performance, the realisation of the basso continuo reflects 19th-century practice. Vocal scores drawn from the edition were published by Novello in London, but some scores, such as the vocal score to Samson, are incomplete.
The continuing Hallische Händel-Ausgabe edition was first inaugurated in 1955 in the Halle region in Saxony-Anhalt, Eastern Germany. It did not start as a critical edition, but after heavy criticism of the first volumes, which were performing editions without a critical apparatus (for example, the opera Serse was published with the title character recast as a tenor, reflecting pre-war German practice), it repositioned itself as a critical edition. Influenced in part by cold-war realities, editorial work was inconsistent: misprints are found in abundance and editors failed to consult important sources. In 1985, a committee was formed to establish better standards for the edition. The unification of Germany in 1990 removed communication problems, and the volumes issued have since shown a significant improvement in standards.
Between 1978 and 1986 the German academic Bernd Baselt catalogued Handel's works in his Händel-Werke-Verzeichnis publication. The catalogue has achieved wide acceptance and is used as the modern numbering system, with each of Handel's works designated an "HWV" number, for example Messiah is catalogued as "HWV 56".
Legacy
Handel's works were collected and preserved by two men: Sir Samuel Hellier, a country squire whose musical acquisitions form the nucleus of the Shaw-Hellier Collection, and the abolitionist Granville Sharp. The catalogue accompanying the National Portrait Gallery exhibition marking the tercentenary of the composer's birth calls them two men of the late eighteenth century "who have left us solid evidence of the means by which they indulged their enthusiasm". With his English oratorios, such as Messiah and Solomon, the coronation anthems, and other works including Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, Handel became a national icon in Britain, and featured in the BBC series, The Birth of British Music: Handel – The Conquering Hero.
After his death, Handel's Italian operas fell into obscurity, except for selections such as the aria from Serse, "Ombra mai fu". The oratorios continued to be performed but not long after Handel's death they were thought to need some modernisation, and Mozart orchestrated German versions of Messiah and other works. Throughout the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, particularly in the Anglophone countries, his reputation rested primarily on his English oratorios, which were customarily performed by choruses of amateur singers on solemn occasions. The centenary of his death, in 1859, was celebrated by a performance of Messiah at The Crystal Palace, involving 2,765 singers and 460 instrumentalists, who played for an audience of about 10,000 people.
Recent decades have revived his secular cantatas and what one might call 'secular oratorios' or 'concert operas'. Of the former, Ode for St. Cecilia's Day (1739) (set to texts by John Dryden) and Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne (1713) are noteworthy. For his secular oratorios, Handel turned to classical mythology for subjects, producing such works as Acis and Galatea (1719), Hercules (1745) and Semele (1744). These works have a close kinship with the sacred oratorios, particularly in the vocal writing for the English-language texts. They also share the lyrical and dramatic qualities of Handel's Italian operas. As such, they are sometimes fully staged as operas. With the rediscovery of his theatrical works, Handel, in addition to his renown as instrumentalist, orchestral writer, and melodist, is now perceived as being one of opera's great musical dramatists.
The original form of his name, Georg Friedrich Händel, is generally used in Germany and elsewhere, but he is known as "Haendel" in France. A different composer, Jacob Handl or Händl (1550–1591) is usually known by the Latin form Jacobus Gallus that appears in his publications.
Reception
Handel has generally been accorded high esteem by fellow composers, both in his own time and since. Johann Sebastian Bach attempted, unsuccessfully, to meet Handel while he was visiting Halle. (Handel was born in the same year as Bach and Domenico Scarlatti.) Mozart is reputed to have said of him, "Handel understands affect better than any of us. When he chooses, he strikes like a thunder bolt." To Beethoven he was "the master of us all... the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb." Beethoven emphasised above all the simplicity and popular appeal of Handel's music when he said, "Go to him to learn how to achieve great effects, by such simple means."
Borrowings
Since 1831, when William Crotch raised the issue in his Substance of Several Lectures on Music, scholars have extensively studied Handel's "borrowing" of music from other composers. Summarising the field in 2005, Richard Taruskin wrote that Handel "seems to have been the champion of all parodists, adapting both his own works and those of other composers in unparalleled numbers and with unparalleled exactitude." Among the composers whose music has been shown to have been re-used by Handel are Alessandro Stradella, Gottlieb Muffat, Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti Giacomo Carissimi, Georg Philipp Telemann, Carl Heinrich Graun, Leonardo Vinci, Jacobus Gallus, Francesco Antonio Urio, Reinhard Keiser, Francesco Gasparini, Giovanni Bononcini, William Boyce, Henry Lawes, Michael Wise, Agostino Steffani, Franz Johann Habermann, and numerous others.
In an essay published in 1985, John H. Roberts demonstrated that Handel's borrowings were unusually frequent even for his own era, enough to have been criticised by contemporaries (notably Johann Mattheson); Roberts suggested several reasons for Handel's practice, including Handel's attempts to make certain works sound more up-to-date and more radically, his "basic lack of facility in inventing original ideas" – though Roberts took care to argue that this does not "diminish Handel's stature", which should be "judged not by his methods, still less by his motives in employing them, but solely by the effects he achieves."
Homages
After Handel's death, many composers wrote works based on or inspired by his music. The first movement from Louis Spohr's Symphony No. 6, Op. 116, "The Age of Bach and Handel", resembles two melodies from Handel's Messiah. In 1797, Ludwig van Beethoven published the 12 Variations in G major on "See the conqu’ring hero comes" from Judas Maccabaeus by Handel, for cello and piano. In 1822, Beethoven composed the overture The Consecration of the House, which also bears the influence of Handel. Guitar virtuoso Mauro Giuliani composed his Variations on a Theme by Handel, Op. 107 for guitar, based on Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major, HWV 430, for harpsichord.
In 1861, using a theme from the second of Handel's harpsichord suites, Johannes Brahms wrote the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24, one of his most successful works (praised by Richard Wagner). Several works by the French composer Félix-Alexandre Guilmant use Handel's themes, for example his March on a Theme by Handel uses a theme from Messiah. French composer and flautist Philippe Gaubert wrote his Petite marche for flute and piano based on the fourth movement of Handel's Trio Sonata, Op. 5, No. 2, HWV 397. Argentine composer Luis Gianneo composed his Variations on a Theme by Handel for piano. In 1911, Australian-born composer and pianist Percy Grainger based one of his most famous works on the final movement of Handel's Suite No. 5 in E major (just like Giuliani). He first wrote some variations on the theme, which he titled Variations on Handel's 'The Harmonious Blacksmith' . Then he used the first sixteen bars of his set of variations to create Handel in the Strand, one of his most beloved pieces, of which he made several versions (for example, the piano solo version from 1930). Arnold Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in B-flat major (1933) was composed after Handel's Concerto Grosso, Op. 6/7.<ref>Auner Joseph H. (1996), "Schoenberg's Handel Concerto and the Ruins of Tradition", Journal of the American Musicological Society', and also Robert Schumann tried to compose an additional piece for a theme of Handel in his Album for the Young. 49: 264–313</ref>
Veneration
Handel is honoured with a feast day on 28 July in the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church, with Johann Sebastian Bach and Henry Purcell. In the Lutheran Calendar of Saints Handel and Bach share that date with Heinrich Schütz, and Handel and Bach are commemorated in the calendar of saints prepared by the Order of Saint Luke for the use of the United Methodist Church. The Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (Westminster John Knox Press, 2018) commemorates him on 20 April.
Fictional depictions
In 1942, Handel was the subject of the British biopic The Great Mr. Handel directed by Norman Walker and starring Wilfrid Lawson. It was made at Denham Studios by the Rank Organisation, and shot in Technicolor. He is also the central character in the television films God Rot Tunbridge Wells! (1985) and Handel's Last Chance (1996) and the stage play All the Angels (2015). Handel was portrayed by Jeroen Krabbé as the antagonist in the film Farinelli (1994).
See also
Handel Reference Database
Letters and writings of George Frideric Handel
Publications by Friedrich Chrysander
Valentine Snow
Drexel 5856
Notes, references and sources
Notes
References
Sources
Consisting of three volumes (separately hosted online by zeno.org): Buch 1: Jugendzeit und Lehrjahre in Deutschland (1685–1706); Buch 2: Die große Wanderung (1707–1720).
Leopold, Silke. Bärenreiter 2009,
Meynell, Hugo. The Art of Handel's Operas, The Edwin Mellen Press (1986)
Further reading
Buch 3: Zwanzig Jahre bei der italienischen Oper in London.
Buch 4: Übergang zum Oratorium.
External links
Handel Reference Database
Handel Houses:
Händel-Haus in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Handel's birthplace
The Handel House Museum Handel's home in London
Scores and recordings
: includes Complete Works Edition ('')
The Mutopia Project provides free downloading of sheet music and MIDI files for some of Handel's works.
Digitized images of Old English Songs, containing works by Handel, housed at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections
George Frideric Handel cylinder recordings, from the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.
Kunst der Fuge: George Frideric Handel – MIDI files
1685 births
1759 deaths
18th-century British composers
18th-century German composers
18th-century German male musicians
18th-century keyboardists
Classical composers of church music
Composers for harpsichord
Composers for pipe organ
English Baroque composers
English opera composers
British male organists
German male organists
German Baroque composers
German opera composers
Oratorio composers
Organ improvisers
Members of the Royal Society of Musicians
Burials at Westminster Abbey
People from Halle (Saale)
People from the Duchy of Magdeburg
German emigrants to England
German emigrants to the Kingdom of Great Britain
Naturalised subjects of the Kingdom of Great Britain
German duellists | [
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12776 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni%20Pierluigi%20da%20Palestrina | Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina | Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina ( 1525 – 2 February 1594) was an Italian Renaissance composer of sacred music and the best-known 16th-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition. He had a long-lasting influence on the development of church and secular music in Europe, especially on the development of counterpoint, and his work is considered the culmination of Renaissance polyphony.
Biography
Palestrina was born in the town of Palestrina, near Rome, then part of the Papal States to Neapolitan parents, Santo and Palma Pierluigi, in 1525, possibly on 3 February. His mother died on 16 January 1536, when Palestrina was 10. Documents suggest that he first visited Rome in 1537, when he was listed as a chorister at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the papal basilicas of the Diocese of Rome, which allowed him to learn literature and music. In 1540, he moved to Rome, where he studied in the school of the Huguenot Claude Goudimel. He also studied with Robin Mallapert and Firmin Lebel. He spent most of his career in the city.
Palestrina came of age as a musician under the influence of the northern European style of polyphony, which owed its dominance in Italy primarily to two influential Netherlandish composers, Guillaume Du Fay and Josquin des Prez, who had spent significant portions of their careers there. Italy itself had yet to produce anyone of comparable fame or skill in polyphony. Orlando di Lasso , who accompanied Palestrina in his early years, also played an important role in the formation of his style as an adviser.
From 1544 to 1551, Palestrina was the organist of the Cathedral of St. Agapito, the principal church of his native city. In 1551 Pope Julius III (previously the Bishop of Palestrina) appointed Palestrina maestro di cappella or musical director of the Cappella Giulia, (Julian Chapel, in the sense of choir), the choir of the chapter of canons at St. Peter's Basilica. Palestrina dedicated to Julius III his first published compositions (1554), a book of Masses. It was the first book of Masses by a native composer, since in the Italian states of Palestrina's day, most composers of sacred music were from the Low Countries, France, or Spain. In fact the book was modelled on one by Cristóbal de Morales: the woodcut in the front is almost an exact copy of the one from the book by the Spanish composer.
In 1555, Pope Paul IV ordered that all papal choristers should be clerical. As Palestrina married early in life and had four children, he was unable to continue in the chapel as a layman.
During the next decade, Palestrina held positions similar to his Julian Chapel appointment at other chapels and churches in Rome, notably St. John Lateran (1555–1560, a post previously held by Lassus), and Santa Maria Maggiore (1561–1566). In 1571 he returned to the Julian Chapel and remained at St Peter's for the rest of his life. The decade of the 1570s was difficult for him personally: he lost his brother, two of his sons, and his wife in three separate outbreaks of the plague (1572, 1575, and 1580, respectively). He seems to have considered becoming a priest at this time, but instead he remarried, this time to a wealthy widow. This finally gave him financial independence (he was not paid well as choirmaster) and was able to compose prolifically until his death.
He died in Rome of pleurisy on 2 February 1594. It is said that Palestrina died only one day before his 69th birthday. As was usual, Palestrina was buried on the same day he died, in a plain coffin with a lead plate on which was inscribed Libera me Domine. A five-part psalm for three choirs was sung at the funeral. Palestrina's funeral was held at St. Peter's, and he was buried beneath the floor of the basilica. His tomb was later covered by new construction and attempts to locate his grave have been unsuccessful.
Italian composers Giovanni Maria Nanino and Gregorio Allegri, both of them disciples of his school, continued his works.
Music
Palestrina left hundreds of compositions, including 105 masses, 68 offertories, at least 140 madrigals and more than 300 motets. In addition, there are at least 72 hymns, 35 magnificats, 11 litanies, and four or five sets of lamentations. The Gloria melody from Palestrina's Magnificat Tertii Toni (1591) is widely used today in the resurrection hymn tune, Victory (The Strife Is O'er).
His attitude toward madrigals was somewhat enigmatic: whereas in the preface to his collection of Canticum canticorum (Song of Songs) motets (1584) he renounced the setting of profane texts, only two years later he was back in print with Book II of his secular madrigals (some of these being among the finest compositions in the medium). He published just two collections of madrigals with profane texts, one in 1555 and another in 1586. The other two collections were spiritual madrigals, a genre beloved by the proponents of the Counter-Reformation.
Palestrina's masses show how his compositional style developed over time. His Missa sine nomine seems to have been particularly attractive to Johann Sebastian Bach, who studied and performed it while writing the Mass in B minor. Most of Palestrina's masses appeared in thirteen volumes printed between 1554 and 1601, the last seven published after his death.
One of his most important works, the Missa Papae Marcelli (Pope Marcellus Mass) has been historically associated with erroneous information involving the Council of Trent. According to this tale (which forms the basis of Hans Pfitzner's opera Palestrina), it was composed in order to persuade the Council of Trent that a draconian ban on the polyphonic treatment of text in sacred music (as opposed, that is, to a more directly intelligible homophonic treatment) was unnecessary. However, more recent scholarship shows that this mass was in fact composed before the cardinals convened to discuss the ban (possibly as much as 10 years before). Historical data indicates that the Council of Trent, as an official body, never actually banned any church music and failed to make any ruling or official statement on the subject. These stories originated from the unofficial points-of-view of some Council attendees who discussed their ideas with those not privy to the Council's deliberations. Those opinions and rumors have, over centuries, been transmuted into fictional accounts, put into print, and often incorrectly taught as historical fact. While Palestrina's compositional motivations are not known, he may have been quite conscious of the need for intelligible text; however, this was not to conform with any doctrine of the Counter-Reformation, because no such doctrine exists. His characteristic style remained consistent from the 1560s until the end of his life. Roche's hypothesis that Palestrina's seemingly dispassionate approach to expressive or emotive texts could have resulted from his having to produce many to order, or from a deliberate decision that any intensity of expression was unbecoming in church music, reflects modern expectations about expressive freedom and underestimates the extent to which the mood of Palestrina's settings is adapted to the liturgical occasions for which the texts were set, rather than the line-by-line meaning of the text, and depends on the distinctive characters of the church modes and variations in vocal grouping for expressive effect. Performing editions and recordings of Palestrina have tended to favour his works in the more familiar modes and standard (SATB) voicings, under-representing the expressive variety of his settings.
There are two comprehensive editions of Palestrina's works: a 33-volume edition published by Breitkopf and Härtel, in Leipzig Germany between 1862 and 1894 edited by Franz Xaver Haberl, and a 34-volume edition published in the mid twentieth century, by Fratelli Scalera, in Rome, Italy edited by R. Casimiri and others.
The "Palestrina Style"
One of the hallmarks of Palestrina's music is that dissonances are typically relegated to the "weak" beats in a measure. This produced a smoother and more consonant type of polyphony which is now considered to be definitive of late Renaissance music, given Palestrina's position as Europe's leading composer (along with Orlande de Lassus and Victoria) in the wake of Josquin des Prez (d. 1521).
The "Palestrina style" taught in college courses covering Renaissance counterpoint is often based on the codification by the 18th-century composer and theorist Johann Joseph Fux, published as Gradus ad Parnassum (Steps to Parnassus, 1725). Citing Palestrina as his model, Fux divided counterpoint into five species (hence the term "species counterpoint"), designed as exercises for the student, which deployed progressively more elaborate rhythmic combinations of voices while adhering to strict harmonic and melodic requirements. The method was widely adopted and was the main basis of contrapuntal training in the 19th century, but Fux had introduced a number of simplifications to the Palestrina style, notably the obligatory use of a cantus firmus in semibreves, which were corrected by later authors such as Knud Jeppesen and R. O. Morris. Palestrina's music conforms in many ways to Fux's rules, particularly in the fifth species but does not fit his pedagogical format.
The main insight, that the "pure" style of polyphony achieved by Palestrina followed an invariable set of stylistic and combinational requirements, was justified. Fux's manual was endorsed by his contemporary J.S. Bach, who himself arranged two of Palestrina's masses for performance.
According to Fux, Palestrina had established and followed these basic guidelines:
The flow of music is dynamic, not rigid or static.
Melody should contain few leaps between notes. (Jeppesen: "The line is the starting point of Palestrina's style".)
If a leap occurs, it must be small and immediately countered by stepwise motion in the opposite direction.
Dissonances are to be confined to suspensions, passing notes and weak beats. If one falls on a strong beat (in a suspension) it must be immediately resolved.
Fux omits to mention the manner in which the musical phrasing of Palestrina followed the syntax of the sentences he was setting to music,
something not always observed by earlier composers. Also to be noticed in Palestrina is a great deal of tone painting. Elementary examples of this are descending musical motion with Latin words like descendit (descends) or of a static musical or cadential moment with the words de coelis (from heaven).
Reputation
Palestrina was extremely famous in his day, and if anything, his reputation and influence increased after his death. J.S. Bach studied and hand-copied Palestrina's first book of Masses, and in 1742 wrote his own adaption of the Kyrie and Gloria of the Missa sine nomine. Felix Mendelssohn placed him in the pantheon of the greatest musicians, writing, "I always get upset when some praise only Beethoven, others only Palestrina and still others only Mozart or Bach. All four of them, I say, or none at all.".
Conservative music of the Roman school continued to be written in Palestrina's style (which in the 17th century came to be known as the prima pratica) by such students of his as Giovanni Maria Nanino, Ruggiero Giovanelli, Arcangelo Crivelli, Teofilo Gargari, Francesco Soriano, and Gregorio Allegri. As late as the 1750s, Palestrina's style was still the reference for composers working in the motet form, as can be seen by Francesco Barsanti's Sei Antifones 'in the style of Palestrina' (c. 1750; published by [Peter] Welcker, c. 1762).
Much research on Palestrina was done in the 19th century by Giuseppe Baini, who published a monograph in 1828 which made Palestrina famous again and reinforced the already existing legend that he was the "Saviour of Church Music" during the reforms of the Council of Trent.
20th and 21st century scholarship by and large retains the view that Palestrina was a strong and refined composer whose music represents a summit of technical perfection. Contemporary analysis highlighted the modern qualities in the compositions of Palestrina such as research of color and sonority, use of sonic grouping in large-scale setting, interest in vertical as well as horizontal organization, studied attention to text setting. These unique characteristics, together with effortless delivery and an indefinable "otherness", constitute to this day the attraction of Palestrina's work.
The Cagliari music conservatory in Cagliari, Italy is named in his honor.
Film
In 2009 a film about the composer was produced by German television ZDF/Arte. Title: Palestrina - Prince of Music, directed by Georg Brintrup.
References
Sources
Books and chapters
Journal and encyclopedia articles
External links
Palestrina Foundation
: a 1971 concert performance by Guildford Cathedral Choir, directed by Barry Rose
recording of Palestrina's Sicut Cervus from Coro Nostro, a mixed chamber choir based in Leicester, UK. Accessed 2010-04-17
audio of songs Accessed 2010-04-17
Palestrina, princeps musicae – Film by Georg Brintrup (2009) (IMDb)
Italian classical composers
1520s births
1594 deaths
People from Palestrina
16th-century Italian composers
Classical composers of church music
Counter-Reformation
Italian male classical composers
Madrigal composers
Renaissance composers
Roman school composers
Sacred music composers
Italian Roman Catholics
16th-century classical composers
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12778 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group%20velocity | Group velocity | The group velocity of a wave is the velocity with which the overall envelope shape of the wave's amplitudes—known as the modulation or envelope of the wave—propagates through space.
For example, if a stone is thrown into the middle of a very still pond, a circular pattern of waves with a quiescent center appears in the water, also known as a capillary wave. The expanding ring of waves is the wave group, within which one can discern individual waves that travel faster than the group as a whole. The amplitudes of the individual waves grow as they emerge from the trailing edge of the group and diminish as they approach the leading edge of the group.
Definition and interpretation
Definition
The group velocity is defined by the equation:
where is the wave's angular frequency (usually expressed in radians per second), and is the angular wavenumber (usually expressed in radians per meter). The phase velocity is: .
The function , which gives as a function of , is known as the dispersion relation.
If is directly proportional to , then the group velocity is exactly equal to the phase velocity. A wave of any shape will travel undistorted at this velocity.
If ω is a linear function of k, but not directly proportional , then the group velocity and phase velocity are different. The envelope of a wave packet (see figure on right) will travel at the group velocity, while the individual peaks and troughs within the envelope will move at the phase velocity.
If is not a linear function of , the envelope of a wave packet will become distorted as it travels. Since a wave packet contains a range of different frequencies (and hence different values of ), the group velocity will be different for different values of . Therefore, the envelope does not move at a single velocity, but its wavenumber components () move at different velocities, distorting the envelope. If the wavepacket has a narrow range of frequencies, and is approximately linear over that narrow range, the pulse distortion will be small, in relation to the small nonlinearity. See further discussion below. For example, for deep water gravity waves, , and hence . This underlies the Kelvin wake pattern for the bow wave of all ships and swimming objects. Regardless of how fast they are moving, as long as their velocity is constant, on each side the wake forms an angle of 19.47° = arcsin(1/3) with the line of travel.
Derivation
One derivation of the formula for group velocity is as follows.
Consider a wave packet as a function of position and time .
Let be its Fourier transform at time ,
By the superposition principle, the wavepacket at any time is
where is implicitly a function of .
Assume that the wave packet is almost monochromatic, so that is sharply peaked around a central wavenumber .
Then, linearization gives
where
and
(see next section for discussion of this step). Then, after some algebra,
There are two factors in this expression. The first factor, , describes a perfect monochromatic wave with wavevector , with peaks and troughs moving at the phase velocity within the envelope of the wavepacket.
The other factor,
,
gives the envelope of the wavepacket. This envelope function depends on position and time only through the combination .
Therefore, the envelope of the wavepacket travels at velocity
which explains the group velocity formula.
Higher-order terms in dispersion
Part of the previous derivation is the Taylor series approximation that:
If the wavepacket has a relatively large frequency spread, or if the dispersion has sharp variations (such as due to a resonance), or if the packet travels over very long distances, this assumption is not valid, and higher-order terms in the Taylor expansion become important.
As a result, the envelope of the wave packet not only moves, but also distorts, in a manner that can be described by the material's group velocity dispersion. Loosely speaking, different frequency-components of the wavepacket travel at different speeds, with the faster components moving towards the front of the wavepacket and the slower moving towards the back. Eventually, the wave packet gets stretched out. This is an important effect in the propagation of signals through optical fibers and in the design of high-power, short-pulse lasers.
History
The idea of a group velocity distinct from a wave's phase velocity was first proposed by W.R. Hamilton in 1839, and the first full treatment was by Rayleigh in his "Theory of Sound" in 1877.
Other expressions
For light, the refractive index , vacuum wavelength , and wavelength in the medium , are related by
with the phase velocity.
The group velocity, therefore, can be calculated by any of the following formulas,
Relation to phase velocity, refractive index and transmission speed
In three dimensions
For waves traveling through three dimensions, such as light waves, sound waves, and matter waves, the formulas for phase and group velocity are generalized in a straightforward way:
One dimension:
Three dimensions:
where means the gradient of the angular frequency as a function of the wave vector , and is the unit vector in direction k.
If the waves are propagating through an anisotropic (i.e., not rotationally symmetric) medium, for example a crystal, then the phase velocity vector and group velocity vector may point in different directions.
In lossy or gainful media
The group velocity is often thought of as the velocity at which energy or information is conveyed along a wave. In most cases this is accurate, and the group velocity can be thought of as the signal velocity of the waveform. However, if the wave is travelling through an absorptive or gainful medium, this does not always hold. In these cases the group velocity may not be a well-defined quantity, or may not be a meaningful quantity.
In his text “Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures”, Brillouin argued that in a dissipative medium the group velocity ceases to have a clear physical meaning. An example concerning the transmission of electromagnetic waves through an atomic gas is given by Loudon. Another example is mechanical waves in the solar photosphere: The waves are damped (by radiative heat flow from the peaks to the troughs), and related to that, the energy velocity is often substantially lower than the waves' group velocity.
Despite this ambiguity, a common way to extend the concept of group velocity to complex media is to consider spatially damped plane wave solutions inside the medium, which are characterized by a complex-valued wavevector. Then, the imaginary part of the wavevector is arbitrarily discarded and the usual formula for group velocity is applied to the real part of wavevector, i.e.,
Or, equivalently, in terms of the real part of complex refractive index, , one has
It can be shown that this generalization of group velocity continues to be related to the apparent speed of the peak of a wavepacket. The above definition is not universal, however: alternatively one may consider the time damping of standing waves (real , complex ), or, allow group velocity to be a complex-valued quantity. Different considerations yield distinct velocities, yet all definitions agree for the case of a lossless, gainless medium.
The above generalization of group velocity for complex media can behave strangely, and the example of anomalous dispersion serves as a good illustration.
At the edges of a region of anomalous dispersion, becomes infinite (surpassing even the speed of light in vacuum), and may easily become negative
(its sign opposes Re) inside the band of anomalous dispersion.
Superluminal group velocities
Since the 1980s, various experiments have verified that it is possible for the group velocity (as defined above) of laser light pulses sent through lossy materials, or gainful materials, to significantly exceed the speed of light in vacuum . The peaks of wavepackets were also seen to move faster than .
In all these cases, however, there is no possibility that signals could be carried faster than the speed of light in vacuum, since the high value of does not help to speed up the true motion of the sharp wavefront that would occur at the start of any real signal. Essentially the seemingly superluminal transmission is an artifact of the narrow band approximation used above to define group velocity and happens because of resonance phenomena in the intervening medium. In a wide band analysis it is seen that the apparently paradoxical speed of propagation of the signal envelope is actually the result of local interference of a wider band of frequencies over many cycles, all of which propagate perfectly causally and at phase velocity. The result is akin to the fact that shadows can travel faster than light, even if the light causing them always propagates at light speed; since the phenomenon being measured is only loosely connected with causality, it does not necessarily respect the rules of causal propagation, even if it under normal circumstances does so and leads to a common intuition.
See also
Wave propagation
Dispersion (water waves)
Dispersion (optics)
Wave propagation speed
Group delay
Group velocity dispersion
Group delay dispersion
Phase delay
Phase velocity
Signal velocity
Slow light
Front velocity
Matter wave#Group velocity
Soliton
References
Notes
Further reading
Crawford jr., Frank S. (1968). Waves (Berkeley Physics Course, Vol. 3), McGraw-Hill, Free online version
External links
Greg Egan has an excellent Java applet on his web site that illustrates the apparent difference in group velocity from phase velocity.
Maarten Ambaum has a webpage with movie demonstrating the importance of group velocity to downstream development of weather systems.
Phase vs. Group Velocity – Various Phase- and Group-velocity relations (animation)
Radio frequency propagation
Optics
Wave mechanics
Physical quantities
Mathematical physics | [
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12780 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitnir | Glitnir | Glitnir (meaning "one who shines") is the hall of Forseti, the Norse god of law and justice, and the seat of justice amongst gods and men. It is also noted to have been a place of dwelling for Balder, Forseti's father in Norse and Germanic mythologies. Glitnir is symbolic of the importance of discussion rather than violence as a means of resolution of conflict within the Norse tradition. It has pillars of gold and is roofed with silver.
References
Locations in Norse mythology | [
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12781 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group%20action | Group action | In mathematics, a group action on a space is a group homomorphism of a given group into the group of transformations of the space. Similarly, a group action on a mathematical structure is a group homomorphism of a group into the automorphism group of the structure. It is said that the group acts on the space or structure. If a group acts on a structure, it will usually also act on objects built from that structure. For example, the group of Euclidean isometries acts on Euclidean space and also on the figures drawn in it. In particular, it acts on the set of all triangles. Similarly, the group of symmetries of a polyhedron acts on the vertices, the edges, and the faces of the polyhedron.
A group action on a (finite-dimensional) vector space is called a representation of the group. It allows one to identify many groups with subgroups of , the group of the invertible matrices of dimension over a field .
The symmetric group acts on any set with elements by permuting the elements of the set. Although the group of all permutations of a set depends formally on the set, the concept of group action allows one to consider a single group for studying the permutations of all sets with the same cardinality.
Definition
Left group action
If is a group with identity element , and is a set, then a (left) group action of on is a function
that satisfies the following two axioms:
{|
|Identity:
|
|-
|Compatibility:
|
|}
(with often shortened to or when the action being considered is clear from context):
{|
|Identity:
|
|-
|Compatibility:
|
|}
for all and in and all in .
The group is said to act on (from the left). A set together with an action of is called a (left) -set.
From these two axioms, it follows that for any fixed in , the function from to itself which maps to is a bijection, with inverse bijection the corresponding map for . Therefore, one may equivalently define a group action of on as a group homomorphism from into the symmetric group of all bijections from to itself.
Right group action
Likewise, a right group action of on is a function
that satisfies the analogous axioms:
{|
|Identity:
|
|-
|Compatibility:
|
|}
(with often shortened to or when the action being considered is clear from context)
{|
|Identity:
|
|-
|Compatibility:
|
|}
for all and in and all in .
The difference between left and right actions is in the order in which a product acts on . For a left action, acts first, followed by second. For a right action, acts first, followed by second. Because of the formula , a left action can be constructed from a right action by composing with the inverse operation of the group. Also, a right action of a group on can be considered as a left action of its opposite group on .
Thus, for establishing general properties of group actions, it suffices to consider only left actions. However, there are cases where this is not possible. For example, the multiplication of a group induces both a left action and a right action on the group itself—multiplication on the left and on the right, respectively.
Types of actions
The action of G on X is called:
if X is non-empty and if for each pair x, y in X there exists a g in G such that . For example, the action of the symmetric group of X is transitive (unless X is empty), the action of the general linear group or the special linear group of a vector space V on is transitive, but the action of the orthogonal group of a Euclidean space E is not transitive on (it is transitive on the unit sphere of E, though).
(or ) if for every two distinct g, h in G there exists an x in X such that ; or equivalently, if for each in G there exists an x in X such that . In other words, in a faithful group action, different elements of G induce different permutations of X. In algebraic terms, a group G acts faithfully on X if and only if the corresponding homomorphism to the symmetric group, , has a trivial kernel. Thus, for a faithful action, G embeds into a permutation group on X; specifically, G is isomorphic to its image in Sym(X). If G does not act faithfully on X, we can easily modify the group to obtain a faithful action. If we define , then N is a normal subgroup of G; indeed, it is the kernel of the homomorphism . The factor group G/N acts faithfully on X by setting . The original action of G on X is faithful if and only if . The smallest set on which a faithful action can be defined can vary greatly for groups of the same size. For example:
Three groups of size 120 are the symmetric group S5, the icosahedral group, and the cyclic group . The smallest sets on which faithful actions can be defined are of size 5, 12, and 16 respectively.
The abelian groups of size 2n include a cyclic group as well as (the direct product of n copies of ), but the latter acts faithfully on a set of size 2n, whereas the former cannot act faithfully on a set smaller than itself.
(or semiregular or fixed-point free) if, given g, h in G, the existence of an x in X with implies . Equivalently: if g is a group element and there exists an x in X with (that is, if g has at least one fixed point), then g is the identity. Note that a free action on a non-empty set is faithful.
(or or sharply transitive) if it is both transitive and free; this is equivalent to saying that for every two x, y in the non-empty set X there exists precisely one g in G such that . In this case, X is called a principal homogeneous space for G or a G-torsor. The action of any group G on itself by left multiplication is regular, and thus faithful as well. Every group can, therefore, be embedded in the symmetric group on its own elements, Sym(G). This result is known as Cayley's theorem.
if X has at least n elements, and for all distinct x1, ..., xn and all distinct y1, ..., yn, there is a g in G such that for . A 2-transitive action is also called , a 3-transitive action is also called triply transitive, and so on. Such actions define interesting classes of subgroups in the symmetric groups: 2-transitive groups and more generally multiply transitive groups. The action of its symmetric group on a set with n elements is always n-transitive; the action of its alternating group is (n − 2)-transitive.
if there is exactly one such g.
if it is transitive and preserves no non-trivial partition of X. See primitive permutation group for details.
Locally free if G is a topological group, and there is a neighborhood U of e in G such that the restriction of the action to U is free; that is, if for some x and some g in U then .
Furthermore, if G acts on a topological space X, then the action is:
Wandering if every point x in X has a neighborhood U such that is finite. For example, the action of on by translations is wandering. The action of the modular group on the Poincaré half-plane is also wandering.
Properly discontinuous if X is a locally compact space and for every compact subset K ⊂ X the set is finite. The wandering actions given above are also properly discontinuous. On the other hand, the action of on given by is wandering and free but not properly discontinuous.
if G is a topological group and the map from is proper. If G is discrete then properness is equivalent to proper discontinuity for G-actions.
Said to have discrete orbits if the orbit of each x in X under the action of G is discrete in X.
A covering space action if every point x in X has a neighborhood U such that .
If X is a non-zero module over a ring R and the action of G is R-linear then it is said to be
Irreducible if there is no nonzero proper invariant submodule.
Orbits and stabilizers
Consider a group G acting on a set X. The of an element x in X is the set of elements in X to which x can be moved by the elements of G. The orbit of x is denoted by :
The defining properties of a group guarantee that the set of orbits of (points x in) X under the action of G form a partition of X. The associated equivalence relation is defined by saying if and only if there exists a g in G with The orbits are then the equivalence classes under this relation; two elements x and y are equivalent if and only if their orbits are the same, that is,
The group action is transitive if and only if it has exactly one orbit, that is, if there exists x in X with This is the case if and only if for x in X (given that X is non-empty).
The set of all orbits of X under the action of G is written as X/G (or, less frequently: G\X), and is called the of the action. In geometric situations it may be called the , while in algebraic situations it may be called the space of , and written by contrast with the invariants (fixed points), denoted XG: the coinvariants are a while the invariants are a . The coinvariant terminology and notation are used particularly in group cohomology and group homology, which use the same superscript/subscript convention.
Invariant subsets
If Y is a subset of X, then denotes the set The subset Y is said to be invariant under G if (which is equivalent to ). In that case, G also operates on Y by restricting the action to Y. The subset Y is called fixed under G if for all g in G and all y in Y. Every subset that is fixed under G is also invariant under G, but not conversely.
Every orbit is an invariant subset of X on which G acts transitively. Conversely, any invariant subset of X is a union of orbits. The action of G on X is transitive if and only if all elements are equivalent, meaning that there is only one orbit.
A G-invariant element of X is such that for all The set of all such x is denoted and called the G-invariants of X. When X is a G-module, XG is the zeroth cohomology group of G with coefficients in X, and the higher cohomology groups are the derived functors of the functor of G-invariants.
Fixed points and stabilizer subgroups
Given g in G and x in X with it is said that "x is a fixed point of g" or that "g fixes x". For every x in X, the of G with respect to x (also called the isotropy group or little group) is the set of all elements in G that fix x:
This is a subgroup of G, though typically not a normal one. The action of G on X is free if and only if all stabilizers are trivial. The kernel N of the homomorphism with the symmetric group, is given by the intersection of the stabilizers Gx for all x in X. If N is trivial, the action is said to be faithful (or effective).
Let x and y be two elements in X, and let be a group element such that Then the two stabilizer groups and are related by Proof: by definition, if and only if Applying to both sides of this equality yields that is, An opposite inclusion follows similarly by taking and supposing
The above says that the stabilizers of elements in the same orbit are conjugate to each other. Thus, to each orbit, we can associate a conjugacy class of a subgroup of G (that is, the set of all conjugates of the subgroup). Let denote the conjugacy class of H. Then the orbit O has type if the stabilizer of some/any x in O belongs to . A maximal orbit type is often called a principal orbit type.
and Burnside's lemma
Orbits and stabilizers are closely related. For a fixed x in X, consider the map given by By definition the image of this map is the orbit The condition for two elements to have the same image is
In other words, if and only if and lie in the same coset for the stabilizer subgroup . Thus, the fiber of f over any y in G·x is contained in such a coset, and every such coset also occurs as a fiber. Therefore f defines a between the set of cosets for the stabilizer subgroup and the orbit which sends . This result is known as the orbit-stabilizer theorem.
If G is finite then the orbit-stabilizer theorem, together with Lagrange's theorem, gives
in other words the length of the orbit of x times the order of its stabilizer is the order of the group. In particular that implies that the orbit length is a divisor of the group order.
Example: Let G be a group of prime order p acting on a set X with k elements. Since each orbit has either 1 or p elements, there are at least orbits of length 1 which are G-invariant elements.
This result is especially useful since it can be employed for counting arguments (typically in situations where X is finite as well).
Example: We can use the orbit-stabilizer theorem to count the automorphisms of a graph. Consider the cubical graph as pictured, and let G denote its automorphism group. Then G acts on the set of vertices {1, 2, ..., 8}, and this action is transitive as can be seen by composing rotations about the center of the cube. Thus, by the orbit-stabilizer theorem, Applying the theorem now to the stabilizer we can obtain Any element of G that fixes 1 must send 2 to either 2, 4, or 5. As an example of such automorphisms consider the rotation around the diagonal axis through 1 and 7 by which permutes 2,4,5 and 3,6,8, and fixes 1 and 7. Thus, Applying the theorem a third time gives Any element of G that fixes 1 and 2 must send 3 to either 3 or 6. Reflecting the cube at the plane through 1,2,7 and 8 is such an automorphism sending 3 to 6, thus . One also sees that consists only of the identity automorphism, as any element of G fixing 1, 2 and 3 must also fix all other vertices, since they are determined by their adjacency to 1, 2 and 3. Combining the preceding calculations, we can now obtain
A result closely related to the orbit-stabilizer theorem is Burnside's lemma:
where Xg is the set of points fixed by g. This result is mainly of use when G and X are finite, when it can be interpreted as follows: the number of orbits is equal to the average number of points fixed per group element.
Fixing a group G, the set of formal differences of finite G-sets forms a ring called the Burnside ring of G, where addition corresponds to disjoint union, and multiplication to Cartesian product.
Examples
The action of any group G on any set X is defined by for all g in G and all x in X; that is, every group element induces the identity permutation on X.
In every group G, left multiplication is an action of G on G: for all g, x in G. This action is free and transitive (regular), and forms the basis of a rapid proof of Cayley's theorem - that every group is isomorphic to a subgroup of the symmetric group of permutations of the set G.
In every group G with subgroup H, left multiplication is an action of G on the set of cosets G/H: for all g,a in G. In particular if H contains no nontrivial normal subgroups of G this induces an isomorphism from G to a subgroup of the permutation group of degree [G : H].
In every group G, conjugation is an action of G on G: . An exponential notation is commonly used for the right-action variant: ; it satisfies (.
In every group G with subgroup H, conjugation is an action of G on conjugates of H: for all g in G and K conjugates of H.
The symmetric group Sn and its subgroups act on the set by permuting its elements
The symmetry group of a polyhedron acts on the set of vertices of that polyhedron. It also acts on the set of faces or the set of edges of the polyhedron.
The symmetry group of any geometrical object acts on the set of points of that object.
The automorphism group of a vector space (or graph, or group, or ring . . .) acts on the vector space (or set of vertices of the graph, or group, or ring . . .).
The general linear group and its subgroups, particularly its Lie subgroups (including the special linear group , orthogonal group , special orthogonal group , and symplectic group ) are Lie groups that act on the vector space Kn. The group operations are given by multiplying the matrices from the groups with the vectors from Kn.
The general linear group acts on Zn by natural matrix action. The orbits of its action are classified by the greatest common divisor of coordinates of the vector in Zn.
The affine group acts transitively on the points of an affine space, and the subgroup V of the affine group (that is, a vector space) has transitive and free (that is, regular) action on these points; indeed this can be used to give a definition of an affine space.
The projective linear group and its subgroups, particularly its Lie subgroups, which are Lie groups that act on the projective space Pn(K). This is a quotient of the action of the general linear group on projective space. Particularly notable is , the symmetries of the projective line, which is sharply 3-transitive, preserving the cross ratio; the Möbius group is of particular interest.
The isometries of the plane act on the set of 2D images and patterns, such as wallpaper patterns. The definition can be made more precise by specifying what is meant by image or pattern, for example, a function of position with values in a set of colors. Isometries are in fact one example of affine group (action).
The sets acted on by a group G comprise the category of G-sets in which the objects are G-sets and the morphisms are G-set homomorphisms: functions such that for every g in G.
The Galois group of a field extension L/K acts on the field L but has only a trivial action on elements of the subfield K. Subgroups of Gal(L/K) correspond to subfields of L that contain K, that is, intermediate field extensions between L and K.
The additive group of the real numbers acts on the phase space of "well-behaved" systems in classical mechanics (and in more general dynamical systems) by time translation: if t is in R and x is in the phase space, then x describes a state of the system, and is defined to be the state of the system t seconds later if t is positive or −t seconds ago if t is negative.
The additive group of the real numbers acts on the set of real functions of a real variable in various ways, with (t⋅f)(x) equal to, for example, , , , , , or , but not .
Given a group action of G on X, we can define an induced action of G on the power set of X, by setting for every subset U of X and every g in G. This is useful, for instance, in studying the action of the large Mathieu group on a 24-set and in studying symmetry in certain models of finite geometries.
The quaternions with norm 1 (the versors), as a multiplicative group, act on R3: for any such quaternion , the mapping is a counterclockwise rotation through an angle α about an axis given by a unit vector v; z is the same rotation; see quaternions and spatial rotation. Note that this is not a faithful action because the quaternion −1 leaves all points where they were, as does the quaternion 1.
Given left G-sets , there is a left G-set whose elements are G-equivariant maps , and with left G-action given by (where "" indicates right multiplication by ). This G-set has the property that its fixed points correspond to equivariant maps ; more generally, it is an exponential object in the category of G-sets.
Group actions and groupoids
The notion of group action can be put in a broader context by using the action groupoid associated to the group action, thus allowing techniques from groupoid theory such as presentations and fibrations. Further the stabilizers of the action are the vertex groups, and the orbits of the action are the components, of the action groupoid. For more details, see the book Topology and groupoids referenced below.
This action groupoid comes with a morphism p: G′ → G which is a covering morphism of groupoids. This allows a relation between such morphisms and covering maps in topology.
Morphisms and isomorphisms between G-sets
If X and Y are two G-sets, a morphism from X to Y is a function such that for all g in G and all x in X. Morphisms of G-sets are also called equivariant maps or G-maps.
The composition of two morphisms is again a morphism. If a morphism f is bijective, then its inverse is also a morphism. In this case f is called an isomorphism, and the two G-sets X and Y are called isomorphic; for all practical purposes, isomorphic G-sets are indistinguishable.
Some example isomorphisms:
Every regular G action is isomorphic to the action of G on G given by left multiplication.
Every free G action is isomorphic to , where S is some set and G acts on by left multiplication on the first coordinate. (S can be taken to be the set of orbits X/G.)
Every transitive G action is isomorphic to left multiplication by G on the set of left cosets of some subgroup H of G. (H can be taken to be the stabilizer group of any element of the original G-set.)
With this notion of morphism, the collection of all G-sets forms a category; this category is a Grothendieck topos (in fact, assuming a classical metalogic, this topos will even be Boolean).
Continuous group actions
One often considers continuous group actions: the group G is a topological group, X is a topological space, and the map is continuous with respect to the product topology of . The space X is also called a G-space in this case. This is indeed a generalization, since every group can be considered a topological group by using the discrete topology. All the concepts introduced above still work in this context, however we define morphisms between G-spaces to be continuous maps compatible with the action of G. The quotient X/G inherits the quotient topology from X, and is called the quotient space of the action. The above statements about isomorphisms for regular, free and transitive actions are no longer valid for continuous group actions.
If X is a regular covering space of another topological space Y, then the action of the deck transformation group on X is properly discontinuous as well as being free. Every free, properly discontinuous action of a group G on a path-connected topological space X arises in this manner: the quotient map is a regular covering map, and the deck transformation group is the given action of G on X. Furthermore, if X is simply connected, the fundamental group of X/G will be isomorphic to G.
These results have been generalized in the book Topology and Groupoids referenced below to obtain the fundamental groupoid of the orbit space of a discontinuous action of a discrete group on a Hausdorff space, as, under reasonable local conditions, the orbit groupoid of the fundamental groupoid of the space. This allows calculations such as the fundamental group of the symmetric square of a space X, namely the orbit space of the product of X with itself under the twist action of the cyclic group of order 2 sending to .
An action of a group G on a locally compact space X is cocompact if there exists a compact subset A of X such that . For a properly discontinuous action, cocompactness is equivalent to compactness of the quotient space X/G.
The action of G on X is said to be proper if the mapping that sends is a proper map.
Strongly continuous group action and smooth points
A group action of a topological group G on a topological space X is said to be strongly continuous if for all x in X, the map is continuous with respect to the respective topologies. Such an action induces an action on the space of continuous functions on X by defining for every g in G, f a continuous function on X, and x in X. Note that, while every continuous group action is strongly continuous, the converse is not in general true.
The subspace of smooth points for the action is the subspace of X of points x such that is smooth, that is, it is continuous and all derivatives are continuous.
Variants and generalizations
We can also consider actions of monoids on sets, by using the same two axioms as above. This does not define bijective maps and equivalence relations however. See semigroup action.
Instead of actions on sets, we can define actions of groups and monoids on objects of an arbitrary category: start with an object X of some category, and then define an action on X as a monoid homomorphism into the monoid of endomorphisms of X. If X has an underlying set, then all definitions and facts stated above can be carried over. For example, if we take the category of vector spaces, we obtain group representations in this fashion.
We can view a group G as a category with a single object in which every morphism is invertible. A (left) group action is then nothing but a (covariant) functor from G to the category of sets, and a group representation is a functor from G to the category of vector spaces. A morphism between G-sets is then a natural transformation between the group action functors. In analogy, an action of a groupoid is a functor from the groupoid to the category of sets or to some other category.
In addition to continuous actions of topological groups on topological spaces, one also often considers smooth actions of Lie groups on smooth manifolds, regular actions of algebraic groups on algebraic varieties, and actions of group schemes on schemes. All of these are examples of group objects acting on objects of their respective category.
Gallery
See also
Gain graph
Group with operators
Measurable group action
Monoid action
Notes
Citations
References
Brown, Ronald (2006). Topology and groupoids, Booksurge PLC, .
Categories and groupoids, P.J. Higgins, downloadable reprint of van Nostrand Notes in Mathematics, 1971, which deal with applications of groupoids in group theory and topology.
External links
Group theory
Representation theory of groups
Symmetry | [
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12783 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip | Gzip | gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and intended for use by GNU (the "g" is from "GNU"). Version 0.1 was first publicly released on 31 October 1992, and version 1.0 followed in February 1993.
The decompression of the gzip format can be implemented as a streaming algorithm, an important feature for Web protocols, data interchange and ETL (in standard pipes) applications.
File format
gzip is based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which is a combination of LZ77 and Huffman coding. DEFLATE was intended as a replacement for LZW and other patent-encumbered data compression algorithms which, at the time, limited the usability of compress and other popular archivers.
"gzip" is often also used to refer to the gzip file format, which is:
a 10-byte header, containing a magic number (1f 8b), the compression method (08 for DEFLATE), 1-byte of header flags, a 4-byte timestamp, compression flags and the operating system ID.
optional extra headers as allowed by the header flags, including the original filename, a comment field, an "extra" field, and the lower half of a CRC-32 checksum for the header section.
a body, containing a DEFLATE-compressed payload
an 8-byte footer, containing a CRC-32 checksum and the length of the original uncompressed data, modulo 232.
Although its file format also allows for multiple such streams to be concatenated (gzipped files are simply decompressed concatenated as if they were originally one file), gzip is normally used to compress just single files. Compressed archives are typically created by assembling collections of files into a single tar archive (also called tarball), and then compressing that archive with gzip. The final compressed file usually has the extension or .
gzip is not to be confused with the ZIP archive format, which also uses DEFLATE. The ZIP format can hold collections of files without an external archiver, but is less compact than compressed tarballs holding the same data, because it compresses files individually and cannot take advantage of redundancy between files (solid compression).
Implementations
Various implementations of the program have been written. The most commonly known is the GNU Project's implementation using Lempel-Ziv coding (LZ77). OpenBSD's version of gzip is actually the compress program, to which support for the gzip format was added in OpenBSD 3.4. The 'g' in this specific version stands for gratis. FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD and NetBSD use a BSD-licensed implementation instead of the GNU version; it is actually a command-line interface for zlib intended to be compatible with the GNU implementation's options. These implementations originally come from NetBSD, and support decompression of bzip2 and the Unix pack format.
An alternative compression program achieving 3-8% better compression is Zopfli. It achieves gzip-compatible compression using more exhaustive algorithms, at the expense of compression time required. It does not affect decompression time.
pigz, written by Mark Adler, is compatible with gzip and speeds up compression by using all available CPU cores and threads.
Damage recovery
Data in blocks prior to the first damaged part of the archive is usually fully readable. Data from blocks not demolished by damage that are located afterward may be recoverable through difficult workarounds.
Derivatives and other uses
The tar utility included in most Linux distributions can extract .tar.gz files by passing the option, e.g., , where -z instructs decompression, -x means extraction, and -f specifies the name of the compressed archive file to extract from. Optionally, -v (verbose) lists files as they are being extracted.
zlib is an abstraction of the DEFLATE algorithm in library form which includes support both for the gzip file format and a lightweight data stream format in its API. The zlib stream format, DEFLATE, and the gzip file format were standardized respectively as RFC 1950, RFC 1951, and RFC 1952.
The gzip format is used in HTTP compression, a technique used to speed up the sending of HTML and other content on the World Wide Web. It is one of the three standard formats for HTTP compression as specified in RFC 2616. This RFC also specifies a zlib format (called "DEFLATE"), which is equal to the gzip format except that gzip adds eleven bytes of overhead in the form of headers and trailers. Still, the gzip format is sometimes recommended over zlib because Internet Explorer does not implement the standard correctly and cannot handle the zlib format as specified in RFC 1950.
zlib DEFLATE is used internally by the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.
Since the late 1990s, bzip2, a file compression utility based on a block-sorting algorithm, has gained some popularity as a gzip replacement. It produces considerably smaller files (especially for source code and other structured text), but at the cost of memory and processing time (up to a factor of 4).
AdvanceCOMP and 7-Zip can produce gzip-compatible files, using an internal DEFLATE implementation with better compression ratios than gzip itself—at the cost of more processor time compared to the reference implementation.
See also
Comparison of file archivers
Free file format
List of archive formats
List of Unix commands
Libarc
Notes
References
RFC 1952 – GZIP file format specification version 4.3
External links
Archive formats
Cross-platform software
Free data compression software
Free software programmed in C
GNU Project software
Lossless compression algorithms
Unix archivers and compression-related utilities
Plan 9 commands
Inferno (operating system) commands | [
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12786 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General%20anaesthetic | General anaesthetic | General anaesthetics (or anesthetics, see spelling differences) are often defined as compounds that induce a loss of consciousness in humans or loss of righting reflex in animals. Clinical definitions are also extended to include an induced coma that causes lack of awareness to painful stimuli, sufficient to facilitate surgical applications in clinical and veterinary practice. General anaesthetics do not act as analgesics and should also not be confused with sedatives. General anaesthetics are a structurally diverse group of compounds whose mechanisms encompasses multiple biological targets involved in the control of neuronal pathways. The precise workings are the subject of some debate and ongoing research.
General anesthetics elicit a state of general anesthesia. It remains somewhat controversial regarding how this state should be defined. General anesthetics, however, typically elicit several key reversible effects: immobility, analgesia, amnesia, unconsciousness, and reduced autonomic responsiveness to noxious stimuli.
Mode of administration
General anaesthetics can be either as gases or vapours (inhalational anaesthetics), or as injections (intravenous anaesthetics or even intramuscular). All of these agents share the property of being quite hydrophobic (i.e., as liquids, they are not freely miscible—or mixable—in water, and as gases they dissolve in oils better than in water). It is possible to deliver anaesthesia solely by inhalation or injection, but most commonly the two forms are combined, with an injection given to induce anaesthesia and a gas used to maintain it.
Inhalation
Inhalational anaesthetic substances are either volatile liquids or gases, and are usually delivered using an anaesthesia machine. An anaesthesia machine allows composing a mixture of oxygen, anaesthetics and ambient air, delivering it to the patient and monitoring patient and machine parameters. Liquid anaesthetics are vapourised in the machine.
Many compounds have been used for inhalation anaesthesia, but only a few are still in widespread use. Desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane are the most widely used volatile anaesthetics today. They are often combined with nitrous oxide. Older, less popular, volatile anaesthetics, include halothane, enflurane, and methoxyflurane. Researchers are also actively exploring the use of xenon as an anaesthetic.
Injection
Injectable anaesthetics are used for the induction and maintenance of a state of unconsciousness. Anaesthetists prefer to use intravenous injections, as they are faster, generally less painful and more reliable than intramuscular or subcutaneous injections. Among the most widely used drugs are:
Propofol
Etomidate
Barbiturates such as methohexital and thiopentone/thiopental
Benzodiazepines such as midazolam
Ketamine is used in the UK as "field anaesthesia", for instance in road traffic incidents or similar situations where an operation must be conducted at the scene or when there is not enough time to move to an operating room, while preferring other anaesthetics where conditions allow their use. It is more frequently used in the operative setting in the US.
Benzodiazepines are sedatives and are used in combinations with other general anaesthetics
Method of action
Induction and maintenance of general anesthesia, and the control of the various physiological side effects is typically achieved through a combinatorial drug approach. Individual general anesthetics vary with respect to their specific physiological and cognitive effects. While general anesthesia induction may be facilitated by one general anesthetic, others may be used in parallel or subsequently to achieve and maintain the desired anesthetic state. The drug approach utilized is dependent upon the procedure and the needs of the healthcare providers.
It is postulated that general anaesthetics exert their action by the activation of inhibitory central nervous system (CNS) receptors, and the inactivation of CNS excitatory receptors. The relative roles of different receptors is still under debate, but evidence exists for particular targets being involved with certain anaesthetics and drug effects.
Below are several key targets of general anesthetics that likely mediate their effects:
GABAA receptor agonists
GABAA receptors are chloride channels that hyperpolarize neurons and function as inhibitory CNS receptors. General anesthetics that agonize them are typically used to induce a state of sedation and/or unconsciousness. Such drugs include propofol, etomidate, isoflurane, benzodiazepines (midazolam, lorazepam, diazepam), and barbiturates (sodium thiopental, methohexital).
NMDA receptor antagonists
Ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist, is used primarily for its analgesic effects and in an off-label capacity for its anti-depressant effects. This drug, however, also alters arousal and is often used in parallel with other general anesthetics to help maintain a state of general anesthesia. Administration of ketamine alone leads to a dissociative state, in which a patient may experience auditory and visual hallucinations. Additionally, the perception of pain is dissociated from the perception of noxious stimuli. Ketamine appears to bind preferentially to the NMDA receptors on GABAergic interneurons, which may partially explain its effects.
Two-pore potassium channels (K2Ps) activation
Two-pore potassium channels (K2Ps) modulate the potassium conductance that contributes to the resting membrane potential in neurons. Opening of these channels therefore facilitates a hyperpolarizing current, which reduces neuronal excitability. K2Ps have been found to be affected by general anesthetics (esp. halogenated inhalation anesthetics) and are currently under investigation as potential targets. The K2P channel family comprises six subfamilies, which includes 15 unique members. 13 of these channels (excluding TWIK-1 and TWIK-2 homomers) are affected by general anesthetics. While it has not been determined that general anesthetics bind directly to these channels, nor is it clear how these drugs affect K2P conductance, electrophysiological studies have shown that certain general anesthetics result in K2P channel activation. This drug-elicited channel activation has been shown to be dependent upon specific amino-acids within certain K2P channels (i.e. TREK-1 and TASK channels). In the case of TREK-1, activation was shown through an anesthetic perturbation to membrane lipid clusters and activation of phospholipase D2; direct binding of anesthetics to purified reconstituted TREK-1 had no effect on conductance. The effects of certain general anesthetics are less pronounced in K2P knock-out mice, as compared to their wild-type counterparts. Cumulatively, TASK-1, TASK-3, and TREK-1 are particularly well supported as playing a role in the induction of general anesthesia.
Others
Opioid receptor agonists are primarily utilized for their analgesic effects. These drugs, however, can also elicit sedation. This effect is mediated by opioid actions on both opioid and acetylcholine receptors. While these drugs can lead to decreased arousal, they do not elicit a loss of consciousness. For this reason, they are often used in parallel with other general anesthetics to help maintain a state of general anesthesia. Such drugs include morphine, fentanyl, hydromorphone, and remifentanil.
Administration of the alpha2 adrenergic receptor agonist dexmedetomidine leads to sedation that resembles non-REM sleep. It is used in parallel with other general anesthetics to help maintain a state of general anesthesia, in an off-label capacity. Notably, patients are easily aroused from this non-REM sleep state.
Dopamine receptor antagonists have sedative and antiemetic properties. Previously, they were used in parallel with opioids to elicit neuroleptic anesthesia (catalepsy, analgesia, and unresponsiveness). They are no longer used in the context, because patients experiencing neuroleptic anesthesia were frequently aware of the medical procedures being performed, but could not move or express emotion. Such drugs include haloperidol and droperidol.
Stages of Anesthesia
During administration of an anesthetic, the receiver goes through different stages of behavior ultimately leading to unconsciousness. This process is accelerated with intravenous anesthetics, so much so that it is negligible to consider during their use. The four stages of anesthesia are described using Guedel's signs, signifying the depth of anesthesia. These stages describe effects of anesthesia mainly on cognition, muscular activity, and respiration.
Stage I - Analgesia
The receiver of the anesthesia primarily feels analgesia followed by amnesia and a sense of confusion moving into the next stage.
Stage II - Excitement
Stage II is often characterized by the receiver being delirious and confused, with severe amnesia. Irregularities in the patterns of respiration are common at this stage of Anesthesia. Nausea and vomiting are also indicators of Stage II anesthesia. Struggling and panic can sometimes occur as a result of delirium.
Stage III - Surgical Anesthesia
Normal breathing resumes at the beginnings of Stage III. Nearing the end of the stage, breathing ceases completely. Indicators for stage III anesthesia include loss of the eyelash reflex as well as regular breathing. Depth of stage III anesthesia can often be gauged by eye movement and pupil size.
Stage IV - Medullary Depression
No respiration occurs in stage IV. This is shortly followed by circulatory failure and depression of the vasomotor centers. Death is common at this stage of anesthesia if no breathing and circulatory support is available.
Physiological side effects
Aside from the clinically advantageous effects of general anesthetics, there are a number of other physiological consequences mediated by this class of drug. Notably, a reduction in blood pressure can be facilitated by a variety of mechanisms, including reduced cardiac contractility and dilation of the vasculature. This drop in blood pressure may activate a reflexive increase in heart rate, due to a baroreceptor-mediated feedback mechanism. Some anesthetics, however, disrupt this reflex.
Patients under general anesthesia are at greater risk of developing hypothermia, as the aforementioned vasodilation increases the heat lost via peripheral blood flow. By and large, these drugs reduce the internal body temperature threshold at which autonomic thermoregulatory mechanisms are triggered in response to cold. (On the other hand, the threshold at which thermoregulatory mechanisms are triggered in response to heat is typically increased.)
Anesthetics typically affect respiration. Inhalational anesthetics elicit bronchodilation, an increase in respiratory rate, and reduced tidal volume. The net effect is decreased respiration, which must be managed by healthcare providers, while the patient is under general anesthesia. The reflexes that function to alleviate airway obstructions are also dampened (e.g. gag and cough). Compounded with a reduction in lower esophageal sphincter tone, which increases the frequency of regurgitation, patients are especially prone to asphyxiation while under general anesthesia. Healthcare providers closely monitor individuals under general anesthesia and utilize a number of devices, such as an endotracheal tube, to ensure patient safety.
General anesthetics also affect the chemoreceptor trigger zone and brainstem vomiting center, eliciting nausea and vomiting following treatment.
Pharmacokinetics
Intravenous general anesthetics
Induction
Intravenously-delivered general anesthetics are typically small and highly lipophilic molecules. These characteristics facilitate their rapid preferential distribution into the brain and spinal cord, which are both highly vascularized and lipophilic. It is here where the actions of these drugs lead to general anesthesia induction.
Elimination
Following distribution into the central nervous system (CNS), the anesthetic drug then diffuses out of the CNS into the muscles and viscera, followed by adipose tissues. In patients given a single injection of drug, this redistribution results in termination of general anesthesia. Therefore, following administration of a single anesthetic bolus, duration of drug effect is dependent solely upon the redistribution kinetics.
The half-life of an anesthetic drug following a prolonged infusion, however, depends upon both drug redistribution kinetics, drug metabolism in the liver, and existing drug concentration in fat. When large quantities of an anesthetic drug have already been dissolved in the body's fat stores, this can slow its redistribution out of the brain and spinal cord, prolonging its CNS effects. For this reason, the half-lives of these infused drugs are said to be context-dependent. Generally, prolonged anesthetic drug infusions result in longer drug half-lives, slowed elimination from the brain and spinal cord, and delayed termination of general anesthesia.
Inhalational general anesthetics
Minimal alveolar concentration (MAC) is the concentration of an inhalational anesthetic in the lungs that prevents 50% of patients from responding to surgical incision. This value is used to compare the potencies of various inhalational general anesthetics and impacts the partial-pressure of the drug utilized by healthcare providers during general anesthesia induction and/or maintenance.
Induction
Induction of anesthesia is facilitated by diffusion of an inhaled anesthetic drug into the brain and spinal cord. Diffusion throughout the body proceeds until the drug's partial pressure within the various tissues is equivalent to the partial pressure of the drug within the lungs. Healthcare providers can control the rate of anesthesia induction and final tissue concentrations of the anesthetic by varying the partial pressure of the inspired anesthetic. A higher drug partial pressure in the lungs will drive diffusion more rapidly throughout the body and yield a higher maximum tissue concentration. Respiratory rate and inspiratory volume will also affect the promptness of anesthesia onset, as will the extent of pulmonary blood flow.
The partition coefficient of a gaseous drug is indicative of its relative solubility in various tissues. This metric is the relative drug concentration between two tissues, when their partial pressures are equal (gas:blood, fat:blood, etc.). Inhalational anesthetics vary widely with respect to their tissue solubilities and partition coefficients. Anesthetics that are highly soluble require many molecules of drug to raise the partial pressure within a given tissue, as opposed to minimally soluble anesthetics which require relatively few. Generally, inhalational anesthetics that are minimally soluble reach equilibrium more quickly. Inhalational anesthetics that have a high fat:blood partition coefficient, however, reach equilibrium more slowly, due to the minimal vascularization of fat tissue, which serves as a large, slowly-filling reservoir for the drug.
Elimination
Inhaled anesthetics are eliminated via expiration, following diffusion into the lungs. This process is dependent largely upon the anesthetic blood:gas partition coefficient, tissue solubility, blood flow to the lungs, and patient respiratory rate and inspiratory volume. For gases that have minimal tissue solubility, termination of anesthesia generally occurs as rapidly as the onset of anesthesia. For gases that have high tissue solubility, however, termination of anesthesia is generally context-dependent. As with intravenous anesthetic infusions, prolonged delivery of highly soluble anesthetic gases generally results in longer drug half-lives, slowed elimination from the brain and spinal cord, and delayed termination of anesthesia.
Metabolism of inhaled anesthetics is generally not a major route of drug elimination.
History
Arab/Persian physicians introduced the use of preoperative anaesthetic compounds around the 9th century.
See also
Local anaesthesia
Mechanical ventilation
Intraoperative awareness
History of general anesthesia
References
Anesthesia
Arab inventions
Drugs with unknown mechanisms of action
Iranian inventions | [
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12787 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey%20Chaucer | Geoffrey Chaucer | Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Among Chaucer's many other works are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. His contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed Chaucer as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage". Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in Chaucerian manuscripts.
Life
Origin
Chaucer was born in London most likely in the early 1340s (by some accounts, including his monument, he was born in 1343), though the precise date and location remain unknown. The Chaucer family offers an extraordinary example of upward mobility. His great-grandfather was a tavern keeper, his grandfather worked as a purveyor of wines, and his father John Chaucer rose to become an important wine merchant with a royal appointment. Several previous generations of Geoffrey Chaucer's family had been vintners and merchants in Ipswich. His family name is derived from the French chaucier, once thought to mean 'shoemaker', but now known to mean a maker of hose or leggings.
In 1324, his father John Chaucer was kidnapped by an aunt in the hope of marrying the 12-year-old to her daughter in an attempt to keep property in Ipswich. The aunt was imprisoned and fined £250, now equivalent to about £, which suggests that the family was financially secure.
John Chaucer married Agnes Copton, who inherited properties in 1349, including 24 shops in London from her uncle Hamo de Copton, who is described in a will dated 3 April 1354 and listed in the City Hustings Roll as "moneyer", said to be a moneyer at the Tower of London. In the City Hustings Roll 110, 5, Ric II, dated June 1380, Chaucer refers to himself as me Galfridum Chaucer, filium Johannis Chaucer, Vinetarii, Londonie, which translates as: "Geoffrey Chaucer, son of the vintner John Chaucer, London".
Career
While records concerning the lives of his contemporaries William Langland and the Pearl Poet are practically non-existent, since Chaucer was a public servant his official life is very well documented, with nearly five hundred written items testifying to his career. The first of the "Chaucer Life Records" appears in 1357, in the household accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, the Countess of Ulster, when he became the noblewoman's page through his father's connections, a common medieval form of apprenticeship for boys into knighthood or prestige appointments. The countess was married to Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the second surviving son of the king, Edward III, and the position brought the teenage Chaucer into the close court circle, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He also worked as a courtier, a diplomat, and a civil servant, as well as working for the king from 1389 to 1391 as Clerk of the King's Works.
In 1359, the early stages of the Hundred Years' War, Edward III invaded France and Chaucer travelled with Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, Elizabeth's husband, as part of the English army. In 1360, he was captured during the siege of Rheims. Edward paid £16 for his ransom, a considerable sum , and Chaucer was released.
After this, Chaucer's life is uncertain, but he seems to have travelled in France, Spain, and Flanders, possibly as a messenger and perhaps even going on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Around 1366, Chaucer married Philippa (de) Roet. She was a lady-in-waiting to Edward III's queen, Philippa of Hainault, and a sister of Katherine Swynford, who later (c. 1396) became the third wife of John of Gaunt. It is uncertain how many children Chaucer and Philippa had, but three or four are most commonly cited. His son, Thomas Chaucer, had an illustrious career, as chief butler to four kings, envoy to France, and Speaker of the House of Commons. Thomas's daughter, Alice, married the Duke of Suffolk. Thomas's great-grandson (Geoffrey's great-great-grandson), John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was the heir to the throne designated by Richard III before he was deposed. Geoffrey's other children probably included Elizabeth Chaucy, a nun at Barking Abbey, Agnes, an attendant at Henry IV's coronation; and another son, Lewis Chaucer. Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe" was written for Lewis.
According to tradition, Chaucer studied law in the Inner Temple (an Inn of Court) at this time. He became a member of the royal court of Edward III as a valet de chambre, yeoman, or esquire on 20 June 1367, a position which could entail a wide variety of tasks. His wife also received a pension for court employment. He travelled abroad many times, at least some of them in his role as a valet. In 1368, he may have attended the wedding of Lionel of Antwerp to Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo II Visconti, in Milan. Two other literary stars of the era were in attendance: Jean Froissart and Petrarch. Around this time, Chaucer is believed to have written The Book of the Duchess in honour of Blanche of Lancaster, the late wife of John of Gaunt, who died in 1369 of the plague.
Chaucer travelled to Picardy the next year as part of a military expedition; in 1373 he visited Genoa and Florence. Numerous scholars such as Skeat, Boitani, and Rowland suggested that, on this Italian trip, he came into contact with Petrarch or Boccaccio. They introduced him to medieval Italian poetry, the forms and stories of which he would use later. The purposes of a voyage in 1377 are mysterious, as details within the historical record conflict. Later documents suggest it was a mission, along with Jean Froissart, to arrange a marriage between the future King Richard II and a French princess, thereby ending the Hundred Years War. If this was the purpose of their trip, they seem to have been unsuccessful, as no wedding occurred.
In 1378, Richard II sent Chaucer as an envoy (secret dispatch) to the Visconti and to Sir John Hawkwood, English condottiere (mercenary leader) in Milan. It has been speculated that it was Hawkwood on whom Chaucer based his character the Knight in the Canterbury Tales, for a description matches that of a 14th-century condottiere.
A possible indication that his career as a writer was appreciated came when Edward III granted Chaucer "a gallon of wine daily for the rest of his life" for some unspecified task. This was an unusual grant, but given on a day of celebration, St George's Day, 1374, when artistic endeavours were traditionally rewarded, it is assumed to have been another early poetic work. It is not known which, if any, of Chaucer's extant works prompted the reward, but the suggestion of him as poet to a king places him as a precursor to later poets laureate. Chaucer continued to collect the liquid stipend until Richard II came to power, after which it was converted to a monetary grant on 18 April 1378.
Chaucer obtained the very substantial job of comptroller of the customs for the port of London, which he began on 8 June 1374. He must have been suited for the role as he continued in it for twelve years, a long time in such a post at that time. His life goes undocumented for much of the next ten years, but it is believed that he wrote (or began) most of his famous works during this period. He was mentioned in law papers of 4 May 1380, involved in the raptus (rape or seizure) of Cecilia Chaumpaigne. What was meant is unclear, but the incident seems to have been resolved quickly with an exchange of money in June 1380 and did not leave a stain on Chaucer's reputation. It is not known if Chaucer was in the City of London at the time of the Peasants' Revolt, but if he was, he would have seen its leaders pass almost directly under his apartment window at Aldgate.
While still working as comptroller, Chaucer appears to have moved to Kent, being appointed as one of the commissioners of peace for Kent, at a time when French invasion was a possibility. He is thought to have started work on The Canterbury Tales in the early 1380s. He also became a member of parliament for Kent in 1386, and attended the 'Wonderful Parliament' that year. He appears to have been present at most of the 71 days it sat, for which he was paid £24 9s. On 15 October that year, he gave a deposition in the case of Scrope v. Grosvenor. There is no further reference after this date to Philippa, Chaucer's wife, and she is presumed to have died in 1387. He survived the political upheavals caused by the Lords Appellants, despite the fact that Chaucer knew some of the men executed over the affair quite well.
On 12 July 1389, Chaucer was appointed the clerk of the king's works, a sort of foreman organising most of the king's building projects. No major works were begun during his tenure, but he did conduct repairs on Westminster Palace, St. George's Chapel, Windsor, continued building the wharf at the Tower of London, and built the stands for a tournament held in 1390. It may have been a difficult job, but it paid well: two shillings a day, more than three times his salary as a comptroller. Chaucer was also appointed keeper of the lodge at the King's park in Feckenham Forest in Worcestershire, which was a largely honorary appointment.
Later life
In September 1390, records say that Chaucer was robbed and possibly injured while conducting the business, and he stopped working in this capacity on 17 June 1391. He began as Deputy Forester in the royal forest of Petherton Park in North Petherton, Somerset on 22 June. This was no sinecure, with maintenance an important part of the job, although there were many opportunities to derive profit.
Richard II granted him an annual pension of 20 pounds in 1394 (), and Chaucer's name fades from the historical record not long after Richard's overthrow in 1399. The last few records of his life show his pension renewed by the new king, and his taking a lease on a residence within the close of Westminster Abbey on 24 December 1399. Henry IV renewed the grants assigned by Richard, but The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse hints that the grants might not have been paid. The last mention of Chaucer is on 5 June 1400 when some debts owed to him were repaid.
Chaucer died of unknown causes on 25 October 1400, although the only evidence for this date comes from the engraving on his tomb which was erected more than 100 years after his death. There is some speculation that he was murdered by enemies of Richard II or even on the orders of his successor Henry IV, but the case is entirely circumstantial. Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey in London, as was his right owing to his status as a tenant of the Abbey's close. In 1556, his remains were transferred to a more ornate tomb, making him the first writer interred in the area now known as Poets' Corner.
Relationship to John of Gaunt
Chaucer was a close friend of John of Gaunt, the wealthy Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV, and he served under Lancaster's patronage. Near the end of their lives, Lancaster and Chaucer became brothers-in-law when Lancaster married Katherine Swynford (de Roet) in 1396; she was the sister of Philippa (Pan) de Roet, whom Chaucer had married in 1366.
Chaucer's Book of the Duchess (also known as the Deeth of Blaunche the Duchesse) was written in commemoration of Blanche of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's first wife. The poem refers to John and Blanche in allegory as the narrator relates the tale of "A long castel with walles white/Be Seynt Johan, on a ryche hil" (1318–1319) who is mourning grievously after the death of his love, "And goode faire White she het/That was my lady name ryght" (948–949). The phrase "long castel" is a reference to Lancaster (also called "Loncastel" and "Longcastell"), "walles white" is thought to be an oblique reference to Blanche, "Seynt Johan" was John of Gaunt's name-saint, and "ryche hil" is a reference to Richmond. These references reveal the identity of the grieving black knight of the poem as John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Earl of Richmond. "White" is the English translation of the French word "blanche", implying that the white lady was Blanche of Lancaster.
Poem Fortune
Chaucer's short poem Fortune, believed to have been written in the 1390s, is also thought to refer to Lancaster. "Chaucer as narrator" openly defies Fortune, proclaiming that he has learned who his enemies are through her tyranny and deceit, and declares "my suffisaunce" (15) and that "over himself hath the maystrye" (14).
Fortune, in turn, does not understand Chaucer's harsh words to her for she believes that she has been kind to him, claims that he does not know what she has in store for him in the future, but most importantly, "And eek thou hast thy beste frend alyve" (32, 40, 48). Chaucer retorts, "My frend maystow nat reven, blind goddesse" (50) and orders her to take away those who merely pretend to be his friends.
Fortune turns her attention to three princes whom she implores to relieve Chaucer of his pain and "Preyeth his beste frend of his noblesse/That to som beter estat he may atteyne" (78–79). The three princes are believed to represent the dukes of Lancaster, York, and Gloucester, and a portion of line 76 ("as three of you or tweyne") is thought to refer to the ordinance of 1390 which specified that no royal gift could be authorised without the consent of at least two of the three dukes.
Most conspicuous in this short poem is the number of references to Chaucer's "beste frend". Fortune states three times in her response to the plaintiff, "And also, you still have your best friend alive" (32, 40, 48); she also refers to his "beste frend" in the envoy when appealing to his "noblesse" to help Chaucer to a higher estate. The narrator makes a fifth reference when he rails at Fortune that she shall not take his friend from him.
Religious beliefs
Chaucer's attitudes toward the Church should not be confused with his attitudes toward Christianity. He seems to have respected and admired Christians and to have been one himself, though he also recognised that many people in the church were venal and corrupt. He wrote in Canterbury Tales, "now I beg all those that listen to this little treatise, or read it, that if there be anything in it that pleases them, they thank our Lord Jesus Christ for it, from whom proceeds all understanding and goodness."
Literary works
Chaucer's first major work was The Book of the Duchess, an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster who died in 1368. Two other early works were Anelida and Arcite and The House of Fame. He wrote many of his major works in a prolific period when he held the job of customs comptroller for London (1374 to 1386). His Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde all date from this time. It is believed that he started The Canterbury Tales in the 1380s.
Chaucer also translated Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (extended by Jean de Meun). Eustache Deschamps called himself a "nettle in Chaucer's garden of poetry". In 1385, Thomas Usk made glowing mention of Chaucer, and John Gower also lauded him.
Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe describes the form and use of the astrolabe in detail and is sometimes cited as the first example of technical writing in the English language, and it indicates that Chaucer was versed in science in addition to his literary talents. The equatorie of the planetis is a scientific work similar to the Treatise and sometimes ascribed to Chaucer because of its language and handwriting, an identification which scholars no longer deem tenable.
Influence
Linguistic
Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed in English literature since around the 12th century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentametre, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him. The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, first seen in his The Legend of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a satirist is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, apparently making its first appearance in The Reeve's Tale.
The poetry of Chaucer, along with other writers of the era, is credited with helping to standardise the London Dialect of the Middle English language from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects. This is probably overstated; the influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy – of which Chaucer was a part – remains a more probable influence on the development of Standard English.
Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer's poems owing to the effect of the Great Vowel Shift some time after his death. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience.
The status of the final -e in Chaucer's verse is uncertain: it seems likely that during the period of Chaucer's writing the final -e was dropping out of colloquial English and that its use was somewhat irregular. Chaucer's versification suggests that the final -e is sometimes to be vocalised, and sometimes to be silent; however, this remains a point on which there is disagreement. When it is vocalised, most scholars pronounce it as a schwa.
Apart from the irregular spelling, much of the vocabulary is recognisable to the modern reader. Chaucer is also recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as the first author to use many common English words in his writings. These words were probably frequently used in the language at the time but Chaucer, with his ear for common speech, is the earliest extant manuscript source. Acceptable, alkali, altercation, amble, angrily, annex, annoyance, approaching, arbitration, armless, army, arrogant, arsenic, arc, artillery and aspect are just some of almost two thousand English words first attested in Chaucer.
Literary
Widespread knowledge of Chaucer's works is attested by the many poets who imitated or responded to his writing. John Lydgate was one of the earliest poets to write continuations of Chaucer's unfinished Tales while Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid completes the story of Cressida left unfinished in his Troilus and Criseyde. Many of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works contain material from these poets and later appreciations by the Romantic era poets were shaped by their failure to distinguish the later "additions" from original Chaucer.
Writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as John Dryden, admired Chaucer for his stories, but not for his rhythm and rhyme, as few critics could then read Middle English and the text had been butchered by printers, leaving a somewhat unadmirable mess. It was not until the late 19th century that the official Chaucerian canon, accepted today, was decided upon, largely as a result of Walter William Skeat's work. Roughly seventy-five years after Chaucer's death, The Canterbury Tales was selected by William Caxton to be one of the first books to be printed in England.
English
Chaucer is sometimes considered the source of the English vernacular tradition. His achievement for the language can be seen as part of a general historical trend towards the creation of a vernacular literature, after the example of Dante, in many parts of Europe. A parallel trend in Chaucer's own lifetime was underway in Scotland through the work of his slightly earlier contemporary, John Barbour, and was likely to have been even more general, as is evidenced by the example of the Pearl Poet in the north of England.
Although Chaucer's language is much closer to Modern English than the text of Beowulf, such that (unlike that of Beowulf) a Modern English-speaker with a large vocabulary of archaic words may understand it, it differs enough that most publications modernise his idiom. The following is a sample from the prologue of The Summoner's Tale that compares Chaucer's text to a modern translation:
{| cellspacing="4" style="white-space: nowrap;"
| || Original Text || Modern Translation
|-
| || This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle,
| This friar boasts that he knows hell,
|-
| || And God it woot, that it is litel wonder;
| And God knows that it is little wonder;
|-
| || Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.
| Friars and fiends are seldom far apart.
|-
| || For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle
| For, by God, you have ofttimes heard tell
|-
| || How that a frere ravyshed was to helle
| How a friar was taken to hell
|-
| || In spirit ones by a visioun;
| In spirit, once by a vision;
|-
| || And as an angel ladde hym up and doun,
| And as an angel led him up and down,
|-
| || To shewen hym the peynes that the were,
| To show him the pains that were there,
|-
| || In al the place saugh he nat a frere;
| In all the place he saw not a friar;
|-
| || Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo.
| Of other folk he saw enough in woe.
|-
| || Unto this angel spak the frere tho:
| Unto this angel spoke the friar thus:
|-
| || Now, sire, quod he, han freres swich a grace
| "Now sir", said he, "Have friars such a grace
|-
| || That noon of hem shal come to this place?
| That none of them come to this place?"
|-
| || Yis, quod this aungel, many a millioun!
| "Yes", said the angel, "many a million!"
|-
| || And unto sathanas he ladde hym doun.
| And unto Satan the angel led him down.
|-
| || –And now hath sathanas, –seith he, –a tayl
| "And now Satan has", he said, "a tail,
|-
| || Brodder than of a carryk is the sayl.
| Broader than a galleon's sail.
|-
| || Hold up thy tayl, thou sathanas!–quod he;
| Hold up your tail, Satan!" said he.
|-
| || –shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se
| "Show forth your arse, and let the friar see
|-
| || Where is the nest of freres in this place!–
| Where the nest of friars is in this place!"
|-
| || And er that half a furlong wey of space,
| And before half a furlong of space,
|-
| || Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve,
| Just as bees swarm out from a hive,
|-
| ||Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve
| Out of the devil's arse there were driven
|-
| || Twenty thousand freres on a route,
| Twenty thousand friars on a rout,
|-
| || And thurghout helle swarmed al aboute,
| And throughout hell swarmed all about,
|-
| || And comen agayn as faste as they may gon,
| And came again as fast as they could go,
|-
| || And in his ers they crepten everychon.
| And every one crept into his arse.
|-
| ||He clapte his tayl agayn and lay ful stille.
| He shut his tail again and lay very still.
|}
Valentine's Day and romance
The first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love is believed to be in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls (1382), a dream vision portraying a parliament for birds to choose their mates. Honouring the first anniversary of the engagement of fifteen-year-old King Richard II of England to fifteen-year-old Anne of Bohemia:
For this was on seynt Volantynys dayWhan euery bryd comyth there to chese his makeOf euery kynde that men thinke mayAnd that so heuge a noyse gan they makeThat erthe & eyr & tre & euery lakeSo ful was that onethe was there spaceFor me to stonde, so ful was al the place.
Critical reception
Early criticism
The poet Thomas Hoccleve, who may have met Chaucer and considered him his role model, hailed Chaucer as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage". John Lydgate referred to Chaucer within his own text The Fall of Princes as the "lodesterre … off our language". Around two centuries later, Sir Philip Sidney greatly praised Troilus and Criseyde in his own Defence of Poesie. During the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Chaucer came to be viewed as a symbol of the nation's poetic heritage.
Manuscripts and audience
The large number of surviving manuscripts of Chaucer's works is testimony to the enduring interest in his poetry prior to the arrival of the printing press. There are 83 surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (in whole or part) alone, along with sixteen of Troilus and Criseyde, including the personal copy of Henry IV. Given the ravages of time, it is likely that these surviving manuscripts represent hundreds since lost.
Chaucer's original audience was a courtly one, and would have included women as well as men of the upper social classes. Yet even before his death in 1400, Chaucer's audience had begun to include members of the rising literate, middle and merchant classes. This included many Lollard sympathisers who may well have been inclined to read Chaucer as one of their own.
Lollards were particularly attracted to Chaucer's satirical writings about friars, priests, and other church officials. In 1464, John Baron, a tenant farmer in Agmondesham (Amersham in Buckinghamshire), was brought before John Chadworth, the Bishop of Lincoln, on charges of being a Lollard heretic; he confessed to owning a "boke of the Tales of Caunterburie" among other suspect volumes.
Printed editions
William Caxton, the first English printer, was responsible for the first two folio editions of The Canterbury Tales which were published in 1478 and 1483. Caxton's second printing, by his own account, came about because a customer complained that the printed text differed from a manuscript he knew; Caxton obligingly used the man's manuscript as his source. Both Caxton editions carry the equivalent of manuscript authority. Caxton's edition was reprinted by his successor, Wynkyn de Worde, but this edition has no independent authority.
Richard Pynson, the King's Printer under Henry VIII for about twenty years, was the first to collect and sell something that resembled an edition of the collected works of Chaucer; however, in the process, he introduced five previously printed texts that are now known not to be Chaucer's. (The collection is actually three separately printed texts, or collections of texts, bound together as one volume.)
There is a likely connection between Pynson's product and William Thynne's a mere six years later. Thynne had a successful career from the 1520s until his death in 1546, as chief clerk of the kitchen of Henry VIII, one of the masters of the royal household. He spent years comparing various versions of Chaucer's works, and selected 41 pieces for publication. While there were questions over the authorship of some of the material, there is not doubt this was the first comprehensive view of Chaucer's work. The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, published in 1532, was the first edition of Chaucer's collected works. Thynne's editions of Chaucer's Works in 1532 and 1542 were the first major contributions to the existence of a widely recognised Chaucerian canon. Thynne represents his edition as a book sponsored by and supportive of the king who is praised in the preface by Sir Brian Tuke. Thynne's canon brought the number of apocryphal works associated with Chaucer to a total of 28, even if that was not his intention. As with Pynson, once included in the Works, pseudepigraphic texts stayed with those works, regardless of their first editor's intentions.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Chaucer was printed more than any other English author, and he was the first author to have his works collected in comprehensive single-volume editions in which a Chaucer canon began to cohere. Some scholars contend that 16th-century editions of Chaucer's Works set the precedent for all other English authors in terms of presentation, prestige and success in print. These editions certainly established Chaucer's reputation, but they also began the complicated process of reconstructing and frequently inventing Chaucer's biography and the canonical list of works which were attributed to him.
Probably the most significant aspect of the growing apocrypha is that, beginning with Thynne's editions, it began to include medieval texts that made Chaucer appear as a proto-Protestant Lollard, primarily the Testament of Love and The Plowman's Tale. As "Chaucerian" works that were not considered apocryphal until the late 19th century, these medieval texts enjoyed a new life, with English Protestants carrying on the earlier Lollard project of appropriating existing texts and authors who seemed sympathetic—or malleable enough to be construed as sympathetic—to their cause. The official Chaucer of the early printed volumes of his Works was construed as a proto-Protestant as the same was done, concurrently, with William Langland and Piers Plowman.
The famous Plowman's Tale did not enter Thynne's Works until the second, 1542, edition. Its entry was surely facilitated by Thynne's inclusion of Thomas Usk's Testament of Love in the first edition. The Testament of Love imitates, borrows from, and thus resembles Usk's contemporary, Chaucer. (Testament of Love also appears to borrow from Piers Plowman.)
Since the Testament of Love mentions its author's part in a failed plot (book 1, chapter 6), his imprisonment, and (perhaps) a recantation of (possibly Lollard) heresy, all this was associated with Chaucer. (Usk himself was executed as a traitor in 1388.) John Foxe took this recantation of heresy as a defence of the true faith, calling Chaucer a "right Wiclevian" and (erroneously) identifying him as a schoolmate and close friend of John Wycliffe at Merton College, Oxford. (Thomas Speght is careful to highlight these facts in his editions and his "Life of Chaucer".) No other sources for the Testament of Love exist—there is only Thynne's construction of whatever manuscript sources he had.
John Stow (1525–1605) was an antiquarian and also a chronicler. His edition of Chaucer's Works in 1561 brought the apocrypha to more than 50 titles. More were added in the 17th century, and they remained as late as 1810, well after Thomas Tyrwhitt pared the canon down in his 1775 edition. The compilation and printing of Chaucer's works was, from its beginning, a political enterprise, since it was intended to establish an English national identity and history that grounded and authorised the Tudor monarchy and church. What was added to Chaucer often helped represent him favourably to Protestant England.
In his 1598 edition of the Works, Speght (probably taking cues from Foxe) made good use of Usk's account of his political intrigue and imprisonment in the Testament of Love to assemble a largely fictional "Life of Our Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer". Speght's "Life" presents readers with an erstwhile radical in troubled times much like their own, a proto-Protestant who eventually came round to the king's views on religion. Speght states, "In the second year of Richard the second, the King tooke Geffrey Chaucer and his lands into his protection. The occasion wherof no doubt was some daunger and trouble whereinto he was fallen by favouring some rash attempt of the common people." Under the discussion of Chaucer's friends, namely John of Gaunt, Speght further explains:
Yet it seemeth that [Chaucer] was in some trouble in the daies of King Richard the second, as it may appeare in the Testament of Loue: where hee doth greatly complaine of his owne rashnesse in following the multitude, and of their hatred against him for bewraying their purpose. And in that complaint which he maketh to his empty purse, I do find a written copy, which I had of Iohn Stow (whose library hath helped many writers) wherein ten times more is adioined, then is in print. Where he maketh great lamentation for his wrongfull imprisonment, wishing death to end his daies: which in my iudgement doth greatly accord with that in the Testament of Loue. Moreouer we find it thus in Record.
Later, in "The Argument" to the Testament of Love, Speght adds:
Chaucer did compile this booke as a comfort to himselfe after great griefs conceiued for some rash attempts of the commons, with whome he had ioyned, and thereby was in feare to loose the fauour of his best friends.
Speght is also the source of the famous tale of Chaucer being fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street, as well as a fictitious coat of arms and family tree. Ironically – and perhaps consciously so – an introductory, apologetic letter in Speght's edition from Francis Beaumont defends the unseemly, "low", and bawdy bits in Chaucer from an elite, classicist position.
Francis Thynne noted some of these inconsistencies in his Animadversions, insisting that Chaucer was not a commoner, and he objected to the friar-beating story. Yet Thynne himself underscores Chaucer's support for popular religious reform, associating Chaucer's views with his father William Thynne's attempts to include The Plowman's Tale and The Pilgrim's Tale in the 1532 and 1542 Works.
The myth of the Protestant Chaucer continues to have a lasting impact on a large body of Chaucerian scholarship. Though it is extremely rare for a modern scholar to suggest Chaucer supported a religious movement that did not exist until more than a century after his death, the predominance of this thinking for so many centuries left it for granted that Chaucer was at least hostile toward Catholicism. This assumption forms a large part of many critical approaches to Chaucer's works, including neo-Marxism.
Alongside Chaucer's Works, the most impressive literary monument of the period is John Foxe's Acts and Monuments.... As with the Chaucer editions, it was critically significant to English Protestant identity and included Chaucer in its project. Foxe's Chaucer both derived from and contributed to the printed editions of Chaucer's Works, particularly the pseudepigrapha. Jack Upland was first printed in Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and then it appeared in Speght's edition of Chaucer's Works.
Speght's "Life of Chaucer" echoes Foxe's own account, which is itself dependent upon the earlier editions that added the Testament of Love and The Plowman's Tale to their pages. Like Speght's Chaucer, Foxe's Chaucer was also a shrewd (or lucky) political survivor. In his 1563 edition, Foxe "thought it not out of season … to couple … some mention of Geoffrey Chaucer" with a discussion of John Colet, a possible source for John Skelton's character Colin Clout.
Probably referring to the 1542 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, Foxe said that he "marvel[s] to consider … how the bishops, condemning and abolishing all manner of English books and treatises which might bring the people to any light of knowledge, did yet authorise the works of Chaucer to remain still and to be occupied; who, no doubt, saw into religion as much almost as even we do now, and uttereth in his works no less, and seemeth to be a right Wicklevian, or else there never was any. And that, all his works almost, if they be thoroughly advised, will testify (albeit done in mirth, and covertly); and especially the latter end of his third book of the Testament of Love … Wherein, except a man be altogether blind, he may espy him at the full: although in the same book (as in all others he useth to do), under shadows covertly, as under a visor, he suborneth truth in such sort, as both privily she may profit the godly-minded, and yet not be espied of the crafty adversary. And therefore the bishops, belike, taking his works but for jests and toys, in condemning other books, yet permitted his books to be read."
It is significant, too, that Foxe's discussion of Chaucer leads into his history of "The Reformation of the Church of Christ in the Time of Martin Luther" when "Printing, being opened, incontinently ministered unto the church the instruments and tools of learning and knowledge; which were good books and authors, which before lay hid and unknown. The science of printing being found, immediately followed the grace of God; which stirred up good wits aptly to conceive the light of knowledge and judgment: by which light darkness began to be espied, and ignorance to be detected; truth from error, religion from superstition, to be discerned."
Foxe downplays Chaucer's bawdy and amorous writing, insisting that it all testifies to his piety. Material that is troubling is deemed metaphoric, while the more forthright satire (which Foxe prefers) is taken literally.
John Urry produced the first edition of the complete works of Chaucer in a Latin font, published posthumously in 1721. Included were several tales, according to the editors, for the first time printed, a biography of Chaucer, a glossary of old English words, and testimonials of author writers concerning Chaucer dating back to the 16th century. According to A. S. G Edwards, "This was the first collected edition of Chaucer to be printed in roman type. The life of Chaucer prefixed to the volume was the work of the Reverend John Dart, corrected and revised by Timothy Thomas. The glossary appended was also mainly compiled by Thomas. The text of Urry's edition has often been criticised by subsequent editors for its frequent conjectural emendations, mainly to make it conform to his sense of Chaucer's metre. The justice of such criticisms should not obscure his achievement. His is the first edition of Chaucer for nearly a hundred and fifty years to consult any manuscripts and is the first since that of William Thynne in 1534 to seek systematically to assemble a substantial number of manuscripts to establish his text. It is also the first edition to offer descriptions of the manuscripts of Chaucer's works, and the first to print texts of 'Gamelyn' and 'The Tale of Beryn', works ascribed to, but not by, Chaucer."
Modern scholarship
Although Chaucer's works had long been admired, serious scholarly work on his legacy did not begin until the late 18th century, when Thomas Tyrwhitt edited The Canterbury Tales, and it did not become an established academic discipline until the 19th century.
Scholars such as Frederick James Furnivall, who founded the Chaucer Society in 1868, pioneered the establishment of diplomatic editions of Chaucer's major texts, along with careful accounts of Chaucer's language and prosody. Walter William Skeat, who like Furnivall was closely associated with the Oxford English Dictionary, established the base text of all of Chaucer's works with his edition, published by Oxford University Press. Later editions by John H. Fisher and Larry D. Benson offered further refinements, along with critical commentary and bibliographies.
With the textual issues largely addressed, if not resolved, attention turned to the questions of Chaucer's themes, structure, and audience. The Chaucer Review was founded in 1966 and has maintained its position as the pre-eminent journal of Chaucer studies. In 1994, literary critic Harold Bloom placed Chaucer among the greatest Western writers of all time, and in 1997 expounded on William Shakespeare's debt to the author.
List of works
The following major works are in rough chronological order but scholars still debate the dating of most of Chaucer's output and works made up from a collection of stories may have been compiled over a long period.
Major works
Translation of Roman de la Rose, possibly extant as The Romaunt of the Rose
The Book of the Duchess
The House of Fame
Anelida and Arcite
Parlement of Foules
Translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy as Boece
Troilus and Criseyde
The Legend of Good Women
The Canterbury Tales
A Treatise on the Astrolabe
Short poems
An ABC
Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn (disputed)
The Complaint unto Pity
The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse
The Complaint of Mars
The Complaint of Venus
A Complaint to His Lady
The Former Age
Fortune
Gentilesse
Lak of Stedfastnesse
Lenvoy de Chaucer a Scogan
Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton
Proverbs
Balade to Rosemounde
Truth
Womanly Noblesse
Poems of doubtful authorship
Against Women Unconstant
A Balade of Complaint
Complaynt D'Amours
Merciles Beaute
The Equatorie of the Planets – A rough translation of a Latin work derived from an Arab work of the same title. It is a description of the construction and use of a planetary equatorium, which was used in calculating planetary orbits and positions (at the time it was believed the sun orbited the Earth). The similar Treatise on the Astrolabe, not usually doubted as Chaucer's work, in addition to Chaucer's name as a gloss to the manuscript are the main pieces of evidence for the ascription to Chaucer. However, the evidence Chaucer wrote such a work is questionable, and as such is not included in The Riverside Chaucer. If Chaucer did not compose this work, it was probably written by a contemporary.
Works presumed lost
Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde, possible translation of Innocent III's De miseria conditionis humanae
Origenes upon the Maudeleyne
The Book of the Leoun – "The Book of the Lion" is mentioned in Chaucer's retraction. It has been speculated that it may have been a redaction of Guillaume de Machaut's 'Dit dou lyon,' a story about courtly love (a subject about which Chaucer frequently wrote).
Spurious works
The Pilgrim's Tale – written in the 16th century with many Chaucerian allusions
The Plowman's Tale or The Complaint of the Ploughman – a Lollard satire later appropriated as a Protestant text
Pierce the Ploughman's Crede – a Lollard satire later appropriated by Protestants
The Ploughman's Tale – its body is largely a version of Thomas Hoccleve's "Item de Beata Virgine"
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" – frequently attributed to Chaucer, but actually a translation by Richard Roos of Alain Chartier's poem
The Testament of Love – actually by Thomas Usk
Jack Upland – a Lollard satire
The Floure and the Leafe – a 15th-century allegory
Derived works
God Spede the Plough – Borrows twelve stanzas of Chaucer's Monk's Tale
See also
Chaucer (surname)
Middle English literature
Poet-diplomat
References
Bibliography
Fruoco, Jonathan, ed. and transl. (2021). Le Livre de la Duchesse: oeuvres complètes (Tome I). Paris: Classiques Garnier, ISBN 978-2406119999.
Fruoco, Jonathan (2020). Chaucer's Polyphony. The Modern in Medieval Poetry. Berlin-Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, De Gruyter. .
External links
Chaucer Bibliography Online
Educational institutions
Chaucer Page by Harvard University, including interlinear translation of The Canterbury Tales
Caxton's Chaucer – Complete digitised texts of Caxton's two earliest editions of The Canterbury Tales from the British Library
Caxton's Canterbury Tales: The British Library Copies An online edition with complete transcriptions and images captured by the HUMI Project
Chaucer Metapage – Project in addition to the 33rd International Congress of Medieval Studies
Chaucer and his works: Introduction to Chaucer and his works (Descriptions of books with images, University of Glasgow Library)
1343 births
1400 deaths
14th-century English writers
Burials at Westminster Abbey
The Canterbury Tales
English Catholic poets
English civil servants
English translators
English MPs 1386
Middle English poets
People from the City of London
Writers from London
14th-century English poets
Medieval orientalists
14th-century translators
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12789 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald%20Gardner%20%28Wiccan%29 | Gerald Gardner (Wiccan) | Gerald Brosseau Gardner (13 June 1884 – 12 February 1964), also known by the craft name Scire, was an English Wiccan, as well as an author and an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist. He was instrumental in bringing the Contemporary Pagan religion of Wicca to public attention, writing some of its definitive religious texts and founding the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca.
Born into an upper-middle-class family in Blundellsands, Lancashire, Gardner spent much of his childhood abroad in Madeira. In 1900, he moved to colonial Ceylon, and then in 1911 to Malaya, where he worked as a civil servant, independently developing an interest in the native peoples and writing papers and a book about their magical practices. After his retirement in 1936, he travelled to Cyprus, penning the novel A Goddess Arrives before returning to England. Settling down near the New Forest, he joined an occult group, the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, through which he said he had encountered the New Forest coven into which he was initiated in 1939. Believing the coven to be a survival of the pre-Christian witch-cult discussed in the works of Margaret Murray, he decided to revive the faith, supplementing the coven's rituals with ideas borrowed from Freemasonry, ceremonial magic and the writings of Aleister Crowley to form the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca.
Moving to London in 1945, he became intent on propagating this religion, attracting media attention and writing about it in High Magic's Aid (1949), Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). Founding a Wiccan group known as the Bricket Wood coven, he introduced a string of High Priestesses into the religion, including Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, through which the Gardnerian community spread throughout Britain and subsequently into Australia and the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Involved for a time with Cecil Williamson, Gardner also became director of the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on the Isle of Man, which he ran until his death.
Gardner is internationally recognised as the "Father of Wicca" among the Pagan and occult communities. His claims regarding the New Forest coven have been widely scrutinised, with Gardner being the subject of investigation for historians and biographers Aidan Kelly, Ronald Hutton and Philip Heselton.
Early life
Childhood: 1884–99
Gardner's family was wealthy and upper middle class, running a family firm, Joseph Gardner and Sons, which described itself as "the oldest private company in the timber trade within the British Empire." Specialising in the import of hardwood, the company had been founded in the mid-18th century by Edmund Gardner (b. 1721), an entrepreneur who would subsequently become a Freeman of Liverpool. Gerald's father, William Robert Gardner (1844–1935) had been the youngest son of Joseph Gardner (b. 1791), after whom the firm had been renamed, and who with his wife Maria had had five sons and three daughters. In 1867, William had been sent to New York City, in order to further the interests of the family firm. Here, he had met an American, Louise Burguelew Ennis, the daughter of a wholesale stationer; entering a relationship, they were married in Manhattan on 25 November 1868. After a visit to England, the couple returned to the US, where they settled in Mott Haven, Morrisania in New York State. It was here that their first child, Harold Ennis Gardner, was born in 1870. At some point in the next two years they moved back to England, by 1873 settling into The Glen, a large Victorian house in Blundellsands in Lancashire, north-west England, which was developing into a wealthy suburb of Liverpool. It was here that their second child, Robert "Bob" Marshall Gardner, was born in 1874.
In 1876 the family moved into one of the neighbouring houses, Ingle Lodge, and it was here that the couple's third son, Gerald Brosseau Gardner, was born on Friday 13 June 1884. A fourth child, Francis Douglas Gardner, was then born in 1886. Gerald would rarely see Harold, who went on to study Law at the University of Oxford, but saw more of Bob, who drew pictures for him, and Douglas, with whom he shared his nursery. The Gardners employed an Irish nursemaid named Josephine "Com" McCombie, who was entrusted with taking care of the young Gerald; she would subsequently become the dominant figure of his childhood, spending far more time with him than his parents. Gardner suffered with asthma from a young age, having particular difficulty in the cold Lancashire winters. His nursemaid offered to take him to warmer climates abroad at his father's expense in the hope that this condition would not be so badly affected. Subsequently, in summer 1888, Gerald and Com travelled via London to Nice in the south of France. After several more years spent in the Mediterranean, in 1891 they went to the Canary Islands, and it was here that Gardner first developed his lifelong interest in weaponry. From there, they then went on to Accra in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). Accra was followed by a visit to Funchal on the Portuguese colony of Madeira; they would spend most of the next nine years on the island, only returning to England for three or four months in the summer.
According to Gardner's first biographer, Jack Bracelin, Com was very flirtatious and "clearly looked on these trips as mainly manhunts", viewing Gardner as a nuisance. As a result, he was largely left to his own devices, which he spent going out, meeting new people and learning about foreign cultures. In Madeira, he also began collecting weapons, many of which were remnants from the Napoleonic Wars, displaying them on the wall of his hotel room. As a result of his illness and these foreign trips, Gardner ultimately never attended school, or gained any formal education. He taught himself to read by looking at copies of The Strand Magazine but his writing betrayed his poor education all his life, with highly eccentric spelling and grammar. A voracious reader, one of the books that most influenced him at the time was Florence Marryat's There Is No Death (1891), a discussion of spiritualism, and from which he gained a firm belief in the existence of an afterlife.
Ceylon and Borneo: 1900–11
In 1900, Com married David Elkington, one of her many suitors who owned a tea plantation in the British colony of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka). It was agreed with the Gardners that Gerald would live with her on a tea plantation named Ladbroke Estate in Maskeliya district, where he could learn the tea trade. In 1901 Gardner and the Elkingtons lived briefly in a bungalow in Kandy, where a neighbouring bungalow had just been vacated by the occultists Aleister Crowley and Charles Henry Allan Bennett. At his father's expense, Gardner trained as a "creeper", or trainee planter, learning all about the growing of tea; although he disliked the "dreary endlessness" of the work, he enjoyed being outdoors and near to the forests. He lived with the Elkingtons until 1904, when he moved into his own bungalow and began earning a living working on the Non Pareil tea estate below the Horton Plains. He spent much of his spare time hunting deer and trekking through the local forests, becoming acquainted with the Singhalese natives and taking a great interest in their Buddhist beliefs. In December 1904, his parents and younger brother visited, with his father asking him to invest in a pioneering rubber plantation which Gardner was to manage; located near the village of Belihil Oya, it was known as the Atlanta Estate, but allowed him a great deal of leisure time. Exploring his interest in weaponry, in 1907 Gardner joined the Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps, a local volunteer force composed of European tea and rubber planters intent on protecting their interests from foreign aggression or domestic insurrection.
In 1907 Gardner returned to Britain for several months' leave, spending time with his family and joining the Legion of Frontiersmen, a militia founded to repel the threat of German invasion. During his visit, Gardner spent a lot of time with family relations known as the Sergenesons. Gardner became very friendly with this side of his family, whom his Anglican parents avoided because they were Methodists. According to Gardner, the Surgenesons readily talked about the paranormal with him; the patriarch of the family, Ted Surgeneson, believed that fairies were living in his garden and would say "I can often feel they're there, and sometimes I've seen them", though he readily admitted the possibility that it was all in his imagination. It was from the Sergenesons that Gardner claimed to have discovered a family rumour that his grandfather, Joseph, had been a practising witch, after being converted to the practice by his mistress. Another unconfirmed family belief repeated by Gardner was that a Scottish ancestor, Grissell Gairdner, had been burned as a witch in Newburgh in 1610.
Gardner returned to Ceylon in late 1907 and settled down to the routine of managing the rubber plantation. In 1910 he was initiated as an Apprentice Freemason into the Sphinx Lodge No. 107 in Colombo, affiliated with the Irish Grand Lodge. Gardner placed great importance on this new activity; In order to attend masonic meetings, he had to arrange a weekend's leave, walk 15 miles to the nearest railway station in Haputale, and then catch a train to the city. He entered into the second and third degrees of Freemasonry within the next month, but this enthusiasm seems also to have waned, and he resigned the next year, probably because he intended to leave Ceylon. The experiment with rubber growing at the Atlanta Estate had proved relatively unsuccessful, and Gardner's father decided to sell the property in 1911, leaving Gerald unemployed.
That year, Gardner moved to British North Borneo, gaining employment as a rubber planter at the Mawo Estate at Membuket. However, he did not get on well with the plantation's manager, a racist named R. J. Graham who had wanted to deforest the entire local area. Instead Gardner became friendly with many of the locals, including the Dayak and Dusun people. An amateur anthropologist, Gardner was fascinated by the indigenous way of life, particularly the local forms of weaponry such as the sumpitan. He was intrigued by the tattoos of the Dayaks and pictures of him in later life show large snake or dragon tattoos on his forearms, presumably obtained at this time. Taking a great interest in indigenous religious beliefs, Gardner told his first biographer that he had attended Dusun séances or healing rituals. He was unhappy with the working conditions and the racist attitudes of his colleagues, and when he developed malaria he felt that this was the last straw; he left Borneo and moved to Singapore, in what was then known as the Straits Settlements, part of British Malaya.
Malaya and World War I: 1911–26
Arriving in Singapore, he initially planned to return to Ceylon, but was offered a job working as an assistant on a rubber plantation in Perak, northern Malaya, and decided to take it, working for the Borneo Company. Arriving in the area, he decided to supplement this income by purchasing his own estate, Bukit Katho, on which he could grow rubber; initially sized at 450 acres, Gardner purchased various pieces of adjacent land until it covered 600 acres. Here, Gardner made friends with an American man known as Cornwall, who had converted to Islam and married a local Malay woman. Through Cornwall, Gardner was introduced to many locals, whom he soon befriended, including members of the Senoi and Malay peoples. Cornwall invited Gardner to make the Shahada, the Muslim confession of faith, which he did; it allowed him to gain the trust of locals, although would he would never become a practising Muslim. Cornwall was however an unorthodox Muslim, and his interest in local peoples included their magical and spiritual beliefs, to which he also introduced Gardner, who took a particular interest in the kris, a ritual knife with magical uses.
In 1915, Gardner again joined a local volunteer militia, the Malay States Volunteer Rifles. Although between 1914 and 1918 World War I was raging in Europe, its effects were little felt in Malaya, apart from the 1915 Singapore Mutiny. Gardner was keen to do more towards the war effort and in 1916 once again returned to Britain. He attempted to join the British Navy, but was turned down due to ill health. Unable to fight on the front lines, he began working as an orderly in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) in the First Western General Hospital, Fazakerley, located on the outskirts of Liverpool. He was working in the VAD when casualties came back from the Battle of the Somme and he was engaged in looking after patients and assisting in changing wound dressings. He soon had to give this up when his malaria returned, and so decided to return to Malaya in October 1916 because of the warmer climate.
He continued to manage the rubber plantation but after the end of the war, commodity prices dropped and by 1921 it was difficult to make a profit. He returned again to Britain, in what later biographer Philip Heselton speculated might have been an unsuccessful attempt to ask his father for money. Returning to Malaya, Gardner found that the Borneo Company had sacked him, and he was forced to find work with the Public Works Department. In September 1923 he successfully applied to the Office of Customs to become a government-inspector of rubber plantations, a job that involved a great amount of travelling around the country, something he enjoyed. After a brief but serious illness, the Johore government reassigned Gardner to an office in the Lands Office while he recovered, eventually being promoted to Principal Officer of Customs. In this capacity, he was made an Inspector of Rubber Shops, overseeing the regulation and sale of rubber in the country. In 1926 he was placed in charge of monitoring shops selling opium, noting regular irregularities and a thriving illegal trade in the controlled substance; believing opium to be essentially harmless, there is evidence indicating that Gardner probably took many bribes in this position, earning himself a small fortune.
Marriage and archaeology: 1927–36
Gardner's mother had died in 1920, but he had not returned to Britain on that occasion. However, in 1927 his father became very ill with dementia, and Gardner decided to visit him. On his return to Britain, Gardner began to investigate spiritualism and mediumship. He soon had several encounters which he attributed to spirits of deceased family members. Continuing to visit Spiritualist churches and séances, he was highly critical of much of what he saw, although he encountered several mediums he considered genuine. One medium apparently made contact with a deceased cousin of Gardner's, an event which impressed him greatly. His first biographer Jack Bracelin reports that this was a watershed in Gardner's life, and that a previous academic interest in spiritualism and life after death thereafter became a matter of firm personal belief for him. The very same evening (28 July 1927) after Gardner had met this medium, he met the woman he was to marry; Dorothea Frances Rosedale, known as Donna, a relation of his sister-in-law Edith. He asked her to marry him the next day and she agreed. Because his leave was coming to an end very soon, they married quickly on 16 August at St Jude's Church, Kensington, and then honeymooned in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, before heading via France to Malaya.
Arriving in the country, the couple settled into a bungalow at Bukit Japon in Johor Bahru. Here, he once more became involved in Freemasonry, joining the Johore Royal Lodge No. 3946, but had retired from it by April 1931. Gardner also returned to his old interests in the anthropology of Malaya, witnessing the magical practices performed by the locals, and he readily accepted a belief in magic. During his time in Malaya, Gardner became increasingly interested in local customs, particularly those involved in folk magic and weapons. Gardner was not only interested in the anthropology of Malaya, but also in its archaeology. He began excavations at the city of Johore Lama, alone and in secret, as the local Sultan considered archaeologists little better than grave-robbers. Prior to Gardner's investigations, no serious archaeological excavation had occurred at the city, though he himself soon unearthed four miles of earthworks, and uncovered finds that included tombs, pottery, and porcelain dating from Ming China. He went on to begin further excavations at the royal cemetery of Kota Tinggi, and the jungle city of Syong Penang. His finds were displayed as an exhibit on the "Early History of Johore" at the National Museum of Singapore, and several beads that he had discovered suggested that trade went on between the Roman Empire and the Malays, presumably, Gardner thought, via India. He also found gold coins originating from Johore and he published academic papers on both the beads and the coins.
By the early 1930s Gardner's activities had moved from those exclusively of a civil servant, and he began to think of himself more as a folklorist, archaeologist and anthropologist. He was encouraged in this by the director of the Raffles Museum (now the National Museum of Singapore) and by his election to Fellowship of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1936. En route back to London in 1932 Gardner stopped off in Egypt and, armed with a letter of introduction, joined Sir Flinders Petrie who was excavating the site of Tall al-Ajjul in Palestine. Arriving in London in August 1932 he attended a conference on prehistory and protohistory at King's College London, attending at least two lectures which described the cult of the Mother Goddess. He also befriended the archaeologist and practising Pagan Alexander Keiller, known for his excavations at Avebury, who would encourage Gardner to join in with the excavations at Hembury Hill in Devon, also attended by Aileen Fox and Mary Leakey.
Returning to East Asia, he took a ship from Singapore to Saigon in French Indo-China, from where he travelled to Phnom Penh, visiting the Silver Pagoda. He then took a train to Hangzhou in China, before continuing onto Shanghai; because of the ongoing Chinese Civil War, the train did not stop throughout the entire journey, something that annoyed the passengers. In 1935, Gardner attended the Second Congress for Prehistoric Research in the Far East in Manila, Philippines, acquainting himself with several experts in the field. His main research interest lay in the Malay kris blade, which he unusually chose to spell "keris"; he eventually collected 400 examples and talked to natives about their magico-religious uses. Deciding to author a book on the subject, he wrote Keris and Other Malay Weapons, being encouraged to do so by anthropologist friends; it would subsequently edited into a readable form by Betty Lumsden Milne and published by the Singapore-based Progressive Publishing Company in 1936. It was well received by literary and academic circles in Malaya. In 1935, Gardner heard that his father had died, leaving him a bequest of £3,000. This assurance of financial independence may have led him to consider retirement, and as he was due for a long leave in 1936 the Johore Civil Service allowed him to retire slightly early, in January 1936. Gardner wanted to stay in Malaya, but he conceded to his wife Donna, who insisted that they return to England.
Return to Europe: 1936–38
In 1936, Gardner and Donna left Malaya and headed for Europe. She proceeded straight to London, renting them a flat at 26 Charing Cross Road. Gardner visited Palestine, becoming involved in the archaeological excavations run by J.L. Starkey at Lachish. Here he grew particularly interested in a temple containing statues to both the male deity of Judeo-Christian theology and the pagan goddess Ashtoreth. From Palestine, Gardner went to Turkey, Greece, Hungary, and Germany. He eventually reached England, but soon went on a visit to Denmark to attend a conference on weaponry at the Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen, during which he gave a talk on the kris.
Returning to Britain, he found that the climate made him sick, leading him to register with a doctor, Edward A. Gregg, who recommended that he try nudism. Hesitant at first, Gardner first attended an indoor nudist club, the Lotus League in Finchley, North London, where he made several new friends and felt that the nudity cured his ailment. When summer came, he decided to visit an outdoor nudist club, that of Fouracres near the town of Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire, which he soon began to frequent. Through nudism, Gardner made a number of notable friends, including James Laver (1899–1975), who became the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Cottie Arthur Burland (1905–1983), who was the Curator of the Department of Ethnography at the British Museum. Biographer Philip Heselton suggested that through the nudist scene Gardner may have also met Dion Byngham (1896–1990), a senior member of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry who propounded a Contemporary Pagan religion known as Dionysianism. By the end of 1936, Gardner was finding his Charing Cross Road flat to be cramped, and moved into the block of flats at 32a Buckingham Palace Mansions.
Fearing the cold of the English winter, Gardner decided to sail to Cyprus in late 1936, remaining there into the following year. Visiting the Museum in Nicosia, he studied the Bronze Age swords of the island, successfully hafting one of them, on the basis of which he wrote a paper entitled "The Problem of the Cypriot Bronze Dagger Hilt", which would subsequently be translated into both French and Danish, being published in the journals of the Société Préhistorique Française and the Vaabenhistorisk Selskab respectively. Back in London, in September 1937, Gardner applied for and received a Doctorate of Philosophy from the Meta Collegiate Extension of the National Electronic Institute, an organisation based in Nevada that was widely recognised by academic institutions as offering invalid academic degrees via post for a fee. He would subsequently style himself as "Dr. Gardner", despite the fact that academic institutions would not recognise his qualifications.
Planning to return to the Palestinian excavations the following winter, he was prevented from doing so when Starkey was murdered. Instead he decided to return to Cyprus. A believer in reincarnation, Gardner came to believe that he had lived on the island once before, in a previous life, subsequently buying a plot of land in Famagusta, planning to build a house on it, although this never came about. Influenced by his dreams, he wrote his first novel, A Goddess Arrives, over the next few years. Revolving around an Englishman living in 1930s London named Robert Denvers who has recollections of a previous life as a Bronze Age Cypriot – an allusion to Gardner himself – the primary plot of A Goddess Arrives is set in ancient Cyprus and featured a queen, Dayonis, who practices sorcery in an attempt to help her people defend themselves from invading Egyptians. Published in late 1939, biographer Philip Heselton noted that the book was "a very competent first work of fiction", with strong allusions to the build-up which proceeded World War II. Returning to London, he helped to dig shelter trenches in Hyde Park as a part of the build-up to the war, also volunteering for the Air Raid Wardens' Service. Fearing the bombing of the city, Gardner and his wife soon moved to Highcliffe, just south of the New Forest in Hampshire. Here, they purchased a house built in 1923 named Southridge, situated on the corner of Highland Avenue and Elphinstone Road.
Involvement in Wicca
The Rosicrucian Order: 1938–39
In Highcliffe, Gardner came across a building describing itself as the "First Rosicrucian Theatre in England". Having an interest in Rosicrucianism, a prominent magico-religious tradition within Western esotericism, Gardner decided to attend one of the plays performed by the group; in August 1939, Gardner took his wife to a theatrical performance based on the life of Pythagoras. An amateur thespian, she hated the performance, thinking the quality of both actors and script terrible, and she refused to go again. Unperturbed and hoping to learn more of Rosicrucianism, Gardner joined the group in charge of running the theatre, the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, and began attending meetings held in their local ashram. Founded in 1920 by George Alexander Sullivan, the Fellowship had been based upon a blend of Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Freemasonry and his own personal innovation, and had moved to Christchurch in 1930.
As time went by, Gardner became critical of many of the Rosicrucian Order's practices; Sullivan's followers claimed that he was immortal, having formerly been the famous historical figures Pythagoras, Cornelius Agrippa and Francis Bacon. Gardner facetiously asked if he was also the Wandering Jew, much to the annoyance of Sullivan himself. Another belief held by the group that Gardner found amusing was that a lamp hanging from one of the ceilings was the disguised holy grail of Arthurian legend. Gardner's dissatisfaction with the group grew, particularly when in 1939, one of the group's leaders sent a letter out to all members in which she stated that war would not come. The very next day, Britain declared war on Germany, greatly unimpressing the increasingly cynical Gardner.
Alongside Rosicrucianism, Gardner had also been pursuing other interests. In 1939, Gardner joined the Folk-Lore Society; his first contribution to its journal Folk-Lore, appeared in the June 1939 issue and described a box of witchcraft relics that he believed had belonged to the 17th century "Witch-Finder General", Matthew Hopkins. Subsequently, in 1946 he would go on to become a member of the society's governing council, although most other members of the society were wary of him and his academic credentials. Gardner would also join the Historical Association, being elected Co-President of its Bournemouth and Christchurch branch in June 1944, following which he became a vocal supporter for the construction of a local museum for the Christchurch borough. He also involved himself in preparations for the impending war, joining the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) as a warden, where he soon rose to a position of local seniority, with his own house being assigned as the ARP post. In 1940, following the outbreak of conflict, he also tried to sign up for the Local Defence Volunteers, or "Home Guard", but was turned away because he was already an ARP warden. He managed to circumvent this restriction by joining his local Home Guard in the capacity as armourer, which was officially classified as technical staff. Gardner took a strong interest in the Home Guard, helping to arm his fellows from his own personal weaponry collection and personally manufacturing molotov cocktails.
The New Forest coven: 1939–44
Although sceptical of the Rosicrucian Order, Gardner got on well with a group of individuals inside the group who were "rather brow-beaten by the others, kept themselves to themselves." Gardner's biographer Philip Heselton theorised that this group consisted of Edith Woodford-Grimes (1887–1975), Susie Mason, her brother Ernie Mason, and their sister Rosetta Fudge, all of whom had originally come from Southampton before moving to the area around Highcliffe, where they joined the Order. According to Gardner, "unlike many of the others [in the Order], [they] had to earn their livings, were cheerful and optimistic and had a real interest in the occult". Gardner became "really very fond of them", remarking that he "would have gone through hell and high water even then for any of them." In particular he grew close to Woodford-Grimes, being invited over to her home to meet her daughter, and the two helped each other with their writing, Woodford-Grimes probably assisting Gardner edit A Goddess Arrives prior to publication. Gardner would subsequently give her the nickname "Dafo", for which she would become better known.
According to Gardner's later account, one night in September 1939 they took him to a large house owned by "Old Dorothy" Clutterbuck, a wealthy local woman, where he was made to strip naked and taken through an initiation ceremony. Halfway through the ceremony, he heard the word "Wicca (Male)" and "Wicce (Female)", and he recognised it as an Old English word for "witch". He was already acquainted with Margaret Murray's theory of the Witch-cult, and that "I then knew then that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived." This group, he claimed, were the New Forest coven, and he believed them to be one of the few surviving covens of the ancient, pre-Christian Witch-Cult religion. Subsequent research by the likes of Hutton and Heselton has shown that in fact the New Forest coven was probably only formed in the mid-1930s, based upon such sources as folk magic and the theories of Margaret Murray.
Gardner only ever described one of their rituals in depth, and this was an event that he termed "Operation Cone of Power". According to his own account, it took place in 1940 in a part of the New Forest and was designed to ward off the Nazis from invading Britain by magical means. Gardner claimed that a "Great Circle" was erected at night, with a "great cone of power" – a form of magical energy – being raised and sent to Berlin with the command of "you cannot cross the sea, you cannot cross the sea, you cannot come, you cannot come".
Bricket Wood and the Origins of Gardnerianism: 1945–50
Throughout his time in the New Forest, Gardner had regularly travelled to London, keeping his flat at Buckingham Palace Mansions until mid-1939 and regularly visiting the Spielplatz nudist club there. At Spielplatz he befriended Ross Nichols, whom he would later introduce to the Pagan religion of Druidry; Nichols would become enamoured with this faith, eventually founding the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. However, following the war, Gardner decided to return to London, moving into 47 Ridgemount Gardens, Bloomsbury in late 1944 or early 1945. Continuing his interest in nudism, in 1945 he purchased a plot of land in Fouracres, a nudist colony near to the village of Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire that would soon be renamed Five Acres. As a result, he would become one of the major shareholders at the club, exercising a significant level of power over any administrative decisions and was involved in a recruitment drive to obtain more members.
Between 1936 and 1939, Gardner befriended the Christian mystic J.S.M. Ward, proprietor of the Abbey Folk Park, Britain's oldest open-air museum. One of the exhibits was a 16th-century cottage that Ward had found near to Ledbury, Herefordshire and had transported to his park, where he exhibited it as a "witch's cottage". Gardner made a deal with Ward exchanging the cottage for Gardner's piece of land near to Famagusta in Cyprus. The witch's cottage was dismantled and the parts transported to Bricket Wood, where they were reassembled on Gardner's land at Five Acres. In Midsummer 1947 he held a ceremony in the cottage as a form of house-warming, which Heselton speculated was probably based upon the ceremonial magic rites featured in The Key of Solomon grimoire.
Furthering his interest in esoteric Christianity, in August 1946 Gardner was ordained as a priest in the Ancient British Church, a fellowship open to anyone who considered themselves a monotheist. Gardner also took an interest in Druidry, joining the Ancient Druid Order (ADO) and attending its annual Midsummer rituals at Stonehenge. He also joined the Folk-Lore Society, being elected to their council in 1946, and that same year giving a talk on "Art Magic and Talismans". Nevertheless, many fellows – including Katherine Briggs – were dismissive of Gardner's ideas and his fraudulent academic credentials. In 1946 he also joined the Society for Psychical Research.
On May Day 1947, Gardner's friend Arnold Crowther introduced him to Aleister Crowley, the ceremonial magician who had founded the religion of Thelema in 1904. Shortly before his death, Crowley elevated Gardner to the IV° of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) and issued a charter decreeing that Gardner could admit people into its Minerval degree. The charter itself was written in Gardner's handwriting and only signed by Crowley. From November 1947 to March 1948, Gardner and his wife toured the United States visiting relatives in Memphis, also visiting New Orleans, where Gardner hoped to learn about Voodoo. During his voyage, Crowley had died, and as a result Gardner considered himself the head of the O.T.O. in Europe, (a position accepted by Lady Frieda Harris). He met Crowley's successor, Karl Germer, in New York though Gardner would soon lose interest in leading the O.T.O., and in 1951 he was replaced by Frederic Mellinger as the O.T.O.'s European representative.
Gardner hoped to spread Wicca, and described some of its practices in a fictional form as High Magic's Aid. Set in the twelfth-century, Gardner included scenes of ceremonial magic based on The Key of Solomon. Published by the Atlantis Bookshop in July 1949, Gardner's manuscript had been edited into a publishable form by astrologer Madeline Montalban. Privately, he had also begun work on a scrapbook known as "Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical", in which he wrote down a number of Wiccan rituals and spells. This would prove to be the prototype for what he later termed a Book of Shadows. He also gained some of his first initiates, Barbara and Gilbert Vickers, who were initiated at some point between autumn 1949 and autumn 1950.
Doreen Valiente and the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft: 1950–57
Gardner also came into contact with Cecil Williamson, who was intent on opening his own museum devoted to witchcraft; the result would be the Folk-lore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft, opened in Castletown on the Isle of Man in 1951. Gardner and his wife moved to the island, where he took up the position of "resident witch". On 29 July, the Sunday Pictorial published an article about the museum in which Gardner declared "Of course I'm a witch. And I get great fun out of it." The museum was not a financial success, and the relationship between Gardner and Williamson deteriorated. In 1954, Gardner bought the museum from Williamson, who returned to England to found the rival Museum of Witchcraft, eventually settling it in Boscastle, Cornwall. Gardner renamed his exhibition the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft and continued running it up until his death. He also acquired a flat at 145 Holland Road, near Shepherd's Bush in West London, but nevertheless fled to warmer climates during the winter, where his asthma would not be so badly affected, for instance spending time in France, Italy, and the Gold Coast. From his base in London, he would frequent Atlantis bookshop, thereby encountering a number of other occultists, including Austin Osman Spare and Kenneth Grant, and he also continued his communication with Karl Germer until 1956.
In 1952, Gardner had begun to correspond with a young woman named Doreen Valiente. She eventually requested initiation into the Craft, and though Gardner was hesitant at first, he agreed that they could meet during the winter at the home of Edith Woodford-Grimes. Valiente got on well with both Gardner and Woodford-Grimes, and having no objections to either ritual nudity or scourging (which she had read about in a copy of Gardner's novel High Magic's Aid that he had given to her), she was initiated by Gardner into Wicca on Midsummer 1953. Valiente went on to join the Bricket Wood Coven. She soon rose to become the High Priestess of the coven, and helped Gardner to revise his Book of Shadows, and attempting to cut out most of Crowley's influence.
In 1954, Gardner published a non-fiction book, Witchcraft Today, containing a preface by Margaret Murray, who had published her theory of a surviving Witch-Cult in her 1921 book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. In his book, Gardner not only espoused the survival of the Witch-Cult, but also his theory that a belief in faeries in Europe was due to a secretive pygmy race that lived alongside other communities, and that the Knights Templar had been initiates of the Craft. Alongside this book, Gardner began to increasingly court publicity, going so far as to invite the press to write articles about the religion. Many of these turned out very negatively for the cult; one declared "Witches Devil-Worship in London!", and another accused him of whitewashing witchcraft in his luring of people into covens. Gardner continued courting publicity, despite the negative articles that many tabloids were producing, and believed that only through publicity could more people become interested in witchcraft, so preventing the "Old Religion", as he called it, from dying out.
Later life and death
In 1960, Gardner's official biography, entitled Gerald Gardner: Witch, was published. It was written by a friend of his, the Sufi mystic Idries Shah, but used the name of one of Gardner's High Priests, Jack L. Bracelin, because Shah was wary about being associated with Witchcraft. In May of that year, Gardner travelled to Buckingham Palace, where he enjoyed a garden party in recognition of his years of service to the Empire in the Far East. Soon after his trip, Gardner's wife Donna died, and Gardner himself once again began to suffer badly from asthma. The following year he, along with Shah and Lois Bourne, travelled to the island of Majorca to holiday with the poet Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess would play a significant part in the burgeoning Wiccan religion. In 1963, Gardner decided to go to Lebanon over the winter. Whilst returning home on the ship, The Scottish Prince on 12 February 1964, he suffered a fatal heart attack at the breakfast table. He was buried in Tunisia, the ship's next port of call, and his funeral was attended only by the ship's captain. He was 79 years old.
Though having bequeathed the museum, all his artifacts, and the copyright to his books in his will to one of his High Priestesses, Monique Wilson, she and her husband sold off the artefact collection to the American Ripley's Believe It or Not! organisation several years later. Ripley's took the collection to America, where it was displayed in two museums before being sold off during the 1980s. Gardner had also left parts of his inheritance to Patricia Crowther, Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne and Jack Bracelin, the latter inheriting the Fiveacres Nudist Club and taking over as full-time High Priest of the Bricket Wood coven.
Several years after Gardner's death, the Wiccan High Priestess Eleanor Bone visited North Africa and went looking for Gardner's grave. She discovered that the cemetery he was interred in was to be redeveloped, and so she raised enough money for his body to be moved to another cemetery in Tunis, where it currently remains. In 2007, a new plaque was attached to his grave, describing him as being "Father of Modern Wicca. Beloved of the Great Goddess".
Personal life
Gardner only married once, to Donna, and several who knew him made the claim that he was devoted to her. Indeed, after her death in 1960, he began to again suffer serious asthma attacks. Despite this, as many coven members slept over at his cottage due to living too far away to travel home safely, he was known to cuddle up to his young High Priestess, Dayonis, after rituals. The author Philip Heselton, who largely researched Wicca's origins, came to the conclusion that Gardner had held a long-term affair with Dafo, a theory expanded upon by Adrian Bott. Those who knew him within the modern witchcraft movement recalled how he was a firm believer in the therapeutic benefits of sunbathing. He also had several tattoos on his body, depicting magical symbols such as a snake, dragon, anchor and dagger. In his later life he wore a "heavy bronze bracelet... denoting the three degrees... of witchcraft" as well as a "large silver ring with... signs on it, which... represented his witch-name 'Scire', in the letters of the magical Theban alphabet."
According to Bricket Wood coven member Frederic Lamond, Gardner also used to comb his beard into a narrow barbiche and his hair into two horn like peaks, giving him "a somewhat demonic appearance". Lamond thought that Gardner was "surprisingly lacking in charisma" for someone at the forefront of a religious movement.
Gardner was a supporter of the right wing Conservative Party, and for several years had been a member of the Highcliffe Conservative Association, as well as being an avid reader of the pro-Conservative newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.
Criticisms
In a 1951 interview with a journalist from the Sunday Pictorial newspaper, Gardner said he was a doctor of philosophy from Singapore and also to have a doctorate in literature from Toulouse. Later investigation by Doreen Valiente suggested that these claims were false. The University of Singapore did not exist at that time and the University of Toulouse had no record of his receiving a doctorate. Valiente suggests that these claims may have been a form of compensation for his lack of formal education.
Valiente further criticises Gardner for his publicity-seeking – or at least his indiscretion. After a series of tabloid exposés, some members of his coven proposed some rules limiting what members of the Craft should say to non-members. Valiente reports that Gardner responded with a set of Wiccan laws of his own, which he claimed were original but others suspected he had made up on the spot. This led to a split in the coven, with Valiente and others leaving.
Legacy
Commenting on Gardner, Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White commented that "There are few figures in esoteric history who can rival him for
his dominating place in the pantheon of Pagan pioneers."
In 2012, Philip Heselton published a two-volume biography of Gardner, titled Witchfather. The biography was reviewed by Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White in The Pomegranate journal, where he commented that it was "more exhaustive with greater detail" than Heselton's prior tomes and was "excellent in most respects".
See also
Ashrama Hall and Christchurch Garden Theatre
References
Footnotes
Bibliography
External links
GeraldGardner.com, an online reference resource
Historical documents and media reports about Gardner at www.thewica.co.uk
Biography at Controverscial.com
Biography at About.com
The Gardnerian Book of Shadows
1884 births
1964 deaths
20th-century English non-fiction writers
20th-century English novelists
Amateur anthropologists
Ceremonial magicians
English Freemasons
English Wiccans
English civil servants
English occult writers
English religious leaders
English religious writers
Founders of Modern Pagan movements
Members of Ordo Templi Orientis
People from Crosby, Merseyside
Planters of British Ceylon
Wiccan priests
Writers from Liverpool
People who died at sea | [
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12792 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin%20MacLeod | Gavin MacLeod | Gavin MacLeod () (born Allan George See; February 28, 1931 – May 29, 2021) was an American actor best known for portraying Merrill Stubing, the ship's captain, on ABC's The Love Boat and Murray Slaughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. A Christian television host and author whose career spanned six decades, he also appeared as a guest on several talk, variety, and religious programs.
MacLeod's career began in films in 1957. In 1965, he starred in The Sword of Ali Baba. He went on to appear in A Man Called Gannon (1968), in The Thousand Plane Raid (1969), and in Kelly's Heroes (1970).
MacLeod also achieved continuing television success co-starring alongside Ernest Borgnine on McHale's Navy (1962–1964) as Joseph "Happy" Haines.
Early life
MacLeod was born in Mount Kisco, New York, the elder of two children. His mother, Margaret (née Shea) See (1906–2004), a middle school dropout, worked for Reader's Digest. His father, George See (1906–1945), an electrician, was part Chippewa (Ojibwe). His brother Ronald was three years his junior. He grew up in Pleasantville, New York, and studied acting at Ithaca College, from which he graduated in 1952 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts.
After serving in the United States Air Force, he moved to New York City and worked at Radio City Music Hall while looking for acting work. At about this time he changed his name, drawing "Gavin" from a physically disabled victim in a television drama, and "MacLeod" from his Ithaca drama coach, Beatrice MacLeod. MacLeod said in a 2013 interview with Parade about his stage name, he "felt as if my name was getting in the way of my success." Allan, he wrote, "just wasn't strong enough," and See was "too confusing."
Career
MacLeod made his television debut in 1957 on The Walter Winchell File at the age of 26. His first movie appearance was a small, uncredited role in The True Story of Lynn Stuart in 1958. Soon thereafter, he landed a credited role in I Want to Live!, a 1958 prison drama starring Susan Hayward. He was soon noticed by Blake Edwards, who in 1958 cast him in the pilot episode of his NBC series Peter Gunn, two guest roles on the Edwards CBS series Mr. Lucky in 1959, and as a nervous harried navy yeoman in Operation Petticoat, with Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Operation Petticoat proved to be a breakout role for MacLeod, and he was soon cast in two other Edwards comedies, High Time, with Bing Crosby and The Party with Peter Sellers.
In December 1961, he landed a guest role on The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was his first time working with Mary Tyler Moore. MacLeod also had guest appearances on Perry Mason, The Andy Griffith Show, Ben Casey, The Big Valley, Hogan's Heroes, Ironside, and My Favorite Martian. He played the role of a drug pusher, "Big Chicken", in two episodes of the first season of Hawaii Five-O.
His first regular television role began in 1962 as Joseph "Happy" Haines on McHale's Navy; he left this role after two seasons to appear in the motion picture The Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen.
MacLeod's breakout role as Murray Slaughter on CBS's The Mary Tyler Moore Show won him lasting fame and two Golden Globe Award nominations. His starring role as Captain Stubing on The Love Boat, his next television series, was broadcast in 90 countries worldwide, between 1977 and 1986, spanning nine seasons. His work on that show earned him three Golden Globe nominations. Co-starring with him was a familiar actor and best friend Bernie Kopell as Dr. Adam Bricker and Ted Lange as bartender Isaac Washington. Lange said in a 2017 interview with The Wiseguyz Show of MacLeod that "Oh yeah, sure, Gavin was wonderful. Gavin lives down here in Palm Springs and we're still tight, all of us, Gavin and Bernie and Jill; we still see each other. Fred (Grandy) lives in a different state, we're still close, we're still good friends."
MacLeod became the global ambassador for Princess Cruises in 1986. He played a role in ceremonies launching many of the line's new ships. In 1997, MacLeod joined the Love Boat cast on The Oprah Winfrey Show. After The Love Boat, MacLeod toured with Michael Learned of The Waltons in Love Letters. He made several appearances in musicals such as Gigi and Copacabana between 1997 and 2003. In December 2008, he appeared with the Colorado Symphony in Denver.
MacLeod and his wife were hosts on the Trinity Broadcasting Network for 17 years, primarily hosting a show about marriage called Back on Course. MacLeod appeared in Rich Christiano's Time Changer, a movie about time travel and how the morals of society have moved away from the Bible. He also plays the lead role in Christiano's 2009 film The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry.
Later activity
In April 2010, the entire cast of The Love Boat attended the TV Land Awards with the exception of MacLeod, due to a back operation to repair a couple of injured discs. Former co-star and long-term friend Ted Lange contacted him and received word that MacLeod was doing well. In December, MacLeod appeared as a guest narrator with the Florida Orchestra and Master Chorale of Tampa Bay.
MacLeod served as the honorary Mayor of Pacific Palisades for five years, until Sugar Ray Leonard succeeded him in 2011. On February 28, 2011, MacLeod celebrated his 80th birthday aboard the Golden Princess on Princess Cruises in Los Angeles, California. His friends and family wished him a happy birthday and presented him with a 3-D cake replica of the Pacific Princess, the original "Love Boat".
MacLeod appeared on the special for Betty White's 90th birthday on January 17, 2012. He reunited with White to film "Safety Old School Style", an in-flight safety video for Air New Zealand in 2013. By January 2013, the video had been viewed two million times on YouTube. In October 2013, MacLeod appeared on Today to begin the promotional tour for his new book This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life. This appearance included a special set change to honor MacLeod's appearance on the show. In addition to television appearances, he continued his national book tour.
On November 5, 2013, MacLeod joined his Love Boat castmates live on the CBS daytime show The Talk. A full one-hour episode was dedicated to the cast reunion. The Talk co-hosts dressed in costumes to commemorate their special guests' arrivals. Spanish-American actress Charo also appeared on the reunion show. Charo guest-starred in eight episodes of The Love Boat. Jack Jones performed the Love Boat theme song, which he introduced in 1977.
In December 2013, MacLeod appeared on The 700 Club to discuss his life and career. The following year, on February 1, MacLeod was honored with a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in downtown Palm Springs, California. In January 2015, MacLeod appeared in the Rose Parade along with several other members of the original cast of The Love Boat. Later that same year MacLeod starred in the play Happy Hour at the Coachella Valley Repertory Theatre (CVRep) in Rancho Mirage, California, a role which earned him critical praise.
Writing
In 1987, following MacLeod's conversion and remarriage, he and his wife, Patti, wrote about struggles with divorce and alcoholism in Back On Course: The Remarkable Story of a Divorce That Ended in Remarriage.
In 2013, MacLeod released his memoir, This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life. The book recalls his upbringing, as well as his life after more than fifty years in Hollywood. He said, "... all my living has been based on what other people have written ... I hope it can help others, how I overcame and never gave up. There are so many lessons in life." In the book, MacLeod recounted his stories as a young actor trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood, the lifelong friends he made, his bout with alcoholism and divorce and his journey through faith and Christianity.
Personal life
MacLeod married his second wife Patti in 1974. It was also her second marriage.
During his time as the Captain on The Love Boat, in 1982, MacLeod divorced her. She then spent the next three years seeking help from psychiatrists on both the West and the East coasts. Patti eventually received a telephone call from Shirley Boone, wife of Pat Boone, inviting her to a Christian prayer group that contained a number of famous actresses who started to pray for Gavin.
MacLeod later said, "From that day, I started to think about her. Something told me to call Patti. I called Patti. I went back to see her the following Monday and things haven't been the same since." MacLeod asked her what had happened. She then explained everything to him, including that she had given her life to Jesus Christ. They remarried in 1985. During the mid-1980s, they became evangelical Protestants and credited their faith for bringing them back together.
On September 20, 2009, MacLeod discussed his conversion to Christianity at The Rock Church in Anaheim, California, with further guest appearances in 2012.
Death
MacLeod died at his home in Palm Desert, California, on May 29, 2021, aged 90, after a period of ill health. No cause was given. He is interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cathedral City.
Filmography
Film
Television
References
External links
Official Goodreads Page
TBN page
Gavin MacLeod at Find a Grave
1931 births
2021 deaths
20th-century Christians
20th-century American male actors
21st-century Christians
21st-century American male actors
American evangelicals
American male film actors
American male television actors
American people of Ojibwe descent
Television personalities from New York City
Converts to Christianity
Ithaca College alumni
Male actors from New York City
Ojibwe people
People from Mount Kisco, New York
People from Pleasantville, New York
United States Air Force airmen
Burials at Forest Lawn Cemetery (Cathedral City) | [
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12794 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher%20%28protocol%29 | Gopher (protocol) | The Gopher protocol is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to HTTP. The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.
The protocol was invented by a team led by Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota. It offers some features not natively supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on the documents it stores. Its text menu interface is well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote text-oriented computer terminals, which were still common at the time of its creation in 1991, and the simplicity of its protocol facilitated a wide variety of client implementations. More recent Gopher revisions and graphical clients added support for multimedia.
Gopher's hierarchical structure provided a platform for the first large-scale electronic library connections. The Gopher protocol is still in use by enthusiasts, and although it has been almost entirely supplanted by the Web, a small population of actively-maintained servers remains.
Origins
Gopher system was released in mid-1991 by Mark P. McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota in the United States. Its central goals were, as stated in :
A file-like hierarchical arrangement that would be familiar to users.
A simple syntax.
A system that can be created quickly and inexpensively.
Extensibility of the file system metaphor; allowing addition of searches for example.
Gopher combines document hierarchies with collections of services, including WAIS, the Archie and Veronica search engines, and gateways to other information systems such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Usenet.
The general interest in campus-wide information systems (CWISs) in higher education at the time, and the ease of setup of Gopher servers to create an instant CWIS with links to other sites' online directories and resources were the factors contributing to Gopher's rapid adoption.
The name was coined by Anklesaria as a play on several meanings of the word "gopher". The University of Minnesota mascot is the gopher, a gofer is an assistant who "goes for" things, and a gopher burrows through the ground to reach a desired location.
Decline
The World Wide Web was in its infancy in 1991, and Gopher services quickly became established. By the late 1990s, Gopher had ceased expanding. Several factors contributed to Gopher's stagnation:
In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server. Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations. Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership. In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.
Gopher client functionality was quickly duplicated by the early Mosaic web browser, which subsumed its protocol.
Gopher has a more rigid structure than the free-form HTML of the Web. Every Gopher document has a defined format and type, and the typical user navigates through a single server-defined menu system to get to a particular document. This can be quite different from the way a user finds documents on the Web.
Gopher remains in active use by its enthusiasts, and there have been attempts to revive Gopher on modern platforms and mobile devices. One attempt is The Overbite Project, which hosts various browser extensions and modern clients.
Server census
, there remained about 160 gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2, reflecting a slow growth from 2007 when there were fewer than 100. They are typically infrequently updated. On these servers Veronica indexed approximately 2.5 million unique selectors. A handful of new servers were being set up every year by hobbyists with over 50 having been set up and added to Floodgap's list since 1999. A snapshot of Gopherspace in 2007 circulated on BitTorrent and was still available in 2010. Due to the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, setting up new servers or adding Gopher support to browsers is often done in a tongue-in-cheek manner, principally on April Fools' Day.
In November 2014 Veronica indexed 144 gopher servers, reflecting a small drop from 2012, but within these servers Veronica indexed approximately 3 million unique selectors.
In March 2016 Veronica indexed 135 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 4 million unique selectors.
In March 2017 Veronica indexed 133 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 4.9 million unique selectors.
In May 2018 Veronica indexed 260 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 3.7 million unique selectors.
In May 2019 Veronica indexed 320 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 4.2 million unique selectors.
In January 2020 Veronica indexed 395 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 4.5 million unique selectors.
In February 2021 Veronica indexed 361 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 6 million unique selectors.
In February 2022 Veronica indexed 325 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 5 million unique selectors.
Technical details
The conceptualization of knowledge in "Gopher space" or a "cloud" as specific information in a particular file, and the prominence of the FTP, influenced the technology and the resulting functionality of Gopher.
Gopher characteristics
Gopher is designed to function and to appear much like a mountable read-only global network file system (and software, such as gopherfs, is available that can actually mount a Gopher server as a FUSE resource). At a minimum, whatever can be done with data files on a CD-ROM, can be done on Gopher.
A Gopher system consists of a series of hierarchical hyperlinkable menus. The choice of menu items and titles is controlled by the administrator of the server.
Similar to a file on a Web server, a file on a Gopher server can be linked to as a menu item from any other Gopher server. Many servers take advantage of this inter-server linking to provide a directory of other servers that the user can access.
Protocol
The Gopher protocol was first described in . IANA has assigned TCP port 70 to the Gopher protocol. The protocol is simple to negotiate, making it possible to browse without using a client.
User request
First, the client establishes a TCP connection with the server on port 70, the standard gopher port. The client then sends a string followed by a carriage return followed by a line feed (a "CR + LF" sequence). This is the selector, which identifies the document to be retrieved. If the item selector were an empty line, the default directory would be selected.
Server response
The server then replies with the requested item and closes the connection. According to the protocol, before the connection is closed, the server should send a full-stop (i.e., a period character) on a line by itself. However, not all servers conform to this part of the protocol and the server may close the connection without returning the final full-stop.
The main type of reply from the server is a text or binary resource. Alternatively, the resource can be a menu: a form of structured text resource providing references to other resources.
Because of the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, tools such as netcat make it possible to download Gopher content easily from the command line:
echo jacks/jack.exe | nc gopher.example.org 70 > jack.exe
The protocol is also supported by cURL as of 7.21.2-DEV.
Search request
The selector string in the request can optionally be followed by a tab character and a search string. This is used by item type 7.
Source code of a menu
Gopher menu items are defined by lines of tab-separated values in a text file. This file is sometimes called a gophermap. As the source code to a gopher menu, a gophermap is roughly analogous to an HTML file for a web page. Each tab-separated line (called a selector line) gives the client software a description of the menu item: what it is, what it's called, and where it leads. The client displays the menu items in the order that they appear in the gophermap.
The first character in a selector line indicates the item type, which tells the client what kind of file or protocol the menu item points to. This helps the client decide what to do with it. Gopher's item types are a more basic precursor to the media type system used by the Web and email attachments.
The item type is followed by the user display string (a description or label that represents the item in the menu); the selector (a path or other string for the resource on the server); the hostname (the domain name or IP address of the server), and the network port.
All lines in a gopher menu are terminated by "CR + LF".
For example: The following selector line generates a link to the "/home" directory at the subdomain gopher.floodgap.com, on port 70. The item type of indicates that the resource is a Gopher menu. The string "Floodgap Home" is what the user sees in the menu.
1Floodgap Home /home gopher.floodgap.com 70
Item types
In a Gopher menu's source code, a one-character code indicates what kind of content the client should expect. This code may either be a digit or a letter of the alphabet; letters are case-sensitive.
The technical specification for Gopher, , defines 14 item types. The later gopher+ specification defined an additional 3 types. A one-character code indicates what kind of content the client should expect. Item type is an error code for exception handling. Gopher client authors improvised item types (HTML), (informational message), and (sound file) after the publication of RFC 1436. Browsers like Netscape Navigator and early versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer would prepend the item type code to the selector as described in , so that the type of the gopher item could be determined by the url itself. Most gopher browsers still available, use these prefixes in their urls.
Here is an example gopher session where the user requires a gopher menu ( on the first line):
/Reference
1CIA World Factbook /Archives/mirrors/textfiles.com/politics/CIA gopher.quux.org 70
0Jargon 4.2.0 /Reference/Jargon 4.2.0 gopher.quux.org 70 +
1Online Libraries /Reference/Online Libraries gopher.quux.org 70 +
1RFCs: Internet Standards /Computers/Standards and Specs/RFC gopher.quux.org 70
1U.S. Gazetteer /Reference/U.S. Gazetteer gopher.quux.org 70 +
iThis file contains information on United States fake (NULL) 0
icities, counties, and geographical areas. It has fake (NULL) 0
ilatitude/longitude, population, land and water area, fake (NULL) 0
iand ZIP codes. fake (NULL) 0
i fake (NULL) 0
iTo search for a city, enter the city's name. To search fake (NULL) 0
ifor a county, use the name plus County -- for instance, fake (NULL) 0
iDallas County. fake (NULL) 0
The gopher menu sent back from the server, is a sequence of lines each of which describes an item that can be retrieved. Most clients will display these as hypertext links, and so allow the user to navigate through gopherspace by following the links.
This menu includes a text resource (itemtype on the third line), multiple links to submenus (itemtype , on the second line as well as lines 4-6) and a non-standard information message (from line 7 on), broken down to multiple lines by providing dummy values for selector, host and port.
Web links
Historically, to create a link to a Web server, "GET /" was used as a pseudo-selector to emulate an HTTP GET request. John Goerzen created an addition to the Gopher protocol, commonly referred to as "URL links", that allows links to any protocol that supports URLs. For example, to create a link to http://gopher.quux.org/, the item type is , the display string is the title of the link, the item selector is "URL:http://gopher.quux.org/", and the domain and port are that of the originating Gopher server (so that clients that do not support URL links will query the server and receive an HTML redirection page).
Related technology
Gopher+
Gopher+ is a forward compatible enhancement to the Gopher protocol. Gopher+ works by sending metadata between the client and the server. The enhancement was never widely adopted by Gopher servers.
How it works
The client sends a tab followed by a +. A Gopher+ server will respond with a status line followed by the content the client requested. An item is marked as supporting Gopher+ in the Gopher directory listing by a tab + after the port (this is the case of some of the items in the example above).
Other features
Other features of Gopher+ include:
Item attributes, which can include the items
Administrator
Last date of modification
Different views of the file, like PostScript or plain text, or different languages
Abstract, or description of the item
Interactive queries
Search Engines
Veronica
The master Gopherspace search engine is Veronica. Veronica offers a keyword search of all the public Internet Gopher server menu titles. A Veronica search produces a menu of Gopher items, each of which is a direct pointer to a Gopher data source. Individual Gopher servers may also use localized search engines specific to their content such as Jughead and Jugtail.
Jugtail
Jugtail (formerly Jughead) is a search engine system for the Gopher protocol. It is distinct from Veronica in that it searches a single server at a time.
GopherVR
GopherVR is a 3D virtual reality variant of the original Gopher system.
Client software
Gopher clients
These are clients, libraries, and utilities primarily designed to access gopher resources.
Web clients
Web clients are browsers, libraries, and utilities primarily designed to access world wide web resources, but which maintain gopher support.
Browsers that do not natively support Gopher can still access servers using one of the available Gopher to HTTP gateways.
Gopher support was disabled in Internet Explorer versions 5.x and 6 for Windows in August 2002 by a patch meant to fix a security vulnerability in the browser's Gopher protocol handler to reduce the attack surface which was included in IE6 SP1; however, it can be re-enabled by editing the Windows registry. In Internet Explorer 7, Gopher support was removed on the WinINET level.
Gopher browser extensions
For Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey, Overbite extensions extend Gopher browsing and support the current versions of the browsers (Firefox Quantum v ≥57 and equivalent versions of SeaMonkey):
OverbiteWX redirects gopher:// URLs to a proxy;
OverbiteNX adds native-like support;
for Firefox up to 56.*, and equivalent versions of SeaMonkey, OverbiteFF adds native-like support, but it is no longer maintained
OverbiteWX includes support for accessing Gopher servers not on port 70 using a whitelist and for CSO/ph queries. OverbiteFF always uses port 70.
For Chromium and Google Chrome, Burrow is available. It redirects gopher:// URLs to a proxy. In the past an Overbite proxy-based extension for these browsers was available but is no longer maintained and does not work with the current (>23) releases.
For Konqueror, Kio gopher is available.
Gopher over HTTP gateways
Users of Web browsers that have incomplete or no support for Gopher can access content on Gopher servers via a server gateway or proxy server that converts Gopher menus into HTML; known proxies are the Floodgap Public Gopher proxy and Gopher Proxy. Similarly, certain server packages such as GN and PyGopherd have built-in Gopher to HTTP interfaces. Squid Proxy software gateways any gopher:// URL to HTTP content, enabling any browser or web agent to access gopher content easily.
Gopher clients for mobile devices
Some have suggested that the bandwidth-sparing simple interface of Gopher would be a good match for mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), but so far, mobile adaptations of HTML and XML and other simplified content have proven more popular. The PyGopherd server provides a built-in WML front-end to Gopher sites served with it.
The early 2010s saw a renewed interest in native Gopher clients for popular smartphones: Overbite, an open source client for Android 1.5+ was released in alpha stage in 2010. PocketGopher was also released in 2010, along with its source code, for several Java ME compatible devices. Gopher Client was released in 2016 as a proprietary client for iPhone and iPad devices and is currently maintained.
Other Gopher clients
Gopher popularity was at its height at a time when there were still many equally competing computer architectures and operating systems. As a result, there are several Gopher clients available for Acorn RISC OS, AmigaOS, Atari MiNT, CMS, DOS, classic Mac OS, MVS, NeXT, OS/2 Warp, most UNIX-like operating systems, VMS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x. GopherVR was a client designed for 3D visualization, and there is even a Gopher client in MOO. The majority of these clients are hard-coded to work on TCP port 70.
Server software
Because the protocol is trivial to implement in a basic fashion, there are many server packages still available, and some are still maintained.
See also
References
External links
List of public Gopher servers (Gopher link) (proxied link)
An announcement of Gopher on the Usenet 8 October 1991
Why is Gopher Still Relevant? — a position statement on Gopher's survival
The Web may have won, but Gopher tunnels on — an article published by the technology discussion site Ars Technica about the Gopher community of enthusiasts as of 5 November 2009
History of Gopher — Article in MinnPost
Gopherpedia — Gopher interface for Wikipedia (Gopher link) (proxied link, by another proxy)
Mark McCahill and Farhad Anklesaria – gopher inventors – explain the evolution of gopher: part 1, part 2
Proposed Gopher+ Specification (gopher link)
History of the Internet
Internet Standards
University of Minnesota software
URI schemes | [
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12795 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General%20election | General election | A general election is a political voting election where generally all or most members of a given political body are chosen. These are usually held for a nation, state, or territory's primary legislative body, and are different from by-elections (only one electorate goes to election).
In most systems, a general election is a regularly scheduled election where both a head of government (such as president or prime minister), and either "a class" or all members of a legislature are elected at the same time. Occasionally, dates for general elections may align with dates of elections within different administrative divisions, such as a local election.
United Kingdom
The term general election in the United Kingdom often refers to the elections held on the same day in all constituencies of their Members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons. Under the terms of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, the period between one general election and the next is fixed at 5 years, unless the House of Commons passes
A motion of no confidence in the Government sooner than that, and does not pass a motion of confidence in a new Government within 14 days, or;
a motion, approved by two-thirds of its members, resolving that a general election should take place sooner, or;
a proposal from the Prime Minister to reschedule an election mandated by the Act to no later than two months after the original date. or;
An act specifically calling for a general election. This was not provided for in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. Unlike the second option, this only requires a simple majority. This was used to precipitate the 2019 General Election when the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019 was passed.
The term may also be used to refer to elections to any democratically elected body in which all of the members are up for election. Section 2 of the Scotland Act 1998, for example, specifically refers to ordinary elections to the Scottish Parliament as general elections.
Originally, British elections took place over a period of several weeks, with individual constituencies holding polling on separate days. The Parliament Act 1911 introduced the requirement that elections in all parliamentary constituencies be held on the same day. There has been a convention since the 1930s that general elections in Britain should take place on a Thursday; the last general election to take place on any other weekday was that of 1931.
United States
In U.S. politics, general elections are elections held at any level (e.g. city, county, congressional district, state) that typically involve competition between at least two parties. General elections occur every 4 years (depending on the positions being filled with most positions good for four years) and include the presidential election, but unlike parliamentary systems, the term can also refer to special elections that fill out positions prematurely vacated by the previous office holder (e.g. through death, resignation, etc.). Some parallels can be drawn between the general election in parliamentary systems and the biennial elections determining all House seats, although there is no analogue to "calling early elections" in the U.S., and the members of the elected U.S. Senate face elections of only one-third at a time at two-year intervals including during a general election.
Unlike parliamentary systems where the term general election is distinguished from by-elections or local and regional elections, the term is used in the US about and distinguished from primaries or caucuses, which are intra-party elections meant to select a party's official candidate for a particular race. Thus, if a primary is meant to elect a party's candidate for the position-in-question, a general election is meant to elect who occupies the position itself.
In the State of Louisiana the expression general election means the runoff election which occurs between the two highest candidates as determined by the jungle primary.
Footnotes
External links
International IDEA's Electoral Processes Program
A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825
General Election 2010
Elections | [
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12796 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genotype | Genotype | The genotype of an organism is its complete set of genetic material. Genotype can also be used to refer to the alleles or variants an individual carries in a particular gene or genetic location. The number of alleles an individual can have in a specific gene depends on the number of copies of each chromosome found in that species, also referred to as ploidy. In diploid species like humans, two full sets of chromosomes are present, meaning each individual has two alleles for any given gene. If both alleles are the same, the genotype is referred to as homozygous. If the alleles are different, the genotype is referred to as heterozygous.
Genotype contributes to phenotype, the observable traits and characteristics in an individual or organism. The degree to which genotype affects phenotype depends on the trait. For example, the petal color in a pea plant is exclusively determined by genotype. The petals can be purple or white depending on the alleles present in the pea plant. However, other traits are only partially influenced by genotype. These traits are often called complex traits because they are influenced by additional factors, such as environmental and epigenetic factors. Not all individuals with the same genotype look or act the same way because appearance and behavior are modified by environmental and growing conditions. Likewise, not all organisms that look alike necessarily have the same genotype.
The term genotype was coined by the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen in 1903.
Phenotype
Any given gene will usually cause an observable change in an organism, known as the phenotype. The terms genotype and phenotype are distinct for at least two reasons:
To distinguish the source of an observer's knowledge (one can know about genotype by observing DNA; one can know about phenotype by observing outward appearance of an organism).
Genotype and phenotype are not always directly correlated. Some genes only express a given phenotype in certain environmental conditions. Conversely, some phenotypes could be the result of multiple genotypes. The genotype is commonly mixed up with the phenotype which describes the end result of both the genetic and the environmental factors giving the observed expression (e.g. blue eyes, hair color, or various hereditary diseases).
A simple example to illustrate genotype as distinct from phenotype is the flower colour in pea plants (see Gregor Mendel). There are three available genotypes, PP (homozygous dominant ), Pp (heterozygous), and pp (homozygous recessive). All three have different genotypes but the first two have the same phenotype (purple) as distinct from the third (white).
A more technical example to illustrate genotype is the single-nucleotide polymorphism or SNP. A SNP occurs when corresponding sequences of DNA from different individuals differ at one DNA base, for example where the sequence AAGCCTA changes to AAGCTTA. This contains two alleles : C and T. SNPs typically have three genotypes, denoted generically AA Aa and aa. In the example above, the three genotypes would be CC, CT and TT. Other types of genetic marker, such as microsatellites, can have more than two alleles, and thus many different genotypes.
Penetrance is the proportion of individuals showing a specified genotype in their phenotype under a given set of environmental conditions.
Mendelian inheritance
Traits that are determined exclusively by genotype are typically inherited in a Mendelian pattern. These laws of inheritance were described extensively by Gregor Mendel, who performed experiments with pea plants to determine how traits were passed on from generation to generation. He studied phenotypes that were easily observed, such as plant height, petal color, or seed shape. He was able to observe that if he crossed two true-breeding plants with distinct phenotypes, all the offspring would have the same phenotype. For example, when he crossed a tall plant with a short plant, all the resulting plants would be tall. However, when he self-fertilized the plants that resulted, about 1/4 of the second generation would be short. He concluded that some traits were dominant, such as tall height, and others were recessive, like short height. Though Mendel was not aware at the time, each phenotype he studied was controlled by a single gene with two alleles. In the case of plant height, one allele caused the plants to be tall, and the other caused plants to be short. When the tall allele was present, the plant would be tall, even if the plant was heterozygous. In order for the plant to be short, it had to be homozygous for the recessive allele.
One way this can be illustrated is using a Punnett square. In a Punnett square, the genotypes of the parents are placed on the outside. An uppercase letter is typically used to represent the dominant allele, and a lowercase letter is used to represent the recessive allele. The possible genotypes of the offspring can then be determined by combining the parent genotypes. In the example on the right, both parents are heterozygous, with a genotype of Bb. The offspring can inherit a dominant allele from each parent, making them homozygous with a genotype of BB. The offspring can inherit a dominant allele from one parent and a recessive allele from the other parent, making them heterozygous with a genotype of Bb. Finally, the offspring could inherit a recessive allele from each parent, making them homozygous with a genotype of bb. Plants with the BB and Bb genotypes will look the same, since the B allele is dominant. The plant with the bb genotype will have the recessive trait.
These inheritance patterns can also be applied to hereditary diseases or conditions in humans or animals. Some conditions are inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern, meaning individuals with the condition typically have an affected parent as well. A classic pedigree for an autosomal dominant condition shows affected individuals in every generation. Other conditions are inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern, where affected individuals do not typically have an affected parent. Since each parent must have a copy of the recessive allele in order to have an affected offspring, the parents are referred to as carriers of the condition.
In autosomal conditions, the sex of the offspring does not play a role in their risk of being affected. In sex-linked conditions, the sex of the offspring affects their chances of having the condition. In humans, females inherit two X chromosomes, one from each parent, while males inherit an X chromosome from their mother and a Y chromosome from their father. X-linked dominant conditions can be distinguished from autosomal dominant conditions in pedigrees by the lack of transmission from fathers to sons, since affected fathers only pass their X chromosome to their daughters. In X-linked recessive conditions, males are typically affected more commonly because they are hemizygous, with only one X chromosome. In females, the presence of a second X chromosome will prevent the condition from appearing. Females are therefore carriers of the condition and can pass the trait on to their sons.
Mendelian patterns of inheritance can be complicated by additional factors. Some diseases show incomplete penetrance, meaning not all individuals with the disease-causing allele develop signs or symptoms of the disease. Penetrance can also be age-dependent, meaning signs or symptoms of disease are not visible until later in life. For example, Huntington disease is an autosomal dominant condition, but up to 25% of individuals with the affected genotype will not develop symptoms until after age 50. Another factor that can complicate Mendelian inheritance patterns is variable expressivity, in which individuals with the same genotype show different signs or symptoms of disease. For example, individuals with polydactyly can have a variable number of extra digits.
Non-Mendelian inheritance
Many traits are not inherited in a Mendelian fashion, but have more complex patterns of inheritance.
Incomplete dominance
For some traits, neither allele is completely dominant. Heterozygotes often have an appearance somewhere in between those of homozygotes. For example, a cross between true-breeding red and white Mirabilis jalapa results in pink flowers.
Codominance
Codominance refers to traits in which both alleles are expressed in the offspring in approximately equal amounts. A classic example is the ABO blood group system in humans, where both the A and B alleles are expressed when they are present. Individuals with the AB genotype have both A and B proteins expressed on their red blood cells.
Epistasis
Epistasis is when the phenotype of one gene is affected by one or more other genes. This is often through some sort of masking effect of one gene on the other. For example, the "A" gene codes for hair color, a dominant "A" allele codes for brown hair, and a recessive "a" allele codes for blonde hair, but a separate "B" gene controls hair growth, and a recessive "b" allele causes baldness. If the individual has the BB or Bb genotype, then they produce hair and the hair color phenotype can be observed, but if the individual has a bb genotype, then the person is bald which masks the A gene entirely.
Polygenic traits
A polygenic trait is one whose phenotype is dependent on the additive effects of multiple genes. The contributions of each of these genes are typically small and add up to a final phenotype with a large amount of variation. A well studied example of this is the number of sensory bristles on a fly. These types of additive effects is also the explanation for the amount of variation in human eye color.
Genotyping
Genotyping refers to the method used to determine an individual's genotype. There are a variety of techniques that can be used to assess genotype. The genotyping method typically depends on what information is being sought. Many techniques initially require amplification of the DNA sample, which is commonly done using PCR.
Some techniques are designed to investigate specific SNPs or alleles in a particular gene or set of genes, such as whether an individual is a carrier for a particular condition. This can be done via a variety of techniques, including allele specific oligonucleotide (ASO) probes or DNA sequencing. Tools such as multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification can also be used to look for duplications or deletions of genes or gene sections. Other techniques are meant to assess a large number of SNPs across the genome, such as SNP arrays. This type of technology is commonly used for genome-wide association studies.
Large-scale techniques to assess the entire genome are also available. This includes karyotyping to determine the number of chromosomes an individual has and chromosomal microarrays to assess for large duplications or deletions in the chromosome. More detailed information can be determined using exome sequencing, which provides the specific sequence of all DNA in the coding region of the genome, or whole genome sequencing, which sequences the entire genome including non-coding regions.
See also
Endophenotype
Genotype–phenotype distinction
Nucleic acid sequence
Phenotype
Sequence (biology)
References
External links
Genetic nomenclature
Genetics
Polymorphism (biology)
Biology
DNA sequencing | [
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12797 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard%20Hengeveld | Gerard Hengeveld | Gerard Hengeveld (December 7, 1910 in Kampen – October 28, 2001 in Bergen, North Holland) was a Dutch classical pianist, music composer and educationalist. He is especially known for his compositions of study material for piano. Other compositions include two piano concertos, a violin sonata, and a sonata for cello. Hengeveld was an able interpreter and performer of the music of Bach for piano and harpsichord. He gave regular concerts in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Some of his concerts were captured on record. Hengeveld was a professor at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Amongst his students was Dutch pianist and musicologist Frans Bouwman.
Hengeveld died in 2001 at the age of 90, in Bergen. His closest relative is Nick Hengeveld, who operates a Discord server.
References
External links
Gerard Hengeveld at the Virtual International Authority File
Gerard Hengeveld Discography
Gerard Hengeveld at the Classical Composers Database
1910 births
2001 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Dutch male classical composers
Dutch classical composers
Dutch classical pianists
People from Kampen, Overijssel
20th-century classical pianists
Male classical pianists
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12798 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20William%2C%20Elector%20of%20Brandenburg | George William, Elector of Brandenburg | George William (; 13 November 1595 – 1 December 1640), of the Hohenzollern dynasty, was margrave and elector of Brandenburg and duke of Prussia from 1619 until his death. His reign was marked by ineffective governance during the Thirty Years' War. He was the father of Frederick William, the "Great Elector".
Biography
Born in Cölln on the Spree (today part of Berlin), George William was the son of John Sigismund, Margrave of Brandenburg and Anna of Prussia. His maternal grandfather was Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia. In 1616, he married Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate. Their only son Frederick William would later be known as the "Great Elector". Of his two daughters, the eldest, Louise Charlotte, married Jacob Kettler, Duke of Courland, and the younger, Hedwig Sophie, married William VI, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel.
In 1619, George William inherited the Margravate of Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia, then part of Poland, although his ownership was not confirmed by Sigismund III Vasa until September 1621. He proved a weak and ineffective ruler in a very difficult period of history; possession of Prussia involved him in the 1621 to 1625 Polish–Swedish War, since Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was married to his sister Maria Eleonora.
During the Thirty Years' War, the Calvinist George William tried to remain neutral in the contest between the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II, and his mostly Lutheran opponents. When the war shifted to northern Germany in 1625, this did not protect his lands from being looted by Imperial troops, and he was forced to take sides when Gustavus intervened in the Empire in 1630. However, this simply replaced one set of plunderers with another; Gustavus could not support so large an army, and his unpaid and unfed troops became increasingly mutinous and ill-disciplined.
After Gustavus was killed at Lützen in November 1632, George William joined the Swedish-backed Heilbronn League, until defeat at Nördlingen on 6 September 1634. Following the 1635 Peace of Prague, the League was dissolved, although by now Brandenburg's population had been decimated by the war.
Leaving his Catholic and pro-Imperial chief minister Schwarzenberg to run the government, George William withdrew in 1637 to the relatively untouched region of Prussia, where he lived in retirement until his death at Königsberg in 1640. He was succeeded by his far more accomplished son Frederick William.
Ancestry
References
Sources
[aged 45]
External links
1595 births
1640 deaths
17th-century Dukes of Prussia
People from Berlin
German Calvinist and Reformed Christians
Converts to Calvinism from Lutheranism
Prince-electors of Brandenburg
House of Hohenzollern
16th-century German people
17th-century German people
Dukes of Prussia
Electoral Princes of Brandenburg
German people of the Thirty Years' War | [
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12799 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic%20design | Graphic design | Graphic design is the profession and academic discipline whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. As opposed to art, whose aim is merely contemplation, design is based on the principle of "form follows a specific function".
Therefore, graphic design is an interdisciplinary branch of design whose foundations and objectives revolve around the definition of problems and the determination of objectives for decision-making, through creativity, innovation and lateral thinking along with manual or digital tools, transforming them for proper interpretation. This activity helps in the optimization of graphic communications (see also communication design). It is also known as visual communication design, visual design or editorial design.
The role of the graphic designer in the communication process is that of encoder or interpreter of the message. They work on the interpretation, ordering, and presentation of visual messages. The design work can be based on a customer’s demand, a demand that ends up being established linguistically, either orally or in writing, that is, that graphic design transforms a linguistic message into a graphic manifestation.
Graphic design has, as a field of application, different areas of knowledge focused on any visual communication system. For example, it can be applied in advertising strategies, or it can also be applied in the aviation world or space exploration. In this sense, in some countries graphic design is related as only associated with the production of sketches and drawings, this is incorrect, since visual communication is a small part of a huge range of types and classes where it can be applied.
Given the rapid and massive growth in information sharing, the demand for experienced designers is greater than ever, particularly because of the development of new technologies and the need to pay attention to human factors beyond the competence of the engineers who develop them.
Terminology
The first known use of the term "graphic design" in the way in which we understand it today was in the 4 July 1908 issue (volume 9, number 27) of Organized Labor, a publication of the Labor Unions of San Francisco, in an article about technical education for printers:
An Enterprising Trades Union
… The admittedly high standard of intelligence which prevails among printers is an assurance that with the elemental principles of design at their finger ends many of them will grow in knowledge and develop into specialists in graphic design and decorating. …
A decade later, the 1917–1918 course catalog of the California School of Arts & Crafts advertised a course titled Graphic Design and Lettering, which replaced one called Advanced Design and Lettering. Both classes were taught by Frederick Meyer; it is unclear why he changed the name of the course.
History
The origins of graphic design can be traced from the origins of human existence, from the caves of Lascaux, to Rome's Trajan's Column to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, to the neon lights of Ginza, Tokyo. In "Babylon, artisans pressed cuneiform inscriptions into clay bricks or tablets which were used for construction. The bricks gave information such as the name of the reigning monarch, the builder, or some other dignitary". This was the first known road sign announcing the name of the governor of a state or mayor of the city. The Egyptians developed communication by hieroglyphics that used picture symbols dating as far back as 136 B.C. found on the Rosetta Stone. "The Rosetta stone, found by one of Napoleon's engineers was an advertisement for the Egyptian ruler, Ptolemy as the "true Son of the Sun, the Father of the Moon, and the Keeper of the Happiness of Men" The Egyptians also invented papyrus, paper made from reeds found along the Nile, on which they transcribed advertisements more common among their people at the time. During the "Dark Ages", from 500 AD to 1450 AD, monks created elaborate, illustrated manuscripts.
In both its lengthy history and in the relatively recent explosion of visual communication in the 20th and 21st centuries, the distinction between advertising, art, graphic design and fine art has disappeared. They share many elements, theories, principles, practices, languages and sometimes the same benefactor or client. In advertising, the ultimate objective is the sale of goods and services. In graphic design, "the essence is to give order to information, form to ideas, expression, and feeling to artifacts that document the human experience."
Graphic design in the United States began with Benjamin Franklin who used his newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette to master the art of publicity, to promote his own books, and to influence the masses. "Benjamin Franklin's ingenuity gained in strength as did his cunning and in 1737 he had replaced his counterpart in Pennsylvania, Andrew Bradford as postmaster and printer after a competition he instituted and won. He showed his prowess by running an ad in his General Magazine and the Historical Chronicle of British Plantations in America (the precursor to the Saturday Evening Post) that stressed the benefits offered by a stove he invented, named the Pennsylvania Fireplace. His invention is still sold today and is known as the Franklin stove. "
American advertising initially imitated British newspapers and magazines. Advertisements were printed in scrambled type and uneven lines, which made them difficult to read. Franklin better organized this by adding a 14-point type for the first line of the advertisement; although later shortened and centered it, making "headlines". Franklin added illustrations, something that London printers had not attempted. Franklin was the first to utilize logos, which were early symbols that announced such services as opticians by displaying golden spectacles. Franklin taught advertisers that the use of detail was important in marketing their products. Some advertisements ran for 10-20 lines, including color, names, varieties, and sizes of the goods that were offered.
The advent of printing
During the Tang Dynasty (618–907) wood blocks were cut to print on textiles and later to reproduce Buddhist texts. A Buddhist scripture printed in 868 is the earliest known printed book. Beginning in the 11th century, longer scrolls and books were produced using movable type printing, making books widely available during the Song dynasty (960–1279).
During the 17th-18th century movable type was used for handbills or trade cards which were printed from wood or copper engravings. These documents announced a business and its location. English painter William Hogarth used his skill in engraving was one of the first to design for business trade.
In Mainz Germany, in 1448, Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type using a new metal alloy for use in a printing press and opened a new era of commerce. This made graphics more readily available since mass printing dropped the price of printing material significantly. Previously, most advertising was word of mouth. In France and England, for example, criers announced products for sale just as ancient Romans had done.
The printing press made books more widely available. Aldus Manutius developed the book structure that became the foundation of western publication design. This era of graphic design is called Humanist or Old Style. Additionally, William Caxton, England's first printer produced religious books, but had trouble selling them. He discovered the use of leftover pages and used them to announce the books and post them on church doors. This practice was termed "squis" or "pin up" posters, in approximately 1612, becoming the first form of print advertising in Europe. The term Siquis came from the Roman era when public notices were posted stating "if anybody...", which in Latin is "si quis". These printed announcements were followed by later public registers of wants called want ads and in some areas such as the first periodical in Paris advertising was termed "advices". The "Advices" were what we know today as want ad media or advice columns.
In 1638 Harvard University received a printing press from England. More than 52 years passed before London bookseller Benjamin Harris received another printing press in Boston. Harris published a newspaper in serial form, Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick. It was four pages long and suppressed by the government after its first edition.
John Campbell is credited for the first newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, which appeared in 1704. The paper was known during the revolution as "Weeklies". The name came from the 13 hours required for the ink to dry on each side of the paper. The solution was to first, print the ads and then to print the news on the other side the day before publication. The paper was four pages long having ads on at least 20%-30% of the total paper, (pages one and four) the hot news was located on the inside. The initial use of the Boston News-Letter carried Campbell's own solicitations for advertising from his readers. Campbell's first paid advertisement was in his third edition, May 7 or 8th, 1704. Two of the first ads were for stolen anvils. The third was for real estate in Oyster Bay, owned by William Bradford, a pioneer printer in New York, and the first to sell something of value. Bradford published his first newspaper in 1725, New York's first, the New-York Gazette. Bradford's son preceded him in Philadelphia publishing the American Weekly Mercury, 1719. The Mercury and William Brooker's Massachusetts Gazette, first published a day earlier.
Nineteenth century
In 1849, Henry Cole became one of the major forces in design education in Great Britain, informing the government of the importance of design in his Journal of Design and Manufactures. He organized the Great Exhibition as a celebration of modern industrial technology and Victorian design.
From 1891 to 1896, William Morris' Kelmscott Press published some of the most significant of the graphic design products of the Arts and Crafts movement, and made a lucrative business of creating and selling stylish books. Morris created a market for works of graphic design in their own right and a profession for this new type of art. The Kelmscott Press is characterized by an obsession with historical styles. This historicism was the first significant reaction to the state of nineteenth-century graphic design. Morris' work, along with the rest of the Private Press movement, directly influenced Art Nouveau.
During the first half of the ninetieth century, there were diverse styles that were used by various graphic designers. Several examples are Greek, Roman, Classical, Egyptian, and Gothic. The early part of the century has often been regarded as being lackluster for reviving historic styles. However, the latter part of the century would showcase designers using these existing styles as a conceptual framework to expand their own styles. For instance, designer Augustus W.N. Pugin has a quote in the book The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841) that says Gothic is "not a style, but a principle."
Will H. Bradley became one of the notable graphic designers in the late nineteenth-century due to creating art pieces in various Art Nouveau styles. Bradley created a number of designs as promotions for a literary magazine titled The Chap-Book. One of them was a Thanksgiving poster that was finished in 1895. The poster is recognized for including a system of curved lines and forms. The poster also borrows elements from Japanese printing styles by using flat colored planes. Bradley's works have proven to be inspiration as the concept of art posters would become more commonplace by the early twentieth century. In addition, art posters would become a significant aspect in the subject of advertising.
Twentieth century
In 1917, Frederick H. Meyer, director and instructor at the California School of Arts and Crafts, taught a class entitled "Graphic Design and Lettering". Raffe's Graphic Design, published in 1927, was the first book to use "Graphic Design" in its title.
The signage in the London Underground is a classic design example of the modern era. Although he lacked artistic training, Frank Pick led the Underground Group design and publicity movement. The first Underground station signs were introduced in 1908 with a design of a solid red disk with a blue bar in the center and the name of the station. The station name was in white sans-serif letters. It was in 1916 when Pick used the expertise of Edward Johnston to design a new typeface for the Underground. Johnston redesigned the Underground sign and logo to include his typeface on the blue bar in the center of a red circle.
In the 1920s, Soviet constructivism applied 'intellectual production' in different spheres of production. The movement saw individualistic art as useless in revolutionary Russia and thus moved towards creating objects for utilitarian purposes. They designed buildings, theater sets, posters, fabrics, clothing, furniture, logos, menus, etc.
Jan Tschichold codified the principles of modern typography in his 1928 book, New Typography. He later repudiated the philosophy he espoused in this book as fascistic, but it remained influential. Tschichold, Bauhaus typographers such as Herbert Bayer and László Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky greatly influenced graphic design. They pioneered production techniques and stylistic devices used throughout the twentieth century. The following years saw graphic design in the modern style gain widespread acceptance and application.
The post-World War II American economy revealed a greater need for graphic design, mainly in advertising and packaging. The spread of the German Bauhaus school of design to Chicago in 1937 brought a "mass-produced" minimalism to America; sparking "modern" architecture and design. Notable names in mid-century modern design include Adrian Frutiger, designer of the typefaces Univers and Frutiger; Paul Rand, who took the principles of the Bauhaus and applied them to popular advertising and logo design, helping to create a uniquely American approach to European minimalism while becoming one of the principal pioneers of corporate identity, a subset of graphic design. Alex Steinweiss is credited with the invention of the album cover; and Josef Müller-Brockmann, who designed posters in a severe yet accessible manner typical of the 1950s and 1970s era.
The professional graphic design industry grew in parallel with consumerism. This raised concerns and criticisms, notably from within the graphic design community with the First Things First manifesto. First launched by Ken Garland in 1964, it was re-published as the First Things First 2000 manifesto in 1999 in the magazine Emigre 51 stating "We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design." Both editions attracted signatures from practitioners and thinkers such as Rudy VanderLans, Erik Spiekermann, Ellen Lupton and Rick Poynor. The 2000 manifesto was also published in Adbusters, known for its strong critiques of visual culture.
Applications
Graphic design is applied to everything visual, from road signs to technical schematics, from interoffice memorandums to reference manuals.
Design can aid in selling a product or idea. It is applied to products and elements of company identity such as logos, colors, packaging and text as part of branding (see also advertising). Branding has become increasingly more important in the range of services offered by graphic designers. Graphic designers often form part of a branding team.
Graphic design is applied in the entertainment industry in decoration, scenery and visual story telling. Other examples of design for entertainment purposes include novels, vinyl album covers, comic books, DVD covers, opening credits and closing credits in filmmaking, and programs and props on stage. This could also include artwork used for T-shirts and other items screenprinted for sale.
From scientific journals to news reporting, the presentation of opinion and facts is often improved with graphics and thoughtful compositions of visual information - known as information design. Newspapers, magazines, blogs, television and film documentaries may use graphic design. With the advent of the web, information designers with experience in interactive tools are increasingly used to illustrate the background to news stories. Information design can include data visualization, which involves using programs to interpret and form data into a visually compelling presentation, and can be tied in with information graphics.
Skills
A graphic design project may involve the stylization and presentation of existing text and either preexisting imagery or images developed by the graphic designer. Elements can be incorporated in both traditional and digital form, which involves the use of visual arts, typography, and page layout techniques. Graphic designers organize pages and optionally add graphic elements. Graphic designers can commission photographers or illustrators to create original pieces. Designers use digital tools, often referred to as interactive design, or multimedia design. Designers need communication skills to convince an audience and sell their designs.
The "process school" is concerned with communication; it highlights the channels and media through which messages are transmitted and by which senders and receivers encode and decode these messages. The semiotic school treats a message as a construction of signs which through interaction with receivers, produces meaning; communication as an agent.
Typography
Typography includes type design, modifying type glyphs and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using illustration techniques. Type arrangement is the selection of typefaces, point size, tracking (the space between all characters used), kerning (the space between two specific characters) and leading (line spacing).
Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic artists, art directors, and clerical workers. Until the digital age, typography was a specialized occupation. Certain fonts communicate or resemble stereotypical notions. For example, 1942 Report is a font which types text akin to a typewriter or a vintage report.
Page layout
Page layout deals with the arrangement of elements (content) on a page, such as image placement, text layout and style. Page design has always been a consideration in printed material and more recently extended to displays such as web pages. Elements typically consist of type (text), images (pictures), and (with print media) occasionally place-holder graphics such as a dieline for elements that are not printed with ink such as die/laser cutting, foil stamping or blind embossing.
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing on paper and other materials or surfaces. The process is capable of producing multiples of the same work, each called a print. Each print is an original, technically known as an impression. Prints are created from a single original surface, technically a matrix. A matrix is essentially a template, and can be made of wood, metal, or glass. The design is created on the matrix by working its flat surface with either tools or chemical. Common types of matrices include: plates of metal, usually copper or zinc for engraving or etching; stone, used for lithography; blocks of wood for woodcuts, linoleum for lino-cuts and fabric plates for screen-printing. Works printed from a single plate create an edition, in modern times usually each signed and numbered to form a limited edition. Prints may be published in book form, as artist's books. A single print could be the product of one or multiple techniques.
Aside from technology, graphic design requires judgment and creativity. Critical, observational, quantitative and analytic thinking are required for design layouts and rendering. If the executor is merely following a solution (e.g. sketch, script or instructions) provided by another designer (such as an art director), then the executor is not usually considered the designer.
Strategy
Strategy is becoming more and more essential to effective graphic design. The main distinction between graphic design and art is that graphic design solves a problem as well as being aesthetically pleasing. This balance is where strategy comes in. It is important for a graphic designer to understand their clients' needs, as well as the needs of the people who will be interacting with the design. It is the designer's job to combine business and creative objectives to elevate the design beyond purely aesthetic means.
Tools
The method of presentation (e.g. Arrangements, style, medium) is important to the design. The development and presentation tools can change how an audience perceives a project. The image or layout is produced using traditional media and guides, or digital image editing tools on computers. Tools in computer graphics often take on traditional names such as "scissors" or "pen". Some graphic design tools such as a grid are used in both traditional and digital form.
In the mid-1980s desktop publishing and graphic art software applications introduced computer image manipulation and creation capabilities that had previously been manually executed. Computers enabled designers to instantly see the effects of layout or typographic changes, and to simulate the effects of traditional media. Traditional tools such as pencils can be useful even when computers are used for finalization; a designer or art director may sketch numerous concepts as part of the creative process. Styluses can be used with tablet computers to capture hand drawings digitally.
Computers and software
Designers disagree whether computers enhance the creative process. Some designers argue that computers allow them to explore multiple ideas quickly and in more detail than can be achieved by hand-rendering or paste-up. While other designers find the limitless choices from digital design can lead to paralysis or endless iterations with no clear outcome.
Most designers use a hybrid process that combines traditional and computer-based technologies. First, hand-rendered layouts are used to get approval to execute an idea, then the polished visual product is produced on a computer.
Graphic designers are expected to be proficient in software programs for image-making, typography and layout. Nearly all of the popular and "industry standard" software programs used by graphic designers since the early 1990s are products of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Adobe Photoshop (a raster-based program for photo editing) and Adobe Illustrator (a vector-based program for drawing) are often used in the final stage. Some designers across the world use CorelDraw. CorelDraw is a vector graphics editor software developed and marketed by Corel Corporation. Open source software used to edit the vector graphis is Inkscape. Primary file format used in Inkscape is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). You can import or export the file in any other vector format. Designers often use pre-designed raster images and vector graphics in their work from online design databases. Raster images may be edited in Adobe Photoshop, vector logos and illustrations in Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw, and the final product assembled in one of the major page layout programs, such as Adobe InDesign, Serif PagePlus and QuarkXpress.
Powerful open-source programs (which are free) are also used by both professionals and casual users for graphic design, these include Inkscape (for vector graphics), GIMP (for photo-editing and image manipulation), Krita (for painting), and Scribus (for page layout).
Related design fields
Interface design
Since the advent of personal computers, many graphic designers have become involved in interface design, in an environment commonly referred to as a Graphical User Interface (GUI). This has included web design and software design when end user-interactivity is a design consideration of the layout or interface. Combining visual communication skills with an understanding of user interaction and online branding, graphic designers often work with software developers and web developers to create the look and feel of a web site or software application. An important aspect of interface design is icon design.
User experience design
User experience design (UX) is the study, analysis, and development of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the creation of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function.
Experiential graphic design
Experiential graphic design is the application of communication skills to the built environment. This area of graphic design requires practitioners to understand physical installations that have to be manufactured and withstand the same environmental conditions as buildings. As such, it is a cross-disciplinary collaborative process involving designers, fabricators, city planners, architects, manufacturers and construction teams.
Experiential graphic designers try to solve problems that people encounter while interacting with buildings and space (also called environmental graphic design). Examples of practice areas for environmental graphic designers are wayfinding, placemaking, branded environments, exhibitions and museum displays, public installations and digital environments.
Occupations
Graphic design career paths cover all parts of the creative spectrum and often overlap. Workers perform specialized tasks, such as design services, publishing, advertising and public relations. As of 2017, median pay was $48,700 per year. The main job titles within the industry are often country specific. They can include graphic designer, art director, creative director, animator and entry level production artist. Depending on the industry served, the responsibilities may have different titles such as "DTP Associate" or "Graphic Artist". The responsibilities may involve specialized skills such as illustration, photography, animation, visual effects or interactive design.
Employment in design of online projects was expected to increase by 35% by 2026, while employment in traditional media, such as newspaper and book design, expect to go down by 22%. Graphic designers will be expected to constantly learn new techniques, programs, and methods.
Graphic designers can work within companies devoted specifically to the industry, such as design consultancies or branding agencies, others may work within publishing, marketing or other communications companies. Especially since the introduction of personal computers, many graphic designers work as in-house designers in non-design oriented organizations. Graphic designers may also work freelance, working on their own terms, prices, ideas, etc.
A graphic designer typically reports to the art director, creative director or senior media creative. As a designer becomes more senior, they spend less time designing and more time leading and directing other designers on broader creative activities, such as brand development and corporate identity development. They are often expected to interact more directly with clients, for example taking and interpreting briefs.
Crowdsourcing in graphic design
Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine first used the term "crowdsourcing" in his 2006 article, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing." It spans such creative domains as graphic design, architecture, apparel design, writing, illustration etc. Tasks may be assigned to individuals or a group and may be categorized as convergent or divergent. An example of a divergent task is generating alternative designs for a poster. An example of a convergent task is selecting one poster design. Companies, Startups, Small businesses & Entrepreneurs have all benefitted a lot from design crowdsourcing since it helps them source great graphic designs at a fraction of the budget they used to spend before. Getting a logo design through crowdsourcing being one of the most common. Major companies who operate in the design crowdsourcing space are generally referred to as design contest sites.
See also
Related areas
Related topics
References
Bibliography
Fiell, Charlotte and Fiell, Peter (editors). Contemporary Graphic Design. Taschen Publishers, 2008.
Wiedemann, Julius and Taborda, Felipe (editors). Latin-American Graphic Design. Taschen Publishers, 2008.
External links
The Universal Arts of Graphic Design – Documentary produced by Off Book
Graphic Designers, entry in the Occupational Outlook Handbook of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States Department of Labor
Communication design | [
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12800 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great%20Rift%20Valley | Great Rift Valley | The Great Rift Valley is a series of contiguous geographic trenches, approximately in total length, that runs from Lebanon in Asia to Mozambique in Southeast Africa. While the name continues in some usages, it is rarely used in geology as it is considered an imprecise merging of separate though related rift and fault systems.
Today, the term is most often used to refer to the valley of the East African Rift, the divergent plate boundary which extends from the Afar Triple Junction southward across eastern Africa, and is in the process of splitting the African Plate into two new separate plates. Geologists generally refer to these incipient plates as the Nubian Plate and the Somali Plate.
Theoretical extent
Today these rifts and faults are seen as distinct, although connected, but originally, the Great Rift Valley was thought to be a single feature that extended from Lebanon in the north to Mozambique in the south, where it constitutes one of two distinct physiographic provinces of the East African mountains. It included what today is called the Lebanese section of the Dead Sea Transform, the Jordan Rift Valley, Red Sea Rift and the East African Rift. These rifts and faults were formed 35 million years ago.
Asia
The northernmost parts of the Rift corresponds to the central section of what is called today the Dead Sea Transform (DST) or Rift. This midsection of the DST forms the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, separating the Lebanon from the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. Further south it is known as the Hula Valley separating the Galilee mountains and the Golan Heights.
The Jordan River begins here and flows southward through Lake Hula into the Sea of Galilee in Israel. The Rift then continues south through the Jordan Rift Valley into the Dead Sea on the Israeli-Jordanian border. From the Dead Sea southwards, the Rift is occupied by the Wadi Arabah, then the Gulf of Aqaba, and then the Red Sea.
Off the southern tip of Sinai in the Red Sea, the Dead Sea Transform meets the Red Sea Rift which runs the length of the Red Sea. The Red Sea Rift comes ashore to meet the East African Rift and the Aden Ridge in the Afar Depression of East Africa. The junction of these three rifts is called the Afar Triple Junction.
Africa
The East African Rift follows the Red Sea to the end before turning inland into the Ethiopian highlands, dividing the country into two large and adjacent but separate mountainous regions. In Kenya, Uganda and the fringes of South Sudan, the Great Rift runs along two separate branches that are joined to each other only at their southern end, in Southern Tanzania along its border with Zambia. The two branches are called the Western Rift Valley and the Eastern Rift Valley.
The Western Rift, also called the Albertine Rift, is bordered by some of the highest mountains in Africa, including the Virunga Mountains, Mitumba Mountains, and Ruwenzori Range. It contains the Rift Valley lakes, which include some of the deepest lakes in the world (up to deep at Lake Tanganyika).
Much of this area lies within the boundaries of national parks such as Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwenzori National Park and Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda, and Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda. Lake Victoria is considered to be part of the rift valley system although it actually lies between the two branches. All of the African Great Lakes were formed as the result of the rift, and most lie in territories within the rift.
In Kenya, the valley is deepest to the north of Nairobi. As the lakes in the Eastern Rift have no outlet to the sea and tend to be shallow, they have a high mineral content as the evaporation of water leaves the salts behind. For example, Lake Magadi has high concentrations of soda (sodium carbonate) and Lake Elmenteita, Lake Bogoria, and Lake Nakuru are all strongly alkaline, while the freshwater springs supplying Lake Naivasha are essential to support its current biological variety.
The southern section of the Rift Valley includes Lake Malawi, the third-deepest freshwater body in the world, reaching in depth and separating the Nyassa plateau of Northern Mozambique from Malawi; it ends in the Zambezi valley.
It conclusion it tuns through the African nations of Eriteria, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, The DRC, Burundi, Rwanada, and Ugana.
See also
Great Rift Valley, Ethiopia
Great Rift Valley, Kenya
The Great Rift: Africa's Wild Heart, a BBC/Animal Planet production
Main earthquakes
1837 Galilee earthquake
2005 Lake Tanganyika earthquake
2008 Lake Kivu earthquake
References
Further reading
Africa's Great Rift Valley, 2001,
Tribes of the Great Rift Valley, 2007,
East African Rift Valley lakes, 2006,
Photographic atlas of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge Rift Valley, 1977,
Rift Valley fever : an emerging human and animal problem, 1982,
Rift valley: definition and geologic significance, Giacomo Corti (National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources) – The Ethiopian Rift Valley, 2013,
Big crack is evidence that East Africa could be splitting in two, by Lucia Perez Diaz, CNN. Updated April 5, 2018
External links
Article on geology.com
Geological Structure
Rifts and grabens
Landforms of Africa
Landforms of the Middle East
Landforms of Israel
Landforms of Syria
Landforms of Egypt
Landforms of Lebanon
Landforms of Ethiopia
Landforms of Kenya
Landforms of Saudi Arabia
Landforms of Yemen
Landforms of Tanzania
Landforms of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Landforms of Uganda
Landforms of Burundi
Geology of Israel
Geology of Syria
Geology of Egypt
Geology of Lebanon
Geology of Ethiopia
Geology of Kenya
Geology of Saudi Arabia
Geology of Yemen
Geology of Tanzania
Geology of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Geology of Uganda
Geology of Burundi
Geology of Africa
Physiographic provinces | [
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12804 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori%20Rasputin | Grigori Rasputin | Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (; ; – ) was a Russian mystic and self-proclaimed holy man who befriended the family of Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, and gained considerable influence in late Imperial Russia.
Rasputin was born to a peasant family in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye in the Tyumensky Uyezd of Tobolsk Governorate (now Yarkovsky District of Tyumen Oblast). He had a religious conversion experience after taking a pilgrimage to a monastery in 1897. He has been described as a monk or as a "strannik" (wanderer or pilgrim), though he held no official position in the Russian Orthodox Church. He traveled to Saint Petersburg in 1903 or the winter of 1904–1905, where he captivated some church and social leaders. He became a society figure and met Emperor Nicholas and Empress Alexandra in November 1905.
In late 1906, Rasputin began acting as a healer for the imperial couple's only son, Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia. He was a divisive figure at court, seen by some Russians as a mystic, visionary, and prophet, and by others as a religious charlatan. The high point of Rasputin's power was in 1915 when Nicholas II left St. Petersburg to oversee Russian armies fighting World War I, increasing both Alexandra and Rasputin's influence. Russian defeats mounted during the war, however, and both Rasputin and Alexandra became increasingly unpopular. In the early morning of , Rasputin was assassinated by a group of conservative noblemen who opposed his influence over Alexandra and Nicholas.
Historians often suggest that Rasputin's scandalous and sinister reputation helped discredit the tsarist government and thus helped precipitate the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty a few weeks after he was assassinated. Accounts of his life and influence were often based on hearsay and rumor.
Early life
Rasputin was born a peasant in the small village of Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River in the Tobolsk Governorate (now Tyumen Oblast) in the Russian Empire. According to official records, he was born on and christened the following day. He was named for St. Gregory of Nyssa, whose feast was celebrated on 10 January.
There are few records of Rasputin's parents. His father, Yefim, was a peasant farmer and church elder who had been born in Pokrovskoye in 1842 and married Rasputin's mother, Anna Parshukova, in 1863. Yefim also worked as a government courier, ferrying people and goods between Tobolsk and Tyumen. The couple had seven other children, all of whom died in infancy and early childhood; there may have been a ninth child, Feodosiya. According to historian Joseph T. Fuhrmann, Rasputin was certainly close to Feodosiya and was godfather to her children, but "the records that have survived do not permit us to say more than that".
According to historian Douglas Smith, Rasputin's youth and early adulthood are "a black hole about which we know almost nothing", though the lack of reliable sources and information did not stop others from fabricating stories about his parents and his youth after Rasputin's rise to fame. Historians agree, however, that like most Siberian peasants, including his mother and father, Rasputin was not formally educated and remained illiterate well into his early adulthood. Local archival records suggest that he had a somewhat unruly youth—possibly involving drinking, small thefts, and disrespect for local authorities—but contain no evidence of his being charged with stealing horses, blasphemy, or bearing false witness, all major crimes later imputed to him as a young man.
In 1886, Rasputin traveled to Abalak, Russia, some 250 km east-northeast of Tyumen and 2,800 km east of Moscow, where he met a peasant girl named Praskovya Dubrovina. After a courtship of several months, they married in February 1887. Praskovya remained in Pokrovskoye throughout Rasputin's later travels and rise to prominence and remained devoted to him until his death. The couple had seven children, though only three survived to adulthood: Dmitry (b. 1895), Maria (b. 1898), and Varvara (b. 1900).
Religious conversion
In 1897, Rasputin developed a renewed interest in religion and left Pokrovskoye to go on a pilgrimage. His reasons are unclear; according to some sources, Rasputin left the village to escape punishment for his role in horse theft. Other sources suggest he had a vision of the Virgin Mary or of St. Simeon of Verkhoturye, while still others suggest that Rasputin's pilgrimage was inspired by a young theological student, Melity Zaborovsky. Whatever his reasons, Rasputin cast off his old life: he was twenty-eight, married ten years, with an infant son and another child on the way. According to Douglas Smith, his decision "could only have been occasioned by some sort of emotional or spiritual crisis".
Rasputin had undertaken earlier, shorter pilgrimages to the Holy Znamensky Monastery at Abalak and to Tobolsk's cathedral, but his visit to the St. Nicholas Monastery at Verkhoturye in 1897 transformed him. There, he met and was "profoundly humbled" by a starets (elder) known as Makary. Rasputin may have spent several months at Verkhoturye, and it was perhaps here that he learned to read and write, but he later complained about the monastery, claiming that some of the monks engaged in homosexuality and criticizing monastic life as too coercive. He returned to Pokrovskoye a changed man, looking disheveled and behaving differently. He became a vegetarian, swore off alcohol, and prayed and sang much more fervently than he had in the past.
Rasputin spent the years that followed as a strannik (a holy wanderer or pilgrim), leaving Pokrovskoye for months or even years at a time to wander the country and visit a variety of holy sites. It is possible he wandered as far as Mount Athos—the center of Eastern Orthodox monastic life—in 1900.
By the early 1900s, Rasputin had developed a small circle of followers, primarily family members, and other local peasants, who prayed with him on Sundays and other holy days when he was in Pokrovskoye. Building a makeshift chapel in Efim's root cellar—Rasputin was still living within his father's household at the time—the group held secret prayer meetings there. These meetings were the subject of some suspicion and hostility from the village priest and other villagers. It was rumored that female followers were ceremonially washing him before each meeting, that the group sang strange songs, and even that Rasputin had joined the Khlysty, a religious sect whose ecstatic rituals were rumored to include self-flagellation and sexual orgies. According to historian Joseph Fuhrmann, however, "repeated investigations failed to establish that Rasputin was ever a member of the sect", and rumors that he was a Khlyst appear to have been unfounded.
Rise to prominence
Word of Rasputin's activity and charisma began to spread in Siberia during the early 1900s. At some point during 1904 or 1905, he traveled to the city of Kazan, where he acquired a reputation as a wise starets, or holy man, who could help people resolve their spiritual crises and anxieties. Despite rumors that Rasputin was having sex with female followers, he made a favorable impression on the father superior of the Seven Lakes Monastery outside Kazan, as well as local church officials Archimandrite Andrei and Bishop Chrysthanos, who gave him a letter of recommendation to Bishop Sergei, the rector of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, and arranged for him to travel to St. Petersburg.
Upon meeting Sergei at the Nevsky Monastery, Rasputin was introduced to church leaders, including Archimandrite Theofan, inspector of the theological seminary, who was well-connected in St. Petersburg society and later served as confessor to the tsar and his wife. Theofan was so impressed with Rasputin that he invited him to stay in his home. Theofan became one of Rasputin's most important and influential friends in St. Petersburg, and gained him entry to many of the influential salons where the aristocracy gathered for religious discussions. It was through these meetings that Rasputin attracted some of his early and influential followers - many of whom would later turn against him.
Alternative religious movements such as spiritualism and theosophy had become popular among the city's aristocracy before Rasputin's arrival in St. Petersburg, and many of the aristocracy were intensely curious about the occult and the supernatural. Rasputin's ideas and "strange manners" made him the subject of intense curiosity among St Petersburg's elite, who according to historian Joseph Fuhrmann were "bored, cynical, and seeking new experiences" during this period. His appeal may have been enhanced by the fact that he was also a native Russian, unlike other self-described "holy men" such as Nizier Anthelme Philippe and Gérard Encausse, who had previously been popular in St Petersburg.
According to Joseph T. Fuhrmann, Rasputin stayed in St. Petersburg for only a few months on his first visit and returned to Pokrovskoye in the fall of 1903. Historian Douglas Smith, however, argues that it is impossible to know whether Rasputin stayed in St. Petersburg or returned to Pokrovskoye at some point between his first arrival and 1905. Regardless, by 1905 Rasputin had formed friendships with several members of the aristocracy, including the "Black Princesses", Militsa and Anastasia of Montenegro, who had married the tsar's cousins (Grand Duke Peter Nikolaevich and Prince George Maximilianovich Romanowsky), and were instrumental in introducing Rasputin to the tsar and his family.
Rasputin first met the tsar on 1 November 1905, at the Peterhof Palace. The tsar recorded the event in his diary, writing that he and Alexandra had "made the acquaintance of a man of God – Grigory, from Tobolsk province". Rasputin returned to Pokrovskoye shortly after their first meeting and did not return to St. Petersburg until July 1906. On his return, Rasputin sent Nicholas a telegram asking to present the tsar with an icon of Simeon of Verkhoturye. He met with Nicholas and Alexandra on 18 July and again in October, when he first met their children. At some point, the royal family became convinced that Rasputin possessed the miraculous power to heal Alexei, but historians disagree over when: according to Orlando Figes, Rasputin was first introduced to the tsar and tsarina as a healer who could help their son in November 1905, while Joseph Fuhrmann has speculated that it was in October 1906 that Rasputin was first asked to pray for the health of Alexei.
Healer to Alexei
Much of Rasputin's influence with the royal family stemmed from the belief by Alexandra and others that he had on several occasions eased the pain and stopped the bleeding of tsarevich Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia. According to historian Marc Ferro, the tsarina had a "passionate attachment" to Rasputin, believing he could heal her son's affliction. Harold Shukman wrote that Rasputin became "an indispensable member of the royal entourage". It is unclear when Rasputin first learned of Alexei's hemophilia, or when he first acted as a healer. He may have been aware of Alexei's condition as early as October 1906, and was summoned by Alexandra to pray for Alexei when he had an internal hemorrhage in the spring of 1907. Alexei recovered the next morning. Rasputin had been rumored to be capable of faith-healing since his arrival in St. Petersburg, and the tsarina's friend Anna Vyrubova became convinced that Rasputin had miraculous powers shortly thereafter. Vyrubova would become one of Rasputin's most influential advocates.
During the summer of 1912, Alexei developed a hemorrhage in his thigh and groin after a jolting carriage ride near the royal hunting grounds at Spala, which caused a large hematoma. In severe pain and delirious with fever, the tsarevich appeared close to death. In desperation, Alexandra asked Vyrubova to send Rasputin (who was in Siberia) a telegram, asking him to pray for Alexei. Rasputin wrote back quickly, telling Alexandra that "God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much." The next morning, Alexei's condition was unchanged, but Alexandra was encouraged by the message and regained some hope that Alexei would survive. Alexei's bleeding stopped the following day. Dr. S. P. Fedorov, one of the physicians who attended Alexei, admitted that "the recovery was wholly inexplicable from a medical point of view." Later, Dr. Fedorov admitted that Alexandra couldn't be blamed for seeing Rasputin as a miracle man: "Rasputin would come in, walk up to the patient, look at him, and spit. The bleeding would stop in no time.... How could the empress not trust Rasputin after that?"
Historian Robert K. Massie has called Alexei's recovery "one of the most mysterious episodes of the whole Rasputin legend". The cause of his recovery is unclear: Massie speculated that Rasputin's suggestion not to let doctors disturb Alexei had aided his recovery by allowing him to rest and heal, or that his message may have aided Alexei's recovery by calming Alexandra and reducing the emotional stress on Alexei. Alexandra believed that Rasputin had performed a miracle, and concluded that he was essential to Alexei's survival. Some writers and historians, such as Ferro, claim that Rasputin stopped Alexei's bleeding on other occasions through hypnosis. Some historians, including memoirist Pierre Gilliard, Alexi's French-language tutor, have speculated that Rasputin controlled Alexi's bleeding by disallowing the administration of aspirin, then widely used to relieve pain, but unknown as an anti-clotting agent until the 1950s.
Controversy
The Imperial Family's belief in Rasputin's healing powers brought him considerable status and power at court. The tsar appointed Rasputin his lampadnik (lamplighter), charged with keeping the lamps lit before religious icons in the palace, and this gained him regular access to the palace and royal family. By December 1906, Rasputin had become close enough to ask a special favor of the tsar: that he be permitted to change his surname to Rasputin-Noviy (Rasputin-New). Nicholas granted the request and the name change was speedily processed, suggesting that he already had the tsar's favor at that early date. Rasputin used his position to full effect, accepting bribes and sexual favors from admirers and working diligently to expand his influence.
Rasputin soon became a controversial figure; he was accused by his enemies of religious heresy and rape, was suspected of exerting undue political influence over the tsar, and was even rumored to be having an affair with the tsarina. Opposition to Rasputin's influence grew within the church. In 1907, the local clergy in Pokrovskoye denounced Rasputin as a heretic, and the Bishop of Tobolsk launched an inquest into his activities, accusing him of "spreading false, Khlyst-like doctrines". In St Petersburg, Rasputin faced opposition from even more prominent critics, including prime minister Peter Stolypin and the Okhrana, the Tsar's secret police. Having ordered an investigation into Rasputin's activities, Stolypin confronted the Tsar about him but did not succeed in reining in Rasputin's influence or exiling him from St Petersburg. In 1909 Kehioniya Berlatskaya, who had been one of Rasputin's early supporters in St Petersburg, accused him of rape. She went to Theofan for aid, and the incident helped to convince Theofan that Rasputin was a danger to the monarchy. Rumors multiplied that Rasputin had assaulted female followers and behaved inappropriately on visits to the Imperial Family – and particularly with the Tsar's teenage daughters Olga and Tatyana, rumors reported widely in the press after March 1910.
World War I, the dissolution of feudalism, and a meddling government bureaucracy all contributed to Russia's rapid economic decline. Many laid the blame on Alexandra and her evil spirit, Rasputin. One outspoken member of the Duma, far-right politician Vladimir Purishkevich, stated in November 1916 that he held the tsar's ministers had "been turned into marionettes, marionettes whose threads have been taken firmly in hand by Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna – the evil genius of Russia and the Tsarina… who has remained a German on the Russian throne and alien to the country and its people". (The tsarina had been born a German princess.)
Assassination attempt
On a 33-year-old peasant woman named Chionya Guseva attempted to assassinate Rasputin by stabbing him in the stomach outside his home in Pokrovskoye. Rasputin was seriously wounded, and for a time it was not clear if he would survive. After surgery and some time in a hospital in Tyumen, he recovered.
Guseva was a follower of Iliodor, a former priest who had supported Rasputin before denouncing his sexual escapades and self-aggrandizement in December 1911. A radical conservative and anti-semite, Iliodor had been part of a group of establishment figures who had attempted to drive a wedge between the royal family and Rasputin in 1911. When this effort failed, Iliodor was banished from Saint Petersburg and was ultimately defrocked. Guseva claimed to have acted alone, having read about Rasputin in the newspapers and believing him to be a "false prophet and even an Antichrist". Both the police and Rasputin, however, believed that Iliodor had instigated the attempt on Rasputin's life. Iliodor fled the country before he could be questioned, and Guseva was found to be not responsible for her actions by reason of insanity.
Death
A group of nobles led by Prince Felix Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and right-wing politician Vladimir Purishkevich decided that Rasputin's influence over the tsarina threatened the empire, and they concocted a plan in December 1916 to kill him, apparently by luring him to the Yusupovs' Moika Palace.
Rasputin was murdered during the early morning on at the home of Felix Yusupov. He died of three gunshot wounds, one of which was a close-range shot to his forehead. Little is certain about his death beyond this, and the circumstances of his death have been the subject of considerable speculation. According to historian Douglas Smith, "what really happened at the Yusupov home on 17 December will never be known". The story that Yusupov recounted in his memoirs, however, has become the most frequently told version of events.
Yusupov said he invited Rasputin to his home shortly after midnight and ushered him into the basement. Yusupov offered Rasputin tea and cakes which had been laced with cyanide. Rasputin initially refused the cakes but then began to eat them and, to Yusupov's surprise, appeared unaffected by the poison. Rasputin then asked for some Madeira wine (which had also been poisoned) and drank three glasses, but still showed no sign of distress. At around 2:30 am, Yusupov excused himself to go upstairs, where his fellow conspirators were waiting. He took a revolver from Dmitry Pavlovich, then returned to the basement and told Rasputin that he'd "better look at the crucifix and say a prayer", referring to a crucifix in the room, then shot him once in the chest. The conspirators then drove to Rasputin's apartment, with Sukhotin wearing Rasputin's coat and hat in an attempt to make it look as though Rasputin had returned home that night. Upon returning to the Moika Palace, Yusupov went back to the basement to ensure that Rasputin was dead. Suddenly, Rasputin leaped up and attacked Yusupov, who freed himself with some effort and fled upstairs. Rasputin followed Yusupov into the palace's courtyard, where he was shot by Purishkevich. He collapsed into a snowbank. The conspirators then wrapped his body in cloth, drove it to the Petrovsky Bridge, and dropped it into the Malaya Nevka River.
Aftermath
News of Rasputin's murder spread quickly, even before his body was found. According to Douglas Smith, Purishkevich spoke openly about Rasputin's murder to two soldiers and to a policeman who was investigating reports of shots shortly after the event, but he urged them not to tell anyone else. An investigation was launched the next morning. The Stock Exchange Gazette ran a report of Rasputin's death "after a party in one of the most aristocratic homes in the center of the city" on the afternoon of .
Two workmen noticed blood on the railing of the Petrovsky Bridge and found a boot on the ice below, and police began searching the area. Rasputin's body was found under the river ice on 1 January (O.S. 19 December) approximately 200 meters downstream from the bridge. Dr. Dmitry Kosorotov, the city's senior autopsy surgeon, conducted an autopsy. Kosorotov's report was lost, but he later stated that Rasputin's body had shown signs of severe trauma, including three gunshot wounds (one at close range to the forehead), a slice wound to his left side, and many other injuries, many of which Kosorotov felt had been sustained post-mortem. Kosorotov found a single bullet in Rasputin's body but stated that it was too badly deformed and of a type too widely used to trace. He found no evidence that Rasputin had been poisoned. According to both Douglas Smith and Joseph Fuhrmann, Kosorotov found no water in Rasputin's lungs, and that reports Rasputin had been thrown into the water alive were incorrect. Some later accounts claimed that Rasputin's penis had been severed, but Kosorotov found his genitals intact.
Rasputin was buried on 2 January (O.S. 21 December) at a small church that Anna Vyrubova had been building at Tsarskoye Selo. The funeral was attended only by the imperial family and a few of their intimates. Rasputin's wife, mistress, and children were not invited, although his daughters met with the imperial family at Vyrubova's home later that day. His body was exhumed and burned by a detachment of soldiers shortly after the Tsar abdicated the throne in March 1917, so that his grave would not become a rallying point for supporters of the old regime.
Theory of British involvement
Some writers have suggested that agents of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) were involved in Rasputin's assassination. According to this theory, British agents were concerned that Rasputin was urging the tsar to make a separate peace with Germany, which would allow Germany to concentrate its military efforts on the Western Front. There are several variants of this theory, but they generally suggest that British intelligence agents were directly involved in planning and carrying out the assassination under the command of Samuel Hoare and Oswald Rayner, who had attended Oxford University with Yusupov, or that Rayner personally shot Rasputin.
However, historians do not consider this theory credible. According to Douglas Smith, "there is no convincing evidence that places any British agents at the murder scene". Historian Keith Jeffery states that if British intelligence agents had been involved, "I would have expected to find some trace of that" in the SIS archives, but no such evidence exists.
Daughter
Rasputin's daughter, Maria Rasputin (born Matryona Rasputina) (1898–1977), emigrated to France after the October Revolution and then to the United States. There, she worked as a dancer and then a lion tamer in a circus.
See also
Archimandrite Photius, influential and reactionary Russian priest and mystic
Faith healing
Grigori Rasputin in popular culture
List of unsolved murders
Rasputin (song)
Grigoriy R., Russian TV miniseries (sometimes marketed under the name Rasputin)
Notes
References
External links
19th-century Russian people
20th-century Christian mystics
20th-century Russian people
1869 births
1916 deaths
1916 murders in Europe
Assassinated Russian people
Deaths by firearm in Russia
Eastern Orthodox Christians from Russia
Eastern Orthodox mystics
Faith healers
Folk saints
Komi people
Male murder victims
Nicholas II of Russia
People from Tyumensky Uyezd
People from Yarkovsky District
People murdered in Russia
Grigori
Russian murder victims
Russian royal favourites
Court of Nicholas II of Russia
Posthumous executions | [
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12806 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemstone | Gemstone | A gemstone (also called a fine gem, jewel, precious stone, or semiprecious stone) is a piece of mineral crystal which, in cut and polished form, is used to make jewelry or other adornments. However, certain rocks (such as lapis lazuli and opal) and occasionally organic materials that are not minerals (such as amber, jet, and pearl) are also used for jewelry and are therefore often considered to be gemstones as well. Most gemstones are hard, but some soft minerals are used in jewelry because of their luster or other physical properties that have aesthetic value. Rarity and notoriety are other characteristics that lend value to gemstones.
Apart from jewelry, from earliest antiquity engraved gems and hardstone carvings, such as cups, were major luxury art forms. A gem maker is called a lapidary or gemcutter; a diamond cutter is called a diamantaire.
Characteristics and classification
The traditional classification in the West, which goes back to the ancient Greeks, begins with a distinction between precious and semi-precious; similar distinctions are made in other cultures. In modern use, the precious stones are emerald, ruby, sapphire and diamond, with all other gemstones being semi-precious. This distinction reflects the rarity of the respective stones in ancient times, as well as their quality: all are translucent with fine color in their purest forms, except for the colorless diamond, and very hard, with hardnesses of 8 to 10 on the Mohs scale. Other stones are classified by their color, translucency, and hardness. The traditional distinction does not necessarily reflect modern values; for example, while garnets are relatively inexpensive, a green garnet called tsavorite can be far more valuable than a mid-quality emerald. Another unscientific term for semi-precious gemstones used in art history and archaeology is hardstone. Use of the terms 'precious' and 'semi-precious' in a commercial context is, arguably, misleading in that it deceptively implies certain stones are intrinsically more valuable than others, which is not necessarily the case.
In modern times gemstones are identified by gemologists, who describe gems and their characteristics using technical terminology specific to the field of gemology. The first characteristic a gemologist uses to identify a gemstone is its chemical composition. For example, diamonds are made of carbon (C) and rubies of aluminium oxide (). Many gems are crystals which are classified by their crystal system such as cubic or trigonal or monoclinic. Another term used is habit, the form the gem is usually found in. For example, diamonds, which have a cubic crystal system, are often found as octahedrons.
Gemstones are classified into different groups, species, and varieties. For example, ruby is the red variety of the species corundum, while any other color of corundum is considered sapphire. Other examples are the emerald (green), aquamarine (blue), red beryl (red), goshenite (colorless), heliodor (yellow), and morganite (pink), which are all varieties of the mineral species beryl.
Gems are characterized in terms of refractive index, dispersion, specific gravity, hardness, cleavage, fracture and luster. They may exhibit pleochroism or double refraction. They may have luminescence and a distinctive absorption spectrum.
Material or flaws within a stone may be present as inclusions.
Gemstones may also be classified in terms of their "water". This is a recognized grading of the gem's luster, transparency, or "brilliance". Very transparent gems are considered "first water", while "second" or "third water" gems are those of a lesser transparency.
Value
Gemstones have no universally accepted grading system. Diamonds are graded using a system developed by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) in the early 1950s. Historically, all gemstones were graded using the naked eye. The GIA system included a major innovation: the introduction of 10x magnification as the standard for grading clarity. Other gemstones are still graded using the naked eye (assuming 20/20 vision).
A mnemonic device, the "four Cs" (color, cut, clarity, and carats), has been introduced to help describe the factors used to grade a diamond. With modification, these categories can be useful in understanding the grading of all gemstones. The four criteria carry different weights depending upon whether they are applied to colored gemstones or to colorless diamonds. In diamonds, the cut is the primary determinant of value, followed by clarity and color. The ideal cut diamond will sparkle, to break down light into its constituent rainbow colors (dispersion), chop it up into bright little pieces (scintillation), and deliver it to the eye (brilliance). In its rough crystalline form, a diamond will do none of these things; it requires proper fashioning and this is called "cut". In gemstones that have color, including colored diamonds, the purity, and beauty of that color is the primary determinant of quality.
Physical characteristics that make a colored stone valuable are color, clarity to a lesser extent (emeralds will always have a number of inclusions), cut, unusual optical phenomena within the stone such as color zoning (the uneven distribution of coloring within a gem) and asteria (star effects). Ancient Greeks, for example, greatly valued asteria gemstones, which they regarded as powerful love charms, and Helen of Troy was supposed to have worn star-corundum.
Aside from the diamond, ruby, sapphire, and emerald, the pearl (not, strictly speaking, a gemstone) and opal have also been considered to be precious. Up to the discoveries of bulk amethyst in Brazil in the 19th century, amethyst was considered a "precious stone" as well, going back to ancient Greece. Even in the last century certain stones such as aquamarine, peridot and cat's eye (cymophane) have been popular and hence been regarded as precious.
Today the gemstone trade no longer makes such a distinction. Many gemstones are used in even the most expensive jewelry, depending on the brand-name of the designer, fashion trends, market supply, treatments, etc. Nevertheless, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds still have a reputation that exceeds those of other gemstones.
Rare or unusual gemstones, generally understood to include those gemstones which occur so infrequently in gem quality that they are scarcely known except to connoisseurs, include andalusite, axinite, cassiterite, clinohumite and red beryl.
Gemstone pricing and value are governed by factors and characteristics in the quality of the stone. These characteristics include clarity, rarity, freedom from defects, the beauty of the stone, as well as the demand for such stones. There are different pricing influencers for both colored gemstones, and for diamonds. The pricing on colored stones is determined by market supply-and-demand, but diamonds are more intricate. Diamond value can change based on location, time, and on the evaluations of diamond vendors.
Proponents of energy medicine also value gemstones on the basis of alleged healing powers.
Grading
There are a number of laboratories which grade and provide reports on gemstones.
Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the main provider of education services and diamond grading reports
International Gemological Institute (IGI), independent laboratory for grading and evaluation of diamonds, jewelry, and colored stones
Hoge Raad Voor Diamant (HRD Antwerp), The Diamond High Council, Belgium is one of Europe's oldest laboratories; its main stakeholder is the Antwerp World Diamond Centre
American Gemological Society (AGS) is not as widely recognized nor as old as the GIA
American Gem Trade Laboratory which is part of the American Gem Trade Association (AGTA), a trade organization of jewelers and dealers of colored stones
American Gemological Laboratories (AGL), owned by Christopher P. Smith
European Gemological Laboratory (EGL), founded in 1974 by Guy Margel in Belgium
Gemmological Association of All Japan (GAAJ-ZENHOKYO), Zenhokyo, Japan, active in gemological research
The Gem and Jewelry Institute of Thailand (Public Organization) or GIT, Thailand's national institute for gemological research and gem testing, Bangkok
Gemmology Institute of Southern Africa, Africa's premium gem laboratory
Asian Institute of Gemological Sciences (AIGS), the oldest gemological institute in South East Asia, involved in gemological education and gem testing
Swiss Gemmological Institute (SSEF), founded by Henry Hänni, focusing on colored gemstones and the identification of natural pearls
Gübelin Gem Lab, the traditional Swiss lab founded by Eduard Gübelin
Institute for Gems and Gold Research of VINAGEMS (Vietnam), founded by Dr. Van Long Pham
Each laboratory has its own methodology to evaluate gemstones. A stone can be called "pink" by one lab while another lab calls it "padparadscha". One lab can conclude a stone is untreated, while another lab might conclude that it is heat-treated. To minimize such differences, seven of the most respected labs, AGTA-GTL (New York), CISGEM (Milano), GAAJ-ZENHOKYO (Tokyo), GIA (Carlsbad), GIT (Bangkok), Gübelin (Lucerne) and SSEF (Basel), have established the Laboratory Manual Harmonisation Committee (LMHC), for the standardization of wording reports, promotion of certain analytical methods and interpretation of results. Country of origin has sometimes been difficult to determine, due to the constant discovery of new source locations. Determining a "country of origin" is thus much more difficult than determining other aspects of a gem (such as cut, clarity, etc.).
Gem dealers are aware of the differences between gem laboratories and will make use of the discrepancies to obtain the best possible certificate.
Cutting and polishing
A few gemstones are used as gems in the crystal or other forms in which they are found. Most, however, are cut and polished for usage as jewelry. The two main classifications are stones cut as smooth, dome-shaped stones called cabochons, and stones which are cut with a faceting machine by polishing small flat windows called facets at regular intervals at exact angles.
Stones which are opaque or semi-opaque such as opal, turquoise, variscite, etc. are commonly cut as cabochons. These gems are designed to show the stone's color or surface properties as in opal and star sapphires. Grinding wheels and polishing agents are used to grind, shape and polish the smooth dome shape of the stones.
Gems that are transparent are normally faceted, a method that shows the optical properties of the stone's interior to its best advantage by maximizing reflected light which is perceived by the viewer as sparkle. There are many commonly used shapes for faceted stones. The facets must be cut at the proper angles, which varies depending on the optical properties of the gem. If the angles are too steep or too shallow, the light will pass through and not be reflected back toward the viewer. The faceting machine is used to hold the stone onto a flat lap for cutting and polishing the flat facets. Rarely, some cutters use special curved laps to cut and polish curved facets.
Colors
The color of any material is due to the nature of light itself. Daylight, often called white light, is all of the colors of the spectrum combined. When light strikes a material, most of the light is absorbed while a smaller amount of a particular frequency or wavelength is reflected. The part that is reflected reaches the eye as the perceived color. A ruby appears red because it absorbs all the other colors of white light while reflecting the red.
A material which is mostly the same can exhibit different colors. For example, ruby and sapphire have the same primary chemical composition (both are corundum) but exhibit different colors because of impurities. Even the same named gemstone can occur in many different colors: sapphires show different shades of blue and pink and "fancy sapphires" exhibit a whole range of other colors from yellow to orange-pink, the latter called "padparadscha sapphire".
This difference in color is based on the atomic structure of the stone. Although the different stones formally have the same chemical composition and structure, they are not exactly the same. Every now and then an atom is replaced by a completely different atom, sometimes as few as one in a million atoms. These so-called impurities are sufficient to absorb certain colors and leave the other colors unaffected.
For example, beryl, which is colorless in its pure mineral form, becomes emerald with chromium impurities. If manganese is added instead of chromium, beryl becomes pink morganite. With iron, it becomes aquamarine.
Some gemstone treatments make use of the fact that these impurities can be "manipulated", thus changing the color of the gem.
Treatment
Gemstones are often treated to enhance the color or clarity of the stone. Depending on the type and extent of treatment, they can affect the value of the stone. Some treatments are used widely because the resulting gem is stable, while others are not accepted most commonly because the gem color is unstable and may revert to the original tone.
Heat
Heat can either improve or spoil gemstone color or clarity. The heating process has been well known to gem miners and cutters for centuries, and in many stone types heating is a common practice. Most citrine is made by heating amethyst, and partial heating with a strong gradient results in "ametrine" – a stone partly amethyst and partly citrine. Aquamarine is often heated to remove yellow tones, or to change green colors into the more desirable blue, or enhance its existing blue color to a deeper blue.
Nearly all tanzanite is heated at low temperatures to remove brown undertones and give a more desirable blue / purple color. A considerable portion of all sapphire and ruby is treated with a variety of heat treatments to improve both color and clarity.
When jewelry containing diamonds is heated (for repairs) the diamond should be protected with boric acid; otherwise, the diamond (which is pure carbon) could be burned on the surface or even burned completely up. When jewelry containing sapphires or rubies is heated, those stones should not be coated with boracic acid (which can etch the surface) or any other substance. They do not have to be protected from burning, like a diamond (although the stones do need to be protected from heat stress fracture by immersing the part of the jewelry with stones in the water when metal parts are heated).
Radiation
Virtually all blue topaz, both the lighter and the darker blue shades such as "London" blue, has been irradiated to change the color from white to blue. Most greened quartz (Oro Verde) is also irradiated to achieve the yellow-green color. Diamonds are irradiated to produce fancy-color diamonds (which can occur naturally, though rarely in gem quality).
Waxing/oiling
Emeralds containing natural fissures are sometimes filled with wax or oil to disguise them. This wax or oil is also colored to make the emerald appear of better color as well as clarity. Turquoise is also commonly treated in a similar manner.
Fracture filling
Fracture filling has been in use with different gemstones such as diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires. In 2006 "glass-filled rubies" received publicity. Rubies over 10 carats (2 g) with large fractures were filled with lead glass, thus dramatically improving the appearance (of larger rubies in particular). Such treatments are fairly easy to detect.
Synthetic and artificial gemstones
Synthetic gemstones are distinct from imitation or simulated gems.
Synthetic gems are physically, optically, and chemically identical to the natural stone, but are created in a laboratory. Imitation or simulated stones are chemically different from the natural stone, but may appear quite similar to it; they can be more easily manufactured synthetic gemstones of a different mineral (spinel), glass, plastic, resins, or other compounds.
Examples of simulated or imitation stones include cubic zirconia, composed of zirconium oxide, synthetic moissanite, and un-colored, synthetic corundum or spinels; all of which are diamond simulants. The simulants imitate the look and color of the real stone but possess neither their chemical nor physical characteristics. In general, all are less hard than diamond. Moissanite actually has a higher refractive index than diamond, and when presented beside an equivalently sized and cut diamond will show more "fire".
Cultured, synthetic, or "lab-created" gemstones are not imitations: The bulk mineral and trace coloring elements are the same in both. For example, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds have been manufactured in labs that possess chemical and physical characteristics identical to the naturally occurring variety. Synthetic (lab created) corundum, including ruby and sapphire, is very common and costs much less than the natural stones. Small synthetic diamonds have been manufactured in large quantities as industrial abrasives, although larger gem-quality synthetic diamonds are becoming available in multiple carats.
Whether a gemstone is a natural stone or synthetic, the chemical, physical, and optical characteristics are the same: They are composed of the same mineral and are colored by the same trace materials, have the same hardness and density and strength, and show the same color spectrum, refractive index, and birefringence (if any). Lab-created stones tend to have a more vivid color since impurities common in natural stones are not present in the synthetic stone. Synthetics are made free of common naturally occurring impurities that reduce gem clarity or color unless intentionally added in order to provide a more drab, natural appearance, or to deceive an assayer. On the other hand, synthetics often show flaws not seen in natural stones, such as minute particles of corroded metal from lab trays used during synthesis.
List of rare gemstones
Painite was discovered in 1956 in Ohngaing in Myanmar. The mineral was named in honor of the British gemologist Arthur Charles Davy Pain. In 2005, painite was described by the Guinness Book of World Records as the rarest gem mineral on earth.
Hibonite was discovered in 1956 in Madagascar. It was named after the discoverer the French geologist Paul Hibon. Gem quality hibonite has been found only in Myanmar.
Red beryl or bixbite was discovered in an area near Beaver, Utah in 1904 and named after the American mineralogist Maynard Bixby.
Jeremejevite was discovered in 1883 in Russia and named after its discoverer, Pawel Wladimirowich Jeremejew (1830–1899).
Chambersite was discovered in 1957 in Chambers County, Texas, US, and named after the deposit's location.
Taaffeite was discovered in 1945. It was named after the discoverer, the Irish gemologist Count Edward Charles Richard Taaffe.
Musgravite was discovered in 1967 in the Musgrave Mountains in South Australia and named for the location.
Grandidierite was discovered by Antoine François Alfred Lacroix (1863–1948) in 1902 in Tuléar Province, Madagascar. It was named in honor of the French naturalist and explorer Alfred Grandidier (1836–1912).
Poudretteite was discovered in 1965 at the Poudrette Quarry in Canada and named after the quarry's owners and operators, the Poudrette family.
Serendibite was discovered in Sri Lanka by Sunil Palitha Gunasekera in 1902 and named after Serendib, the old Arabic name for Sri Lanka.
Zektzerite was discovered by Bart Cannon in 1968 on Kangaroo Ridge near Washington Pass in Okanogan County, Washington, USA. The mineral was named in honor of mathematician and geologist Jack Zektzer, who presented the material for study in 1976.
See also
Assembled gem
Gemology
List of gemstone species
List of gemstones
Luminous gemstones
References
External links
Jewellery components
Materials
Mineralogy
Stone objects | [
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12807 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard%20David | Gerard David | Gerard David (c. 1460 – 13 August 1523) was an Early Netherlandish painter and manuscript illuminator known for his brilliant use of color. Only a bare outline of his life survives, although some facts are known. He may have been the Meester gheraet van brugghe who became a master of the Antwerp guild in 1515. He was very successful in his lifetime and probably ran two workshops, in Antwerp and Bruges. Like many painters of his period, his reputation diminished in the 17th century until he was rediscovered in the 19th century.
Life
He was born in Oudewater, now located in the province of Utrecht. His year of birth is approximated as c. 1450–1460 on the basis that he looks to be around 50 years in the 1509 self-portrait found in his Virgin among the Virgins. He is believed to have spent time in Italy from 1470 to 1480, where he was influenced by the Italian Renaissance. He formed his early style under Albert van Oudewater in Haarlem, and moved to Bruges in 1483, where he joined the Guild of Saint Luke in 1484. Upon the death of Hans Memling in 1494, David became Bruges' leading painter. He became dean of the guild in 1501, and in 1496 married Cornelia Cnoop, daughter of the dean of the goldsmiths' guild. David was one of the town's leading citizens.
Ambrosius Benson served his apprenticeship with David, but they came into dispute around 1519 over a number of paintings and drawings Benson had collected from other artists. Because of a large debt owed to him by Benson, David had refused to return the material. Benson pursued the matter legally and won, leading to David serving time in prison.
He died on 13 August 1523 and was buried in the Church of Our Lady at Bruges.
Style
David's surviving work mainly consists of religious scenes. They are characterised by an atmospheric, timeless, and almost dream like serenity, achieved through soft, warm and subtle colourisation, and masterful handling of light and shadow. He is innovative in his recasting of traditional themes and in his approach to landscape, which was then only an emerging genre in northern European painting. His ability with landscape can be seen in the detailed foliage of his Triptych of the Baptism and the forest scene in the New York Nativity.
Although many of the art historians of the early 20th century, including Erwin Panofsky and Max Jakob Friedländer saw him as a painter who did little but distill the style of others and painted in an archaic and unimaginative style. However today most view him as a master colourist, and a painter who according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, worked in a "progressive, even enterprising, mode, casting off his late medieval heritage and proceeding with a certain purity of vision in an age of transition."
In his early work David followed Haarlem artists such as Dirk Bouts, Albert van Oudewater, and Geertgen tot Sint Jans, though he had already given evidence of superior power as a colourist. To this early period belong the St John of the Richard von Kaufmann collection in Berlin and the Salting's St Jerome. In Bruges came directly under the influence of Memling, the master whom he followed most closely. It was from him that David acquired a solemnity of treatment, greater realism in the rendering of human form, and an orderly arrangement of figures.
He visited Antwerp in 1515 and was impressed with the work of Quentin Matsys, who had introduced a greater vitality and intimacy in the conception of sacred themes. Together they worked to preserve the traditions of the Bruges school against influences of the Italian Renaissance.
Works
The works for which David is best known are the altarpieces painted before his visit to Antwerp: the Marriage of St Catherine at the National Gallery, London; the triptych of the Madonna Enthroned and Saints of the Brignole-Sale collection in Genoa; the Annunciation of the Sigmaringen collection; and above all, the Madonna with Angels and Saints (usually titled The Virgin among the Virgins), which he donated to the Carmelite Nuns of Sion at Bruges, and which is now in the Rouen museum.
Only a few of his works have remained in Bruges: The Judgment of Cambyses, The Flaying of Sisamnes and the Baptism of Christ in the Groeningemuseum, and the Transfiguration in the Church of Our Lady.
The rest were scattered around the world, and to this may be due the oblivion into which his very name had fallen; this, and the fact that, some believed that for all the beauty and the soulfulness of his work, he had nothing innovative to add to the history of art.
Even in his best work he had only given newer variations of the art of his predecessors and contemporaries. His rank among the masters was renewed, however, when a number of his paintings were assembled at the seminal 1902 Gruuthusemuseum, Bruges exhibition of early Flemish painters.
He also worked closely with the leading manuscript illuminators of the day, and seems to have been brought in to paint specific important miniatures himself, among them a Virgin among the Virgins in the Morgan Library, a Virgin and Child on a Crescent Moon in the Rothschild Prayerbook, and a portrait of the Emperor Maximilian in Vienna. Several of his drawings also survive, and elements from these appear in the works of other painters and illuminators for several decades after his death.
Less known but also of high quality are the works of David found in Spanish public collections. The Prado Museum in Madrid owns a table "Rest on the flight into Egypt" resembling the one in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The Prado also holds another two Works by the painter, one of them only attributed. Another one of the Spanish capital's Museums, The Thyssen-Bornemisza holds a "Crucifixión" from 1475.
Legacy
At the time of David's death, the glory of Bruges and its painters was on the wane: Antwerp had become the leader in art as well as in political and commercial importance. Of David's pupils in Bruges, only Adriaen Isenbrandt, Albert Cornelis, and Ambrosius Benson achieved importance. Among other Flemish painters, Joachim Patinir and Jan Mabuse were to some degree influenced by him.
David's name had been completely forgotten when in 1866 William Henry James Weale discovered documents about him in the archives of Bruges; these brought to light the main facts of the painter's life and led to the reconstruction of David's artistic personality, beginning with the recognition of David's only documented work, the Virgin Among Virgins at Rouen.
Gallery
References
Notes
Sources
Ainsworth, Maryan Wynn. Gerard David: Purity of Vision in an Age of Transition. NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998.
Ainsworth, Maryan Wynn; Christiansen, Keith. From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009.
Campbell, Lorne. The Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Paintings. London: National Gallery, 1998.
Harbison, Craig. "The Art of the Northern Renaissance". London: Laurence King Publishing, 1995.
Nash, Susie. Northern Renaissance art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Ridderbos, Bernhard; Van Buren, Anne; Van Veen, Henk. Early Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception and Research. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005.
External links
Gerard David | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gerard David at Artcyclopedia
Fifteenth- to eighteenth-century European paintings: France, Central Europe, the Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain, a collection catalog fully available online as a PDF, which contains material on Gerard David (cat. no. 20-22)
Gerard David : purity of vision in an age of transition, a collection catalog fully available online as a PDF
Gerard David Foundation (Dutch)
1460s births
1523 deaths
Dutch Renaissance painters
Early Netherlandish painters
16th-century Flemish painters
Manuscript illuminators
Painters from Bruges
People from Oudewater | [
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12808 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM | GSM | The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets. It was first deployed in Finland in December 1991. By the mid-2010s, it became a global standard for mobile communications achieving over 90% market share, and operating in over 193 countries and territories.
2G networks developed as a replacement for first generation (1G) analog cellular networks. The GSM standard originally described a digital, circuit-switched network optimized for full duplex voice telephony. This expanded over time to include data communications, first by circuit-switched transport, then by packet data transport via General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), and Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE).
Subsequently, the 3GPP developed third-generation (3G) UMTS standards, followed by the fourth-generation (4G) LTE Advanced and the fifth-generation 5G standards, which do not form part of the ETSI GSM standard.
"GSM" is a trade mark owned by the GSM Association. It may also refer to the (initially) most common voice codec used, Full Rate.
As a result of the network's widespread use across Europe, the acronym "GSM" was briefly used as a generic term for mobile phones in France, the Netherlands and in Belgium. A great number of people in Belgium still use it to date. Many carriers (like Verizon) will shutdown GSM and CDMA in 2022.
History
Initial development for GSM by Europeans
In 1983, work began to develop a European standard for digital cellular voice telecommunications when the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) set up the Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM) committee and later provided a permanent technical-support group based in Paris. Five years later, in 1987, 15 representatives from 13 European countries signed a memorandum of understanding in Copenhagen to develop and deploy a common cellular telephone system across Europe, and EU rules were passed to make GSM a mandatory standard. The decision to develop a continental standard eventually resulted in a unified, open, standard-based network which was larger than that in the United States.
In February 1987 Europe produced the first agreed GSM Technical Specification. Ministers from the four big EU countries cemented their political support for GSM with the Bonn Declaration on Global Information Networks in May and the GSM MoU was tabled for signature in September. The MoU drew in mobile operators from across Europe to pledge to invest in new GSM networks to an ambitious common date.
In this short 38-week period the whole of Europe (countries and industries) had been brought behind GSM in a rare unity and speed guided by four public officials: Armin Silberhorn (Germany), Stephen Temple (UK), Philippe Dupuis (France), and Renzo Failli (Italy). In 1989 the Groupe Spécial Mobile committee was transferred from CEPT to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
The IEEE/RSE awarded to Thomas Haug and Philippe Dupuis the 2018 James Clerk Maxwell medal for their "leadership in the development of the first international mobile communications standard with subsequent evolution into worldwide smartphone data communication". The GSM (2G) has evolved into 3G, 4G and 5G.
First networks
In parallel France and Germany signed a joint development agreement in 1984 and were joined by Italy and the UK in 1986. In 1986, the European Commission proposed reserving the 900 MHz spectrum band for GSM. The former Finnish prime minister Harri Holkeri made the world's first GSM call on 1 July 1991, calling Kaarina Suonio (deputy mayor of the city of Tampere) using a network built by Nokia and Siemens and operated by Radiolinja. The following year saw the sending of the first short messaging service (SMS or "text message") message, and Vodafone UK and Telecom Finland signed the first international roaming agreement.
Enhancements
Work began in 1991 to expand the GSM standard to the 1800 MHz frequency band and the first 1800 MHz network became operational in the UK by 1993, called and DCS 1800. Also that year, Telecom Australia became the first network operator to deploy a GSM network outside Europe and the first practical hand-held GSM mobile phone became available.
In 1995 fax, data and SMS messaging services were launched commercially, the first 1900 MHz GSM network became operational in the United States and GSM subscribers worldwide exceeded 10 million. In the same year, the GSM Association formed. Pre-paid GSM SIM cards were launched in 1996 and worldwide GSM subscribers passed 100 million in 1998.
In 2000 the first commercial GPRS services were launched and the first GPRS-compatible handsets became available for sale. In 2001, the first UMTS (W-CDMA) network was launched, a 3G technology that is not part of GSM. Worldwide GSM subscribers exceeded 500 million. In 2002, the first Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) was introduced and the first GSM network in the 800 MHz frequency band became operational. EDGE services first became operational in a network in 2003, and the number of worldwide GSM subscribers exceeded 1 billion in 2004.
By 2005 GSM networks accounted for more than 75% of the worldwide cellular network market, serving 1.5 billion subscribers. In 2005, the first HSDPA-capable network also became operational. The first HSUPA network launched in 2007. (High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) and its uplink and downlink versions are 3G technologies, not part of GSM.) Worldwide GSM subscribers exceeded three billion in 2008.
Adoption
The GSM Association estimated in 2011 that technologies defined in the GSM standard served 80% of the mobile market, encompassing more than 5 billion people across more than 212 countries and territories, making GSM the most ubiquitous of the many standards for cellular networks.
GSM is a second-generation (2G) standard employing time-division multiple-access (TDMA) spectrum-sharing, issued by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The GSM standard does not include the 3G Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), code-division multiple access (CDMA) technology, nor the 4G LTE orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) technology standards issued by the 3GPP.
GSM, for the first time, set a common standard for Europe for wireless networks. It was also adopted by many countries outside Europe. This allowed subscribers to use other GSM networks that have roaming agreements with each other. The common standard reduced research and development costs, since hardware and software could be sold with only minor adaptations for the local market.
Discontinuation
Telstra in Australia shut down its 2G GSM network on 1 December 2016, the first mobile network operator to decommission a GSM network. The second mobile provider to shut down its GSM network (on 1 January 2017) was AT&T Mobility from the United States.
Optus in Australia completed the shut down of its 2G GSM network on 1 August 2017, part of the Optus GSM network covering Western Australia and the Northern Territory had earlier in the year been shut down in April 2017.
Singapore shut down 2G services entirely in April 2017.
Technical details
Network structure
The network is structured into several discrete sections:
Base station subsystem – the base stations and their controllers
Network and Switching Subsystem – the part of the network most similar to a fixed network, sometimes just called the "core network"
GPRS Core Network – the optional part which allows packet-based Internet connections
Operations support system (OSS) – network maintenance
Base-station subsystem
GSM utilizes a cellular network, meaning that cell phones connect to it by searching for cells in the immediate vicinity. There are five different cell sizes in a GSM network:
macro
micro
pico
femto, and
umbrella cells
The coverage area of each cell varies according to the implementation environment. Macro cells can be regarded as cells where the base-station antenna is installed on a mast or a building above average rooftop level. Micro cells are cells whose antenna height is under average rooftop level; they are typically deployed in urban areas. Picocells are small cells whose coverage diameter is a few dozen meters; they are mainly used indoors. Femtocells are cells designed for use in residential or small-business environments and connect to a telecommunications service provider's network via a broadband-internet connection. Umbrella cells are used to cover shadowed regions of smaller cells and to fill in gaps in coverage between those cells.
Cell horizontal radius varies – depending on antenna height, antenna gain, and propagation conditions – from a couple of hundred meters to several tens of kilometers. The longest distance the GSM specification supports in practical use is . There are also several implementations of the concept of an extended cell, where the cell radius could be double or even more, depending on the antenna system, the type of terrain, and the timing advance.
GSM supports indoor coverage – achievable by using an indoor picocell base station, or an indoor repeater with distributed indoor antennas fed through power splitters – to deliver the radio signals from an antenna outdoors to the separate indoor distributed antenna system. Picocells are typically deployed when significant call capacity is needed indoors, as in shopping centers or airports. However, this is not a prerequisite, since indoor coverage is also provided by in-building penetration of radio signals from any nearby cell.
GSM carrier frequencies
GSM networks operate in a number of different carrier frequency ranges (separated into GSM frequency ranges for 2G and UMTS frequency bands for 3G), with most 2G GSM networks operating in the 900 MHz or 1800 MHz bands. Where these bands were already allocated, the 850 MHz and 1900 MHz bands were used instead (for example in Canada and the United States). In rare cases the 400 and 450 MHz frequency bands are assigned in some countries because they were previously used for first-generation systems.
For comparison, most 3G networks in Europe operate in the 2100 MHz frequency band. For more information on worldwide GSM frequency usage, see GSM frequency bands.
Regardless of the frequency selected by an operator, it is divided into timeslots for individual phones. This allows eight full-rate or sixteen half-rate speech channels per radio frequency. These eight radio timeslots (or burst periods) are grouped into a TDMA frame. Half-rate channels use alternate frames in the same timeslot. The channel data rate for all is and the frame duration is
The transmission power in the handset is limited to a maximum of 2 watts in and in .
Voice codecs
GSM has used a variety of voice codecs to squeeze 3.1 kHz audio into between 7 and 13 kbit/s. Originally, two codecs, named after the types of data channel they were allocated, were used, called Half Rate (6.5 kbit/s) and Full Rate (13 kbit/s). These used a system based on linear predictive coding (LPC). In addition to being efficient with bitrates, these codecs also made it easier to identify more important parts of the audio, allowing the air interface layer to prioritize and better protect these parts of the signal. GSM was further enhanced in 1997
with the enhanced full rate (EFR) codec, a 12.2 kbit/s codec that uses a full-rate channel. Finally, with the development of UMTS, EFR was refactored into a variable-rate codec called AMR-Narrowband, which is high quality and robust against interference when used on full-rate channels, or less robust but still relatively high quality when used in good radio conditions on half-rate channel.
Subscriber Identity Module (SIM)
One of the key features of GSM is the Subscriber Identity Module, commonly known as a SIM card. The SIM is a detachable smart card containing the user's subscription information and phone book. This allows the user to retain their information after switching handsets. Alternatively, the user can change operators while retaining the handset simply by changing the SIM.
Phone locking
Sometimes mobile network operators restrict handsets that they sell for exclusive use in their own network. This is called SIM locking and is implemented by a software feature of the phone. A subscriber may usually contact the provider to remove the lock for a fee, utilize private services to remove the lock, or use software and websites to unlock the handset themselves. It is possible to hack past a phone locked by a network operator.
In some countries and regions (e.g., Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nepal, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand) all phones are sold unlocked due to the abundance of dual SIM handsets and operators.
GSM security
GSM was intended to be a secure wireless system. It has considered the user authentication using a pre-shared key and challenge-response, and over-the-air encryption. However, GSM is vulnerable to different types of attack, each of them aimed at a different part of the network.
The development of UMTS introduced an optional Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM), that uses a longer authentication key to give greater security, as well as mutually authenticating the network and the user, whereas GSM only authenticates the user to the network (and not vice versa). The security model therefore offers confidentiality and authentication, but limited authorization capabilities, and no non-repudiation.
GSM uses several cryptographic algorithms for security. The A5/1, A5/2, and A5/3 stream ciphers are used for ensuring over-the-air voice privacy. A5/1 was developed first and is a stronger algorithm used within Europe and the United States; A5/2 is weaker and used in other countries. Serious weaknesses have been found in both algorithms: it is possible to break A5/2 in real-time with a ciphertext-only attack, and in January 2007, The Hacker's Choice started the A5/1 cracking project with plans to use FPGAs that allow A5/1 to be broken with a rainbow table attack. The system supports multiple algorithms so operators may replace that cipher with a stronger one.
Since 2000, different efforts have been made in order to crack the A5 encryption algorithms. Both A5/1 and A5/2 algorithms have been broken, and their cryptanalysis has been revealed in the literature. As an example, Karsten Nohl developed a number of rainbow tables (static values which reduce the time needed to carry out an attack) and have found new sources for known plaintext attacks. He said that it is possible to build "a full GSM interceptor...from open-source components" but that they had not done so because of legal concerns. Nohl claimed that he was able to intercept voice and text conversations by impersonating another user to listen to voicemail, make calls, or send text messages using a seven-year-old Motorola cellphone and decryption software available for free online.
GSM uses General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) for data transmissions like browsing the web. The most commonly deployed GPRS ciphers were publicly broken in 2011.
The researchers revealed flaws in the commonly used GEA/1 and GEA/2 (standing for GPRS Encryption Algorithms 1 and 2) ciphers and published the open-source "gprsdecode" software for sniffing GPRS networks. They also noted that some carriers do not encrypt the data (i.e., using GEA/0) in order to detect the use of traffic or protocols they do not like (e.g., Skype), leaving customers unprotected. GEA/3 seems to remain relatively hard to break and is said to be in use on some more modern networks. If used with USIM to prevent connections to fake base stations and downgrade attacks, users will be protected in the medium term, though migration to 128-bit GEA/4 is still recommended.
The first public cryptanalysis of GEA/1 and GEA/2 (also written GEA-1 and GEA-2) was done in 2021. It concluded that although using a 64-bit key, the GEA-1 algorithm actually provides only 40 bits of security, due to a relationship between two parts of the algorithm. The researchers found that this relationship was very unlikely to have happened if it wasn't intentional. This may have been done in order to satisfy European controls on export of cryptographic programs.
Standards information
The GSM systems and services are described in a set of standards governed by ETSI, where a full list is maintained.
GSM open-source software
Several open-source software projects exist that provide certain GSM features:
gsmd daemon by Openmoko
OpenBTS develops a Base transceiver station
The GSM Software Project aims to build a GSM analyzer for less than $1,000
OsmocomBB developers intend to replace the proprietary baseband GSM stack with a free software implementation
YateBTS develops a Base transceiver station
Issues with patents and open source
Patents remain a problem for any open-source GSM implementation, because it is not possible for GNU or any other free software distributor to guarantee immunity from all lawsuits by the patent holders against the users. Furthermore, new features are being added to the standard all the time which means they have patent protection for a number of years.
The original GSM implementations from 1991 may now be entirely free of patent encumbrances, however patent freedom is not certain due to the United States' "first to invent" system that was in place until 2012. The "first to invent" system, coupled with "patent term adjustment" can extend the life of a U.S. patent far beyond 20 years from its priority date. It is unclear at this time whether OpenBTS will be able to implement features of that initial specification without limit. As patents subsequently expire, however, those features can be added into the open-source version. , there have been no lawsuits against users of OpenBTS over GSM use.
See also
Cellular network
Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE)
Enhanced Network Selection (ENS)
GSM forwarding standard features codes – list of call forward codes working with all operators and phones
GSM frequency bands
GSM modem
GSM services
Cell Broadcast
GSM localization
Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)
NITZ Network Identity and Time Zone
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
GSM-R (GSM-Railway)
GSM USSD codes – Unstructured Supplementary Service Data: list of all standard GSM codes for network and SIM related functions
Handoff
High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA)
International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI)
International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI)
Long Term Evolution (LTE)
MSISDN Mobile Subscriber ISDN Number
Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT)
ORFS
Personal communications network (PCN)
RTP audio video profile
Simulation of GSM networks
Standards
Comparison of mobile phone standards
GEO-Mobile Radio Interface
GSM 02.07 – Cellphone features
GSM 03.48 – Security mechanisms for the SIM application toolkit
Intelligent Network
Parlay X
RRLP – Radio Resource Location Protocol
Um interface
Visitors Location Register (VLR)
References
Further reading
External links
GSM Association—Official industry trade group representing GSM network operators worldwide
3GPP—3G GSM standards development group
LTE-3GPP.info: online GSM messages decoder fully supporting all 3GPP releases from early GSM to latest 5G
Telecommunications-related introductions in 1991
GSM standard | [
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12810 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry%20Kasparov | Garry Kasparov | Garry Kimovich Kasparov (Russian: Гарри Кимович Каспаров, Russian pronunciation: [ˈɡarʲɪ ˈkʲiməvʲɪtɕ kɐˈsparəf], born Garik Kimovich Weinstein, Гарик Кимович Вайнштейн; 13 April 1963) is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist and commentator. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by Magnus Carlsen in 2013. From 1984 until his retirement in 2005, Kasparov was ranked world No. 1 for a record 255 months overall for his career, a record that outstrips all other previous and current players. Kasparov also holds records for the most consecutive professional tournament victories (15) and Chess Oscars (11).
Kasparov became the youngest ever undisputed World Chess Champion in 1985 at age 22 by defeating then-champion Anatoly Karpov. He held the official FIDE world title until 1993 when a dispute with FIDE led him to set up a rival organization, the Professional Chess Association. In 1997 he became the first world champion to lose a match to a computer under standard time controls when he lost to the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in a highly publicized match. He continued to hold the "Classical" World Chess Championship until his defeat by Vladimir Kramnik in 2000. Despite losing the title, he continued winning tournaments and was the world's highest-rated player when he retired from professional chess in 2005.
Since retiring, he has devoted his time to politics and writing. He formed the United Civil Front movement and joined as a member of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration and policies of Vladimir Putin. In 2008, he announced an intention to run as a candidate in that year's Russian presidential race, but after encountering logistical problems in his campaign, for which he blamed "official obstruction", he withdrew. In the wake of the Russian mass protests that began in 2011, he announced in 2013 that he had left Russia for the immediate future out of fear of persecution. Following his flight from Russia, he had lived in New York City with his family. In 2014, he obtained Croatian citizenship, and has maintained a residence in Podstrana near Split.
Kasparov is currently chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and chairs its International Council. In 2017, he founded the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), an American political organization promoting and defending liberal democracy in the U.S. and abroad. He serves as chairman of the group. Kasparov is also a Security Ambassador for the software company Avast.
Early life and career
Kasparov was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein (Russian: Гарик Ки́мович Вайнштейн, Garik Kimovich Vainshtein) in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR (now Azerbaijan), Soviet Union. His father, Kim Moiseyevich Weinstein, was Jewish, and his mother, Klara Shagenovna Gasparian, was Armenian. Kasparov has described himself as a "self-appointed Christian", although "very indifferent" and identifies as Russian: "although I'm half-Armenian, half-Jewish, I consider myself Russian because Russian is my native tongue, and I grew up with Russian culture."
Kasparov began the serious study of chess after he came across a chess problem set up by his parents and proposed a solution. When Garry was seven years old, his father died of leukaemia. At the age of twelve, Garry, upon request of his mother Klara and with the consent of the family, adopted Klara's surname Kasparov, which was done to avoid possible antisemitic tensions, which were common in the USSR at the time.
From age 7, Kasparov attended the Young Pioneer Palace in Baku and, at 10 began training at Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school under coach Vladimir Makogonov. Makogonov helped develop Kasparov's positional skills and taught him to play the Caro-Kann Defence and the Tartakower System of the Queen's Gambit Declined. Kasparov won the Soviet Junior Championship in Tbilisi in 1976, scoring 7 points of 9, at age 13. He repeated the feat the following year, winning with a score of 8.5 of 9. He was being trained by Alexander Shakarov during this time.
In 1978, Kasparov participated in the Sokolsky Memorial tournament in Minsk. He had been invited as an exception but took first place and became a chess master. Kasparov has repeatedly said that this event was a turning point in his life and that it convinced him to choose chess as his career. "I will remember the Sokolsky Memorial as long as I live", he wrote. He has also said that after the victory, he thought he had a very good shot at the World Championship.
He first qualified for the Soviet Chess Championship at age 15 in 1978, the youngest ever player at that level. He won the 64-player Swiss system tournament at Daugavpils on tiebreak over Igor V. Ivanov to capture the sole qualifying place.
Kasparov rose quickly through the FIDE world rankings. Starting with oversight by the Russian Chess Federation, he participated in a grandmaster tournament in Banja Luka, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina (part of Yugoslavia at the time), in 1979 while still unrated (he was a replacement for the Soviet defector Viktor Korchnoi, who was originally invited but withdrew due to the threat of a boycott from the Soviets). Kasparov won this high-class tournament, emerging with a provisional rating of 2595, enough to catapult him to the top group of chess players (at the time, number 15 in the world). The next year, 1980, he won the World Junior Chess Championship in Dortmund, West Germany. Later that year, he made his debut as the second reserve for the Soviet Union at the Chess Olympiad at Valletta, Malta, and became a Grandmaster.
Towards the top
As a teenager, Kasparov tied for first place in the USSR Chess Championship in 1981–82. His first win in a superclass-level international tournament was scored at Bugojno, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia in 1982. He earned a place in the 1982 Moscow Interzonal tournament, which he won, to qualify for the Candidates Tournament. At age 19, he was the youngest Candidate since Bobby Fischer, who was 15 when he qualified in 1958. At this stage, he was already the No. 2-rated player in the world, trailing only World Chess Champion Anatoly Karpov on the January 1983 list.Kasparov's first (quarter-final) Candidates match was against Alexander Beliavsky, whom he defeated 6–3 (four wins, one loss). Politics threatened Kasparov's semi-final against Viktor Korchnoi, which was scheduled to be played in Pasadena, California. Korchnoi had defected from the Soviet Union in 1976 and was at that time the strongest active non-Soviet player. Various political manoeuvres prevented Kasparov from playing Korchnoi, and Kasparov forfeited the match. This was resolved by Korchnoi allowing the match to be replayed in London, along with the previously scheduled match between Vasily Smyslov and Zoltán Ribli. The Kasparov-Korchnoi match was put together on short notice by Raymond Keene. Kasparov lost the first game but won the match 7–4 (four wins, one loss).
In January 1984, Kasparov became the No. 1 ranked player in the world, with a FIDE rating of 2710. He became the youngest ever world No. 1, a record that lasted 12 years until being broken by Vladimir Kramnik in January 1996; the record is currently held by Magnus Carlsen.
Later in 1984, he won the Candidates' final 8½–4½ (four wins, no losses) against the resurgent former world champion Vasily Smyslov, at Vilnius, thus qualifying to play Anatoly Karpov for the World Championship. That year he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), as a member of which he was elected to the Central Committee of Komsomol in 1987.
1984 World Championship
The World Chess Championship 1984 match between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov had many ups and downs, and a very controversial finish. Karpov started in very good form, and after nine games Kasparov was down 4–0 in a "first to six wins" match. Fellow players predicted he would be whitewashed 6–0 within 18 games.
In an unexpected turn of events, there followed a series of 17 successive draws, some relatively short, and others drawn in unsettled positions. Kasparov lost game 27 (5–0), then fought back with another series of draws until game 32 (5–1), earning his first-ever win against the World Champion. Another 14 successive draws followed, through game 46; the previous record length for a world title match had been 34 games, the match of José Raúl Capablanca vs. Alexander Alekhine in 1927.
Kasparov won games 47 and 48 to bring the scores to 5–3 in Karpov's favour. Then the match was ended without result by Florencio Campomanes, the President of the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), and a new match was announced to start a few months later. The termination was controversial, as both players stated that they preferred the match to continue. Announcing his decision at a press conference, Campomanes cited the health of the players, which had been strained by the length of the match.
The match became the first, and so far only, world championship match to be abandoned without result. Kasparov's relations with Campomanes and FIDE were greatly strained, and the feud between them finally came to a head in 1993 with Kasparov's complete break-away from FIDE.
World Champion
The second Karpov-Kasparov match in 1985 was organized in Moscow as the best of 24 games where the first player to win 12½ points would claim the World Champion title. The scores from the terminated match would not carry over; however, in the event of a 12–12 draw, the title would remain with Karpov. On 9 November 1985, Kasparov secured the title by a score of 13–11, winning the 24th game with Black, using a Sicilian defence. He was 22 years old at the time, making him the youngest ever World Champion, and breaking the record held by Mikhail Tal for over 20 years. Kasparov's win as Black in the 16th game has been recognized as one of the all-time masterpieces in chess history.
As part of the arrangements following the aborted 1984 match, Karpov had been granted (in the event of his defeat) a right to rematch. Another match took place in 1986, hosted jointly in London and Leningrad, with each city hosting 12 games. At one point in the match, Kasparov opened a three-point lead and looked well on his way to a decisive match victory. But Karpov fought back by winning three consecutive games to level the score late in the match. At this point, Kasparov dismissed one of his seconds, grandmaster Evgeny Vladimirov, accusing him of selling his opening preparation to the Karpov team (as described in Kasparov's autobiography Unlimited Challenge, chapter Stab in the Back). Kasparov scored one more win and kept his title by a final score of 12½–11½.
A fourth match for the world title took place in 1987 in Seville, as Karpov had qualified through the Candidates' Matches to again become the official challenger. This match was very close, with neither player holding more than a one-point lead at any time during the contest. Kasparov was down one full point at the time of the final game and needed a win to draw the match and retain his title. A long tense game ensued in which Karpov blundered away a pawn just before the first time control, and Kasparov eventually won a long ending. Kasparov retained his title as the match was drawn by a score of 12–12. (All this meant that Kasparov had played Karpov four times in the period 1984–87, a statistic unprecedented in chess. Matches organized by FIDE had taken place every three years since 1948, and only Botvinnik had a right to a rematch before Karpov.)
The fifth match between Kasparov and Karpov was held in New York and Lyon in 1990, with each city hosting 12 games. Again, the result was a close one with Kasparov winning by a margin of 12½–11½. In their five world championship matches, Kasparov had 21 wins, 19 losses, and 104 draws in 144 games.
Break with and ejection from FIDE
With the World Champion title in hand, Kasparov began opposing FIDE. In November 1986, he created the Grandmasters Association (GMA), an organization to represent professional chess players and give them more say in FIDE's activities. Kasparov assumed a leadership role. GMA's major achievement was in organizing a series of six World Cup tournaments for the world's top players. This caused a somewhat uneasy relationship to develop with FIDE.
This stand-off lasted until 1993, by which time a new challenger had qualified through the Candidates cycle for Kasparov's next World Championship defence: Nigel Short, a British grandmaster who had defeated Anatoly Karpov in a qualifying match and then Jan Timman in the finals held in early 1993. After a confusing and compressed bidding process produced lower financial estimates than expected, the world champion and his challenger decided to play outside FIDE's jurisdiction, under another organization created by Kasparov called the Professional Chess Association (PCA). At this point, a great fracture occurred in the lineage of the FIDE World Championship. In an interview in 2007, Kasparov called the break with FIDE the worst mistake of his career, as it hurt the game in the long run.
Kasparov and Short were ejected from FIDE and played their well-sponsored match in London in 1993. Kasparov won convincingly by a score of 12½–7½. The match considerably raised the profile of chess in the UK, with an unprecedented level of coverage on Channel 4. Meanwhile, FIDE organized a World Championship match between Jan Timman (the defeated Candidates finalist) and former World Champion Karpov (a defeated Candidates semi-finalist), which Karpov won.
FIDE removed Kasparov and Short from the FIDE rating lists. Until this happened, there was a parallel rating list presented by PCA which featured all the world top players, regardless of their relation to FIDE. There were now two World Champions: PCA champion Kasparov, and FIDE champion Karpov. The title remained split for 13 years.
Kasparov defended his title in a 1995 match against Viswanathan Anand at the World Trade Center in New York City. Kasparov won the match by four wins to one, with thirteen draws.
Kasparov tried to organize another World Championship match, under another organization, the World Chess Association (WCA) with Linares organizer Luis Rentero. Alexei Shirov and Vladimir Kramnik played a candidates match to decide the challenger, which Shirov won in a surprising upset. But when Rentero admitted that the funds required and promised had never materialized, the WCA collapsed. This left Kasparov stranded, and yet another organization stepped in: BrainGames.com, headed by Raymond Keene. No match against Shirov was arranged, and talks with Anand collapsed, so a match was instead arranged against Kramnik.
During this period, Kasparov was approached by Oakham School in the United Kingdom, at the time the only school in the country with a full-time chess coach, and developed an interest in the use of chess in education. In 1997, Kasparov supported a scholarship programme at the school. Kasparov also won the Marca Leyenda trophy that year.
Losing the title and aftermath
The Kasparov-Kramnik match took place in London during the latter half of 2000. Kramnik had been a student of Kasparov's at the famous Botvinnik/Kasparov chess school in Russia and had served on Kasparov's team for the 1995 match against Viswanathan Anand.
The better-prepared Kramnik won game 2 against Kasparov's Grünfeld Defence and achieved winning positions in Games 4 and 6, although Kasparov held the draw in both games. Kasparov made a critical error in Game 10 with the Nimzo-Indian Defence, which Kramnik exploited to win in 25 moves. As White, Kasparov could not crack the passive but solid Berlin Defence in the Ruy Lopez, and Kramnik successfully drew all his games as Black. Kramnik won the match 8½–6½.
After losing the title, Kasparov won a series of major tournaments, and remained the top-rated player in the world, ahead of both Kramnik and the FIDE World Champions. In 2001 he refused an invitation to the 2002 Dortmund Candidates Tournament for the Classical title, claiming his results had earned him a rematch with Kramnik.
Kasparov and Karpov played a four-game match with rapid time controls over two days in December 2002 in New York City. Karpov surprised the experts and emerged victorious, winning two games and drawing one.
Due to Kasparov's continuing strong results, and status as world No. 1 in much of the public eye, he was included in the so-called "Prague Agreement", masterminded by Yasser Seirawan and intended to reunite the two World Championships. Kasparov was to play a match against the FIDE World Champion Ruslan Ponomariov in September 2003. But this match was called off after Ponomariov refused to sign his contract for it without reservation. In its place, there were plans for a match against Rustam Kasimdzhanov, winner of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2004, to be held in January 2005 in the United Arab Emirates. These also fell through due to a lack of funding. Plans to hold the match in Turkey instead came too late. Kasparov announced in January 2005 that he was tired of waiting for FIDE to organize a match and so had decided to stop all efforts to regain the World Championship title.
Retirement from chess
After winning the prestigious Linares tournament for the ninth time, Kasparov announced on 10 March 2005 that he would retire from serious competitive chess. He cited as the reason a lack of personal goals in the chess world (he commented when winning the Russian championship in 2004 that it had been the last major title he had never won outright) and expressed frustration at the failure to reunify the world championship.
Kasparov said he might play in some rapid chess events for fun, but he intended to spend more time on his books, including the My Great Predecessors series, and work on the links between decision-making in chess and other areas of life. He also stated that he would continue to involve himself in Russian politics, which he viewed as "headed down the wrong path."
Post-retirement chess
On 22 August 2006, in his first public chess games since his retirement, Kasparov played in the Lichthof Chess Champions Tournament, a blitz event played at the time control of 5 minutes per side and 3-second increments per move. Kasparov tied for first with Anatoly Karpov, scoring 4½/6.
Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov played a 12-game match from 21 to 24 September 2009, in Valencia, Spain. It consisted of four rapid (or semi rapid) games, in which Kasparov won 3–1, and eight blitz games, in which Kasparov won 6–2, winning the match with a total result of 9–3. The event took place exactly 25 years after the two players' legendary encounter at World Chess Championship 1984.
Kasparov actively coached Magnus Carlsen for approximately one year beginning in February 2009. The collaboration remained secret until September 2009. Under Kasparov's tutelage, Carlsen in October 2009 became the youngest ever to achieve a FIDE rating higher than 2800 and rose from world number four to world number one. While the pair initially planned to work together throughout 2010, in March of that year it was announced that Carlsen had split from Kasparov and would no longer be using him as a trainer. According to an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Carlsen indicated that he would remain in contact and that he would continue to attend training sessions with Kasparov, but in fact, no further training sessions were held and the cooperation gradually fizzled out over the course of the spring.
In May 2010 he played 30 games simultaneously, winning each one, against players at Tel Aviv University in Israel. In the same month, it was revealed that Kasparov had aided Viswanathan Anand in preparation for the World Chess Championship 2010 against challenger Veselin Topalov. Anand won the match 6½–5½ to retain the title.
In January 2011, Kasparov began training the U.S. grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. The first of several training sessions were held in New York just before Nakamura participated in the Tata Steel Chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands. In December 2011, it was announced that the cooperation had come to an end.
Kasparov played two blitz exhibition matches in the autumn of 2011. The first was in September against French grandmaster Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, in Clichy (France), which Kasparov won 1½–½. The second was a longer match consisting of eight blitz games played on 9 October, against English grandmaster Nigel Short. Kasparov won again by a score of 4½–3½.
A little after that, in October 2011, Kasparov played and defeated fourteen opponents in a simultaneous exhibition that took place in Bratislava.
On 25 and 26 April 2015, Kasparov played a mini-match against Nigel Short. The match consisted of two rapid games and eight blitz games and was contested over the course of two days. Both commentators GM Maurice Ashley and Alejandro Ramirez remarked how Kasparov was an 'initiative hog' throughout the match, consistently not allowing Short to gain any foothold in the games, and won the match decisively with a score of 8½–1½. Kasparov also managed to win all five games on the second day, with his victories characterised by aggressive pawn moves breaking up Short's position, thereby allowing Kasparov's pieces to achieve positional superiority.
On Wednesday 19 August 2015, he played and won all 19 games of a simultaneous exhibition in Pula, Croatia.
On Thursday 28 April and Friday 29 April 2016 at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis, Kasparov played a 6-round exhibition blitz round-robin tournament with Fabiano Caruana, Wesley So, and Hikaru Nakamura in an event called the Ultimate Blitz Challenge. He finished the tournament third with 9.5/18, behind Hikaru Nakamura (11/18) and Wesley So (10/18). At the post-tournament interview, he considered the possibility of playing future top-level blitz exhibition matches.
On 2 June 2016, Kasparov played against fifteen chess players in a simultaneous exhibition in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Halle of Mönchengladbach. He won all games.
Candidate for FIDE presidency
On 7 October 2013, Kasparov announced his candidacy for World Chess Federation president during a reception in Tallinn, Estonia, where the 84th FIDE Congress took place. Kasparov's candidacy was supported by his former student, reigning World Chess Champion and FIDE#1 ranked player Magnus Carlsen. At the FIDE General Assembly in August 2014, Kasparov lost the presidential election to incumbent FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, with a vote of 110–61.
A few days before the election took place, the New York Times Magazine had published a lengthy report on the viciously fought campaign. Included was information about a leaked contract between Kasparov and former FIDE Secretary General Ignatius Leong from Singapore, in which the Kasparov campaign reportedly "offered to pay Leong US$500,000 and to pay $250,000 a year for four years to the ASEAN Chess Academy, an organization Leong helped create to teach the game, specifying that Leong would be responsible for delivering 11 votes from his region [...]". In September 2015, the FIDE Ethics Commission found Kasparov and Leong guilty of violating its Code of Ethics and later suspended them for two years from all FIDE functions and meetings.
Return from retirement
In 2017, Kasparov came out of retirement to participate in the inaugural St. Louis Rapid and Blitz tournament from 14 to 19 August, scoring 3.5/9 in the rapid and 9/18 in the blitz, finishing eighth out of ten participants, which included Nakamura, Caruana, former world champion Anand, and the eventual winner, Aronian. Any tournament money that he earned would go towards charities to promote chess in Africa.
In 2020 he participated in 9LX tournament in Chess 960. He finished eighth in a field of 10 players. Notably he drew a game against Magnus Carlsen, who tied for first place.
In 2021 he launched Kasparovchess, a subscription-based online chess community featuring documentaries, lessons and puzzles, podcasts, articles, interviews, and playing zones.
In 2021, Kasparov played in the blitz section of the Grand Chess Tour event in Zagreb, Croatia. He performed poorly, however, scoring 0.5/9 on the first day and 2.0/9 on the second day, getting his only win against Jorden Van Foreest. He also participated in 9XL 2 - Chess 960 tournament - finishing fifth in a field of 10 players, with a score of 5/9.
Politics
1980s
Kasparov's grandfather was a staunch communist but Kasparov gradually began to have doubts about the Soviet Union's political system at age 13 when he travelled abroad for the first time to Paris for a chess tournament. In 1981, at age 18 he read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a copy of which he bought while abroad.
Kasparov joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1984, and in 1987 was elected to the Central Committee of Komsomol. However, in 1990, he left the party.
1990s
In January 1990, Kasparov and his family fled Baku to escape pogroms against Armenians.
In May 1990, Kasparov took part in the creation of the Democratic Party of Russia, which at first was a liberal anti-communist party, later shifting to centrism. Kasparov left the party on 28 April 1991, after its conference.
In 1991, Kasparov received the Keeper of the Flame award from the Center for Security Policy, a Washington, D.C. based far-right, anti-Muslim think tank. In his acceptance speech Kasparov lauded the defeat of communism while also urging the United States to give no financial assistance to central Soviet leaders.
In June 1993, Kasparov was involved with the creation of the "Choice of Russia" bloc of parties and in 1996 took part in the election campaign of Boris Yeltsin. In 2001 he voiced his support for the Russian television channel NTV.
In 1997, Kasparov was awarded honorary citizenship of Bosnia and Herzegovina for his support of Bosnian people during the Bosnian War.
2000s
In 2002, he called for Turkey to be admitted to the European Union if Turkey recognizes the Armenian genocide.
After his retirement from chess in 2005, Kasparov turned to politics and created the United Civil Front, a social movement whose main goal is to "work to preserve electoral democracy in Russia". He has vowed to "restore democracy" to Russia by restoring the rule of law.
Kasparov was instrumental in setting up The Other Russia, a coalition which opposes Putin's government. The Other Russia has been boycotted by the leaders of Russia's mainstream opposition parties, Yabloko and Union of Right Forces due to its inclusion of both nationalist and radical groups. Kasparov has criticized these groups as being secretly under the auspices of the Kremlin.
In April 2005, Kasparov was in Moscow at a promotional event when he was struck over the head with a chessboard he had just signed. The assailant was reported to have said "I admired you as a chess player, but you gave that up for politics" immediately before the attack. Kasparov has been the subject of a number of other episodes since, including police brutality and alleged harassment from the Russian secret service.
Kasparov helped organize the Saint Petersburg Dissenters' March on 3 March 2007 and The March of the Dissenters on 24 March 2007, both involving several thousand people rallying against Putin and Saint Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko's policies.
In April 2007, Kasparov led a pro-democracy demonstration in Moscow. Soon after the demonstration's start, however, over 9,000 police descended on the group and seized almost everyone. Kasparov, who was briefly arrested by the Moscow police, was warned by the prosecution office on the eve of the march that anyone participating risked being detained. He was held for some 10 hours and then fined and released. He was later summoned by the FSB for violations of Russian anti-extremism laws.
Speaking about Kasparov, former KGB defector Oleg Kalugin in 2007 remarked, "I do not talk in details – people who knew them are all dead now because they were vocal, they were open. I am quiet. There is only one man who is vocal and he may be in trouble: [former] world chess champion [Garry] Kasparov. He has been very outspoken in his attacks on Putin and I believe that he is probably next on the list."
Kasparov gave speeches at think tanks such as the Hoover Institution.
On 30 September 2007, Kasparov entered the Russian presidential race, receiving 379 of 498 votes at a congress held in Moscow by The Other Russia. In October 2007, Kasparov announced his intention of standing for the Russian presidency as the candidate of the "Other Russia" coalition and vowed to fight for a "democratic and just Russia". Later that month he traveled to the United States, where he appeared on several popular television programs, which were hosted by Stephen Colbert, Wolf Blitzer, Bill Maher, and Chris Matthews.
In November 2007, Kasparov and other protesters were detained by police at an Other Russia rally in Moscow, which drew 3,000 demonstrators to protest election rigging. Following an attempt by about 100 protesters to march through police lines to the electoral commission, which had barred Other Russia candidates from parliamentary elections, arrests were made. The Russian authorities stated a rally had been approved but not any marches, resulting in several detained demonstrators. He was subsequently charged with resisting arrest and organizing an unauthorized protest and given a jail sentence of five days. Kasparov appealed the charges, citing that he had been following orders given by the police, although it was denied. He was released from jail on 29 November. Putin criticized Kasparov at the rally for his use of English when speaking rather than Russian.
In December 2007, Kasparov announced that he had to withdraw his presidential candidacy due to inability to rent a meeting hall where at least 500 of his supporters could assemble. With the deadline expiring on that date, he explained it was impossible for him to run. Russian election laws required sufficient meeting hall space for assembling supporters. Kasparov's spokeswoman accused the government of using pressure to deter anyone from renting a hall for the gathering and said that the electoral commission had rejected a proposal that would have allowed for smaller gathering sizes rather than one large gathering at a meeting hall.
2010s—2020s
Kasparov was among the 34 first signatories and a key organizer of the online anti-Putin campaign "Putin must go", started on 10 March 2010. The campaign was begun by a coalition of opposition to Putin who regard his rule as lacking any rule of law. Within the text is a call to Russian law enforcement to ignore Putin's orders. By June 2011, there were 90,000 signatures. While the identity of the petition author remained anonymous, there was wide speculation that it was indeed Kasparov.
Kasparov was named Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation in 2011.
On 31 January 2012, Kasparov hosted a meeting of opposition leaders planning a mass march on 4 February 2012, the third major opposition rally held since the disputed State Duma elections of December 2011. Among other opposition leaders attending were Alexey Navalny and Yevgenia Chirikova.
On 17 August 2012, Kasparov was arrested and beaten outside of the Moscow court while attending the sentencing in the case involving the all-female punk band Pussy Riot. On 24 August, he was cleared of charges that he took part in an unauthorized protest against the conviction of three members of Pussy Riot. Judge Yekaterina Veklich said there were "no grounds to believe the testimony of the police". He could still face criminal charges over a police officer's claims that the opposition leader bit his finger while he was being detained. He later thanked all the bloggers and reporters who provided video evidence that contradicted the testimony of the police.
Kasparov wrote in February 2013 that "fascism has come to Russia. ... Project Putin, just like the old Project Hitler, is but the fruit of a conspiracy by the ruling elite. Fascist rule was never the result of the free will of the people. It was always the fruit of a conspiracy by the ruling elites!"
In April 2013, Kasparov joined in an HRF condemnation of Kanye West for having performed for the leader of Kazakhstan in exchange for a $3 million paycheck, saying that West "has entertained a brutal killer and his entourage" and that his fee "came from the loot stolen from the Kazakhstan treasury".
Kasparov denied rumors in April 2013 that he planned to leave Russia for good. "I found these rumors to be deeply saddening and, moreover, surprising," he wrote. "I was unable to respond immediately because I was in such a state of shock that such an incredibly inaccurate statement, the likes of which is constantly distributed by the Kremlin's propagandists, came this time from Ilya Yashin, a fellow member of the Opposition Coordination Council (KSO) and my former colleague from the Solidarity movement."
In an April 2013 op-ed piece, Kasparov accused prominent Russian journalist Vladimir Posner of failing to stand up to Putin and to earlier Russian and Soviet leaders.
Kasparov was presented with the Morris B. Abram Human Rights Award, UN Watch's annual human-rights prize, in 2013. The organization praised him as "not only one of the world's smartest men" but "also among its bravest".
At the 2013 Women in the World conference, Kasparov told The Daily Beasts Michael Moynihan that democracy no longer existed in what he called Russia's "dictatorship".
Kasparov said at a press conference in June 2013 that if he returned to Russia he doubted he would be allowed to leave again, given Putin's ongoing crackdown against dissenters. "So for the time being," he said, "I refrain from returning to Russia." He explained shortly thereafter in an article for The Daily Beast that this had not been intended as "a declaration of leaving my home country, permanently or otherwise", but merely an expression of "the dark reality of the situation in Russia today, where nearly half the members of the opposition's Coordinating Council are under criminal investigation on concocted charges". He noted that the Moscow prosecutor's office was "opening an investigation that would limit my ability to travel", making it impossible for him to fulfill "professional speaking engagements" and hindering his "work for the nonprofit Kasparov Chess Foundation, which has centers in New York City, Brussels, and Johannesburg to promote chess in education".
Kasparov further wrote in his June 2013 Daily Beast article that the mass protests in Moscow 18 months earlier against fraudulent Russian elections had been "a proud moment for me". He recalled that after joining the opposition movement in March 2005, he had been criticized for seeking to unite "every anti-Putin element in the country to march together regardless of ideology". Therefore, the sight of "hundreds of flags representing every group from liberals to nationalists all marching together for 'Russia Without Putin' was the fulfillment of a dream." Yet most Russians, he lamented, had continued to "slumber" even as Putin had "taken off the flimsy mask of democracy to reveal himself in full as the would-be KGB dictator he has always been".
Kasparov responded with several sardonic Twitter postings to a September 2013 The New York Times op-ed by Putin. "I hope Putin has taken adequate protections," he tweeted. "Now that he is a Russian journalist his life may be in grave danger!" Also: "Now we can expect NY Times op-eds by Mugabe on fair elections, Castro on free speech, & Kim Jong-un on prison reform. The Axis of Hypocrisy."
In a 12 May 2013 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Kasparov questioned reports that the Russian security agency, the FSB, had fully cooperated with the FBI in the matter of the Boston bombers. He noted that the elder bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had reportedly met in Russia with two known jihadists who "were killed in Dagestan by the Russian military just days before Tamerlan left Russia for the U.S." Kasparov argued, "If no intelligence was sent from Moscow to Washington" about this meeting, "all this talk of FSB cooperation cannot be taken seriously." He further observed, "This would not be the first time Russian security forces seemed strangely impotent in the face of an impending terror attack," pointing out that in both the 2002 Moscow theater siege and the 2004 Beslan school attack, "there were FSB informants in both terror groups – yet the attacks went ahead unimpeded." Given this history, he wrote, "it is impossible to overlook that the Boston bombing took place just days after the U.S. Magnitsky List was published, creating the first serious external threat to the Putin power structure by penalizing Russian officials complicit in human-rights crimes." In sum, Putin's "dubious record on counterterrorism and its continued support of terror sponsors Iran and Syria mean only one thing: common ground zero".
Kasparov wrote in July 2013 about the trial in Kirov of fellow opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who had been convicted "on concocted embezzlement charges", only to see the prosecutor, surprisingly, ask for his release the next day pending appeal. "The judicial process and the democratic process in Russia," wrote Kasparov, "are both elaborate mockeries created to distract the citizenry at home and to help Western leaders avoid confronting the awkward fact that Russia has returned to a police state". Still, Kasparov felt that whatever had caused the Kirov prosecutor's about-face, "my optimism tells me it was a positive sign. After more than 13 years of predictable repression under Putin, anything different is good."
Kasparov had maintained a summer home in the Croatian city of Makarska. In February 2014, he applied for citizenship by naturalisation in Croatia, according to media reports, claiming he was finding it increasingly difficult to live in Russia. According to an article in The Guardian, Kasparov was "widely perceived" as having been a vocal supporter of Croatian independence during the early 1990s. Later in February 2014, his application for naturalisation was approved and he had a meeting with Croatian prime minister Zoran Milanović on 27 February. Croatian press cited his "lobbying for Croatia in 1991" as grounds for the expedited naturalisation. Subsequent publications in Croatian press suggested that his lobbying for Croatia "was handsomely paid for". In an interview for a Croatian daily published in February 2022, Kasparov said he was "very grateful" to Croatian president Zoran Milanović for the help rendered by him (then as prime minister) in obtaining Croatian citizenship.
Political views
In September 2013, Kasparov wrote in Time magazine that in Syria, Putin and Bashar al-Assad "won by forfeit when President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron and the rest of the so-called leaders of the free world walked away from the table." Kasparov lamented the "new game at the negotiating table where Putin and Assad set the rules and will run the show under the protection of the U.N." Kasparov said in September 2013 that Russia was now a dictatorship. In the same month he told an interviewer that "Obama going to Russia now is dead wrong, morally and politically," because Putin's regime "is behind Assad".
Kasparov has been outspoken against Putin's antigay laws, describing them as "only the most recent encroachment on the freedom of speech and association of Russia's citizens" which the international community had largely ignored. Regarding Russia's hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Kasparov explained in August 2013 that he had opposed Russia's bid from the outset, since it would "allow Vladimir Putin's cronies to embezzle hundreds of millions of dollars" and "lend prestige to Putin's authoritarian regime". Kasparov did not support the proposed Sochi Olympics boycott—writing that it would "unfairly punish athletes"—but called for athletes and others to "transform Putin's self-congratulatory pet project into a spotlight that exposes his authoritarian rule" to the world. In September, Kasparov called upon politicians to refuse to attend the games and the public to pressure sponsors and the media, such that Coca-Cola, for example, could put "a rainbow flag on each Coca-Cola can" and NBC could "do interviews with Russian gay activists or with Russian political activists". Kasparov also emphasized that although he was "still a Russian citizen", he had "good reason to be concerned about my ability to leave Russia if I returned to Moscow".
Kasparov has spoken out against the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and has stated that control of Crimea should be returned to Ukraine after the overthrow of Putin without additional conditions.
Kasparov's website was blocked by the Russian government censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, at the behest of the public prosecutor, allegedly due to Kasparov's opinions on the Crimean crisis. Kasparov's block was made in unison with several other notable Russian sites that were accused of inciting public outrage. Reportedly, several of the blocked sites received an affidavit noting their violations. However, Kasparov stated that his site had received no such notice of violations after its block. In 2015 a whole note on Kasparov was removed from a Russian language encyclopedia of greatest Soviet players after an intervention from "senior leadership".
In October 2015, Kasparov published a book titled Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. In the book, Kasparov likens Putin to Adolf Hitler, and explains the need for the west to oppose Putin sooner, rather than appeasing him and postponing the eventual confrontation. According to his publisher, "Kasparov wants this book out fast, in a way that has potential to influence the discussion during the primary season." In 2018, he said that "anything is better than Putin because that eliminates the probability of a nuclear war. Putin is insane."
In the 2016 United States presidential election, Kasparov described Republican Donald Trump as "a celebrity showman with racist leanings and authoritarian tendencies" and criticised Trump for calling for closer ties with Putin. After Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, called Putin a strong leader, Kasparov said that Putin is a strong leader "in the same way arsenic is a strong drink". He also criticised the economic policies of Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders, but showed respect for Sanders as "a charismatic speaker and a passionate believer in his cause". Kasparov opined that Henry Kissinger "was selling the Trump Administration on the idea of a mirror of 1972 [Richard Nixon's visit to China], except, instead of a Sino-U.S. alliance against the U.S.S.R., this would be a Russian-American alliance against China."
In 2017, he condemned the violence unleashed by the Spanish police against the independence referendum in Catalonia. He criticized the Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy and accused him of "betraying" the European promise of peace. After the Catalan regional election held later the same year, Kasparov wrote: "Despite unprecedented pressure from Madrid, Catalonian separatists won a majority. Europe must speak and help find a peaceful path toward resolution and avoid more violence". Kasparov recommended that Spain look to how Britain handled the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, adding: "look only at how Turkey and Iraq have treated the separatist Kurds. That cannot be the road for Spain and Catalonia."
Kasparov supports recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
He welcomed the Velvet Revolution in Armenia in 2018, just a few days after it happened.
Kasparov condemned the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In October 2018, he wrote that Erdoğan's regime in Turkey "has jailed more journalists than any country in the world and scores of them remain in prison in Turkey. Since 2016, Turkey's intelligence agency has abducted at least 80 people in operations in 18 countries."
In 2021, Kasparov stated that "the only language that Putin understands is power, and his power is his money," arguing that the United States should target the bank accounts of Russian oligarchs to force Russia to rein in its criminals' cyberattacks against American agencies and companies.
Playing style
Kasparov's attacking style of play has been compared by many to Alekhine's. Kasparov has described his style as being influenced chiefly by Alekhine, Tal and Fischer. Kramnik has opined that "[Kasparov's] capacity for study is second to none", and said "There is nothing in chess he has been unable to deal with." Magnus Carlsen, whom Kasparov coached from 2009 to 2010, said of Kasparov, "I've never seen someone with such a feel for dynamics in complex positions." Kasparov was known for his extensive opening preparation and aggressive play in the opening.
Olympiads and other major team events
Kasparov played in a total of eight Chess Olympiads. He represented the Soviet Union four times and Russia four times, following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. In his 1980 Olympiad debut, he became, at age 17, the youngest player to represent the Soviet Union or Russia at that level, a record which was broken by Vladimir Kramnik in 1992. In 82 games, he has scored (+50−3=29), for 78.7% and won a total of 19 medals, including team gold medals all eight times he competed.
For the 1994 Moscow Olympiad, he had a significant organizational role, in helping to put together the event on short notice, after Thessaloniki canceled its offer to host, a few weeks before the scheduled dates. Kasparov's detailed Olympiad record follows:
Valletta 1980, USSR 2nd reserve, 9½/12 (+8−1=3), team gold, board bronze;
Lucerne 1982, USSR 2nd board, 8½/11 (+6−0=5), team gold, board bronze;
Dubai 1986, USSR 1st board, 8½/11 (+7−1=3), team gold, board gold, performance gold;
Thessaloniki 1988, USSR 1st board, 8½/10 (+7−0=3), team gold, board gold, performance gold;
Manila 1992, Russia board 1, 8½/10 (+7−0=3), team gold, board gold, performance silver;
Moscow 1994, Russia board 1, 6½/10 (+4−1=5), team gold;
Yerevan 1996, Russia board 1, 7/9 (+5−0=4), team gold, board silver, performance gold;
Bled 2002, Russia board 1, 7½/9 (+6−0=3), team gold, performance gold.
Kasparov made his international teams debut for the USSR at age 16 in the 1980 European Team Championship and played for Russia in the 1992 edition of that championship. He won a total of five medals. His detailed Euroteams record follows:
Skara 1980, USSR 2nd reserve, 5½/6 (+5−0=1), team gold, board gold;
Debrecen 1992, Russia board 1, 6/8 (+4−0=4), team gold, board gold, performance silver.
Kasparov also represented the USSR once in Youth Olympiad competition, but the detailed data at Olimpbase is incomplete; the Chessmetrics Garry Kasparov player file has his individual score from that event.
Graz 1981, USSR board 1, 9/10 (+8−0=2), team gold.
Records and achievements
Chess ratings achievements
Kasparov holds the record for the longest time as the No. 1 rated player in the worldfrom 1984 to 2005 (Vladimir Kramnik shared the No. 1 ranking with him once, in the January 1996 FIDE rating list). He was also briefly ejected from the list following his split from FIDE in 1993, but during that time he headed the rating list of the rival PCA. At the time of his retirement, he was still ranked No. 1 in the world, with a rating of 2812. His rating has fallen inactive since the January 2006 rating list.
In January 1990, Kasparov achieved the (then) highest FIDE rating ever, passing 2800 and breaking Bobby Fischer's old record of 2785. By the July 1999 and January 2000 FIDE rating lists, Kasparov had reached a 2851 Elo rating, at that time the highest rating ever achieved. He held that record for the highest rating ever achieved until Magnus Carlsen attained a new record high rating of 2861 in January 2013.
Other records
Kasparov holds the record for most consecutive professional tournament victories, placing first or equal first in 15 individual tournaments from 1981 to 1990. The streak was broken by Vasyl Ivanchuk at Linares 1991, where Kasparov placed second, half a point behind him after losing their individual game. The details of this record winning streak follow:
Frunze 1981, USSR Championship, 12½/17, tie for 1st;
Bugojno 1982, 9½/13, 1st;
Moscow 1982, Interzonal, 10/13, 1st;
Nikšić 1983, 11/14, 1st;
Brussels OHRA 1986, 7½/10, 1st;
Brussels SWIFT 1987, 8½/11, tie for 1st;
Amsterdam Optiebeurs 1988, 9/12, 1st;
Belfort (World Cup) 1988, 11½/15, 1st;
Moscow 1988, USSR Championship, 11½/17, tie for 1st;
Reykjavík (World Cup) 1988, 11/17, 1st;
Barcelona (World Cup) 1989, 11/16, tie for 1st;
Skellefteå (World Cup) 1989, 9½/15, tie for 1st;
Tilburg 1989, 12/14, 1st;
Belgrade (Investbank) 1989, 9½/11, 1st;
Linares 1990, 8/11, 1st.
Kasparov went 9 years winning every supertournament he played in addition to contesting his series of 5 consecutive matches with Anatoly Karpov.
His only failure in this time period in either tournament or match play was in the World Chess Championship 1984 when the 21 year old Kasparov was trailing (-5, +3 = 40) against the defending champion Karpov before the match was abruptly cancelled.
Later on in his career, Kasparov went on another long streak of consecutive supertournament wins.
Wijk aan Zee Hoogovens 1999, 10/13, 1st;
Linares 1999, 10½/14, 1st;
Sarajevo 1999, 7/9, 1st;
Wijk aan Zee Corus 2000, 9½/13, 1st;
Linares 2000, 6/10, tie for 1st;
Sarajevo 2000, 8½/11, 1st;
Wijk aan Zee Corus 2001, 9/13, 1st;
Linares 2001, 7.5/10, 1st;
Astana 2001, 7/10, 1st;
Linares 2002, 8/12, 1st.
In these 10 consecutive classical supertournaments wins, Kasparov had a score of 53 wins, 61 draws and 1 loss in 115 games with his only loss coming against Ivan Sokolov in Wijk aan Zee 1999.
Kasparov won the Chess Oscar a record eleven times.
Chess and computers
In 1983, Acorn Computers acted as one of the sponsors for Kasparov's Candidates semi-final match against Viktor Korchnoi. Kasparov was awarded a BBC Micro which he took back with him to Baku, making it perhaps the first western-made microcomputer to reach Baku at that time. In 1985, computer chess magazine editor Frederic Friedel invited Kasparov to his house, and the two of them discussed how a chess database program would be useful for preparation. Two years later, Friedel founded Chessbase, and gave a copy of the program to Kasparov who started using it in his preparation.
In 1985, Kasparov played against thirty-two different chess computers in Hamburg, winning all games, but with some difficulty.
On 22 October 1989, Kasparov defeated the chess computer Deep Thought in both games of a two-game match.
In December 1992, Kasparov visited Frederic Friedel in his hotel room in Cologne, and played 37 blitz games against Fritz 2 winning 24, drawing 4 and losing 9.
Kasparov cooperated in producing video material for the computer game Kasparov's Gambit released by Electronic Arts in November 1993. In April 1994, Intel acted as a sponsor for the first Professional Chess Association Grand Prix event in Moscow played a time control of 25 minutes per game. In May, Chessbase's Fritz 3 running on an Intel Pentium PC defeated Kasparov in their first in the Intel Express blitz tournament in Munich, but Kasparov managed to tie it for first, and then win the playoff with 3 wins and 2 draws. The next day, Kasparov lost to Fritz 3 again in a game on ZDF TV. In August, Kasparov was knocked out of the London Intel Grand Prix by Richard Lang's ChessGenius 2 program in the first round.
In 1995, during Kasparov's world title match with Viswanathan Anand, he unveiled an opening novelty that had been checked with a chess engine, an approach that would become increasingly common in subsequent years.
Kasparov played in a pair of six-game chess matches with an IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue. The first match was played in Philadelphia in 1996 and won by Kasparov. The second was played in New York City in 1997 and won by Deep Blue. The 1997 match was the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion by a computer under tournament conditions.
In May 1997, an updated version of Deep Blue defeated Kasparov 3½–2½ in a highly publicized six-game match. The match was even after five games but Kasparov lost quickly in Game 6. This was the first time a computer had ever defeated a world champion in a match. A documentary film was made about this famous match entitled Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine.
Kasparov said that he was "not well prepared" to face Deep Blue in 1997. He said that based on his "objective strengths" his play was stronger than that of Deep Blue. Kasparov claimed that several factors weighed against him in this match. In particular, he was denied access to Deep Blue's recent games, in contrast to the computer's team, which could study hundreds of Kasparov's.
After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human chess players, in contravention of the rules, intervened. IBM denied that it cheated, saying the only human intervention occurred between games. The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play revealed during the course of the match. Kasparov requested printouts of the machine's log files but IBM refused, although the company later published the logs on the Internet. Much later, it was suggested that the behavior Kasparov noted had resulted from a glitch in the computer program. Although Kasparov wanted another rematch, IBM declined and ended their Deep Blue program.
In January 2003, he engaged in a six-game classical time control match with a $1 million prize fund which was billed as the FIDE "Man vs. Machine" World Championship, against Deep Junior. The engine evaluated three million positions per second. After one win each and three draws, it was all up to the final game. After reaching a decent position Kasparov offered a draw, which was soon accepted by the Deep Junior team. Asked why he offered the draw, Kasparov said he feared making a blunder.
Deep Junior was the first machine to beat Kasparov with black and at a standard time control.
In June 2003, Mindscape released the computer game Kasparov Chessmate with Kasparov himself listed as a co-designer.
In November 2003, he engaged in a four-game match against the computer program X3D Fritz, using a virtual board, 3D glasses and a speech recognition system. After two draws and one win apiece, the X3D Man–Machine match ended in a draw. Kasparov received $175,000 for the result and took home the golden trophy. Kasparov continued to criticize the blunder in the second game that cost him a crucial point. He felt that he had outplayed the machine overall and played well. "I only made one mistake but unfortunately that one mistake lost the game."
Books and other writings
Early writings
Kasparov has written books on chess. He published a controversial autobiography when still in his early 20s, originally titled Child of Change, later retitled Unlimited Challenge. This book was subsequently updated several times after he became World Champion. Its content is mainly literary, with a small chess component of key unannotated games. He published an annotated games collection in 1983, Fighting Chess: My Games and Career, which has been updated several times in further editions. He also wrote a book annotating the games from his World Chess Championship 1985 victory, World Chess Championship Match: Moscow, 1985.
He has annotated his own games extensively for the Yugoslav Chess Informant series and for other chess publications. In 1982, he co-authored Batsford Chess Openings with British grandmaster Raymond Keene and this book was an enormous seller. It was updated into a second edition in 1989. He also co-authored two opening books with his trainer Alexander Nikitin in the 1980s for British publisher Batsfordon the Classical Variation of the Caro-Kann Defence and on the Scheveningen Variation of the Sicilian Defence. Kasparov has also contributed extensively to the five-volume openings series Encyclopedia of Chess Openings.
In 2000, Kasparov co-authored Kasparov Against the World: The Story of the Greatest Online Challenge with grandmaster Daniel King. The 202-page book analyzes the 1999 Kasparov versus the World game, and holds the record for the longest analysis devoted to a single chess game.
My Great Predecessors series
In 2003, the first volume of his five-volume work Garry Kasparov on My Great Predecessors was published. This volume, which deals with the world chess champions Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, José Raúl Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, and some of their strong contemporaries, has received lavish praise from some reviewers (including Nigel Short), while attracting criticism from others for historical inaccuracies and analysis of games directly copied from unattributed sources. Through suggestions on the book's website, most of these shortcomings were corrected in following editions and translations. Despite this, the first volume won the British Chess Federation's Book of the Year award in 2003. Volume two, covering Max Euwe, Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov and Mikhail Tal appeared later in 2003. Volume three, covering Tigran Petrosian and Boris Spassky appeared in early 2004. In December 2004, Kasparov released volume four, which covers Samuel Reshevsky, Miguel Najdorf, and Bent Larsen (none of these three were World Champions), but focuses primarily on Bobby Fischer. The fifth volume, devoted to the chess careers of World Champion Anatoly Karpov and challenger Viktor Korchnoi, was published in March 2006.
Modern Chess series
His book Revolution in the 70s (published in March 2007) covers "the openings revolution of the 1970s–1980s" and is the first book in a new series called "Modern Chess Series", which intends to cover his matches with Karpov and selected games. The book "Revolution in the 70s" concerns the revolution in opening theory that was witnessed in that decade. Such systems as the controversial (at the time) "Hedgehog" opening plan of passively developing the pieces no further than the first three ranks are examined in great detail. Kasparov also analyzes some of the most notable games played in that period. In a section at the end of the book, top opening theoreticians provide their own "take" on the progress made in opening theory in the 1980s.
Garry Kasparov on Garry Kasparov series
Kasparov published three volumes of his games, spanning his entire career.
Winter Is Coming
In October 2015, Kasparov published a book titled Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. The title is a reference to the HBO television series Game of Thrones. In the book, Kasparov writes about the need for an organization composed solely of democratic countries to replace the United Nations. In an interview, he called the United Nations a "catwalk for dictators".
Historical revision
Kasparov believes that the conventional history of civilization is radically incorrect. Specifically, he believes that the history of ancient civilizations is based on misdatings of events and achievements that actually occurred in the medieval period. He has cited several aspects of ancient history that he says are likely to be anachronisms.
Kasparov has written in support of New Chronology (Fomenko), although with some reservations. In 2001, Kasparov expressed a desire to devote his time to promoting the New Chronology after his chess career. "New Chronology is a great area for investing my intellect ... My analytical abilities are well placed to figure out what was right and what was wrong." "When I stop playing chess, it may well be that I concentrate on promoting these ideas... I believe they can improve our lives."
Later, Kasparov renounced his support of Fomenko theories but reaffirmed his belief that mainstream historical knowledge is highly inconsistent.
Other post-retirement writing
In 2007, he wrote How Life Imitates Chess, an examination of the parallels between decision-making in chess and in the business world.
In 2008, Kasparov published a sympathetic obituary for Bobby Fischer, writing: "I am often asked if I ever met or played Bobby Fischer. The answer is no, I never had that opportunity. But even though he saw me as a member of the evil chess establishment that he felt had robbed and cheated him, I am sorry I never had a chance to thank him personally for what he did for our sport."
He is the chief advisor for the book publisher Everyman Chess.
Kasparov works closely with Mig Greengard and his comments can often be found on Greengard's blog (apparently no longer active).
Kasparov collaborated with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel on The Blueprint, a book calling for a revival of world innovation, planned to release in March 2013 from W. W. Norton & Company. The book was never released, as the authors disagreed on its contents.
Kasparov argued that chess has become the model for reasoning in the same way that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster became a model organism for geneticists, in an editorial comment on Google's AlphaZero chess-playing system. "I was pleased to see that AlphaZero had a dynamic, open style like my own," he wrote in late 2018.
Kasparov served as a consultant for the 2020 Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit. He gave an extended interview to Slate describing his contributions.
In 2020, Kasparov collaborated with Matt Calkins, founder and CEO of Appian, on HYPERAUTOMATION, a book about low-code development and the future of business automation. Kasparov wrote the foreword where he discusses his experiences with human-machine relationships.
Bibliography
Kasparov Teaches Chess (1984–85, Sport in the USSR Magazine; 1986, First Collier Books)
The Test of Time (Russian Chess) (1986, Pergamon Pr)
World Chess Championship Match: Moscow, 1985 (1986, Everyman Chess)
Child of Change: An Autobiography (1987, Hutchinson)
London–Leningrad Championship Games (1987, Everyman Chess)
Unlimited Challenge (1990, Grove Pr)
The Sicilian Scheveningen (1991, B.T. Batsford Ltd)
The Queen's Indian Defence: Kasparov System (1991, B.T. Batsford Ltd)
Kasparov Versus Karpov, 1990 (1991, Everyman Chess)
Kasparov on the King's Indian (1993, B.T. Batsford Ltd)
Kasparov, Garry. Jon Speelman and Bob Wade. 1995. Garry Kasparov's Fighting Chess. Henry Holt.
Garry Kasparov's Chess Challenge (1996, Everyman Chess)
Lessons in Chess (1997, Everyman Chess)
Kasparov Against the World: The Story of the Greatest Online Challenge (2000, Kasparov Chess Online)
My Great Predecessors Part I (2003, Everyman Chess)
My Great Predecessors Part II (2003, Everyman Chess)
Checkmate!: My First Chess Book (2004, Everyman Mindsports)
My Great Predecessors Part III (2004, Everyman Chess)
My Great Predecessors Part IV (2004, Everyman Chess)
My Great Predecessors Part V (2006, Everyman Chess)
How Life Imitates Chess (2007, William Heinemann Ltd.)
Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess, Part I: Revolution in the 70s (2007, Everyman Chess)
Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess, Part II: Kasparov vs Karpov 1975–1985 (2008, Everyman Chess)
Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess, Part III: Kasparov vs Karpov 1986–1987 (2009, Everyman Chess)
Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess, Part IV: Kasparov vs Karpov 1988–2009 (2010, Everyman Chess)
Garry Kasparov on Garry Kasparov, part I (2011, Everyman Chess)
Garry Kasparov on Garry Kasparov, part II (2013, Everyman Chess)
Garry Kasparov on Garry Kasparov, part III (2014, Everyman Chess)
Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped (2015, Public Affairs)
Deep Thinking with Mig Greengard (2017, Public Affairs)
Videos
Kasparov, Garry, Nigel Short, Raymond Keene and Daniel King. 1993. Kasparov Short The Inside Story. Grandmaster Video.
Kasparov, Garry, Jonathan Tisdall and Jim Plaskett. 2000. My Story. Grandmaster Video.
Kasparov, Garry. 2004. How to Play the Queen's Gambit. Chessbase.
Kasparov, Garry. 2005. How to Play the Najdorf. Chessbase. vol. 1 , vol. 2
Kasparov, Garry. 2012. How I Became World Champion 1973–1985. Chessbase.
Kasparov, Garry. 2017. Garry Kasparov Teaches Chess. Masterclass.com.
Personal life
Kasparov has lived in New York City since 2013.
He has been married three times: to Masha, with whom he had a daughter before divorcing; to Yulia, with whom he had a son before their 2005 divorce; and to Daria (Dasha), with whom he has two children, a daughter born in 2006 and a son born in 2015. Kasparov's wife manages his business activities worldwide as the founder of Kasparov International Management Inc.
See also
Kasparov Chess, Internet chess club.
Kasparov versus the World
List of chess games between Kasparov and Kramnik
Committee 2008
Putinism
References
Further reading
External links
Garry Kasparov, "Man of the Year?", OpinionJournal, 23 December 2007
Edward Winter, List of Books About Fischer and Kasparov
Kasparov's "Deep Thinking" talk at Google
Garry Kasparov's best games analyzed in video
Articles about Garry Kasparov by Edward Winter
1963 births
Living people
2011–2013 Russian protests
20th-century male writers
21st-century Russian politicians
Azerbaijan University of Languages alumni
Chess coaches
Chess grandmasters
Chess Olympiad competitors
Chess historians
Communist Party of the Soviet Union members
Croatian activists
Croatian chess writers
Croatian people of Armenian descent
Croatian people of Russian-Jewish descent
Naturalized citizens of Croatia
Chess players from Baku
Recipients of the Order of Friendship of Peoples
Russian anti-communists
Russian chess players
Russian chess writers
Russian dissidents
Russian liberals
Russian people of Armenian descent
Russian people of Jewish descent
Russian political activists
Russian sportsperson-politicians
Solidarnost politicians
Soviet chess players
Soviet chess writers
Soviet male writers
The Other Russia (coalition)
World chess champions
World Junior Chess Champions | [
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12815 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag%20of%20Greenland | Flag of Greenland | The flag of Greenland (, ) was designed by Greenland native Thue Christiansen. It features two equal horizontal bands of white (top) and red with a large disk slightly to the hoist side of centre. The top half of the disk is red, the bottom half is white. The top half of the flag bears a slight resemblance to the Flag of Japan as a result. The entire flag measures 18 by 12 parts; each stripe measures 6 parts; the disk is 8 parts in diameter, horizontally offset by 7 parts from the hoist to the centre of the circle, and vertically centered.
Its local name in the Greenlandic language is Erfalasorput, which means "our flag". The term Aappalaartoq (meaning "the red") is also used for both the Greenlandic flag and the flag of Denmark (Dannebrog). Today, Greenlanders display both the Erfalasorput and the Dannebrog—often side by side. The flag of Greenland is the only national flag of a Nordic country or territory without a Nordic Cross.
History
Greenland first entertained the idea of a flag of its own in 1973 when five Greenlanders proposed a green, white and blue flag. The following year, a newspaper solicited eleven design proposals (all but one of which was a Nordic cross) and polled the people to determine the most popular. The flag of Denmark was preferred to the others. Little came of this effort.
In 1978, Denmark granted home rule to Greenland, making it an equal member of the Danish Realm. The home rule government held an official call for flag proposals, receiving 555 (of which 293 were submitted by Greenlanders).
The deciding committee came to no consensus, so more proposals were solicited. Finally the present red-and-white design by Christiansen narrowly won over a green-and-white Nordic cross by a vote of fourteen to eleven. Christiansen's red-and-white flag was officially adopted on 1 May 1989.
To honour the tenth anniversary of the Erfalasorput, the Greenland Post Office issued commemorative postage stamps and a leaflet by the flag's creator. He described the white stripe as representing the glaciers and ice cap, which cover more than 80% of the island; the red stripe, the ocean; the red semicircle, the sun, with its bottom part sunk in the ocean; and the white semicircle, the icebergs and pack ice. The design is also reminiscent of the setting sun half-submerged below the horizon and reflected on the sea. In 1985 it was reported that Greenland's flag had exactly the same motif as the flag of the Danish rowing club HEI Rosport, which was founded before Greenland's flag was chosen. It is not clear whether this is a case of plagiarism or just a coincidence, but the rowing club gave Greenland permission to use their flag.
The colours of the Erfalasorput are the same as those of the Dannebrog, symbolizing Greenland's place in the Danish realm.
Other proposals
See also
Flag of Denmark
Flag of the Faroe Islands
List of flags of Denmark
Raven banner
References
External links
FOTW: Greenland - History of the Erfalasorput
Other flag proposals for a Nordic cross design
http://www.flagscorner.com/greenland-flag/
Greenland
National symbols of Greenland
Greenland
Greenland
Greenland
Greenland
Greenland
1989 establishments in Greenland | [
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12816 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav%20Radbruch | Gustav Radbruch | Gustav Radbruch (21 November 1878 – 23 November 1949) was a German legal scholar and politician. He served as Minister of Justice of Germany during the early Weimar period. Radbruch is also regarded as one of the most influential legal philosophers of the 20th century.
Life
Born in Lübeck, Radbruch studied law in Munich, Leipzig and Berlin. He passed his first bar exam ("Staatsexamen") in Berlin in 1901, and the following year he received his doctorate with a dissertation on "The Theory of Adequate Causation". This was followed in 1903 by his qualification to teach criminal law in Heidelberg. In 1904, he was appointed Professor of criminal and trial law and legal philosophy in Heidelberg. In 1914 he accepted a call to a professorship in Königsberg, and later that year assumed a professorship at Kiel.
Radbruch was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and held a seat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1924. In 1921–22 and throughout 1923, he was minister of justice in the cabinets of Joseph Wirth and Gustav Stresemann. During his time in office, a number of important laws were implemented, such as those giving women access to the justice system, and, after the assassination of Walter Rathenau, the law for the protection of the republic.
In 1926, Radbruch accepted a renewed call to lecture at Heidelberg where he delivered his inaugural lecture entitled "Der Mensch im Recht (Law's Image of the Human)" as the newly appointed Professor of Criminal Law on 13 November 1926. After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Radbruch, as a former Social Democratic politician, was dismissed from his university post under the terms of the so-called "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" ("Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums"). (The universities, as public bodies, were subject to civil service laws and regulations.) Despite the employment ban in Nazi Germany, during 1935/36 he was able to spend a year in England, at University College, Oxford. An important practical outcome of this was his book, Der Geist des englischen Rechts (The Spirit of English Law), although this could be published only in 1945. During the Nazi period, he devoted himself primarily to cultural-historical work.
Immediately after the end of the Second World War in 1945, he resumed his teaching activities, but died at Heidelberg in 1949 without being able to complete his planned updated edition of his textbook on legal philosophy.
In September 1945, Radbruch published a short paper "Fünf Minuten Rechtsphilosophie (Five Minutes of Legal Philosophy)", which was influential in shaping the jurisprudence of values (Wertungsjurisprudenz), prevalent in the aftermath of World War II as a reaction against legal positivism.
Work
Radbruch's legal philosophy derived from Neokantianism, which assumes that a categorical cleavage exists between "is" (sein) and "ought" (sollen). According to this view, "should" can never be derived from "Being." Indicative of the Heidelberg school of neokantianism to which Radbruch subscribed was that it interpolated the value-related cultural studies between the explanatory sciences (being) and philosophical teachings of values (should).
In relation to the law, this triadism shows itself in the subfields of legal sociology, legal philosophy and legal dogma. Legal dogma assumes a place in between. It posits itself in opposition to positive law, as the latter depicts itself in social reality and methodologically in the objective "should-have" sense of law, which reveals itself through value-related interpretation.
The core of Radbruch's legal philosophy consists of his tenets the concept of law and the idea of law. The idea of law is defined through a triad of justice, utility and certainty. Radbruch thereby had the idea of utility or usefulness spring forth from an analysis of the idea of justice. Upon this notion was based the Radbruch formula, which is still vigorously debated today. The concept of law, for Radbruch, is "nothing other than the given fact, which has the sense to serve the idea of law."
Hotly disputed is the question whether Radbruch was a legal positivist before 1933 and executed an about-face in his thinking due to the advent of Nazism, or whether he continued to develop, under the impression of Nazi crimes, the relativistic values-teaching he had already been advocating before 1933.
The problem of the controversy between the spirit and the letter of the law, in Germany, has been brought back to public attention due to the trials of former East German soldiers who guarded the Berlin Wall—the so-called necessity of following orders. Radbruch's theories are posited against the positivist "pure legal tenets" represented by Hans Kelsen and, to some extent, also from Georg Jellinek.
In sum, Radbruch's formula argues that where statutory law is incompatible with the requirements of justice "to an intolerable degree", or where statutory law was obviously designed in a way that deliberately negates "the equality that is the core of all justice", statutory law must be disregarded by a judge in favour of the justice principle. Since its first publication in 1946 the principle has been accepted by Germany's Federal Constitutional Court in a variety of cases. Many people partially blame the older German legal tradition of legal positivism for the ease with which Hitler obtained power in an outwardly "legal" manner, rather than by means of a coup. Arguably, the shift to a concept of natural law ought to act as a safeguard against dictatorship, an untrammeled State power and the abrogation of civil rights.
References
Further reading
External links
1878 births
1949 deaths
Politicians from Lübeck
Jurists from Schleswig-Holstein
German military personnel of World War I
Justice ministers of Germany
Social Democratic Party of Germany politicians
German Protestants
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni
Leipzig University alumni
Humboldt University of Berlin alumni
University of Königsberg faculty
University of Kiel faculty
Heidelberg University faculty
Members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic | [
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12821 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate | Gate | A gate or gateway is a point of entry to or from a space enclosed by walls. The word derived from old Norse "gat" meaning road or path; But other terms include yett and port. The concept originally referred to the gap or hole in the wall or fence, rather than a barrier which closed it. Gates may prevent or control the entry or exit of individuals, or they may be merely decorative. The moving part or parts of a gateway may be considered "doors", as they are fixed at one side whilst opening and closing like one.
A gate may have a latch that can be raised and lowered to both open a gate or prevent it from swinging. Locks are also used on gates to increase the security. Larger gates can be used for a whole building, such as a castle or fortified town. Actual doors can also be considered gates when they are used to block entry as prevalent within a gatehouse. Today, many gate doors are opened by an automated gate operator.
Purpose-specific types of gate
Baby gate a safety gate to protect babies and toddlers
City gate of a walled city
Hampshire gate (a.k.a. New Zealand gate, wire gate, etc.)
Kissing gate on footpaths
Lychgate with a roof
Mon Japanese: gate. The religious torii compares to the Chinese pailou (paifang), Indian torana, Indonesian Paduraksa and Korean hongsalmun. Mon are widespread, in Japanese gardens.
Portcullis of a castle
Race gates a gate used checkpoints on race tracks.
Slip gate on footpaths
Turnstile
Watergate of a castle by navigable water
Slalom skiing gates
Image gallery
See also
Barrier
Boom barrier (a.k.a. boom gate)
Border
Gate tower
Gopuram
Leave the gate as you found it
Portal (architecture)
Portcullis
Threshold (disambiguation)
Triumphal arch
List of scandals with "-gate" suffix
Watergate, as used in politics
References
External links
Doors
Fortification (architectural elements)
Garden features | [
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12822 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek%20fire | Greek fire | Greek fire was an incendiary weapon used by the Byzantine Empire beginning . Used to set fire to enemy ships, it consisted of a combustible compound emitted by a flame-throwing weapon. Some historians believe it could be ignited on contact with water, and was probably based on naphtha and quicklime. The Byzantines typically used it in naval battles to great effect, as it could supposedly continue burning while floating on water. The technological advantage it provided was responsible for many key Byzantine military victories, most notably the salvation of Constantinople from the first and second Arab sieges, thus securing the Empire's survival.
The impression made by Greek fire on the western European Crusaders was such that the name was applied to any sort of incendiary weapon, including those used by Arabs, the Chinese, and the Mongols. However, these mixtures used formulas different from that of Byzantine Greek fire, which was a closely guarded state secret. Byzantines also used pressurized nozzles to project the liquid onto the enemy, in a manner resembling a modern flamethrower.
Although usage of the term "Greek fire" has been general in English and most other languages since the Crusades, original Byzantine sources called the substance a variety of names, such as "sea fire" (Medieval Greek: ), "Roman fire" ( ), "war fire" ( ), "liquid fire" ( ), "sticky fire" ( ), or "manufactured fire" ( ).
The composition of Greek fire remains a matter of speculation and debate, with various proposals including combinations of pine resin, naphtha, quicklime, calcium phosphide, sulfur, or niter.
History
Incendiary and flaming weapons were used in warfare for centuries before Greek fire was invented. They included a number of sulfur-, petroleum-, and bitumen-based mixtures. Incendiary arrows and pots containing combustible substances surrounded by caltrops or spikes, or launched by catapults, were used as early as the 9th century BC by the Assyrians and were extensively used in the Greco-Roman world as well. Furthermore, Thucydides mentions that in the siege of Delium in 424 BC a long tube on wheels was used which blew flames forward using a large bellows. The Roman author Julius Africanus, writing in the 3rd century AD, records a mixture that ignited from adequate heat and intense sunlight, used in grenades or night attacks:Automatic fire also by the following formula. This is the recipe: take equal amounts of sulphur, rock salt, ashes, thunder stone, and pyrite and pound fine in a black mortar at midday sun. Also in equal amounts of each ingredient mix together black mulberry resin and Zakynthian asphalt, the latter in a liquid form and free-flowing, resulting in a product that is sooty colored. Then add to the asphalt the tiniest amount of quicklime. But because the sun is at its zenith, one must pound it carefully and protect the face, for it will ignite suddenly. When it catches fire, one should seal it in some sort of copper receptacle; in this way you will have it available in a box, without exposing it to the sun. If you should wish to ignite enemy armaments, you will smear it on in the evening, either on the armaments or some other object, but in secret; when the sun comes up, everything will be burnt up. In naval warfare, the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I () is recorded by chronicler John Malalas to have been advised by a philosopher from Athens called Proclus to use sulfur to burn the ships of the rebel general Vitalian.
Greek fire proper, however, was developed in and is ascribed by the chronicler Theophanes the Confessor to Kallinikos (Latinized Callinicus), an architect from Heliopolis in the former province of Phoenice, by then overrun by the Muslim conquests:
The accuracy and exact chronology of this account is open to question: elsewhere, Theophanes reports the use of fire-carrying ships equipped with nozzles (siphōn) by the Byzantines a couple of years before the supposed arrival of Kallinikos at Constantinople. If this is not due to chronological confusion of the events of the siege, it may suggest that Kallinikos merely introduced an improved version of an established weapon. The historian James Partington further thinks it likely that Greek fire was not in fact the creation of any single person but "invented by chemists in Constantinople who had inherited the discoveries of the Alexandrian chemical school." Indeed, the 11th-century chronicler George Kedrenos records that Kallinikos came from Heliopolis in Egypt, but most scholars reject this as an error. Kedrenos also records the story, considered rather implausible by modern scholars, that Kallinikos' descendants, a family called Lampros, "brilliant," kept the secret of the fire's manufacture and continued doing so to Kedrenos' time.
Kallinikos' development of Greek fire came at a critical moment in the Byzantine Empire's history: weakened by its long wars with Sassanid Persia, the Byzantines had been unable to effectively resist the onslaught of the Muslim conquests. Within a generation, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt had fallen to the Arabs, who in set out to conquer the imperial capital of Constantinople. Greek fire was used to great effect against the Muslim fleets, helping to repel the Muslims at the first and second Arab sieges of the city. Records of its use in later naval battles against the Saracens are more sporadic, but it did secure a number of victories, especially in the phase of Byzantine expansion in the late 9th and early 10th centuries. Utilisation of the substance was prominent in Byzantine civil wars, chiefly the revolt of the thematic fleets in 727 and the large-scale rebellion led by Thomas the Slav in 821–823. In both cases, the rebel fleets were defeated by the Constantinople-based central Imperial Fleet through the use of Greek fire. The Byzantines also used the weapon to devastating effect against the various Rus' raids on the Bosporus, especially those of 941 and 1043, as well as during the Bulgarian war of 970–971, when the fire-carrying Byzantine ships blockaded the Danube.
The importance placed on Greek fire during the Empire's struggle against the Arabs would lead to its discovery being ascribed to divine intervention. The Emperor Constantine Porphyrogennetos (), in his book De Administrando Imperio, admonishes his son and heir, Romanos II (), to never reveal the secrets of its composition, as it was "shown and revealed by an angel to the great and holy first Christian emperor Constantine" and that the angel bound him "not to prepare this fire but for Christians, and only in the imperial city." As a warning, he adds that one official, who was bribed into handing some of it over to the Empire's enemies, was struck down by a "flame from heaven" as he was about to enter a church. As the latter incident demonstrates, the Byzantines could not avoid capture of their precious secret weapon: the Arabs captured at least one fireship intact in 827, and the Bulgars captured several siphōns and much of the substance itself in 812/814. This, however, was apparently not enough to allow their enemies to copy it (see below). The Arabs, for instance, employed a variety of incendiary substances similar to the Byzantine weapon, but they were never able to copy the Byzantine method of deployment by siphōn, and used catapults and grenades instead.
Greek fire continued to be mentioned during the 12th century, and Anna Komnene gives a vivid description of its use in a naval battle against the Pisans in 1099. However, although the use of hastily improvised fireships is mentioned during the 1203 siege of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, no report confirms the use of the actual Greek fire. This might be because of the general disarmament of the Empire in the 20 years leading up to the sacking, or because the Byzantines had lost access to the areas where the primary ingredients were to be found, or even perhaps because the secret had been lost over time.
Records of a 13th-century event in which "Greek fire" was used by the Saracens against the Crusaders can be read through the Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville during the Seventh Crusade. One description of the memoir says "the tail of fire that trailed behind it was as big as a great spear; and it made such a noise as it came, that it sounded like the thunder of heaven. It looked like a dragon flying through the air. Such a bright light did it cast, that one could see all over the camp as though it were day, by reason of the great mass of fire, and the brilliance of the light that it shed."
In the 19th century, it is reported that an Armenian by the name of Kavafian approached the government of the Ottoman Empire with a new type of Greek fire he claimed to have developed. Kavafian refused to reveal its composition when asked by the government, insisting that he be placed in command of its use during naval engagements. Not long after this, he was poisoned by imperial authorities, without their ever having found out his secret.
Manufacture
General characteristics
As Constantine Porphyrogennetos' warnings show, the ingredients and the processes of manufacture and deployment of Greek fire were carefully guarded military secrets. So strict was the secrecy that the composition of Greek fire was lost forever and remains a source of speculation. Consequently, the "mystery" of the formula has long dominated the research into Greek fire. Despite this almost exclusive focus, however, Greek fire is best understood as a complete weapon system of many components, all of which were needed to operate together to render it effective. This comprised not only the formula of its composition, but also the specialized dromon ships that carried it into battle, the device used to prepare the substance by heating and pressurizing it, the siphōn projecting it, and the special training of the siphōnarioi who used it. Knowledge of the whole system was highly compartmentalised, with operators and technicians aware of the secrets of only one component, ensuring that no enemy could gain knowledge of it in its entirety. This accounts for the fact that when the Bulgarians took Mesembria and Debeltos in 814, they captured 36 siphōns and even quantities of the substance itself, but were unable to make any use of them.
The information available on Greek fire is exclusively indirect, based on references in the Byzantine military manuals and a number of secondary historical sources such as Anna Komnene and Western European chroniclers, which are often inaccurate. In her Alexiad, Anna Komnene provides a description of an incendiary weapon, which was used by the Byzantine garrison of Dyrrhachium in 1108 against the Normans. It is often regarded as an at least partial "recipe" for Greek fire:This fire is made by the following arts: From the pine and certain such evergreen trees, inflammable resin is collected. This is rubbed with sulfur and put into tubes of reed, and is blown by men using it with violent and continuous breath. Then in this manner it meets the fire on the tip and catches light and falls like a fiery whirlwind on the faces of the enemies. At the same time, the reports by Western chroniclers of the famed ignis graecus are largely unreliable, since they apply the name to any and all sorts of incendiary substances.
In attempting to reconstruct the Greek fire system, the concrete evidence, as it emerges from the contemporary literary references, provides the following characteristics:
It burned on water; according to some interpretations it was ignited by water. Numerous writers testify that it could be extinguished only by a few substances, such as sand, strong vinegar, or old urine, some presumably by a sort of chemical reaction.
It was a liquid substance – not some sort of projectile – as verified both by descriptions and the very name "liquid fire".
At sea it was usually ejected from a siphōn, although earthenware pots or grenades filled with it – or similar substances – were also used.
The discharge of Greek fire was accompanied by "thunder" and "much smoke".
Theories on composition
The first and, for a long time, most popular theory regarding the composition of Greek fire held that its chief ingredient was saltpeter, making it an early form of gunpowder. This argument was based on the "thunder and smoke" description, as well as on the distance the flame could be projected from the siphōn, which suggested an explosive discharge. From the times of Isaac Vossius, several scholars adhered to this position, most notably the so-called "French school" during the 19th century, which included chemist Marcellin Berthelot.
This view has been rejected since, as saltpeter does not appear to have been used in warfare in Europe or the Middle East before the 13th century, and is absent from the accounts of the Muslim writers – the foremost chemists of the early medieval world – before the same period. In addition, the behavior of the proposed mixture would have been radically different from the siphōn-projected substance described by Byzantine sources.
A second view, based on the fact that Greek fire was inextinguishable by water (some sources suggest that water intensified the flames) suggested that its destructive power was the result of the explosive reaction between water and quicklime. Although quicklime was certainly known and used by the Byzantines and the Arabs in warfare, the theory is refuted by literary and empirical evidence. A quicklime-based substance would have to come in contact with water to ignite, while Emperor Leo's Tactica indicates that Greek fire was often poured directly on the decks of enemy ships, although admittedly, decks were kept wet due to lack of sealants. Likewise, Leo describes the use of grenades, which further reinforces the view that contact with water was not necessary for the substance's ignition. Furthermore, Zenghelis (1932) pointed out that, based on experiments, the actual result of the water–quicklime reaction would be negligible in the open sea.
Another similar proposition suggested that Kallinikos had in fact discovered calcium phosphide, which can be made by boiling bones in urine within a sealed vessel. On contact with water it releases phosphine, which ignites spontaneously. However, extensive experiments with calcium phosphide also failed to reproduce the described intensity of Greek fire.
Consequently, although the presence of either quicklime or saltpeter in the mixture cannot be entirely excluded, they were not the primary ingredient. Most modern scholars agree that Greek fire was based on either crude or refined petroleum, comparable to modern napalm. The Byzantines had easy access to crude oil from the naturally occurring wells around the Black Sea (e.g., the wells around Tmutorakan noted by Constantine Porphyrogennetos) or in various locations throughout the Middle East. An alternate name for Greek fire was "Median fire" (), and the 6th-century historian Procopius records that crude oil, called "naphtha" (in Greek: naphtha, from Old Persian naft) by the Persians, was known to the Greeks as "Median oil" (). This seems to corroborate the availability of naphtha as a basic ingredient of Greek fire.
Naphtha was also used by the Abbasids in the 9th century, with special troops, the naffāṭūn, who wore thick protective suits and used small copper vessels containing burning oil, which they threw onto the enemy troops. There is also a surviving 9th century Latin text, preserved at Wolfenbüttel in Germany, which mentions the ingredients of what appears to be Greek fire and the operation of the siphōns used to project it. Although the text contains some inaccuracies, it clearly identifies the main component as naphtha. Resins were probably added as a thickener (the Praecepta Militaria refer to the substance as , "sticky fire"), and to increase the duration and intensity of the flame. A modern theoretical concoction included the use of pine tar and animal fat along with other ingredients.
A 12th century treatise prepared by Mardi bin Ali al-Tarsusi for Saladin records an Arab version of Greek fire, called naft, which also had a petroleum base, with sulfur and various resins added. Any direct relation with the Byzantine formula is unlikely. An Italian recipe from the 16th century has been recorded for recreational use; it includes coal from a willow tree, alcohol, incense, sulfur, wool and camphor as well as two undetermined components (burning salt and pegola); the concoction was guaranteed to "burn under water" and to be "beautiful."
Methods of deployment
The chief method of deployment of Greek fire, which sets it apart from similar substances, was its projection through a tube (siphōn), for use aboard ships or in sieges. Portable projectors (cheirosiphōnes, χειροσίφωνες) were also invented, reputedly by Emperor Leo VI. The Byzantine military manuals also mention that jars (chytrai or tzykalia) filled with Greek fire and caltrops wrapped with tow and soaked in the substance were thrown by catapults, while pivoting cranes (gerania) were employed to pour it upon enemy ships. The cheirosiphōnes especially were prescribed for use at land and in sieges, both against siege machines and against defenders on the walls, by several 10th-century military authors, and their use is depicted in the Poliorcetica of Hero of Byzantium. The Byzantine dromons usually had a siphōn installed on their prow under the forecastle, but additional devices could also on occasion be placed elsewhere on the ship. Thus in 941, when the Byzantines were facing the vastly more numerous Rus' fleet, siphōns were placed also amidships and even astern.
Projectors
The use of tubular projectors (σίφων, siphōn) is amply attested in the contemporary sources. Anna Komnene gives this account of beast-shaped Greek fire projectors being mounted to the bow of warships:
As he [the Emperor Alexios I] knew that the Pisans were skilled in sea warfare and dreaded a battle with them, on the prow of each ship he had a head fixed of a lion or other land-animal, made in brass or iron with the mouth open and then gilded over, so that their mere aspect was terrifying. And the fire which was to be directed against the enemy through tubes he made to pass through the mouths of the beasts, so that it seemed as if the lions and the other similar monsters were vomiting the fire.
Some sources provide more information on the composition and function of the whole mechanism. The Wolfenbüttel manuscript in particular provides the following description:
...having built a furnace right at the front of the ship, they set on it a copper vessel full of these things, having put fire underneath. And one of them, having made a bronze tube similar to that which the rustics call a squitiatoria, "squirt," with which boys play, they spray [it] at the enemy.
Another, possibly first-hand, account of the use of Greek fire comes from the 11th-century Yngvars saga víðförla, in which the Viking Ingvar the Far-Travelled faces ships equipped with Greek fire weapons:
[They] began blowing with smiths’ bellows at a furnace in which there was fire and there came from it a great din. There stood there also a brass [or bronze] tube and from it flew much fire against one ship, and it burned up in a short time so that all of it became white ashes...
The account, albeit embellished, corresponds with many of the characteristics of Greek fire known from other sources, such as a loud roar that accompanied its discharge. These two texts are also the only two sources that explicitly mention that the substance was heated over a furnace before being discharged; although the validity of this information is open to question, modern reconstructions have relied upon them.
Based on these descriptions and the Byzantine sources, John Haldon and Maurice Byrne designed a hypothetical apparatus as consisting of three main components: a bronze pump, which was used to pressurize the oil; a brazier, used to heat the oil (πρόπυρον, propyron, "pre-heater"); and the nozzle, which was covered in bronze and mounted on a swivel (στρεπτόν, strepton). The brazier, burning a match of linen or flax that produced intense heat and the characteristic thick smoke, was used to heat oil and the other ingredients in an airtight tank above it, a process that also helped to dissolve the resins into a fluid mixture. The substance was pressurized by the heat and the usage of a force pump. After it had reached the proper pressure, a valve connecting the tank with the swivel was opened and the mixture was discharged from its end, being ignited at its mouth by some source of flame. The intense heat of the flame made necessary the presence of heat shields made of iron (βουκόλια, boukolia), which are attested in the fleet inventories.
The process of operating Haldon and Byrne's design was fraught with danger, as the mounting pressure could easily make the heated oil tank explode, a flaw which was not recorded as a problem with the historical fire weapon. In the experiments conducted by Haldon in 2002 for the episode "Fireship" of the television series Machines Times Forgot, even modern welding techniques failed to secure adequate insulation of the bronze tank under pressure. This led to the relocation of the pressure pump between the tank and the nozzle. The full-scale device built on this basis established the effectiveness of the mechanism's design, even with the simple materials and techniques available to the Byzantines. The experiment used crude oil mixed with wood resins, and achieved a flame temperature of over and an effective range of up to .
Hand-held projectors
The portable cheirosiphōn ("hand-siphōn"), the earliest analogue to a modern flamethrower, is extensively attested in the military documents of the 10th century, and recommended for use in both sea and land. They first appear in the Tactica of emperor Leo VI the Wise, who claims to have invented them. Subsequent authors continued to refer to the cheirosiphōnes, especially for use against siege towers, although Nikephoros II Phokas also advises their use in field armies, with the aim of disrupting the enemy formation. Although both Leo VI and Nikephoros Phokas claim that the substance used in the cheirosiphōnes was the same as in the static devices used on ships, Haldon and Byrne consider that the former were manifestly different from their larger cousins, and theorize that the device was fundamentally different, "a simple syringe [that] squirted both liquid fire (presumably unignited) and noxious juices to repel enemy troops." The illustrations of Hero's Poliorcetica show the cheirosiphōn also throwing the ignited substance.
Grenades
In its earliest form, Greek fire was hurled onto enemy forces by firing a burning cloth-wrapped ball, perhaps containing a flask, using a form of light catapult, most probably a seaborne variant of the Roman light catapult or onager. These were capable of hurling light loads, around , a distance of .
Effectiveness and countermeasures
Although the destructiveness of Greek fire is indisputable, it did not make the Byzantine navy invincible. It was not, in the words of naval historian John Pryor, a "ship-killer" comparable to the naval ram, which, by then, had fallen out of use. While Greek fire remained a potent weapon, its limitations were significant when compared to more traditional forms of artillery: in its siphōn-deployed version, it had a limited range, and it could be used safely only in a calm sea and with favourable wind conditions.
The Muslim navies eventually adapted themselves to it by staying out of its effective range and devising methods of protection such as felt or hides soaked in vinegar.
In literature
In Paloma Recasens´s historical 2021 novel Sevilla antes de la Giralda, the Castilian army fabricates Greek Fire to use it in their crusade against the Almohads.
In Steve Berry's 2007 novel The Venetian Betrayal Greek Fire is described and used as a weapon.
In William Golding's 1958 play The Brass Butterfly, adapted from his novella Envoy Extraordinary, the Greek inventor Phanocles demonstrates explosives to the Roman Emperor. The Emperor decides that his empire is not ready for this or for Phanocles's other inventions and sends him on "a slow boat to China".
In Victor Canning's stage play Honour Bright (1960), the crusader Godfrey of Ware returns with a casket of Greek Fire given to him by an old man in Athens.
In Rick Riordan's Greek storyline, Greek Fire is described as being a volatile green liquid. When it explodes, all of the substance is spread out over an area and burns continuously. It is very strong and dangerous.
In C. J. Sansom's historical mystery novel Dark Fire, Thomas Cromwell sends the lawyer Matthew Shardlake to recover the secret of Greek fire, following its discovery in the library of a dissolved London monastery.
In Michael Crichton's sci-fi novel Timeline, Professor Edward Johnston is stuck in the past in 14th century Europe, and claims to have knowledge of Greek fire.
In Mika Waltari's novel The Dark Angel, some old men who are the last ones who know the secret of Greek fire are mentioned as present in the last Christian services held in Hagia Sophia before the Fall of Constantinople. The narrator is told that in the event of the city's fall, they will be killed so as to keep the secret from the Turks.
In George R. R. Martin's fantasy series of novels A Song of Ice and Fire, and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, wildfire is similar to Greek fire. It was used in naval battles as it could remain lit on water, and its recipe was closely guarded.
In Leland Purvis's graphic novel Vox : collected works, 1999-2003, there is a passage detailing Callinicus and Greek Fire.
See also
Fire ship
List of Byzantine inventions
List of flamethrowers
Napalm
Molotov cocktail
Thermobaric weapon
References
Citations
Sources
Spears, W.H. Jr. (1969). Greek Fire: The Fabulous Secret Weapon That Saved Europe.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner; with an introduction and notes by M.I. Finley (London 1972)
"The Rise of Gawain, Nephew of Arthur (De ortu Waluuanii)," ed. Mildred Leake Day, in Wilhelm, James J. (1994). The Romance of Arthur. New York: Garland. pp. 369–397.
Karatolios K., Greek Fire and its contribution to Byzantine might, translated by Leonard G. Meachim (Mytilene 2013)
External links
Greek Fire – World History Encyclopedia
Technoporn: Greek Fire – Wired Blog, December 29, 2006.
Greek Fire – The Best Kept Secret of the Ancient World – by Richard Groller.
Greek Fire – The University of Calgary, 2000. Retrieved on 10 March 2013.
The Link: Greek Fire – National Geographic, 1 May 2012. Retrieved on 9 Mar 2013.
Flamethrowers
Byzantine military equipment
Greek inventions
Incendiary weapons
Medieval artillery
Byzantine science
Byzantine navy
Technology in the Middle Ages
Naval weapons
Lost inventions | [
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12823 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage%20in%2C%20garbage%20out | Garbage in, garbage out | In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is the concept that flawed, or nonsense (garbage) input data produces nonsense output. Rubbish in, rubbish out (RIRO) is an alternate wording.
The principle also applies more generally to all analysis and logic, in that arguments are unsound if their premises are flawed.
History
It was popular in the early days of computing. The first use of the phrase has been dated to a November 10, 1957, syndicated newspaper article about US Army mathematicians and their work with early computers, in which an Army Specialist named William D. Mellin explained that computers cannot think for themselves, and that "sloppily programmed" inputs inevitably lead to incorrect outputs. The underlying principle was noted by the inventor of the first programmable computing device design:
More recently, the Marine Accident Investigation Branch comes to a similar conclusion:
The term may have been derived from last-in, first-out (LIFO) or first-in, first-out (FIFO).
Uses
This phrase can be used as an explanation for the poor quality of a digitized audio or video file. Although digitizing can be the first step in cleaning up a signal, it does not, by itself, improve the quality. Defects in the original analog signal will be faithfully recorded, but might be identified and removed by a subsequent step by digital signal processing.
GIGO is commonly used to describe failures in human decision-making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data. This sort of issue predates the computer age, but the term can still be applied.
Audiology:
This phrase is also used in audiology to describe the process that occurs at the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) when auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder is present. This occurs when the neural firing from the cochlea has become unsynchronized, resulting in a static-filled sound being input into the DCN and then passed up the chain (hence the "GIGO" nomenclature) to the auditory cortex. The term was coined by Dan Schwartz at the 2012 Worldwide ANSD Conference, St. Petersburg, Florida, on 16 March 2012; and adopted as industry jargon to describe the electrical signal received ay the dorsal cochlear nucleus and passed up the auditory chain to the superior olivary complex on the way to the auditory cortex destination.
GIGO was the name of a Usenet gateway program to FidoNet, MAUSnet, e.a.
See also
Algorithmic bias
Computer says no
FINO
Auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder
Standard error
Undefined behavior
References
Computer errors
Computer humor
Computer jargon | [
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12828 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GATT%20%28disambiguation%29 | GATT (disambiguation) | GATT or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is a legal agreement between many countries, whose overall purpose was to promote international trade.
Gatt or GATT may also refer to:
Gatt (surname)
Gatt Gatt the Bat, a nickname given to Mike Gatting, an English cricketer
Generic Attribute Profile, a data exchange protocol in Bluetooth Low Energy | [
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12830 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gipsy | Gipsy | Gipsy or GIPSY may refer to:
Literature
Gipsy (comics), a graphic novel series
Transport
Austin Gipsy, a British off-road vehicle produced 1958–1967
de Havilland Gipsy, a British aircraft engine designed in 1927
HMS Gipsy, the name of several Royal Navy ships
Gipsy-class destroyer, a Royal Navy ship class
Music
Gipsy.cz, a Romani hip hop group
Gipsy Kings, a French rumba flamenco group
People
Gipsy Daniels (1903–1967), Welsh boxer
Gipsy Petulengro (1859–1957), British Romani businessman and broadcaster
Rodney "Gipsy" Smith (1860–1947), British evangelist
Radoslav Banga also known as Gipsy, lead singer of Gipsy.cz
Places
Gipsy, Missouri
Gipsy, Pennsylvania
Gipsy-1, a system of adits in Tatarstan, Russia, where gypsum was mined
Other uses
Gipsy (term), an English term for Roma/Romani people
Gipsy (dog), a large, long-lived dog buried in Brooklyn, New York
Gipsies Football Club, a 19th-century rugby football club notable for being one of the founding members of the Rugby Football Union
The General Intentional Programming System (GIPSY), for the compilation and evaluation of Lucid (programming language) dialects
Gipsy Row, a hamlet in the county of Suffolk, England
Gipsey (pulley) A pulley on a windlass designed to handle chain without slipping, typically used on the anchor windlass of a ship or boat.
See also
Gypsy (disambiguation)
Gyp (disambiguation) | [
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12831 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General%20Agreement%20on%20Tariffs%20and%20Trade | General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade | The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is a legal agreement between many countries, whose overall purpose was to promote international trade by reducing or eliminating trade barriers such as tariffs or quotas. According to its preamble, its purpose was the "substantial reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers and the elimination of preferences, on a reciprocal and mutually advantageous basis."
The GATT was first discussed during the United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment and was the outcome of the failure of negotiating governments to create the International Trade Organization (ITO). It was signed by 23 nations in Geneva on October 30th, 1947, and was applied on a provisional basis January 1st, 1948. It remained in effect until January 1st, 1995, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established after agreement by 123 nations in Marrakesh on April 15th, 1994, as part of the Uruguay Round Agreements. The WTO is the successor to the GATT, and the original GATT text (GATT 1947) is still in effect under the WTO framework, subject to the modifications of GATT 1994. Nations that were not party in 1995 to the GATT need to meet the minimum conditions spelled out in specific documents before they can accede; in September 2019, the list contained 36 nations.
The GATT, and its successor the WTO, have succeeded in reducing tariffs. The average tariff levels for the major GATT participants were about 22% in 1947, but were 5% after the Uruguay Round in 1999. Experts attribute part of these tariff changes to GATT and the WTO.
History
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is a multi-national trade treaty. It has been updated in a series of global trade negotiations consisting of nine rounds between 1947 and 1995. Its role in international trade was largely succeeded in 1995 by the World Trade Organization.
The GATT was first conceived in the aftermath of the Allied victory in the Second World War at the 1947 United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment (UNCTE), at which the International Trade Organization (ITO) was one of the ideas proposed. It was hoped that the ITO would be run alongside the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). More than 50 nations negotiated ITO and organizing its founding charter, but after the withdrawal of the United States these negotiations collapsed.
Initial round
Preparatory sessions were held simultaneously at the UNCTE regarding the GATT. After several of these sessions, 23 nations signed the GATT on 30 October 1947 in Geneva, Switzerland. It came into force on 1 January 1948.
Annecy Round: 1949
The second round took place in 1949 in Annecy, France. 13 countries took part in the round. The main focus of the talks was more tariff reductions, around 5,000 in total.
Torquay Round: 1951
The third round occurred in Torquay, England in 1951. Thirty-eight countries took part in the round. 8,700 tariff concessions were made totaling the remaining amount of tariffs to ¾ of the tariffs which were in effect in 1948. The contemporaneous rejection by the U.S. of the Havana Charter signified the establishment of the GATT as a governing world body.
Geneva Round: 1955–56
The fourth round returned to Geneva in 1955 and lasted until May 1956. Twenty-six countries took part in the round. $2.5 billion in tariffs were eliminated or reduced.
Dillon Round: 1960–62
The fifth round occurred once more in Geneva and lasted from 1960 to 1962. The talks were named after U.S. Treasury Secretary and former Under Secretary of State, Douglas Dillon, who first proposed the talks. Twenty-six countries took part in the round. Along with reducing over $4.9 billion in tariffs, it also yielded discussion relating to the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC).
Kennedy Round: 1964–67
The sixth round of GATT multilateral trade negotiations, held from 1964 to 1967. It was named after U.S. President John F. Kennedy in recognition of his support for the reformulation of the United States trade agenda, which resulted in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. This Act gave the President the widest-ever negotiating authority.
As the Dillon Round went through the laborious process of item-by-item tariff negotiations, it became clear, long before the Round ended, that a more comprehensive approach was needed to deal with the emerging challenges resulting from the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and EFTA, as well as Europe's re-emergence as a significant international trader more generally.
Japan's high economic growth rate portended the major role it would play later as an exporter, but the focal point of the Kennedy Round always was the United States-EEC relationship. Indeed, there was an influential American view that saw what became the Kennedy Round as the start of a transatlantic partnership that might ultimately lead to a transatlantic economic community.
To an extent, this view was shared in Europe, but the process of European unification created its own stresses under which the Kennedy Round at times became a secondary focus for the EEC. An example of this was the French veto in January 1963, before the round had even started, on membership by the United Kingdom.
Another was the internal crisis of 1965, which ended in the Luxembourg Compromise. Preparations for the new round were immediately overshadowed by the Chicken War, an early sign of the impact variable levies under the Common Agricultural Policy would eventually have. Some participants in the Round had been concerned that the convening of UNCTAD, scheduled for 1964, would result in further complications, but its impact on the actual negotiations was minimal.
In May 1963 Ministers reached agreement on three negotiating objectives for the round:
Measures for the expansion of trade of developing countries as a means of furthering their economic development,
Reduction or elimination of tariffs and other barriers to trade, and
Measures for access to markets for agricultural and other primary products.
The working hypothesis for the tariff negotiations was a linear tariff cut of 50% with the smallest number of exceptions. A drawn-out argument developed about the trade effects a uniform linear cut would have on the dispersed rates (low and high tariffs quite far apart) of the United States as compared to the much more concentrated rates of the EEC which also tended to be in the lower held of United States tariff rates.
The EEC accordingly argued for an evening-out or harmonization of peaks and troughs through its cerement, double cart and thirty: ten proposals. Once negotiations had been joined, the lofty working hypothesis was soon undermined. The special-structure countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa), so called because their exports were dominated by raw materials and other primary commodities, negotiated their tariff reductions entirely through the item-by-item method.
In the end, the result was an average 35% reduction in tariffs, except for textiles, chemicals, steel and other sensitive products; plus a 15% to 18% reduction in tariffs for agricultural and food products. In addition, the negotiations on chemicals led to a provisional agreement on the abolition of the American Selling Price (ASP). This was a method of valuing some chemicals used by the noted States for the imposition of import duties which gave domestic manufacturers a much higher level of protection than the tariff schedule indicated.
However, this part of the outcome was disallowed by Congress, and the American Selling Price was not abolished until Congress adopted the results of the Tokyo Round. The results on agriculture overall were poor. The most notable achievement was agreement on a Memorandum of Agreement on Basic Elements for the Negotiation of a World Grants Arrangement, which eventually was rolled into a new International Grains Arrangement.
The EEC claimed that for it the main result of the negotiations on agriculture was that they "greatly helped to define its own common policy". The developing countries, who played a minor role throughout the negotiations in this round, benefited nonetheless from substantial tariff cuts particularly in non-agricultural items of interest to them.
Their main achievement at the time, however, was seen to be the adoption of Part IV of the GATT, which absolved them from according reciprocity to developed countries in trade negotiations. In the view of many developing countries, this was a direct result of the call at UNCTAD I for a better trade deal for them.
There has been argument ever since whether this symbolic gesture was a victory for them, or whether it ensured their exclusion in the future from meaningful participation in the multilateral trading system. On the other hand, there was no doubt that the extension of the Long-Term Arrangement Regarding International Trade in Cotton Textiles, which later became the Multi-Fiber Arrangement, for three years until 1970 led to the longer-term impairment of export opportunities for developing countries.
Another outcome of the Kennedy Round was the adoption of an Anti-dumping Code, which gave more precise guidance on the implementation of Article VI of the GATT. In particular, it sought to ensure speedy and fair investigations, and it imposed limits on the retrospective application of anti-dumping measures.
Kennedy Round took place from 1962 to 1967. $40 billion in tariffs were eliminated or reduced.
Tokyo Round: 1973–79
Reduced tariffs and established new regulations aimed at controlling the proliferation of non-tariff barriers and voluntary export restrictions. 102 countries took part in the round. Concessions were made on $19 billion worth of trade.
Formation of Quadrilateral Group: 1981
The Quadrilateral Group was formed in 1982 by the European Union, the United States, Japan and Canada, in order to influence the GATT.
Uruguay Round: 1986–94
The Uruguay Round began in 1986. It was the most ambitious round to date, as of 1986, hoping to expand the competence of the GATT to important new areas such as services, capital, intellectual property, textiles, and agriculture. 123 countries took part in the round. The Uruguay Round was also the first set of multilateral trade negotiations in which developing countries had played an active role.
Agriculture was essentially exempted from previous agreements as it was given special status in the areas of import quotas and export subsidies, with only mild caveats. However, by the time of the Uruguay round, many countries considered the exception of agriculture to be sufficiently glaring that they refused to sign a new deal without some movement on agricultural products. These fourteen countries came to be known as the "Cairns Group", and included mostly small and medium-sized agricultural exporters such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, and New Zealand.
The Agreement on Agriculture of the Uruguay Round continues to be the most substantial trade liberalization agreement in agricultural products in the history of trade negotiations. The goals of the agreement were to improve market access for agricultural products, reduce domestic support of agriculture in the form of price-distorting subsidies and quotas, eliminate over time export subsidies on agricultural products and to harmonize to the extent possible sanitary and phytosanitary measures between member countries.
GATT and the World Trade Organization
In 1993, the GATT was updated ('GATT 1994') to include new obligations upon its signatories. One of the most significant changes was the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The 76 existing GATT members and the European Communities became the founding members of the WTO on 1 January 1995. The other 51 GATT members rejoined the WTO in the following two years (the last being Congo in 1997). Since the founding of the WTO, 33 new non-GATT members have joined and 22 are currently negotiating membership. There are a total of 164 member countries in the WTO, with Liberia and Afghanistan being the newest members as of 2018.
Of the original GATT members, Syria, Lebanon and the SFR Yugoslavia have not rejoined the WTO. Since FR Yugoslavia (renamed as Serbia and Montenegro and with membership negotiations later split in two), is not recognised as a direct SFRY successor state; therefore, its application is considered a new (non-GATT) one. The General Council of WTO, on 4 May 2010, agreed to establish a working party to examine the request of Syria for WTO membership. The contracting parties who founded the WTO ended official agreement of the "GATT 1947" terms on 31 December 1995. Montenegro became a member in 2012, while Serbia is in the decision stage of the negotiations and is expected to become a member of the WTO in the future.
Whilst GATT was a set of rules agreed upon by nations, the WTO is an intergovernmental organization with its own headquarters and staff, and its scope includes both traded goods and trade within the service sector and intellectual property rights. Although it was designed to serve multilateral agreements, during several rounds of GATT negotiations (particularly the Tokyo Round) plurilateral agreements created selective trading and caused fragmentation among members. WTO arrangements are generally a multilateral agreement settlement mechanism of GATT.
Effects on trade liberalization
The average tariff levels for the major GATT participants were about 22 percent in 1947. As a result of the first negotiating rounds, tariffs were reduced in the GATT core of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, relative to other contracting parties and non-GATT participants. By the Kennedy round (1962–67), the average tariff levels of GATT participants were about 15%. After the Uruguay Round, tariffs were under 5%.
In addition to facilitating applied tariff reductions, the early GATT's contribution to trade liberalization "include binding the negotiated tariff reductions for an extended period (made more permanent in 1955), establishing the generality of nondiscrimination through most-favored nation (MFN) treatment and national treatment status, ensuring increased transparency of trade policy measures, and providing a forum for future negotiations and for the peaceful resolution of bilateral disputes. All of these elements contributed to the rationalization of trade policy and the reduction of trade barriers and policy uncertainty."
According to Dartmouth economic historian Douglas Irwin,
The prosperity of the world economy over the past half century owes a great deal to the growth of world trade which, in turn, is partly the result of farsighted officials who created the GATT. They established a set of procedures giving stability to the trade-policy environment and thereby facilitating the rapid growth of world trade. With the long run in view, the original GATT conferees helped put the world economy on a sound foundation and thereby improved the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
Article 24
Following the United Kingdom's vote to withdraw from the European Union, supporters of leaving the EU suggested that Article 24, paragraph 5B of the treaty could be used to maintain a "standstill" in trading conditions between the UK and the EU in the event of the UK leaving the EU without a trade deal, hence preventing the introduction of tariffs. According to proponents of this approach, it could be used to implement an interim agreement pending negotiation of a final agreement lasting up to ten years.
This claim formed the basis of the so-called "Malthouse compromise" between Conservative party factions as to how to replace the withdrawal agreement. However, this plan was rejected by parliament. The claim that Article 24 might be used was also adopted by Boris Johnson during his 2019 campaign to lead the Conservative Party.
The claim that Article 24 might be used in this way has been criticised by Mark Carney, Liam Fox and others as being unrealistic given the requirement in paragraph 5c of the treaty that there be an agreement between the parties in order for paragraph 5b to be of use as, in the event of a "no-deal" scenario, there would be no agreement. Moreover, critics of the GATT 24 approach point out that services would not be covered by such an arrangement.
See also
Cultural exception
GATT special and differential treatment
Most favoured nation
References
Further reading
Aaronson Susan A. Trade and the American Dream: A Social History of Postwar Trade Policy & co (1996)
Goldstein, Judith (11 May 2017). "Trading in the Twenty-First Century: Is There a Role for the World Trade Organization?". Annual Review of Political Science. 20 (1): 545–564.
Irwin, Douglas A. "The GATT in Historical Perspective," American Economic Review Vol. 85, No. 2, (May, 1995), pp. 323–28 in JSTOR
McKenzie, Francine. "GATT and the Cold War," Journal of Cold War Studies, Summer 2008, 10#3 pp. 78–109
Zeiler, Thomas W. Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT (1999) excerpt and text search
External links
Trade Talks Episode 9: Happy 70th GATTiversary—The Origins of Multilateral Trade
GATT Digital Library 1947–1994 at Stanford University
The WTO and Global Trade at PBS
BBCnews World/Europe country profile
Text of GATT 1947
Text of GATT 1994
World Trade Organization
1947 in Switzerland
Commercial treaties
Treaties concluded in 1947
Treaties entered into force in 1948
Treaties of Antigua and Barbuda
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History of Geneva
October 1947 events | [
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12832 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%20protein-coupled%20receptor | G protein-coupled receptor | G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), also known as seven-(pass)-transmembrane domain receptors, 7TM receptors, heptahelical receptors, serpentine receptors, and G protein-linked receptors (GPLR), form a large group of evolutionarily-related proteins that are cell surface receptors that detect molecules outside the cell and activate cellular responses. Coupling with G proteins, they are called seven-transmembrane receptors because they pass through the cell membrane seven times. Ligands can bind either to extracellular N-terminus and loops (e.g. glutamate receptors) or to the binding site within transmembrane helices (Rhodopsin-like family). They are all activated by agonists although a spontaneous auto-activation of an empty receptor can also be observed.
G protein-coupled receptors are found only in eukaryotes, including yeast, choanoflagellates, and animals. The ligands that bind and activate these receptors include light-sensitive compounds, odors, pheromones, hormones, and neurotransmitters, and vary in size from small molecules to peptides to large proteins. G protein-coupled receptors are involved in many diseases.
There are two principal signal transduction pathways involving the G protein-coupled receptors:
the cAMP signal pathway and
the phosphatidylinositol signal pathway.
When a ligand binds to the GPCR it causes a conformational change in the GPCR, which allows it to act as a guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF). The GPCR can then activate an associated G protein by exchanging the GDP bound to the G protein for a GTP. The G protein's α subunit, together with the bound GTP, can then dissociate from the β and γ subunits to further affect intracellular signaling proteins or target functional proteins directly depending on the α subunit type (Gαs, Gαi/o, Gαq/11, Gα12/13).
GPCRs are an important drug target and approximately 34% of all Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drugs target 108 members of this family. The global sales volume for these drugs is estimated to be 180 billion US dollars . It is estimated that GPCRs are targets for about 50% of drugs currently on the market, mainly due to their involvement in signaling pathways related to many diseases i.e. mental, metabolic including endocrinological disorders, immunological including viral infections, cardiovascular, inflammatory, senses disorders, and cancer. The long ago discovered association between GPCRs and many endogenous and exogenous substances, resulting in e.g. analgesia, is another dynamically developing field of the pharmaceutical research.
History and significance
With the determination of the first structure of the complex between a G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) and a G-protein trimer (Gαβγ) in 2011 a new chapter of GPCR research was opened for structural investigations of global switches with more than one protein being investigated. The previous breakthroughs involved determination of the crystal structure of the first GPCR, rhodopsin, in 2000 and the crystal structure of the first GPCR with a diffusible ligand (β2AR) in 2007. How the seven transmembrane helices of a GPCR are arranged into a bundle was suspected based on the low-resolution model of frog rhodopsin from cryo-electron microscopy studies of the two-dimensional crystals. The crystal structure of rhodopsin, that came up three years later, was not a surprise apart from the presence of an additional cytoplasmic helix H8 and a precise location of a loop covering retinal binding site. However, it provided a scaffold which was hoped to be a universal template for homology modeling and drug design for other GPCRs – a notion that proved to be too optimistic.
Seven years later, the crystallization of β2-adrenergic receptor (β2AR) with a diffusible ligand brought surprising results because it revealed quite a different shape of the receptor extracellular side than that of rhodopsin. This area is important because it is responsible for the ligand binding and is targeted by many drugs. Moreover, the ligand binding site was much more spacious than in the rhodopsin structure and was open to the exterior. In the other receptors crystallized shortly afterwards the binding side was even more easily accessible to the ligand. New structures complemented with biochemical investigations uncovered mechanisms of action of molecular switches which modulate the structure of the receptor leading to activation states for agonists or to complete or partial inactivation states for inverse agonists.
The 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Brian Kobilka and Robert Lefkowitz for their work that was "crucial for understanding how G protein-coupled receptors function". There have been at least seven other Nobel Prizes awarded for some aspect of G protein–mediated signaling. As of 2012, two of the top ten global best-selling drugs (Advair Diskus and Abilify) act by targeting G protein-coupled receptors.
Classification
The exact size of the GPCR superfamily is unknown, but at least 831 different human genes (or ~ 4% of the entire protein-coding genome) have been predicted to code for them from genome sequence analysis. Although numerous classification schemes have been proposed, the superfamily was classically divided into three main classes (A, B, and C) with no detectable shared sequence homology between classes.
The largest class by far is class A, which accounts for nearly 85% of the GPCR genes. Of class A GPCRs, over half of these are predicted to encode olfactory receptors, while the remaining receptors are liganded by known endogenous compounds or are classified as orphan receptors. Despite the lack of sequence homology between classes, all GPCRs have a common structure and mechanism of signal transduction. The very large rhodopsin A group has been further subdivided into 19 subgroups (A1-A19).
According to the classical A-F system, GPCRs can be grouped into 6 classes based on sequence homology and functional similarity:
Class A (or 1) (Rhodopsin-like)
Class B (or 2) (Secretin receptor family)
Class C (or 3) (Metabotropic glutamate/pheromone)
Class D (or 4) (Fungal mating pheromone receptors)
Class E (or 5) (Cyclic AMP receptors)
Class F (or 6) (Frizzled/Smoothened)
More recently, an alternative classification system called GRAFS (Glutamate, Rhodopsin, Adhesion, Frizzled/Taste2, Secretin) has been proposed for vertebrate GPCRs. They correspond to classical classes C, A, B2, F, and B.
An early study based on available DNA sequence suggested that the human genome encodes roughly 750 G protein-coupled receptors, about 350 of which detect hormones, growth factors, and other endogenous ligands. Approximately 150 of the GPCRs found in the human genome have unknown functions.
Some web-servers and bioinformatics prediction methods have been used for predicting the classification of GPCRs according to their amino acid sequence alone, by means of the pseudo amino acid composition approach.
Physiological roles
GPCRs are involved in a wide variety of physiological processes. Some examples of their physiological roles include:
The visual sense: The opsins use a photoisomerization reaction to translate electromagnetic radiation into cellular signals. Rhodopsin, for example, uses the conversion of 11-cis-retinal to all-trans-retinal for this purpose.
The gustatory sense (taste): GPCRs in taste cells mediate release of gustducin in response to bitter-, umami- and sweet-tasting substances.
The sense of smell: Receptors of the olfactory epithelium bind odorants (olfactory receptors) and pheromones (vomeronasal receptors)
Behavioral and mood regulation: Receptors in the mammalian brain bind several different neurotransmitters, including serotonin, dopamine, histamine, GABA, and glutamate
Regulation of immune system activity and inflammation: chemokine receptors bind ligands that mediate intercellular communication between cells of the immune system; receptors such as histamine receptors bind inflammatory mediators and engage target cell types in the inflammatory response. GPCRs are also involved in immune-modulation, e. g. regulating interleukin induction or suppressing TLR-induced immune responses from T cells.
Autonomic nervous system transmission: Both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are regulated by GPCR pathways, responsible for control of many automatic functions of the body such as blood pressure, heart rate, and digestive processes
Cell density sensing: A novel GPCR role in regulating cell density sensing.
Homeostasis modulation (e.g., water balance).
Involved in growth and metastasis of some types of tumors.
Used in the endocrine system for peptide and amino-acid derivative hormones that bind to GCPRs on the cell membrane of a target cell. This activates cAMP, which in turn activates several kinases, allowing for a cellular response, such as transcription.
Receptor structure
GPCRs are integral membrane proteins that possess seven membrane-spanning domains or transmembrane helices. The extracellular parts of the receptor can be glycosylated. These extracellular loops also contain two highly conserved cysteine residues that form disulfide bonds to stabilize the receptor structure. Some seven-transmembrane helix proteins (channelrhodopsin) that resemble GPCRs may contain ion channels, within their protein.
In 2000, the first crystal structure of a mammalian GPCR, that of bovine rhodopsin (), was solved. In 2007, the first structure of a human GPCR was solved This human β2-adrenergic receptor GPCR structure proved highly similar to the bovine rhodopsin. The structures of activated or agonist-bound GPCRs have also been determined. These structures indicate how ligand binding at the extracellular side of a receptor leads to conformational changes in the cytoplasmic side of the receptor. The biggest change is an outward movement of the cytoplasmic part of the 5th and 6th transmembrane helix (TM5 and TM6). The structure of activated beta-2 adrenergic receptor in complex with Gs confirmed that the Gα binds to a cavity created by this movement.
GPCRs exhibit a similar structure to some other proteins with seven transmembrane domains, such as microbial rhodopsins and adiponectin receptors 1 and 2 (ADIPOR1 and ADIPOR2). However, these 7TMH (7-transmembrane helices) receptors and channels do not associate with G proteins. In addition, ADIPOR1 and ADIPOR2 are oriented oppositely to GPCRs in the membrane (i.e. GPCRs usually have an extracellular N-terminus, cytoplasmic C-terminus, whereas ADIPORs are inverted).
Structure–function relationships
In terms of structure, GPCRs are characterized by an extracellular N-terminus, followed by seven transmembrane (7-TM) α-helices (TM-1 to TM-7) connected by three intracellular (IL-1 to IL-3) and three extracellular loops (EL-1 to EL-3), and finally an intracellular C-terminus. The GPCR arranges itself into a tertiary structure resembling a barrel, with the seven transmembrane helices forming a cavity within the plasma membrane that serves a ligand-binding domain that is often covered by EL-2. Ligands may also bind elsewhere, however, as is the case for bulkier ligands (e.g., proteins or large peptides), which instead interact with the extracellular loops, or, as illustrated by the class C metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs), the N-terminal tail. The class C GPCRs are distinguished by their large N-terminal tail, which also contains a ligand-binding domain. Upon glutamate-binding to an mGluR, the N-terminal tail undergoes a conformational change that leads to its interaction with the residues of the extracellular loops and TM domains. The eventual effect of all three types of agonist-induced activation is a change in the relative orientations of the TM helices (likened to a twisting motion) leading to a wider intracellular surface and "revelation" of residues of the intracellular helices and TM domains crucial to signal transduction function (i.e., G-protein coupling). Inverse agonists and antagonists may also bind to a number of different sites, but the eventual effect must be prevention of this TM helix reorientation.
The structure of the N- and C-terminal tails of GPCRs may also serve important functions beyond ligand-binding. For example, The C-terminus of M3 muscarinic receptors is sufficient, and the six-amino-acid polybasic (KKKRRK) domain in the C-terminus is necessary for its preassembly with Gq proteins. In particular, the C-terminus often contains serine (Ser) or threonine (Thr) residues that, when phosphorylated, increase the affinity of the intracellular surface for the binding of scaffolding proteins called β-arrestins (β-arr). Once bound, β-arrestins both sterically prevent G-protein coupling and may recruit other proteins, leading to the creation of signaling complexes involved in extracellular-signal regulated kinase (ERK) pathway activation or receptor endocytosis (internalization). As the phosphorylation of these Ser and Thr residues often occurs as a result of GPCR activation, the β-arr-mediated G-protein-decoupling and internalization of GPCRs are important mechanisms of desensitization. In addition, internalized "mega-complexes" consisting of a single GPCR, β-arr(in the tail conformation), and heterotrimeric G protein exist and may account for protein signaling from endosomes.
A final common structural theme among GPCRs is palmitoylation of one or more sites of the C-terminal tail or the intracellular loops. Palmitoylation is the covalent modification of cysteine (Cys) residues via addition of hydrophobic acyl groups, and has the effect of targeting the receptor to cholesterol- and sphingolipid-rich microdomains of the plasma membrane called lipid rafts. As many of the downstream transducer and effector molecules of GPCRs (including those involved in negative feedback pathways) are also targeted to lipid rafts, this has the effect of facilitating rapid receptor signaling.
GPCRs respond to extracellular signals mediated by a huge diversity of agonists, ranging from proteins to biogenic amines to protons, but all transduce this signal via a mechanism of G-protein coupling. This is made possible by a guanine-nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) domain primarily formed by a combination of IL-2 and IL-3 along with adjacent residues of the associated TM helices.
Mechanism
The G protein-coupled receptor is activated by an external signal in the form of a ligand or other signal mediator. This creates a conformational change in the receptor, causing activation of a G protein. Further effect depends on the type of G protein. G proteins are subsequently inactivated by GTPase activating proteins, known as RGS proteins.
Ligand binding
GPCRs include one or more receptors for the following ligands:
sensory signal mediators (e.g., light and olfactory stimulatory molecules);
adenosine, bombesin, bradykinin, endothelin, γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), hepatocyte growth factor (HGF), melanocortins, neuropeptide Y, opioid peptides, opsins, somatostatin, GH, tachykinins, members of the vasoactive intestinal peptide family, and vasopressin;
biogenic amines (e.g., dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, histamine, serotonin, and melatonin);
glutamate (metabotropic effect);
glucagon;
acetylcholine (muscarinic effect);
chemokines;
lipid mediators of inflammation (e.g., prostaglandins, prostanoids, platelet-activating factor, and leukotrienes);
peptide hormones (e.g., calcitonin, C5a anaphylatoxin, follicle-stimulating hormone [FSH], gonadotropin-releasing hormone [GnRH], neurokinin, thyrotropin-releasing hormone [TRH], and oxytocin);
and endocannabinoids.
GPCRs that act as receptors for stimuli that have not yet been identified are known as orphan receptors.
However, in other types of receptors that have been studied, wherein ligands bind externally to the membrane, the ligands of GPCRs typically bind within the transmembrane domain. However, protease-activated receptors are activated by cleavage of part of their extracellular domain.
Conformational change
The transduction of the signal through the membrane by the receptor is not completely understood. It is known that in the inactive state, the GPCR is bound to a heterotrimeric G protein complex. Binding of an agonist to the GPCR results in a conformational change in the receptor that is transmitted to the bound Gα subunit of the heterotrimeric G protein via protein domain dynamics. The activated Gα subunit exchanges GTP in place of GDP which in turn triggers the dissociation of Gα subunit from the Gβγ dimer and from the receptor. The dissociated Gα and Gβγ subunits interact with other intracellular proteins to continue the signal transduction cascade while the freed GPCR is able to rebind to another heterotrimeric G protein to form a new complex that is ready to initiate another round of signal transduction.
It is believed that a receptor molecule exists in a conformational equilibrium between active and inactive biophysical states. The binding of ligands to the receptor may shift the equilibrium toward the active receptor states. Three types of ligands exist: Agonists are ligands that shift the equilibrium in favour of active states; inverse agonists are ligands that shift the equilibrium in favour of inactive states; and neutral antagonists are ligands that do not affect the equilibrium. It is not yet known how exactly the active and inactive states differ from each other.
G-protein activation/deactivation cycle
When the receptor is inactive, the GEF domain may be bound to an also inactive α-subunit of a heterotrimeric G-protein. These "G-proteins" are a trimer of α, β, and γ subunits (known as Gα, Gβ, and Gγ, respectively) that is rendered inactive when reversibly bound to Guanosine diphosphate (GDP) (or, alternatively, no guanine nucleotide) but active when bound to guanosine triphosphate (GTP). Upon receptor activation, the GEF domain, in turn, allosterically activates the G-protein by facilitating the exchange of a molecule of GDP for GTP at the G-protein's α-subunit. The cell maintains a 10:1 ratio of cytosolic GTP:GDP so exchange for GTP is ensured. At this point, the subunits of the G-protein dissociate from the receptor, as well as each other, to yield a Gα-GTP monomer and a tightly interacting Gβγ dimer, which are now free to modulate the activity of other intracellular proteins. The extent to which they may diffuse, however, is limited due to the palmitoylation of Gα and the presence of an isoprenoid moiety that has been covalently added to the C-termini of Gγ.
Because Gα also has slow GTP→GDP hydrolysis capability, the inactive form of the α-subunit (Gα-GDP) is eventually regenerated, thus allowing reassociation with a Gβγ dimer to form the "resting" G-protein, which can again bind to a GPCR and await activation. The rate of GTP hydrolysis is often accelerated due to the actions of another family of allosteric modulating proteins called Regulators of G-protein Signaling, or RGS proteins, which are a type of GTPase-Activating Protein, or GAP. In fact, many of the primary effector proteins (e.g., adenylate cyclases) that become activated/inactivated upon interaction with Gα-GTP also have GAP activity. Thus, even at this early stage in the process, GPCR-initiated signaling has the capacity for self-termination.
Crosstalk
GPCRs downstream signals have been shown to possibly interact with integrin signals, such as FAK. Integrin signaling will phosphorylate FAK, which can then decrease GPCR Gαs activity.
Signaling
If a receptor in an active state encounters a G protein, it may activate it. Some evidence suggests that receptors and G proteins are actually pre-coupled. For example, binding of G proteins to receptors affects the receptor's affinity for ligands. Activated G proteins are bound to GTP.
Further signal transduction depends on the type of G protein. The enzyme adenylate cyclase is an example of a cellular protein that can be regulated by a G protein, in this case the G protein Gs. Adenylate cyclase activity is activated when it binds to a subunit of the activated G protein. Activation of adenylate cyclase ends when the G protein returns to the GDP-bound state.
Adenylate cyclases (of which 9 membrane-bound and one cytosolic forms are known in humans) may also be activated or inhibited in other ways (e.g., Ca2+/Calmodulin binding), which can modify the activity of these enzymes in an additive or synergistic fashion along with the G proteins.
The signaling pathways activated through a GPCR are limited by the primary sequence and tertiary structure of the GPCR itself but ultimately determined by the particular conformation stabilized by a particular ligand, as well as the availability of transducer molecules. Currently, GPCRs are considered to utilize two primary types of transducers: G-proteins and β-arrestins. Because β-arr's have high affinity only to the phosphorylated form of most GPCRs (see above or below), the majority of signaling is ultimately dependent upon G-protein activation. However, the possibility for interaction does allow for G-protein-independent signaling to occur.
G-protein-dependent signaling
There are three main G-protein-mediated signaling pathways, mediated by four sub-classes of G-proteins distinguished from each other by sequence homology (Gαs, Gαi/o, Gαq/11, and Gα12/13). Each sub-class of G-protein consists of multiple proteins, each the product of multiple genes or splice variations that may imbue them with differences ranging from subtle to distinct with regard to signaling properties, but in general they appear reasonably grouped into four classes. Because the signal transducing properties of the various possible βγ combinations do not appear to radically differ from one another, these classes are defined according to the isoform of their α-subunit.
While most GPCRs are capable of activating more than one Gα-subtype, they also show a preference for one subtype over another. When the subtype activated depends on the ligand that is bound to the GPCR, this is called functional selectivity (also known as agonist-directed trafficking, or conformation-specific agonism). However, the binding of any single particular agonist may also initiate activation of multiple different G-proteins, as it may be capable of stabilizing more than one conformation of the GPCR's GEF domain, even over the course of a single interaction. In addition, a conformation that preferably activates one isoform of Gα may activate another if the preferred is less available. Furthermore, feedback pathways may result in receptor modifications (e.g., phosphorylation) that alter the G-protein preference. Regardless of these various nuances, the GPCR's preferred coupling partner is usually defined according to the G-protein most obviously activated by the endogenous ligand under most physiological or experimental conditions.
Gα signaling
The effector of both the Gαs and Gαi/o pathways is the cyclic-adenosine monophosphate (cAMP)-generating enzyme adenylate cyclase, or AC. While there are ten different AC gene products in mammals, each with subtle differences in tissue distribution or function, all catalyze the conversion of cytosolic adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to cAMP, and all are directly stimulated by G-proteins of the Gαs class. In contrast, however, interaction with Gα subunits of the Gαi/o type inhibits AC from generating cAMP. Thus, a GPCR coupled to Gαs counteracts the actions of a GPCR coupled to Gαi/o, and vice versa. The level of cytosolic cAMP may then determine the activity of various ion channels as well as members of the ser/thr-specific protein kinase A (PKA) family. Thus cAMP is considered a second messenger and PKA a secondary effector.
The effector of the Gαq/11 pathway is phospholipase C-β (PLCβ), which catalyzes the cleavage of membrane-bound phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2) into the second messengers inositol (1,4,5) trisphosphate (IP3) and diacylglycerol (DAG). IP3 acts on IP3 receptors found in the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to elicit Ca2+ release from the ER, while DAG diffuses along the plasma membrane where it may activate any membrane localized forms of a second ser/thr kinase called protein kinase C (PKC). Since many isoforms of PKC are also activated by increases in intracellular Ca2+, both these pathways can also converge on each other to signal through the same secondary effector. Elevated intracellular Ca2+ also binds and allosterically activates proteins called calmodulins, which in turn tosolic small GTPase, Rho. Once bound to GTP, Rho can then go on to activate various proteins responsible for cytoskeleton regulation such as Rho-kinase (ROCK). Most GPCRs that couple to Gα12/13 also couple to other sub-classes, often Gαq/11.
Gβγ signaling
The above descriptions ignore the effects of Gβγ–signalling, which can also be important, in particular in the case of activated Gαi/o-coupled GPCRs. The primary effectors of Gβγ are various ion channels, such as G-protein-regulated inwardly rectifying K+ channels (GIRKs), P/Q- and N-type voltage-gated Ca2+ channels, as well as some isoforms of AC and PLC, along with some phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K) isoforms.
G-protein-independent signaling
Although they are classically thought of working only together, GPCRs may signal through G-protein-independent mechanisms, and heterotrimeric G-proteins may play functional roles independent of GPCRs. GPCRs may signal independently through many proteins already mentioned for their roles in G-protein-dependent signaling such as β-arrs, GRKs, and Srcs. Such signaling has been shown to be physiologically relevant, for example, β-arrestin signaling mediated by the chemokine receptor CXCR3 was necessary for full efficacy chemotaxis of activated T cells. In addition, further scaffolding proteins involved in subcellular localization of GPCRs (e.g., PDZ-domain-containing proteins) may also act as signal transducers. Most often the effector is a member of the MAPK family.
Examples
In the late 1990s, evidence began accumulating to suggest that some GPCRs are able to signal without G proteins. The ERK2 mitogen-activated protein kinase, a key signal transduction mediator downstream of receptor activation in many pathways, has been shown to be activated in response to cAMP-mediated receptor activation in the slime mold D. discoideum despite the absence of the associated G protein α- and β-subunits.
In mammalian cells, the much-studied β2-adrenoceptor has been demonstrated to activate the ERK2 pathway after arrestin-mediated uncoupling of G-protein-mediated signaling. Therefore, it seems likely that some mechanisms previously believed related purely to receptor desensitisation are actually examples of receptors switching their signaling pathway, rather than simply being switched off.
In kidney cells, the bradykinin receptor B2 has been shown to interact directly with a protein tyrosine phosphatase. The presence of a tyrosine-phosphorylated ITIM (immunoreceptor tyrosine-based inhibitory motif) sequence in the B2 receptor is necessary to mediate this interaction and subsequently the antiproliferative effect of bradykinin.
GPCR-independent signaling by heterotrimeric G-proteins
Although it is a relatively immature area of research, it appears that heterotrimeric G-proteins may also take part in non-GPCR signaling. There is evidence for roles as signal transducers in nearly all other types of receptor-mediated signaling, including integrins, receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs), cytokine receptors (JAK/STATs), as well as modulation of various other "accessory" proteins such as GEFs, guanine-nucleotide dissociation inhibitors (GDIs) and protein phosphatases. There may even be specific proteins of these classes whose primary function is as part of GPCR-independent pathways, termed activators of G-protein signalling (AGS). Both the ubiquity of these interactions and the importance of Gα vs. Gβγ subunits to these processes are still unclear.
Details of cAMP and PIP2 pathways
There are two principal signal transduction pathways involving the G protein-linked receptors: the cAMP signal pathway and the phosphatidylinositol signal pathway.
cAMP signal pathway
The cAMP signal transduction contains 5 main characters: stimulative hormone receptor (Rs) or inhibitory hormone receptor (Ri); stimulative regulative G-protein (Gs) or inhibitory regulative G-protein (Gi); adenylyl cyclase; protein kinase A (PKA); and cAMP phosphodiesterase.
Stimulative hormone receptor (Rs) is a receptor that can bind with stimulative signal molecules, while inhibitory hormone receptor (Ri) is a receptor that can bind with inhibitory signal molecules.
Stimulative regulative G-protein is a G-protein linked to stimulative hormone receptor (Rs), and its α subunit upon activation could stimulate the activity of an enzyme or other intracellular metabolism. On the contrary, inhibitory regulative G-protein is linked to an inhibitory hormone receptor, and its α subunit upon activation could inhibit the activity of an enzyme or other intracellular metabolism.
Adenylyl cyclase is a 12-transmembrane glycoprotein that catalyzes the conversion of ATP to cAMP with the help of cofactor Mg2+ or Mn2+. The cAMP produced is a second messenger in cellular metabolism and is an allosteric activator of protein kinase A.
Protein kinase A is an important enzyme in cell metabolism due to its ability to regulate cell metabolism by phosphorylating specific committed enzymes in the metabolic pathway. It can also regulate specific gene expression, cellular secretion, and membrane permeability. The protein enzyme contains two catalytic subunits and two regulatory subunits. When there is no cAMP，the complex is inactive. When cAMP binds to the regulatory subunits, their conformation is altered, causing the dissociation of the regulatory subunits, which activates protein kinase A and allows further biological effects.
These signals then can be terminated by cAMP phosphodiesterase, which is an enzyme that degrades cAMP to 5'-AMP and inactivates protein kinase A.
Phosphatidylinositol signal pathway
In the phosphatidylinositol signal pathway, the extracellular signal molecule binds with the G-protein receptor (Gq) on the cell surface and activates phospholipase C, which is located on the plasma membrane. The lipase hydrolyzes phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2) into two second messengers: inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (IP3) and diacylglycerol (DAG). IP3 binds with the IP3 receptor in the membrane of the smooth endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria to open Ca2+ channels. DAG helps activate protein kinase C (PKC), which phosphorylates many other proteins, changing their catalytic activities, leading to cellular responses.
The effects of Ca2+ are also remarkable: it cooperates with DAG in activating PKC and can activate the CaM kinase pathway, in which calcium-modulated protein calmodulin (CaM) binds Ca2+, undergoes a change in conformation, and activates CaM kinase II, which has unique ability to increase its binding affinity to CaM by autophosphorylation, making CaM unavailable for the activation of other enzymes. The kinase then phosphorylates target enzymes, regulating their activities. The two signal pathways are connected together by Ca2+-CaM, which is also a regulatory subunit of adenylyl cyclase and phosphodiesterase in the cAMP signal pathway.
Receptor regulation
GPCRs become desensitized when exposed to their ligand for a long period of time. There are two recognized forms of desensitization: 1) homologous desensitization, in which the activated GPCR is downregulated; and 2) heterologous desensitization, wherein the activated GPCR causes downregulation of a different GPCR. The key reaction of this downregulation is the phosphorylation of the intracellular (or cytoplasmic) receptor domain by protein kinases.
Phosphorylation by cAMP-dependent protein kinases
Cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinases (protein kinase A) are activated by the signal chain coming from the G protein (that was activated by the receptor) via adenylate cyclase and cyclic AMP (cAMP). In a feedback mechanism, these activated kinases phosphorylate the receptor. The longer the receptor remains active the more kinases are activated and the more receptors are phosphorylated. In β2-adrenoceptors, this phosphorylation results in the switching of the coupling from the Gs class of G-protein to the Gi class. cAMP-dependent PKA mediated phosphorylation can cause heterologous desensitisation in receptors other than those activated.
Phosphorylation by GRKs
The G protein-coupled receptor kinases (GRKs) are protein kinases that phosphorylate only active GPCRs. G-protein-coupled receptor kinases (GRKs) are key modulators of G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) signaling. They constitute a family of seven mammalian serine-threonine protein kinases that phosphorylate agonist-bound receptor. GRKs-mediated receptor phosphorylation rapidly initiates profound impairment of receptor signaling and desensitization. Activity of GRKs and subcellular targeting is tightly regulated by interaction with receptor domains, G protein subunits, lipids, anchoring proteins and calcium-sensitive proteins.
Phosphorylation of the receptor can have two consequences:
Translocation: The receptor is, along with the part of the membrane it is embedded in, brought to the inside of the cell, where it is dephosphorylated within the acidic vesicular environment and then brought back. This mechanism is used to regulate long-term exposure, for example, to a hormone, by allowing resensitisation to follow desensitisation. Alternatively, the receptor may undergo lysozomal degradation, or remain internalised, where it is thought to participate in the initiation of signalling events, the nature of which depending on the internalised vesicle's subcellular localisation.
Arrestin linking: The phosphorylated receptor can be linked to arrestin molecules that prevent it from binding (and activating) G proteins, in effect switching it off for a short period of time. This mechanism is used, for example, with rhodopsin in retina cells to compensate for exposure to bright light. In many cases, arrestin's binding to the receptor is a prerequisite for translocation. For example, beta-arrestin bound to β2-adrenoreceptors acts as an adaptor for binding with clathrin, and with the beta-subunit of AP2 (clathrin adaptor molecules); thus, the arrestin here acts as a scaffold assembling the components needed for clathrin-mediated endocytosis of β2-adrenoreceptors.
Mechanisms of GPCR signal termination
As mentioned above, G-proteins may terminate their own activation due to their intrinsic GTP→GDP hydrolysis capability. However, this reaction proceeds at a slow rate (≈.02 times/sec) and, thus, it would take around 50 seconds for any single G-protein to deactivate if other factors did not come into play. Indeed, there are around 30 isoforms of RGS proteins that, when bound to Gα through their GAP domain, accelerate the hydrolysis rate to ≈30 times/sec. This 1500-fold increase in rate allows for the cell to respond to external signals with high speed, as well as spatial resolution due to limited amount of second messenger that can be generated and limited distance a G-protein can diffuse in 0.03 seconds. For the most part, the RGS proteins are promiscuous in their ability to activate G-proteins, while which RGS is involved in a given signaling pathway seems more determined by the tissue and GPCR involved than anything else. In addition, RGS proteins have the additional function of increasing the rate of GTP-GDP exchange at GPCRs, (i.e., as a sort of co-GEF) further contributing to the time resolution of GPCR signaling.
In addition, the GPCR may be desensitized itself. This can occur as:
a direct result of ligand occupation, wherein the change in conformation allows recruitment of GPCR-Regulating Kinases (GRKs), which go on to phosphorylate various serine/threonine residues of IL-3 and the C-terminal tail. Upon GRK phosphorylation, the GPCR's affinity for β-arrestin (β-arrestin-1/2 in most tissues) is increased, at which point β-arrestin may bind and act to both sterically hinder G-protein coupling as well as initiate the process of receptor internalization through clathrin-mediated endocytosis. Because only the liganded receptor is desensitized by this mechanism, it is called homologous desensitization
the affinity for β-arrestin may be increased in a ligand occupation and GRK-independent manner through phosphorylation of different ser/thr sites (but also of IL-3 and the C-terminal tail) by PKC and PKA. These phosphorylations are often sufficient to impair G-protein coupling on their own as well.
PKC/PKA may, instead, phosphorylate GRKs, which can also lead to GPCR phosphorylation and β-arrestin binding in an occupation-independent manner. These latter two mechanisms allow for desensitization of one GPCR due to the activities of others, or heterologous desensitization. GRKs may also have GAP domains and so may contribute to inactivation through non-kinase mechanisms as well. A combination of these mechanisms may also occur.
Once β-arrestin is bound to a GPCR, it undergoes a conformational change allowing it to serve as a scaffolding protein for an adaptor complex termed AP-2, which in turn recruits another protein called clathrin. If enough receptors in the local area recruit clathrin in this manner, they aggregate and the membrane buds inwardly as a result of interactions between the molecules of clathrin, in a process called opsonization. Once the pit has been pinched off the plasma membrane due to the actions of two other proteins called amphiphysin and dynamin, it is now an endocytic vesicle. At this point, the adapter molecules and clathrin have dissociated, and the receptor is either trafficked back to the plasma membrane or targeted to lysosomes for degradation.
At any point in this process, the β-arrestins may also recruit other proteins—such as the non-receptor tyrosine kinase (nRTK), c-SRC—which may activate ERK1/2, or other mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling through, for example, phosphorylation of the small GTPase, Ras, or recruit the proteins of the ERK cascade directly (i.e., Raf-1, MEK, ERK-1/2) at which point signaling is initiated due to their close proximity to one another. Another target of c-SRC are the dynamin molecules involved in endocytosis. Dynamins polymerize around the neck of an incoming vesicle, and their phosphorylation by c-SRC provides the energy necessary for the conformational change allowing the final "pinching off" from the membrane.
GPCR cellular regulation
Receptor desensitization is mediated through a combination phosphorylation, β-arr binding, and endocytosis as described above. Downregulation occurs when endocytosed receptor is embedded in an endosome that is trafficked to merge with an organelle called a lysosome. Because lysosomal membranes are rich in proton pumps, their interiors have low pH (≈4.8 vs. the pH≈7.2 cytosol), which acts to denature the GPCRs. In addition, lysosomes contain many degradative enzymes, including proteases, which can function only at such low pH, and so the peptide bonds joining the residues of the GPCR together may be cleaved. Whether or not a given receptor is trafficked to a lysosome, detained in endosomes, or trafficked back to the plasma membrane depends on a variety of factors, including receptor type and magnitude of the signal.
GPCR regulation is additionally mediated by gene transcription factors. These factors can increase or decrease gene transcription and thus increase or decrease the generation of new receptors (up- or down-regulation) that travel to the cell membrane.
Receptor oligomerization
G-protein-coupled receptor oligomerisation is a widespread phenomenon. One of the best-studied examples is the metabotropic GABAB receptor. This so-called constitutive receptor is formed by heterodimerization of GABABR1 and GABABR2 subunits. Expression of the GABABR1 without the GABABR2 in heterologous systems leads to retention of the subunit in the endoplasmic reticulum. Expression of the GABABR2 subunit alone, meanwhile, leads to surface expression of the subunit, although with no functional activity (i.e., the receptor does not bind agonist and cannot initiate a response following exposure to agonist). Expression of the two subunits together leads to plasma membrane expression of functional receptor. It has been shown that GABABR2 binding to GABABR1 causes masking of a retention signal of functional receptors.
Origin and diversification of the superfamily
Signal transduction mediated by the superfamily of GPCRs dates back to the origin of multicellularity. Mammalian-like GPCRs are found in fungi, and have been classified according to the GRAFS classification system based on GPCR fingerprints. Identification of the superfamily members across the eukaryotic domain, and comparison of the family-specific motifs, have shown that the superfamily of GPCRs have a common origin. Characteristic motifs indicate that three of the five GRAFS families, Rhodopsin, Adhesion, and Frizzled, evolved from the Dictyostelium discoideum cAMP receptors before the split of Opisthokonts. Later, the Secretin family evolved from the Adhesion GPCR receptor family before the split of nematodes. Insect GPCRs appear to be in their own group and Taste2 is identified as descending from Rhodopsin. Note that the Secretin/Adhesion split is based on presumed function rather than signature, as the classical Class B (7tm_2, ) is used to identify both in the studies.
See also
G protein-coupled receptors database
List of MeSH codes (D12.776)
Metabotropic receptor
Orphan receptor
Pepducins, a class of drug candidates targeted at GPCRs
Receptor activated solely by a synthetic ligand, a technique for control of cell signaling through synthetic GPCRs
TOG superfamily
References
Further reading
External links
GPCR Cell Line
;
GPCR-HGmod , a database of 3D structural models of all human G-protein coupled receptors, built by the GPCR-I-TASSER pipeline
Biochemistry
Integral membrane proteins
Molecular biology
Protein families
Signal transduction | [
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12833 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTPase | GTPase | GTPases are a large family of hydrolase enzymes that bind to the nucleotide guanosine triphosphate (GTP) and hydrolyze it to guanosine diphosphate (GDP). The GTP binding and hydrolysis takes place in the highly conserved P-loop "G domain", a protein domain common to many GTPases.
Functions
GTPases function as molecular switches or timers in many fundamental cellular processes.
Examples of these roles include:
Signal transduction in response to activation of cell surface receptors, including transmembrane receptors such as those mediating taste, smell and vision.
Protein biosynthesis (a.k.a. translation) at the ribosome.
Regulation of cell differentiation, proliferation, division and movement.
Translocation of proteins through membranes.
Transport of vesicles within the cell, and vesicle-mediated secretion and uptake, through GTPase control of vesicle coat assembly.
GTPases are active when bound to GTP and inactive when bound to GDP. In the generalized receptor-transducer-effector signaling model of Martin Rodbell, signaling GTPases act as transducers to regulate the activity of effector proteins. This inactive-active switch is due to conformational changes in the protein distinguishing these two forms, particularly of the "switch" regions that in the active state are able to make protein-protein contacts with partner proteins that alter the function of these effectors.
Mechanism
Hydrolysis of GTP bound to an (active) G domain-GTPase leads to deactivation of the signaling/timer function of the enzyme. The hydrolysis of the third (γ) phosphate of GTP to create guanosine diphosphate (GDP) and Pi, inorganic phosphate, occurs by the SN2 mechanism (see nucleophilic substitution) via a pentavalent transition state and is dependent on the presence of a magnesium ion Mg2+.
GTPase activity serves as the shutoff mechanism for the signaling roles of GTPases by returning the active, GTP-bound protein to the inactive, GDP-bound state. Most "GTPases" have functional GTPase activity, allowing them to remain active (that is, bound to GTP) only for a short time before deactivating themselves by converting bound GTP to bound GDP. However, many GTPases also use accessory proteins named GTPase-activating proteins or GAPs to accelerate their GTPase activity. This further limits the active lifetime of signaling GTPases. Some GTPases have little to no intrinsic GTPase activity, and are entirely dependent on GAP proteins for deactivation (such as the ADP-ribosylation factor or ARF family of small GTP-binding proteins that are involved in vesicle-mediated transport within cells).
To become activated, GTPases must bind to GTP. Since mechanisms to convert bound GDP directly into GTP are unknown, the inactive GTPases are induced to release bound GDP by the action of distinct regulatory proteins called guanine nucleotide exchange factors or GEFs. The nucleotide-free GTPase protein quickly rebinds GTP, which is in far excess in healthy cells over GDP, allowing the GTPase to enter the active conformation state and promote its effects on the cell. For many GTPases, activation of GEFs is the primary control mechanism in the stimulation of the GTPase signaling functions, although GAPs also play an important role. For heterotrimeric G proteins and many small GTP-binding proteins, GEF activity is stimulated by cell surface receptors in response to signals outside the cell (for heterotrimeric G proteins, the G protein-coupled receptors are themselves GEFs, while for receptor-activated small GTPases their GEFs are distinct from cell surface receptors).
Some GTPases also bind to accessory proteins called guanine nucleotide dissociation inhibitors or GDIs that stabilize the inactive, GDP-bound state.
The amount of active GTPase can be changed in several ways:
Acceleration of GDP dissociation by GEFs speeds up the accumulation of active GTPase.
Inhibition of GDP dissociation by guanine nucleotide dissociation inhibitors (GDIs) slows down accumulation of active GTPase.
Acceleration of GTP hydrolysis by GAPs reduces the amount of active GTPase.
Artificial GTP analogues like GTP-γ-S, β,γ-methylene-GTP, and β,γ-imino-GTP that cannot be hydrolyzed can lock the GTPase in its active state.
Mutations (such as those that reduce the intrinsic GTP hydrolysis rate) can lock the GTPase in the active state, and such mutations in the small GTPase Ras are particularly common in some forms of cancer.
G domain GTPases
In most GTPases, the specificity for the base guanine versus other nucleotides is imparted by the base-recognition motif, which has the consensus sequence [N/T]KXD. The following classification is based on shared features; some examples have mutations in the base-recognition motif that shift their substrate specificity, most commonly to ATP.
TRAFAC class
The TRAFAC class of G domain proteins is named after the prototypical member, the translation factor G proteins. They play roles in translation, signal transduction, and cell motility.
Translation factor superfamily
Multiple classical translation factor family GTPases play important roles in initiation, elongation and termination of protein biosynthesis. Sharing a similar mode of ribosome binding due to the β-EI domain following the GTPase, the most well-known members of the family are EF-1A/EF-Tu, EF-2/EF-G, and class 2 release factors. Other members include EF-4 (LepA), BipA (TypA), SelB (bacterial selenocysteinyl-tRNA EF-Tu paralog), Tet (tetracycline resistance by ribosomal protection), and HBS1L (eukaryotic ribosome rescue protein similar to release factors).
The superfamily also includes the Bms1 family from yeast.
Ras-like superfamily
Heterotrimeric G proteins
Heterotrimeric G protein complexes are composed of three distinct protein subunits named alpha (α), beta (β) and gamma (γ) subunits. The alpha subunits contain the GTP binding/GTPase domain flanked by long regulatory regions, while the beta and gamma subunits form a stable dimeric complex referred to as the beta-gamma complex. When activated, a heterotrimeric G protein dissociates into activated, GTP-bound alpha subunit and separate beta-gamma subunit, each of which can perform distinct signaling roles. The α and γ subunit are modified by lipid anchors to increase their association with the inner leaflet of the plasma membrane.
Heterotrimeric G proteins act as the transducers of G protein-coupled receptors, coupling receptor activation to downstream signaling effectors and second messengers. In unstimulated cells, heterotrimeric G proteins are assembled as the GDP bound, inactive trimer (Gα-GDP-Gβγ complex). Upon receptor activation, the activated receptor intracellular domain acts as GEF to release GDP from the G protein complex and to promote binding of GTP in its place. The GTP-bound complex undergoes an activating conformation shift that dissociates it from the receptor and also breaks the complex into its component G protein alpha and beta-gamma subunit components. While these activated G protein subunits are now free to activate their effectors, the active receptor is likewise free to activate additional G proteins – this allows catalytic activation and amplification where one receptor may activate many G proteins.
G protein signaling is terminated by hydrolysis of bound GTP to bound GDP. This can occur through the intrinsic GTPase activity of the α subunit, or be accelerated by separate regulatory proteins that act as GTPase-activating proteins (GAPs), such as members of the Regulator of G protein signaling (RGS) family). The speed of the hydrolysis reaction works as an internal clock limiting the length of the signal. Once Gα is returned to being GDP bound, the two parts of the heterotrimer re-associate to the original, inactive state.
The heterotrimeric G proteins can be classified by sequence homology of the α unit and by their functional targets into four families: Gs family, Gi family, Gq family and G12 family. Each of these Gα protein families contains multiple members, such that the mammals have 16 distinct α-subunit genes. The Gβ and Gγ are likewise composed of many members, increasing heterotrimer structural and functional diversity. Among the target molecules of the specific G proteins are the second messenger-generating enzymes adenylyl cyclase and phospholipase C, as well as various ion channels.
Small GTPases
Small GTPases function as monomers and have a molecular weight of about 21 kilodaltons that consists primarily of the GTPase domain. They are also called small or monomeric guanine nucleotide-binding regulatory proteins, small or monomeric GTP-binding proteins, or small or monomeric G-proteins, and because they have significant homology with the first-identified such protein, named Ras, they are also referred to as Ras superfamily GTPases. Small GTPases generally serve as molecular switches and signal transducers for a wide variety of cellular signaling events, often involving membranes, vesicles or cytoskeleton. According to their primary amino acid sequences and biochemical properties, the many Ras superfamily small GTPases are further divided into five subfamilies with distinct functions: Ras, Rho ("Ras-homology"), Rab, Arf and Ran. While many small GTPases are activated by their GEFs in response to intracellular signals emanating from cell surface receptors (particularly growth factor receptors), regulatory GEFs for many other small GTPases are activated in response to intrinsic cell signals, not cell surface (external) signals.
Myosin-kinesin superfamily
This class is defined by loss of two beta-strands and additional N-terminal strands. Both namesakes of this superfamily, myosin and kinesin, have shifted to use ATP.
Large GTPases
See dynamin as a prototype for large monomeric GTPases.
SIMIBI class
Much of the SIMIBI class of GTPases is activated by dimerization. Named after the signal recognition particle (SRP), MinD, and BioD, the class is involved in protein localization, chromosome partitioning, and membrane transport. Several members of this class, including MinD and Get3, has shifted in substrate specificity to become ATPases.
Translocation factors
For a discussion of Translocation factors and the role of GTP, see signal recognition particle (SRP).
Other GTPases
While tubulin and related structural proteins also bind and hydrolyze GTP as part of their function to form intracellular tubules, these proteins utilize a distinct tubulin domain that is unrelated to the G domain used by signaling GTPases.
There are also GTP-hydrolyzing proteins that use a P-loop from a superclass other than the G-domain-containg one. Examples include the NACHT proteins of its own superclass and McrB protein of the AAA+ superclass.
See also
G protein-coupled receptors
Growth factor receptor
Septins
References
External links
MBInfo - RhoGTPases
Signal transduction | [
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12835 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galla%20Placidia | Galla Placidia | Galla Placidia (388–89 / 392–93 – 27 November 450), daughter of the Roman emperor Theodosius I, was a mother, tutor, and advisor to emperor Valentinian III, and a major force in Roman politics for most of her life. She was queen consort to Ataulf, king of the Visigoths from 414 until his death in 415, briefly empress consort to Constantius III in 421, and managed the government administration as a regent during the early reign of Valentinian III, until her death.
Family
Placidia was the daughter of Theodosius I and his second wife, Galla, who was herself daughter of Valentinian I and his second wife, Justina. Galla Placidia's date of birth is not recorded, but she must have been born either in the period 388-89 or 392–93. Between these dates, her father was in Italy following his campaign against the usurper Magnus Maximus, while her mother remained in Constantinople.
A surviving letter from Bishop Ambrose of Milan, dated 390, refers to a younger son of Theodosius named Gratianus, who died in infancy; as Gratian must have been born in the period 388–89, it is most probable that Galla Placidia was born during the second period, 392–93. Placidia's mother Galla died some time in 394, perhaps giving birth to a stillborn son.
Placidia was a younger, paternal half-sister of emperors Arcadius and Honorius. Her older half-sister Pulcheria predeceased her parents according to Gregory of Nyssa, placing the death of Pulcheria prior to the death of Aelia Flaccilla, the first wife of Theodosius I, in 385. Coins issued in Placidia's honour in Constantinople after 425 give her name as AELIA PLACIDIA; this may have been intended to integrate Placidia with the eastern dynasty of Theodosius II. There is no evidence that the name Aelia was ever used in the west, or that it formed part of Placidia's official nomenclature.
Early life
Placidia was granted her own household by her father in the early 390s and was thus financially independent while underage. She was summoned to the court of her father in Mediolanum (Milan) during 394, and was present at Theodosius' death on 17 January 395. She was granted the title of "nobilissima puella" ("most noble girl") during her childhood.
Placidia spent most of her early years in the household of Stilicho and his wife, Serena. She is presumed to have learned weaving and embroidery. She might have also been given a classical education. Serena was a first cousin of Arcadius, Honorius and Placidia. The poem "In Praise of Serena" by Claudian and the Historia Nova by Zosimus clarify that Serena's father was an elder Honorius, a brother to Theodosius I. According to "De Consulatu Stilichonis" by Claudian, Placidia was betrothed to Eucherius, only known son of Stilicho and Serena. Her scheduled marriage is mentioned in the text as the third union between Stilicho's family and the Theodosian dynasty, following those of Stilicho to Serena and Maria, their daughter, to Honorius.
Stilicho was the magister militum of the Western Roman Empire. He was the only known person to hold the rank of "magister militum in praesenti" from 394 to 408 in both the Western and the Eastern Roman Empire. He was also titled "magister equitum et peditum" ("Master of the Horse and of Foot"), placing him in charge of both the cavalry and infantry forces of the Western Roman Empire. In 408, Arcadius died and was succeeded by his son Theodosius II, only seven years old. Stilicho planned to proceed to Constantinople and "undertake the management of the affairs of Theodosius", convincing Honorius not to travel to the East himself. Shortly after, Olympius, 'Magister Scrinii', attempted to convince Honorius that Stilicho was in fact conspiring to depose Theodosius II, to replace him with Eucherius. Olympius proceeded to lead a military coup d'état which left him in control of Honorius and his court. Stilicho was arrested and executed on 22 August 408. Eucherius sought refuge in Rome but was arrested there and executed by the eunuchs Arsacius and Tarentius, on imperial orders. Honorius appointed Tarentius imperial chamberlain, and gave the next post under him to Arsacius.
First marriage
In the disturbances that followed the fall of Stilicho, wives and children of foederati living in the cities of Italy were killed. Most of the foederati, regarded as loyal to Stilicho, joined the forces of Alaric I, King of the Visigoths. Alaric led them to Rome and put it under siege, with minor interruptions, from autumn 408 to 24 August 410. Zosimus records that Placidia was within the city during the siege. When Serena was accused of conspiring with Alaric, "the whole senate therefore, with Placidia, uterine sister to the emperor, thought it proper that she should suffer death".
Placidia was captured by Alaric before the fall of Rome, and accompanied the Visigoths from Italy to Gaul in 412. Their ruler Ataulf, having succeeded Alaric, entered an alliance with Honorius against Jovinus and Sebastianus, rival Western Roman emperors located in Gaul, and managed to defeat and execute both in 413.
After the heads of Sebastianus and Jovinus arrived at Honorius' court in Ravenna in late August, to be forwarded for display among other usurpers on the walls of Carthage, relations between Ataulf and Honorius improved sufficiently for Ataulf to cement them by marrying Galla Placidia at Narbonne on 1 January 414. The nuptials were celebrated with high Roman festivities and magnificent gifts. Priscus Attalus gave the wedding speech, a classical epithalamium. The marriage was recorded by Hydatius and Jordanes, although the latter states that it was earlier, in 411 at Forum Livii (Forlì) (possibly a more informal event).
Placidia and Ataulf had one son, Theodosius, born in Barcelona by the end of 414, but the child died early in the following year, eliminating an opportunity for a Romano-Visigothic line; years later the corpse was exhumed and reburied in the imperial mausoleum in Old St. Peter's Basilica, Rome. In Hispania, Ataulf imprudently accepted into his service a man identified as "Dubius" or "Eberwolf", a former follower of Sarus. Sarus had been a Germanic chieftain killed while fighting under Jovinus and Sebastianus, and his follower harbored a secret desire to avenge the death of his patron. In August/September, 415, in the palace at Barcelona, the man brought Ataulf's reign to a sudden end by killing him while he bathed.
The Amali faction proceeded to proclaim Sigeric, a brother of Sarus, as the next king of the Visigoths. Sigeric killed Ataulf's six children from a former wife by taking them away from Sigesar, bishop of the Goths. Galla Placidia, Ataulf's widow, was forced to walk more than twelve miles on foot among the crowd of captives driven ahead of the mounted Sigeric. After 7 days of ruling, Sigeric was assassinated and replaced with Wallia, Ataulf's relative.
Second marriage
According to the Chronicon Albeldense, included in the Códice de Roda, Wallia was desperate for food supplies. He surrendered to Constantius III, at the time magister militum of Honorius, negotiating terms giving foederati status for the Visigoths. Placidia was returned to Honorius as part of the peace treaty. Her brother Honorius forced her into marriage to Constantius III on 1 January 417. Their daughter Justa Grata Honoria was probably born in 417 or 418. The history of Paul the Deacon mentions her first among the children of the marriage, suggesting that she was the eldest. Their son Valentinian III was born 2 July 419.
Placidia intervened in the succession crisis following the death of Pope Zosimus on 26 December 418. Two factions of the Roman clergy had proceeded to elect their own popes, the first electing Eulalius (27 December) and the other electing Boniface I (28 December). They acted as rival popes, both in Rome, and their factions plunged the city into tumult. Symmachus, Prefect of Rome, sent his report to the imperial court at Ravenna, requesting an imperial decision on the matter. Placidia and, presumably, Constantius petitioned the emperor in favor of Eulalius. This was arguably the first intervention by an Emperor in the Papal election.
Honorius initially confirmed Eulalius as the legitimate pope. As this failed to put an end to the controversy, Honorius called a synod of Italian bishops at Ravenna to decide the matter. The synod met from February to March 419 but failed to reach a conclusion. Honorius called a second synod in May, this time including Gaulish and African bishops. In the meantime, the two rival popes were ordered to leave Rome. As Easter approached, however, Eulalius returned to the city and attempted to seize the Basilica of St. John Lateran in order to "preside at the paschal ceremonies". Imperial troops managed to repel him, and on Easter (30 March 419) the ceremonies were led by Achilleus, Bishop of Spoleto. The conflict cost Eulalius the imperial favor, and Boniface was proclaimed the legitimate pope as of 3 April 419, returning to Rome a week later. Placidia had personally written to the African bishops, summoning them to the second synod. Three of her letters are known to have survived.
On 8 February 421, Constantius was proclaimed an Augustus, becoming co-ruler with the childless Honorius. Placidia was proclaimed an Augusta. She was the only Empress in the West, since Honorius had divorced his second wife Thermantia in 408 and had never remarried. Neither title was recognised by Theodosius II, the Eastern Roman Emperor. Constantius reportedly complained about the loss of personal freedom and privacy that came with the imperial office. He died of an illness on 2 September 421.
Widow
According to Olympiodorus of Thebes, a historian used as a source by Zosimus, Sozomen and probably Philostorgius, the public grew suspicious of the increasingly scandalous public caresses she was said to have received from her own brother Honorius after her husband's death. However, the siblings' relationship suddenly turned hostile, and around this time, she may have plotted against him. After her soldiers clashed with those of Honorius, Galla Placidia herself was now forced to flee to Constantinople with her children. Despite this setback, Bonifacius, governor of the Diocese of Africa continued to be loyal to her.
Placidia, Valentinian, and Honoria arrived in Constantinople around 422/423. On 15 August 423, Honorius died of edema, perhaps pulmonary edema. With no member of the Theodosian dynasty present at Ravenna to claim the throne, Theodosius II was expected to nominate a Western co-emperor. However, Theodosius hesitated and the decision was delayed. Taking advantage of the power vacuum, Castinus the Patrician proceeded to become a kingmaker. He declared Joannes, the primicerius notariorum "chief notary" (the head of the civil service), to be the new Western Roman Emperor. Among their supporters was Flavius Aetius. Joannes' rule was accepted in the provinces of Italia, Gaul and Hispania, but not in the province of Africa.
Theodosius II reacted by preparing Valentinian III for eventual promotion to the imperial office. In 423/424, Valentinian was named nobilissimus. In 424, Valentinian was betrothed to Licinia Eudoxia, his first cousin once removed. She was a daughter of Theodosius II and Aelia Eudocia. The year of their betrothal was recorded by Marcellinus Comes. At the time of their betrothal, Valentinian was approximately four years old, Licinia only two.
The campaign against Joannes also started in the same year. Forces of the Eastern Roman army gathered at Thessaloniki, and were placed under the general command of Ardaburius, who had served in the Roman-Persian War. The invasion force was to cross the Adriatic Sea by two routes. Aspar, son of Ardaburius, led the cavalry by land, following the coast of the Adriatic from the Western Balkans to Northern Italy. Placidia and Valentinian joined this force. Along the way, Valentinian was proclaimed Caesar by Helion, a magister officiorum under Theodosius in 23 October 424.
Ardaburius and the infantry boarded ships of the Eastern Roman navy in an attempt to reach Ravenna by sea. Aspar marched his forces to Aquileia, taking the city by surprise and with virtually no resistance. The fleet, on the other hand, was dispersed by a storm. Ardaburius and two of his galleys were captured by forces loyal to Joannes and were held prisoners in Ravenna. Ardaburius was treated well by Joannes, who probably intended to negotiate with Theodosius for an end to the hostilities. The prisoner was allowed the "courteous freedom" of walking the court and streets of Ravenna during his captivity. He took advantage of this privilege to come into contact with the forces of Joannes and convinced some of them to defect to Theodosius' side. The conspirators contacted Aspar and beckoned him to Ravenna. A shepherd led Aspar's cavalry force through the marshes of the Po to the gates of Ravenna; with the besiegers outside the walls and the defectors within, the city was quickly captured. Joannes was taken and his right hand cut off; he was then mounted on a donkey and paraded through the streets, and finally beheaded in the hippodrome of Aquileia.
With Joannes dead, Valentinian was officially proclaimed the new Augustus of the Western Roman Empire on 23 October 425, by Helion, in the presence of the Roman Senate, with Theodosius II's support. Three days following Joannes' death, Aetius brought reinforcements for his army, a reported number of sixty thousand Huns from across the Danube. After some skirmishing, Placidia, Valentinian and Aetius came to an agreement and established peace. The Huns were paid off and sent home, while Aetius received the position of comes and magister militum per Gallias (commander-in-chief of the Roman army in Gaul).
Regent
Galla Placidia was regent of the Western Roman Empire until Aetius' rise. Among her early supporters were Bonifacius and Felix. Aetius, their rival for influence, managed to secure Arles against Theodoric I of the Visigoths. The Visigoths concluded a treaty and were given Gallic noblemen as hostages. The later Emperor Avitus visited Theodoric, lived at his court and taught his sons. Felix, her ally, was assassinated in 430, possibly by Aetius.
Conflict between Bonifacius and Aetius
Conflict between Placidia and Bonifacius started in 429. Placidia appointed Bonifacius general of Libya. Procopius records that Aetius played the two against each other, warning Placidia against Bonifacius and advising her to recall him to Rome; simultaneously writing to Bonifacius, warning him that Placidia was about to summon him for no good reason in order to put him away.
Bonifacius, trusting the warning from Aetius, refused the summons; and, thinking his position untenable, sought an alliance with the Vandals in Spain. The Vandals subsequently crossed from Spain into Libya to join him. To friends of Bonifacius in Rome, this apparent act of hostility toward the Empire seemed entirely out of character for Bonifacius. They traveled to Carthage at Placidia's behest to intercede with him, and he showed them the letter from Aetius. The plot now revealed, his friends returned to Rome to apprise Placidia of the true situation. She did not move against Aetius, as he wielded great influence, and as the Empire was already in danger; but she urged Bonifacius to return to Rome "and not to permit the empire of the Romans to lie under the hand of barbarians."
Bonifacius now regretted his alliance with the Vandals and tried to persuade them to return to Spain. Gaiseric offered battle instead, and Bonifacius was besieged at Hippo Regius in Numidia by the sea. (Augustine of Hippo was its bishop and died in this siege.) Unable to take the city, the Vandals eventually raised the siege. The Romans, with reinforcements under Aspar, renewed the struggle but were routed and lost Africa to the Vandals.
Bonifacius had meanwhile returned to Rome, where Placidia raised him to the rank of patrician and made him "master-general of the Roman armies". Aetius returned from Gaul with an army of "barbarians", and was met by Bonifacius in the bloody Battle of Ravenna (432). Bonifacius won the battle, but was mortally wounded and died a few days later. Aetius was compelled to retire to Pannonia.
Rise of Aetius
With the generals loyal to her having either died or defected to Aetius, Placidia acknowledged Aetius' political role as legitimate. In 433, Aetius was given the titles "magister militum" and "patrician". The appointments effectively left Aetius in control of the entire Western Roman army and gave him considerable influence over imperial policy. Aetius later played a pivotal role in the defense of the Western Empire against Attila. Placidia continued to act as regent until 437, though her direct influence over decisions was diminished. She would continue to exercise political influence until her death in 450—no longer, however, the only power at court.
During these years, Galla Placidia befriended bishop Peter Chrysologus, both having a shared interest in building churches.
Attila was diverted from Constantinople towards Italy by a letter from Placidia's own daughter Justa Grata Honoria in the spring of 450, asking him to rescue her from an unwanted marriage to a Roman senator that the Imperial family, including Placidia, was trying to force upon her. Honoria included her engagement ring with the letter. Though Honoria may not have intended a proposal of marriage, Attila chose to interpret her message as such. He accepted, asking for half of the western Empire as dowry. When Valentinian discovered the plan, only the influence of Placidia persuaded him not to kill Honoria. Valentinian wrote to Attila denying the legitimacy of the supposed marriage proposal. Attila, unconvinced, sent an emissary to Ravenna to proclaim that Honoria was innocent, that the proposal had been legitimate, and that he would come to claim what was rightfully his. Honoria was quickly married to Flavius Bassus Herculanus, though this did not prevent Attila from pressing his claim.
Placidia died shortly afterwards at Rome, in November 450, and was buried in the Theodosian family mausoleum adjacent to Old St. Peter's Basilica, later the chapel of Saint Petronilla. She did not live to see Attila ravage Italy in 451–453, using Honoria's letter as his "legitimate" excuse.
Public works
Being a devout Christian, she was involved in the building and restoration of various churches throughout her period of influence. She restored and expanded the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. She built San Giovanni Evangelista, Ravenna in thanks for the sparing of her life and those of her children in a storm while crossing the Adriatic Sea. The dedicatory inscription reads "Galla Placidia, along with her son Placidus Valentinian Augustus and her daughter Justa Grata Honoria Augusta, paid off their vow for their liberation from the danger of the sea."
Her Mausoleum in Ravenna was one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites inscribed in 1996. However, the building never served as her tomb, but was initially erected as a chapel dedicated to Lawrence of Rome. It is unknown whether the sarcophagi therein contained the bodies of other members of the Theodosian dynasty, or when they were placed in the building.
In literature
Two stanzas in Alexander Blok's poem "Ravenna" (May–June 1909) focus on her tomb; Olga Matich writes: "For Blok, Galla Placidia represented a synthetic historical figure that linked different cultural histories."
Ezra Pound uses her tomb as an exemplar of the "gold" remaining from the past, for example in Canto XXI: "Gold fades in the gloom,/ Under the blue-black roof, Placidia's..."
Louis Zukofsky refers to it in his poem "4 Other Countries", reproduced in "A" 17: "The gold that shines/ in the dark/ of Galla Placidia,/ the gold in the// Round vault rug of stone/ that shows its pattern as well as the stars/ my love might want on her floor..."
Carl Jung refers to Galla Placidia in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, (Chapter IX, Section 'Ravenna and Rome'). He reports a vision of "four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty" he experienced in the Neonian Baptistery right after visiting Galla's tomb at Ravenna. He had been, he says, "personally affected by the figure of Galla Placidia" and goes on to say: "Her tomb seemed to me a final legacy through which I might reach her personality. Her fate and her whole being were vivid presences to me". Jung was later surprised to discover that the mosaics he and an acquaintance remembered had actually never existed.
Galla Placidia is a major supporting character in R. A. Lafferty's semi-historical work The Fall of Rome, which introduces her as "the goblin child and sister of the two young emperors who, at the age of seventeen, and when all the rest of them were cowed, seized control of the Roman Senate and the City and represented the defiance in the last one hundred days of the world."
In popular culture
Galla Placidia is represented in the BBC's Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire by Natasha Barrero.
Spanish musician Jaume Pahissa wrote the opera Galla Placídia in 1913.
Galla Placidia is played by Colette Regis in the 1954 film Attila.
Galla Placidia is played by Alice Krige in the 2001 American TV miniseries Attila.
Notes
References
Further reading
McEvoy, M. A. (2013), Child Emperor Rule in the Late Roman West, AD 367–455, Oxford University Press.
External links
Pictures of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia
Entry of Aelia Flaccilla in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
Zosimus, New History. London: Green and Chaplin (1814). Book 5.
388 births
450 deaths
5th-century Christians
5th-century Roman women
5th-century women rulers
Augustae
Daughters of Roman emperors
Last of the Romans
Nobilissimi
Remarried royal consorts
Roman empresses
Theodosian dynasty
Visigothic queens consort
Valentinianic dynasty | [
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12837 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia%20%28Spain%29 | Galicia (Spain) | Galicia (; or ; ; ) is an autonomous community of Spain and historic nationality under Spanish law. Located in the northwest Iberian Peninsula, it includes the provinces of A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense and Pontevedra.
Galicia is located in Atlantic Europe. It is bordered by Portugal to the south, the Spanish autonomous communities of Castile and León and Asturias to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Cantabrian Sea to the north. It had a population of 2,701,743 in 2018 and a total area of . Galicia has over of coastline, including its offshore islands and islets, among them Cíes Islands, Ons, Sálvora, Cortegada Island, which together form the Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park, and the largest and most populated, A Illa de Arousa.
The area now called Galicia was first inhabited by humans during the Middle Paleolithic period, and takes its name from the Gallaeci, the Celtic people living north of the Douro River during the last millennium BC. Galicia was incorporated into the Roman Empire at the end of the Cantabrian Wars in 19 BC, and was made a Roman province in the 3rd century AD. In 410, the Germanic Suebi established a kingdom with its capital in Braga; this kingdom was incorporated into that of the Visigoths in 585. In 711, the Islamic Umayyad Caliphate invaded the Iberian Peninsula conquering the Visigoth kingdom of Hispania by 718, but soon Galicia was incorporated into the Christian kingdom of Asturias by 740. During the Middle Ages, the kingdom of Galicia was occasionally ruled by its own kings, but most of the time it was leagued to the kingdom of Leon and later to that of Castile, while maintaining its own legal and customary practices and culture. From the 13th century on, the kings of Castile, as kings of Galicia, appointed an Adiantado-mór, whose attributions passed to the Governor and Captain General of the Kingdom of Galiza from the last years of the 15th century. The Governor also presided the Real Audiencia do Reino de Galicia, a royal tribunal and government body. From the 16th century, the representation and voice of the kingdom was held by an assembly of deputies and representatives of the cities of the kingdom, the Cortes or Junta of the Kingdom of Galicia. This institution was forcibly discontinued in 1833 when the kingdom was divided into four administrative provinces with no legal mutual links. During the 19th and 20th centuries, demand grew for self-government and for the recognition of the culture of Galicia. This resulted in the Statute of Autonomy of 1936, soon frustrated by Franco's coup d'etat and subsequent long dictatorship. After democracy was restored the legislature passed the Statute of Autonomy of 1981, approved in referendum and currently in force, providing Galicia with self-government.
The interior of Galicia is characterized by a hilly landscape; mountain ranges rise to in the east and south. The coastal areas are mostly an alternate series of rias and beaches. The climate of Galicia is usually temperate and rainy, with markedly drier summers; it is usually classified as Oceanic. Its topographic and climatic conditions have made animal husbandry and farming the primary source of Galicia's wealth for most of its history, allowing for a relative high density of population. With the exception of shipbuilding and food processing, Galicia was based on a farming and fishing economy until after the mid-20th century, when it began to industrialize. In 2018, the nominal gross domestic product was €62.900 billion, with a nominal GDP per capita of €23,300. Galicia is characterised, unlike other Spanish regions, by the absence of a metropolis dominating the territory. Indeed, the urban network is made up of 7 main cities (the four provincial capitals A Coruña, Pontevedra, Ourense and Lugo, the political capital Santiago de Compostela and the industrial cities Vigo and Ferrol and other small towns. The population is largely concentrated in two main areas: from Ferrol to A Coruña in the northern coast, and in the Rías Baixas region in the southwest, including the cities of Vigo, Pontevedra, and the interior city of Santiago de Compostela. There are smaller populations around the interior cities of Lugo and Ourense. The political capital is Santiago de Compostela, in the province of A Coruña. Vigo, in the province of Pontevedra, is the largest municipality in Galicia, while A Coruña is the largest Galician city.
Two languages are official and widely used today in Galicia: the native Galician, a Romance language closely related to Portuguese with which it shares the Galician-Portuguese medieval literature; and Spanish, usually called Castilian. While most Galicians are bilingual, a 2013 survey reported that 51% of the Galician population spoke Galician most often on a day-to-day basis, while 48% most often used Spanish.
Toponymy
The name Galicia derives from the Latin toponym Callaecia, later Gallaecia, related to the name of an ancient Celtic tribe that resided north of the Douro river, the Gallaeci or Callaeci in Latin, or (Kallaïkoí) in Greek. These Callaeci were the first tribe in the area to help the Lusitanians against the invading Romans. The Romans applied their name to all the other tribes in the northwest who spoke the same language and lived the same life.
The toponymy of the name has been studied since the 7th century by authors such as Isidore of Seville, who wrote that "Galicians are called so, because of their fair skin, as the Gauls", relating the name to the Greek word for milk. (See the etymology of the word galaxy.) In the 21st century, some scholars (J.J. Moralejo, Carlos Búa) have derived the name of the ancient Callaeci either from Proto-Indo-European *kl(H)-no- 'hill', through a local relational suffix -aik-, also attested in Celtiberian, so meaning 'the hill (people)'; or either from Proto-Celtic *kallī- 'forest', so meaning 'the forest (people)'. In any case, Galicia, being per se a derivation of the ethnic name Kallaikói, means 'the land of the Galicians'.
Another recent proposal comes from linguist Francesco Benozzo after identifying the root gall- / kall- in a number of Celtic words with the meaning "stone" or "rock", as follows: gall (old Irish), gal (Middle Welsh), gailleichan (Scottish Gaelic), kailhoù (Breton), galagh (Manx) and gall (Gaulish). Hence, Benozzo explains the ethnonym Callaeci as being "the stone people" or "the people of the stone" ("those who work with stones"), in reference to the builders of the ancient megaliths and stone formations so common in Galicia.
The name evolved during the Middle Ages from Gallaecia, sometimes written Galletia, to Gallicia. In the 13th century, with the written emergence of the Galician language, Galiza became the most usual written form of the name of the country, being replaced during the 15th and 16th centuries by the current form, Galicia, which is also the spelling of the name in Spanish. The historical denomination Galiza became popular again during the end of the 19th and the first three-quarters of the 20th century, and is still used with some frequency today. The Xunta de Galicia, the local devolved government, uses Galicia. The Royal Galician Academy, the institution responsible for regulating the Galician language, whilst recognizing Galiza as a legitimate current denomination, has stated that the only official name of the country is Galicia.
Due to Galicia's history and culture with mythology, the land has been called "Terra Meiga" (land of the witches/witch(ing) land).
History
Prehistory and antiquity
The oldest attestation of human presence in Galicia has been found in the Eirós Cave, in the municipality of Triacastela, which has preserved animal remains and Neanderthal stone objects from the Middle Paleolithic. The earliest culture to have left significant architectural traces is the Megalithic culture, which expanded along the western European coasts during the Neolithic and Calcolithic eras. Thousands of Megalithic tumuli are distributed throughout the country, but mostly along the coastal areas. Within each tumulus is a stone burial chamber known locally as anta (dolmen), frequently preceded by a corridor. Galicia was later influenced by the Bell Beaker culture. Its rich mineral deposits of tin and gold led to the development of Bronze Age metallurgy, and to the commerce of bronze and gold items all along the Atlantic coast of Western Europe. A shared elite culture evolved in this region during the Atlantic Bronze Age.
Dating from the end of the Megalithic era, and up to the Bronze Age, numerous stone carvings (petroglyphs) are found in open air. They usually represent cup and ring marks, labyrinths, deer, Bronze Age weapons, and riding and hunting scenes. Large numbers of these stone carvings can be found in the Rías Baixas regions, at places such as Tourón and Campo Lameiro.
The Castro culture ('Culture of the Castles') developed during the Iron Age, and flourished during the second half of the first millennium BC. It is usually considered a local evolution of the Atlantic Bronze Age, with later developments and influences and overlapping into the Roman era. Geographically, it corresponds to the people the Romans called Gallaeci, which were composed of a large series of nations or tribes, among them the Artabri, Bracari, Limici, Celtici, Albiones and Lemavi. They were capable fighters: Strabo described them as the most difficult foes the Romans encountered in conquering Lusitania, while Appian mentions their warlike spirit, noting that the women bore their weapons side by side with their men, frequently preferring death to captivity. According to Pomponius Mela all the inhabitants of the coastal areas were Celtic people.
Gallaeci lived in castros. These were usually annular forts, with one or more concentric earthen or stony walls, with a trench in front of each one. They were frequently located at hills, or in seashore cliffs and peninsulas. Some well known castros can be found on the seashore at: Fazouro, Santa Tegra, Baroña, and O Neixón; and inland at: San Cibrao de Lás, Borneiro, Castromao, and Viladonga. Some other distinctive features, such as temples, baths, reservoirs, warrior statues and decorative carvings have been found associated to this culture, together with rich gold and metalworking traditions.
The Roman legions first entered the area under Decimus Junius Brutus in 137–136 BC, but the country was only incorporated into the Roman Empire by the time of Augustus (29 BC – 19 BC). The Romans were interested in Galicia mainly for its mineral resources, most notably gold. Under Roman rule, most Galician hillforts began to be – sometimes forcibly – abandoned, and Gallaeci served frequently in the Roman army as auxiliary troops. Romans brought new technologies, new travel routes, new forms of organizing property, and a new language; Latin. The Roman Empire established its control over Galicia through camps (castra) as Aquis Querquennis, Ciadella camp or Lucus Augusti (Lugo), roads (viae) and monuments as the lighthouse known as Tower of Hercules, in Corunna, but the remoteness and lesser interest of the country since the 2nd century of our era, when the gold mines stopped being productive, led to a lesser degree of Romanization. In the 3rd century it was made a province, under the name Gallaecia, which included also northern Portugal, Asturias, and a large section of what today is known as Castile and León.
Early Middle Ages
In the early 5th century, the deep crisis suffered by the Roman Empire allowed different tribes of Central Europe (Suebi, Vandals and Alani) to cross the Rhine and penetrate into the rule on 31 December 406. Its progress towards the Iberian Peninsula forced the Roman authorities to establish a treaty (foedus) by which the Suebi would settle peacefully and govern Galicia as imperial allies. So, from 409 Galicia was taken by the Suebi, forming the first medieval kingdom to be created in Europe, in 411, even before the fall of the Roman Empire, being also the first Germanic kingdom to mint coinage in Roman lands. During this period a Briton colony and bishopric (see Mailoc) was established in Northern Galicia (Britonia), probably as foederati and allies of the Suebi. In 585, the Visigothic King Leovigild invaded the Suebic kingdom of Galicia and defeated it, bringing it under Visigoth control.
Later the Muslims invaded Spain (711), but the Arabs and Moors never managed to have any real control over Galicia, which was later incorporated into the expanding Christian Kingdom of Asturias, usually known as Gallaecia or Galicia (Yillīqiya and Galīsiya) by Muslim chroniclers, as well as by many European contemporaries. This era consolidated Galicia as a Christian society which spoke a Romance language. During the next century Galician noblemen took northern Portugal, conquering Coimbra in 871, thus freeing what was considered the southernmost city of ancient Galicia.
High and Low Middle Ages
In the 9th century, the rise of the cult of the Apostle James in Santiago de Compostela gave Galicia a particular symbolic importance among Christians, an importance it would hold throughout the Reconquista. As the Middle Ages went on, Santiago became a major pilgrim destination and the Way of Saint James (Camiño de Santiago) a major pilgrim road, a route for the propagation of Romanesque art and the words and music of the troubadors. During the 10th and 11th centuries, a period during which Galician nobility become related to the royal family, Galicia was at times headed by its own native kings, while Vikings (locally known as Leodemanes or Lordomanes) occasionally raided the coasts. The Towers of Catoira (Pontevedra) were built as a system of fortifications to prevent and stop the Viking raids on Santiago de Compostela.
In 1063, Ferdinand I of Castile divided his realm among his sons, and the Kingdom of Galicia was granted to Garcia II of Galicia. In 1072, it was forcibly annexed by Garcia's brother Alfonso VI of León; from that time Galicia was united with the Kingdom of León under the same monarchs. In the 13th century Alfonso X of Castile standardized the Castilian language (i.e. Spanish) and made it the language of court and government. Nevertheless, in his Kingdom of Galicia the Galician language was the only language spoken, and the most used in government and legal uses, as well as in literature.
During the 14th and 15th centuries, the progressive distancing of the kings from Galician affairs left the kingdom in the hands of the local knights, counts and bishops, who frequently fought each other to increase their fiefs, or simply to plunder the lands of others. At the same time, the deputies of the Kingdom in the Cortes stopped being called. The Kingdom of Galicia, slipping away from the control of the King, responded with a century of fiscal insubordination.
On the other hand, the lack of an effective royal justice system in the Kingdom led to the social conflict known as the Guerras Irmandiñas ('Wars of the brotherhoods'), when leagues of peasants and burghers, with the support of a number of knights, noblemen, and under legal protection offered by the remote king, toppled many of the castles of the Kingdom and briefly drove the noblemen into Portugal and Castile. Soon after, in the late 15th century, in the dynastic conflict between Isabella I of Castile and Joanna La Beltraneja, part of the Galician aristocracy supported Joanna. After Isabella's victory, she initiated an administrative and political reform which the chronicler Jeronimo Zurita defined as "doma del Reino de Galicia": 'It was then when the taming of Galicia began, because not just the local lords and knights, but all the people of that nation were the ones against the others very bold and warlike'. These reforms, while establishing a local government and tribunal (the Real Audiencia del Reino de Galicia), and bringing the nobleman under submission, also brought most Galician monasteries and institutions under Castilian control, in what has been criticized as a process of centralisation. At the same time the kings began to call the Xunta or Cortes of the Kingdom of Galicia, an assembly of deputies or representatives of the cities of the Kingdom, to ask for monetary and military contributions. This assembly soon developed into the voice and legal representation of the Kingdom, and the depositary of its will and laws.
Early Modern
The modern period of the kingdom of Galicia began with the defeat of some of the most powerful Galician lords, such as Pedro Álvarez de Sotomayor, called Pedro Madruga, and Rodrigo Henriquez Osorio, at the hands of the Castilian armies sent to Galicia between the years 1480 and 1486. Isabella I of Castile, considered a usurper by many Galician nobles, defeated all armed resistance and definitively established the royal power of the Castilian monarchy. Fearing a general revolt, the monarchs ordered the banishing of the rest of the great lords like Pedro de Bolaño, Diego de Andrade or Lope Sánchez de Moscoso, among others.
The establishment of the Santa Hermandad in 1480, and of the Real Audiencia del Reino de Galicia in 1500—a tribunal and executive body directed by the Governor-Captain General as a direct representative of the King—implied initially the submission of the Kingdom to the Crown, after a century of unrest and fiscal insubordination. As a result, from 1480 to 1520 the Kingdom of Galicia contributed more than 10% of the total earnings of the Crown of Castille, including the Americas, well over its economic relevance. Like the rest of Spain, the 16th century was marked by population growth up to 1580, when the simultaneous wars with the Netherlands, France and England hampered Galicia's Atlantic commerce, which consisted mostly in the exportation of sardines, wood, and some cattle and wine.
In the late years of the 15th century the written form of the Galician language began a slow decline as it was increasingly replaced by Spanish, which would culminate in the Séculos Escuros "the Dark Centuries" of the language, roughly from the 16th century through to the mid-18th century, when written Galician almost completely disappeared except for private or occasional uses but the spoken language remained the common language of the people in the villages and even the cities.
From that moment Galicia, which participated to a minor extent in the American expansion of the Spanish Empire, found itself at the center of the Atlantic wars fought by Spain against the French and the Protestant powers of England and the Netherlands, whose privateers attacked the coastal areas, but major assaults were not common as the coastline was difficult and the harbors easily defended. The most famous assaults were upon the city of Vigo by Sir Francis Drake in 1585 and 1589, and the siege of A Coruña in 1589 by the English Armada. Galicia also suffered occasional slave raids by Barbary pirates, but not as frequently as the Mediterranean coastal areas. The most famous Barbary attack was the bloody sack of the town of Cangas in 1617. At the time, the king's petitions for money and troops became more frequent, due to the human and economic exhaustion of Castile; the Junta of the Kingdom of Galicia (the local Cortes or representative assembly) was initially receptive to these petitions, raising large sums, accepting the conscription of the men of the kingdom, and even commissioning a new naval squadron which was sustained with the incomes of the Kingdom.
After the rupture of the wars with Portugal and Catalonia, the Junta changed its attitude, this time due to the exhaustion of Galicia, now involved not just in naval or oversea operations, but also in an exhausting war with the Portuguese, war which produced thousands of casualties and refugees and was heavily disturbing to the local economy and commerce. So, in the second half of the 17th century the Junta frequently denied or considerably reduced the initial petitions of the monarch, and though the tension didn't rise to the levels experienced in Portugal or Catalonia, there were frequent urban mutinies and some voices even asked for the secession of the Kingdom of Galicia.
Late Modern and Contemporary
During the Peninsular War the successful uprising of the local people against the new French authorities, together with the support of the British Army, limited the occupation to a six-month period in 1808–1809. During the pre-war period the Supreme Council of the Kingdom of Galicia (Junta Suprema del Reino de Galicia), auto-proclaimed interim sovereign in 1808, was the sole government of the country and mobilized near 40,000 men against the invaders.
The 1833 territorial division of Spain put a formal end to the Kingdom of Galicia, unifying Spain into a single centralized monarchy. Instead of seven provinces and a regional administration, Galicia was reorganized into the current four provinces. Although it was recognized as a "historical region", that status was strictly honorific. In reaction, nationalist and federalist movements arose.
The liberal General Miguel Solís Cuetos led a separatist coup attempt in 1846 against the authoritarian regime of Ramón María Narváez. Solís and his forces were defeated at the Battle of Cacheiras, 23 April 1846, and the survivors, including Solís himself, were shot. They have taken their place in Galician memory as the Martyrs of Carral or simply the Martyrs of Liberty.
Defeated on the military front, Galicians turned to culture. The Rexurdimento focused on recovery of the Galician language as a vehicle of social and cultural expression. Among the writers associated with this movement are Rosalía de Castro, Manuel Murguía, Manuel Leiras Pulpeiro, and Eduardo Pondal.
In the early 20th century came another turn toward nationalist politics with Solidaridad Gallega (1907–1912) modeled on Solidaritat Catalana in Catalonia. Solidaridad Gallega failed, but in 1916 Irmandades da Fala (Brotherhood of the Language) developed first as a cultural association but soon as a full-blown nationalist movement. Vicente Risco and Ramón Otero Pedrayo were outstanding cultural figures of this movement, and the magazine Nós ('Us'), founded 1920, its most notable cultural institution, Lois Peña Novo the outstanding political figure.
The Second Spanish Republic was declared in 1931. During the republic, the Partido Galeguista (PG) was the most important of a shifting collection of Galician nationalist parties. Following a referendum on a Galician Statute of Autonomy, Galicia was granted the status of an autonomous region.
Galicia was spared the worst of the fighting in that war: it was one of the areas where the initial coup attempt at the outset of the war was successful, and it remained in Nationalist hands (Franco's army) throughout the war. While there were no pitched battles, there was repression and death: all political parties were abolished, as were all labor unions and Galician nationalist organizations as the Seminario de Estudos Galegos. Galicia's statute of autonomy was annulled (as were those of Catalonia and the Basque provinces once those were conquered). According to Carlos Fernández Santander, at least 4,200 people were killed either extrajudicially or after summary trials, among them republicans, communists, Galician nationalists, socialists and anarchists. Victims included the civil governors of all four Galician provinces; Juana Capdevielle, the wife of the governor of A Coruña; mayors such as Ánxel Casal of Santiago de Compostela, of the Partido Galeguista; prominent socialists such as Jaime Quintanilla in Ferrol and Emilio Martínez Garrido in Vigo; Popular Front deputies Antonio Bilbatúa, José Miñones, Díaz Villamil, Ignacio Seoane, and former deputy Heraclio Botana); soldiers who had not joined the rebellion, such as Generals Rogelio Caridad Pita and Enrique Salcedo Molinuevo and Admiral Antonio Azarola; and the founders of the PG, Alexandre Bóveda and Víctor Casas, as well as other professionals akin to republicans and nationalists, as the journalist Manuel Lustres Rivas or physician Luis Poza Pastrana. Many others were forced to escape into exile, or were victims of other reprisals and removed from their jobs and positions.
General Francisco Franco – himself a Galician from Ferrol – ruled as dictator from the civil war until his death in 1975. Franco's centralizing regime suppressed any official use of the Galician language, including the use of Galician names for newborns, although its everyday oral use was not forbidden. Among the attempts at resistance were small leftist guerrilla groups such as those led by José Castro Veiga ("O Piloto") and Benigno Andrade ("Foucellas"), both of whom were ultimately captured and executed. In the 1960s, ministers such as Manuel Fraga Iribarne introduced some reforms allowing technocrats affiliated with Opus Dei to modernize administration in a way that facilitated capitalist economic development. However, for decades Galicia was largely confined to the role of a supplier of raw materials and energy to the rest of Spain, causing environmental havoc and leading to a wave of migration to Venezuela and to various parts of Europe. Fenosa, the monopolistic supplier of electricity, built hydroelectric dams, flooding many Galician river valleys.
The Galician economy finally began to modernize with a French Citroën factory in Vigo, the modernization of the canning industry and the fishing fleet, and eventually a modernization of small peasant farming practices, especially in the production of cows' milk. In the province of Ourense, businessman and politician Eulogio Gómez Franqueira gave impetus to the raising of livestock and poultry by establishing the Cooperativa Orensana S.A. (Coren).
During the last decade of Franco's rule, there was a renewal of nationalist feeling in Galicia. The early 1970s were a time of unrest among university students, workers, and farmers. In 1972, general strikes in Vigo and Ferrol cost the lives of Amador Rey and Daniel Niebla. Later, the bishop of Mondoñedo-Ferrol, Miguel Anxo Araúxo Iglesias, wrote a pastoral letter that was not well received by the Franco regime, about a demonstration in Bazán (Ferrol) where two workers died.
As part of the transition to democracy upon the death of Franco in 1975, Galicia regained its status as an autonomous region within Spain with the Statute of Autonomy of 1981, which begins, "Galicia, historical nationality, is constituted as an Autonomous Community to access to its self-government, in agreement with the Spanish Constitution and with the present Statute (...)". Varying degrees of nationalist or independentist sentiment are evident at the political level. The Bloque Nacionalista Galego or BNG, is a conglomerate of left-wing parties and individuals that claims Galician political status as a nation.
From 1990 to 2005, Manuel Fraga, former minister and ambassador in the Franco dictatorship, presided over the Galician autonomous government, the Xunta de Galicia. Fraga was associated with the Partido Popular ('People's Party', Spain's main national conservative party) since its founding. In 2002, when the oil tanker Prestige sank and covered the Galician coast in oil, Fraga was accused by the grassroots movement Nunca Mais ("Never again") of having been unwilling to react. In the 2005 Galician elections, the 'People's Party' lost its absolute majority, though remaining (barely) the largest party in the parliament, with 43% of the total votes. As a result, power passed to a coalition of the Partido dos Socialistas de Galicia (PSdeG) ('Galician Socialists' Party'), a federal sister-party of Spain's main social-democratic party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, 'Spanish Socialist Workers Party') and the nationalist Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG). As the senior partner in the new coalition, the PSdeG nominated its leader, Emilio Perez Touriño, to serve as Galicia's new president, with Anxo Quintana, the leader of BNG, as its vice president.
In 2009, the PSdG-BNG coalition lost the elections, and the government went back to the People's Party (conservative), even though the PSdG-BNG coalition actually obtained the most votes. Alberto Núñez Feijóo (PPdG) is now Galicia's president.
Geography
Galicia has a surface area of . Its northernmost point, at 43°47′N, is Estaca de Bares (also the northernmost point of Spain); its southernmost, at 41°49′N, is on the Portuguese border in the Baixa Limia-Serra do Xurés Natural Park. The easternmost longitude is at 6°42′W on the border between the province of Ourense and the Castilian-Leonese province of Zamora) its westernmost at 9°18′W, reached in two places: the A Nave Cape in Fisterra (also known as Finisterre), and Cape Touriñán, both in the province of A Coruña.
Topography
The interior of Galicia is a hilly landscape, composed of relatively low mountain ranges, usually below high, without sharp peaks, rising to in the eastern mountains. There are many rivers, most (though not all) running down relatively gentle slopes in narrow river valleys, though at times their courses become far more rugged, as in the canyons of the Sil river, Galicia's second most important river after the Miño.
Topographically, a remarkable feature of Galicia is the presence of many firth-like inlets along the coast, estuaries that were drowned with rising sea levels after the ice age. These are called rías and are divided into the smaller Rías Altas ("High Rías"), and the larger Rías Baixas ("Low Rías"). The Rías Altas include Ribadeo, Foz, Viveiro, O Barqueiro, Ortigueira, Cedeira, Ferrol, Betanzos, A Coruña, Corme e Laxe and Camariñas. The Rías Baixas, found south of Fisterra, include Corcubión, Muros e Noia, Arousa, Pontevedra and Vigo. The Rías Altas can sometimes refer only to those east of Estaca de Bares, with the others being called Rías Medias ("Intermediate Rías").
Erosion by the Atlantic Ocean has contributed to the great number of capes. Besides the aforementioned Estaca de Bares in the far north, separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Cantabrian Sea, other notable capes are Cape Ortegal, Cape Prior, Punta Santo Adrao, Cape Vilán, Cape Touriñán (westernmost point in Galicia), Cape Finisterre or Fisterra, considered by the Romans, along with Finistère in Brittany and Land's End in Cornwall, to be the end of the known world.
All along the Galician coast are various archipelagos near the mouths of the rías. These archipelagos provide protected deepwater harbors and also provide habitat for seagoing birds. A 2007 inventory estimates that the Galician coast has 316 archipelagos, islets, and freestanding rocks. Among the most important of these are the archipelagos of Cíes, Ons, and Sálvora. Together with Cortegada Island, these make up the Atlantic Islands of Galicia National Park. Other significant islands are Islas Malveiras, Islas Sisargas, and, the largest and holding the largest population, Arousa Island.
The coast of this 'green corner' of the Iberian Peninsula, some in length, attracts great numbers of tourists, although real estate development in the 2000–2010 decade have degraded it partially.
Galicia is quite mountainous, a fact which has contributed to isolate the rural areas, hampering communications, most notably in the inland. The main mountain range is the Macizo Galaico (Serra do Eixe, Serra da Lastra, Serra do Courel), also known as Macizo Galaico-Leonés, located in the eastern parts, bordering with Castile and León. Noteworthy mountain ranges are O Xistral (northern Lugo), the Serra dos Ancares (on the border with León and Asturias), O Courel (on the border with León), O Eixe (the border between Ourense and Zamora), Serra de Queixa (in the center of Ourense province), O Faro (the border between Lugo and Pontevedra), Cova da Serpe (border of Lugo and A Coruña), Montemaior (A Coruña), Montes do Testeiro, Serra do Suído, and Faro de Avión (between Pontevedra and Ourense); and, to the south, A Peneda, O Xurés and O Larouco, all on the border of Ourense and Portugal.
The highest point in Galicia is Trevinca or Pena Trevinca (), located in the Serra do Eixe, at the border between Ourense and León and Zamora provinces. Other tall peaks are Pena Survia () in the Serra do Eixe, O Mustallar () in Os Ancares, and Cabeza de Manzaneda () in Serra de Queixa, where there is a ski resort.
Hydrography
Galicia is poetically known as the "country of the thousand rivers" ("o país dos mil ríos"). The largest and most important of these rivers is the Miño, poetically known as O Pai Miño (Father Miño), which is long and discharges per second, with its affluent the Sil, which has created a spectacular canyon. Most of the rivers in the inland are tributaries of this river system, which drains some . Other rivers run directly into the Atlantic Ocean or the Cantabrian Sea, most of them having short courses. Only the Navia, Ulla, Tambre, and Limia have courses longer than .
Galicia's many hydroelectric dams take advantage of the steep, deep, narrow rivers and their canyons. Due to their steep course, few of Galicia's rivers are navigable, other than the lower portion of the Miño and the portions of various rivers that have been dammed into reservoirs. Some rivers are navigable by small boats in their lower reaches: this is taken great advantage of in a number of semi-aquatic festivals and pilgrimages.
Environment
Galicia has preserved some of its dense forests. It is relatively unpolluted, and its landscapes composed of green hills, cliffs and rias are generally different from what is commonly understood as Spanish landscape. Nevertheless, Galicia has some important environmental problems.
Deforestation and forest fires are a problem in many areas, as is the continual spread of the eucalyptus tree, a species imported from Australia, actively promoted by the paper industry since the mid-20th century. Galicia is one of the more forested areas of Spain, but the majority of Galicia's plantations, usually growing eucalyptus or pine, lack any formal management. Massive eucalyptus plantation, especially of Eucalyptus globulus, began in the Francisco Franco era, largely on behalf of the paper company Empresa Nacional de Celulosas de España (ENCE) in Pontevedra, which wanted it for its pulp. Galician photographer Delmi Álvarez began documenting the fires in Galicia from 2006 in a project called Queiman Galiza (Burn Galicia).. Wood products figure significantly in Galicia's economy. Apart from tree plantations Galicia is also notable for the extensive surface occupied by meadows used for animal husbandry, especially cattle, an important activity. Hydroelectric development in most rivers has been a serious concern for local conservationists during the last decades.
Fauna, most notably the European wolf, has suffered because of the actions of livestock owners and farmers, and because of the loss of habitats, whilst the native deer species have declined because of hunting and development.
Oil spills are a major issue. The Prestige oil spill in 2002 spilt more oil than the Exxon Valdez in Alaska.
Biodiversity
Galicia has more than 2,800 plant species and 31 endemic plant taxa. Plantations and mixed forests of eucalyptus predominates in the west and north; a few oak forests (variously known locally as fragas or devesas) remain, particularly in the north-central part of the province of Lugo and the north of the province of A Coruña (Fragas do Eume). In the interior regions of the country, oak and bushland predominates.
Galicia has 262 inventoried species of vertebrates, including 12 species of freshwater fish, 15 amphibians, 24 reptiles, 152 birds, and 59 mammals.
The animals most often thought of as being "typical" of Galicia are the livestock raised there. The Galician horse is native to the region, as is the Galician Blond cow and the domestic fowl known as the galiña de Mos. The last is an endangered species, although it is showing signs of a comeback since 2001.
Galicia is home to one of the largest population of wolves in western Europe. Galicia's woodlands and mountains are also home to rabbits, hares, wild boars, and roe deer, all of which are popular with hunters. Several important bird migration routes pass through Galicia, and some of the community's relatively few environmentally protected areas are Special Protection Areas (such as on the Ría de Ribadeo) for these birds. From a domestic point of view, Galicia has been credited for author Manuel Rivas as the "land of one million cows". Galician Blond and Holstein cattle coexist on meadows and farms.
Climate
Being located on the Atlantic coastline, Galicia has a very mild climate for the latitude and the marine influence affects most of the province to various degrees. In comparison to similar latitudes on the other side of the Atlantic, winters are exceptionally mild, with consistent rainfall. At sea level snow is exceptional, with temperatures just occasionally dropping below freezing; on the other hand, snow regularly falls in the eastern mountains from November to May. Overall, the climate of Galicia is comparable to the Pacific Northwest; the warmest coastal station of Pontevedra has a yearly mean temperature of . Ourense located somewhat inland is only slightly warmer with . Lugo, to the north, is colder, with , similar to the of Portland, Oregon.
In coastal areas summers are tempered, with daily maximums averaging around in Vigo. Temperatures are further cooler in A Coruña, with a subdued normal. Temperatures are much higher in inland areas such as Ourense, where days above are regular.
The lands of Galicia are ascribed to two different areas in the Köppen climate classification: a south area (roughly, the province of Ourense and Pontevedra) with an appreciable summer drought, classified as a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb), with mild temperatures and rainfall usual throughout the year; and the western and northern coastal regions, the provinces of Lugo and A Coruña, which are characterized by their Oceanic climate (Cfb), with a more uniform precipitation distribution along the year, and milder summers. However, precipitation in southern coastal areas are often classified as oceanic since the averages remain significantly higher than a typical Mediterranean climate.
As an example, Santiago de Compostela, the capital city, has an average of 129 rainy days (> 1 mm) and per year (with just 17 rainy days in the three summer months) and 2,101 sunlight hours per year, with just 6 days with frosts per year. But the colder city of Lugo, to the east, has an average of 1,759 sunlight hours per year, 117 days with precipitations (> 1 mm) totalling , and 40 days with frosts per year. The more mountainous parts of the provinces of Ourense and Lugo receive significant snowfall during the winter months. The sunniest city is Pontevedra with 2,223 sunny hours per year.
Climate data for some locations in Galicia (average 1981–2010):
Government and politics
Local government
Galicia has partial self-governance, in the form of a devolved government, established on 16 March 1978 and reinforced by the Galician Statute of Autonomy, ratified on 28 April 1981. There are three branches of government: the executive branch, the Xunta de Galicia, consisting of the President and the other independently elected councillors; the legislative branch consisting of the Galician Parliament; and the judicial branch consisting of the High Court of Galicia and lower courts.
Executive
The Xunta de Galicia is a collective entity with executive and administrative power. It consists of the President, a vice president, and twelve councillors. Administrative power is largely delegated to dependent bodies. The Xunta also coordinates the activities of the provincial councils () located in A Coruña, Pontevedra, Ourense and Lugo.
The President of the Xunta directs and coordinates the actions of the Xunta. He or she is simultaneously the representative of the autonomous community and of the Spanish state in Galicia. He or she is a member of the parliament and is elected by its deputies and then formally named by the monarch of Spain.
Legislative
The Galician Parliament consists of 75 deputies elected by universal adult suffrage under a system of proportional representation. The franchise includes also Galicians who reside abroad. Elections occur every four years.
The last elections, held 12 July 2020, resulted in the following distribution of seats:
Partido Popular de Galicia (PPdeG): 41 deputies (47.98% of popular vote)
Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG): 19 deputies (23.80% of popular vote)
Partido Socialista de Galicia (PSdeG-PSOE): 15 deputies (19.38% of popular vote)
Judicial
Municipal governments
There are 314 municipalities () in Galicia, each of which is run by a mayor–council government known as a .
There is a further subdivision of local government known as an ; each has its own council () and mayor (). There are nine of these in Galicia: Arcos da Condesa, Bembrive, Camposancos, Chenlo, Morgadáns, Pazos de Reis, Queimadelos, Vilasobroso and Berán.
Galicia is also traditionally subdivided in some 3,700 civil parishes, each one comprising one or more vilas (towns), aldeas (villages), lugares (hamlets) or barrios (neighbourhoods).
National government
Galicia's interests are represented at national level by 25 elected deputies in the Congress of Deputies and 19 senators in the Senate – of these, 16 are elected and 3 are appointed by the Galician parliament.
Administrative divisions
Prior to the 1833 territorial division of Spain Galicia was divided into seven administrative provinces:
A Coruña
Santiago
Betanzos
Mondoñedo
Lugo
Ourense
Tui
From 1833, the seven original provinces of the 15th century were consolidated into four:
A Coruña, capital: A Coruña
Pontevedra, capital: Pontevedra
Ourense; capital: Ourense
Lugo; capital: Lugo
Galicia is further divided into 53 comarcas, 315 municipalities (93 in A Coruña, 67 in Lugo, 92 in Ourense, 62 in Pontevedra) and 3,778 parishes. Municipalities are divided into parishes, which may be further divided into aldeas ("hamlets") or lugares ("places"). This traditional breakdown into such small areas is unusual when compared to the rest of Spain. Roughly half of the named population entities of Spain are in Galicia, which occupies only 5.8 percent of the country's area. It is estimated that Galicia has over a million named places, over 40,000 of them being communities.
Economy
Textiles, fishing, livestock, forestry and car manufacturing are the most dynamic sectors of the Galician economy.
The companies based in the province of Coruña generate 70% of the entrepreneurial output of Galicia. Arteixo, an industrial municipality in the A Coruña metropolitan area, is the headquarters of Inditex, the world's largest fashion retailer. Of their eight brands, Zara is the best-known; indeed, it is the best-known Spanish brand of any sort on an international basis. For 2007, Inditex had 9,435 million euros in sales for a net profit of 1,250 million euros. The company president, Amancio Ortega, is the richest person in Spain and indeed Europe with a net worth of 45 billion euros.
A major economic sector of Galicia is its fishing Industry; the main ports are A Coruña, Marín-Pontevedra, Vigo and Ferrol. Related to this fact, the European Fisheries Control Agency, which coordinates fishing controls in European Union waters, is based in Vigo.
Galicia is a land of economic contrast. While the western coast, with its major population centers and its fishing and manufacturing industries, is prosperous and increasing in population, the rural hinterland—the provinces of Ourense and Lugo—is economically dependent on traditional agriculture, based on small landholdings called minifundios. However, the rise of tourism, sustainable forestry and organic and traditional agriculture are bringing other possibilities to the Galician economy without compromising the preservation of the natural resources and the local culture.
Traditionally, Galicia depended mainly on agriculture and fishing. Nonetheless, today the tertiary sector of the economy (the service sector) is the largest, with 582,000 workers out of a regional total of 1,072,000 (as of 2002).
The secondary sector (manufacturing) includes shipbuilding in Vigo, Marín-Pontevedra and Ferrol, textiles and granite work in A Coruña. A Coruña also manufactures automobiles. The French Centro de Vigo de PSA Peugeot Citroën, founded in 1958, makes about 450,000 vehicles annually (455,430 in 2006); a Citroën C4 Picasso made in 2007 was their nine-millionth vehicle.
Other companies with a large number of workers and a significant turnover are San José, based in Pontevedra, belonging to the construction sector, and Gadisa and Vego, based in A Coruña and Froiz, based in Pontevedra, linked to the retail sector.
Galicia is home to the savings bank, and to Spain's two oldest commercial banks Banco Etcheverría (the oldest) and Banco Pastor, owned since 2011 by Banco Popular Español.
Galicia was late to catch the tourism boom that has swept Spain in recent decades, but the coastal regions (especially the Rías Baixas and Santiago de Compostela) are now significant tourist destinations and are especially popular with visitors from other regions in Spain, where the majority of tourists come from. In 2007, 5.7 million tourists visited Galicia, an 8% growth over the previous year, and part of a continual pattern of growth in this sector. 85% of tourists who visit Galicia visit Santiago de Compostela. Tourism constitutes 12% of Galician GDP and employs about 12% of the regional workforce.
The Gross domestic product (GDP) of the autonomous community was 62.6 billion euros in 2018, accounting for 5.2% of Spanish economic output. GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power was 24,900 euros or 82% of the EU27 average in the same year. The GDP per employee was 95% of the EU average.
The unemployment rate stood at 15.7% in 2017 and was lower than the national average.
Transportation
Galicia's main airport is Santiago de Compostela Airport. Having been used by 2,083,873 passengers in 2014, it connects the Galician capital with cities in Spain as well as several major European cities. There are two other domestic airports in Galicia: A Coruña Airport – Alvedro and Vigo-Peinador Airport.
The most important Galician fishing port is the Port of Vigo; It is one of the European's leading fishing ports, with an annual catch worth 1,500 million euros. In 2007 the port took in of fish and seafood, and about of other cargoes. Other important ports are Ferrol, A Coruña, Marín and the smaller port of Vilagarcía de Arousa, as well as important recreational ports in Pontevedra capital city and Burela. Beyond these, Galicia has 120 other organized ports.
includes autopistas and autovías connecting the major cities, as well as national and secondary roads to the rest of the municipalities. The Autovía A-6 connects A Coruña and Lugo to Madrid, entering Galicia at Pedrafita do Cebreiro. The Autovía A-52 connects O Porriño, Ourense and Benavente, and enters Galicia at A Gudiña. Two more autovías are under construction. Autovía A-8 enters Galicia on the Cantabrian coast, and ends in Baamonde (Lugo province). Autovía A-76 enters Galicia in Valdeorras; it is an upgrade of the existing N-120 to Ourense.
Within Galicia are the Autopista AP-9 from Ferrol to Vigo and the Autopista AP-53 (also known as AG-53, because it was initially built by the Xunta de Galicia) from Santiago to Ourense. Additional roads under construction include Autovía A-54 from Santiago de Compostela to Lugo, and Autovía A-56 from Lugo to Ourense. The Xunta de Galicia has built roads connecting comarcal capitals, such as the before mentioned AG-53, Autovía AG-55 connecting A Coruña to Carballo or AG-41 connecting Pontevedra to Sanxenxo.
The first railway line in Galicia was inaugurated 15 September 1873. It ran from O Carril, Vilagarcía da Arousa to Cornes, Conxo, Santiago de Compostela. A second line was inaugurated in 1875, connecting A Coruña and Lugo. In 1883, Galicia was first connected by rail to the rest of Spain, by way of O Barco de Valdeorras. Galicia today has roughly of rail lines. Several lines operated by Adif and Renfe Operadora connect all the important Galician cities. A line operated by FEVE connects Ferrol to Ribadeo and Oviedo. An electrified line is the Ponferrada-Monforte de Lemos-Ourense-Vigo line. Several high-speed rail lines are under construction. Among these are the Olmedo-Zamora-Galicia high-speed rail line that opened partly in 2011, and the AVE Atlantic Axis route, which will connect all of the major Galician Atlantic coast cities A Coruña, Santiago de Compostela, Pontevedra and Vigo to Portugal. Another projected AVE line will connect Ourense to Pontevedra and Vigo.
Demographics
Population
Galicia's inhabitants are known as Galicians (, ). For well over a century Galicia has grown more slowly than the rest of Spain, due largely to a poorer economy compared with other regions of Spain and emigration to Latin America and to other parts of Spain. Sometimes Galicia has lost population in absolute terms. In 1857, Galicia had Spain's densest population and constituted 11.5% of the national population. , only 6.1% of the Spanish population resided in the autonomous community. This is due to an exodus of Galician people since the 19th century, first to South America and later to Central Europe and to the development of population centers and industry in other parts of Spain.
According to the 2006 census, Galicia has a fertility rate of 1.03 children per woman, compared to 1.38 nationally, and far below the figure of 2.1 that represents a stable populace. Lugo and Ourense provinces have the lowest fertility rates in Spain, 0.88 and 0.93, respectively.
In northern Galicia, the A Coruña-Ferrol metropolitan area has become increasingly dominant in terms of population. The population of the city of A Coruña in 1900 was 43,971. The population of the rest of the province, including the City and Naval Station of nearby Ferrol and Santiago de Compostela, was 653,556. A Coruña's growth occurred after the Spanish Civil War at the same speed as other major Galician cities, but since the revival of democracy after the death of Francisco Franco, A Coruña has grown at a faster rate than all the other Galician cities.
During the mid-20th century, the population rapidly increased in A Coruña, Vigo, and to a lesser degree, other major Galician cities, like Ourense, Pontevedra or Santiago de Compostela as the rural population declined after the Spanish Civil War: many villages and hamlets of the four provinces of Galicia disappeared or nearly disappeared during the same period. Economic development and mechanization of agriculture resulted in the fields being abandoned, and most of the population moving to find jobs in the main cities. The number of people working in the tertiary and quaternary sectors of the economy increased significantly.
Since 1999, the absolute number of births in Galicia has been increasing. In 2006, 21,392 births were registered in Galicia, 300 more than in 2005, according to the Instituto Galego de Estatística. Since 1981, the Galician life expectancy has increased by five years, thanks to a higher quality of life.
Birth rate (2006): 7.9 per 1,000 (all of Spain: 11.0 per 1,000)
Death rate (2006): 10.8 per 1,000 (all of Spain: 8.4 per 1,000)
Life expectancy at birth (2005): 80.4 years (all of Spain: 80.2 years)
Male: 76.8 years (all of Spain: 77.0 years)
Female: 84.0 years (all of Spain: 83.5 years)
Roman Catholicism is, by far, the largest religion in Galicia. In 2012, the proportion of Galicians that identify themselves as Roman Catholic was 82.2%.
Urbanization
The principal cities are the four capitals A Coruña, Pontevedra, Ourense and Lugo, Santiago de Compostela – the political capital and archiepiscopal seat – and the industrial cities Vigo and Ferrol.
The largest conurbations are:
Pontevedra-Vigo 660,000
A Coruña-Ferrol 640,000
Migration
Like many rural areas of Western Europe, Galicia's history has been defined by mass emigration. Significant internal migration took place from Galicia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the industrialized Spanish cities of Barcelona, Bilbao, Zaragoza and Madrid. Other Galicians emigrated to Latin America – Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil and Cuba in particular.
The two cities with the greatest number of people of Galician descent outside Galicia are Buenos Aires, Argentina, and nearby Montevideo, Uruguay. Immigration from Galicia was so significant in these areas that Argentines and Uruguayans now commonly refer to all Spaniards as gallegos (Galicians).
During the Franco years, there was a new wave of emigration out of Galicia to other European countries, most notably to France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Many of these immigrant or expatriate communities have their own groups or clubs, which they formed in the first decades of settling in a new place. The Galician diaspora is so widespread that websites such as Fillos de Galicia have been created in the 21st century to organize and form a network of ethnic Galicians throughout the world.
After this, a third wave was a Spanish internal emigration to heavier industrialised areas of Spain, like the Basque Country or Catalonia.
The proportion of foreign-born people in Galicia is only 2.9 percent compared to a national figure of 10 percent; among the autonomous communities, only Extremadura has a lower percentage of immigrants. Of the foreign nationals resident in Galicia, 17.93 percent are the ethnically related Portuguese, 10.93 percent are Colombian and 8.74 percent Brazilian.
Language
Galicia has two official languages: Galician (Galician: galego) and Spanish (also known in Spain as castellano, i.e. "Castilian"), both of them Romance languages. Galician originated regionally; the latter was associated with Castile. Galician is recognized in the Statute of Autonomy of Galicia as the lingua propia ("own language") of Galicia.
Galician is closely related to Portuguese. Both share a common medieval phase known as Galician-Portuguese. The independence of Portugal since the late Middle Ages has favored the divergence of the Galician and Portuguese languages as they developed. Though considered to be independent languages in Galicia, the shared history between Galician and Portuguese has been widely acknowledged; in 2014, the Galician parliament approved Law 1/2014 on the promotion of Portuguese and links with the Lusophony.
The official Galician language has been standardized by the Real Academia Galega on the basis of literary tradition. Although there are local dialects, Galician media conform to this standard form, which is also used in primary, secondary, and university education. There are more than three million Galician speakers in the world. Galician ranks in the lower orders of the 150 most widely spoken languages on earth.
For more than four centuries of Castilian domination, Spanish was the only official language in Galicia. Galician faded from day-to-day use in urban areas. Since the re-establishment of democracy in Spain—in particular since passage and implementation of the Lei de Normalización Lingüística ("Law of Linguistic Normalization", Ley 3/1983, 15 June 1983)—the first generation of students in mass education has attended schools conducted in Galician. (Spanish is also taught.)
Since the late 20th century and the establishment of Galicia's autonomy, the Galician language is resurgent. In the cities, it is generally used as a second language for most. According to a 2001 census, 99.16 percent of the population of Galicia understood the language, 91.04 percent spoke it, 68.65 percent could read it and 57.64 percent could write it. The first two numbers (understanding and speaking) were roughly the same as responses a decade earlier. But there were great gains among the percentage of the population who could read and write Galician: a decade earlier, only 49.3 percent of the population could read Galician, and 34.85 percent could write it. During the Franco era, the teaching of Galician was prohibited. Today older people may speak the language but have no written competence because of those years. Among the regional languages of Spain, Galician has the highest percentage of speakers in its population.
The earliest known document in Galician-Portuguese dates from 1228. The Foro do bo burgo do Castro Caldelas was granted by Alfonso IX of León to the town of Burgo, in Castro Caldelas, after the model of the constitutions of the town of Allariz. A distinct Galician literature emerged during the Middle Ages: In the 13th century important contributions were made to the Romance canon in Galician-Portuguese, the most notable those by the troubadour Martín Codax, the priest Airas Nunes, King Denis of Portugal, and King Alfonso X of Castile, Alfonso O Sabio ("Alfonso the Wise"), the same monarch who began the process of standardization of the Spanish language. During this period, Galician-Portuguese was considered the language of love poetry in the Iberian Romance linguistic culture. The names and memories of Codax and other popular cultural figures are well preserved in modern Galicia.
Religion
Christianity is the most widely practised religion in Galicia. It was introduced in Late Antiquity and was practiced alongside the native Celtic religion for a few centuries which, incidentally, was re-established as an officially recognised religion in 2015. Still, today about 77.7% of Galicians identify as Catholic. Most Christians adhere to Roman Catholicism, though only 32.1% of the population described themselves as active members. The Catholic Church in Galicia has had its primatial seat in Santiago de Compostela since the 12th century.
Since the Middle Ages, the Galician Catholic Church has been organized into five ecclesiastical dioceses (Lugo, Ourense, Santiago de Compostela, Mondoñedo-Ferrol and Tui-Vigo). While these may have coincided with contemporary 15th-century civil provinces, they no longer have the same boundaries as the modern civil provincial divisions. The church is led by one archbishop and four bishops. The five dioceses of Galicia are divided among 163 districts and 3,792 parishes. A few are governed by administrators, the remainder by parish priests.
The patron saint of Galicia is Saint James the Greater. According to Catholic tradition, his body was discovered in 814 near Compostela. After that date, the relics of Saint James attracted an extraordinary number of pilgrims. Since the 9th century these relics have been kept in the heart of the church – the modern-day cathedral – dedicated to him. There are many other Galician and associated saints; some of the best-known are: Saint Ansurius, Saint Rudesind, Saint Mariña of Augas Santas, Saint Senorina, Trahamunda and Froilan.
Education
Galicia's education system is administered by the regional government's Ministry of Education and University Administration. 76% of Galician teenagers achieve a high school degree – ranked fifth out of the 17 autonomous communities.
There are three public universities in Galicia: University of A Coruña with campuses in A Coruña and Ferrol, University of Santiago de Compostela with campuses in Santiago de Compostela and Lugo and the University of Vigo with campuses in Pontevedra, Ourense and Vigo.
Health care
Galicia's public healthcare system is the (SERGAS). It is administered by the regional government's Ministry of Health.
Culture
Architecture
Hundreds of ancient standing stone monuments like dolmens, menhirs and megalithic tumuli were erected during the prehistoric period in Galicia. Amongst the best-known are the dolmens of Dombate, Corveira, Axeitos of Pedra da Arca, and menhirs like the Lapa de Gargñáns. From the Iron Age, Galicia has a rich heritage based mainly on a great number of hill forts, few of them excavated like Baroña, Sta. Tegra, San Cibrao de Lás and Formigueiros among others. With the introduction of Ancient Roman architecture there was a development of basilicas, castra, city walls, cities, villas, Roman temples, Roman roads, and the Roman bridge of Ponte Vella. It was the Romans who founded some of the first cities in Galicia like Lugo and Ourense. Perhaps the best-known examples are the Roman Walls of Lugo and the Tower of Hercules in A Coruña.
During the Middle Ages, many fortified castles were built by Galician feudal nobles to mark their powers against their rivals. Although most of them were demolished during the Irmandiño Wars (1466–1469), some Galician castles that survived are Pambre, Castro Caldelas, Sobroso, Soutomaior and Monterrei. Ecclesiastical architecture raised early in Galicia, and the first churches and monasteries as San Pedro de Rocas, began to be built in the 5th and 6th centuries. However, the most famous medieval architecture in Galicia had been using Romanesque architecture like most of Western Europe. Some of the greatest examples of Romanesque churches in Galicia are the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the Ourense Cathedral, Saint John of Caaveiro, Our Lady Mary of Cambre and the Church of San Xoán of Portomarín among others.
Cuisine
Galician cuisine often uses fish and shellfish. The empanada is a meat or fish pie, with a bread-like base, top and crust with the meat or fish filling usually being in a tomato sauce including onions and garlic. Caldo galego is a hearty soup whose main ingredients are potatoes and a local vegetable named grelo (broccoli rabe). The latter is also employed in lacón con grelos, a typical carnival dish, consisting of pork shoulder boiled with grelos, potatoes and chorizo. Centolla is the equivalent of king crab. It is prepared by being boiled alive, having its main body opened like a shell, and then having its innards mixed vigorously. Another popular dish is octopus, boiled (traditionally in a copper pot) and served in a wooden plate, cut into small pieces and laced with olive oil, sea salt and pimentón (Spanish paprika). This dish is called pulpo a la gallega or in Galician polbo á feira, which roughly translates as 'fair-style octopus', most commonly translated as 'Galician-style octopus'. There are several regional varieties of cheese. The best-known one is the so-called tetilla, named after its breast-like shape. Other highly regarded varieties include the San Simón cheese from Vilalba and the creamy cheese produced in the Arzúa-Ulloa area. A classical is filloas, crêpe-like pancakes made with flour, broth or milk, and eggs. When cooked at a pig slaughter festival, they may also contain the animal's blood. A famous almond cake called Tarta de Santiago (St. James' cake) is a Galician sweet speciality mainly produced in Santiago de Compostela and all around Galicia.
Galicia has 30 products with Denominación de orixe (D.O.), some of them with Denominación de Orixe Protexida (D.O.P.). D.O. and D.O.P. are part of a system of regulation of quality and geographical origin among Spain's finest producers. Galicia produces a number of high-quality Galician wines, including Albariño, Ribeiro, Ribeira Sacra, Monterrei and Valdeorras. The grape varieties used are local and rarely found outside Galicia and Northern Portugal. Just as notably from Galicia comes the spirit Augardente—the name means burning water—often referred to as Orujo in Spain and internationally or as caña in Galicia. This spirit is made from the distillation of the pomace of grapes.
Music
Folk and traditionally based music
The traditional music of Galicia and Asturias features highly distinctive folk styles that have some similarities with the neighboring area of Cantabria. The music is characterized by the use of bagpipes.
Luar na Lubre: a band inspired by traditional Galician music. They have collaborated with Mike Oldfield and other musicians.
Carlos Núñez: he has also collaborated with a great number of artists, being notable his long-term friendship with The Chieftains.
Susana Seivane: virtuoso piper. She descends from a family of pipe makers and stated she preferred pipes instead of dolls during her childhood.
Milladoiro
Cristina Pato: Galician bagpiper and member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble.
Tanxugueiras
Berrogüetto
Pop and rock
Andrés Suárez: singer-songwriter from Ferrol, known for his poetic, insightful and often romantic lyrics.
Los Suaves: hard rock/heavy metal band active since the early 1980s, from Ourense
Deluxe: pop/rock band from A Coruña led by Xoel López
Siniestro Total: punk rock
Os Resentidos: led by Antón Reixa in the 1980s
Heredeiros da Crus: rock band singing in Galician language
Iván Ferreiro
Xoel Lopez
Bala
Triángulo de Amor Bizarro
Arrythmia
Broa
Chicharrón
Hip-hop
Dios Ke Te Crew: powerful band of hip-hop with social compromised lyrics.
Ezetaerre
Malandrómeda
Rebeliom do Inframundo
Literature, poetry and philosophy
As with many other Romance languages, Galician-Portuguese emerged as a literary language in the Middle Ages, during the 12th and 13th centuries, when a rich lyric tradition developed, followed by a minor prose tradition, whilst being the predominant language used for legal and private texts till the 15th century. However, in the face of the hegemony of Spanish, during the so-called Séculos Escuros ("Dark Centuries") from 1530 to the late 18th century, it fell from major literary or legal written use.
As a literary language it was revived again during the 18th and, most notably, the 19th-century (Rexurdimento Resurgence) with such writers as Rosalía de Castro, Manuel Murguía, Manuel Leiras Pulpeiro, and Eduardo Pondal. In the 20th century, before the Spanish Civil War the Irmandades da Fala ("Brotherhood of the Language") and Grupo Nós included such writers as Vicente Risco, Ramón Cabanillas and Castelao. Public use of Galician was largely suppressed during the Franco dictatorship but has been resurgent since the restoration of democracy. Though written primarily in Castilian, a number of works by the Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela, notably Mazurka for Two Dead Men, are set in the author's native Galicia and make frequent allusions to Galician folklore, customs, and language. Other notable Galician authors who wrote mostly in Spanish, but always around Galician subjects, are Valle-Inclán, Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, Emilia Pardo Bazán and Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. Contemporary writers in Galician include Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, Manuel Rivas, Chus Pato, and Suso de Toro.
Public holidays
(St. Joseph's Day) on 19 March (strictly religious)
(May Day) on 1 May
(Galician Literature Day) on 17 May
(Galicia's National Day) also known as St. James the Apostle Day on 25 July
on 15 August (strictly religious)
Festivals
Entroido, or Carnival, is a traditional celebration in Galicia, historically disliked and even forbidden by the Catholic Church. Famous celebrations are held in Laza, Verín, and Xinzo de Limia.
Festa do Corpus Christi in Ponteareas, has been observed since 1857 on the weekend following Corpus Christi (a movable feast) and is known for its floral carpets. It was declared a Festival of Tourist Interest in 1968 and a Festival of National Tourist Interest in 1980.
Feira Franca, first weekend of September, in Pontevedra recreates an open market that first occurred in 1467. The fair commemorates the height of Pontevedra's prosperity in the 15th and 16th centuries, through historical recreation, theater, animation, and demonstration of artistic activities. Held annually since 2000.
Arde Lucus, in June, celebrates the Celtic and Roman history of the city of Lugo, with recreations of a Celtic weddings, Roman circus, etc.
Bonfires of Saint John, Noite de San Xoán or Noite da Queima is widely spread in all Galician territory, celebrated as a welcome to the summer solstice since the Celtic period, and Christianized in Saint John's day eve. Bonfires are believed to make meigas (malicious or fallen witches), to flee. They are particularly relevant in the city of Corunna, where it became Fiesta of National Tourist Interest of Spain. The whole city participate on making great bonfires in each district, whereas the centre of the party is located in the beaches of Riazor and Orzan, in the very city heart, where hundreds of bonfires of different sizes are lighted. Also, grilled sardines are very typical.
Rapa das Bestas ("shearing of the beasts") in Sabucedo, the first weekend in July, is the most famous of a number of rapas in Galicia and was declared a Festival of National Tourist Interest in 1963. Wild colts are driven down from the mountains and brought to a closed area known as a curro, where their manes are cut and the animals are marked, and assisted after a long winter in the hills. In Sabucedo, unlike in other rapas, the aloitadores ("fighters") each take on their task with no assistance.
Festival de Ortigueira (Ortigueira's Festival of Celtic World) lasts four days in July, in Ortigueira. First celebrated 1978–1987 and revived in 1995, the festival is based in Celtic culture, folk music, and the encounter of different peoples throughout Spain and the world. Attended by over 100,000 people, it is considered a Festival of National Tourist Interest.
Festa da Dorna, 24 July, in Ribeira. Founded 1948, declared a Galician Festival of Tourist Interest in 2005. Founded as a joke by a group of friends, it includes the Gran Prix de Carrilanas, a regatta of hand-made boats; the Icarus Prize for Unmotorized Flight; and a musical competition, the Canción de Tasca.
Festas do Apóstolo Santiago (Festas of the Apostle James): the events in honor of the patron saint of Galicia last for half a month. The religious celebrations take place 24 July. Celebrants set off fireworks, including a pyrotechnic castle in the form of the façade of the cathedral.
Romería Vikinga de Catoira ("Viking Festival of Catoira"), first Sunday in August, is a secular festival that has occurred since 1960 and was declared a Festival of International Tourist Interest in 2002. It commemorates the historic defense of Galicia and the treasures of Santiago de Compostela from Norman and Saracen pirate attacks.
Festas da Peregrina in Pontevedra, 2nd week of August, celebrating the Pilgrim Virgin of Pontevedra. There is a bullfighting festival at the same time. Pontevedra is the only city where there is a permanent bullring.
Festa de San Froilán, 4–12 October, celebrating the patron saint of the city of Lugo. A Festival of National Tourist Interest, the festival was attended by 1,035,000 people in 2008. It is most famous for the booths serving polbo á feira, an octopus dish.
Festa do marisco (Seafood festival), October, in O Grove. Established 1963; declared a Festival of National Tourist Interest in the 1980s.
In 2015 only five corridas took place within Galicia.
In addition, recent studies have stated that 92% of Galicians are firmly against bullfighting, the highest rate in Spain. Despite this, popular associations, such as Galicia Mellor Sen Touradas ("Galicia Better without Bullfights"), have blamed politicians for having no compromise in order to abolish it and have been very critical of local councils', especially those governed by the PP and PSOE, payment of subsidies for corridas. The province government of Pontevedra stopped the end of these subsidies and declared the province "free of bullfights". The province government of A Coruña approved a document supporting the abolition of these events.
Media
Television
Televisión de Galicia (TVG) is the autonomous community's public channel, which has broadcast since 24 July 1985 and is part of the Compañía de Radio-Televisión de Galicia (CRTVG). TVG broadcasts throughout Galicia and has two international channels, Galicia Televisión Europa and Galicia Televisión América, available throughout the European Union and the Americas through Hispasat. CRTVG also broadcasts a digital terrestrial television (DTT) channel known as tvG2 and is considering adding further DTT channels, with a 24-hour news channel projected for 2010.
Radio
Radio Galega (RG) is the autonomous community's public radio station and is part of CRTVG. Radio Galega began broadcasting 24 February 1985, with regular programming starting 29 March 1985. There are two regular broadcast channels: Radio Galega and Radio Galega Música. In addition, there is a DTT and internet channel, Son Galicia Radio, dedicated specifically to Galician music.
Galicia has several free and community radiostations. Cuac FM is the headquarters of the Community Media Network (which brings together media non-profit oriented and serve their community). CUAC FM (A Coruña), Radio Filispim (Ferrol), Radio Roncudo (corme), Kalimera Radio (Santiago de Compostela), Radio Piratona (Vigo) and Radio Clavi (Lugo) are part of the Galician Network of Free and Association of Community Radio Broadcasters(ReGaRLiC)
Press
The most widely distributed newspaper in Galicia is La Voz de Galicia, with 12 local editions and a national edition. Other major newspapers are El Correo Gallego (Santiago de Compostela), Faro de Vigo (Vigo), Diario de Pontevedra (Pontevedra), El Progreso (Lugo), La Región (Ourense), and Galicia Hoxe – The first daily newspaper to publish exclusively in Galician. Other newspapers are Diario de Ferrol, the sports paper DxT Campeón, El Ideal Gallego from A Coruña, the Heraldo de Vivero, Atlántico Diario from Vigo and the Xornal de Galicia.
Sport
Galicia has a long sporting tradition dating back to the early 20th century, when the majority of sports clubs in Spain were founded. The most popular and well-supported teams in the region are Deportivo La Coruña and Celta Vigo. When the two sides play, it is referred to as the Galician derby. Deportivo was champion of La Liga in the 1999–2000 season.
Pontevedra CF from Pontevedra and Racing Ferrol from Ferrol are two other notable clubs from Galicia as well as CD Lugo and SD Compostela. The Galician Football Federation periodically fields a national team against international opposition. This fact causes some political controversy because matches involving other national football teams different from the Spanish official national team threaten its status as the one and only national football team of the State. The policy of centralization in sport is very strong as it is systematically used as a patriotic device with which to build a symbol of the supposed unity of Spain which is actually a plurinational State.
Football aside, the most popular team sports in Galicia are futsal, handball and basketball. In basketball, Obradoiro CAB is the most successful team of note, and currently the only Galician team that plays in the Liga ACB; other teams are CB Breogan, Club Ourense Baloncesto and OAR Ferrol. In the sport of handball, Club Balonmán Cangas plays in the top-flight (Liga ASOBAL). The sport is particularly popular in the province of Pontevedra with the three other Galician teams in the top two divisions: SD Teucro (Pontevedra), Octavio Pilotes Posada (Vigo) and SD Chapela (Redondela).
In roller hockey HC Liceo is the most successful Galician team, in any sport, with numerous European and World titles. In futsal teams, Lobelle Santiago and Azkar Lugo.
Galicia is also known for its tradition of participation in water sports both at sea and in rivers; these include rowing, yachting, canoeing and surfing. Its athletes have regularly won medals in the Olympics; currently the most notable examples are David Cal, Carlos Pérez Rial and Fernando Echavarri.
Galician triathlon contenders Francisco Javier Gómez Noya and Iván Raña have been world champions. In 2006 the cyclist Oscar Pereiro won the Tour de France after the disqualification of American Floyd Landis, gaining the top position on the penultimate day of the race. Galicians are also prominent athletes in the sport of mountaineering—Chus Lago is the third woman to reach the summit of Everest without supplemental oxygen.
Emerging sports
Since 2011, several Gaelic football teams have been set up in Galicia. The first was Fillos de Breogán (A Coruña), followed Artabros (Oleiros), Irmandinhos (A Estrada), SDG Corvos (Pontevedra), and Suebia (Santiago de Compostela) with talk of creating a Galician league. Galicia also fielded a Gaelic football side (recognised as national by the GAA) that beat Brittany in July 2012 and was reported in the Spanish nationwide press.
Rugby is growing in popularity, although the success of local teams is hampered by the absence of experienced expat players from English-speaking countries typically seen at teams based on the Mediterranean coast or in the big cities. Galicia has a long established Rugby Federation that organises its own women's, children's and men's leagues. Galicia has also fielded a national side for friendly matches against other regions of Spain and against Portugal. A team of expat Galicians in Salvador, Brazil have also formed Galicia Rugby, a sister team of the local football club.
Symbols
A golden chalice enclosed in a field of azure has been the symbol of Galicia since the 13th century. Originated as a Canting arms due to the phonetic similarity between the words "chalice" and Galyce ("Galicia" in old Norman language), the first documented mention of this emblem is on the Segar's Roll, an English medieval roll of arms where are represented all the Christian kingdoms of 13th-century Europe. In following centuries, the Galician emblem was variating; diverse shapes and number of chalices (initially three and later one or five), wouldn't be until the 16th century that its number was fixed finally as one single chalice. Centuries after, a field of crosses was slowly added to the azure background, and latterly also a silver host. Since then basically the emblem of the kingdom would be kept until nowadays.
The ancient flag of the Kingdom of Galicia was based mainly on its coat of arms until the 19th century. However, when in 1833 the Government of Spain decided to abolish the kingdom and divided it in four provinces, the Galician emblem as well as flag, lost its legal status and international validity. It wouldn't be until the late 19th century that some Galician intellectuals (nationalist politicians and writers) began to use a new flag as symbol a renewed national unity for Galicia. That flag, what was composed by a diagonal stripe over a white background, was designated "official flag of Galicia" in 1984, after the fall of the Franco's dictatorship. In addition, the Royal Academy of Galicia asked the Galician government to incorporate the ancient coat of arms of the kingdom onto the modern flag, being present in it since then.
In addition to its coat of arms and flag, Galicia also has an own anthem. While it is true that the Kingdom of Galicia had during centuries a kind of unofficial anthem known as the "Solemn March of the kingdom", the Galician current anthem was not created until 1907, although its composition had begun already in 1880. Titled "Os Pinos" ("The Pines"), the Galician anthem lyrics was written by Eduardo Pondal, one of the greatest modern Galician poets, and its music was composed by Pascual Veiga. Performed for the first time in 1907 in Havana (Cuba) by Galician emigrants, the anthem was banned since 1927 by diverse Spanish Governments until 1977, when it was officially established by the Galician authorities.
Galicians
Honour
Galicia Peak in Vinson Massif, Antarctica is named after the autonomous community of Galicia.
Image gallery
See also
List of castros in Galicia
Timeline of Galician history
Notes
References
Bibliography
Bell, Aubrey F. B. (1922). Spanish Galicia. London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd.
Meakin, Annette M. B. (1909). Galicia: The Switzerland of Spain. London: Methuen & Co.
External links
Autonomous communities of Spain
Celtic nations
Green Spain
NUTS 2 statistical regions of the European Union
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12841 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%20protein | G protein | G proteins, also known as guanine nucleotide-binding proteins, are a family of proteins that act as molecular switches inside cells, and are involved in transmitting signals from a variety of stimuli outside a cell to its interior. Their activity is regulated by factors that control their ability to bind to and hydrolyze guanosine triphosphate (GTP) to guanosine diphosphate (GDP). When they are bound to GTP, they are 'on', and, when they are bound to GDP, they are 'off'. G proteins belong to the larger group of enzymes called GTPases.
There are two classes of G proteins. The first function as monomeric small GTPases (small G-proteins), while the second function as heterotrimeric G protein complexes. The latter class of complexes is made up of alpha (α), beta (β) and gamma (γ) subunits. In addition, the beta and gamma subunits can form a stable dimeric complex referred to as the beta-gamma complex
.
Heterotrimeric G proteins located within the cell are activated by G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) that span the cell membrane. Signaling molecules bind to a domain of the GPCR located outside the cell, and an intracellular GPCR domain then in turn activates a particular G protein. Some active-state GPCRs have also been shown to be "pre-coupled" with G proteins. The G protein activates a cascade of further signaling events that finally results in a change in cell function. G protein-coupled receptor and G proteins working together transmit signals from many hormones, neurotransmitters, and other signaling factors. G proteins regulate metabolic enzymes, ion channels, transporter proteins, and other parts of the cell machinery, controlling transcription, motility, contractility, and secretion, which in turn regulate diverse systemic functions such as embryonic development, learning and memory, and homeostasis.
History
G proteins were discovered when Alfred G. Gilman and Martin Rodbell investigated stimulation of cells by adrenaline. They found that when adrenaline binds to a receptor, the receptor does not stimulate enzymes (inside the cell) directly. Instead, the receptor stimulates a G protein, which then stimulates an enzyme. An example is adenylate cyclase, which produces the second messenger cyclic AMP. For this discovery, they won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Nobel prizes have been awarded for many aspects of signaling by G proteins and GPCRs. These include receptor antagonists, neurotransmitters, neurotransmitter reuptake, G protein-coupled receptors, G proteins, second messengers, the enzymes that trigger protein phosphorylation in response to cAMP, and consequent metabolic processes such as glycogenolysis.
Prominent examples include (in chronological order of awarding):
The 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Carl Cori, Gerty Cori and Bernardo Houssay, for their discovery of how glycogen is broken down to glucose and resynthesized in the body, for use as a store and source of energy. Glycogenolysis is stimulated by numerous hormones and neurotransmitters including adrenaline.
The 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Julius Axelrod, Bernard Katz and Ulf von Euler for their work on the release and reuptake of neurotransmitters.
The 1971 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Earl Sutherland for discovering the key role of adenylate cyclase, which produces the second messenger cyclic AMP.
The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to George H. Hitchings, Sir James Black and Gertrude Elion "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment" targeting GPCRs.
The 1992 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Edwin G. Krebs and Edmond H. Fischer for describing how reversible phosphorylation works as a switch to activate proteins, and to regulate various cellular processes including glycogenolysis.
The 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Alfred G. Gilman and Martin Rodbell for their discovery of "G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells".
The 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Eric Kandel, Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard, for research on neurotransmitters such as dopamine, which act via GPCRs.
The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck for their work on G protein-coupled olfactory receptors.
The 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Brian Kobilka and Robert Lefkowitz for their work on GPCR function.
Function
G proteins are important signal transducing molecules in cells. "Malfunction of GPCR [G Protein-Coupled Receptor] signaling pathways are involved in many diseases, such as diabetes, blindness, allergies, depression, cardiovascular defects, and certain forms of cancer. It is estimated that about 30% of the modern drugs' cellular targets are GPCRs." The human genome encodes roughly 800 G protein-coupled receptors, which detect photons of light, hormones, growth factors, drugs, and other endogenous ligands. Approximately 150 of the GPCRs found in the human genome still have unknown functions.
Whereas G proteins are activated by G protein-coupled receptors, they are inactivated by RGS proteins (for "Regulator of G protein signalling"). Receptors stimulate GTP binding (turning the G protein on). RGS proteins stimulate GTP hydrolysis (creating GDP, thus turning the G protein off).
Diversity
All eukaryotes use G proteins for signaling and have evolved a large diversity of G proteins. For instance, humans encode 18 different Gα proteins, 5 Gβ proteins, and 12 Gγ proteins.
Signaling
G protein can refer to two distinct families of proteins. Heterotrimeric G proteins, sometimes referred to as the "large" G proteins, are activated by G protein-coupled receptors and are made up of alpha (α), beta (β), and gamma (γ) subunits. "Small" G proteins (20-25kDa) belong to the Ras superfamily of small GTPases. These proteins are homologous to the alpha (α) subunit found in heterotrimers, but are in fact monomeric, consisting of only a single unit. However, like their larger relatives, they also bind GTP and GDP and are involved in signal transduction.
Heterotrimeric
Different types of heterotrimeric G proteins share a common mechanism. They are activated in response to a conformational change in the GPCR, exchanging GDP for GTP, and dissociating in order to activate other proteins in a particular signal transduction pathway. The specific mechanisms, however, differ between protein types.
Mechanism
Receptor-activated G proteins are bound to the inner surface of the cell membrane. They consist of the Gα and the tightly associated Gβγ subunits. There are many classes of Gα subunits: Gsα (G stimulatory), Giα (G inhibitory), Goα (G other), Gq/11α, and G12/13α are some examples. They behave differently in the recognition of the effector molecule, but share a similar mechanism of activation.
Activation
When a ligand activates the G protein-coupled receptor, it induces a conformational change in the receptor that allows the receptor to function as a guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) that exchanges GDP for GTP. The GTP (or GDP) is bound to the Gα subunit in the traditional view of heterotrimeric GPCR activation. This exchange triggers the dissociation of the Gα subunit (which is bound to GTP) from the Gβγ dimer and the receptor as a whole. However, models which suggest molecular rearrangement, reorganization, and pre-complexing of effector molecules are beginning to be accepted. Both Gα-GTP and Gβγ can then activate different signaling cascades (or second messenger pathways) and effector proteins, while the receptor is able to activate the next G protein.
Termination
The Gα subunit will eventually hydrolyze the attached GTP to GDP by its inherent enzymatic activity, allowing it to re-associate with Gβγ and starting a new cycle. A group of proteins called Regulator of G protein signalling (RGSs), act as GTPase-activating proteins (GAPs), are specific for Gα subunits. These proteins accelerate the hydrolysis of GTP to GDP, thus terminating the transduced signal. In some cases, the effector itself may possess intrinsic GAP activity, which then can help deactivate the pathway. This is true in the case of phospholipase C-beta, which possesses GAP activity within its C-terminal region. This is an alternate form of regulation for the Gα subunit. Such Gα GAPs do not have catalytic residues (specific amino acid sequences) to activate the Gα protein. They work instead by lowering the required activation energy for the reaction to take place.
Specific mechanisms
Gαs
Gαs activates the cAMP-dependent pathway by stimulating the production of cyclic AMP (cAMP) from ATP. This is accomplished by direct stimulation of the membrane-associated enzyme adenylate cyclase. cAMP can then act as a second messenger that goes on to interact with and activate protein kinase A (PKA). PKA can phosphorylate a myriad downstream targets.
The cAMP-dependent pathway is used as a signal transduction pathway for many hormones including:
ADH – Promotes water retention by the kidneys (created by the magnocellular neurosecretory cells of the posterior pituitary)
GHRH – Stimulates the synthesis and release of GH (somatotropic cells of the anterior pituitary)
GHIH – Inhibits the synthesis and release of GH (somatotropic cells of anterior pituitary)
CRH – Stimulates the synthesis and release of ACTH (anterior pituitary)
ACTH – Stimulates the synthesis and release of cortisol (zona fasciculata of the adrenal cortex in the adrenal glands)
TSH – Stimulates the synthesis and release of a majority of T4 (thyroid gland)
LH – Stimulates follicular maturation and ovulation in women; or testosterone production and spermatogenesis in men
FSH – Stimulates follicular development in women; or spermatogenesis in men
PTH – Increases blood calcium levels. This is accomplished via the parathyroid hormone 1 receptor (PTH1) in the kidneys and bones, or via the parathyroid hormone 2 receptor (PTH2) in the central nervous system and brain, as well as the bones and kidneys.
Calcitonin – Decreases blood calcium levels (via the calcitonin receptor in the intestines, bones, kidneys, and brain)
Glucagon – Stimulates glycogen breakdown in the liver
hCG – Promotes cellular differentiation, and is potentially involved in apoptosis.
Epinephrine – released by the adrenal medulla during the fasting state, when body is under metabolic duress. It stimulates glycogenolysis, in addition to the actions of glucagon.
Gαi
Gαi inhibits the production of cAMP from ATP.
e.g. somatostatin, prostaglandins
Gαq/11
Gαq/11 stimulates the membrane-bound phospholipase C beta, which then cleaves PIP2 (a minor membrane phosphoinositol) into two second messengers, IP3 and diacylglycerol (DAG).
The Inositol Phospholipid Dependent Pathway is used as a signal transduction pathway for many hormones including:
ADH (Vasopressin/AVP) – Induces the synthesis and release of glucocorticoids (Zona fasciculata of adrenal cortex); Induces vasoconstriction (V1 Cells of Posterior pituitary)
TRH – Induces the synthesis and release of TSH (Anterior pituitary)
TSH – Induces the synthesis and release of a small amount of T4 (Thyroid Gland)
Angiotensin II – Induces Aldosterone synthesis and release (zona glomerulosa of adrenal cortex in kidney)
GnRH – Induces the synthesis and release of FSH and LH (Anterior Pituitary)
Gα12/13
Gα12/13 are involved in Rho family GTPase signaling (see Rho family of GTPases). This is through the RhoGEF superfamily involving the RhoGEF domain of the proteins' structures). These are involved in control of cell cytoskeleton remodeling, and thus in regulating cell migration.
Gβ
The Gβγ complexes sometimes also have active functions. Examples include coupling to and activating G protein-coupled inwardly-rectifying potassium channels.
Small GTPases
Small GTPases, also known as small G-proteins, bind GTP and GDP likewise, and are involved in signal transduction. These proteins are homologous to the alpha (α) subunit found in heterotrimers, but exist as monomers. They are small (20-kDa to 25-kDa) proteins that bind to guanosine triphosphate (GTP). This family of proteins is homologous to the Ras GTPases and is also called the Ras superfamily GTPases.
Lipidation
In order to associate with the inner leaflet of the plasma membrane, many G proteins and small GTPases are lipidated, that is, covalently modified with lipid extensions. They may be myristoylated, palmitoylated or prenylated.
References
External links
Peripheral membrane proteins
Cell signaling
Signal transduction
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12848 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary%20Gygax | Gary Gygax | Ernest Gary Gygax ( ; July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008) was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson.
In the 1960s, Gygax created an organization of wargaming clubs and founded the Gen Con gaming convention. In 1971, he helped develop Chainmail, a miniatures wargame based on medieval warfare. He co-founded the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR, Inc.) with childhood friend Don Kaye in 1973. The following year, he and Arneson created D&D, which expanded on Gygax's Chainmail and included elements of the fantasy stories he loved as a child. In the same year, he founded The Dragon, a magazine based around the new game. In 1977, Gygax began work on a more comprehensive version of the game, called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax designed numerous manuals for the game system, as well as several pre-packaged adventures called "modules" that gave a person running a D&D game (the "Dungeon Master") a rough script and ideas on how to run a particular gaming scenario. In 1983, he worked to license the D&D product line into the successful D&D cartoon series.
After leaving TSR in 1986 over issues with its new majority owner, Gygax continued to create role-playing game titles independently, beginning with the multi-genre Dangerous Journeys in 1992. He designed another gaming system called Lejendary Adventure, released in 1999. In 2005, Gygax was involved in the Castles & Crusades role-playing game, which was conceived as a hybrid between the third edition of D&D and the original version of the game conceived by Gygax.
Gygax was married twice and had six children. In 2004, Gygax suffered two strokes and narrowly avoided a subsequent heart attack; he was then diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm and died in March 2008.
Early life and inspiration
Gygax was born in Chicago, the son of Almina Emelie "Posey" (Burdick) and Swiss immigrant and former Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist Ernst Gygax. He was named Ernest after his father, but he was commonly known as Gary, the middle name given to him by his mother after the actor Gary Cooper. The family lived on Kenmore Avenue, close enough to Wrigley Field that he could hear the roar of the crowds watching the Chicago Cubs play. At age 7, he became a member of a small group of friends who called themselves the "Kenmore Pirates". In 1946, after the Kenmore Pirates were involved in a fracas with another gang of boys, his father decided to move the family to Posey's family home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where Posey's family had settled in the early 19th century, and where Gary's grandparents still lived.
In this new setting, Gygax soon made friends with several of his peers, including Don Kaye and Mary Jo Powell. During his childhood and teen years, he developed a love of games and an appreciation for fantasy and science fiction literature. When he was five, he played card games such as pinochle and then board games such as chess. At the age of ten, he and his friends played the sort of make-believe games that eventually came to be called "live action role-playing games" with one of them acting as a referee. His father introduced him to science fiction and fantasy through pulp novels. His interest in games, combined with an appreciation of history, eventually led Gygax to begin playing miniature war games in 1953 with his best friend Don Kaye. As teenagers Gygax and Kaye designed their own miniatures rules for toy soldiers with a large collection of and figures, where they used "ladyfingers" (small firecrackers) to simulate explosions.
By the time he reached his teens, Gygax had a voracious appetite for pulp fiction authors such as Robert Howard, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Gygax was a mediocre student, and in 1956, a few months after his father died, he dropped out of high school in his junior year. He joined the Marines, but after being diagnosed with walking pneumonia, he received a medical discharge and moved back home with his mother. From there, he commuted to a job as a shipping clerk with Kemper Insurance Co. in Chicago. Shortly after his return, a friend introduced him to Avalon Hill's new wargame Gettysburg. Gygax was soon obsessed with the game, often playing marathon sessions once or more a week. It was also from Avalon Hill that he ordered the first blank hex mapping sheets available, which he then employed to design his own games.
About the same time that he discovered Gettysburg, his mother re-introduced him to Mary Jo Powell, who had left Lake Geneva as a child and had just returned. Gygax was smitten with the woman and, after a short courtship, persuaded her to marry him, despite the fact that he was only 19. This caused some friction with his best friend Don Kaye, who had also been wooing Mary Jo. Kaye refused to attend Gygax's wedding. Kaye and Gygax reconciled after the wedding.
The couple moved to Chicago where Gygax continued as a shipping clerk at Kemper Insurance. He found a job for Mary Jo there, but the company laid her off when she became pregnant with their first child. He also took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago.
Despite his commitments to his job, raising a family, school, and his political volunteerism, Gygax continued to play wargames. It reached the point that Mary Jo, pregnant with their second child, believed he was having an affair and confronted him in a friend's basement only to discover him and his friends sitting around a map-covered table.
In 1962, Gygax got a job as an insurance underwriter at Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. His family continued to grow, and after his third child was born, he decided to move his family back to Lake Geneva. Except for a few months he would spend in Clinton, Wisconsin, following his divorce, and his time in Hollywood while he was the head of TSR's entertainment division, Lake Geneva would be his home for the rest of his life.
By 1966, Gygax was active in the wargame hobby world and was writing many magazine articles on the subject. Gygax learned about H. G. Wells' Little Wars book for play of military miniatures wargames and Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame book. Gygax later looked for innovative ways to generate random numbers, and he used not only common six-sided dice, but dice of all five Platonic solid shapes, which he discovered in a school supply catalog.
Gygax cited his influences as Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, A. Merritt, and H. P. Lovecraft.
Wargames
In 1967, Gygax co-founded the International Federation of Wargamers (IFW) with Bill Speer and Scott Duncan. The IFW grew rapidly, particularly by assimilating several pre-existing wargaming clubs, and aimed to promote interest in wargames of all periods. It provided a forum for wargamers, via its newsletters and societies, which enabled them to form local groups and share rules. In 1967, Gygax organized a 20-person gaming meet in the basement of his home; this event would later be referred to as "Gen Con 0". In 1968, Gygax rented Lake Geneva's vine-covered Horticultural Hall for () to hold the first Lake Geneva Convention, also known as the Gen Con gaming convention for short. Gen Con is now one of North America's largest annual hobby-game gatherings. Gygax met Dave Arneson, the future co-creator of D&D, at the second Gen Con in August 1969.
Together with Don Kaye, Mike Reese, and Leon Tucker, Gygax created a military miniatures society called Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA) in 1970, with its first headquarters in Gygax's basement. Shortly thereafter in 1970, Robert Kuntz and Gygax founded the Castle & Crusade Society of the IFW.
Late in October 1970, Gygax lost his job at the insurance company after almost nine years. Unemployed and now with a family of five children—Ernest ("Ernie"), Lucion ("Luke"), Heidi, Cindy, and Elise—he tried to use his enthusiasm for games to make a living by designing board games for commercial sale. This clearly proved to be unsustainable when he only grossed $882 in 1971 (). He began cobbling shoes in his basement, which provided him with a steady income and gave him more time for pursuing his interest in game development. In 1971, he began doing some editing work at Guidon Games, a publisher of wargames, for which he produced the board games Alexander the Great and Dunkirk: The Battle of France. Early that same year, Gygax published Chainmail, a miniatures wargame that simulated medieval-era tactical combat, which he had originally written with hobby-shop owner Jeff Perren. The Chainmail medieval miniatures rules were originally published in the Castle & Crusade Society's fanzine The Domesday Book. Guidon Games hired Gygax to produce a "Wargaming with Miniatures" series of games, and a new edition of Chainmail (1971) was the first book in the series. The first edition of Chainmail included a fantasy supplement to the rules. These comprised a system for warriors, wizards, and various monsters of non-human races drawn from the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and other sources. For a small publisher like Guidon Games, Chainmail was relatively successful, selling 100 copies per month.
Gygax also collaborated on Tractics with Mike Reese & Leon Tucker, his contribution being the change to a 20-sided spinner or a coffee can with 20 numbered poker chips (or eventually 20-sided dice) to decide combat resolutions instead of the standard 6-sided dice. He also collaborated with Dave Arneson on the Napoleonic naval wargame Don't Give Up the Ship!
Dave Arneson adapted the Chainmail rules for his fantasy Blackmoor campaign. In the fall of 1972, around late November, Dave Arneson and friend David Megarry, inventor of the Dungeon! board game, traveled to Lake Geneva to showcase their respective games to Gygax, in his role as a representative of Guidon Games. Gygax saw potential in both games, and was especially excited by Arneson's role-playing game. Gygax and Arneson immediately started to collaborate on creating "The Fantasy Game", the role-playing game which would evolve into Dungeons & Dragons.
Two weeks after Arneson's Blackmoor demonstration, Gygax had produced a 50-page set of rules, and was ready to try it on his two oldest children, Ernie and Elise, in a setting he called "Greyhawk". This group rapidly expanded to include Don Kaye, Rob Kuntz and eventually a large circle of players. Gygax sent the 50 pages of rules to his wargaming contacts and asked them to playtest the new game. Gygax and Arneson continued to trade notes about their respective campaigns. The final draft, however contained changes that were not vetted by Arneson, and Gygax's vision differed on some rule details Arneson had preferred.
Based on the feedback he received, Gygax created a 150-page revision of the rules by mid-1973. Several aspects of the system governing magic in the game were inspired by The Dying Earth stories of fantasy author Jack Vance (notably the fact that magic-users in the game forget the spells that they have learned immediately upon casting them, and must re-study them in order to cast them again), and the system as a whole drew upon the work of authors such as Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Poul Anderson, Tolkien, Bram Stoker, and others. He asked Guidon Games to publish it, but the 3-volume rule set in a labeled box was beyond the scope of the small publisher. Gygax attempted to pitch the game to Avalon Hill, but the largest company in wargaming did not understand the new concept of role-playing, and turned down his offer.
By 1974, Gygax's Greyhawk group, which had started off with himself, Ernie Gygax, Don Kaye, Rob Kuntz, and Terry Kuntz, had grown to over 20 people, with Rob Kuntz becoming the co-dungeon-master so that each of them could referee groups of only a dozen players.
TSR
Gygax left Guidon Games in 1973 and in October, with Don Kaye as a partner, founded Tactical Studies Rules, later known as TSR, Inc. The two men each invested in the venture—Kaye borrowed his share on his life insurance policy—to print a thousand copies of the Dungeons & Dragons boxed set. They also tried to raise money by immediately publishing a set of wargame rules called Cavaliers and Roundheads, but sales were poor; when the printing costs for the thousand copies of Dungeons & Dragons rose from $2000 to $2500, they still did not have enough capital to publish it. Worried that the other playtesters and wargamers now familiar with Gygax's rules would bring a similar product to the market first, the two accepted an offer in December 1973 by game playing acquaintance Brian Blume to invest $2,000 in TSR to become an equal one-third partner. (Gygax accepted Blume's offer right away. Kaye was less enthusiastic, and after a week to consider the offer, he questioned Blume closely before acquiescing.) Blume's investment finally brought the financing that enabled them to publish D&D. Gygax worked on rules for more miniatures and tabletop battle games including Classic Warfare (Ancient Period: 1500 BC to 500 AD), and Warriors of Mars.
The first commercial version of D&D was released by TSR in January 1974 as a boxed set. Sales of the hand-assembled print run of 1,000 copies, put together in Gygax's home, sold out in less than a year. (In 2018, a first printing of the boxed set sold at auction for more than $20,000.)
At the end of 1974, with sales of D&D skyrocketing, the future looked bright for Gygax and Kaye, who were only 36. However, in January 1975, Kaye unexpectedly died of a heart attack. He had not made any specific provision in his will regarding his one-third share of the company, simply leaving his entire estate to his wife Donna. Although she had worked briefly for TSR as an accountant, she had not shared her husband's enthusiasm for gaming, and made it clear that she would not be having anything to do with managing the company. Gygax characterized her as "less than personable... After Don died she dumped all the Tactical Studies Rules materials off on my front porch. It would have been impossible to manage a business with her involved as a partner." After Kaye's death, TSR was forced to relocate from Kaye's dining room to Gygax's basement. In July 1975, Gygax and Blume reorganized their company from a partnership to a corporation called TSR Hobbies. Gygax owned 150 shares, Blume owned the other 100 shares, and both had the option to buy up to 700 shares at any time in the future. But TSR Hobbies had nothing to publish—D&D was still owned by the three-way partnership of TSR, and neither Gygax nor Blume had the money to buy out the shares owned by Kaye's wife. Blume persuaded a reluctant Gygax to allow his father, Melvin Blume, to buy Donna's shares, and those were converted to 200 shares in TSR Hobbies. In addition, Brian bought another 140 shares. These purchases reduced Gygax from the majority shareholder in control of the company to minority shareholder; he effectively became the Blumes' employee.
Gygax wrote the supplements Greyhawk, Eldritch Wizardry, and Swords & Spells for the original D&D game. With Brian Blume, Gygax also designed the wild west-oriented role-playing game Boot Hill. In the same year, Gygax created the magazine The Strategic Review with himself as editor. But wanting a more industry-wide periodical, he hired Tim Kask as TSR's first employee to change this magazine to the fantasy periodical The Dragon, with Gygax as writer, columnist, and publisher (from 1978 to 1981). The Dragon debuted in June 1976, and Gygax commented on its success years later: "When I decided that The Strategic Review was not the right vehicle, hired Tim Kask as a magazine editor for Tactical Studies Rules, and named the new publication he was to produce The Dragon, I thought we would eventually have a great periodical to serve gaming enthusiasts worldwide ... At no time did I ever contemplate so great a success or so long a lifespan."
In 1976, TSR moved out of Gygax's house into its first professional home, known as "The Dungeon Hobby Shop". Dave Arneson was hired as part of the creative staff, but was let go after only ten months, another sign that Gygax and Arneson still had creative differences over D&D.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Hollywood
The Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, released in 1977, was an introductory version of the original D&D geared towards new players and edited by J. Eric Holmes. In the same year, TSR Hobbies released a completely new and complex version of D&D, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D). The Monster Manual, released later that year, became the first supplemental rule book of the new system, and many more followed. The AD&D rules were not fully compatible with those of the D&D Basic Set and as a result, D&D and AD&D became distinct product lines. Splitting the game lines created a further rift between Gygax and Arneson; although Arneson received a 10% royalty on sales of all D&D products, Gygax refused to pay him royalties on AD&D books, claiming it was a new and different property. In 1979, Arneson filed a lawsuit against TSR; it was eventually settled in March 1981 with the agreement that Arneson would receive a 2.5% royalty on all AD&D products, giving him a very comfortable six-figure annual income for the next decade.
Gygax wrote the AD&D hardcovers Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, Monster Manual, and Monster Manual II. Gygax also wrote or co-wrote numerous AD&D and basic D&D adventure modules, including The Keep on the Borderlands, Tomb of Horrors, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, The Temple of Elemental Evil, The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure, Isle of the Ape, and all seven of the modules later combined into Queen of the Spiders. In 1980, Gygax's long-time campaign setting of Greyhawk was published in the form of the World of Greyhawk Fantasy World Setting folio, which was expanded in 1983 into the World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting boxed set. Sales of the D&D game reached in 1980. Gygax also provided assistance on the Gamma World science fantasy role-playing game in 1981 and co-authored the Gamma World adventure Legion of Gold.
In 1979, a Michigan State University student, James Dallas Egbert III, allegedly disappeared into the school's steam tunnels while playing a live-action version of D&D. In fact, Egbert was discovered in Louisiana several weeks later, but negative mainstream media attention focused on D&D as the cause. In 1982, Patricia Pulling's son killed himself. Blaming D&D for her son's suicide, Pulling formed an organization named B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) to attack the game and the company that produced it. Gygax defended the game on a segment of 60 Minutes, which aired in 1985. When death threats started arriving at the TSR office, Gygax hired a bodyguard. Despite the negative publicity, or perhaps because of it, TSR's annual D&D sales increased in 1982 to , and in January 1983, The New York Times speculated that D&D might become "the great game of the 1980s" in the same manner that Monopoly was emblematic of the Great Depression.
Brian Blume persuaded Gygax to allow Brian's brother Kevin to purchase Melvin Blume's shares. This gave the Blume brothers a controlling interest, and by 1981, Gygax and the Blumes were increasingly at loggerheads over management of the company. Gygax's frustrations at work, and increased prosperity from his generous royalty cheques, brought a number of changes to his personal life. He and Mary Jo had been active members of the local Jehovah's Witnesses, but others in the congregation already felt uneasy about Gygax's smoking and drinking; his connection to the "satanic" game of D&D caused enough friction that the Gygaxes finally disassociated themselves from Jehovah's Witnesses. Mary Jo, continuing to resent the amount of time her husband spent "playing games", had begun to drink excessively, and the couple argued frequently. Gygax, who had started smoking marijuana when he lost his insurance job in 1970, started to use cocaine, and had a number of extramarital affairs. Finally in 1983, the two had an acrimonious divorce.
At the same time, the Blumes, wanting to get Gygax out of Lake Geneva so they could manage the company without his "interference", split TSR Hobbies into TSR, Inc., and TSR Entertainment, Inc. Gygax became the President of TSR Entertainment, Inc., and the Blumes sent him to Hollywood to develop TV and movie opportunities. He became co-producer of the licensed D&D cartoon series for CBS, which led its time slot for two years.
Gygax, newly single, took advantage of his time on the West Coast, renting an immense mansion, increasing his cocaine use, and spending time with several young starlets.
Leaving TSR
Because he was occupied with getting a movie off the ground in Hollywood, Gygax had to leave the day-to-day operations of TSR to Kevin and Brian Blume. In 1984, after months of negotiation, he reached an agreement with Orson Welles to star in a D&D movie, and John Boorman to act as producer and director. But almost at the same time, he received word that back in Lake Geneva, TSR had run into severe financial difficulties and Kevin Blume was shopping the company for .
Gygax immediately discarded his movie ambitions—his D&D movie would never be made—and flew back to Lake Geneva. There, he discovered to his shock that although industry leader TSR was grossing , it was barely breaking even; it was in fact in debt and teetering on the edge of insolvency. After investigating the reasons why, Gygax brought his findings to the five other company directors. (Since 1982, TSR, Inc. had conformed to the recommendations of the American Management Association by adding three "outside" directors to the board, increasing its size to six.) Gygax charged that the financial crisis was due to mismanagement by Kevin Blume: excess inventory, overstaffing, too many company cars, and some questionable (and expensive) projects such as dredging up a 19th century shipwreck. Gygax demanded that Kevin Blume be removed as company president, and the three outside directors agreed with him. However, the board still believed the financial problems were terminal and the company needed to be sold. In an effort to stay in control, in March 1985, Gygax exercised his 700-share stock option, giving him just over 50% control. He appointed himself president and CEO, and rather than selling the company, he took steps to produce new revenue-generating products. To that end, he contacted Dave Arneson with a view to produce some Blackmoor material. He also bet heavily on a new AD&D book, Unearthed Arcana, a compilation of material culled from Dragon magazine articles. And he quickly wrote a novel set in his Greyhawk setting, Saga of Old City, featuring a protagonist called Gord the Rogue. In order to bring some financial stability to TSR, he hired a company manager, Lorraine Williams.
When Unearthed Arcana was released in July, Gygax's bet paid off, as the new book sold 90,000 copies in the first month. His novel also sold well, and he immediately published a sequel, Artifact of Evil. The financial crisis had been averted, but Gygax had paved the way for his own downfall. In October 1985, the new manager, Lorraine Williams, revealed that she had purchased all of the shares of Kevin and Brian Blume—after Brian had triggered his own 700-share option. Williams was now the majority shareholder, and replaced Gygax as president and CEO. She also made it clear that Gygax would be making no further creative contributions to TSR. Several of his projects were immediately shelved and never published. Gygax took TSR to court in a bid to block the Blumes' sale of their shares to Williams, but he lost.
Sales of D&D reached in 1985, but Gygax, seeing his future at TSR as untenable, resigned all positions with TSR, Inc. in October 1986, and settled his disputes with TSR in December 1986. By the terms of his settlement with TSR, Gygax kept the rights to Gord the Rogue as well as all D&D characters whose names were anagrams or plays on his own name (for example, Yrag and Zagyg). However, he lost the rights to all his other work, including the World of Greyhawk and the names of all the characters he had ever used in TSR material, such as Mordenkainen, Robilar, and Tenser.
After TSR
1985–1989: New Infinities Productions, Inc.
Immediately after leaving TSR, Gygax was approached by a wargaming acquaintance, Forrest Baker, who had done some consulting work for TSR in 1983 and 1984. Gygax, who was tired of company management, was simply looking for some way to market more of his Gord the Rogue novels, but Baker had a vision for a new gaming company. He promised that he would handle the business end, while Gygax would handle the creative projects. Baker also guaranteed that, using Gygax's name, he would be able to bring in one to two million dollars of investment. Gygax decided this was a good opportunity, and in October 1986, New Infinities Productions, Inc. (NIPI) was publicly announced. To help him with the creative work, Gygax poached Frank Mentzer and Dragon magazine editor Kim Mohan from TSR. But before a single product was released, Forrest Baker left NIPI when his promised outside investment of one to two million dollars failed to materialize.
Against his will, Gygax was back in charge again; he immediately looked for a quick product to get NIPI off the ground. He had retained the rights to Gord the Rogue as part of his severance agreement with TSR, so he licensed Greyhawk from TSR and started writing new novels beginning with Sea of Death (1987); sales were brisk, and Gygax's Gord the Rogue novels ended up keeping New Infinities in business.
Gygax brought in Don Turnbull from Games Workshop to manage the company, then worked with Mohan and Mentzer on a science fiction-themed RPG, Cyborg Commando, which was published in 1987. However, sales of the new game were not brisk: the game received overwhelmingly negative reception. NIPI was still dependent on Gord the Rogue.
Mentzer and Mohan also wrote a series of generic RPG adventures called Gary Gygax Presents Fantasy Master. They also began working on a third line of products, which began with an adventure written by Mentzer called The Convert (1987); Mentzer had written the adventure as an RPGA tournament for D&D, but TSR was not interested in publishing it. Mentzer got verbal permission to publish it with New Infinities, but since the permission was not in writing TSR filed an injunction to prevent the adventure's sale, although the injunction was later lifted. The legal costs further drained NIPI of capital.
During all of this drama, Gygax became a father again. Over the past year, he had formed a romantic relationship with Gail Carpenter, his former assistant at TSR. In November 1986, she gave birth to Gygax's sixth child, Alex. Biographer Michael Witwer believes the birth of Alex forced Gygax to reconsider the equation of work, gaming and family that, up until this time, had been dominated by work and gaming. "Gary, keenly aware that he had made mistakes as a father and husband in the past, was determined not to make them again ... Gary was also a realist, and knew what good fatherhood would demand, especially at his age." On August 15, 1987, on what would have been his parents' 50th wedding anniversary, Gygax married Gail Carpenter.
During 1987 and 1988, Gygax worked with Flint Dille on the Sagard the Barbarian books, as well as Role-Playing Mastery and its sequel, Master of the Game. He also wrote two more Gord the Rogue novels, City of Hawks (1987), and Come Endless Darkness (1988). However, by 1988, TSR had rewritten the setting for the world of Greyhawk, and Gygax was not happy with the new direction in which TSR was taking "his" creation. In a literary declaration that his old world was dead, and wanting to make a clean break with all things Greyhawk, Gygax destroyed his version of Oerth in the final Gord the Rogue novel, Dance of Demons.
With the Gord the Rogue novels finished, NIPI's main source of steady income dried up. The company needed a new product. Gygax announced in 1988 in a company newsletter that he and Rob Kuntz, his co-Dungeon Master during the early days of the Greyhawk campaign, were working as a team again. This time they would create a new multi-genre fantasy RPG called "Infinite Adventures", which would be supported by different gamebooks for different genres. This line would detail the Castle and City of Greyhawk as Gygax and Kuntz had originally envisioned them, now called "Castle Dunfalcon".
However, before work on this project could commence, NIPI ran out of money, was forced into bankruptcy, and was dissolved in 1989.
1990–1994: Dangerous Journeys
After NIPI folded, Gygax decided to create an entirely new RPG called The Carpenter Project, one considerably more complex and "rule heavy" than his original and relatively simple D&D system, which had been encompassed by a mere 150 typewritten pages. He also wanted to create a horror setting for the new RPG called Unhallowed. He began working on the RPG and the setting with the help of games designer Mike McCulley. Game Designers' Workshop became interested in publishing the new system, and it also drew the attention of JVC and NEC, who were looking for a new RPG system and setting to turn into a series of computer games. NEC and JVC were not interested in horror though, and work on the Unhallowed setting was shelved in favour of a fantasy setting called Mythus. JVC also wanted a name change for the RPG, favoring Dangerous Dimensions over The Carpenter Project. Work progressed favourably until March 1992, when TSR filed an injunction against Dangerous Dimensions, claiming the name and initials were too similar to Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax, with the approval of NEC and JVC, quickly changed the name to Dangerous Journeys, and work on the new game continued.
The marketing strategy for Dangerous Journeys: Mythus was multi-pronged: in addition to the RPG and setting to be published by Game Designers' Workshop, and the Mythus computer game being prepared by NEC and JVC, there would also be a series of books based on the Mythus setting written by Gygax. So in addition to his work on the RPG and the Mythus setting, Gygax wrote three novels, released under publisher Penguin/Roc and later reprinted by Paizo Publishing: The Anubis Murders, The Samarkand Solution, and Death in Delhi.
In late 1992, the Dangerous Journeys RPG was released by Game Designers' Workshop, but TSR immediately applied for an injunction against the entire Dangerous Journeys RPG and the Mythus setting, arguing that Dangerous Journeys was based on D&D and AD&D. Although the injunction failed, TSR moved forward with litigation. Gygax believed the legal action was without merit and fuelled by Lorraine Williams' personal enmity, but NEC and JVC both withdrew from the project, killing the Mythus computer game. By 1994, the legal costs associated with many months of pretrial discovery had drained all of Gygax's resources; believing that TSR was also suffering, Gygax offered to settle. In the end, TSR paid Gygax for the complete rights to Dangerous Journeys and Mythus. Although Gygax was well compensated for his years of work on Dangerous Journeys and Mythus, TSR immediately and permanently shelved them both.
1995–2000: Lejendary Adventures
In 1995, Gygax began work on a new computer role-playing game called Lejendary Adventures. In contrast to the rules-heavy Dangerous Journeys, this new system was a return to simple and basic rules. Although he was not able to successfully release a Lejendary Adventures computer game, Gygax decided to instead publish it as a tabletop game.
Meanwhile, in 1996 the games industry was rocked by the news that TSR had run into insoluble financial problems and had been bought by Wizards of the Coast. While WotC was busy refocussing TSR's products, Christopher Clark of Inner City Games Designs approached Gygax in 1997 to suggest that they produce some adventures to sell in game stores while TSR was otherwise occupied; the result was a pair of fantasy adventures published by Inner City Games: A Challenge of Arms (1998) and The Ritual of the Golden Eyes (1999). Gygax introduced some investors to Clark's publication setup, and although the investors were not willing to fund publication of Legendary Adventures, Clark and Gygax formed a partnership called Hekaforge Productions. Gygax was thus able to return to publish Lejendary Adventures in 1999. The game was published as a three-volume set: The Lejendary Rules for All Players (1999), Lejend Master's Lore (2000) and Beasts of Lejend (2000).
The new owner of TSR, WotC's Peter Adkison, clearly did not harbor any of Lorraine Williams' ill-will toward Gygax: Adkison purchased all of Gygax's residual rights to D&D and AD&D for a six-figure sum. Although Gygax did not write any new supplements or books for TSR or WotC, he did agree to write the preface to the 1998 adventure Return to the Tomb of Horrors, a paean to Gygax's original AD&D adventure Tomb of Horrors. He also returned to the pages of Dragon Magazine, writing the "Up on a Soapbox" column from Issue #268 (January 2000) to Issue #320 (June 2004).
2000–2008: Later works and death
Gygax continued to work on Lejendary Adventures which he believed was his best work. However, sales were below expectation.
On June 11, 2001, Stephen Chenault and Davis Chenault of Troll Lord Games announced that Gygax would be writing books for their company. Gygax's early work for Troll Lord included a series of hardcover books that eventually came to be called "Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds"; the first was The Canting Crew (2002), a look at the roguish underworld. He also wrote World Builder (2003) and Living Fantasy (2003), generic game design books usable in many different settings. After the first four books in the series, Gygax stepped down from writing and took on an advisory role, though the series logo still carried his name. Troll Lord also published a few adventures as a result of their partnership with Gygax, including The Hermit (2002) an adventure intended for d20 and also for Lejendary Adventures.
By 2002, Gygax had given Christopher Clark of Hekaforge an encyclopaedic 72,000-word text describing the Lejendary Earth. Clark split the manuscript up into five books and expanded it, with each of the final books coming to about 128,000 words, giving Hekaforge a third Lejendary Adventures line to supplement the core rules and adventures. Hekaforge managed to publish the first two of those Lejendary Earth sourcebooks, Gazetteer (2002) and Noble Kings and Great Lands (2003), but by 2003 the small company was having financial difficulties. Clark had to ask Troll Lord Games to become an "angel" investor by publishing the three remaining Lejendary Adventures books.
On October 9, 2001, Necromancer Games announced that they would be publishing a d20 version of Necropolis, an adventure originally planned by Gygax for New Infinities Productions and later printed in 1992 as a Mythus adventure by GDW; Gary Gygax's Necropolis was published a year later.
Gygax also performed voiceover narration for cartoons and video games. In 2000, he voiced his own cartoon self for an episode of Futurama, "Anthology of Interest I" that also included the voices of Al Gore, Stephen Hawking and Nichelle Nichols. Gygax also performed as a guest Dungeon Master in the Delera's Tomb quest series of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach.
During his time with TSR, Gygax had often mentioned the mysterious Castle Greyhawk which formed the centre of his own home campaign. But despite all of his written output over the previous 30 years, Gygax had never published details of the castle. In 2003, Gygax announced that he was again partnering with Rob Kuntz to publish the original and previously unpublished details of Castle Greyhawk and the City of Greyhawk in 6 volumes, although the project would use the rules for Castles and Crusades rather than D&D. As Gygax wrote in an on-line forum:
Since Wizards of the Coast, which had bought TSR in 1997, still owned the rights to the name "Greyhawk", Gygax changed the name of Castle Greyhawk to "Castle Zagyg", a reverse homophone of his own name, and also changed the name of the nearby city to "Yggsburgh", a play on his initials "E.G.G."
The scale of the project was enormous: By the time Gygax and Kuntz had stopped working on their original home campaign, the castle dungeons had encompassed 50 levels of cunningly complex passages with thousands of rooms and traps. This, plus plans for the city of Yggsburgh and encounter areas outside the castle and city, would clearly be too much to fit into the proposed 6 volumes. Gygax decided he would compress the castle dungeons into 13 levels, the size of his original Castle Greyhawk in 1973 by amalgamating the best of what could be gleaned from binders and boxes of old notes. However, neither Gygax nor Kuntz had kept careful or comprehensive plans. Because they had often made up details of play sessions on the spot, they usually just scribbled a quick map as they played, with cursory notes about monsters, treasures, and traps. These sketchy maps had contained just enough detail that the two could ensure their independent work would dovetail. All of these old notes now had to be deciphered, 25-year-old memories dredged up as to what had happened in each room, and a decision made whether to keep or discard each new piece. Recreating the city too would be a challenge. Although Gygax still had his old maps of the original city, all of his previously published work on the city was owned by WotC, so he would have to create most of the city from scratch while still maintaining the "look and feel" of his original.
Due to creative differences, Kuntz backed out of the project, but created an adventure module that would be published at the same time as Gygax's first book. Gygax continued to painstakingly put Castle Zagyg together on his own, but even this slow and laborious process came to a complete halt when Gygax suffered a serious stroke in April 2004 and then another one a few weeks later. Although he returned to his keyboard after a seven-month convalescence, his output was reduced from 14-hour work days to only one or two hours per day. Finally in 2005, Castle Zagyg Part I: Yggsburgh, the first book in the six-book series, appeared. Later that year, Troll Lord Games also published Castle Zagyg: Dark Chateau (2005), the adventure module written for the Yggsburgh setting by Rob Kuntz. Jeff Talanian helped with the creation of the dungeon, eventually resulting in publication of the limited edition CZ9: The East Marks Gazetteer (2007).
That same year, Gygax was diagnosed with a potentially deadly abdominal aortic aneurysm. Doctors concurred that surgery was needed, but their estimates of success varied from 50% to 90%. With no firm medical consensus, Gygax came to believe that he would likely die on the operating table; he refused to consider surgery, although he realized that a rupture of the aneurysm – likely inevitable – would be fatal. In one concession to his condition, he switched from cigarettes, which he had smoked since high school, to cigars.
It wasn't until 2008 that Gygax was able to finish the second volume of six volumes, Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works, which described details of the castle above ground. The next two volumes were supposed to detail the dungeons beneath Castle Zagyg. However, before they could be written, Gygax died in March 2008. Three months after his death, Gygax Games – a new company formed by Gary's widow, Gail – withdrew all of the Gygax licenses from Troll Lord, and also from Hekaforge.
Personal life
From an early age, Gygax hunted and was a target-shooter with both bow and gun. He was also an avid gun collector, and at various times owned a variety of rifles, shotguns, and handguns.
Awards and honors
As the "father of role-playing games", Gygax received many awards, honors, and tributes related to gaming:
He was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Origins Award Hall of Fame, also known as the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame, in 1980.
Sync magazine named Gygax number one on the list of "The 50 Biggest Nerds of All Time".
SFX magazine listed him as number 37 on the list of the "50 Greatest SF Pioneers".
In 1999, Pyramid magazine named Gygax as one of "The Millennium's Most Influential Persons" "in the realm of adventure gaming".
Gygax was tied with J. R. R. Tolkien for number 18 on GameSpy's "30 Most Influential People in Gaming".
A strain of bacteria was named in honor of Gygax, "Arthronema gygaxiana sp nov UTCC393".
He was inducted into the Pop Culture Hall of Fame Class of 2019
In 2008 Gail Gygax, the widow of Gary Gygax, began the process to establish a memorial to her late husband in Lake Geneva. On March 28, 2011 the City Council of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, approved Gail Gygax's application for a site of memorial in Donian Park; however, the Gygax family was unable to raise the money at the time to complete the memorial during a 2012 funding campaign. The design of the monument is a stone castle look with medieval pole arms, a family crest and a dragon.
In 2014, with the approval of Gary's eldest son, Ernie, Epic Quest Publishing started a Kickstarter campaign to raise the initial funding for a museum dedicated to Gary featuring a gaming and event center and hall of fame for authors, artists, designers and game masters.
In popular culture
Stephen Colbert, an avid D&D gamer in his youth, dedicated the last part of the March 5, 2008, episode of The Colbert Report to Gygax.
In 2000, Gygax voiced his cartoon self for an episode of Futurama, "Anthology of Interest I" that also included the voices of Al Gore, Stephen Hawking, and Nichelle Nichols.
Gygax also appeared as his 8-bit self on Code Monkeys.
Numerous names in D&D, such as Zagyg, Ring of Gaxx, and Gryrax, are anagrams or alterations of Gygax's name.
See also
Gary Gygax bibliography
References
External links
Dungeons & Dragons Creator Gary Gygax Passes Away; Interview on BoingBoing Gadgets
Gygax Magazine
1938 births
2008 deaths
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American novelists
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American novelists
American Christians
American fantasy writers
American game designers
American male novelists
American people of Swiss descent
Board game designers
Chess variant inventors
Deaths from abdominal aortic aneurysm
Deaths from heart disease
Dungeons & Dragons game designers
Former Jehovah's Witnesses
Novelists from Illinois
Novelists from Wisconsin
People from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
Role-playing game designers
Writers from Chicago | [
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12850 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor%20of%20New%20South%20Wales | Governor of New South Wales | The governor of New South Wales is the viceregal representative of the Australian monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, in the state of New South Wales. In an analogous way to the governor-general of Australia at the national level, the governors of the Australian states perform constitutional and ceremonial functions at the state level. The governor is appointed by the queen on the advice of the premier of New South Wales, for an unfixed period of time—known as serving At Her Majesty's pleasure—though five years is the norm. The current governor is retired judge Margaret Beazley, who succeeded David Hurley on 2 May 2019.
The office has its origin in the 18th-century colonial governors of New South Wales upon its settlement in 1788, and is the oldest continuous institution in Australia. The present incarnation of the position emerged with the Federation of Australia and the New South Wales Constitution Act 1902, which defined the viceregal office as the governor acting by and with the advice of the Executive Council of New South Wales. However, the post still ultimately represented the government of the United Kingdom until, after continually decreasing involvement by the British government, the passage in 1942 of the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942 (see Statute of Westminster) and the Australia Act 1986, after which the governor became the direct, personal representative of the Australian sovereign.
Appointment
The Office of Governor is required by the New South Wales Constitution Act, 1902. The Australian monarch, on the advice and recommendation of the premier of New South Wales, approves the appointment of governor with a commission issued under the royal sign-manual and Public Seal of the State, who is from then until being sworn in by the premier and chief justice referred to as the governor-designate.
Besides the administration of the oaths of office, there is no set formula for the swearing-in of a governor-designate. The constitution act stipulates that: "Before assuming office, a person appointed to be Governor shall take the Oath or Affirmation of Allegiance and the Oath or Affirmation of Office in the presence of the Chief Justice or another Judge of the Supreme Court." The sovereign will also hold an audience with the appointee and will at that time induct the governor-designate as a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC).
The incumbent will generally serve for at least five years, though this is only a developed convention, and the governor still technically acts at Her Majesty's pleasure (or the Royal Pleasure). The premier may therefore recommend to the queen that the viceroy remain in her service for a longer period of time, sometimes upwards of more than seven years. A governor may also resign and three have died in office. In such a circumstance, or if the governor leaves the country for longer than one month, the lieutenant governor of New South Wales, concurrently held by the chief justice of New South Wales since 1872, serves as Administrator of the Government and exercises all powers of the governor. Furthermore, if the lieutenant governor becomes incapacitated while serving in the office of governor or is also absent from the state, the next most senior judge of the Supreme Court is sworn in as the administrator.
Selection
Between 1788 and 1957, all governors were born outside New South Wales and were often members of the peerage. Historian A. J. P. Taylor once noted that "going out and governing New South Wales became the British aristocracy's 'abiding consolation'". However, even though the implementation of the Australian Citizenship Act in 1948 established the concept of an independent Australian citizenship, the idea of Australian-born persons being appointed governor of New South Wales was much earlier. Coincidentally the first Australian-born governor, Sir John Northcott on 1 August 1946, was also the first Australian-born governor of any state. However, as Northcott was born in Victoria, it was not until Sir Eric Woodward's appointment by Queen Elizabeth II in 1957 that the position was filled by a New South Welshman; this practice continued until 1996, when Queen Elizabeth II commissioned as her representative Gordon Samuels, a London-born immigrant to Australia.
Although required by the tenets of constitutional monarchy to be non-partisan while in office, governors were frequently former politicians, many being members of the House of Lords by virtue of their peerage. The first governors were all military officers and the majority of governors since have come from a military background, numbering 19. Samuels was the first governor in New South Wales history without either a political, public service or military background, being a former justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. The first woman to hold this position is also the first Lebanese-Australian governor, Dame Marie Bashir.
Role
As the sovereign predominantly lives outside New South Wales, the governor's primary task is to perform the sovereign's constitutional duties on their behalf.
It is the governor who is required, by the Constitution Act 1902, to appoint persons to the Government of New South Wales, who are all theoretically tasked with tendering to the monarch and viceroy guidance on the exercise of the Royal Prerogative. Convention dictates that the governor must draw from the Parliament an individual to act as premier, who is also capable of forming governmentin almost all cases the Member of Parliament who commands the confidence of the Legislative Assembly. The premier then directs the governor to appoint other members of parliament to the Executive Council of New South Wales known as the Cabinet, and it is in practice only from this group of ministers of the Crown that the queen and governor will take direction on the use of executive power, an arrangement called the Queen-in-Council or, more specifically, the Governor-in-Council. In this capacity, the governor will issue royal proclamations and sign orders in council. The governor-in-council is also required to appoint in the queen's name the president of the Legislative Council, the speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Supreme Court and District Court justices, and local court magistrates in the state, though all of these are made on the advice of either the premier and cabinet or the majority of elected members of each house in the case of the speaker or president. The advice given by the Cabinet is, in order to ensure the stability of government, typically binding; both the queen and her viceroy, however, may in exceptional circumstances invoke the reserve powers, which remain the Crown's final check against a ministry's abuse of power, this was last fully exercised in 1932, when Sir Philip Game revoked the commission of Premier Jack Lang.
The governor alone is constitutionally mandated to summon parliament. Beyond that, the viceroy carries out the other conventional parliamentary duties in the sovereign's absence, including reading the Speech from the throne and the proroguing and dissolving of parliament. The governor grants royal assent in the queen's name; legally, by granting royal assent (making the bill law), withholding royal assent (vetoing the bill), or reserving the bill for the queen's pleasure (allowing the sovereign to personally grant or withhold assent). If the governor withholds the queen's assent, the sovereign may within two years disallow the bill, thereby annulling the law in question. No modern viceroy has denied royal assent to a bill. With most constitutional functions delegated to Cabinet, the governor acts in a primarily ceremonial fashion. The governor hosts members of Australia's royal family, as well as foreign royalty and heads of state. Also as part of international relations, the governor receives letters of credence and of recall from foreign consuls-general appointed to Sydney. When they are the longest-serving state governor, the governor of New South Wales holds a dormant commission to act as the administrator of the Commonwealth when the governor-general of Australia is absent from Australia, a role most recently held by Governor Bashir.
The governor is also tasked with fostering unity and pride. The governor inducts individuals into the various national orders and present national medals and decorations, however the most senior awards such as ACs or the Victoria Cross are the sole prerogative of the governor general. The governor also ex-officio serves as Honorary Colonel of the Royal New South Wales Regiment (since 1960), Honorary Air Commodore of No. 22 (City of Sydney) Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force (since 1937) and Honorary Commodore of the Royal Australian Navy , as well as the Chief Scout for New South Wales.
Symbols and protocol
As the personal representative of the monarch, the governor follows only the sovereign in the NSW order of precedence. The incumbent governor is entitled to use the style of His or Her Excellency, while in office. On 28 November 2013 the premier of NSW announced that the Queen had given approval for the title of "The Honourable" to be accorded to the governors and former governors of New South Wales. Upon installation, the governor serves as a Deputy Prior of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in Australia and is also traditionally invested as either a Knight or Dame of Justice or Grace of the Order. It is also customary that the governor is made a Companion of the Order of Australia, though this is not necessarily automatic.
The Viceregal Salute—composed of the first and last four bars of the national anthem ("Advance Australia Fair")—is the salute used to greet the governor upon arrival at, and mark his or her departure from most official events, although "God Save The Queen", as the royal anthem, is also used. To mark the viceroy's presence at any building, ship, aeroplane, or car in Australia, the governor's flag is employed. The present form was adopted on 15 January 1981. The state badge of the New South Wales crowned with the St Edward's Crown is employed as the badge of the governor, appearing on the viceroy's flag and on other objects associated with the person or the office.
Past and present standards of the governor
History
Aside from the Crown itself, the office of Governor of New South Wales is the oldest constitutional office in Australia. Captain Arthur Phillip assumed office as Governor of New South Wales on 7 February 1788, when the Colony of New South Wales, the first British settlement in Australia, was formally proclaimed. The early colonial governors held an almost autocratic power due to the distance from and poor communications with Great Britain, until 1824 when the New South Wales Legislative Council, Australia's first legislative body, was appointed to advise the governor.
Between 1850 and 1861, the governor of New South Wales was titled governor-general, in an early attempt at federalism imposed by Earl Grey. All communication between the Australian colonies and the British Government was meant to go through the governor-general, and the other colonies had lieutenant-governors. As South Australia (1836), Tasmania (January 1855) and Victoria (May 1855) obtained responsible government, their lieutenant-governors were replaced by governors. Although he had ceased acting as a governor-general, Sir William Denison retained the title until his retirement in 1861.
The six British colonies in Australia joined to form the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. New South Wales and the other colonies became states in the federal system under the Constitution of Australia. In 1902, the New South Wales Constitution Act 1902 confirmed the modern system of government of New South Wales as a state, including defining the role of the governor as the monarch's representative, who acts by and with the advice of the Executive Council. Like the new federal governor-general and the other state governors, in the first years after federation, the governor of New South Wales continued to act both as a constitutional head of the state, and as a liaison between the government and the imperial government in London. However, the British government's involvement in Australian affairs gradually reduced in the next few years.
In 1942, the Commonwealth of Australia passed the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942, which rendered Australia dominion status under the Statute of Westminster, and while Australia and Britain share the same person as monarch, that person acts in a distinct capacity when acting as the monarch of each dominion. The convention that the monarch acts in respect of Australian affairs on the advice of his or her Australian ministers, rather than his or her British ministers, became enshrined in law. For New South Wales however, because the Statute of Westminster did not disturb the constitutional arrangements of the Australian states, the governor remains (at least formally) in New South Wales the representative of the British monarch. This arrangement seemed incongruous with the Commonwealth of Australia's independent dominion status conferred by the Statute of Westminster, and with the federal structure.
After much negotiation between the federal and state governments of Australia, the British government and Buckingham Palace, the Australia Act 1986 removed any remaining constitutional roles of the British monarch and British government in the Australian states, and established that the governor of New South Wales (along with the other state governors) was the direct, personal representative of the Australian monarch, and not the British monarch or the British government, nor the governor-general of Australia or the Australian federal government.
Residences and household
Government House
On his arrival in Sydney in 1788, Governor Phillip resided in a temporary wood and canvas house before the construction of a more substantial house on a site now bounded by Bridge Street and Phillip Street, Sydney. This first Government House was extended and repaired by the following eight governors, but was generally in poor condition and was vacated when the governor relocated to the new building in 1845, designed by Edward Blore and Mortimer Lewis.
With the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901, it was announced that Government House was to serve as the secondary residence of the new governor-general of Australia. As a consequence the NSW Government leased the residence of Cranbrook, Bellevue Hill as the residence of the governor. This arrangement lasted until 1913 when the NSW Government terminated the Commonwealth lease of Government House (the governor-general moved to the new Sydney residence of Admiralty House), the governor from 1913 to 1917, Sir Gerald Strickland, continued to live in Cranbrook and on his departure his successor returned to Government House.
On 16 January 1996, Premier Bob Carr announced that the next governor would be Gordon Samuels, that he would not live or work at Government House and that he would retain his appointment as chairman of the New South Wales Law Reform Commission. On these changes, Carr said: "The Office of the Governor should be less associated with pomp and ceremony, less encumbered by anachronistic protocol, more in tune with the character of the people." The state's longest-serving governor, Sir Roden Cutler, was also reported as saying: "It's a political push to make way in New South Wales to lead the push for a republic. If they decide not to have a Governor and the public agrees with that, and Parliament agrees, and the queen agrees to it, that is a different matter, but while there is a Governor you have got to give him some respectability and credibility, because he is the host for the whole of New South Wales. For the life of me I cannot understand the logic of having a Governor who is part-time and doesn’t live at Government House. It is such a degrading of the office and of the Governor."
In October 2011, the new premier, Barry O'Farrell, announced that the governor, now Dame Marie Bashir, had agreed with O'Farrell's offer to move back into Government House: "A lot of people believe the Governor should live at Government House. That's what it was built for ... [A]t some stage a rural or regional governor will be appointed and we will need to provide accommodation at Government House so it makes sense to provide appropriate living areas". With the Governor's return, management of the residence reverted to the Office of the Governor in December 2013.
Summer residence
In addition to the primary Sydney vice-regal residence, many governors had also felt the need for a 'summer retreat' to escape the hard temperatures of the Sydney summers. In 1790, Governor Phillip had a secondary residence built in the township of Parramatta. In 1799 the second governor, John Hunter, had the remains of Arthur Phillip's cottage cleared away, and a more permanent building erected on the same site. This residence remained occupied until the completion of the primary Government House in 1845, however the hard summers and growing size of Sydney convinced successive governors of the need for a rural residence.
The governor from 1868 to 1872, the Earl Belmore, used Throsby Park in Moss Vale as his summer residence. His successor, Sir Hercules Robinson, often retired privately to the same area, in the Southern Highlands, for the same reason. In 1879 it was then decided that the colony should purchase a house at Sutton Forest for use as a permanent summer residence, and in 1881 the NSW Government purchased for £6000 a property known as "Prospect" that had been built by Robert Pemberton Richardson (of the firm Richardson & Wrench). This was renamed "Hillview", and became the primary summer governor's residence from 1885 to 1957. In 1957, seen as unnecessary and expensive, Hillview was put up for sale and purchased from the state government by Edwin Klein. Hillview was returned to the people of NSW in 1985 and is currently leased under the ownership of the Office of Environment and Heritage.
Household
The viceregal household aids the governor in the execution of the royal constitutional and ceremonial duties and is managed by the Office of the Governor, whose current official secretary and chief of staff is Michael Miller RFD. These organised offices and support systems include aides-de-camp, press officers, financial managers, speech writers, trip organisers, event planners and protocol officers, chefs and other kitchen employees, waiters, and various cleaning staff, as well as tour guides. In this official and bureaucratic capacity, the entire household is often referred to as Government House. These departments are funded through the annual budget, as is the governor's salary of A$529,000.
List of governors of New South Wales
The following individuals have served as a governor of New South Wales:
See also
Spouse of the Governor of New South Wales
Governor-General of Australia
Governors of the Australian states
Governor's Body Guard of Light Horse
Notes
References
External links
Governor of New South Wales official website
New South Wales
Parliament of New South Wales
New South Wales-related lists
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12851 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor%20of%20Victoria | Governor of Victoria | The governor of Victoria is the representative of the monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, in the Australian state of Victoria. The governor is one of seven viceregal representatives in the country, analogous to the governors of the other states, and the governor-general federally.
The governor is appointed by the monarch on the advice of the premier of Victoria. Unlike in other federal monarchies such as Canada, the governor's role is to represent the Crown in right of Victoria itself, rather than being a delegate of the federal viceroy. This role mainly includes performing ceremonial functions, such as opening and dissolving Parliament, appointing the Cabinet, and providing royal assent.
The governor's office and official residence is Government House next to the Royal Botanic Gardens and surrounded by Kings Domain in Melbourne.
The current governor of Victoria is Linda Dessau, Victoria's first female governor.
Powers
In accordance with the conventions of the Westminster system of parliamentary government, the governor nearly always acts solely on the advice of the head of the elected government, the Premier of Victoria. Nevertheless, the governor retains the reserve powers of the Crown, and has the right to dismiss the premier.
Role of governor
The governor of Victoria is appointed by the queen of Australia, on the advice of the premier of Victoria, to act as her representative as head of state in Victoria. The governor acts "at the Queen's pleasure", meaning that the term of the governor can be terminated at any time by the monarch acting upon the advice of the premier.
Since the Australia Acts of 1986, it is the governor, and not the queen, who exercises all the powers of the head of state, and the governor is not subject to the direction or supervision of the monarch, but acts upon the advice of the premier. Upon appointment, he or she becomes a viceroy. The governor's main responsibilities fall into three categories – constitutional, ceremonial and community engagement.
Governor's personal standard
The personal standard of the governor of Victoria is the same design as the State Flag of Victoria, but with the blue background replaced by gold, and red stars depicting the Southern Cross. Above the Southern Cross is the Royal Crown.
The current standard has been in place since 1984. Previously, the standard used by Victorian governors after 1870 had been the Union Jack with the Badge of the State of Victoria emblazoned in the centre. Between 1903 and 1953, the Tudor Crown was used on the State Flag and Governor's Standard, and this was changed to the present crown in 1954.
The governor's standard is flown at Government House and on vehicles conveying the governor. The standard is lowered over Government House when the governor is absent from Victoria.
Past and present standards of the governor
Related offices
There is also a lieutenant-governor and an administrator. The Chief Justice of Victoria is ex officio the Administrator, unless he or she is the lieutenant-governor, in which case, the next most senior judge is the administrator. The lieutenant-governor takes on the responsibilities of the governor when that post is vacant or when the governor is out of the state or unable to act. The administrator takes on those duties if both the governor and lieutenant-governor are not able to act for the above reasons.
See Governors of the Australian states for a description and history of the office of governor.
The Official Secretary to the Governor of Victoria is the head of the Office of the Governor that supports the Governor of Victoria in carrying out his or her official constitutional and ceremonial duties and community and international engagements. The Official Secretary manages the Office and its administrative and service staff. All staff report to their respective managers, and through them to the Deputy Official Secretary and Official Secretary. The Office also is in charge of maintaining Government House, Melbourne, and its collections as a heritage and community asset of national importance. The Official Secretary is the Victorian nominee on the Council for the Order of Australia.
The Office of the Governor was established under the Public Administration Act 2004 (Vic) as an administrative office within the portfolio of the Department of Premier and Cabinet. The current Official Secretary is Joshua Puls MVO, and the current Deputy Official Secretary (Operations) is Taara Olorenshaw.
Australianisation of the office
As with the other states, until the 1986 Australia Acts, the office of Governor of Victoria was an appointment of the British Foreign Office although local advice was considered and sometimes accepted.
Until the appointment of Victorian-born Sir Henry Winneke in 1974, the Governors of Victoria were British. Since then, governors have been Australian although several were born overseas, namely Dr Davis McCaughey, born in Ireland, came to Australia for work; and Professor David de Kretser, born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Alex Chernov, born in Lithuania, both of whom came to Australia while at school.
List of governors of Victoria
Lieutenant-governors
Prior to the separation of the colony of Victoria from New South Wales in 1851, the area was called the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. The governor of New South Wales appointed superintendents of the district. In 1839 Charles La Trobe was appointed superintendent. La Trobe became lieutenant-governor of the new colony of Victoria on separation on 1 July 1851.
Between 1850 and 1861, the governor of New South Wales was titled governor-general of New South Wales, in an attempt to form a federal structure. Until Victoria obtained responsible government in 1855, the governor-general of New South Wales appointed lieutenant-governors to Victoria. On Victoria obtaining responsible government in May 1855, the title of the then incumbent lieutenant-governor, Captain Sir Charles Hotham, became governor.
Governors
Line of succession
There is also a lieutenant-governor and an administrator. The lieutenant-governor takes on the responsibilities of the governor when that post is vacant or when the governor is out of the state or unable to act. The lieutenant-governor is appointed by the governor on the advice of the premier of Victoria. Appointment as lieutenant-governor does not of itself confer any powers or functions. If there is no governor or if the governor is unavailable to act for a substantial period, the lieutenant-governor assumes office as administrator and exercises all the powers and functions of the governor.
If expecting to be unavailable for a short period only, the governor, with the consent of the premier, usually commissions the lieutenant-governor to act as deputy for the governor, performing some or all of the powers and functions of the governor.
The chief justice of Victoria is ex officio the administrator, unless he or she is the lieutenant-governor, in which case the next most senior judge is the administrator. The administrator takes on the governor's duties if both the governor and lieutenant-governor are not able to act for the above reasons.
The current lieutenant-governor is Ken Lay, who was appointed to the role on 9 November 2017 to succeed Marilyn Warren.
See also
Governor-General of Australia
Governors of the Australian states
References
External links
The Official Website of the Governor of Victoria
Governors of Victoria, Parliament of Victoria
Office of the Governor Text was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Victoria
Parliament of Victoria
Victoria (Australia)-related lists
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12855 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20Bernard%20Shaw | George Bernard Shaw | George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.
Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform, and opposed vaccination and organised religion. He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable, and although not a republican, castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period. These stances had no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years saw a series of often ambitious plays, which achieved varying degrees of popular success. In 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he received an Academy Award. His appetite for politics and controversy remained undiminished; by the late 1920s he had largely renounced Fabian Society gradualism and often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of the right and left—he expressed admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin. In the final decade of his life he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946.
Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion about his works has varied, but he has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare; analysts recognise his extensive influence on generations of English-language playwrights. The word Shavian has entered the language as encapsulating Shaw's ideas and his means of expressing them.
Life
Early years
Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw (1814–1885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw (née Gurly; 1830–1913). His elder siblings were Lucinda (Lucy) Frances (1853–1920) and Elinor Agnes (1855–1876). The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to the dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland; George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual alcoholic, was among the family's less successful members. His relatives secured him a sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s; thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant. In 1852 he married Bessie Gurly; in the view of Shaw's biographer Michael Holroyd she married to escape a tyrannical great-aunt. If, as Holroyd and others surmise, George's motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her family's money. She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty".
By the time of Shaw's birth, his mother had become close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin's musical circles. Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father; there is no consensus among Shavian scholars on the likelihood of this. The young Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but he later recalled that her indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply. He found solace in the music that abounded in the house. Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing; Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Lee's unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws' house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players.
In 1862, Lee and the Shaws agreed to share a house, No. 1 Hatch Street, in an affluent part of Dublin, and a country cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking Killiney Bay. Shaw, a sensitive boy, found the less salubrious parts of Dublin shocking and distressing, and was happier at the cottage. Lee's students often gave him books, which the young Shaw read avidly; thus, as well as gaining a thorough musical knowledge of choral and operatic works, he became familiar with a wide spectrum of literature.
Between 1865 and 1871, Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated. His experiences as a schoolboy left him disillusioned with formal education: "Schools and schoolmasters", he later wrote, were "prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents." In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents, where he worked hard, and quickly rose to become head cashier. During this period, Shaw was known as "George Shaw"; after 1876, he dropped the "George" and styled himself "Bernard Shaw".
In June 1873, Lee left Dublin for London and never returned. A fortnight later, Bessie followed him; the two girls joined her. Shaw's explanation of why his mother followed Lee was that without the latter's financial contribution the joint household had to be broken up. Left in Dublin with his father, Shaw compensated for the absence of music in the house by teaching himself to play the piano.
London
Early in 1876 Shaw learned from his mother that Agnes was dying of tuberculosis. He resigned from the land agents, and in March travelled to England to join his mother and Lucy at Agnes's funeral. He never again lived in Ireland, and did not visit it for twenty-nine years.
Initially, Shaw refused to seek clerical employment in London. His mother allowed him to live free of charge in her house in South Kensington, but he nevertheless needed an income. He had abandoned a teenage ambition to become a painter, and had not yet thought of writing for a living, but Lee found a little work for him, ghost-writing a musical column printed under Lee's name in a satirical weekly, The Hornet. Lee's relations with Bessie deteriorated after their move to London. Shaw maintained contact with Lee, who found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer.
Eventually Shaw was driven to applying for office jobs. In the interim he secured a reader's pass for the British Museum Reading Room (the forerunner of the British Library) and spent most weekdays there, reading and writing. His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel, Immaturity (1879), was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s. He was employed briefly by the newly formed Edison Telephone Company in 1879–80, and as in Dublin achieved rapid promotion. Nonetheless, when the Edison firm merged with the rival Bell Telephone Company, Shaw chose not to seek a place in the new organisation. Thereafter he pursued a full-time career as an author.
For the next four years Shaw made a negligible income from writing, and was subsidised by his mother. In 1881, for the sake of economy, and increasingly as a matter of principle, he became a vegetarian. He grew a beard to hide a facial scar left by smallpox. In rapid succession he wrote two more novels: The Irrational Knot (1880) and Love Among the Artists (1881), but neither found a publisher; each was serialised a few years later in the socialist magazine Our Corner.
In 1880 Shaw began attending meetings of the Zetetical Society, whose objective was to "search for truth in all matters affecting the interests of the human race". Here he met Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant who, like Shaw, was busy educating himself. Despite difference of style and temperament, the two quickly recognised qualities in each other and developed a lifelong friendship. Shaw later reflected: "You knew everything that I didn't know and I knew everything you didn't know ... We had everything to learn from one another and brains enough to do it".
Shaw's next attempt at drama was a one-act playlet in French, Un Petit Drame, written in 1884 but not published in his lifetime. In the same year the critic William Archer suggested a collaboration, with a plot by Archer and dialogue by Shaw. The project foundered, but Shaw returned to the draft as the basis of Widowers' Houses in 1892, and the connection with Archer proved of immense value to Shaw's career.
Political awakening: Marxism, socialism, Fabian Society
On 5 September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, addressed by the political economist Henry George. Shaw then read George's book Progress and Poverty, which awakened his interest in economics. He began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx, and thereafter spent much of 1883 reading Das Kapital. He was not impressed by the SDF's founder, H. M. Hyndman, whom he found autocratic, ill-tempered and lacking leadership qualities. Shaw doubted the ability of the SDF to harness the working classes into an effective radical movement and did not join it—he preferred, he said, to work with his intellectual equals.
After reading a tract, Why Are The Many Poor?, issued by the recently formed Fabian Society, Shaw went to the society's next advertised meeting, on 16 May 1884. He became a member in September, and before the year's end had provided the society with its first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2. He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885, and later that year recruited Webb and also Annie Besant, a fine orator.
From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association; it was, Holroyd observes, "the closest Shaw had ever come to university education." This experience changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism. When in 1886–87 the Fabians debated whether to embrace anarchism, as advocated by Charlotte Wilson, Besant and others, Shaw joined the majority in rejecting this approach. After a rally in Trafalgar Square addressed by Besant was violently broken up by the authorities on 13 November 1887 ("Bloody Sunday"), Shaw became convinced of the folly of attempting to challenge police power. Thereafter he largely accepted the principle of "permeation" as advocated by Webb: the notion whereby socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into existing political parties.
Throughout the 1880s the Fabian Society remained small, its message of moderation frequently unheard among more strident voices. Its profile was raised in 1889 with the publication of Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw who also provided two of the essays. The second of these, "Transition", details the case for gradualism and permeation, asserting that "the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone". In 1890 Shaw produced Tract No. 13, What Socialism Is, a revision of an earlier tract in which Charlotte Wilson had defined socialism in anarchistic terms. In Shaw's new version, readers were assured that "socialism can be brought about in a perfectly constitutional manner by democratic institutions".
Novelist and critic
The mid-1880s marked a turning point in Shaw's life, both personally and professionally: he lost his virginity, had two novels published, and began a career as a critic. He had been celibate until his twenty-ninth birthday, when his shyness was overcome by Jane (Jenny) Patterson, a widow some years his senior. Their affair continued, not always smoothly, for eight years. Shaw's sex life has caused much speculation and debate among his biographers, but there is a consensus that the relationship with Patterson was one of his few non-platonic romantic liaisons.
The published novels, neither commercially successful, were his two final efforts in this genre: Cashel Byron's Profession written in 1882–83, and An Unsocial Socialist, begun and finished in 1883. The latter was published as a serial in ToDay magazine in 1884, although it did not appear in book form until 1887. Cashel Byron appeared in magazine and book form in 1886.
In 1884 and 1885, through the influence of Archer, Shaw was engaged to write book and music criticism for London papers. When Archer resigned as art critic of The World in 1886 he secured the succession for Shaw. The two figures in the contemporary art world whose views Shaw most admired were William Morris and John Ruskin, and he sought to follow their precepts in his criticisms. Their emphasis on morality appealed to Shaw, who rejected the idea of art for art's sake, and insisted that all great art must be didactic.
Of Shaw's various reviewing activities in the 1880s and 1890s it was as a music critic that he was best known. After serving as deputy in 1888, he became musical critic of The Star in February 1889, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto. In May 1890 he moved back to The World, where he wrote a weekly column as "G.B.S." for more than four years. In the 2016 version of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Robert Anderson writes, "Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability." Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950.
From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for The Saturday Review, edited by his friend Frank Harris. As at The World, he used the by-line "G.B.S." He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright: "I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse I manufactured the evidence".
Playwright and politician: 1890s
After using the plot of the aborted 1884 collaboration with Archer to complete Widowers' Houses (it was staged twice in London, in December 1892), Shaw continued writing plays. At first he made slow progress; The Philanderer, written in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage production. Similarly, Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) was written five years before publication and nine years before reaching the stage.
Shaw's first play to bring him financial success was Arms and the Man (1894), a mock-Ruritanian comedy satirising conventions of love, military honour and class. The press found the play overlong, and accused Shaw of mediocrity, sneering at heroism and patriotism, heartless cleverness, and copying W.S.Gilbert's style. The public took a different view, and the management of the theatre staged extra matinée performances to meet the demand. The play ran from April to July, toured the provinces and was staged in New York. It earned him £341 in royalties in its first year, a sufficient sum to enable him to give up his salaried post as a music critic. Among the cast of the London production was Florence Farr, with whom Shaw had a romantic relationship between 1890 and 1894, much resented by Jenny Patterson.
The success of Arms and the Man was not immediately replicated. Candida, which presented a young woman making a conventional romantic choice for unconventional reasons, received a single performance in South Shields in 1895; in 1897 a playlet about Napoleon called The Man of Destiny had a single staging at Croydon. In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the West End stage; his biggest success of the decade was in New York in 1897, when Richard Mansfield's production of the historical melodrama The Devil's Disciple earned the author more than £2,000 in royalties.
In January 1893, as a Fabian delegate, Shaw attended the Bradford conference which led to the foundation of the Independent Labour Party. He was sceptical about the new party, and scorned the likelihood that it could switch the allegiance of the working class from sport to politics. He persuaded the conference to adopt resolutions abolishing indirect taxation, and taxing unearned income "to extinction". Back in London, Shaw produced what Margaret Cole, in her Fabian history, terms a "grand philippic" against the minority Liberal administration that had taken power in 1892. To Your Tents, O Israel excoriated the government for ignoring social issues and concentrating solely on Irish Home Rule, a matter Shaw declared of no relevance to socialism. In 1894 the Fabian Society received a substantial bequest from a sympathiser, Henry Hunt Hutchinson—Holroyd mentions £10,000. Webb, who chaired the board of trustees appointed to supervise the legacy, proposed to use most of it to found a school of economics and politics. Shaw demurred; he thought such a venture was contrary to the specified purpose of the legacy. He was eventually persuaded to support the proposal, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) opened in the summer of 1895.
By the later 1890s Shaw's political activities lessened as he concentrated on making his name as a dramatist. In 1897 he was persuaded to fill an uncontested vacancy for a "vestryman" (parish councillor) in London's St Pancras district. At least initially, Shaw took to his municipal responsibilities seriously; when London government was reformed in 1899 and the St Pancras vestry became the Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras, he was elected to the newly formed borough council.
In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw's health broke down. He was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a rich Anglo-Irish woman whom he had met through the Webbs. The previous year she had proposed that she and Shaw should marry. He had declined, but when she insisted on nursing him in a house in the country, Shaw, concerned that this might cause scandal, agreed to their marriage. The ceremony took place on 1 June 1898, in the register office in Covent Garden. The bride and bridegroom were both aged forty-one. In the view of the biographer and critic St John Ervine, "their life together was entirely felicitous". There were no children of the marriage, which it is generally believed was never consummated; whether this was wholly at Charlotte's wish, as Shaw liked to suggest, is less widely credited. In the early weeks of the marriage Shaw was much occupied writing his Marxist analysis of Wagner's Ring cycle, published as The Perfect Wagnerite late in 1898. In 1906 the Shaws found a country home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire; they renamed the house "Shaw's Corner", and lived there for the rest of their lives. They retained a London flat in the Adelphi and later at Whitehall Court.
Stage success: 1900–1914
During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays. The first, John Bull's Other Island, a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by Edward VII, who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was withheld from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, for fear of the affront it might provoke, although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907. Shaw later wrote that William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for... It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland." Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends; Yeats and Lady Gregory tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after J. M. Synge's death in 1909. Shaw admired other figures in the Irish Literary Revival, including George Russell and James Joyce, and was a close friend of Seán O'Casey, who was inspired to become a playwright after reading John Bull's Other Island.
Man and Superman, completed in 1902, was a success both at the Royal Court in 1905 and in Robert Loraine's New York production in the same year. Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were Major Barbara (1905), depicting the contrasting morality of arms manufacturers and the Salvation Army; The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a mostly serious piece about professional ethics; and Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, seen in New York in 1906 and in London the following year.
Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious farce". These plays included Getting Married (premiered 1908), The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny's First Play (1911). Blanco Posnet was banned on religious grounds by the Lord Chamberlain (the official theatre censor in England), and was produced instead in Dublin; it filled the Abbey Theatre to capacity. Fanny's First Play, a comedy about suffragettes, had the longest initial run of any Shaw play—622 performances.
Androcles and the Lion (1912), a less heretical study of true and false religious attitudes than Blanco Posnet, ran for eight weeks in September and October 1913. It was followed by one of Shaw's most successful plays, Pygmalion, written in 1912 and staged in Vienna the following year, and in Berlin shortly afterwards. Shaw commented, "It is the custom of the English press when a play of mine is produced, to inform the world that it is not a play—that it is dull, blasphemous, unpopular, and financially unsuccessful. ... Hence arose an urgent demand on the part of the managers of Vienna and Berlin that I should have my plays performed by them first." The British production opened in April 1914, starring Sir Herbert Tree and Mrs Patrick Campbell as, respectively, a professor of phonetics and a cockney flower-girl. There had earlier been a romantic liaison between Shaw and Campbell that caused Charlotte Shaw considerable concern, but by the time of the London premiere it had ended. The play attracted capacity audiences until July, when Tree insisted on going on holiday, and the production closed. His co-star then toured with the piece in the US.
Fabian years: 1900–1913
In 1899, when the Boer War began, Shaw wished the Fabians to take a neutral stance on what he deemed, like Home Rule, to be a "non-Socialist" issue. Others, including the future Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, wanted unequivocal opposition, and resigned from the society when it followed Shaw. In the Fabians' war manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), Shaw declared that "until the Federation of the World becomes an accomplished fact we must accept the most responsible Imperial federations available as a substitute for it".
As the new century began, Shaw became increasingly disillusioned by the limited impact of the Fabians on national politics. Thus, although a nominated Fabian delegate, he did not attend the London conference at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street in February 1900, that created the Labour Representation Committee—precursor of the modern Labour Party. By 1903, when his term as borough councillor expired, he had lost his earlier enthusiasm, writing: "After six years of Borough Councilling I am convinced that the borough councils should be abolished". Nevertheless, in 1904 he stood in the London County Council elections. After an eccentric campaign, which Holroyd characterises as "[making] absolutely certain of not getting in", he was duly defeated. It was Shaw's final foray into electoral politics. Nationally, the 1906 general election produced a huge Liberal majority and an intake of 29 Labour members. Shaw viewed this outcome with scepticism; he had a low opinion of the new prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and saw the Labour members as inconsequential: "I apologise to the Universe for my connection with such a body".
In the years after the 1906 election, Shaw felt that the Fabians needed fresh leadership, and saw this in the form of his fellow-writer H. G. Wells, who had joined the society in February 1903. Wells's ideas for reform—particularly his proposals for closer cooperation with the Independent Labour Party—placed him at odds with the society's "Old Gang", led by Shaw. According to Cole, Wells "had minimal capacity for putting [his ideas] across in public meetings against Shaw's trained and practised virtuosity". In Shaw's view, "the Old Gang did not extinguish Mr Wells, he annihilated himself". Wells resigned from the society in September 1908; Shaw remained a member, but left the executive in April 1911. He later wondered whether the Old Gang should have given way to Wells some years earlier: "God only knows whether the Society had not better have done it". Although less active—he blamed his advancing years—Shaw remained a Fabian.
In 1912 Shaw invested £1,000 for a one-fifth share in the Webbs' new publishing venture, a socialist weekly magazine called The New Statesman, which appeared in April 1913. He became a founding director, publicist, and in due course a contributor, mostly anonymously. He was soon at odds with the magazine's editor, Clifford Sharp, who by 1916 was rejecting his contributions—"the only paper in the world that refuses to print anything by me", according to Shaw.
First World War
After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw produced his tract Common Sense About the War, which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable. Such a view was anathema in an atmosphere of fervent patriotism, and offended many of Shaw's friends; Ervine records that "[h]is appearance at any public function caused the instant departure of many of those present."
Despite his errant reputation, Shaw's propagandist skills were recognised by the British authorities, and early in 1917 he was invited by Field Marshal Haig to visit the Western Front battlefields. Shaw's 10,000-word report, which emphasised the human aspects of the soldier's life, was well received, and he became less of a lone voice. In April 1917 he joined the national consensus in welcoming America's entry into the war: "a first class moral asset to the common cause against junkerism".
Three short plays by Shaw were premiered during the war. The Inca of Perusalem, written in 1915, encountered problems with the censor for burlesquing not only the enemy but the British military command; it was performed in 1916 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. O'Flaherty V.C., satirising the government's attitude to Irish recruits, was banned in the UK and was presented at a Royal Flying Corps base in Belgium in 1917. Augustus Does His Bit, a genial farce, was granted a licence; it opened at the Royal Court in January 1917.
Ireland
Shaw had long supported the principle of Irish Home Rule within the British Empire (which he thought should become the British Commonwealth).
In April 1916 he wrote scathingly in The New York Times about militant Irish nationalism: "In point of learning nothing and forgetting nothing these fellow-patriots of mine leave the Bourbons nowhere." Total independence, he asserted, was impractical; alliance with a bigger power (preferably England) was essential. The Dublin Easter Rising later that month took him by surprise. After its suppression by British forces, he expressed horror at the summary execution of the rebel leaders, but continued to believe in some form of Anglo-Irish union. In How to Settle the Irish Question (1917), he envisaged a federal arrangement, with national and imperial parliaments. Holroyd records that by this time the separatist party Sinn Féin was in the ascendency, and Shaw's and other moderate schemes were forgotten.
In the postwar period, Shaw despaired of the British government's coercive policies towards Ireland, and joined his fellow-writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in publicly condemning these actions. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 led to the partition of Ireland between north and south, a provision that dismayed Shaw. In 1922 civil war broke out in the south between its pro-treaty and anti-treaty factions, the former of whom had established the Irish Free State. Shaw visited Dublin in August, and met Michael Collins, then head of the Free State's Provisional Government. Shaw was much impressed by Collins, and was saddened when, three days later, the Irish leader was ambushed and killed by anti-treaty forces. In a letter to Collins's sister, Shaw wrote: "I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory, and will not be so disloyal to it as to snivel over his valiant death". Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual British-Irish nationality in 1934.
1920s
Shaw's first major work to appear after the war was Heartbreak House, written in 1916–17 and performed in 1920. It was produced on Broadway in November, and was coolly received; according to The Times: "Mr Shaw on this occasion has more than usual to say and takes twice as long as usual to say it". After the London premiere in October 1921 The Times concurred with the American critics: "As usual with Mr Shaw, the play is about an hour too long", although containing "much entertainment and some profitable reflection". Ervine in The Observer thought the play brilliant but ponderously acted, except for Edith Evans as Lady Utterword.
Shaw's largest-scale theatrical work was Back to Methuselah, written in 1918–20 and staged in 1922. Weintraub describes it as "Shaw's attempt to fend off 'the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism'". This cycle of five interrelated plays depicts evolution, and the effects of longevity, from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920 AD. Critics found the five plays strikingly uneven in quality and invention. The original run was brief, and the work has been revived infrequently. Shaw felt he had exhausted his remaining creative powers in the huge span of this "Metabiological Pentateuch". He was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays.
This mood was short-lived. In 1920 Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by Pope Benedict XV; Shaw had long found Joan an interesting historical character, and his view of her veered between "half-witted genius" and someone of "exceptional sanity". He had considered writing a play about her in 1913, and the canonisation prompted him to return to the subject. He wrote Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December. It was enthusiastically received there, and at its London premiere the following March. In Weintraub's phrase, "even the Nobel prize committee could no longer ignore Shaw after Saint Joan". The citation for the literature prize for 1925 praised his work as "... marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty". He accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs".
After Saint Joan, it was five years before Shaw wrote a play. From 1924, he spent four years writing what he described as his "magnum opus", a political treatise entitled The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. The book was published in 1928 and sold well. At the end of the decade Shaw produced his final Fabian tract, a commentary on the League of Nations. He described the League as "a school for the new international statesmanship as against the old Foreign Office diplomacy", but thought that it had not yet become the "Federation of the World".
Shaw returned to the theatre with what he called "a political extravaganza", The Apple Cart, written in late 1928. It was, in Ervine's view, unexpectedly popular, taking a conservative, monarchist, anti-democratic line that appealed to contemporary audiences. The premiere was in Warsaw in June 1928, and the first British production was two months later, at Sir Barry Jackson's inaugural Malvern Festival. The other eminent creative artist most closely associated with the festival was Sir Edward Elgar, with whom Shaw enjoyed a deep friendship and mutual regard. He described The Apple Cart to Elgar as "a scandalous Aristophanic burlesque of democratic politics, with a brief but shocking sex interlude".
During the 1920s Shaw began to lose faith in the idea that society could be changed through Fabian gradualism, and became increasingly fascinated with dictatorial methods. In 1922 he had welcomed Mussolini's accession to power in Italy, observing that amid the "indiscipline and muddle and Parliamentary deadlock", Mussolini was "the right kind of tyrant". Shaw was prepared to tolerate certain dictatorial excesses; Weintraub in his ODNB biographical sketch comments that Shaw's "flirtation with authoritarian inter-war regimes" took a long time to fade, and Beatrice Webb thought he was "obsessed" about Mussolini.
1930s
Shaw's enthusiasm for the Soviet Union dated to the early 1920s when he had hailed Lenin as "the one really interesting statesman in Europe". Having turned down several chances to visit, in 1931 he joined a party led by Nancy Astor. The carefully managed trip culminated in a lengthy meeting with Stalin, whom Shaw later described as "a Georgian gentleman" with no malice in him. At a dinner given in his honour, Shaw told the gathering: "I have seen all the 'terrors' and I was terribly pleased by them". In March 1933 Shaw was a co-signatory to a letter in The Manchester Guardian protesting at the continuing misrepresentation of Soviet achievements: "No lie is too fantastic, no slander is too stale ... for employment by the more reckless elements of the British press."
Shaw's admiration for Mussolini and Stalin demonstrated his growing belief that dictatorship was the only viable political arrangement. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in January 1933, Shaw described Hitler as "a very remarkable man, a very able man", and professed himself proud to be the only writer in England who was "scrupulously polite and just to Hitler". His principal admiration was for Stalin, whose regime he championed uncritically throughout the decade. Shaw saw the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as a triumph for Stalin who, he said, now had Hitler under his thumb.
Shaw's first play of the decade was Too True to be Good, written in 1931 and premiered in Boston in February 1932. The reception was unenthusiastic. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times commenting that Shaw had "yielded to the impulse to write without having a subject", judged the play a "rambling and indifferently tedious conversation". The correspondent of The New York Herald Tribune said that most of the play was "discourse, unbelievably long lectures" and that although the audience enjoyed the play it was bewildered by it.
During the decade Shaw travelled widely and frequently. Most of his journeys were with Charlotte; she enjoyed voyages on ocean liners, and he found peace to write during the long spells at sea. Shaw met an enthusiastic welcome in South Africa in 1932, despite his strong remarks about the racial divisions of the country. In December 1932 the couple embarked on a round-the-world cruise. In March 1933 they arrived at San Francisco, to begin Shaw's first visit to the US. He had earlier refused to go to "that awful country, that uncivilized place", "unfit to govern itself... illiberal, superstitious, crude, violent, anarchic and arbitrary". He visited Hollywood, with which he was unimpressed, and New York, where he lectured to a capacity audience in the Metropolitan Opera House. Harried by the intrusive attentions of the press, Shaw was glad when his ship sailed from New York harbour. New Zealand, which he and Charlotte visited the following year, struck him as "the best country I've been in"; he urged its people to be more confident and loosen their dependence on trade with Britain. He used the weeks at sea to complete two plays—The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and The Six of Calais—and begin work on a third, The Millionairess.
Despite his contempt for Hollywood and its aesthetic values, Shaw was enthusiastic about cinema, and in the middle of the decade wrote screenplays for prospective film versions of Pygmalion and Saint Joan. The latter was never made, but Shaw entrusted the rights to the former to the unknown Gabriel Pascal, who produced it at Pinewood Studios in 1938. Shaw was determined that Hollywood should have nothing to do with the film, but was powerless to prevent it from winning one Academy Award ("Oscar"); he described his award for "best-written screenplay" as an insult, coming from such a source. He became the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. In a 1993 study of the Oscars, Anthony Holden observes that Pygmalion was soon spoken of as having "lifted movie-making from illiteracy to literacy".
Shaw's final plays of the 1930s were Cymbeline Refinished (1936), Geneva (1936) and In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939). The first, a fantasy reworking of Shakespeare, made little impression, but the second, a satire on European dictators, attracted more notice, much of it unfavourable. In particular, Shaw's parody of Hitler as "Herr Battler" was considered mild, almost sympathetic. The third play, an historical conversation piece first seen at Malvern, ran briefly in London in May 1940. James Agate commented that the play contained nothing to which even the most conservative audiences could take exception, and though it was long and lacking in dramatic action only "witless and idle" theatregoers would object. After their first runs none of the three plays were seen again in the West End during Shaw's lifetime.
Towards the end of the decade, both Shaws began to suffer ill health. Charlotte was increasingly incapacitated by Paget's disease of bone, and he developed pernicious anaemia. His treatment, involving injections of concentrated animal liver, was successful, but this breach of his vegetarian creed distressed him and brought down condemnation from militant vegetarians.
Second World War and final years
Although Shaw's works since The Apple Cart had been received without great enthusiasm, his earlier plays were revived in the West End throughout the Second World War, starring such actors as Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat. In 1944 nine Shaw plays were staged in London, including Arms and the Man with Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton in the leading roles. Two touring companies took his plays all round Britain. The revival in his popularity did not tempt Shaw to write a new play, and he concentrated on prolific journalism. A second Shaw film produced by Pascal, Major Barbara (1941), was less successful both artistically and commercially than Pygmalion, partly because of Pascal's insistence on directing, to which he was unsuited.
Following the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 and the rapid conquest of Poland, Shaw was accused of defeatism when, in a New Statesman article, he declared the war over and demanded a peace conference. Nevertheless, when he became convinced that a negotiated peace was impossible, he publicly urged the neutral United States to join the fight. The London blitz of 1940–41 led the Shaws, both in their mid-eighties, to live full-time at Ayot St Lawrence. Even there they were not immune from enemy air raids, and stayed on occasion with Nancy Astor at her country house, Cliveden. In 1943, the worst of the London bombing over, the Shaws moved back to Whitehall Court, where medical help for Charlotte was more easily arranged. Her condition deteriorated, and she died in September.
Shaw's final political treatise, Everybody's Political What's What, was published in 1944. Holroyd describes this as "a rambling narrative ... that repeats ideas he had given better elsewhere and then repeats itself". The book sold well—85,000 copies by the end of the year. After Hitler's suicide in May 1945, Shaw approved of the formal condolences offered by the Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, at the German embassy in Dublin. Shaw disapproved of the postwar trials of the defeated German leaders, as an act of self-righteousness: "We are all potential criminals".
Pascal was given a third opportunity to film Shaw's work with Caesar and Cleopatra (1945). It cost three times its original budget and was rated "the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema". The film was poorly received by British critics, although American reviews were friendlier. Shaw thought its lavishness nullified the drama, and he considered the film "a poor imitation of Cecil B. de Mille".
In 1946, the year of Shaw's ninetieth birthday, he accepted the freedom of Dublin and became the first honorary freeman of the borough of St Pancras, London. In the same year the British government asked Shaw informally whether he would accept the Order of Merit. He declined, believing that an author's merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history. 1946 saw the publication, as The Crime of Imprisonment, of the preface Shaw had written 20 years previously to a study of prison conditions. It was widely praised; a reviewer in the American Journal of Public Health considered it essential reading for any student of the American criminal justice system.
Shaw continued to write into his nineties. His last plays were Buoyant Billions (1947), his final full-length work; Farfetched Fables (1948) a set of six short plays revisiting several of his earlier themes such as evolution; a comic play for puppets, Shakes versus Shav (1949), a ten-minute piece in which Shakespeare and Shaw trade insults; and Why She Would Not (1950), which Shaw described as "a little comedy", written in one week shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday.
During his later years, Shaw enjoyed tending the gardens at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of ninety-four of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November 1950. His ashes, mixed with those of Charlotte, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.
Works
Plays
Shaw published a collected edition of his plays in 1934, comprising forty-two works. He wrote a further twelve in the remaining sixteen years of his life, mostly one-act pieces. Including eight earlier plays that he chose to omit from his published works, the total is sixty-two.
Early works
Shaw's first three full-length plays dealt with social issues. He later grouped them as "Plays Unpleasant". Widowers' Houses (1892) concerns the landlords of slum properties, and introduces the first of Shaw's New Women—a recurring feature of later plays. The Philanderer (1893) develops the theme of the New Woman, draws on Ibsen, and has elements of Shaw's personal relationships, the character of Julia being based on Jenny Patterson. In a 2003 study Judith Evans describes Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) as "undoubtedly the most challenging" of the three Plays Unpleasant, taking Mrs Warren's profession—prostitute and, later, brothel-owner—as a metaphor for a prostituted society.
Shaw followed the first trilogy with a second, published as "Plays Pleasant". Arms and the Man (1894) conceals beneath a mock-Ruritanian comic romance a Fabian parable contrasting impractical idealism with pragmatic socialism. The central theme of Candida (1894) is a woman's choice between two men; the play contrasts the outlook and aspirations of a Christian Socialist and a poetic idealist. The third of the Pleasant group, You Never Can Tell (1896), portrays social mobility, and the gap between generations, particularly in how they approach social relations in general and mating in particular.
The "Three Plays for Puritans"—comprising The Devil's Disciple (1896), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) and Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1899)—all centre on questions of empire and imperialism, a major topic of political discourse in the 1890s. The three are set, respectively, in 1770s America, Ancient Egypt, and 1890s Morocco. The Gadfly, an adaptation of the popular novel by Ethel Voynich, was unfinished and unperformed. The Man of Destiny (1895) is a short curtain raiser about Napoleon.
1900–1909
Shaw's major plays of the first decade of the twentieth century address individual social, political or ethical issues. Man and Superman (1902) stands apart from the others in both its subject and its treatment, giving Shaw's interpretation of creative evolution in a combination of drama and associated printed text. The Admirable Bashville (1901), a blank verse dramatisation of Shaw's novel Cashel Byron's Profession, focuses on the imperial relationship between Britain and Africa. John Bull's Other Island (1904), comically depicting the prevailing relationship between Britain and Ireland, was popular at the time but fell out of the general repertoire in later years. Major Barbara (1905) presents ethical questions in an unconventional way, confounding expectations that in the depiction of an armaments manufacturer on the one hand and the Salvation Army on the other the moral high ground must invariably be held by the latter. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), a play about medical ethics and moral choices in allocating scarce treatment, was described by Shaw as a tragedy. With a reputation for presenting characters who did not resemble real flesh and blood, he was challenged by Archer to present an on-stage death, and here did so, with a deathbed scene for the anti-hero.
Getting Married (1908) and Misalliance (1909)—the latter seen by Judith Evans as a companion piece to the former—are both in what Shaw called his "disquisitionary" vein, with the emphasis on discussion of ideas rather than on dramatic events or vivid characterisation. Shaw wrote seven short plays during the decade; they are all comedies, ranging from the deliberately absurd Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction (1905) to the satirical Press Cuttings (1909).
1910–1919
In the decade from 1910 to the aftermath of the First World War Shaw wrote four full-length plays, the third and fourth of which are among his most frequently staged works. Fanny's First Play (1911) continues his earlier examinations of middle-class British society from a Fabian viewpoint, with additional touches of melodrama and an epilogue in which theatre critics discuss the play. Androcles and the Lion (1912), which Shaw began writing as a play for children, became a study of the nature of religion and how to put Christian precepts into practice. Pygmalion (1912) is a Shavian study of language and speech and their importance in society and in personal relationships. To correct the impression left by the original performers that the play portrayed a romantic relationship between the two main characters Shaw rewrote the ending to make it clear that the heroine will marry another, minor character. Shaw's only full-length play from the war years is Heartbreak House (1917), which in his words depicts "cultured, leisured Europe before the war" drifting towards disaster. Shaw named Shakespeare (King Lear) and Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) as important influences on the piece, and critics have found elements drawing on Congreve (The Way of the World) and Ibsen (The Master Builder).
The short plays range from genial historical drama in The Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Great Catherine (1910 and 1913) to a study of polygamy in Overruled; three satirical works about the war (The Inca of Perusalem, O'Flaherty V.C. and Augustus Does His Bit, 1915–16); a piece that Shaw called "utter nonsense" (The Music Cure, 1914) and a brief sketch about a "Bolshevik empress" (Annajanska, 1917).
1920–1950
Saint Joan (1923) drew widespread praise both for Shaw and for Sybil Thorndike, for whom he wrote the title role and who created the part in Britain. In the view of the commentator Nicholas Grene, Shaw's Joan, a "no-nonsense mystic, Protestant and nationalist before her time" is among the 20th century's classic leading female roles. The Apple Cart (1929) was Shaw's last popular success. He gave both that play and its successor, Too True to Be Good (1931), the subtitle "A political extravaganza", although the two works differ greatly in their themes; the first presents the politics of a nation (with a brief royal love-scene as an interlude) and the second, in Judith Evans's words, "is concerned with the social mores of the individual, and is nebulous." Shaw's plays of the 1930s were written in the shadow of worsening national and international political events. Once again, with On the Rocks (1933) and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1934), a political comedy with a clear plot was followed by an introspective drama. The first play portrays a British prime minister considering, but finally rejecting, the establishment of a dictatorship; the second is concerned with polygamy and eugenics and ends with the Day of Judgement.
The Millionairess (1934) is a farcical depiction of the commercial and social affairs of a successful businesswoman. Geneva (1936) lampoons the feebleness of the League of Nations compared with the dictators of Europe. In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939), described by Weintraub as a warm, discursive high comedy, also depicts authoritarianism, but less satirically than Geneva. As in earlier decades, the shorter plays were generally comedies, some historical and others addressing various political and social preoccupations of the author. Ervine writes of Shaw's later work that although it was still "astonishingly vigorous and vivacious" it showed unmistakable signs of his age. "The best of his work in this period, however, was full of wisdom and the beauty of mind often displayed by old men who keep their wits about them."
Music and drama reviews
Music
Shaw's collected musical criticism, published in three volumes, runs to more than 2,700 pages. It covers the British musical scene from 1876 to 1950, but the core of the collection dates from his six years as music critic of The Star and The World in the late 1880s and early 1890s. In his view music criticism should be interesting to everyone rather than just the musical élite, and he wrote for the non-specialist, avoiding technical jargon—"Mesopotamian words like 'the dominant of D major'". He was fiercely partisan in his columns, promoting the music of Wagner and decrying that of Brahms and those British composers such as Stanford and Parry whom he saw as Brahmsian. He campaigned against the prevailing fashion for performances of Handel oratorios with huge amateur choirs and inflated orchestration, calling for "a chorus of twenty capable artists". He railed against opera productions unrealistically staged or sung in languages the audience did not speak.
Drama
In Shaw's view, the London theatres of the 1890s presented too many revivals of old plays and not enough new work. He campaigned against "melodrama, sentimentality, stereotypes and worn-out conventions". As a music critic he had frequently been able to concentrate on analysing new works, but in the theatre he was often obliged to fall back on discussing how various performers tackled well-known plays. In a study of Shaw's work as a theatre critic, E. J. West writes that Shaw "ceaselessly compared and contrasted artists in interpretation and in technique". Shaw contributed more than 150 articles as theatre critic for The Saturday Review, in which he assessed more than 212 productions. He championed Ibsen's plays when many theatregoers regarded them as outrageous, and his 1891 book Quintessence of Ibsenism remained a classic throughout the twentieth century. Of contemporary dramatists writing for the West End stage he rated Oscar Wilde above the rest: "... our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre". Shaw's collected criticisms were published as Our Theatres in the Nineties in 1932.
Shaw maintained a provocative and frequently self-contradictory attitude to Shakespeare (whose name he insisted on spelling "Shakespear"). Many found him difficult to take seriously on the subject; Duff Cooper observed that by attacking Shakespeare, "it is Shaw who appears a ridiculous pigmy shaking his fist at a mountain." Shaw was, nevertheless, a knowledgeable Shakespearian, and in an article in which he wrote, "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his," he also said, "But I am bound to add that I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespear. He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more". Shaw had two regular targets for his more extreme comments about Shakespeare: undiscriminating "Bardolaters", and actors and directors who presented insensitively cut texts in over-elaborate productions. He was continually drawn back to Shakespeare, and wrote three plays with Shakespearean themes: The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Cymbeline Refinished and Shakes versus Shav. In a 2001 analysis of Shaw's Shakespearian criticisms, Robert Pierce concludes that Shaw, who was no academic, saw Shakespeare's plays—like all theatre—from an author's practical point of view: "Shaw helps us to get away from the Romantics' picture of Shakespeare as a titanic genius, one whose art cannot be analyzed or connected with the mundane considerations of theatrical conditions and profit and loss, or with a specific staging and cast of actors."
Political and social writings
Shaw's political and social commentaries were published variously in Fabian tracts, in essays, in two full-length books, in innumerable newspaper and journal articles and in prefaces to his plays. The majority of Shaw's Fabian tracts were published anonymously, representing the voice of the society rather than of Shaw, although the society's secretary Edward Pease later confirmed Shaw's authorship. According to Holroyd, the business of the early Fabians, mainly under the influence of Shaw, was to "alter history by rewriting it". Shaw's talent as a pamphleteer was put to immediate use in the production of the society's manifesto—after which, says Holroyd, he was never again so succinct.
After the turn of the twentieth century, Shaw increasingly propagated his ideas through the medium of his plays. An early critic, writing in 1904, observed that Shaw's dramas provided "a pleasant means" of proselytising his socialism, adding that "Mr Shaw's views are to be sought especially in the prefaces to his plays". After loosening his ties with the Fabian movement in 1911, Shaw's writings were more personal and often provocative; his response to the furore following the issue of Common Sense About the War in 1914, was to prepare a sequel, More Common Sense About the War. In this, he denounced the pacifist line espoused by Ramsay MacDonald and other socialist leaders, and proclaimed his readiness to shoot all pacifists rather than cede them power and influence. On the advice of Beatrice Webb, this pamphlet remained unpublished.
The Intelligent Woman's Guide, Shaw's main political treatise of the 1920s, attracted both admiration and criticism. MacDonald considered it the world's most important book since the Bible; Harold Laski thought its arguments outdated and lacking in concern for individual freedoms. Shaw's increasing flirtation with dictatorial methods is evident in many of his subsequent pronouncements. A New York Times report dated 10 December 1933 quoted a recent Fabian Society lecture in which Shaw had praised Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin: "[T]hey are trying to get something done, [and] are adopting methods by which it is possible to get something done". As late as the Second World War, in Everybody's Political What's What, Shaw blamed the Allies' "abuse" of their 1918 victory for the rise of Hitler, and hoped that, after defeat, the Führer would escape retribution "to enjoy a comfortable retirement in Ireland or some other neutral country". These sentiments, according to the Irish philosopher-poet Thomas Duddy, "rendered much of the Shavian outlook passé and contemptible".
"Creative evolution", Shaw's version of the new science of eugenics, became an increasing theme in his political writing after 1900. He introduced his theories in The Revolutionist's Handbook (1903), an appendix to Man and Superman, and developed them further during the 1920s in Back to Methuselah. A 1946 Life magazine article observed that Shaw had "always tended to look at people more as a biologist than as an artist". By 1933, in the preface to On the Rocks, he was writing that "if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it"; critical opinion is divided on whether this was intended as irony. In an article in the American magazine Liberty in September 1938, Shaw included the statement: "There are many people in the world who ought to be liquidated". Many commentators assumed that such comments were intended as a joke, although in the worst possible taste. Otherwise, Life magazine concluded, "this silliness can be classed with his more innocent bad guesses".
Fiction
Shaw's fiction-writing was largely confined to the five unsuccessful novels written in the period 1879–1885. Immaturity (1879) is a semi-autobiographical portrayal of mid-Victorian England, Shaw's "own David Copperfield" according to Weintraub. The Irrational Knot (1880) is a critique of conventional marriage, in which Weintraub finds the characterisations lifeless, "hardly more than animated theories". Shaw was pleased with his third novel, Love Among the Artists (1881), feeling that it marked a turning point in his development as a thinker, although he had no more success with it than with its predecessors. Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) is, says Weintraub, an indictment of society which anticipates Shaw's first full-length play, Mrs Warren's Profession. Shaw later explained that he had intended An Unsocial Socialist as the first section of a monumental depiction of the downfall of capitalism. Gareth Griffith, in a study of Shaw's political thought, sees the novel as an interesting record of conditions, both in society at large and in the nascent socialist movement of the 1880s.
Shaw's only subsequent fiction of any substance was his 1932 novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, written during a visit to South Africa in 1932. The eponymous girl, intelligent, inquisitive, and converted to Christianity by insubstantial missionary teaching, sets out to find God, on a journey that after many adventures and encounters, leads her to a secular conclusion. The story, on publication, offended some Christians and was banned in Ireland by the Board of Censors.
Letters and diaries
Shaw was a prolific correspondent throughout his life. His letters, edited by Dan H. Laurence, were published between 1965 and 1988. Shaw once estimated his letters would occupy twenty volumes; Laurence commented that, unedited, they would fill many more. Shaw wrote more than a quarter of a million letters, of which about ten per cent have survived; 2,653 letters are printed in Laurence's four volumes. Among Shaw's many regular correspondents were his childhood friend Edward McNulty; his theatrical colleagues (and amitiés amoureuses) Mrs Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry; writers including Lord Alfred Douglas, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton; the boxer Gene Tunney; the nun Laurentia McLachlan; and the art expert Sydney Cockerell. In 2007 a 316-page volume consisting entirely of Shaw's letters to The Times was published.
Shaw's diaries for 1885–1897, edited by Weintraub, were published in two volumes, with a total of 1,241 pages, in 1986. Reviewing them, the Shaw scholar Fred Crawford wrote: "Although the primary interest for Shavians is the material that supplements what we already know about Shaw's life and work, the diaries are also valuable as a historical and sociological document of English life at the end of the Victorian age." After 1897, pressure of other writing led Shaw to give up keeping a diary.
Miscellaneous and autobiographical
Through his journalism, pamphlets and occasional longer works, Shaw wrote on many subjects. His range of interest and enquiry included vivisection, vegetarianism, religion, language, cinema and photography, on all of which he wrote and spoke copiously. Collections of his writings on these and other subjects were published, mainly after his death, together with volumes of "wit and wisdom" and general journalism.
Despite the many books written about him (Holroyd counts 80 by 1939) Shaw's autobiographical output, apart from his diaries, was relatively slight. He gave interviews to newspapers—"GBS Confesses", to The Daily Mail in 1904 is an example—and provided sketches to would-be biographers whose work was rejected by Shaw and never published. In 1939 Shaw drew on these materials to produce Shaw Gives Himself Away, a miscellany which, a year before his death, he revised and republished as Sixteen Self Sketches (there were seventeen). He made it clear to his publishers that this slim book was in no sense a full autobiography.
Beliefs and opinions
Throughout his lifetime Shaw professed many beliefs, often contradictory. This inconsistency was partly an intentional provocation—the Spanish scholar-statesman Salvador de Madariaga describes Shaw as "a pole of negative electricity set in a people of positive electricity". In one area at least Shaw was constant: in his lifelong refusal to follow normal English forms of spelling and punctuation. He favoured archaic spellings such as "shew" for "show"; he dropped the "u" in words like "honour" and "favour"; and wherever possible he rejected the apostrophe in contractions such as "won't" or "that's". In his will, Shaw ordered that, after some specified legacies, his remaining assets were to form a trust to pay for fundamental reform of the English alphabet into a phonetic version of forty letters. Though Shaw's intentions were clear, his drafting was flawed, and the courts initially ruled the intended trust void. A later out-of-court agreement provided a sum of £8,300 for spelling reform; the bulk of his fortune went to the residuary legatees—the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the National Gallery of Ireland. Most of the £8,300 went on a special phonetic edition of Androcles and the Lion in the Shavian alphabet, published in 1962 to a largely indifferent reception.
Shaw's views on religion and Christianity were less consistent. Having in his youth proclaimed himself an atheist, in middle age he explained this as a reaction against the Old Testament image of a vengeful Jehovah. By the early twentieth century, he termed himself a "mystic", although Gary Sloan, in an essay on Shaw's beliefs, disputes his credentials as such. In 1913 Shaw declared that he was not religious "in the sectarian sense", aligning himself with Jesus as "a person of no religion". In the preface (1915) to Androcles and the Lion, Shaw asks "Why not give Christianity a chance?" contending that Britain's social order resulted from the continuing choice of Barabbas over Christ. In a broadcast just before the Second World War, Shaw invoked the Sermon on the Mount, "a very moving exhortation, and it gives you one first-rate tip, which is to do good to those who despitefully use you and persecute you". In his will, Shaw stated that his "religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution". He requested that no one should imply that he accepted the beliefs of any specific religious organisation, and that no memorial to him should "take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice".
Shaw espoused racial equality, and inter-marriage between people of different races. Despite his expressed wish to be fair to Hitler, he called anti-Semitism "the hatred of the lazy, ignorant fat-headed Gentile for the pertinacious Jew who, schooled by adversity to use his brains to the utmost, outdoes him in business". In The Jewish Chronicle he wrote in 1932, "In every country you can find rabid people who have a phobia against Jews, Jesuits, Armenians, Negroes, Freemasons, Irishmen, or simply foreigners as such. Political parties are not above exploiting these fears and jealousies."
In 1903 Shaw joined in a controversy about vaccination against smallpox. He called vaccination "a peculiarly filthy piece of witchcraft"; in his view immunisation campaigns were a cheap and inadequate substitute for a decent programme of housing for the poor, which would, he declared, be the means of eradicating smallpox and other infectious diseases. Less contentiously, Shaw was keenly interested in transport; Laurence observed in 1992 a need for a published study of Shaw's interest in "bicycling, motorbikes, automobiles, and planes, climaxing in his joining the Interplanetary Society in his nineties". Shaw published articles on travel, took photographs of his journeys, and submitted notes to the Royal Automobile Club.
Shaw strove throughout his adult life to be referred to as "Bernard Shaw" rather than "George Bernard Shaw", but confused matters by continuing to use his full initials—G.B.S.—as a by-line, and often signed himself "G.Bernard Shaw". He left instructions in his will that his executor (the Public Trustee) was to license publication of his works only under the name Bernard Shaw. Shaw scholars including Ervine, Judith Evans, Holroyd, Laurence and Weintraub, and many publishers have respected Shaw's preference, although the Cambridge University Press was among the exceptions with its 1988 Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw.
Legacy and influence
Theatrical
Shaw did not found a school of dramatists as such, but Crawford asserts that today "we recognise [him] as second only to Shakespeare in the British theatrical tradition ... the proponent of the theater of ideas" who struck a death-blow to 19th-century melodrama. According to Laurence, Shaw pioneered "intelligent" theatre, in which the audience was required to think, thereby paving the way for the new breeds of twentieth-century playwrights from Galsworthy to Pinter.
Crawford lists numerous playwrights whose work owes something to that of Shaw. Among those active in Shaw's lifetime he includes Noël Coward, who based his early comedy The Young Idea on You Never Can Tell and continued to draw on the older man's works in later plays. T. S. Eliot, by no means an admirer of Shaw, admitted that the epilogue of Murder in the Cathedral, in which Becket's slayers explain their actions to the audience, might have been influenced by Saint Joan. The critic Eric Bentley comments that Eliot's later play The Confidential Clerk "had all the earmarks of Shavianism ... without the merits of the real Bernard Shaw". Among more recent British dramatists, Crawford marks Tom Stoppard as "the most Shavian of contemporary playwrights"; Shaw's "serious farce" is continued in the works of Stoppard's contemporaries Alan Ayckbourn, Henry Livings and Peter Nichols.
Shaw's influence crossed the Atlantic at an early stage. Bernard Dukore notes that he was successful as a dramatist in America ten years before achieving comparable success in Britain. Among many American writers professing a direct debt to Shaw, Eugene O'Neill became an admirer at the age of seventeen, after reading The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Other Shaw-influenced American playwrights mentioned by Dukore are Elmer Rice, for whom Shaw "opened doors, turned on lights, and expanded horizons"; William Saroyan, who empathised with Shaw as "the embattled individualist against the philistines"; and S. N. Behrman, who was inspired to write for the theatre after attending a performance of Caesar and Cleopatra: "I thought it would be agreeable to write plays like that".
Assessing Shaw's reputation in a 1976 critical study, T. F. Evans described Shaw as unchallenged in his lifetime and since as the leading English-language dramatist of the (twentieth) century, and as a master of prose style. The following year, in a contrary assessment, the playwright John Osborne castigated The Guardians theatre critic Michael Billington for referring to Shaw as "the greatest British dramatist since Shakespeare". Osborne responded that Shaw "is the most fraudulent, inept writer of Victorian melodramas ever to gull a timid critic or fool a dull public". Despite this hostility, Crawford sees the influence of Shaw in some of Osborne's plays, and concludes that though the latter's work is neither imitative nor derivative, these affinities are sufficient to classify Osborne as an inheritor of Shaw.
In a 1983 study, R. J. Kaufmann suggests that Shaw was a key forerunner—"godfather, if not actually finicky paterfamilias"—of the Theatre of the Absurd. Two further aspects of Shaw's theatrical legacy are noted by Crawford: his opposition to stage censorship, which was finally ended in 1968, and his efforts which extended over many years to establish a National Theatre. Shaw's short 1910 play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, in which Shakespeare pleads with Queen Elizabeth I for the endowment of a state theatre, was part of this campaign.
Writing in The New Statesman in 2012 Daniel Janes commented that Shaw's reputation had declined by the time of his 150th anniversary in 2006 but had recovered considerably. In Janes's view, the many current revivals of Shaw's major works showed the playwright's "almost unlimited relevance to our times". In the same year, Mark Lawson wrote in The Guardian that Shaw's moral concerns engaged present-day audiences, and made him—like his model, Ibsen—one of the most popular playwrights in contemporary British theatre.
The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada is the second largest repertory theatre company in North America. It produces plays by or written during the lifetime of Shaw as well as some contemporary works. The Gingold Theatrical Group, founded in 2006, presents works by Shaw and others in New York City that feature the humanitarian ideals that his work promoted. It became the first theatre group to present all of Shaw's stage work through its monthly concert series Project Shaw.
General
In the 1940s the author Harold Nicolson advised the National Trust not to accept the bequest of Shaw's Corner, predicting that Shaw would be totally forgotten within fifty years. In the event, Shaw's broad cultural legacy, embodied in the widely used term "Shavian", has endured and is nurtured by Shaw Societies in various parts of the world. The original society was founded in London in 1941 and survives; it organises meetings and events, and publishes a regular bulletin The Shavian. The Shaw Society of America began in June 1950; it foundered in the 1970s but its journal, adopted by Penn State University Press, continued to be published as Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies until 2004. A second American organisation, founded in 1951 as "The Bernard Shaw Society", remains active . More recent societies have been established in Japan and India.
Besides his collected music criticism, Shaw has left a varied musical legacy, not all of it of his choosing. Despite his dislike of having his work adapted for the musical theatre ("my plays set themselves to a verbal music of their own") two of his plays were turned into musical comedies: Arms and the Man was the basis of The Chocolate Soldier in 1908, with music by Oscar Straus, and Pygmalion was adapted in 1956 as My Fair Lady with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. Although he had a high regard for Elgar, Shaw turned down the composer's request for an opera libretto, but played a major part in persuading the BBC to commission Elgar's Third Symphony, and was the dedicatee of The Severn Suite (1930).
The substance of Shaw's political legacy is uncertain. In 1921 Shaw's erstwhile collaborator William Archer, in a letter to the playwright, wrote: "I doubt if there is any case of a man so widely read, heard, seen, and known as yourself, who has produced so little effect on his generation." Margaret Cole, who considered Shaw the greatest writer of his age, professed never to have understood him. She thought he worked "immensely hard" at politics, but essentially, she surmises, it was for fun—"the fun of a brilliant artist". After Shaw's death, Pearson wrote: "No one since the time of Tom Paine has had so definite an influence on the social and political life of his time and country as Bernard Shaw."
In its obituary tribute to Shaw, The Times Literary Supplement concluded:
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Books
Shaw's writings
Journals
Newspapers
Online
External links
(About 50 ebooks of Shaw's works and some additional Shaw-related material)
(More links to Shaw-related material)
(19 downloads for audiobooks)
Shaw at IBDb.com (Information on Broadway productions, 1894 to present)
(Lists all film and TV versions of Shaw's works since 1921)
Shaw photographs held at LSE Library
International Shaw Society
The Shaw Society, UK, established in 1941
The Bernard Shaw Society, New York
Shaw collection at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin
1856 births
1950 deaths
19th-century British dramatists and playwrights
19th-century Irish dramatists and playwrights
19th-century male writers
20th-century British dramatists and playwrights
20th-century Irish dramatists and playwrights
20th-century British male writers
Accidental deaths from falls
Accidental deaths in England
Anti-vivisectionists
Articles containing video clips
Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award winners
British eugenicists
British male dramatists and playwrights
British music critics
British Nobel laureates
British screenwriters
British socialists
Burials at Ayot St Lawrence
Classical music critics
Deaths from kidney failure
English-language spelling reform advocates
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
PEN International
Irish anti-vaccination activists
Irish Dominion League
Irish male dramatists and playwrights
Irish music critics
Irish Nobel laureates
Irish people of English descent
Irish screenwriters
Irish socialists
Members of St Pancras Metropolitan Borough Council
Members of the Fabian Society
Writers from Dublin (city)
Nobel laureates in Literature
People associated with the British Museum
People associated with the London School of Economics
People associated with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
People educated at Wesley College, Dublin
People from Ayot St Lawrence
People from Portobello, Dublin
Victorian novelists
20th-century British screenwriters | [
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12858 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanization | Galvanization | Galvanization or galvanizing (also spelled galvanisation or galvanising) is the process of applying a protective zinc coating to steel or iron, to prevent rusting. The most common method is hot-dip galvanizing, in which the parts are submerged in a bath of molten hot zinc.
Protective action
Galvanizing protects the underlying iron or steel in the following main ways:
The zinc coating, when intact, prevents corrosive substances from reaching the underlying steel or iron.
Additional electroplating such as a chromate conversion coating may be applied to provide further surface passivation to the substrate material.
The zinc acts as a sacrificial metal to protect the underlying iron/steel and thus acts as a sacrificial anode. In the event the underlying metal becomes exposed, protection can continue as long as there is zinc close enough to be electrically coupled. After all of the zinc in the immediate area is consumed, localized corrosion of the base metal can occur.
History and etymology
The earliest known example of galvanized iron was encountered by Europeans on 17th-century Indian armour in the Royal Armouries Museum collection.
The etymology of galvanisation is via French from the name of Italian scientist Luigi Galvani. However this is an obscure back-formation; Galvani had no involvement in zinc coating.
The earliest use of the term was in late 18th-century scientific research and medical practice by Galvani and meant the stimulation of a muscle by the application of an electric current. Although Galvani was the first to study this, it was Alessandro Volta who then developed a better understanding of its cause and effect. Galvani's explanation of 'animal electricity' as a cause was replaced by Volta's invention of the electric battery and its use to stimulate animal tissue. Despite the superseding of his experimental results, it was Galvani's name rather than Volta's which became associated with the field.
The term "galvanized" continues to be used metaphorically of any stimulus which results in activity by a person or group of people, such as to "galvanize into action" meaning stimulating a complacent person or group to take action.
In modern usage, the term "galvanizing" has largely come to be associated with zinc coatings, to the exclusion of other metals. Galvanic paint, a precursor to hot-dip galvanizing, was patented by Stanislas Sorel, of Paris, on June 10, 1837, as an adoption of a term from a highly fashionable field of contemporary science, despite having no evident relation to it.
Methods
Hot-dip galvanizing deposits a thick, robust layer of zinc iron alloys on the surface of a steel item. In the case of automobile bodies, where additional decorative coatings of paint will be applied, a thinner form of galvanizing is applied by electrogalvanizing. The hot-dip process generally does not reduce strength on a measurable scale, with the exception of high-strength steels (>1100 MPa) where hydrogen embrittlement can become a problem. This deficiency is a consideration affecting the manufacture of wire rope and other highly stressed products.
The protection provided by hot-dip galvanizing is insufficient for products that will be constantly exposed to corrosive materials such as acids, including acid rain in outdoor uses. For these applications, more expensive stainless steel is preferred. Some nails made today are galvanized. Nonetheless, electroplating is used on its own for many outdoor applications because it is cheaper than hot-dip zinc coating and looks good when new. Another reason not to use hot-dip zinc coating is that for bolts and nuts of size M10 (US 3/8") or smaller, the thick hot-dipped coating fills in too much of the threads, which reduces strength (because the dimension of the steel prior to coating must be reduced for the fasteners to fit together). This means that for cars, bicycles, and many other light mechanical products, the practical alternative to electroplating bolts and nuts is not hot-dip zinc coating, but making the fasteners from stainless steel or titanium.
The size of crystallites (grains) in galvanized coatings is a visible and aesthetic feature, known as "spangle". By varying the number of particles added for heterogeneous nucleation and the rate of cooling in a hot-dip process, the spangle can be adjusted from an apparently uniform surface (crystallites too small to see with the naked eye) to grains several centimetres wide. Visible crystallites are rare in other engineering materials, even though they are usually present.
Thermal diffusion galvanizing, or Sherardizing, provides a zinc diffusion coating on iron- or copper-based materials. Parts and zinc powder are tumbled in a sealed rotating drum. Around , zinc will diffuse into the substrate to form a zinc alloy. The advance surface preparation of the goods can be carried out by shot blasting. The process is also known as "dry galvanizing", because no liquids are involved; this can avoid possible problems caused by hydrogen embrittlement. The dull-grey crystal structure of the zinc diffusion coating has a good adhesion to paint, powder coatings, or rubber. It is a preferred method for coating small, complex-shaped metals, and for smoothing rough surfaces on items formed with sintered metal.
Eventual corrosion
Although galvanizing will inhibit attack of the underlying steel, rusting will be inevitable after some decades' exposure to weather, especially if exposed to acidic conditions. For example, corrugated iron sheet roofing will start to degrade within a few years despite the protective action of the zinc coating. Marine and salty environments also lower the lifetime of galvanized iron because the high electrical conductivity of sea water increases the rate of corrosion, primarily through converting the solid zinc to soluble zinc chloride which simply washes away. Galvanized car frames exemplify this; they corrode much faster in cold environments due to road salt, though they will last longer than unprotected steel.
Galvanized steel can last for many decades if other supplementary measures are maintained, such as paint coatings and additional sacrificial anodes. The rate of corrosion in non-salty environments is caused mainly by levels of sulfur dioxide in the air.
Galvanized construction steel
This is the most common use for galvanized metal, and hundreds of thousands of tons of steel products are galvanized annually worldwide. In developed countries most larger cities have several galvanizing factories, and many items of steel manufacture are galvanized for protection. Typically these include: street furniture, building frameworks, balconies, verandahs, staircases, ladders, walkways, and more. Hot dip galvanized steel is also used for making steel frames as a basic construction material for steel frame buildings.
Galvanized piping
In the early 20th century, galvanized piping replaced previously-used cast iron and lead in cold-water plumbing. Typically, galvanized piping rusts from the inside out, building up layers of plaque on the inside of the piping, causing both water pressure problems and eventual pipe failure. These plaques can flake off, leading to visible impurities in water and a slight metallic taste. The life expectancy of galvanized piping is about 40–50 years, but it may vary on how well the pipes were built and installed. Pipe longevity also depends on the thickness of zinc in the original galvanizing, which ranges on a scale from G01 to G360, and whether the pipe was galvanized on both the inside and outside, or just the outside.
Since World War 2, copper and plastic piping have replaced galvanized piping for interior drinking water service, but galvanized steel pipes are still used in outdoor applications requiring steel's superior mechanical strength.
The use of galvanized pipes lends some truth to the urban myth that water purity in outdoor water faucets is lower, but the actual impurities (iron, zinc, calcium) are harmless.
The presence of galvanized piping detracts from the appraised value of housing stock because piping can fail, increasing the risk of water damage. Galvanized piping will eventually need to be replaced if housing stock is to outlast a 50 to 70 year life expectancy, and some jurisdictions require galvanized piping to be replaced before sale. One option to extend the life expectancy of existing galvanized piping is to line it with an epoxy resin.
See also
Cathodic protection
Corrugated galvanized iron
Galvanic corrosion
Galvannealed – galvanization and annealing
Prepainted metal
Rust
Rustproofing
Sendzimir process
Sherardizing
Corrosion
Sacrificial metal
Corrosion engineering
References
External links
Chemical processes
Corrosion prevention
Metal plating
Zinc
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12859 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden%20Rule | Golden Rule | The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one wants to be treated. It is a maxim that is found in most religions and cultures. It can be considered an ethic of reciprocity in some religions, although different religions treat it differently.
The maxim may appear as a positive or negative injunction governing conduct:
Treat others as you would like others to treat you (positive or directive form)
Do not treat others in ways that you would not like to be treated (negative or prohibitive form)
What you wish upon others, you wish upon yourself (empathetic or responsive form)
The idea dates at least to the early Confucian times (551–479 BCE), according to Rushworth Kidder, who identifies the concept appearing prominently in Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and "the rest of the world's major religions". 143 leaders of the world's major faiths endorsed the Golden Rule as part of the 1993 "Declaration Toward a Global Ethic". According to Greg M. Epstein, it is "a concept that essentially no religion misses entirely", but belief in God is not necessary to endorse it. Simon Blackburn also states that the Golden Rule can be "found in some form in almost every ethical tradition".
Etymology
The term "Golden Rule", or "Golden law", began to be used widely in the early 17th century in Britain by Anglican theologians and preachers; the earliest known usage is that of Anglicans Charles Gibbon and Thomas Jackson in 1604.
Ancient history
Ancient Egypt
Possibly the earliest affirmation of the maxim of reciprocity, reflecting the ancient Egyptian goddess Ma'at, appears in the story of "The Eloquent Peasant", which dates to the Middle Kingdom (c. 2040–1650 BCE): "Now this is the command: Do to the doer to make him do." This proverb embodies the do ut des principle. A Late Period (c. 664–323 BCE) papyrus contains an early negative affirmation of the Golden Rule: "That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another."
Ancient India
Sanskrit tradition
In Mahābhārata, the ancient epic of India, there is a discourse in which sage Brihaspati tells the king Yudhishthira the following about dharma, a philosophical understanding of values and actions that lend good order to life:
The Mahābhārata is usually dated to the period between 400 BCE and 400 CE.
Tamil tradition
In Chapter 32 in the Book of Virtue of the Tirukkuṛaḷ (c. 1st century BCE to 5th century CE), Valluvar says:
Furthermore, in verse 312, Valluvar says that it is the determination or code of the spotless (virtuous) not to do evil, even in return, to those who have cherished enmity and done them evil. According to him, the proper punishment to those who have done evil is to put them to shame by showing them kindness, in return and to forget both the evil and the good done on both sides (verse 314).
Ancient Greece
The Golden Rule in its prohibitive (negative) form was a common principle in ancient Greek philosophy. Examples of the general concept include:
"Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing." – Thales (c. 624–c. 546 BCE)
"What you do not want to happen to you, do not do it yourself either. " – Sextus the Pythagorean. The oldest extant reference to Sextus is by Origen in the third century of the common era.
"may I be of a sound mind, and do to others as I would that they should do to me." - Plato (c. 420–c. 347 BCE)
"Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you." – Isocrates (436–338 BCE)
Ancient Persia
The Pahlavi Texts of Zoroastrianism (c. 300 BCE–1000 CE) were an early source for the Golden Rule: "That nature alone is good which refrains from doing to another whatsoever is not good for itself." Dadisten-I-dinik, 94,5, and "Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others." Shayast-na-Shayast 13:29
Ancient Rome
Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BCE–65 CE), a practitioner of Stoicism (c. 300 BCE–200 CE) expressed a hierarchical variation of the Golden Rule in his Letter 47, an essay regarding the treatment of slaves: "Treat your inferior as you would wish your superior to treat you."
Religious context
According to Simon Blackburn, the Golden Rule "can be found in some form in almost every ethical tradition".
Abrahamic religions
Judaism
A rule of reciprocal altruism was stated positively in a well-known Torah verse (Hebrew: ):
Hillel the Elder (c. 110 BCE – 10 CE), used this verse as a most important message of the Torah for his teachings. Once, he was challenged by a gentile who asked to be converted under the condition that the Torah be explained to him while he stood on one foot. Hillel accepted him as a candidate for conversion to Judaism but, drawing on Leviticus 19:18, briefed the man:
Hillel recognized brotherly love as the fundamental principle of Jewish ethics. Rabbi Akiva agreed, while Simeon ben Azzai suggested that the principle of love must have its foundation in Genesis chapter 1, which teaches that all men are the offspring of Adam, who was made in the image of God. According to Jewish rabbinic literature, the first man Adam represents the unity of mankind. This is echoed in the modern preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And it is also taught, that Adam is last in order according to the evolutionary character of God's creation:Why was only a single specimen of man created first? To teach us that he who destroys a single soul destroys a whole world and that he who saves a single soul saves a whole world; furthermore, so no race or class may claim a nobler ancestry, saying, 'Our father was born first'; and, finally, to give testimony to the greatness of the Lord, who caused the wonderful diversity of mankind to emanate from one type. And why was Adam created last of all beings? To teach him humility; for if he be overbearing, let him remember that the little fly preceded him in the order of creation.
The Jewish Publication Society's edition of Leviticus states:Thou shalt not hate thy brother, in thy heart; thou shalt surely rebuke thy neighbour, and not bear sin because of him. 18 Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the .This Torah verse represents one of several versions of the Golden Rule, which itself appears in various forms, positive and negative. It is the earliest written version of that concept in a positive form.
At the turn of the eras, the Jewish rabbis were discussing the scope of the meaning of Leviticus 19:18 and 19:34 extensively:
Commentators summed up foreigners (= Samaritans), proselytes (= 'strangers who resides with you') or Jews. to the scope of the meaning.
On the verse, "Love your fellow as yourself", the classic commentator Rashi quotes from Torat Kohanim, an early Midrashic text regarding the famous dictum of Rabbi Akiva: "Love your fellow as yourself – Rabbi Akiva says this is a great principle of the Torah."
Israel's postal service quoted from the previous Leviticus verse when it commemorated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on a 1958 postage stamp.
Christianity
The "Golden Rule" was proclaimed by Jesus of Nazareth during his Sermon on the Mount and described by him as the second great commandment. The common English phrasing is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". A similar form of the phrase appeared in a Catholic catechism around 1567 (certainly in the reprint of 1583).
Various applications of the Golden Rule are stated positively numerous times in the Old Testament: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.". See also Great Commandment) and Leviticus 19:34: "But treat them just as you treat your own citizens. Love foreigners as you love yourselves, because you were foreigners one time in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.".
The Old Testament Deuterocanonical books of Tobit and Sirach, accepted as part of the Scriptural canon by Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Non-Chalcedonian Churches, express a negative form of the golden rule:
Two passages in the New Testament quote Jesus of Nazareth espousing the positive form of the Golden rule:
A similar passage, a parallel to the Great Commandment, is Luke 10:25.
The passage in the book of Luke then continues with Jesus answering the question, "Who is my neighbor?", by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, which John Wesley interprets as meaning that "your neighbor" is anyone in need.
Jesus' teaching goes beyond the negative formulation of not doing what one would not like done to themselves, to the positive formulation of actively doing good to another that, if the situations were reversed, one would desire that the other would do for them. This formulation, as indicated in the parable of the Good Samaritan, emphasizes the needs for positive action that brings benefit to another, not simply restraining oneself from negative activities that hurt another.
In one passage of the New Testament, Paul the Apostle refers to the golden rule:
St. Paul also comments on the golden rule in the book of Romans:
"The commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery,’ 'You shall not murder,’ 'You shall not steal,’ 'You shall not covet,’ and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'”
Islam
The Arabian peninsula was known to not practice the golden rule prior to the advent of Islam. According to Th. Emil Homerin: "Pre-Islamic Arabs regarded the survival of the tribe, as most essential and to be ensured by the ancient rite of blood vengeance." Homerin goes on to say:
From the hadith, the collected oral and written accounts of Muhammad and his teachings during his lifetime:
Ali ibn Abi Talib (4th Caliph in Sunni Islam, and first Imam in Shia Islam) says:
Baháʼí Faith
The writings of the Baháʼí Faith encourage everyone to treat others as they would treat themselves and even prefer others over oneself:
Indian religions
Hinduism
Also,
Buddhism
Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama, c. 623–543 BCE) made this principle one of the cornerstones of his ethics in the 6th century BCE. It occurs in many places and in many forms throughout the Tripitaka.
Jainism
The Golden Rule is paramount in the Jainist philosophy and can be seen in the doctrines of Ahimsa and Karma. As part of the prohibition of causing any living beings to suffer, Jainism forbids inflicting upon others what is harmful to oneself.
The following lines from the Acaranga Sutra sums up the philosophy of Jainism:
Sikhism
Chinese religions
Confucianism
"What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others."
Zi Gong (a disciple of Confucius) asked: "Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?" The Master replied: "How about 'shu' [reciprocity]: never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself?"
--Confucius, Analects XV.24, tr. David Hinton (another translation is in the online Chinese Text Project)
The same idea is also presented in V.12 and VI.30 of the Analects (c. 500 BCE), which can be found in the online Chinese Text Project. The phraseology differs from the Christian version of the Golden Rule. It does not presume to do anything unto others, but merely to avoid doing what would be harmful. It does not preclude doing good deeds and taking moral positions.
Taoism
Mohism
Mozi regarded the golden rule as a corollary to the cardinal virtue of impartiality, and encouraged egalitarianism and selflessness in relationships.
Iranian religions
Zoroastrianism
New religious movements
Wicca
Traditional African religions
Yoruba
Odinani
Secular context
Global ethic
The "Declaration Toward a Global Ethic" from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (1993) proclaimed the Golden Rule ("We must treat others as we wish others to treat us") as the common principle for many religions. The Initial Declaration was signed by 143 leaders from all of the world's major faiths, including Baháʼí Faith, Brahmanism, Brahma Kumaris, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Indigenous, Interfaith, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Native American, Neo-Pagan, Sikhism, Taoism, Theosophist, Unitarian Universalist and Zoroastrian. In the folklore of several cultures the Golden Rule is depicted by the allegory of the long spoons.
Humanism
In the view of Greg M. Epstein, a Humanist chaplain at Harvard University, " 'do unto others' ... is a concept that essentially no religion misses entirely. But not a single one of these versions of the golden rule requires a God". Various sources identify the Golden Rule as a humanist principle:
Existentialism
Other contexts
Human rights
According to Marc H. Bornstein, and William E. Paden, the Golden Rule is arguably the most essential basis for the modern concept of human rights, in which each individual has a right to just treatment, and a reciprocal responsibility to ensure justice for others.
However, Leo Damrosch argued that the notion that the Golden Rule pertains to "rights" per se is a contemporary interpretation and has nothing to do with its origin. The development of human "rights" is a modern political ideal that began as a philosophical concept promulgated through the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau in 18th century France, among others. His writings influenced Thomas Jefferson, who then incorporated Rousseau's reference to "inalienable rights" into the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776. Damrosch argued that to confuse the Golden Rule with human rights is to apply contemporary thinking to ancient concepts.
Science and economics
There has been research published arguing that some 'sense' of fair play and the Golden Rule may be stated and rooted in terms of neuroscientific and neuroethical principles.
The Golden Rule can also be explained from the perspectives of psychology, philosophy, sociology, human evolution, and economics. Psychologically, it involves a person empathizing with others. Philosophically, it involves a person perceiving their neighbor also as "I" or "self". Sociologically, "love your neighbor as yourself" is applicable between individuals, between groups, and also between individuals and groups. In evolution, "reciprocal altruism" is seen as a distinctive advance in the capacity of human groups to survive and reproduce, as their exceptional brains demanded exceptionally long childhoods and ongoing provision and protection even beyond that of the immediate family. In economics, Richard Swift, referring to ideas from David Graeber, suggests that "without some kind of reciprocity society would no longer be able to exist."
Study of other primates provides evidence that the Golden Rule exists in other non-human species.
Criticism
Philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, have objected to the rule on a variety of grounds. The most serious among these is its application. How does one know how others want to be treated? The obvious way is to ask them, but this cannot be done if one assumes they have not reached a particular and relevant understanding. One religion that officially rejects the Golden Rule is the Neo-Nazi religion of the "Creativity Movement" founded by Ben Klassen. Followers of the religion believe that the Golden Rule doesn't make sense and is a "completely unworkable principle.".
Differences in values or interests
George Bernard Shaw wrote, "Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." This suggests that if your values are not shared with others, the way you want to be treated will not be the way they want to be treated. Hence, the Golden Rule of "do unto others" is "dangerous in the wrong hands", according to philosopher Iain King, because "some fanatics have no aversion to death: the Golden Rule might inspire them to kill others in suicide missions."
Differences in situations
Immanuel Kant famously criticized the golden rule for not being sensitive to differences of situation, noting that a prisoner duly convicted of a crime could appeal to the golden rule while asking the judge to release him, pointing out that the judge would not want anyone else to send him to prison, so he should not do so to others. Kant's Categorical Imperative, introduced in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, is often confused with the Golden Rule.
Responses to criticisms
Walter Terence Stace, in The Concept of Morals (1937), wrote:
Marcus George Singer observed that there are two importantly different ways of looking at the golden rule: as requiring (1) that you perform specific actions that you want others to do to you or (2) that you guide your behavior in the same general ways that you want others to. Counter-examples to the golden rule typically are more forceful against the first than the second.
In his book on the golden rule, Jeffrey Wattles makes the similar observation that such objections typically arise while applying the golden rule in certain general ways (namely, ignoring differences in taste, in situation, and so forth). But if we apply the golden rule to our own method of using it, asking in effect if we would want other people to apply the golden rule in such ways, the answer would typically be no, since it is quite predictable that others' ignoring of such factors will lead to behavior which we object to. It follows that we should not do so ourselves—according to the golden rule. In this way, the golden rule may be self-correcting. An article by Jouni Reinikainen develops this suggestion in greater detail.
It is possible, then, that the golden rule can itself guide us in identifying which differences of situation are morally relevant. We would often want other people to ignore any prejudice against our race or nationality when deciding how to act towards us, but would also want them to not ignore our differing preferences in food, desire for aggressiveness, and so on. This principle of "doing unto others, wherever possible, as they would be done by..." has sometimes been termed the platinum rule.
Popular references
Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863) includes a character named Mrs Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By (and another, Mrs Be-Done-By-As-You-Did).
See also
Empathy
General welfare clause
Norm of reciprocity, social norm of in-kind responses to the behavior of others
Reciprocity (cultural anthropology), way of defining people's informal exchange of goods and labour
Reciprocity (evolution), mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation
Reciprocity (international relations), principle that favours, benefits, or penalties that are granted by one state to the citizens or legal entities of another, should be returned in kind
Reciprocity (social and political philosophy), concept of reciprocity as in-kind positive or negative responses for the actions of others; relation to justice; related ideas such as gratitude, mutuality, and the Golden Rule
Reciprocity (social psychology), in-kind positive or negative responses of individuals towards the actions of others
Serial reciprocity, where the benefactor of a gift or service will in turn provide benefits to a third party
Ubuntu (philosophy), an ethical philosophy originating from Southern Africa, which has been summarised as 'A person is a person through other people'
References
External links
The Golden Rule Movie A teaching resource.
Golden Rule Day An annual global event every April 5.
Golden Rule Project - learning tools, etc. (based in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA)
Monmouth Center for World Religions and Ethical Thought. The Golden Rule
Scarboro Mission. The Golden Rule Educational, participatory, and interactive resources including videos, exercises, multi-disciplinary commentaries, The Golden Rule Poster, and interfaith dialogues on the Golden Rule.
St Columbans Mission Society - Interfaith Relations. The Golden Rule The Golden Rule Poster, etc.
Ethical principles
Interpersonal relationships
Life skills
Philosophy of law
Religious practices
Positive Mitzvoth
Codes of conduct
Sermon on the Mount | [
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12861 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor%20of%20New%20York | Governor of New York | The governor of New York is the head of government of the U.S. state of New York. The governor is the head of the executive branch of New York's state government and the commander-in-chief of the state's military forces. The governor has a duty to enforce state laws and the power to either approve or veto bills passed by the New York Legislature, to convene the legislature and grant pardons, except in cases of impeachment and treason.
Powers and duties
The governor has a duty to enforce state laws, and the power to either approve or veto bills passed by the New York State Legislature, to convene the legislature, and to grant pardons, except in cases of treason and impeachment. Unlike the other government departments that compose the executive branch of government, the governor is the head of the state Executive Department. The officeholder is afforded the courtesy style of His/Her Excellency while in office.
Often considered a potential candidate to lead the executive branch of the federal government, 10 New York governors have been selected as presidential candidates by a major party, four of whom (Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt) were elected as president of the United States. Meanwhile, six New York governors have gone on to serve as vice president. Additionally, two New York governors, John Jay and Charles Evans Hughes, have served as chief justice.
Qualifications
Under the New York State Constitution, a person must be at least 30 years of age, a United States citizen, and a resident of the state of New York for at least five years prior to being elected to serve as governor.
List of governors of New York
There have been a total of 57 governors as of October 1, 2021.
Appointments
The governor is responsible for appointing his or her Executive Chamber. These appointments do not require the confirmation of the New York State Senate. Most political advisors report to the secretary to the governor, while most policy advisors report to the director of state operations, who also answers to the secretary to the governor, making that position, in practice, the true chief of staff and most powerful position in the Cabinet. The literal chief of staff is in charge of the Office of Scheduling and holds no authority over other cabinet officials.
The governor is also charged with naming the heads of the various departments, divisions, boards, and offices within the state government. These nominees require confirmation by the state Senate. While some appointees may share the title of commissioner, director, etc., only department level-heads are considered members of the actual state cabinet, although the heads of the various divisions, boards, and offices may attend cabinet-level meetings from time to time.
History
The position of governor in New York dates back to the British take over of New Amsterdam where the position replaced the former Dutch offices of director or director-general.
Following the American Revolution, a new office of governor was established by the first New York State Constitution in 1777 to coincide with the calendar year. An 1874 amendment extended the term of office to three years, but the 1894 constitution reduced it to two years. The most recent constitution of 1938 extended the term to the current four years. David Paterson was the first African American to hold the office, and Kathy Hochul is the first woman to hold the office.
Line of succession
The Constitution of New York has provided since 1777 for the election of a lieutenant governor of New York, who also acts as president of the State Senate, to the same term (keeping the same term lengths as the governor throughout all the constitutional revisions). Originally, in the event of the death, resignation or impeachment of the governor, or absence from the state, the lieutenant governor would take on the governor's duties and powers. Since the 1938 constitution, the lieutenant governor explicitly becomes governor upon such vacancy in the office.
Should the office of lieutenant governor become vacant, the temporary president of the state senate performs the duties of a lieutenant governor until the governor can take back the duties of the office, or the next election; likewise, should both offices become vacant, the temporary president acts as governor, with the office of lieutenant governor remaining vacant. Although no provision exists in the constitution for it, precedent set in 2009 allows the governor to appoint a lieutenant governor should a vacancy occur. Should the temporary president be unable to fulfill the duties, the speaker of the assembly is next in the line of succession. The lieutenant governor is elected on the same ticket as the governor, but nominated separately.
Line of succession:
Lieutenant Governor
Temporary President of the Senate
Speaker of the Assembly
Attorney General
Comptroller
Commissioner of Transportation
Commissioner of Health
Commissioner of Commerce
Industrial Commissioner
Chairman of the Public Service Commission
Secretary of State
See also
Politics of New York (state)
List of governors of New York
First Ladies and Gentlemen of New York
List of Colonial Governors of New York
New York gubernatorial elections, for results of the elections for the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of New York.
Bibliography
Paterson, David "Black, Blind, & In Charge: A Story of Visionary Leadership and Overcoming Adversity."Skyhorse Publishing. New York, New York, 2020
References
External links
Governor's Office in the New York Codes, Rules and Regulations
1777 establishments in New York (state) | [
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12862 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasnevin | Glasnevin | Glasnevin (, also known as Glas Naedhe, meaning "stream of O'Naeidhe" after a local stream and an ancient chieftain) is a neighbourhood of Dublin, Ireland, situated on the River Tolka. While primarily residential, Glasnevin is also home to the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin Cemetery, the National Meteorological Office, and a range of other state bodies, and Dublin City University has its main campus and other facilities in and near the area. Glasnevin is also a civil parish in the ancient barony of Coolock.
Geography
A mainly residential neighbourhood, Glasnevin is located on the Northside of the city of Dublin (about 3 km north of Dublin city centre). It was established on the northern bank of the River Tolka where the stream for which it may be named joins, and now extends north and south of the river. Three watercourses flow into the Tolka in the area. Two streams can be seen near the Catholic "pyramid church", the Claremont Stream or Nevin Stream, flowing south from Poppintree and Jamestown Industrial Estate branches, and what is sometimes called the "Cemetery Drain" coming north from the southern edge of Glasnevin Cemetery. In addition, a major diversion from the Wad River comes from the Ballymun area, joining near the Claremont Stream.
The boundaries of Glasnevin stretch from the Royal Canal to Glasnevin Avenue and from the Finglas Road to the edges of Drumcondra. It spans the postal districts of Dublin 9 and 11, and is bordered to the northwest by Finglas, northeast by Ballymun and Santry, Whitehall to the east, Phibsborough and Drumcondra to the south and Cabra to the southwest.
History
Foundation
Glasnevin was reputedly founded by Saint Mobhi (sometimes known as St Berchan) in the sixth (or perhaps fifth) century as a monastery. His monastery continued to be used for many years afterwards - St. Colman is recorded as having paid homage to its founder when he returned from abroad to visit Ireland a century after St Mobhi's death in 544. St. Columba of Iona is thought to have studied under St. Mobhi, but left Glasnevin following an outbreak of plague and journeyed north to open the House at Derry; there is a long street (Iona Road) in Glasnevin named in his honour and the church on Iona Road is called Saint Columba's.
Middle Ages
A settlement grew up around the monastery, which survived until the Viking invasions in the eighth century. After raids on monasteries at Glendalough and Clondalkin, the monasteries at Glasnevin and Finglas were attacked and destroyed.
By 822 Glasnevin, along with Grangegorman and Clonken or Clonkene (now known as Deansgrange), had become parts of the grange (farm) of Christ Church Cathedral and it seems to have maintained this connection up to the time of the Reformation.
The Battle of Clontarf was fought on the banks of the River Tolka in 1014 (a field called the bloody acre is supposed to be part of the site). The Irish defeated the Danes in a battle, in which 7,000 Danes and 4,000 Irish died.
The 12th century saw the Normans (who had conquered England and Wales in the eleventh century) invade Ireland. As local rulers continued fighting amongst themselves the Norman King of England Henry II was invited to intervene. He arrived in 1171, took control of much land, and then parcelled it out amongst his supporters. Glasnevin ended up under the jurisdiction of Finglas Abbey. Later, Laurence O'Toole, Archbishop of Dublin, took responsibility for Glasnevin and it became the property of the Priory of the Most Holy Trinity (Christ Church Cathedral).
In 1240 a church and tower was reconstructed on the site of the Church of St. Mobhi in the monastery. The returns of the church for 1326 stated that 28 tenants resided in Glasnevin. The church was enlarged in 1346, along with a small hall known as the Manor Hall.
Late Middle Ages
When King Henry VIII broke from Rome an era of religious repression began. During the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Catholic Church property and land was appropriated to the new Church of England, and monasteries (including the one at Glasnevin) were forcibly closed and fell into ruin. Glasnevin had at this stage developed as a village, with its principal landmark and focal point being its "bull-ring" noted in 1542.
By 1667 Glasnevin had expanded - but not by very much; it is recorded as containing 24 houses. The development of the village was given a fresh impetus when Sir John Rogerson built his country residence - "The Glen" or "Glasnevin House" - outside the village.
The plantations of Ireland saw the settlement of Protestant English families on land previously held by Catholics. Lands at Glasnevin were leased to such families and a Protestant church was erected there in 1707. It was built on the site of the old Catholic Church and was named after St. Mobhi. The church was largely rebuilt in the mid-18th century. The attached churchyard became a graveyard for both Protestants and Catholics. It is said that Robert Emmet is buried there, this claim being made because once somebody working in the graveyard there dug up a headless body.
Early modern times
By now Glasnevin was an area for "families of distinction" - in spite of a comment attributed to the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, William King that "when any couple had a mind to be wicked, they would retire to Glasnevin". In a letter, dated 1725 he described Glasnevin as "the receptacle for thieves and rogues [..] The first search when anything was stolen, was there, and when any couple had a mind to retire to be wicked there was their harbour. But since the church was built, and service regularly settled, all these evils are banished. Good houses are built in it, and the place civilised." Glasnevin National School was also built during this period.
19th and 20th centuries
In the 1830s, the civil parish population was recorded as 1,001, of whom 559 resided in the village. Glasnevin was described as a parish in the barony of Coolock, pleasantly situated and the residence of many families of distinction.
On 1 June 1832, Charles Lindsay, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin and William John released their holdings of Sir John Rogerson's lands at Glasnevin, (including Glasnevin House) to George Hayward Lindsay. This transfer included the sum of 1,500 Pounds Sterling. Although this does not specifically cite the marriage of George Hayward Lindsay to Lady Mary Catherine Gore, George Lindsay almost certainly came into possession of the lands at Glasnevin as a result of his marriage.
When Drumcondra began to rapidly expand in the 1870s, the residents of Glasnevin sought to protect their district and opposed being merged with the neighbouring suburb. One of the objectors was the property-owner, Dr Gogarty, the father of the Irish poet, Oliver St. John Gogarty.
Glasnevin became a township in 1878 and became part of the City of Dublin in 1900 under the Dublin Boundaries Act, which received the Royal Assent on August 6, 1900.
George Hayward Lindsay's eldest son, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Gore Lindsay, was in possession of his father's lands at Glasnevin when the area began to be developed at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The development of his lands after 1903/04 marked the start of the gradual development of the area.
Glasnevin remained relatively undeveloped until the opening up of the Carroll Estate in 1914, which saw the creation of the redbrick residential roads running down towards Drumcondra. The process was accelerated by Dublin Corporation in the 1920s and the present shape of the suburb was in place by 1930. Among the developers who built estates in the area were Alexander Strain and his son-in-law George Linzell. Linzell built the first individual house built in the international style in Ireland, Balnagowan House, on St. Mobhi Boithrin in the late 1920s.
The start of the 20th century also saw the opening of a short lived railway station on the Drumcondra and North Dublin Link Railway line from Glasnevin Junction to Connolly Station (then Amiens Street). Glasnevin railway station opened on 1 April 1901 and closed on 1 December 1910.
Village of Glasnevin
The village has changed a lot over the years, and is now part of Dublin city. It is now populated by a mix of young families, senior citizens and students attending Dublin City University.
As well as the amenities of the National Botanic Gardens (Ireland) and local parks, the national meteorological office Met Éireann, the Fisheries Board, the National Standards Authority of Ireland, Sustainable Energy Ireland, the National Metrology Laboratory (NML), the Department of Defence and the national enterprise and trade board Enterprise Ireland are all located in the area.
National Botanic Gardens
The house and lands of the poet Thomas Tickell were sold in 1790 to the Irish Parliament and given to the Royal Dublin Society for them to establish Ireland's first Botanic Gardens. The gardens were the first location in Ireland where the infection responsible for the 1845–1847 Great Famine was identified. Throughout the famine research to stop the infection was undertaken at the gardens.
The which border the River Tolka also adjoin the Prospect Cemetery. In 2002 the Botanic Gardens gained a new two-storey complex which included a new cafe and a large lecture theatre. The Irish National Herbarium is also located at the botanic gardens.
Glasnevin (Prospect) Cemetery
Prospect Cemetery is located in Glasnevin, although better known as Glasnevin Cemetery, the most historically notable burial place in the country and the last resting place, among a host of historical figures, of Michael Collins, Éamon de Valera, Charles Stewart Parnell and also Arthur Griffith. This graveyard led to Glasnevin being known as "the dead centre of Dublin". It opened in 1832 and is the final resting place for thousands of ordinary citizens, as well as many Irish patriots.
Hart's Corner
Approaching Glasnevin via Phibsboro is what is known as Hart's Corner but which about 200 years ago was called Glasmanogue, and was then a well-known stage on the way to Finglas. At an earlier date the name possessed a wider signification and was applied to a considerable portion of the adjoining district.
Delville
At the start of the 18th century a large house, called Delville, known at first as The Glen, was built on the site of the present Bon Secours Hospital, Dublin. Its name was an amalgamation of the surnames of two tenants, Dr. Helsam and Dr. Patrick Delany (as Heldeville), both Fellows of Trinity College.
When Delany married his first wife he acquired sole ownership, but it became more well known as the home of Delany and his second wife, Mary Pendarves. She was a widow whom Delany married in 1743, and was an accomplished letter writer.
They couple were friends of Dean Jonathan Swift and, through him, of Alexander Pope. Pope encouraged the Delaneys to develop a garden in a style then becoming popular in England - moving away from the very formal, geometric layout that was common. He redesigned the house in the style of a villa and had the gardens laid out in the latest Dutch fashion creating what was almost certainly Ireland's first naturalistic garden.
The house was, under Mrs Delany, a centre of Dublin's intellectual life. Swift is said to have composed a number of his campaigning pamphlets while staying there. He and his life-long companion Stella were both in the habit of visiting, and Swift satirised the grounds which he considered too small for the size of the house. Through her correspondence with her sister, Mrs Dewes, Mary wrote of Swift in 1733: "he calls himself my master and corrects me when I speak bad English or do not pronounce my words distinctly".
Patrick Delany died in 1768 at the age of 82, prompting his widow to sell Delville and return to her native England until her death twenty years later.
The Pyramid Church
Glasnevin is also a parish in the Fingal South West deanery of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. It is served by the Church of Lady of Dolours.
The church underwent some refurbishment work inside and in its grounds and car park during the first half of 2011. A timber church, which originally stood on Berkeley Road, was moved to a riverside site on Botanic Avenue early in the twentieth century. The altar in this church was from Newgate prison in Dublin. It served as the parish church until it was replaced, in 1972, by a structure resembling a pyramid when viewed from Botanic Avenue. The previous church was known locally as "The Woodener" or "The Wooden" and the new building is still known to older residents as "The new Woodener" or "The Wigwam".
Met Éireann
In 1975 the new headquarters of Met Éireann, the Irish Meteorological Office, opened just off Glasnevin Hill, on the former site of Marlborough House. The Met Éireann building too was built in a somewhat pyramidal shape and is recognised as one of the most significant, smaller commercial buildings, to be erected in Dublin in the 1970s.
Griffith Avenue
Griffith Avenue, which runs through Glasnevin, Drumcondra and Marino. The avenue spans three electoral constituencies. It was named after Arthur Griffith who was the founder and third leader of Sinn Féin and also served as President of Dáil Éireann. Arthur Griffith also was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
It is reputed to be the longest tree-lined purely residential avenue in the northern hemisphere.
Amenities and sport
The Gaelic games of Gaelic football, hurling, camogie and Gaelic handball are all organised locally by Na Fianna CLG, while soccer is played by local clubs Tolka Rovers, Glasnevin FC and Glasnaion FC. Basketball is organised by Tolka Rovers. Tennis is played in Charleville Lawn Tennis Club which was founded in 1894 and took its name from the original location at the corner of the Charleville and Cabra Roads. The move to its present location on Whitworth Road took place in 1904. The club has a membership of 400 senior and junior members and the club has won many Dublin Lawn Tennis Council titles. Hockey is also played in Botanic Hockey club on the Old Finglas Road. Glasnevin Boxing Club and Football (soccer) club has a clubhouse on Mobhi road.
Scouting is represented in Glasnevin by the 1st Dublin (L.H.O) Scout Troop located on the corner of Griffith Avenue and Ballygall Road East.
There are several primary schools in Glasnevin, including Lindsay Road National School, Glasnevin National School, Glasnevin Educate Together National school, North Dublin National School Project, Scoil Mobhi, St. Brigids GNS, St. Columbas NS and St.Vincents CBS.
There are several Roman Catholic secondary schools in the area St Vincent's (Christian Brothers) School, Scoil Chaitríona and St Mary's Secondary School.
Billy Whelan, one of the eight Manchester United players who lost their lives in the Munich air disaster of 6 February 1958, was born locally on 1 April 1935. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Representation
Glasnevin is part of the Dáil Éireann constituency of Dublin Central and Dublin North-West.
Notable people
Margaret Buckley, former president of Sinn Féin (originally from Cork, lived on Marguerite Road, Glasnevin)
Saint Canice, early Christian abbot (studied under Mobhí of Glasnevin)
Saint Comgall, early Christian abbot and founder of monastery at Bangor
Ian Gallahar, cyclist and commissaire
Liam Harrison, musician and songwriter
Niamh Kavanagh, singer and winner of the Eurovision Song Contest
Robbie Kelleher, former All-Ireland winning Gaelic footballer
Anne Kernan (1933–2020), Irish physicist
Celia Lynch, Fianna Fáil TD and assistant government whip (originally from Galway, lived on Botanic Road)
Colm Meaney, actor
Damien McCaul, television presenter and radio DJ
Saint Mobhi, early Christian missionary and abbot of Glasnevin monastery
John O'Connell, Fianna Fáil TD and former Minister for Health
Francis Martin O'Donnell, diplomat
Patrick Denis O'Donnell, military historian
Michael O'Hehir, sports commentator and journalist
James O'Higgins Norman, academic
John J. O'Kelly, politician, former President of Sinn Féin and government minister
Michael O'Riordan, founder of the Communist Party of Ireland
Róisín Owens, biochemist
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, satirist, playwright, and politician
Jonathan Swift, author and essayist who lived across the road from the Glasnevin Model School (now Glasnevin Educate Together)
Thomas Tickell, poet whose Glasnevin property was later developed as the National Botanic Gardens
David P. Tyndall, businessperson
Mona Tyndall, doctor and missionary
References
Further reading
The Parish of Glasnevin from F.E. Ball's A History of the County Dublin (1920)
Account of Glasnevin from D'Alton's History of the County Dublin (1838)
Glasnevin, Finglas and the Adjacent District from The Neighbourhood of Dublin by Weston St. John Joyce (third and enlarged edition 1920)
The Tolka, Glasnevin and the Naul Road from North Dublin by Dillon Cosgrove (1909)
External links
Met Éireann
A History of Glasnevin from Egan's House
The Botanic Gardens
Towns and villages in Dublin (city) | [
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12863 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20Abbot%20%28author%29 | George Abbot (author) | George Abbot or Abbott (1604 — 2 February 1649) was an English lay writer, known as "The Puritan", and a politician who sat in the House of Commons in two periods between 1640 and 1649. He is known also for his part in defending Caldecote House against royalist forces in the early days of the English Civil War.
Life
Abbott was the son of George Abbott of York (died 1607) and his wife Joan Penkeston. While Alumni Cantabrigienses states that he matriculated at King's College, Cambridge in 1622, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography discounts the identification, for lack of evidence. He owned property in Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire, and was a good friend of Richard Vines, minister at Caldecote some way to the east. In April 1640, he was elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Tamworth in the Short Parliament.
In the English Civil War, Abbot worked closely in Warwickshire with his stepfather William Purefoy, and made a notable defence, with his mother Joan, of the Purefoy house at Caldecote, Warwickshire, gaining the family coverage in the London press. On 15 August 1642, with eight men, his mother and maids, he held out for a time against Prince Rupert of the Rhine, with about 18 troops of horses and dragoons. In the aftermath of the Battle of Edgehill, in October of the same year, Richard Baxter moved to Coventry, and Abbot was one of those hearing him preach there. Baxter in writing on the Sabbath referred to "my dear friend Mr. George Abbot". In his memoirs Reliquiæ Baxterianæ, Baxter placed Abbot's defence of Caldecote House, where barns were burnt, in local context: royalists under Spencer Compton, 2nd Earl of Northampton were attacking Warwick Castle, defended by John Bridges, and Coventry, defended by John Barker.
Abbot was re-elected MP for Tamworth in 1645 for the Long Parliament and held the seat until his death in 1649. He died unmarried in his 44th year, and was buried in Caldecote church where his monument describes his defence of Caldecote.
Legacy
By his will, Abbot endowed a free school at Caldecote. It was supported by land left to it at Baddesley Ensor.
Works
Abbot was a lay theologian and scholar. His Whole Booke of Job Paraphrased, or made easy for any to understand (1640), was written in a terse style, and his Vindiciae Sabbathi (1641) influenced the Sabbatarian controversy. His The Whole Book of Psalms Paraphrased (1650) was published posthumously by Richard Vines, and dedicated to Joan Purefoy, his mother.
Mistaken identifications
Abbot has been confused with others of the same name and has been described as a clergyman, which he never was. His writings have been incorrectly attributed in the bibliographical authorities to a relation of George Abbot the archbishop of Canterbury. One of the sons of Sir Morris Abbot called George was also an MP in the Long Parliament but for the constituency of Guildford.
Notes
References
Endnotes:
MS.collections at Abbeyville for history of all of the name of Abbot, by J.T. Abbot, Esq., F.S.A., Darlington;
William Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1730 p. 1099;
Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (Bliss), ii.141, 594;
Cox, Literature of the Sabbath.
External links
|-
1600s births
1648 deaths
People from York
English religious writers
Lay theologians
English MPs 1640 (April)
English MPs 1640–1648
17th-century English male writers
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12866 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globular%20cluster | Globular cluster | A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars. Globular clusters are very tightly bound by gravity, with a high concentration of stars towards their centers. Their name is derived from Latin —a small sphere. Globular clusters are occasionally known simply as globulars.
Although one globular cluster, Omega Centauri, was observed in antiquity and long thought to be a star, recognition of the clusters' true nature came with the advent of telescopes in the 17th century. In early telescopic observations, globular clusters appeared as fuzzy blobs, leading French astronomer Charles Messier to include many of them in his catalog of astronomical objects that he thought could be mistaken for comets. Using larger telescopes, 18th-century astronomers recognized that globular clusters are groups of many individual stars. Early in the 20th century, the distribution of globular clusters in the sky was some of the first evidence that the Sun is far from the center of the Milky Way.
Globular clusters are found in nearly all galaxies. In spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, they are mostly found in the outer, spheroidal part of the galaxy—the galactic halo. They are the largest and most massive type of star cluster, tending to be older, denser, and composed of fewer heavy elements than open clusters, which are generally found in the disks of spiral galaxies. The Milky Way has over 150 known globulars, and there may be many more.
The origin of globular clusters and their role in galactic evolution are unclear. Some are among the oldest objects in their galaxies and even the universe, constraining estimates of the universe's age. Star clusters are often assumed to consist of stars that all formed at the same time from one star-forming nebula, but nearly all globular clusters contain stars that formed at different times, or that have differing compositions. Some clusters may have had multiple episodes of star formation, and some may be remnants of smaller galaxies captured by larger galaxies.
History of observations
The first known globular cluster, now called M22, was discovered in 1665 by Abraham Ihle, a German amateur astronomer. The cluster Omega Centauri, easily visible in the southern sky with the naked eye, was known to ancient astronomers like Ptolemy as a star, but was reclassified as a nebula by Edmond Halley in 1677, then finally as a globular cluster in the early 19th century by John Herschel. The French astronomer Abbé Lacaille listed NGC 104, NGC 4833, M55, M69, and NGC 6397 in his 1751–1752 catalogue. The low resolution of early telescopes prevented individual stars in a cluster from being visually separated until Charles Messier observed M4 in 1764.
When William Herschel began his comprehensive survey of the sky using large telescopes in 1782, there were 34 known globular clusters. Herschel discovered another 36 and was the first to resolve virtually all of them into stars. He coined the term globular cluster in his Catalogue of a Second Thousand New Nebulae and Clusters of Stars (1789). In 1914, Harlow Shapley began a series of studies of globular clusters, published across about 40 scientific papers. He examined the clusters' RR Lyrae variables—stars which he assumed were Cepheid variables—and used their luminosity and period of variability to estimate the distances to the clusters. It was later found that RR Lyrae variables are fainter than Cepheid variables, causing Shapley to overestimate the distances.
A large majority of the Milky Way's globular clusters are found in the celestial sky around the galactic core. In 1918, Shapley used this strongly asymmetrical distribution to determine the overall dimensions of the galaxy. Assuming a roughly spherical distribution of globular clusters around the galaxy’s center, he used the positions of the clusters to estimate the position of the Sun relative to the galactic center. He correctly concluded that the Milky Way's center is in the Sagittarius constellation and not near the Earth. He overestimated the distance, finding typical globular cluster distances of ; the modern distance to the galactic center is roughly . Shapley's measurements indicated the Sun is relatively far from the center of the galaxy, contrary to what had been inferred from the observed uniform distribution of ordinary stars. In reality, most ordinary stars lie within the galaxy's disk and are thus obscured by gas and dust in the disk, whereas globular clusters lie outside the disk and can be seen at much further distances.
The count of known globular clusters in the Milky Way has continued to increase, reaching 83 in 1915, 93 in 1930, 97 by 1947, and 157 in 2010. Additional, undiscovered globular clusters are believed to be in the galactic bulge or hidden by the gas and dust of the Milky Way. The Andromeda Galaxy—comparable in size to the Milky Way—may have as many as 500 globulars. Every galaxy of sufficient mass in the Local Group has an associated system of globular clusters, as does almost every large galaxy surveyed. Some giant elliptical galaxies (particularly those at the centers of galaxy clusters), such as M87, have as many as 13,000 globular clusters.
Classification
Shapley was later assisted in his studies of clusters by Henrietta Swope and Helen Sawyer Hogg. In 1927–1929, Shapley and Sawyer categorized clusters by the degree of concentration of stars toward each core. Their system, known as the Shapley–Sawyer Concentration Class, identifies the most concentrated clusters as Class I and ranges to the most diffuse Class XII. In 2015, astronomers from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile proposed a new type of globular cluster on the basis of observational data: dark globular clusters.
Formation
The formation of globular clusters is poorly understood. Globular clusters have traditionally been described as a simple star population formed from a single giant molecular cloud, and thus with roughly uniform age and metallicity (proportion of heavy elements in their composition). Modern observations show that nearly all globular clusters contain multiple populations; the globular clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) exhibit a bimodal population, for example. During their youth, these LMC clusters may have encountered giant molecular clouds that triggered a second round of star formation. This star-forming period is relatively brief, compared with the age of many globular clusters. It has been proposed that this multiplicity in stellar populations could have a dynamical origin. In the Antennae Galaxy, for example, the Hubble Space Telescope has observed clusters of clusters—regions in the galaxy that span hundreds of parsecs, in which many of the clusters will eventually collide and merge. Their overall range of ages and (possibly) metallicities could lead to clusters with a bimodal, or even multiple, distribution of populations.
Observations of globular clusters show that their stars primarily come from regions of more efficient star formation, and from where the interstellar medium is at a higher density, as compared to normal star-forming regions. Globular cluster formation is prevalent in starburst regions and in interacting galaxies. Some globular clusters likely formed in dwarf galaxies and were removed by tidal forces to join the Milky Way. In elliptical and lenticular galaxies there is a correlation between the mass of the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at their centers and the extent of their globular cluster systems. The mass of the SMBH in such a galaxy is often close to the combined mass of the galaxy's globular clusters.
No known globular clusters display active star formation, consistent with the hypothesis that globular clusters are typically the oldest objects in their galaxy and were among the first collections of stars to form. Very large regions of star formation known as super star clusters, such as Westerlund 1 in the Milky Way, may be the precursors of globular clusters.
Many of the Milky Way's globular clusters have a retrograde orbit, including the most massive, Omega Centauri. Its retrograde orbit suggests it may be a remnant of a dwarf galaxy captured by the Milky Way.
Composition
Globular clusters are generally composed of hundreds of thousands of low-metal, old stars. The stars found in a globular cluster are similar to those in the bulge of a spiral galaxy but confined to a spheroid in which half the light is emitted within a radius of only a few to a few tens of parsecs. They are free of gas and dust and it is presumed that all of the gas and dust was long ago either turned into stars or blown out of the cluster by the massive first-generation stars.
Globular clusters can contain a high density of stars; on average about 0.4 stars per cubic parsec, increasing to 100 or 1000 stars/pc in the core of the cluster. In comparison, the stellar density around the sun is roughly 0.1 stars/pc. The typical distance between stars in a globular cluster is about 1 light year, but at its core the separation between stars averages about a third of a light year—13 times closer than Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun.
Globular clusters are thought to be unfavorable locations for planetary systems. Planetary orbits are dynamically unstable within the cores of dense clusters because of the gravitational perturbations of passing stars. A planet orbiting at 1 astronomical unit around a star that is within the core of a dense cluster, such as , would only survive on the order of 100million years. There is a planetary system orbiting a pulsar (PSR B1620−26) that belongs to the globular cluster M4, but these planets likely formed after the event that created the pulsar.
Some globular clusters, like Omega Centauri in the Milky Way and Mayall II in the Andromeda Galaxy, are extraordinarily massive, measuring several million solar masses () and having multiple stellar populations. Both are evidence that supermassive globular clusters are in fact the cores of dwarf galaxies that have been consumed by larger galaxies. About a quarter of the globular cluster population in the Milky Way may have been accreted this way, as with more than 60% of the globular clusters in the outer halo of Andromeda.
Heavy element content
Globular clusters normally consist of Population II stars which, compared with Population I stars such as the Sun, have a higher proportion of hydrogen and helium and a lower proportion of heavier elements. Astronomers refer to these heavier elements as metals (distinct from the material concept) and to the proportions of these elements as the metallicity. Produced by stellar nucleosynthesis, the metals are recycled into the interstellar medium and enter a new generation of stars. The proportion of metals can thus be an indication of the age of a star in simple models, with older stars typically having a lower metallicity.
The Dutch astronomer Pieter Oosterhoff observed two special populations of globular clusters, which became known as Oosterhoff groups. The second group has a slightly longer period of RR Lyrae variable stars. While both groups have a low proportion of metallic elements as measured by spectroscopy, the metal spectral lines in the stars of Oosterhoff type I (Oo I) cluster are not quite as weak as those in type II (Oo II), and so type I stars are referred to as metal-rich (e.g. Terzan 7), while type II stars are metal-poor (e.g. ESO 280-SC06). These two distinct populations have been observed in many galaxies, especially massive elliptical galaxies. Both groups are nearly as old as the universe itself and are of similar ages. Suggested scenarios to explain these subpopulations include violent gas-rich galaxy mergers, the accretion of dwarf galaxies, and multiple phases of star formation in a single galaxy. In the Milky Way, the metal-poor clusters are associated with the halo and the metal-rich clusters with the bulge.
In the Milky Way, a large majority of the metal-poor clusters are aligned on a plane in the outer part of the galaxy's halo. This observation supports the view that type II clusters were captured from a satellite galaxy, rather than being the oldest members of the Milky Way's globular cluster system—as was previously thought. The difference between the two cluster types would then be explained by a time delay between when the two galaxies formed their cluster systems.
Exotic components
Close interactions and near-collisions of stars occur relatively often in globular clusters because of their high star density. These chance encounters give rise to some exotic classes of stars—such as blue stragglers, millisecond pulsars, and low-mass X-ray binaries—which are much more common in globular clusters. How blue stragglers form remains unclear, but most models attribute them to interactions between stars, such as stellar mergers, the transfer of material from one star to another, or even an encounter between two binary systems. The resulting star has a higher temperature than other stars in the cluster with comparable luminosity and thus differs from the main sequence stars formed early in the cluster's existence. Some clusters have two distinct sequences of blue stragglers, one bluer than the other.
Astronomers have searched for black holes within globular clusters since the 1970s. The required resolution for this task is exacting; it is only with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that the first claimed discoveries were made, in 2002 and 2003. Based on HST observations, other researchers suggested the existence of a (solar masses) intermediate-mass black hole in the globular cluster M15 and a black hole in the Mayall II cluster of the Andromeda Galaxy. Both X-ray and radio emissions from Mayall II appear consistent with an intermediate-mass black hole; however, these claimed detections are controversial. The heaviest objects in globular clusters are expected to migrate to the cluster center due to mass segregation. One research group pointed out that the mass-to-light ratio should rise sharply towards the center of the cluster, even without a black hole, in both M15 and Mayall II. Observations from 2018 find no evidence for an intermediate-mass black hole in any globular cluster, including M15, but cannot definitively rule out one with a mass of .
The confirmation of intermediate-mass black holes in globular clusters would have important ramifications for theories of galaxy development as being possible sources for the supermassive black holes at their centers. The mass of these supposed intermediate-mass black holes is proportional to the mass of their surrounding clusters, following a pattern previously discovered between supermassive black holes and their surrounding galaxies.
Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams
Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams (H–R diagrams) of globular clusters allow astronomers to determine many of the properties of their populations of stars. An H–R diagram is a graph of a large sample of stars plotting their absolute magnitude (their luminosity, or brightness measured from a standard distance), as a function of their color index. The color index, roughly speaking, measures the color of the star; positive color indices indicate a reddish star with a cool surface temperature, while negative values indicate a bluer star with a hotter surface. Stars on an H–R diagram mostly lie along a roughly diagonal line sloping from hot, luminous stars in the upper left to cool, faint stars in the lower right. This line is known as the main sequence and represents the primary stage of stellar evolution. The diagram also includes stars in later evolutionary stages such as the cool but luminous red giants.
Constructing an H–R diagram requires knowing the distance to the observed stars to convert apparent into absolute magnitude. Because all the stars in a globular cluster have about the same distance from Earth, a color–magnitude diagram using their observed magnitudes looks like a shifted H–R diagram—because of the roughly constant difference between their apparent and absolute magnitudes. This shift is called the distance modulus and can be used to calculate the distance to the cluster. The modulus is determined by comparing features (like the main sequence) of the cluster's color–magnitude diagram to corresponding features in an H–R diagram of another set of stars, a method known as spectroscopic parallax or main-sequence fitting.
Properties
Since globular clusters form at once from a single giant molecular cloud, a cluster's stars have roughly the same age and composition. A star's evolution is primarily determined by its initial mass, so the positions of stars in a cluster's H–R or color–magnitude diagram mostly reflect their initial masses. A cluster's H–R diagram, therefore, appears quite different from H–R diagrams containing stars of a wide variety of ages. Almost all stars fall on a well-defined curve in globular cluster H–R diagrams, and that curve's shape indicates the age of the cluster. A more detailed H–R diagram often reveals multiple stellar populations as indicated by the presence of closely separated curves, each corresponding to a distinct population of stars with a slightly different age or composition. Observations with the Wide Field Camera 3, installed in 2009 on the Hubble Space Telescope, made it possible to distinguish these slightly different curves.
The most massive main-sequence stars have the highest luminosity and will be the first to evolve into the giant star stage. As the cluster ages, stars of successively lower masses will do the same. Therefore, the age of a single-population cluster can be measured by looking for those stars just beginning to enter the giant star stage, which form a "knee" in the H–R diagram called the main sequence turnoff, bending to the upper right from the main-sequence line. The absolute magnitude at this bend is directly a function of the cluster's age; an age scale can be plotted on an axis parallel to the magnitude.
The morphology and luminosity of globular cluster stars in H–R diagrams are influenced by numerous parameters, many of which are still actively researched. Recent observations have overturned the historical paradigm that all globular clusters consist of stars born at exactly the same time, or sharing exactly the same chemical abundance. Some clusters feature multiple populations, slightly differing in composition and age; for example, high-precision imagery of cluster NGC 2808 discerned three close, but distinct, main sequences. Further, the placements of the cluster stars in an H–R diagram—including the brightnesses of distance indicators—can be influenced by observational biases. One such effect, called blending, arises when the cores of globular clusters are so dense that observations see multiple stars as a single target. The brightness measured for that seemingly single star is thus incorrect—too bright, given that multiple stars contributed. The computed distance is in turn incorrect, so the blending effect can introduce a systematic uncertainty into the cosmic distance ladder and may bias the estimated age of the universe and the Hubble constant.
Consequences
The aforementioned blue stragglers appear on the H–R diagram as a series diverging from the main sequence in the direction of brighter, bluer stars. White dwarfs (the final remnants of some Sun-like stars), which are much fainter and somewhat hotter than the main sequence stars, lie on the bottom-left of an H–R diagram. Globular clusters can be dated by looking at the temperatures of the coolest white dwarfs, often giving results as old as 12.7 billion years. In comparison, open clusters are rarely older than about 500 million years. The ages of globular clusters place a lower bound on the age of the entire universe, presenting a significant constraint in cosmology. Astronomers were historically faced with age estimates of clusters older than their cosmological models would allow, but better measurements of cosmological parameters, through deep sky surveys and satellites, appear to have resolved this issue.
Studying globular clusters sheds light on how the composition of the formational gas and dust affects stellar evolution; the stars' evolutionary tracks vary depending on the abundance of heavy elements. Data obtained from these studies are then used to study the evolution of the Milky Way as a whole.
Morphology
In contrast to open clusters, most globular clusters remain gravitationally bound together for time periods comparable to the lifespans of most of their stars. Strong tidal interactions with other large masses result in the dispersal of some stars, leaving behind "tidal tails" of stars removed from the cluster.
After formation, the stars in the globular cluster begin to interact gravitationally with each other. The velocities of the stars steadily change, and the stars lose any history of their original velocity. The characteristic interval for this to occur is the relaxation time, related to the characteristic length of time a star needs to cross the cluster and the number of stellar masses. The relaxation time varies by cluster, but a typical value is on the order of one billion years.
Although globular clusters are generally spherical in form, ellipticity can form via tidal interactions. Clusters within the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are typically oblate spheroids in shape, while those in the Large Magellanic Cloud are more elliptical.
Radii
Astronomers characterize the morphology (shape) of a globular cluster by means of standard radii: the core radius (rc), the half-light radius (rh), and the tidal or Jacobi radius (rt). The radius can be expressed as a physical distance or as a subtended angle in the sky. Considering a radius around the core, the surface luminosity of the cluster steadily decreases with distance, and the core radius is the distance at which the apparent surface luminosity has dropped by half. A comparable quantity is the half-light radius, or the distance from the core containing half the total luminosity of the cluster; the half-light radius is typically larger than the core radius.
Most globular clusters have a half-light radius of less than 10 parsecs (pc), although some globular clusters have very large radii, like NGC 2419 (rh = 18 pc) and Palomar 14 (rh = 25 pc). The half-light radius includes stars in the outer part of the cluster that happen to lie along the line of sight, so theorists also use the half-mass radius (rm)—the radius from the core that contains half the total mass of the cluster. A small half-mass radius, relative to the overall size, indicates a dense core. Messier 3 (M3), for example, has an overall visible dimension of about 18 arc minutes, but a half-mass radius of only 1.12 arc minutes.
The tidal radius, or Hill sphere, is the distance from the center of the globular cluster at which the external gravitation of the galaxy has more influence over the stars in the cluster than does the cluster itself. This is the distance at which the individual stars belonging to a cluster can be separated away by the galaxy. The tidal radius of M3, for example, is about 40 arc minutes, or about 113 pc.
Mass segregation, luminosity and core collapse
In most Milky Way clusters, the surface brightness of a globular cluster as a function of decreasing distance to the core first increases, then levels off at a distance typically 1–2 parsecs from the core. About 20% of the globular clusters have undergone a process termed "core collapse". In such a cluster, the luminosity increases steadily all the way to the core region.
Models of globular clusters predict core collapse occurs when the more massive stars in a globular cluster encounter their less massive counterparts. Over time, dynamic processes cause individual stars to migrate from the center of the cluster to the outside, resulting in a net loss of kinetic energy from the core region and leading the region's remaining stars to occupy a more compact volume. When this gravothermal instability occurs, the central region of the cluster becomes densely crowded with stars, and the surface brightness of the cluster forms a power-law cusp. A massive black hole at the core could also result in a luminosity cusp. Over a long time this leads to a concentration of massive stars near the core, a phenomenon called mass segregation.
The dynamical heating effect of binary star systems works to prevent an initial core collapse of the cluster. When a star passes near a binary system, the orbit of the latter pair tends to contract, releasing energy. Only after this primordial supply of energy is exhausted can a deeper core collapse proceed. In contrast, the effect of tidal shocks as a globular cluster repeatedly passes through the plane of a spiral galaxy tends to significantly accelerate core collapse.
Core collapse may be divided into three phases. During a cluster's adolescence, core collapse begins with stars nearest the core. Interactions between binary star systems prevents further collapse as the cluster approaches middle age. The central binaries are either disrupted or ejected, resulting in a tighter concentration at the core. The interaction of stars in the collapsed core region causes tight binary systems to form. As other stars interact with these tight binaries they increase the energy at the core, causing the cluster to re-expand. As the average time for a core collapse is typically less than the age of the galaxy, many of a galaxy's globular clusters may have passed through a core collapse stage, then re-expanded.
The HST has provided convincing observational evidence of this stellar mass-sorting process in globular clusters. Heavier stars slow down and crowd at the cluster's core, while lighter stars pick up speed and tend to spend more time at the cluster's periphery. The cluster 47 Tucanae, made up of about one million stars, is one of the densest globular clusters in the Southern Hemisphere. This cluster was subjected to an intensive photographic survey that obtained precise velocities for nearly 15,000 stars in this cluster.
The overall luminosities of the globular clusters within the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy each have a roughly Gaussian distribution, with an average magnitude Mv and a variance σ2. This distribution of globular cluster luminosities is called the Globular Cluster Luminosity Function (GCLF). For the Milky Way, Mv = , σ = . The GCLF has been used as a "standard candle" for measuring the distance to other galaxies, under the assumption that globular clusters in remote galaxies behave similarly to those in the Milky Way.
N-body simulations
Computing the gravitational interactions between stars within a globular cluster requires solving the N-body problem. The naive computational cost for a dynamic simulation increases in proportion to N 2 (where N is the number of objects), so the computing requirements to accurately simulate a cluster of thousands of stars can be enormous. A more efficient method of simulating the N-body dynamics of a globular cluster is done by subdivision into small volumes and velocity ranges, and using probabilities to describe the locations of the stars. Their motions are described by means of the Fokker–Planck equation, often using a model describing the mass density as a function of radius, such as a Plummer model. The simulation becomes more difficult when the effects of binaries and the interaction with external gravitation forces (such as from the Milky Way galaxy) must also be included. In 2010 a low-density globular cluster's lifetime evolution was able to be directly computed, star-by-star.
Completed N-body simulations have shown that stars can follow unusual paths through the cluster, often forming loops and falling more directly toward the core than would a single star orbiting a central mass. Additionally, some stars gain sufficient energy to escape the cluster due to gravitational interactions that result in a sufficient increase in velocity. Over long periods of time this process leads to the dissipation of the cluster, a process termed evaporation. The typical time scale for the evaporation of a globular cluster is 1010 years. The ultimate fate of a globular cluster must be either to accrete stars at its core, causing its steady contraction, or gradual shedding of stars from its outer layers.
Binary stars form a significant portion of stellar systems, with up to half of all field stars and open cluster stars occurring in binary systems. The present-day binary fraction in globular clusters is difficult to measure, and any information about their initial binary fraction is lost by subsequent dynamical evolution. Numerical simulations of globular clusters have demonstrated that binaries can hinder and even reverse the process of core collapse in globular clusters. When a star in a cluster has a gravitational encounter with a binary system, a possible result is that the binary becomes more tightly bound and kinetic energy is added to the solitary star. When the massive stars in the cluster are sped up by this process, it reduces the contraction at the core and limits core collapse.
Intermediate forms
Cluster classification is not always definitive; objects have been found that can be classified in more than one categories. For example, BH 176 in the southern part of the Milky Way has properties of both an open and a globular cluster.
In 2005, astronomers discovered a new, "extended" type of star cluster in the Andromeda Galaxy's halo, similar to the globular cluster. The three new-found clusters have a similar star count as globular clusters and share other characteristics, such as stellar populations and metallicity, but are distinguished by their larger size—several hundred light years across—and some hundred times lower density. Their stars are separated by larger distances; parametrically, these clusters lie somewhere between a globular cluster and a dwarf spheroidal galaxy.
The formation of these extended clusters is likely related to accretion. It is unclear why the Milky Way lacks such clusters; Andromeda is unlikely to be the sole galaxy with them, but their presence in other galaxies remains unknown.
Tidal encounters
When a globular cluster comes close to a large mass, such as the core region of a galaxy, it undergoes a tidal interaction. The difference in gravitational strength between the nearer and further parts of the cluster results in an asymmetric, tidal force. A "tidal shock" occurs whenever the orbit of a cluster takes it through the plane of a galaxy.
Tidal shocks can pull stars away from the cluster halo, leaving only the core part of the cluster; these trails of stars can extend several degrees away from the cluster. These tails typically both precede and follow the cluster along its orbit and can accumulate significant portions of the original mass of the cluster, forming clump-like features. The globular cluster Palomar 5, for example, is near the apogalactic point of its orbit after passing through the Milky Way. Streams of stars extend outward toward the front and rear of the orbital path of this cluster, stretching to distances of 13,000 light years. Tidal interactions have stripped away much of Palomar 5's mass; further interactions with the galactic core are expected to transform it into a long stream of stars orbiting the Milky Way in its halo.
The Milky Way is in the process of tidally stripping the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy of stars and globular clusters through the Sagittarius Stream. As many as 20% of the globular clusters in the Milky Way's outer halo may have originated in that galaxy. Palomar 12, for example, most likely originated in the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal but is now associated with the Milky Way. Tidal interactions like these add kinetic energy into a globular cluster, dramatically increasing the evaporation rate and shrinking the size of the cluster. The increased evaporation accelerates the process of core collapse.
Planets
Astronomers are searching for exoplanets of stars in globular star clusters. A search in 2000 for giant planets in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae came up negative, suggesting that the abundance of heavier elements—low in globular clusters—necessary to build these planets may need to be at least 40% of the Sun's abundance. Because terrestrial planets are built from heavier elements such as silicon, iron and magnesium, member stars have a far lower likelihood of hosting Earth-mass planets than stars in the solar neighborhood. Globular clusters are thus unlikely to host habitable terrestrial planets.
A giant planet was found in the Messier 4 globular cluster orbiting a pulsar in the binary star system PSR B1620-26. The planet's eccentric and highly inclined orbit suggests it may have been formed around another star in the cluster, then "exchanged" into its current arrangement. The likelihood of close encounters between stars in a globular cluster can disrupt planetary systems; some planets break free to become rogue planets, orbiting the galaxy. Planets orbiting close to their star can become disrupted, potentially leading to orbital decay and an increase in orbital eccentricity and tidal effects.
See also
Footnotes
References
Further reading
Books
Review articles
External links
Globular Clusters, Students for the Exploration and Development of Space Messier pages
Milky Way Globular Clusters
Catalogue of Milky Way Globular Cluster Parameters by William E. Harris, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada
A galactic globular cluster database by Marco Castellani, Rome Astronomical Observatory, Italy
Catalogue of structural and kinematic parameters and galactic orbits of globular clusters by Holger Baumgardt, University of Queensland, Australia
SCYON, a newsletter dedicated to star clusters.
MODEST, a loose collaboration of scientists working on star clusters.
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12867 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20Vancouver | George Vancouver | Captain George Vancouver (22 June 1757 – 10 May 1798) was a British officer of the Royal Navy best known for his 1791–95 expedition, which explored and charted North America's northwestern Pacific Coast regions, including the coasts of what are now the Canadian province of British Columbia as well as the US states of Alaska, Washington and Oregon. He also explored the Hawaiian Islands and the southwest coast of Australia.
Vancouver Island, the city of Vancouver in British Columbia, as well as Vancouver, Washington in the United States, are all named for him. Mount Vancouver, on the Canadian–US border between Yukon and Alaska, and New Zealand's sixth-highest mountain, also Mount Vancouver, are also named for him.
Early life
George Vancouver was born in the seaport town of King's Lynn (Norfolk, England) on 22 June 1757 - the sixth and youngest child of John Jasper Vancouver, a Dutch-born deputy collector of customs, and Bridget Berners. The surname Vancouver comes from Coevorden, Drenthe province, Netherlands (Koevern in Dutch Low Saxon).
In 1771, at the age of 13, Vancouver entered the Royal Navy as a "young gentleman", a future candidate for midshipman. He was nominally an able seaman (AB) but, in reality, sailed as one of the midshipmen aboard , on James Cook's second voyage (1772–1775) searching for Terra Australis. He also sailed with Cook's third voyage (1776–1780), this time aboard Resolutions companion ship, , and was present during the first European sighting and exploration of the Hawaiian Islands. Upon his return to Britain in October 1780 Vancouver was commissioned as a lieutenant and posted aboard the sloop - initially on escort and patrol duty in the English Channel and North Sea. He accompanied the ship when it left Plymouth on 11 February 1782 for the West Indies. On 7 May 1782 he was appointed fourth lieutenant of the 74-gun ship of the line , which was at the time part of the British West Indies Fleet and assigned to patrolling the French-held Leeward Islands. Vancouver subsequently saw action at the Battle of the Saintes (April 1782), wherein he distinguished himself. Vancouver returned to England in June 1783.
In the late 1780s the Spanish Empire commissioned an expedition to the Pacific Northwest. In 1789 the Nootka Crisis developed, and Spain and Britain came close to war over ownership of Nootka Sound on contemporary Vancouver Island, and - of greater importance - over the right to colonise and settle the Pacific Northwest coast. Henry Roberts had recently taken command of the survey ship (a new vessel named in honour of the ship on Cook's voyage) with the prospect of another round-the-world voyage, and Roberts selected Vancouver as his first lieutenant, but they both were then posted to other warships due to the crisis. Vancouver went with Joseph Whidbey to the 74-gun ship of the line . When the first Nootka Convention ended the crisis in 1790, Vancouver was given command of Discovery to take possession of Nootka Sound and to survey the coasts.
Explorations
Vancouver Expedition
Departing England with two ships, HMS Discovery and , on 1 April 1791, Vancouver commanded an expedition charged with exploring the Pacific region. In its first year the expedition travelled to Cape Town, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii, collecting botanical samples and surveying coastlines along the way. He formally claimed at Possession Point, King George Sound Western Australia, now the town of Albany, Western Australia for the British. Proceeding to North America, Vancouver followed the coasts of present-day Oregon and Washington northward. In April 1792 he encountered American Captain Robert Gray off the coast of Oregon just prior to Gray's sailing up the Columbia River.
Vancouver entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island and the present-day Washington state mainland, on 29 April 1792. His orders included a survey of every inlet and outlet on the west coast of the mainland, all the way north to Alaska. Most of this work was in small craft propelled by both sail and oar; manoeuvring larger sail-powered vessels in uncharted waters was generally impractical and dangerous.
Vancouver named many features for his officers, friends, associates, and his ship Discovery, including:
Mount Baker – after Discovery's 3rd Lieutenant Joseph Baker, the first on the expedition to spot it
Mount St. Helens – after his friend, Alleyne Fitzherbert, 1st Baron St Helens
Puget Sound – after Discovery's 2nd lieutenant Peter Puget, who explored its southern reaches.
Mount Rainier – after his friend, Rear Admiral Peter Rainier.
Port Gardner and Port Susan, Washington – after his former commander Vice Admiral Sir Alan Gardner and his wife Susannah, Lady Gardner.
Whidbey Island – after naval engineer Joseph Whidbey.
Discovery Passage, Discovery Island, Discovery Bay, Port Discovery and Discovery Park (Seattle).
After a Spanish expedition in 1791, Vancouver was the second European to enter Burrard Inlet on 13 June 1792, naming it for his friend Sir Harry Burrard. It is the present day main harbour area of the City of Vancouver beyond Stanley Park. He surveyed Howe Sound and Jervis Inlet over the next nine days. Then, on his 35th birthday on 22 June 1792, he returned to Point Grey, the present-day location of the University of British Columbia. Here he unexpectedly met a Spanish expedition led by Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés y Flores. Vancouver was "mortified" (his word) to learn they already had a crude chart of the Strait of Georgia based on the 1791 exploratory voyage of José María Narváez the year before, under command of Francisco de Eliza. For three weeks they cooperatively explored the Georgia Strait and the Discovery Islands area before sailing separately towards Nootka Sound.
After the summer surveying season ended, in August 1792, Vancouver went to Nootka, then the region's most important harbour, on contemporary Vancouver Island. Here he was to receive any British buildings and lands returned by the Spanish from claims by Francisco de Eliza for the Spanish crown. The Spanish commander, Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra, was very cordial and he and Vancouver exchanged the maps they had made, but no agreement was reached; they decided to await further instructions. At this time, they decided to name the large island on which Nootka was now proven to be located as Quadra and Vancouver Island. Years later, as Spanish influence declined, the name was shortened to simply Vancouver Island.
While at Nootka Sound Vancouver acquired Robert Gray's chart of the lower Columbia River. Gray had entered the river during the summer before sailing to Nootka Sound for repairs. Vancouver realised the importance of verifying Gray's information and conducting a more thorough survey. In October 1792, he sent Lieutenant William Robert Broughton with several boats up the Columbia River. Broughton got as far as the Columbia River Gorge, sighting and naming Mount Hood.
Vancouver sailed south along the coast of Spanish Alta California, visiting Chumash villages at Point Conception and near Mission San Buenaventura. In November, he entered San Francisco Bay, later visiting Monterey; in both places, he was warmly received by the Spanish. Vancouver spent the winter in continuing exploration of the Sandwich Islands, the contemporary islands of Hawaii.
Further explorations
The next year, 1793, he returned to British Columbia and proceeded further north, unknowingly missing the overland explorer Alexander Mackenzie by only 48 days. He got to 56°30'N, having explored north from Point Menzies in Burke Channel to the northwest coast of Prince of Wales Island. He sailed around the latter island, as well as circumnavigating Revillagigedo Island and charting parts of the coasts of Mitkof, Zarembo, Etolin, Wrangell, Kuiu and Kupreanof Islands. With worsening weather, he sailed south to Alta California, hoping to find Bodega y Quadra and fulfil his territorial mission, but the Spaniard was not there. The Spanish governor refused to let a foreign official into the interior. Vancouver noted that the region's "only defenses against foreign attack are a few poor cannons". He again spent the winter in the Sandwich Islands.
In 1794, he first went to Cook Inlet, the northernmost point of his exploration, and from there followed the coast south. Boat parties charted the east coasts of Chichagof and Baranof Islands, circumnavigated Admiralty Island, explored to the head of Lynn Canal, and charted the rest of Kuiu Island and nearly all of Kupreanof Island. He then set sail for Great Britain by way of Cape Horn, returning in September 1795, thus completing a circumnavigation of South America.
Later life
Impressed by the view from Richmond Hill, Vancouver retired to Petersham, London.
Vancouver faced difficulties when he returned home to England. The accomplished and politically well-connected naturalist Archibald Menzies complained that his servant had been pressed into service during a shipboard emergency; sailing master Joseph Whidbey had a competing claim for pay as expedition astronomer; and Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelford, whom Vancouver had disciplined for numerous infractions and eventually sent home in disgrace, proceeded to harass him publicly and privately.
Pitt's allies, including his cousin, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, attacked Vancouver in the press. Thomas Pitt took a more direct approach; on 29 August 1796 he sent Vancouver a letter heaping many insults on the head of his former captain, and challenging him to a duel. Vancouver gravely replied that he was unable "in a private capacity to answer for his public conduct in his official duty," and offered instead to submit to formal examination by flag officers. Pitt chose instead to stalk Vancouver, ultimately assaulting him on a London street corner. The terms of their subsequent legal dispute required both parties to keep the peace, but nothing stopped Vancouver's civilian brother Charles from interposing and giving Pitt blow after blow until onlookers restrained the attacker. Charges and counter-charges flew in the press, with the wealthy Camelford faction having the greater firepower until Vancouver, ailing from his long naval service, died.
Death
Vancouver, at one time amongst Britain's greatest explorers and navigators, died in obscurity on 10 May 1798 at the age of 40, less than three years after completing his voyages and expeditions. No official cause of death was stated, as the medical records pertaining to Vancouver were destroyed; one doctor named John Naish claimed Vancouver died from kidney failure, while others believed it was a hyperthyroid condition. His grave is in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Petersham, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, England. The Hudson's Bay Company placed a memorial plaque in the church in 1841. His grave in Portland stone, renovated in the 1960s, is now Grade II listed in view of its historical associations.
Legacy
Navigation
Vancouver determined that the Northwest Passage did not exist at the latitudes that had long been suggested. His charts of the North American northwest coast were so extremely accurate that they served as the key reference for coastal navigation for generations. Robin Fisher, the academic vice-president of Mount Royal University in Calgary and author of two books on Vancouver, states:
However, Vancouver failed to discover two of the largest and most important rivers on the Pacific coast, the Fraser River and the Columbia River. He also missed the Skeena River near Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia. Vancouver did eventually learn of the river before he finished his survey—from Robert Gray, captain of the American merchant ship that conducted the first Euroamerican sailing of the Columbia River on 11 May 1792, after first sighting it on an earlier voyage in 1788. However it and the Fraser River never made it onto Vancouver's charts.
Stephen R. Bown, noted in Mercator's World magazine (November/December 1999) that:
While it is difficult to comprehend how Vancouver missed the Fraser River, much of this river's delta was subject to flooding and summer freshet which prevented the captain from spotting any of its great channels as he sailed the entire shoreline from Point Roberts, Washington, to Point Grey in 1792. The Spanish expeditions to the Pacific Northwest, with the 1791 Francisco de Eliza expedition preceding Vancouver by a year, had also missed the Fraser River although they knew from its muddy plume that there was a major river located nearby.
Indigenous peoples
Vancouver generally established a good rapport with both Indigenous peoples and European trappers. Historical records show Vancouver enjoyed good relations with native leaders both in Hawaii – where King Kamehameha I ceded Hawaii to Vancouver in 1794 – as well as the Pacific Northwest and California. Vancouver's journals exhibit a high degree of sensitivity to natives. He wrote of meeting the Chumash people, and of his exploration of a small island on the Californian coast on which an important burial site was marked by a sepulchre of "peculiar character" lined with boards and fragments of military instruments lying near a square box covered with mats. Vancouver states:
Vancouver also displayed contempt in his journals towards unscrupulous western traders who provided guns to natives by writing:
Robin Fisher notes that Vancouver's "relationships with aboriginal groups were generally peaceful; indeed, his detailed survey would not have been possible if they had been hostile." While there were hostile incidents at the end of Vancouver's last season – the most serious of which involved a clash with Tlingits at Behm Canal in southeast Alaska in 1794 – these were the exceptions to Vancouver's exploration of the US and Canadian Northwest coast.
Despite a long history of warfare between Britain and Spain, Vancouver maintained excellent relations with his Spanish counterparts and even fêted a Spanish sea captain aboard his ship during his 1792 trip to the Vancouver region.
Namesakes
Ship and cadet units
HMCS Vancouver Halifax-class frigate of the Royal Canadian Navy (Named for the city, which is named for the man.)
TS Vancouver, Australian Navy Cadets
47 RCSCC CAPTAIN VANCOUVER, Royal Canadian Sea Cadets
Places
Many places around the world have been named after George Vancouver, including:
Australia
Vancouver Peninsula, Cape Vancouver and Vancouver Breakers in King George Sound, Western Australia
Canada
Mount Vancouver, in Yukon and neighbouring Alaska, eighth highest mountain in Canada
Vancouver, British Columbia, a major city on the mainland in southwestern British Columbia, the province's largest city
Vancouver Maritime Museum
Vancouver Bay, British Columbia, in Jervis Inlet, East of Powell River, named after Vancouver when Capt. George H. Richards resurveyed the area in 1860.
Vancouver Island, in British Columbia off the southwest coast of the mainland. North America's largest Pacific Island and location of the provincial capital at Victoria on its southern tip.
New Zealand
Mount Vancouver, the sixth highest mountain in New Zealand.
Vancouver Arm of Breaksea Sound, Fiordland, South Island
United Kingdom
Vancouver Road in Ham, London, near Petersham, his place of burial
United States
Vancouver, Washington, a city in southwest Washington across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon
Fort Vancouver, a Hudson's Bay Company trading post established in 1825
Memorials
Statues of Vancouver are located in his birthplace of King's Lynn, in front of Vancouver City Hall, and on top of the dome of the British Columbia Parliament Buildings.
The Vancouver Quarter Shopping Centre bears his name in King's Lynn.
Canada Post issued a pair of 14-cent stamps to mark the 200th anniversary of Captain Cook's arrival at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island on 26 April 1978. George Vancouver was a crewman on this voyage.
Gate to the Northwest Passage, a commemorative statue by Vancouver artist Alan Chung Hung was commissioned by Parks Canada and installed at the mouth of False Creek in Vanier Park near the Vancouver Maritime Museum in 1980.
Canada Post issued a 37-cent stamp inscribed Vancouver Explores the Coast on 17 March 1988. It was one of a set of four stamps issued to honour Exploration of Canada – Recognizers.
The George Vancouver Rose, named in his honour and hybridised by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
First Capital Connect named Class 365 unit 365514 Captain George Vancouver, operating on the route between King's Lynn and London.
Virgin CrossCountry named Class 221 unit 221129 George Vancouver in 2003, it was denamed on transfer to Arriva CrossCountry in 2007.
A commemorative monument is located on the beach in North Kihei, Maui, Hawaii, commemorating George Vancouver's contribution of coffee and root vegetables to the islands of Hawaii, inscribed by Pierre Elliot Trudeau 2 December 1967.
Statue of George Vancouver (2000), Vancouver, Washington
Many collections were made on the voyage: one was donated by Archibald Menzies to the British Museum 1796; another made by surgeon George Goodman Hewett (1765–1834) was donated by Augustus Wollaston Franks to the British Museum in 1891. An account of these has been published.
250th birthday commemorations
Canada Post issued a $1.55 postage stamp to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Vancouver's birth, on 22 June 2007. The stamp has an embossed image of Vancouver seen from behind as he gazes forward towards a mountainous coastline. This may be the first Canadian stamp not to show the subject's face.
The City of Vancouver in Canada organised a celebration to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Vancouver's birth, in June 2007 at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. The one-hour festivities included the presentation of a massive 63 by 114 centimetre carrot cake, the firing of a gun salute by the Royal Canadian Artillery's 15th Field Regiment and a performance by the Vancouver Firefighter's Band.
Vancouver's then-mayor, Sam Sullivan, officially declared 22 June 2007 to be "George Day".
The Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Elder sɁəyeɬəq (Larry Grant) attended the festivities and acknowledged that some of his people might disapprove of his presence, but also noted:
Origins of the family name
There has been some debate about the origins of the Vancouver name. It is now commonly accepted that the name Vancouver derives from the expression van Coevorden, meaning "(originating) from Coevorden", a city in the northeast of the Netherlands. This city is apparently named after the "Coeverden" family of the 13th–15th century.
In the 16th century, a number of businessmen from the Coevorden area (and the rest of the Netherlands) moved to England. Some of them were known as Van Coeverden. Others adopted the surname Oxford, as in oxen fording (a river), which is approximately the English translation of Coevorden. However, it is not the exact name of the noble family mentioned in the history books that claim Vancouver's noble lineage: that name was Coeverden not Coevorden.
In the 1970s, Adrien Mansvelt, a former consul general of the Netherlands based in Vancouver, published a collation of information in both historical and genealogical journals and in the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Mansvelt's theory was later presented by the city during the Expo 86 World's Fair, as historical fact. The information was then used by historian W. Kaye Lamb in his book A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1791–1795 (1984).
W. Kaye Lamb, in summarising Mansvelt's 1973 research, observes evidence of close family ties between the Vancouver family of Britain and the Van Coeverden family of the Netherlands as well as George Vancouver's own words from his diaries in referring to his Dutch ancestry:
In 2006 John Robson, a librarian at the University of Waikato, conducted his own research into George Vancouver's ancestry, which he published in an article in the British Columbia History journal. Robson theorises that Vancouver's forebears may have been Flemish rather than Dutch; he believes that Vancouver is descended from the Vangover family of Ipswich in Suffolk and Colchester in Essex. Those towns had a significant Flemish population in the 16th and 17th centuries.
George Vancouver named the south point of what is now Couverden Island, Alaska, Point Couverden during his exploration of the North American Pacific coast, in honour of his family's hometown of Coevorden. It is located at the western point of entry to Lynn Canal in southeastern Alaska.
Works by George Vancouver
The Admiralty instructed Vancouver to publish a narrative of his voyage which he started to write in early 1796 in Petersham. At the time of his death the manuscript covered the period up to mid-1795. The work, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World, was completed by his brother John and published in three volumes in the autumn of 1798. A second edition was published in 1801 in six volumes.
A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean: And Round the World, Volume 1
A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean: And Round the World, Volume 2
A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean: And Round the World, Volume 3
A modern annotated edition (1984) by W. Kaye Lamb was renamed The Voyage of George Vancouver 1791–1795, and published in four volumes by the Hakluyt Society of London, England.
See also
European and American voyages of scientific exploration
References
Further reading
Godwin, George. "Captain George Vancouver, 1757-1798." History Today (Sep 1957) 7#9 pp 605–609.
Brown, Stephen R. Madness, Betrayal and the Lash: The Epic Voyage of Captain George Vancouver (Douglas & McIntyre 2008).
Godwin, George. Vancouver A Life: 1757–1798 (D. Appleton and Company, 1931).
The Life and Voyages of Captain George Vancouver by Bern Anderson. Published by University of Washington Press, 1966.
Captain Vancouver: A Portrait of His Life by Alison Gifford. Published by St. James Press, 1986.
Journal of the Voyages of the H.M.S. Discovery and Chatham by Thomas Manby. Published by Ye Galleon Press, 1988.
Vancouver's Voyage: Charting the Northwest Coast, 1791–1795 by Robin Fisher and Gary Fiegehen. Published by Douglas & McIntyre, 1992.
On Stormy Seas, The Triumphs and Torments of Captain George Vancouver by B. Guild Gillespie. Published by Horsdal & Schubart, 1992.
Captain Vancouver: North-West Navigator by E.C. Coleman. Published by Tempus, 2007.
Sailing with Vancouver: A Modern Sea Dog, Antique Charts and a Voyage Through Time by Sam McKinney. Published by Touchwood Editions, 2004.
The Early Exploration of Inland Washington Waters: Journals and Logs from Six Expeditions, 1786–1792 edited by Richard W. Blumenthal. Published by McFarland & Company, 2004.
A Discovery Journal: George Vancouver's First Survey Season – 1792 by John E. Roberts. Published by Trafford Publishing, 2005.
With Vancouver in Inland Washington Waters: Journals of 12 Crewmen April–June 1792 edited by Richard W. Blumenthal. Published by McFarland & Company, 2007.
External links
Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
George Vancouver (1757–1798), Explorer, illustrations in the National Portrait Gallery.
The True Meaning of Vancouver – Etymology of his name.
interactive Google map showing the path Vancouver followed during his 11-day survey of the southwest coast of British Columbia
Coevorden: What connection does Vancouver have with Coevorden, an industrial town of about 20,000 in the northeast Netherlands?- The History of Metropolitan Vancouver website. (Retrieved on 11 June 2007)
Vancouver History – Including historic street video of Vancouver from 1907.
English explorers
English explorers of the Pacific
English explorers of North America
Explorers of British Columbia
Explorers of Oregon
18th-century English people
1757 births
1798 deaths
Burials at St Peter's, Petersham
People from King's Lynn
Royal Navy officers
History of Bellingham, Washington
Persons of National Historic Significance (Canada)
Pre-Confederation British Columbia people
Explorers of California
Explorers of Alaska
English people of Dutch descent
James Cook
Explorers of Washington (state)
18th-century Royal Navy personnel
18th-century explorers
Mount Rainier
Explorers of Canada
English hydrographers | [
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12872 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great%20Vowel%20Shift | Great Vowel Shift | The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels was changed. Some consonant sounds changed as well, particularly those that became silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is sometimes used to include these consonant changes.
The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.
Causes
The causes of the Great Vowel Shift are unknown and have been a source of intense scholarly debate; as yet, there is no firm consensus. The greatest changes occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries, and its origins are at least partly phonetic.
Population migration: is the most accepted theory, some scholars have argued that the rapid migration of peoples to the southeast of England from East Midlands of England and Central Midlands of England following the Black Death produced a clash of dialects that made Londoners distinguish their speech from the immigrants by changing their vowel system.
French loan words: Others argue that the influx of French loanwords was a major factor in the shift.
Middle class hypercorrection: Yet others assert that because of the increasing prestige of French pronunciations among the middle classes (perhaps related to the English aristocracy's switching from French to English around this time), a process of hypercorrection may have started a shift that unintentionally resulted in vowel pronunciations that are inaccurate imitations of French pronunciations.
War with France: An opposing theory states that the wars with France and general anti-French sentiments caused hypercorrection deliberately to make English sound less like French.
Overall changes
The main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English in the year 1400 and Modern English (Received Pronunciation) is in the value of the long vowels.
Long vowels in Middle English had "continental" values, much like those in Italian and Standard German; in standard Modern English, they have entirely different pronunciations. The differing pronunciations of English vowel letters do not stem from the Great Shift as such but because English spelling did not adapt to the changes.
German had undergone vowel changes quite similar to the Great Shift in a slightly earlier period but the spelling was changed accordingly (e.g. Middle High German → modern German "to bite").
This timeline shows the main vowel changes that occurred between late Middle English in the year 1400 and Received Pronunciation in the mid-20th century by using representative words. The Great Vowel Shift occurred in the lower half of the table, between 1400 and 1600–1700.
The changes that happened after 1700 are not considered part of the Great Vowel Shift. Pronunciation is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet:
Details
Middle English vowel system
Before the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English in Southern England had seven long vowels, . The vowels occurred in, for example, the words bite, meet, meat, mate, boat, boot, and out, respectively.
The words had very different pronunciations in Middle English from their pronunciations in Modern English.
Long i in bite was pronounced as so Middle English bite sounded like Modern English beet .
Long e in meet was pronounced as so Middle English meet sounded similar to Modern English mate
Long a in mate was pronounced as , with a vowel similar to the broad a of spa.
Long o in boot was pronounced as , similar to modern oa in General American boat .
In addition, Middle English had:
Long in beat, like modern short e in bed but pronounced longer, and
Long in boat.
Changes
After around 1300, the long vowels of Middle English began changing in pronunciation as follows:
Diphthongisation – The two close vowels, , became diphthongs (vowel breaking).
Vowel raising – The other five, , underwent an increase in tongue height (raising).
They occurred over several centuries and can be divided into two phases. The first phase affected the close vowels and the close-mid vowels : were raised to , and became the diphthongs or . The second phase affected the open vowel and the open-mid vowels : were raised, in most cases changing to .
The Great Vowel Shift changed vowels without merger so Middle English before the vowel shift had the same number of vowel phonemes as Early Modern English after the vowel shift.
After the Great Vowel Shift, some vowel phonemes began merging. Immediately after the Great Vowel Shift, the vowels of meet and meat were different, but they are merged in Modern English, and both words are pronounced as .
However, during the 16th and the 17th centuries, there were many different mergers, and some mergers can be seen in individual Modern English words like great, which is pronounced with the vowel as in mate rather than the vowel as in meat.
This is a simplified picture of the changes that happened between late Middle English (late ME), Early Modern English (EModE), and today's English (ModE). Pronunciations in 1400, 1500, 1600, and 1900 are shown. To hear recordings of the sounds, click the phonetic symbols.
Before labial consonants and also after , did not shift, and remains as in soup and room (its Middle English spelling was roum).
First phase
The first phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English close-mid vowels , as in beet and boot, and the close vowels , as in bite and out. The close-mid vowels became close , and the close vowels became diphthongs. The first phase was complete in 1500, meaning that by that time, words like beet and boot had lost their Middle English pronunciation, and were pronounced with the same vowels as in Modern English. The words bite and out were pronounced with diphthongs, but not the same diphthongs as in Modern English.
Scholars agree that the Middle English close vowels became diphthongs around the year 1500, but disagree about what diphthongs they changed to. According to Lass, the words bite and out after diphthongisation were pronounced as and , similar to American English bait and oat . Later, the diphthongs shifted to , then , and finally to Modern English . This sequence of events is supported by the testimony of orthoepists before Hodges in 1644.
However, many scholars such as , , and argue for theoretical reasons that, contrary to what 16th-century witnesses report, the vowels were actually immediately centralised and lowered to .
Evidence from northern English and Scots (see below) suggests that the close-mid vowels were the first to shift. As the Middle English vowels were raised towards , they forced the original Middle English out of place and caused them to become diphthongs . This type of sound change, in which one vowel's pronunciation shifts so that it is pronounced like a second vowel, and the second vowel is forced to change its pronunciation, is called a push chain.
However, according to professor Jürgen Handke, for some time, there was a phonetic split between words with the vowel and the diphthong , in words where the Middle English shifted to the Modern English . For an example, high was pronounced with the vowel , and like and my were pronounced with the diphthong . Therefore, for logical reasons, the close vowels could have diphthongised before the close-mid vowels raised. Otherwise, high would probably rhyme with thee rather than my. This type of chain is called a drag chain.
Second phase
The second phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English open vowel , as in mate, and the Middle English open-mid vowels , as in meat and boat. Around 1550, Middle English was raised to . Then, after 1600, the new was raised to , with the Middle English open-mid vowels raised to close-mid .
Later mergers
During the first and the second phases of the Great Vowel Shift, long vowels were shifted without merging with other vowels, but after the second phase, several vowels merged. The later changes also involved the Middle English diphthong , as in day, which had monophthongised to , and merged with Middle English as in mate or as in meat.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, several different pronunciation variants existed among different parts of the population for words like meet, meat, mate, and day. In each pronunciation variant, different pairs or trios of words were merged in pronunciation. Four different pronunciation variants are shown in the table below. The fourth pronunciation variant gave rise to Modern English pronunciation. In Modern English, meet and meat are merged in pronunciation and both have the vowel , and mate and day are merged with the diphthong , which developed from the 16th-century long vowel .
Modern English typically has the meet–meat merger: both meet and meat are pronounced with the vowel . Words like great and steak, however, have merged with mate and are pronounced with the vowel , which developed from the shown in the table above.
Northern English and Scots
The Great Vowel Shift affected other dialects as well as the standard English of southern England but in different ways. In Northern England, the shift did not operate on the long back vowels because they had undergone an earlier shift. Similarly, the Scots language in Scotland had a different vowel system before the Great Vowel Shift, as had shifted to in Early Scots. In the Scots equivalent of the Great Vowel Shift, the long vowels , and shifted to , and by the Middle Scots period and remained unaffected.
The first step in the Great Vowel Shift in Northern and Southern English is shown in the table below. The Northern English developments of Middle English and were different from Southern English. In particular, the Northern English vowels in bite, in feet, and in boot shifted, while the vowel in house did not. These developments below fall under the label "older" to refer to Scots and a more conservative and increasingly rural Northern sound, while "younger" refers to a more mainstream Northern sound largely emerging just since the twentieth century.
The vowel systems of Northern and Southern Middle English immediately before the Great Vowel Shift were different in one way. In Northern Middle English, the back close-mid vowel in boot had already shifted to front (a sound change known as fronting), like the long in German "hear". Thus, Southern English had a back close-mid vowel , but Northern English did not:
In both Northern and Southern English, the first step of the Great Vowel Shift raised the close-mid vowels to become close. Northern Middle English had two close-mid vowels – in feet and in boot – which were raised to and . Later on, Northern English changed to in many dialects (though not in all, see ), so that boot has the same vowel as feet. Southern Middle English had two close-mid vowels – in feet and in boot – which were raised to and .
In Southern English, the close vowels in bite and in house shifted to become diphthongs, but in Northern English, in bite shifted but in house did not.
If the difference between the Northern and Southern vowel shifts is caused by the vowel systems at the time of the Great Vowel Shift, did not shift because there was no back mid vowel in Northern English. In Southern English, shifting of to could have caused diphthongisation of original , but because Northern English had no back close-mid vowel to shift, the back close vowel did not diphthongise.
See also
Canaanite Shift
High German consonant shift
Slavic palatalisation
Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law
Grimm's law
Chain shift
"The Chaos"
History of English
Phonological history of English vowels
Vowel shift
Notes
Sources
References
Bibliography
(See vol. 2, 594–713 for discussion of long stressed vowels)
External links
Great Vowel Shift Video lecture
History of the English language
Vowel shifts | [
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12874 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert%20Arthur%20%C3%A0%20Beckett | Gilbert Arthur à Beckett | Gilbert Arthur à Beckett (April 7, 1837 – October 15, 1891) was an English writer.
Biography
Beckett was born at Portland House Hammersmith, on 7 April 1837, the eldest son of the civil servant and humorist Gilbert Abbott à Beckett and the composer Mary Anne à Beckett, daughter of Joseph Glossop, clerk of the cheque to the hon. corps of gentlemen-at-arms.
His brother was Arthur William à Beckett.
He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, as a Westminster scholar in 1860.
He was entered at Lincoln's Inn on 15 October 1857, but gave his attention chiefly to drama, producing Diamonds and Hearts at the Haymarket Theatre in 1867; this was followed by other light comedies.
His adaptation of a French operetta by Émile Jonas called The Two Harlequins opened the new Gaiety Theatre, London in 1868, together with his distant cousin, W. S. Gilbert's, Robert the Devil and another piece.
Beckett's pieces include numerous burlesques and pantomimes, the libretti of Savonarola (Hamburg, 1884) and The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884) for the music of Dr. C. V. Stanford.
With the composer Alfred Cellier, Beckett wrote the operetta Two Foster Brothers (St. George's Hall, 1877).
In 1879, he had been asked by Tom Taylor, the editor of Punch, to follow the example of his younger brother Arthur, and become a regular member of the staff of Punch.
Three years later he was 'appointed to the Table.'
The Punch dinners 'were his greatest pleasure, and he attended them with regularity, although the paralysis of the legs, the result of falling down the stairway of Gower Street station, rendered his locomotion, and especially the mounting of Mr. Punch's staircase, a matter of painful exertion'.
To Punch he contributed both prose and verse; he wrote, in greater part, the admirable parody of a boy's sensational shocker (March 1882), and he developed Jerrold's idea of humorous bogus advertisements under the heading 'How we advertise now.'
The idea of one of Sir John Tenniel's best cartoons for Punch, entitled 'Dropping the Pilot,' illustrative of Bismarck's resignation in 1889, was due to him.
Apart from his work on 'Punch,' he wrote songs and music for the German Reeds' entertainment, while in 1873 and 1874 he was collaborator in two dramatic productions which evoked a considerable amount of public attention.
On 3 March 1873, The Happy Land was given at the Court Theatre, 1873, a daring political satire and burlesque of W. S. Gilbert's The Wicked World.
In this amusing piece of banter three statesmen (Gladstone, Lowe, and Ayrton) were represented as visiting Fairyland in order to impart to the inhabitants the secrets of popular government. The actors representing 'Mr. G.,' 'Mr. L.,' and 'Mr. A.' were dressed so as to resemble the ministers satirised, and the representation elicited a question in the House of Commons and an official visit of the Lord Chamberlain to the theatre, with the result that the actors had to change their 'make-up.'
In the following year, he furnished the 'legend' to Herman Merivale's tragedy 'The White Pilgrim,' first given at the Court in February 1874.
At the close of his life he furnished the 'lyrics' and most of the book for the operetta La Cigale, which at the time of his death was nearing its four hundredth performance at the Lyric Theatre.
In 1889, he suffered a great shock from the death by drowning of his only son, and he died in London on 15 October 1891, and was buried in Mortlake cemetery.
Legacy
Punch devoted some appreciative stanzas to his memory, bearing the epigraph 'Wearing the white flower of a blameless life' (24 Oct. 1891). His portrait appeared in the well-known drawing of 'The Mahogany Tree' (Punch, Jubilee Number, 18 July 1887), and likenesses were also given in the 'Illustrated London News' and in Spielmann's 'History of Punch' (1895).
Family
He married Emily, eldest daughter of William Hunt, J.P., of Bath, and his only daughter Minna married in 1896 Mr. Hugh Clifford, C.M.G., governor of Labuan and British North Borneo.
References
Attribution
External links
Information about The Happy Land
1837 births
1891 deaths
People associated with Gilbert and Sullivan | [
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12875 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaucus%20%28disambiguation%29 | Glaucus (disambiguation) | In Greek mythology, Glaucus was a Greek prophetic sea-god.
Glaucus, often transliterated to Glafkos, may also refer to:
People
Glaucus of Messenia, A mythological king of Messenia, a Heraclid and a son of Aepytus
Glaucus of Carystus, an Ancient Greek athlete
Glaucus of Chios (c. 7th century BCE), Greek sculptor in metal
Glaucus of Corinth, son of Sisyphus in Greek Mythology
Glaucus of Crete, a Cretan prince and son of Minos
Glaucus of Lycia, a son of Hippolokhos and a grandson of the hero, Bellerophon
Apollonius Glaucus, 2nd-century Roman physician
Glafcos Clerides (1919–2013), former President of Cyprus
Rivers
Glafkos (river), a river in Patras, Greece
Glaucus (river of Asia Minor), rivers in Asia Minor
Ships
Greek submarine Glafkos (Υ-6), a Protefs-class submarine of the Hellenic Navy
SS Glaucus (1871), shipwrecked in 1921
USS Glaucus (1863), a steamship of the Union Navy during the American Civil War
Other
1870 Glaukos, a Trojan asteroid
Glaucus (gastropod), a genus of nudibranchs in the family Glaucidae
Glaucus (mythology), characters named Glaucus in Greek mythology
Glaucus (sculpture), a sculpture by the French artist Auguste Rodin
The protagonist in the 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
, a linea on Europa
Glaucus Sinus, now Gulf of Fethiye in Turkey
Project Glaucus, an underwater habitat in Plymouth Sound
See also
Glaucias (disambiguation)
Glaucous
Glauce
Glaucia | [
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12878 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20Gordon%2C%201st%20Earl%20of%20Aberdeen | George Gordon, 1st Earl of Aberdeen | George Gordon, 1st Earl of Aberdeen (3 October 163720 April 1720), was a Lord Chancellor of Scotland.
Early life
Gordon, born on 3 October 1637, the second son of Sir John Gordon, 1st Baronet, of Haddo, Aberdeenshire, (executed in 1644);
and his wife, Mary Forbes. He graduated MA, and was chosen professor at King's College, Aberdeen, in 1658. Subsequently, he travelled and studied civil law abroad.
Career
At the Restoration the sequestration of his father's lands was annulled, and in 1665 he succeeded by the death of his elder brother as the 3rd Baronet Gordon, of Haddo and to the family estates. He returned home in 1667, was admitted advocate in 1668 and gained a high legal reputation. He represented Aberdeenshire in the Parliament of Scotland of 1669 to 1674, the Convention of Estates of 1678 and the following parliamentary assembly of 1681/82. During his first session he strongly opposed the projected union of England and Scotland. In November 1678 he was made a Privy Counsellor for Scotland, and in 1680 was raised to the bench as Lord Haddo. He was a leading member of the Duke of York's administration, was created a Lord of the Articles in June and in November 1681 Lord President of the Privy Council. The same year he is reported as moving in the council for the torture of witnesses.
In 1682 he was made Lord Chancellor of Scotland, and was created, on 13 November, Earl of Aberdeen, Viscount Formartine, and Lord Haddo, Methlick, Tarves and Kellie, in the Scottish peerage, being appointed also Sheriff of Aberdeen and Sheriff of Edinburgh later the same year.
Burnet reflected unfavourably upon him, writing of him, "...a proud and covetous man ... the new chancellor exceeded all that had gone before him.
He executed the laws enforcing religious conformity with severity, and filled the parish churches, but resisted the excessive measures of tyranny prescribed by the English government; and in consequence of an intrigue of the Duke of Queensberry and Lord Perth, who gained the duchess of Portsmouth with a present of £27,000, he was dismissed in 1684.
After his fall he was subjected to various petty prosecutions by his victorious rivals with the view of discovering some act of maladministration on which to found a charge against him, but the investigations only served to strengthen his credit. He took an active part in parliament in 1685 and 1686, but remained a non-juror during the whole of William's reign, being frequently fined for his non-attendance, and took the oaths for the first time after Anne's accession, on 11 May 1703.
In the great affair of the Union in 1707, while protesting against the completion of the treaty till the act declaring the Scots aliens should be repealed, he refused to support the opposition to the measure itself and refrained from attending parliament when the treaty was settled.
He is described by John Mackay as, "...very knowing in the laws and constitution of his country and is believed to be the solidest statesman in Scotland, a fine orator, speaks slow but sure.
His person was said to be deformed, and his want of mine or deportment was alleged as a disqualification for the office of Lord Chancellor.
Family
He married Anne Lockhart, daughter and (eventual) sole heiress of George Lockhart of Tarbrax and Anne Lockhart. They had several children:
John Gordon (1673–1675)
Hon. George Gordon, Lord Haddo (1674after 1694), d.v.p.s.p.
Lady Anne Gordon (1675–1709), married Alexander Montgomerie, 9th Earl of Eglinton
Hon. James Gordon (1676–?), d.v.p.s.p.
Lady Jean Gordon (1678–?)
William Gordon, 2nd Earl of Aberdeen (1679–30 March 1746)
Lady Martha Gordon (1681– ?), married John Udny of Udny in March 1701
Lady Mary Gordon (1682–1753), married Alexander Fraser, 13th Lord Saltoun, 26 October 1707
Lady Margaret Gordon (d.1738)
His only surviving son, William, succeeded him as 2nd earl of Aberdeen. He died on 20 April 1720, having amassed a large fortune.
Notes
References
Attribution
Endnotes:
Letters to George, earl of Aberdeen (with memoir: Spalding Club, 1851);
Hist. Account of the Senators of the College of Justice, by G. Brunton and D. Haig (1832), p. 408;
G. Crawfurd's Lives of the Officers of State (1726), p. 226;
Memoirs of Affairs in Scotland, by Sir G. Mackenzie (1821), p. 148;
Sir J. Lauder's (Lord Fountainhall) Journals (Scottish Hist. Society, vol. xxxvi., 1900);
J. Mackay's Memoirs (1733), p. 215;
A. Lang's Hist. of Scotland, iii. 369, 376.
External links
1637 births
1720 deaths
Academics of the University of Aberdeen
Alumni of the University of Aberdeen
01
Peers of Scotland created by Charles II
Lord Chancellors of Scotland
Shire Commissioners to the Parliament of Scotland
People from Aberdeenshire
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Members of the Parliament of Scotland 1669–1674
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Members of the Parliament of Scotland 1681–1682 | [
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12879 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20Hamilton-Gordon%2C%204th%20Earl%20of%20Aberdeen | George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen | George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, (28 January 178414 December 1860), styled Lord Haddo from 1791 to 1801, was a British statesman, diplomat and landowner, successively a Tory, Conservative and Peelite politician and specialist in foreign affairs. He served as Prime Minister from 1852 until 1855 in a coalition between the Whigs and Peelites, with Radical and Irish support. The Aberdeen ministry was filled with powerful and talented politicians, whom Aberdeen was largely unable to control and direct. Despite his trying to avoid this happening, it took Britain into the Crimean War, and fell when its conduct became unpopular, after which Aberdeen retired from politics.
Born into a wealthy family with largest estates in Scotland, his personal life was marked by the loss of both parents by the time he was eleven, and of his first wife after only seven years of a happy marriage. His daughters died young, and his relations with his sons were difficult. He travelled extensively in Europe, including Greece, and he had a serious interest in the classical civilisations and their archaeology. His Scottish estates having been neglected by his father, he devoted himself (when he came of age) to modernising them according to the latest standards.
After 1812 he became a diplomat, and in 1813, at age 29, was given the critically important embassy to Vienna, where he organized and financed the sixth coalition that defeated Napoleon. His rise in politics was equally rapid and lucky, and "two accidents — Canning's death and Wellington's impulsive acceptance of the Canningite resignations" led to his becoming Foreign Secretary for Prime Minister Wellington in 1828 despite "an almost ludicrous lack of official experience"; he had been a minister for less than six months. After holding the position for two years, followed by another cabinet role, by 1841 his experience led to his appointment as Foreign Secretary again under Robert Peel for a longer term. His diplomatic successes include organizing the coalition against Napoleon in 1812–1814, normalizing relations with post-Napoleonic France, settling the old border dispute between Canada and the United States, and ending the First Opium War with China in 1842, whereby Hong Kong was obtained. Aberdeen was a poor speaker, but this scarcely mattered in the House of Lords. He exhibited a "dour, awkward, occasionally sarcastic exterior". His friend William Ewart Gladstone, said of him that he was "the man in public life of all others whom I have . I say emphatically . I have others, but never like him".
Early life
Born in Edinburgh on 28 January 1784, he was the eldest son of George Gordon, Lord Haddo, son of George Gordon, 3rd Earl of Aberdeen. His mother was Charlotte, youngest daughter of William Baird of Newbyth. He lost his father on 18 October 1791 and his mother in 1795, and he was brought up by Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville and William Pitt the Younger. He was educated at Harrow, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a Master of Arts in 1804. Before this, however, he had become Earl of Aberdeen on his grandfather's death in 1801, and had travelled all over Europe. On his return to Britain, he founded the Athenian Society. In 1805, he married Lady Catherine Elizabeth, daughter of John Hamilton, 1st Marquess of Abercorn.
Political and diplomatic career, 1805–1828
In December 1805, Lord Aberdeen took his seat as a Tory Scottish representative peer in the House of Lords. In 1808, he was created a Knight of the Thistle. Following the death of his wife from tuberculosis in 1812 he joined the Foreign Service. He was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Austria, and signed the Treaty of Töplitz between Britain and Austria in Vienna in October 1813. In the company of the Austrian Emperor, Francis II, he was an observer at the decisive Coalition victory of the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813; he had met Napoleon in his earlier travels. He became one of the central diplomatic figures in European diplomacy at this time, and he was one of the British representatives at the Congress of Châtillon in February 1814, and at the negotiations which led to the Treaty of Paris in May of that year.
Aberdeen was greatly affected by the aftermath of war which he witnessed at first hand. He wrote home:The near approach of war and its effects are horrible beyond what you can conceive. The whole road from Prague to [Teplitz] was covered with waggons full of wounded, dead, and dying. The shock and disgust and pity produced by such scenes are beyond what I could have supposed possible...the scenes of distress and misery have sunk deeper in my mind. I have been quite haunted by them.
Returning home he was created a peer of the United Kingdom as Viscount Gordon, of Aberdeen in the County of Aberdeen (1814), and made a member of the Privy Council.
In July 1815, he married his former sister-in-law Harriet, daughter of John Douglas, and widow of James Hamilton, Viscount Hamilton; the marriage was much less happy than his first. During the ensuing thirteen years Aberdeen took a less prominent part in public affairs.
Political career, 1828–1852
Lord Aberdeen served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster between January and June 1828 and subsequently as Foreign Secretary until 1830 under the Duke of Wellington. He resigned with Wellington over the Reform Bill of 1832.
He was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in the first Peel ministry (December 1834 - April 1835), and again Foreign Secretary between 1841 and 1846 under Sir Robert Peel (second Peel ministry). It was during his second stint as Foreign Secretary that he had the harbor settlement of 'Little Hong Kong', on the south side of Hong Kong Island, named after him. It was probably the most productive period of his career; he settled two disagreements with the US: the northeast boundary dispute by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842), and the Oregon dispute by the Oregon Treaty of 1846. He enjoyed the trust of Queen Victoria, which was still important for a Foreign Secretary. He worked closely with Henry Bulwer, his ambassador to Madrid, to help arrange marriages for Queen Isabella and her younger sister the Infanta Luisa Fernanda. They helped stabilize Spain's internal and external relations. He sought better relations with France, relying on his friendship with Guizot, but Britain was annoyed with France on a series of issues, especially French colonial policies, the right to search slave ships, the French desire to control Belgium, disputes in the Pacific and French intervention in Morocco.
In opposition
Aberdeen again followed his leader and resigned with Peel over the issue of the Corn Laws. After Peel's death in July 1850 he became the recognised leader of the Peelites. In August 1847, a general election of Parliament had been held which resulted in the election of 325 Tory/Conservative party members to Parliament. This represented 42.7% of the seats in Parliament. The main opposition to the Tory/Conservative Party was the Whig Party, which had 292 seats.
While the Peelites agreed with the Whigs on issues dealing with international trade, there were other issues on which the Peelites disagreed with the Whigs. Indeed, Lord Aberdeen's own dislike of the Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Bill, the rejection of which he failed to secure in 1851, prevented him from joining the Whig government of Lord John Russell in 1851. Additionally, 113 of the members of Parliament elected in 1847 were Free Traders. These members agreed with the Peelites on the repeal of the "Corn Laws", but they felt that the tariffs on all consumer products should be removed.
Furthermore, 36 members of Parliament elected in 1847 were members of the "Irish Brigade", who voted with the Peelites and the Whigs for the repeal of the Corn Laws because they sought an end the Great Irish Famine by means of cheaper wheat and bread prices for the poor and middle classes in Ireland. Currently, however, the Free Traders and the Irish Brigade had disagreements with the Whigs that prevented them from joining with the Whigs to form a government. Accordingly, the Tory/Conservative Party leader the Earl of Derby was asked to form a "minority government". Derby appointed Benjamin Disraeli as the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the minority government. The general election in July 1852 had no clear winner.
When in December 1852 Disraeli submitted his budget to Parliament on behalf of the minority government, the Peelites, the Free Traders, and the Irish Brigade were all alienated by the proposed budget. Accordingly, those groups suddenly forgot their differences with the Whig Party and voted with the Whigs against the proposed budget. The vote was 286 in favour of the budget and 305 votes against the budget. Because the leadership of the minority government had made the vote on the budget vote a vote of confidence, the defeat of the Disraeli budget was a "vote of no confidence" in the minority government and meant its downfall. Lord Aberdeen was asked to form a new government; Gladstone became his Chancellor.
Prime Minister, 1852–1855
Following the downfall of the Tory/Conservative minority government under Lord Derby in December 1852, Lord Aberdeen formed a new government from the coalition of Free Traders, Peelites, and Whigs that had voted no confidence in the minority government. Lord Aberdeen was able to put together a coalition that held 53.8% of the seats of Parliament. Thus Lord Aberdeen, a Peelite, became Prime Minister and headed a coalition ministry of Whigs and Peelites.
Although united on international trade issues and on questions of domestic reform, his cabinet also contained Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, who were certain to differ on questions of foreign policy. Charles Greville wrote in his Memoirs, "In the present cabinet are five or six first-rate men of equal, or nearly equal, pretensions, none of them likely to acknowledge the superiority or defer to the opinions of any other, and every one of these five or six considering himself abler and more important than their premier"; and Sir James Graham wrote, "It is a powerful team, but it will require good driving", which Aberdeen was unable to provide. During the administration, much trouble was caused by the rivalry between Palmerston and Russell, and over the course of it Palmerston managed to out-manoeuvre Russell to emerge as the Whig heir apparent. The cabinet also included a single Radical, Sir William Molesworth, but much later, when justifying to the Queen his own new appointments, Gladstone told her: "For instance, even in Ld Aberdeen's Govt, in 52, Sir William Molesworth had been selected, at that time, a very advanced Radical, but who was perfectly harmless, & took little, or no part.... He said these people generally became very moderate, when they were in office", which she admitted had been the case.
One of the foreign policy issues on which Palmerston and Russell disagreed was the type of relationship that Britain should have with France and especially France's ruler, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. Bonaparte was the nephew of the famous Napoleon Bonaparte, who had become dictator and then Emperor of France from 1804 until 1814. The younger Bonaparte had been elected to a three-year term as President of the Second Republic of France on 20 December 1848. The Constitution of the Second Republic limited the President to a single term in office. Thus, Louis Bonaparte would be unable to succeed himself and after 20 December 1851 would no longer be President. Consequently, on 2 December 1851, shortly before the end of his single three-year term in office was to expire, Bonaparte staged a coup against the Second Republic in France, disbanded the elected Constituent Assembly, arrested some of the Republican leaders, and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III of France. This coup upset many democrats in England as well as in France. Some British government officials felt that Louis Bonaparte was seeking foreign adventure in the spirit of his uncle, Napoleon I. Consequently, these officials felt that any close association with Bonaparte would eventually lead Britain into another series of wars, like the wars with France and Napoleon dating from 1793 until 1815. British relations with France had scarcely improved since 1815. As prime minister, the Earl of Aberdeen was one of these officials who feared France and Bonaparte.
However, other British government officials were beginning to worry more about the rising political dominance of the Russian Empire in eastern Europe and the corresponding decline of the Ottoman Empire. Lord Palmerston at the time of Louis Bonaparte's 2 December 1851 coup was serving as the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the Whig government of Prime Minister Lord John Russell. Without informing the rest of the cabinet or Queen Victoria, Palmerston had sent a private note to the French ambassador endorsing Louis Bonaparte's coup and congratulating Louis Bonaparte himself on the coup. Queen Victoria and members of the Russell government demanded that Palmerston be dismissed as Foreign Minister. Russell requested Palmerston's resignation and Palmerston reluctantly provided it.
In February 1852, Palmerston took revenge on Russell by voting with the Conservatives in a "no confidence" vote against the Russell government. This brought an end to the Russell Whig government and set the stage for a general election in July 1852 which eventually brought the Conservatives to power in a minority government under the Earl of Derby. Later in the year, another problem facing the Earl of Aberdeen in the formation of his own new government in December 1852 was Lord John Russell himself. Russell was the leader of the Whig Party, the largest group in the coalition government. Consequently, Lord Aberdeen, was required to appoint Russell as the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, which he had done on 29 December 1852. However, Russell sometimes liked to use this position to speak for the whole government, as if he were the prime minister. In 1832, Russell had been nicknamed "Finality John" because of his statement that the 1832 Reform Act had just been approved by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords would be the "final" expansion of the vote in Britain. There would be no further extension of the ballot to the common people of Britain. However, as political pressure in favour of further reform had risen over the twenty years since 1832, Russell had changed his mind. Russell had said, in January 1852, that he intended to introduce a new reform bill into the House of Commons which would equalise the populations of the districts from which members of Parliament were elected. Probably as a result of their continuing feud, Palmerston declared himself against this Reform Bill of 1852. As a result, support for the bill dwindled and Russell was forced to change his mind again and not introduce any Reform Bill in 1852.
In order to form the coalition government, the Earl of Aberdeen had been required to appoint both Palmerston and Russell to his cabinet. Because of the controversy surrounding Palmerston's removal as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Palmerston could not now be appointed Foreign Minister again so soon after his removal from that position. Accordingly, on 28 December 1852, Aberdeen appointed Palmerston as Home Secretary and appointed Russell as Foreign Minister.
The "Eastern Question"
Given the differences of opinion within the Lord Aberdeen cabinet over the direction of foreign policy with regard to relations between Britain and France under Napoleon III, it is not surprising that debate raged within the government as Louis Bonaparte, now assuming the title of Emperor Napoleon III. As Prime Minister of the Peelite/Whig coalition government, Aberdeen eventually led Britain into war on the side of the French and Ottomans against the Russian Empire. This war would eventually be called the Crimean War, but throughout the foreign policy negotiations surrounding the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, which would continue throughout the middle and end of nineteenth century, the problem would be referred to as the "Eastern Question".
The cabinet was bitterly divided. Palmerston stirred up anti-reform feeling in Parliament and pro-war public opinion to out-maneuver Russell. The result was that the weak Aberdeen government went to war with Russia as the result of internal British political rivalries. Aberdeen accepted Russian arguiments at face value because he sympathised with Russian interests against French pressure and was not in favour of the Crimean War. However, he was unable to resist the pressure that was being exerted on him by Palmerston's faction. In the end, the Crimean War proved to be the downfall of his government.
The Eastern Question flared up on 2 December 1852, with the Napoleon's coup against the Second Republic. As Napoleon III was forming his new imperial government, he sent an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire with instructions to assert France's right to protect Christian sites in Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The Ottoman Empire agreed to this condition to avoid conflict or even war with France. Aberdeen, as Foreign Secretary in 1845, had himself tacitly authorised the construction of the first Anglican church in Jerusalem, following his predecessor's commission in 1838 of the first European Consul in Jerusalem on Britain's behalf, which lead to series of successive appointments by other nations. Both resulted from Lord Shaftesbury's canvassing with substantial public support.
Nevertheless, Britain became increasingly worried about the situation in Turkey, and Prime Minister Aberdeen sent Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, a diplomat with vast experience in Turkey, as a special envoy to the Ottoman Empire to guard British interests. Russia protested the Turkish agreement with the French as a violation of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1778, which ended the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774). Under the treaty, the Russians had been granted the exclusive right to protect the Christian sites in the Holy Land. Accordingly, on 7 May 1853, the Russians sent Prince Alexander Sergeyevich Menshikov, one their premier statesmen, to negotiate a settlement of the issue. Prince Menshikov called the attention of the Turks to the fact that during the Russo-Turkish War, the Russians had occupied the Turkish-controlled provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia on the north bank of the Danube River, and he reminded them that pursuant to the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, the Russians had returned these "Danubian provinces" to Ottoman control in exchange for the right to protect the Christian sites in the Holy Land. Accordingly, the Turks reversed themselves and agreed with the Russians.
The French sent one of their premier ships-of-the-line, the Charlemagne, to the Black Sea as a show of force. In light of the French show of force, the Turks, again, reversed themselves and recognised the French right to protect the Christian sites. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe was advising the Ottomans during this time, and later it was alleged that he had been instrumental in persuading the Turks to reject the Russian arguments.
As war became inevitable, Aberdeen wrote to Russell:
The abstract justice of the cause, although indisputable, is but a poor consolation for the inevitable calamities of all war, or for a decision which I am not without fear may prove to have been impolitic and unwise. My conscience upbraids me the more, because seeing, as I did from the first, all that was to be apprehended, it is possible that by a little more energy and vigour, not on the Danube, but in Downing Street, it might have been prevented.
Crimean War 1853–1856
In response this latest change of mind by the Ottomans, the Russians on 2 July 1853 occupied the Turkish satellite states of Wallachia and Moldavia, as they had during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774. Almost immediately, the Russian troops deployed along the northern banks of the Danube River, implying that they might cross the river. Aberdeen ordered the British Fleet to Constantinople and later into the Black Sea. On 23 October 1853, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. A Russian naval raid on Sinope, on 30 November 1853, resulted in the destruction of the Turkish fleet in the battle of Sinope. When Russia ignored an Anglo-French ultimatum to abandon the Danubian provinces, Britain and France declared war on Russia on 28 March 1854. In September 1854, British and French troops landed on the Crimean peninsula at Eupatoria, north of Sevastopol. The Allied troops then moved across the Alma River on 20 September 1854 at the battle of Alma and set siege to the fort of Sevastopol.
A Russian attack on the allied supply base at Balaclava on 25 October 1854 was rebuffed. The Battle of Balaclava is noted for its famous (or rather infamous) Charge of the Light Brigade. On 5 November 1854, Russian forces tried to relieve the siege at Sevastopol and defeat the Allied armies in the field in the Battle of Inkerman. However, this attempt failed. Dissatisfaction as to the course of the war grew in England. As reports returned detailing the mismanagement of the conflict, Parliament began to investigate. On 29 January 1855, John Arthur Roebuck introduced a motion for the appointment of a select committee to enquire into the conduct of the war. This motion was carried by the large majority of 305 in favour and 148 against.
Treating this as a vote of no confidence in his government, Aberdeen resigned, and retired from active politics, speaking for the last time in the House of Lords in 1858. In visiting Windsor Castle to resign, he told the Queen: "Nothing could have been better, he said than the feeling of the members towards each other. Had it not been for the incessant attempts of Ld John Russell to keep up party differences, it must be acknowledged that the experiment of a coalition had succeeded admirably. We discussed future possibilities & agreed that nothing remained to be done, but to offer the Govt to Ld Derby,...". The Queen continued to criticise Lord John Russell for his behaviour for the rest of his life; on his death in 1878 her journal records that he was "A man of much talent, who leaves a name behind him, kind, & good, with a great knowledge of the constitution, who behaved very well, on many trying occasions; but he was impulsive, very selfish (as shown on many occasions, especially during Ld Aberdeen's administration) vain, & often reckless & imprudent".
Relations with the United States
British-American relations had been troublesome under Palmerston, but Aberdeen proved much more conciliatory, and worked well with Daniel Webster, the American Secretary of State who was himself an Anglophile. In 1842, Aberdeen sent Lord Ashburton to Washington to settle all disputes, especially the border between Canada and Maine, the boundary along the Great Lakes, the Oregon boundary, the African slave trade, the Caroline affair about boundaries in 1837 and the Creole case of 1841 involving a slave revolt on the high seas. The Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842 solved the most of the problems amicably. Thus Maine got most of the disputed land, but Canada obtained a vital, strategic strip of land connecting it to a warm water port. Aberdeen helped solve the Oregon dispute amicably in 1846. However, as prime minister, Aberdeen had trouble with the United States. In 1854 an American naval vessel bombarded the mosquito port of Greytown, Nicaragua in retaliation for an insult; Britain protested. Later in 1846, the United States announced its intention of annexing Hawaii, and Britain not only complained but sent a naval force to make the point. Negotiations for reciprocal trade agreement between the United States and Canada dragged on for eight years until a reciprocity treaty was reached in 1854.
Legacy
Aberdeen was generally successful as a hard-working diplomat, but his reputation has suffered greatly because of the lack of military success in the Crimean War and from the ridicule of enemies such as Disraeli who regarded him as weak, inefficient, and cold. Before the Crimean debacle that ended his career he scored numerous diplomatic triumphs, starting in 1813-14 when as ambassador to the Austrian Empire he negotiated the alliances and financing that led to the defeat of Napoleon. In Paris, he normalized relations with the newly-restored Bourbon government and convinced London it could be trusted. He worked well with top European diplomats such as his friends Klemens von Metternich in Vienna and François Guizot in Paris. He brought Britain into the center of Continental diplomacy on critical issues, such as the local wars in Greece, Portugal, and Belgium. Simmering troubles on numerous issues with the United States were ended by friendly compromises. He played a central role in winning the Opium Wars against China, gaining control of Hong Kong in the process.
Family
Lord Aberdeen married Lady Catherine Elizabeth Hamilton (10 January 1784 – 29 February 1812; daughter of Lord Abercorn) on 28 July 1805. They had four children.
Lady Jane Hamilton-Gordon (11 February 1807 – 18 August 1824) died at the age of seventeen years old
Lady Charlotte Catherine Hamilton-Gordon (28 March 1808 – 24 July 1818) died at the age of ten years old.
Lady Alice Hamilton-Gordon (12 July 1809 – 21 April 1829) died at the age of nineteen years old.
unnamed Gordon, Lord Haddo (23 November 1810 – 23 November 1810)
He remarried Harriet Douglas (paternal granddaughter of James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton and maternal granddaughter of Edward Lascelles, 1st Earl of Harewood) on 8 July 1815. They had five children:
George John James Hamilton-Gordon, 5th Earl of Aberdeen (28 September 1816 – 22 March 1864). He married Lady Mary Baillie (younger sister of George Baillie-Hamilton, 10th Earl of Haddington) on 5 November 1840. They had six children.
General Sir Alexander Hamilton-Gordon (11 December 1817 – 19 May 1890). He married Caroline Herschel (daughter of Sir John Herschel, 1st Baronet) on 9 December 1852. They had nine children.
Lady Frances Hamilton-Gordon (4 December 1818 – 20 April 1834) died at the age of fifteen years old.
Reverend Hon. Douglas Hamilton-Gordon (13 March 1824 – 6 December 1901). He married Lady Ellen Douglas (maternal first cousin) on 15 July 1851.
Arthur Charles Hamilton-Gordon (26 November 1829 – 30 January 1912). He married Rachel Emily Shaw-Lefevre on 20 September 1865. They had two children.
The Countess of Aberdeen died in August 1833. Lord Aberdeen died at Argyll House, St. James's, London, on 14 December 1860, and was buried in the family vault at Stanmore church. In 1994 the novelist, columnist, and politician Ferdinand Mount used George Gordon's life as the basis for a historical novel, Umbrella.
Apart from his political career, Aberdeen was also a scholar of the classical civilisations, who published An Inquiry into the Principles of Beauty in Grecian Architecture (London, 1822) and was referred to by his cousin Lord Byron in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) as "the travell'd thane, Athenian Aberdeen." He was appointed Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen in 1827 and was President of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Ancestry
Religious interests
Aberdeen's biographer Muriel Chamberlain summarises, "Religion never came easy to him". In his Scots landowning capacity "North of the border, he considered himself ex officio a Presbyterian". In England "he privately considered himself an Anglican"; as early as 1840 he told Gladstone he preferred what Aberdeen called "the sister church [of England]" and when in London worshipped at St James's Piccadilly. He was ultimately buried in the Anglican parish church at Stanmore, Middlesex.
He was a member of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from 1818 to 1828 and exercised his existing rights to present ministers to parishes on his Scottish estates through a time when the right of churches to veto the appointment or 'call' of a minister became so contentious as to lead in 1843 to the schism known as "the Disruption" when a third of ministers broke away to form the Free Church of Scotland. In the House of Lords, in 1840 and 1843, he raised two Compromise Bills to allow presbyteries but not congregations the right of veto. The first failed to pass (and was voted against by the General Assembly) but the latter, raised post-schism, became law for Scotland and remained in force until patronage of Scots livings was abolished in 1874.
It was under his prime ministership that the revival of the Convocations of Canterbury and York began, though they did not obtain their potential power till 1859.
He is said in the last few months of his life, after the Crimean War, to have declined to contribute to building a church on his Scotland estates because of a sense of guilt in having "shed much blood", citing biblically King David's being forbidden to build the Temple in Jerusalem.
Notes
Bibliography
Anderson, Olive. A liberal state at war: English politics and economics during the Crimean War (1967).
online
Balfour, Frances. The life of George, fourth earl of Aberdeen (vol 1 1922) online
Balfour, Frances. The life of George, fourth earl of Aberdeen (vol 2 1922) online
Butcher, Samuel J. "Lord Aberdeen and Conservative Foreign Policy, 1841-1846" (PhD Diss. University of East Anglia, 2015) online.
Cecil, Algernon. British foreign secretaries, 1807-1916: studies in personality and policy (1927). pp 89–130. online
MacIntyre, Angus, review of Lord Aberdeen. A Political Biography by Muriel E. Chamberlain, The English Historical Review, 100#396 (1985), pp. 641–644, JSTOR
Guymer, Laurence. "The Wedding Planners: Lord Aberdeen, Henry Bulwer, and the Spanish Marriages, 1841–1846." Diplomacy & Statecraft 21.4 (2010): 549-573.
Hoppen, K. Theodore. The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846–1886 (2000), Wide-ranging scholarly survey of the entire era.
Iremonger, Lucille. Lord Aberdeen: a biography of the fourth Earl of Aberdeen, KG, KT, Prime Minister 1852–1855 (1978) online free to borrow
Martin, Kingsley. The triumph of Lord Palmerston: a study of public opinion in England before the Crimean War (Hutchinson, 1963). Online
Martin, B. K., "The Resignation of Lord Palmerston in 1853: Extracts from Unpublished Letters of Queen Victoria and Lord Aberdeen", Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1923), pp. 107–112, Cambridge University Press, JSTOR
Seton-Watson, R. W. Britain in Europe, 1789–1914: A survey of foreign policy (1937) pp 223–40. online
Temperley, Harold W. V. England and the Near East: The Crimea (1936) online
Temperley, Harold and L.M. Penson, eds. Foundations of British Foreign Policy: From Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902) (1938), primary sources online
External links
More about The Earl of Aberdeen on the Downing Street website.
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12880 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCash | GnuCash | GnuCash is an accounting program that implements a double-entry bookkeeping system. It was initially aimed at developing capabilities similar to Intuit, Inc.'s Quicken application, but also has features for small business accounting. Recent development has been focused on adapting to modern desktop support-library requirements.
GnuCash is part of the GNU Project, and runs on Linux, GNU, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, macOS, and other Unix-like platforms. A Microsoft Windows (2000 or newer) port was made available starting with the 2.2.0 series.
History
Programming on GnuCash began in 1997, and its first stable release was in 1998. Small Business Accounting was added in 2001. A Mac installer became available in 2004. A Windows port was released in 2007.
In May 2012, the development of GnuCash for Android was announced. This was an expense-tracking companion app for GnuCash, as opposed to a stand-alone accounting package, and is now abandoned.
Backwards compatibility issues
Gnucash maintains the ability to read older data files between major releases, as long as major releases are not skipped. If a user wishes to access historical data saved in old GnuCash files, they must install intermediate versions of GnuCash. For example, upgrading from 2.2 to 4.1 may not be possible; the user should upgrade from 2.2.9 to 2.4.15, then to 2.6.21, then 3.11, then 4.1. The other alternative is for users to export transactions files to a CSV format prior to upgrading GnuCash. Exporting of the account tree must be done as a separate step.
Features
Double-entry bookkeeping
Scheduled Transactions
Mortgage and Loan Repayment Assistant
Small Business Accounting Features
OFX, QIF Import, CSV Import
HBCI Support
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Stock/Mutual Fund Portfolios
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Built-in and custom reports and charts
Budget
Bank and Credit Card reconciliation
Check printing
Small business accounting features
Invoicing and Credit Notes (Credit note functionality was added with version 2.6)
Accounts Receivable (A/R)
Accounts Payable (A/P) including bills due reminders
Employee expense voucher
Limited Payroll Management through use of A/Receivable and A/Payable accounts.
Depreciation
Mapping to income tax schedules and TXF export for import into tax prep software (US)
Setting up tax tables and applying sales tax on invoices
Technical design
GnuCash is written primarily in C, with a small fraction in Scheme. One of the available features is pure fixed-point arithmetic to avoid rounding errors which would arise with floating-point arithmetic. This feature was introduced with version 1.6.
Users
Users on the GnuCash mailing list have reported using it for United States 501(c)3 non-profit organizations successfully. However, the reports need to be exported and edited.
Slaw, a Canadian legal webzine, offered this advice to lawyers just starting out in practice, especially those who are trying to pay off student loans, "The GnuCash software...should present a great alternative for lawyers looking for a solid accounting system at low cost. Do not believe that open source software is somehow second-class."
In April 2011, the Minnesota State Bar Association made their GnuCash trust accounting guide freely available in PDF format.
Download statistics
As of July 2018, SourceForge shows a count of over 6.3 million downloads of the stable releases starting from November 1999 Also, SourceForge shows that current downloads are running at ~7,000 per week. This does not include other software download sites as well as Linux distributions that provide download from their own repositories.
Project status
Open Hub's analysis based on commits up to May 2018 (noninclusive) concluded that the project has a mature, well established code base with increasing year-over-year development activity. Moreover, "Over the past twelve months, 51 developers contributed new code to GnuCash. This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Open Hub."
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Accounting software for Linux
Cross-platform software
Free accounting software
Free software programmed in C
GNU Project software
Office software that uses GTK | [
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12881 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20Robert%20Aberigh-Mackay | George Robert Aberigh-Mackay | George Robert Aberigh-Mackay (25 July 184812 January 1881), Anglo-Indian writer, was the son of the Reverend James Aberigh-Mackay D.D., B.D. and his first wife Lucretia Livingston née Reed. He was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford and St. Catherine's College, Cambridge. Entering the Indian education department in 1870, he became professor of English literature in Delhi College in 1873, tutor to the Raja of Rutlam in 1876, and principal of the Rajkumar College at Indore in 1877. On 8 January 1881 he developed symptoms of tetanus after playing polo and tennis on the previous 2 days, and died on 12 January 1881 in Indore.
He is best known for his book Twenty-one Days in India (1878–1879), a satire upon Anglo-Indian society and modes of thought. This book gave promise of a successful literary career, but the author died at the age of thirty-three. Aberigh-Mackay wrote also an extensive manual giving first-hand data about the princely states and their rulers.
Family
George Robert Aberigh-Mackay married Mary Ann Louisa Cherry on 13 October 1873 at Simla, Bengal, India.
Children of George Robert Aberigh-Mackay & Mary Ann Louisa Cherry
Mary Livingston (Miss Patty) Aberigh-Mackay (1874–1952)
Frances Lilian Aberigh-Mackay (1875–?)
Beatrice Georgiana Aberigh-Mackay (1878–1948)
Katharine Madeline Aberigh-Mackay (1879–1945) married 1st Montague Tharp 2nd James Herbert Everett Evans.
Notes
References
External links
1848 births
1881 deaths
19th-century Indian writers
Indian male writers
People educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford
19th-century Indian male writers | [
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12882 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallon | Gallon | The gallon is a unit of volume in imperial units and United States customary units. Three different versions are in current use:
the imperial gallon (imp gal), defined as , which is or was used in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and some Caribbean countries;
the US gallon (US gal) defined as 231 cubic inches (exactly ), which is used in the US and some Latin American and Caribbean countries; and
the US dry gallon ("usdrygal"), defined as US bushel (exactly ).
There are four quarts in a gallon and eight pints in a gallon, which have different volumes in different systems.
The IEEE standard symbol for both US (liquid) and imperial gallon is gal, not to be confused with the gal (symbol: Gal), a CGS unit of acceleration.
Definitions
The gallon currently has one definition in the imperial system, and two definitions (liquid and dry) in the US customary system. Historically, there were many definitions and redefinitions.
English system gallons
There were a number of systems of liquid measurements in the United Kingdom prior to the 19th century.
Winchester or Corn Gallon was (1697 Act 8 & 9 Will III c22)
Henry VII (Winchester) corn gallon from 1497 onwards was
Elizabeth I corn gallon from 1601 onwards was
William III corn gallon from 1697 onwards was
Old English (Elizabethan) Ale Gallon was (1700 Act 11 Will III c15)
Old English (Queen Anne) Wine gallon was standardized as in the 1706 Act 5 Anne c27, but it differed before that:
London 'Guildhall' gallon (before 1688) was
Jersey gallon (from 1562 onwards) was
Guernsey gallon (17th century origins till 1917) was
Irish Gallon was (1495 Irish Act 10 Hen VII c22 confirmed by 1736 Act Geo II c9)
Imperial gallon
The British imperial gallon is defined as exactly 4.54609 dm3. It is used in some Commonwealth countries, and until 1976 was defined as the volume of 10 pounds (4.5359237 kg) of water at . There are four quarts in a gallon, the imperial pint is defined as 0.56826125 litres ( gallon) and there are 20 imperial fluid ounces in an imperial pint, yielding 160 fluid ounces in an imperial gallon.
US liquid gallon
The US liquid gallon (frequently called simply "gallon") is legally defined as 231 cubic inches, which is exactly . A US liquid gallon of water weighs about at , making it about 16.6% lighter than the imperial gallon. There are four quarts in a gallon, two pints in a quart and 16 US fluid ounces in a US pint, which makes the US fluid ounce equal to of a US gallon. In order to overcome the effects of expansion and contraction with temperature when using a gallon to specify a quantity of material for purposes of trade, it is common to define the temperature at which the material will occupy the specified volume. For example, the volume of petroleum products and alcoholic beverages are both referenced to in government regulations.
US dry gallon
Since the dry measure is one-eighth of a US Winchester bushel of cubic inches, it is equal to exactly 268.8025 cubic inches, which is . The US dry gallon is not used in commerce, and is also not listed in the relevant statute, which jumps from the dry pint to the bushel.
Worldwide usage
Imperial gallon
As of 2021, the imperial gallon continues to be used as the standard petrol unit in four British Overseas Territories (Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Montserrat) and six countries (Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Christopher and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines).
All ten of the countries and territories which use the imperial gallon as their petrol unit also use miles per hour for speed limits, and drive on the left side of the road.
The United Arab Emirates ceased selling petrol by the imperial gallon in 2010 and switched to the litre, with Guyana following suit in 2013.
Burma subsequently switched from the imperial gallon to the litre in 2014.
Antigua and Barbuda has proposed switching to selling petrol by litres since 2015.
The gallon was removed from the list of legally defined primary units of measure catalogued in the EU directive 80/181/EEC for trading and official purposes, with effect from 31 December 1994. Under the directive the gallon could still be used, but only as a supplementary or secondary unit. One of the effects of this directive was that the United Kingdom amended its own legislation to replace the gallon with the litre as a primary unit of measure in trade and in the conduct of public business, effective from 30 September 1995. However within the United Kingdom and Ireland, barrels and large containers of beer, oil and other fluids are sometimes marked in imperial gallons.
Ireland also passed legislation in response to the EU directive, with the effective date being 31 December 1993. Though the gallon has ceased to be a primary unit of trade, it can still be legally used in both the UK and Ireland as a supplementary unit.
Miles per imperial gallon is used as the primary fuel economy unit in the United Kingdom and as a supplementary unit in Canada on official documentation.
In the Middle East, water-chiller bottles come in multiples of the imperial gallon.
US liquid gallon
Other than the United States, petrol is sold by the US gallon in Belize, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, and Peru, as well as in the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau, which are associated with the United States.
Despite its status as a US territory, and unlike American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico ceased selling petrol by the US gallon in 1980.
Panama ceased selling petrol in US gallons in 2013 and uses litres, while El Salvador followed suit in June 2021.
In the Turks and Caicos Islands, both the US gallon and imperial gallon are used due to an increase in tax duties which was disguised by levying the same duty on the US gallon (3.79 L) as was previously levied on the Imperial gallon (4.55 L).
The Bahamas also uses both the US gallon and imperial gallon.
Relationship to other units
Both the US liquid and imperial gallon are divided into four quarts (quarter gallons), which in turn are divided into two pints, which in turn are divided into two cups, which in turn are further divided into two gills. Thus, both gallons are equal to four quarts, eight pints, sixteen cups, or thirty-two gills.
The imperial gill is further divided into five fluid ounces, whereas the US gill is divided into four fluid ounces, meaning an imperial fluid ounce is of an imperial pint, or of an imperial gallon, while a US fluid ounce is of a US pint, or of a US gallon. Thus, the imperial gallon, quart, pint, cup and gill are approximately 20% larger than their US counterparts, meaning these are not interchangeable, but the imperial fluid ounce is only approximately 4% smaller than the US fluid ounce, meaning these are often used interchangeably.
Historically, a common bottle size for liquor in the US was the "fifth", i.e. one-fifth of a US gallon (or one-sixth of an imperial gallon). While spirit sales in the US were switched to metric measures in 1976, a 750 mL bottle is still sometimes known as a "fifth".
History
The term derives most immediately from galun, galon in Old Northern French, but the usage was common in several languages, for example in Old French and (bowl) in Old English. This suggests a common origin in Romance Latin, but the ultimate source of the word is unknown.
The gallon originated as the base of systems for measuring wine and beer in England. The sizes of gallon used in these two systems were different from each other: the first was based on the wine gallon (equal in size to the US gallon), and the second one either the ale gallon or the larger imperial gallon.
By the end of the 18th century, there were three definitions of the gallon in common use:
The corn gallon, or Winchester gallon, of about ,
The wine gallon, or Queen Anne's gallon, which was , and
The ale gallon of .
The corn or dry gallon is used (along with the dry quart and pint) in the United States for grain and other dry commodities. It is one-eighth of the (Winchester) bushel, originally defined as a cylindrical measure of inches in diameter and 8 inches in depth, which made the dry gallon )2 × ≈ 2150.42017 cubic inches. The bushel was later defined to be 2150.42 cubic inches exactly, thus making its gallon exactly (); in previous centuries, there had been a corn gallon of between 271 and 272 cubic inches.
The wine, fluid, or liquid gallon has been the standard US gallon since the early 19th century. The wine gallon, which some sources relate to the volume occupied by eight medieval merchant pounds of wine, was at one time defined as the volume of a cylinder 6 inches deep and 7 inches in diameter, i.e. . It was redefined during the reign of Queen Anne in 1706 as 231 cubic inches exactly, the earlier definition with approximated to . Although the wine gallon had been used for centuries for import duty purposes, there was no legal standard of it in the Exchequer, while a smaller gallon was actually in use, requiring this statute; it remains the US definition today.
In 1824, Britain adopted a close approximation to the ale gallon known as the imperial gallon, and abolished all other gallons in favour of it. Inspired by the kilogram-litre relationship, the imperial gallon was based on the volume of 10 pounds of distilled water weighed in air with brass weights with the barometer standing at 30 inches of mercury and at a temperature of .
In 1963, this definition was refined as the space occupied by 10 pounds of distilled water of density weighed in air of density against weights of density (the original "brass" was refined as the densities of brass alloys vary depending on metallurgical composition), which was calculated as to ten significant figures.
The precise definition of exactly cubic decimetres (also , ≈ ) came after the litre was redefined in 1964. This was adopted shortly afterwards in Canada, and adopted in 1976 in the United Kingdom.
Sizes of gallons
Historically, gallons of various sizes were used in many parts of Western Europe. In these localities, it has been replaced as the unit of capacity by the litre.
References
External links
Customary units of measurement in the United States
Imperial units
Systems of units
Units of volume
Alcohol measurement
Cooking weights and measures | [
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12883 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini%20coefficient | Gini coefficient | In economics, the Gini coefficient ( ), also the Gini index and the Gini ratio, is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality or the wealth inequality within a nation or a social group. The Gini coefficient was developed by statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini.
The Gini coefficient measures the inequality among values of a frequency distribution, for example, levels of income. A Gini coefficient of 0 expresses perfect equality, where all values are the same (i.e. where everyone has the same income). A Gini coefficient of 1 (or 100%) expresses maximal inequality among values (i.e. for a large number of people where only one person has all the income or consumption and all others have none, the Gini coefficient will be nearly one).
For larger groups, values close to 1 are unlikely. Given the normalization of both the cumulative population and the cumulative share of income used to calculate the Gini coefficient, the measure is not overly sensitive to the specifics of the income distribution, but rather only on how incomes vary relative to the other members of a population. The exception to this is in the redistribution of income resulting in a minimum income for all people. When the population is sorted, if their income distribution were to approximate a well-known function, then some representative values could be calculated.
The Gini coefficient was proposed by Corrado Gini as a measure of inequality of income or wealth. For OECD countries, in the late 20th century, considering the effect of taxes and transfer payments, the income Gini coefficient ranged between 0.24 and 0.49, with Slovenia being the lowest and Mexico the highest. African countries had the highest pre-tax Gini coefficients in 2008–2009, with South Africa the world's highest, variously estimated to be 0.63 to 0.7, although this figure drops to 0.52 after social assistance is taken into account, and drops again to 0.47 after taxation. The global income Gini coefficient in 2005 has been estimated to be between 0.61 and 0.68 by various sources.
There are some issues in interpreting a Gini coefficient. The same value may result from many different distribution curves. The demographic structure should be taken into account. Countries with an aging population, or with a baby boom, experience an increasing pre-tax Gini coefficient even if real income distribution for working adults remains constant. Scholars have devised over a dozen variants of the Gini coefficient.
History
The Gini coefficient was developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini and published in his 1912 paper Variability and Mutability (). Building on the work of American economist Max Lorenz, Gini proposed that the difference between the hypothetical straight line depicting perfect equality, and the actual line depicting people's incomes, be used as a measure of inequality.
Definition
The Gini coefficient is a single number that demonstrates a degree of inequality in a distribution of income/wealth. It is used to estimate how far a country's wealth or income distribution deviates from a totally equal distribution.
In terms of income-ordered population percentiles, the Gini coefficient is the cumulative shortfall from equal share of the total income up to each percentile. That summed shortfall is then divided by the value it would have in the case of complete equality.
The Gini coefficient is usually defined mathematically based on the Lorenz curve, which plots the proportion of the total income of the population (y axis) that is cumulatively earned by the bottom x of the population (see diagram). The line at 45 degrees thus represents perfect equality of incomes. The Gini coefficient can then be thought of as the ratio of the area that lies between the line of equality and the Lorenz curve (marked A in the diagram) over the total area under the line of equality (marked A and B in the diagram); i.e., . It is also equal to 2A and to due to the fact that (since the axes scale from 0 to 1).
If all people have non-negative income (or wealth, as the case may be), the Gini coefficient can theoretically range from 0 (complete equality) to 1 (complete inequality); it is sometimes expressed as a percentage ranging between 0 and 100. In reality, both extreme values are not quite reached. If negative values are possible (such as the negative wealth of people with debts), then the Gini coefficient could theoretically be more than 1. Usually the mean (or total) is assumed to be positive, which rules out a Gini coefficient less than zero.
An alternative approach is to define the Gini coefficient as half of the relative mean absolute difference, which is mathematically equivalent to the definition based on the Lorenz curve. The mean absolute difference is the average absolute difference of all pairs of items of the population, and the relative mean absolute difference is the mean absolute difference divided by the average, , to normalize for scale. If xi is the wealth or income of person i, and there are n persons, then the Gini coefficient G is given by:
When the income (or wealth) distribution is given as a continuous probability density function p(x), the Gini coefficient is again half of the relative mean absolute difference:
where is the mean of the distribution, and the lower limits of integration may be replaced by zero when all incomes are positive.
Calculation
While the income distribution of any particular country won't always follow theoretical models in reality, these functions give a qualitative understanding of the income distribution in a nation given the Gini coefficient.
Example: two levels of income
The extreme cases are the most equal society in which every person receives the same income () and the most unequal society where a single person receives 100% of the total income and the remaining people receive none ().
A more general simplified case also just distinguishes two levels of income, low and high. If the high income group is a proportion u of the population and earns a proportion f of all income, then the Gini coefficient is . An actual more graded distribution with these same values u and f will always have a higher Gini coefficient than .
The proverbial case where the richest 20% have 80% of all income (see Pareto principle) would lead to an income Gini coefficient of at least 60%.
An often cited case that 1% of all the world's population owns 50% of all wealth, means a wealth Gini coefficient of at least 49%.
Alternative expressions
In some cases, this equation can be applied to calculate the Gini coefficient without direct reference to the Lorenz curve. For example, (taking y to mean the income or wealth of a person or household):
For a population uniform on the values yi, i = 1 to n, indexed in non-decreasing order (yi ≤ yi+1):
This may be simplified to:
This formula actually applies to any real population, since each person can be assigned his or her own yi.
Since the Gini coefficient is half the relative mean absolute difference, it can also be calculated using formulas for the relative mean absolute difference. For a random sample S consisting of values yi, i = 1 to n, that are indexed in non-decreasing order (yi ≤ yi+1), the statistic:
is a consistent estimator of the population Gini coefficient, but is not, in general, unbiased. Like G, has a simpler form:
There does not exist a sample statistic that is in general an unbiased estimator of the population Gini coefficient, like the relative mean absolute difference.
Discrete probability distribution
For a discrete probability distribution with probability mass function , where is the fraction of the population with income or wealth , the Gini coefficient is:
where
If the points with nonzero probabilities are indexed in increasing order then:
where
and These formulae are also applicable in the limit as
Continuous probability distribution
When the population is large, the income distribution may be represented by a continuous probability density function f(x) where f(x) dx is the fraction of the population with wealth or income in the interval dx about x. If F(x) is the cumulative distribution function for f(x):
and L(x) is the Lorenz function:
then the Lorenz curve L(F) may then be represented as a function parametric in L(x) and F(x) and the value of B can be found by integration:
The Gini coefficient can also be calculated directly from the cumulative distribution function of the distribution F(y). Defining μ as the mean of the distribution, and specifying that F(y) is zero for all negative values, the Gini coefficient is given by:
The latter result comes from integration by parts. (Note that this formula can be applied when there are negative values if the integration is taken from minus infinity to plus infinity.)
The Gini coefficient may be expressed in terms of the quantile function Q(F) (inverse of the cumulative distribution function: Q(F(x)) = x)
Since the Gini coefficient is independent of scale, if the distribution function can be expressed in the form f(x,φ,a,b,c...) where φ is a scale factor and a,b,c... are dimensionless parameters, then the Gini coefficient will be a function only of a,b,c.... For example, for the exponential distribution, which is a function of only x and a scale parameter, the Gini coefficient is a constant, equal to 1/2.
For some functional forms, the Gini index can be calculated explicitly. For example, if y follows a log-normal distribution with the standard deviation of logs equal to , then where is the error function ( since , where is the cumulative distribution function of a standard normal distribution). In the table below, some examples for probability density functions with support on are shown. The Dirac delta distribution represents the case where everyone has the same wealth (or income); it implies that there are no variations at all between incomes.
{| class="wikitable" style="float: left; margin-left: 1em;"
|-
! Income Distribution function !! PDF(x) !! Gini Coefficient
|-
| Dirac delta function || || 0
|-
| Uniform distribution
||
||
|-
| Exponential distribution
||
||
|-
| Log-normal distribution
||
||
|-
| Pareto distribution
||
||
|-
| Chi-squared distribution
||
||
|-
| Gamma distribution
||
||
|-
| Weibull distribution
||
||
|-
| Beta distribution
||
||
|-
|Log-logistic distribution
|
|
|}
Other approaches
Sometimes the entire Lorenz curve is not known, and only values at certain intervals are given. In that case, the Gini coefficient can be approximated by using various techniques for interpolating the missing values of the Lorenz curve. If (Xk, Yk) are the known points on the Lorenz curve, with the Xk indexed in increasing order (Xk – 1 < Xk), so that:
Xk is the cumulated proportion of the population variable, for k = 0,...,n, with X0 = 0, Xn = 1.
Yk is the cumulated proportion of the income variable, for k = 0,...,n, with Y0 = 0, Yn = 1.
Yk should be indexed in non-decreasing order (Yk > Yk – 1)
If the Lorenz curve is approximated on each interval as a line between consecutive points, then the area B can be approximated with trapezoids and:
is the resulting approximation for G. More accurate results can be obtained using other methods to approximate the area B, such as approximating the Lorenz curve with a quadratic function across pairs of intervals, or building an appropriately smooth approximation to the underlying distribution function that matches the known data. If the population mean and boundary values for each interval are also known, these can also often be used to improve the accuracy of the approximation.
The Gini coefficient calculated from a sample is a statistic and its standard error, or confidence intervals for the population Gini coefficient, should be reported. These can be calculated using bootstrap techniques but those proposed have been mathematically complicated and computationally onerous even in an era of fast computers. Economist Tomson Ogwang made the process more efficient by setting up a "trick regression model" in which respective income variables in the sample are ranked with the lowest income being allocated rank 1. The model then expresses the rank (dependent variable) as the sum of a constant A and a normal error term whose variance is inversely proportional to yk;
Thus, G can be expressed as a function of the weighted least squares estimate of the constant A and that this can be used to speed up the calculation of the jackknife estimate for the standard error. Economist David Giles argued that the standard error of the estimate of A can be used to derive that of the estimate of G directly without using a jackknife at all. This method only requires the use of ordinary least squares regression after ordering the sample data. The results compare favorably with the estimates from the jackknife with agreement improving with increasing sample size.
However, it has since been argued that this is dependent on the model's assumptions about the error distributions and the independence of error terms, assumptions that are often not valid for real data sets. There is still ongoing debate surrounding this topic.
Guillermina Jasso and Angus Deaton independently proposed the following formula for the Gini coefficient:
where is mean income of the population, Pi is the income rank P of person i, with income X, such that the richest person receives a rank of 1 and the poorest a rank of N. This effectively gives higher weight to poorer people in the income distribution, which allows the Gini to meet the Transfer Principle. Note that the Jasso-Deaton formula rescales the coefficient so that its value is 1 if all the are zero except one. Note however Allison's reply on the need to divide by N² instead.
FAO explains another version of the formula.
Generalized inequality indices
The Gini coefficient and other standard inequality indices reduce to a common form. Perfect equality—the absence of inequality—exists when and only when the inequality ratio, , equals 1 for all j units in some population (for example, there is perfect income equality when everyone's income equals the mean income , so that for everyone). Measures of inequality, then, are measures of the average deviations of the from 1; the greater the average deviation, the greater the inequality. Based on these observations the inequality indices have this common form:
where pj weights the units by their population share, and f(rj) is a function of the deviation of each unit's rj from 1, the point of equality. The insight of this generalised inequality index is that inequality indices differ because they employ different functions of the distance of the inequality ratios (the rj) from 1.
Of income distributions
Gini coefficients of income are calculated on a market income as well as a disposable income basis. The Gini coefficient on market income—sometimes referred to as a pre-tax Gini coefficient—is calculated on income before taxes and transfers, and it measures inequality in income without considering the effect of taxes and social spending already in place in a country. The Gini coefficient on disposable income—sometimes referred to as after-tax Gini coefficient—is calculated on income after taxes and transfers, and it measures inequality in income after considering the effect of taxes and social spending already in place in a country.
For OECD countries over the 2008–2009 period, the Gini coefficient (pre-taxes and transfers) for a total population ranged between 0.34 and 0.53, with South Korea the lowest and Italy the highest. The Gini coefficient (after-taxes and transfers) for a total population ranged between 0.25 and 0.48, with Denmark the lowest and Mexico the highest. For the United States, the country with the largest population of the OECD countries, the pre-tax Gini index was 0.49, and the after-tax Gini index was 0.38, in 2008–2009. The OECD averages for total populations in OECD countries was 0.46 for the pre-tax income Gini index and 0.31 for the after-tax income Gini index. Taxes and social spending that were in place in 2008–2009 period in OECD countries significantly lowered effective income inequality, and in general, "European countries—especially Nordic and Continental welfare states—achieve lower levels of income inequality than other countries."
Using the Gini can help quantify differences in welfare and compensation policies and philosophies. However it should be borne in mind that the Gini coefficient can be misleading when used to make political comparisons between large and small countries or those with different immigration policies (see limitations section).
The Gini coefficient for the entire world has been estimated by various parties to be between 0.61 and 0.68. The graph shows the values expressed as a percentage in their historical development for a number of countries.
Regional income Gini indices
According to UNICEF, Latin America and the Caribbean region had the highest net income Gini index in the world at 48.3, on unweighted average basis in 2008. The remaining regional averages were: sub-Saharan Africa (44.2), Asia (40.4), Middle East and North Africa (39.2), Eastern Europe and Central Asia (35.4), and High-income Countries (30.9). Using the same method, the United States is claimed to have a Gini index of 36, while South Africa had the highest income Gini index score of 67.8.
World income Gini index since 1800s
Taking income distribution of all human beings, worldwide income inequality has been constantly increasing since the early 19th century. There was a steady increase in the global income inequality Gini score from 1820 to 2002, with a significant increase between 1980 and 2002. This trend appears to have peaked and begun a reversal with rapid economic growth in emerging economies, particularly in the large populations of BRIC countries.
The table below presents the estimated world income Gini coefficients over the last 200 years, as calculated by Milanovic.
More detailed data from similar sources plots a continuous decline since 1988. This is attributed to globalization increasing incomes for billions of poor people, mostly in countries like China and India. Developing countries like Brazil have also improved basic services like health care, education, and sanitation; others like Chile and Mexico have enacted more progressive tax policies.
Countries by Gini index
Of social development
Gini coefficient is widely used in fields as diverse as sociology, economics, health science, ecology, engineering and agriculture. For example, in social sciences and economics, in addition to income Gini coefficients, scholars have published education Gini coefficients and opportunity Gini coefficients.
Education
Education Gini index estimates the inequality in education for a given population. It is used to discern trends in social development through educational attainment over time. From a study of 85 countries by three Economists of World Bank Vinod Thomas, Yan Wang, Xibo Fan, estimate Mali had the highest education Gini index of 0.92 in 1990 (implying very high inequality in educational attainment across the population), while the United States had the lowest education inequality Gini index of 0.14. Between 1960 and 1990, China, India and South Korea had the fastest drop in education inequality Gini Index. They also claim education Gini index for the United States slightly increased over the 1980–1990 period.
Opportunity
Similar in concept to income Gini coefficient, opportunity Gini coefficient measures inequality of opportunity. The concept builds on Amartya Sen's suggestion that inequality coefficients of social development should be premised on the process of enlarging people's choices and enhancing their capabilities, rather than on the process of reducing income inequality. Kovacevic in a review of opportunity Gini coefficient explains that the coefficient estimates how well a society enables its citizens to achieve success in life where the success is based on a person's choices, efforts and talents, not his background defined by a set of predetermined circumstances at birth, such as, gender, race, place of birth, parent's income and circumstances beyond the control of that individual.
In 2003, Roemer reported Italy and Spain exhibited the largest opportunity inequality Gini index amongst advanced economies.
Income mobility
In 1978, Anthony Shorrocks introduced a measure based on income Gini coefficients to estimate income mobility. This measure, generalized by Maasoumi and Zandvakili, is now generally referred to as Shorrocks index, sometimes as Shorrocks mobility index or Shorrocks rigidity index. It attempts to estimate whether the income inequality Gini coefficient is permanent or temporary, and to what extent a country or region enables economic mobility to its people so that they can move from one (e.g., bottom 20%) income quantile to another (e.g., middle 20%) over time. In other words, Shorrocks index compares inequality of short-term earnings such as the annual income of households, to inequality of long-term earnings such as 5-year or 10-year total income for the same households.
Shorrocks index is calculated in number of different ways, a common approach being from the ratio of income Gini coefficients between short-term and long-term for the same region or country.
A 2010 study using social security income data for the United States since 1937 and Gini-based Shorrocks indices concludes that income mobility in the United States has had a complicated history, primarily due to the mass influx of women into the American labor force after World War II. Income inequality and income mobility trends have been different for men and women workers between 1937 and the 2000s. When men and women are considered together, the Gini coefficient-based Shorrocks index trends imply long-term income inequality has been substantially reduced among all workers, in recent decades for the United States. Other scholars, using just 1990s data or other short periods have come to different conclusions. For example, Sastre and Ayala, conclude from their study of income Gini coefficient data between 1993 and 1998 for six developed economies, that France had the least income mobility, Italy the highest, and the United States and Germany intermediate levels of income mobility over those 5 years.
Features
The Gini coefficient has features that make it useful as a measure of dispersion in a population, and inequalities in particular.
Limitations
The Gini coefficient is a relative measure. It is possible for the Gini coefficient of a developing country to rise (due to increasing inequality of income) while the number of people in absolute poverty decreases. This is because the Gini coefficient measures relative, not absolute, wealth. Changing income inequality, measured by Gini coefficients, can be due to structural changes in a society such as growing population (baby booms, aging populations, increased divorce rates, extended family households splitting into nuclear families, emigration, immigration) and income mobility. Gini coefficients are simple, and this simplicity can lead to oversights and can confuse the comparison of different populations; for example, while both Bangladesh (per capita income of $1,693) and the Netherlands (per capita income of $42,183) had an income Gini coefficient of 0.31 in 2010, the quality of life, economic opportunity and absolute income in these countries are very different, i.e. countries may have identical Gini coefficients, but differ greatly in wealth. Basic necessities may be available to all in a developed economy, while in an undeveloped economy with the same Gini coefficient, basic necessities may be unavailable to most or unequally available, due to lower absolute wealth.
Different income distributions with the same Gini coefficient
Even when the total income of a population is the same, in certain situations two countries with different income distributions can have the same Gini index (e.g. cases when income Lorenz Curves cross). Table A illustrates one such situation. Both countries have a Gini coefficient of 0.2, but the average income distributions for household groups are different. As another example, in a population where the lowest 50% of individuals have no income and the other 50% have equal income, the Gini coefficient is 0.5; whereas for another population where the lowest 75% of people have 25% of income and the top 25% have 75% of the income, the Gini index is also 0.5. Economies with similar incomes and Gini coefficients can have very different income distributions. Bellù and Liberati claim that to rank income inequality between two different populations based on their Gini indices is sometimes not possible, or misleading.
Extreme wealth inequality, yet low-income Gini coefficient
A Gini index does not contain information about absolute national or personal incomes. Populations can have very low income Gini indices, yet simultaneously very high wealth Gini index. By measuring inequality in income, the Gini ignores the differential efficiency of use of household income. By ignoring wealth (except as it contributes to income) the Gini can create the appearance of inequality when the people compared are at different stages in their life. Wealthy countries such as Sweden can show a low Gini coefficient for disposable income of 0.31 thereby appearing equal, yet have a very high Gini coefficient for wealth of 0.79 to 0.86 thereby suggesting an extremely unequal wealth distribution in its society. These factors are not assessed in income-based Gini.
Small sample bias – sparsely populated regions more likely to have low Gini coefficient
Gini index has a downward-bias for small populations. Counties or states or countries with small populations and less diverse economies will tend to report small Gini coefficients. For economically diverse large population groups, a much higher coefficient is expected than for each of its regions. Taking world economy as one, and income distribution for all human beings, for example, different scholars estimate global Gini index to range between 0.61 and 0.68.
As with other inequality coefficients, the Gini coefficient is influenced by the granularity of the measurements. For example, five 20% quantiles (low granularity) will usually yield a lower Gini coefficient than twenty 5% quantiles (high granularity) for the same distribution. Philippe Monfort has shown that using inconsistent or unspecified granularity limits the usefulness of Gini coefficient measurements.
The Gini coefficient measure gives different results when applied to individuals instead of households, for the same economy and same income distributions. If household data is used, the measured value of income Gini depends on how the household is defined. When different populations are not measured with consistent definitions, the comparison is not meaningful.
Deininger and Squire (1996) show that income Gini coefficient based on individual income, rather than household income, are different. For example, for the United States, they find that the individual income-based Gini index was 0.35, while for France it was 0.43. According to their individual-focused method, in the 108 countries they studied, South Africa had the world's highest Gini coefficient at 0.62, Malaysia had Asia's highest Gini coefficient at 0.5, Brazil the highest at 0.57 in Latin America and the Caribbean region, and Turkey the highest at 0.5 in OECD countries.
Gini coefficient is unable to discern the effects of structural changes in populations
Expanding on the importance of life-span measures, the Gini coefficient as a point-estimate of equality at a certain time ignores life-span changes in income. Typically, increases in the proportion of young or old members of a society will drive apparent changes in equality, simply because people generally have lower incomes and wealth when they are young than when they are old. Because of this, factors such as age distribution within a population and mobility within income classes can create the appearance of inequality when none exist taking into account demographic effects. Thus a given economy may have a higher Gini coefficient at any one point in time compared to another, while the Gini coefficient calculated over individuals' lifetime income is actually lower than the apparently more equal (at a given point in time) economy's. Essentially, what matters is not just inequality in any particular year, but the composition of the distribution over time.
Billionaire Thomas Kwok claims income Gini coefficient for Hong Kong has been high (0.434 in 2010), in part because of structural changes in its population. Over recent decades, Hong Kong has witnessed increasing numbers of small households, elderly households and elderly living alone. The combined income is now split into more households. Many old people are living separately from their children in Hong Kong. These social changes have caused substantial changes in household income distribution. The income Gini coefficient, claims Kwok, does not discern these structural changes in its society. Household money income distribution for the United States, summarized in Table C of this section, confirms that this issue is not limited to just Hong Kong. According to the US Census Bureau, between 1979 and 2010, the population of the United States experienced structural changes in overall households, the income for all income brackets increased in inflation-adjusted terms, household income distributions shifted into higher income brackets over time, while the income Gini coefficient increased.
Another limitation of the Gini coefficient is that it is not a proper measure of egalitarianism, as it only measures income dispersion. For example, if two equally egalitarian countries pursue different immigration policies, the country accepting a higher proportion of low-income or impoverished migrants will report a higher Gini coefficient and therefore may appear to exhibit more income inequality.
Inability to value benefits and income from informal economy affects Gini coefficient accuracy
Some countries distribute benefits that are difficult to value. Countries that provide subsidized housing, medical care, education or other such services are difficult to value objectively, as it depends on the quality and extent of the benefit. In absence of free markets, valuing these income transfers as household income is subjective. The theoretical model of the Gini coefficient is limited to accepting correct or incorrect subjective assumptions.
In subsistence-driven and informal economies, people may have significant income in other forms than money, for example through subsistence farming or bartering. These income tend to accrue to the segment of population that is below-poverty line or very poor, in emerging and transitional economy countries such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. Informal economy accounts for over half of global employment and as much as 90 per cent of employment in some of the poorer sub-Saharan countries with high official Gini inequality coefficients. Schneider et al., in their 2010 study of 162 countries, report about 31.2%, or about $20 trillion, of world's GDP is informal. In developing countries, the informal economy predominates for all income brackets except for the richer, urban upper income bracket populations. Even in developed economies, between 8% (United States) to 27% (Italy) of each nation's GDP is informal, and resulting informal income predominates as a livelihood activity for those in the lowest income brackets. The value and distribution of the incomes from informal or underground economy is difficult to quantify, making true income Gini coefficients estimates difficult. Different assumptions and quantifications of these incomes will yield different Gini coefficients.
Gini has some mathematical limitations as well. It is not additive and different sets of people cannot be averaged to obtain the Gini coefficient of all the people in the sets.
Alternatives
Given the limitations of the Gini coefficient, other statistical methods are used in combination or as an alternative measure of population dispersity. For example, entropy measures are frequently used (e.g. the Atkinson index or the Theil Index and Mean log deviation as special cases of the generalized entropy index). These measures attempt to compare the distribution of resources by intelligent agents in the market with a maximum entropy random distribution, which would occur if these agents acted like non-interacting particles in a closed system following the laws of statistical physics.
Relation to other statistical measures
There is a summary measure of the diagnostic ability of a binary classifier system that is also called the Gini coefficient, which is defined as twice the area between the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and its diagonal. It is related to the AUC (Area Under the ROC Curve) measure of performance given by and to Mann–Whitney U. Although both Gini coefficients are defined as areas between certain curves and share certain properties, there is no direct simple relation between the Gini coefficient of statistical dispersion and the Gini coefficient of a classifier.
The Gini index is also related to the Pietra index — both of which are a measure of statistical heterogeneity and are derived from Lorenz curve and the diagonal line.
In certain fields such as ecology, inverse Simpson's index is used to quantify diversity, and this should not be confused with the Simpson index . These indicators are related to Gini. The inverse Simpson index increases with diversity, unlike Simpson index and Gini coefficient which decrease with diversity. The Simpson index is in the range [0, 1], where 0 means maximum and 1 means minimum diversity (or heterogeneity). Since diversity indices typically increase with increasing heterogeneity, Simpson index is often transformed into inverse Simpson, or using the complement , known as Gini-Simpson Index.
Other uses
Although the Gini coefficient is most popular in economics, it can in theory be applied in any field of science that studies a distribution. For example, in ecology the Gini coefficient has been used as a measure of biodiversity, where the cumulative proportion of species is plotted against cumulative proportion of individuals. In health, it has been used as a measure of the inequality of health related quality of life in a population. In education, it has been used as a measure of the inequality of universities. In chemistry it has been used to express the selectivity of protein kinase inhibitors against a panel of kinases. In engineering, it has been used to evaluate the fairness achieved by Internet routers in scheduling packet transmissions from different flows of traffic.
The Gini coefficient is sometimes used for the measurement of the discriminatory power of rating systems in credit risk management.
A 2005 study accessed US census data to measure home computer ownership and used the Gini coefficient to measure inequalities amongst whites and African Americans. Results indicated that although decreasing overall, home computer ownership inequality is substantially smaller among white households.
A 2016 peer-reviewed study titled Employing the Gini coefficient to measure participation inequality in treatment-focused Digital Health Social Networks illustrated that the Gini coefficient was helpful and accurate in measuring shifts in inequality, however as a standalone metric it failed to incorporate overall network size.
The discriminatory power refers to a credit risk model's ability to differentiate between defaulting and non-defaulting clients. The formula , in calculation section above, may be used for the final model and also at the individual model factor level, to quantify the discriminatory power of individual factors. It is related to accuracy ratio in population assessment models.
The Gini coefficient has also been applied to analyze inequality on dating apps.
Kaminskiy and Krivtsov extended the concept of the Gini coefficient from economics to reliability theory and proposed a Gini–type coefficient that helps to assess the degree of aging of non−repairable systems or aging and rejuvenation of repairable systems. The coefficient is defined between -1 and 1 and can be used in both empirical and parametric life distributions. It takes negative values for the class of decreasing failure rate distributions and point processes with decreasing failure intensity rate and is positive for the increasing failure rate distributions and point processes with increasing failure intensity rate. The value of zero corresponds to the exponential life distribution or the Homogeneous Poisson Process.
See also
References
Further reading
Reprinted in
The Chinese version of this paper appears in
External links
Deutsche Bundesbank: Do banks diversify loan portfolios?, 2005 (on using e.g. the Gini coefficient for risk evaluation of loan portfolios)
Forbes Article, In praise of inequality
Measuring Software Project Risk With The Gini Coefficient, an application of the Gini coefficient to software
The World Bank: Measuring Inequality
Travis Hale, University of Texas Inequality Project:The Theoretical Basics of Popular Inequality Measures, online computation of examples: 1A, 1B
Article from The Guardian analysing inequality in the UK 1974–2006
World Income Inequality Database
Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries
U.S. Income Distribution: Just How Unequal?
The Wealth Re-distribution Theory Patent by Shravan Charya
1912 introductions
1912 in economics
Concentration indicators
Demographic economics
Income inequality metrics
Welfare economics | [
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12884 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCHQ | GCHQ | Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Based at "The Doughnut" in the suburbs of Cheltenham, GCHQ is the responsibility of the country's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Foreign Secretary), but it is not a part of the Foreign Office and its Director ranks as a Permanent Secretary.
GCHQ was originally established after the First World War as the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and was known under that name until 1946. During the Second World War it was located at Bletchley Park, where it was responsible for breaking the German Enigma codes. There are two main components of the GCHQ, the Composite Signals Organisation (CSO), which is responsible for gathering information, and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is responsible for securing the UK's own communications. The Joint Technical Language Service (JTLS) is a small department and cross-government resource responsible for mainly technical language support and translation and interpreting services across government departments. It is co-located with GCHQ for administrative purposes.
In 2013, GCHQ received considerable media attention when the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was in the process of collecting all online and telephone data in the UK via the Tempora programme. Snowden's revelations began a spate of ongoing disclosures of global surveillance. The Guardian newspaper was then forced to destroy all files Snowden had given them because of the threats of a lawsuit under the Official Secrets Act.
Structure
GCHQ is led by the Director of GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, and a Corporate Board, made up of executive and non-executive directors. Reporting to the Corporate Board are:
Sigint missions: comprising maths and cryptanalysis, IT and computer systems, linguistics and translation, and the intelligence analysis unit
Enterprise: comprising applied research and emerging technologies, corporate knowledge and information systems, commercial supplier relationships, and biometrics
Corporate management: enterprise resource planning, human resources, internal audit, and architecture
National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
History
Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS)
During the First World War, the British Army and Royal Navy had separate signals intelligence agencies, MI1b and NID25 (initially known as Room 40) respectively. In 1919, the Cabinet's Secret Service Committee, chaired by Lord Curzon, recommended that a peacetime codebreaking agency should be created, a task which was given to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Hugh Sinclair. Sinclair merged staff from NID25 and MI1b into the new organisation, which initially consisted of around 25–30 officers and a similar number of clerical staff. It was titled the "Government Code and Cypher School" (GC&CS), a cover-name which was chosen by Victor Forbes of the Foreign Office. Alastair Denniston, who had been a member of NID25, was appointed as its operational head. It was initially under the control of the Admiralty and located in Watergate House, Adelphi, London. Its public function was "to advise as to the security of codes and cyphers used by all Government departments and to assist in their provision", but also had a secret directive to "study the methods of cypher communications used by foreign powers". GC&CS officially formed on 1 November 1919, and produced its first decrypt prior to that date, on 19 October.
Before the Second World War, GC&CS was a relatively small department. By 1922, the main focus of GC&CS was on diplomatic traffic, with "no service traffic ever worth circulating" and so, at the initiative of Lord Curzon, it was transferred from the Admiralty to the Foreign Office. GC&CS came under the supervision of Hugh Sinclair, who by 1923 was both the Chief of SIS and Director of GC&CS. In 1925, both organisations were co-located on different floors of Broadway Buildings, opposite St. James's Park. Messages decrypted by GC&CS were distributed in blue-jacketed files that became known as "BJs". In the 1920s, GC&CS was successfully reading Soviet Union diplomatic cyphers. However, in May 1927, during a row over clandestine Soviet support for the General Strike and the distribution of subversive propaganda, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made details from the decrypts public.
During the Second World War, GC&CS was based largely at Bletchley Park, in present-day Milton Keynes, working on understanding the German Enigma machine and Lorenz ciphers. In 1940, GC&CS was working on the diplomatic codes and ciphers of 26 countries, tackling over 150 diplomatic cryptosystems. Senior staff included Alastair Denniston, Oliver Strachey, Dilly Knox, John Tiltman, Edward Travis, Ernst Fetterlein, Josh Cooper, Donald Michie, Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Joan Clarke, Max Newman, William Tutte, I. J. (Jack) Good, Peter Calvocoressi and Hugh Foss.
An outstation in the Far East, the Far East Combined Bureau was set up in Hong Kong in 1935 and moved to Singapore in 1939. Subsequently, with the Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsula, the Army and RAF codebreakers went to the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi, India. The Navy codebreakers in FECB went to Colombo, Ceylon, then to Kilindini, near Mombasa, Kenya.
Post Second World War
GC&CS was renamed the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in June 1946.
The organisation was at first based in Eastcote in northwest London, then in 1951 moved to the outskirts of Cheltenham, setting up two sites at Oakley and Benhall. One of the major reasons for selecting Cheltenham was that the town had been the location of the headquarters of the United States Army Services of Supply for the European Theater during the War, which built up a telecommunications infrastructure in the region to carry out its logistics tasks.
Following the Second World War, US and British intelligence have shared information as part of the UKUSA Agreement. The principal aspect of this is that GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency (NSA), share technologies, infrastructure and information.
GCHQ ran many signals intelligence (SIGINT) monitoring stations abroad. During the early Cold War, the remnants of the British Empire provided a global network of ground stations which were a major contribution to the UKUSA Agreement; the US regarded RAF Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong as the most valuable of these. The monitoring stations were largely run by inexpensive National Service recruits, but when this ended in the early 1960s, the increased cost of civilian employees caused budgetary problems. In 1965 a Foreign Office review found that 11,500 staff were involved in SIGINT collection (8,000 GCHQ staff and 3,500 military personnel), exceeding the size of the Diplomatic Service. Reaction to the Suez War led to the eviction of GCHQ from several of its best foreign SIGINT collection sites, including the new Perkar, Ceylon site and RAF Habbaniya, Iraq. The staff largely moved to tented encampments on military bases in Cyprus, which later became the Sovereign Base Area.
Duncan Campbell and Mark Hosenball revealed the existence of GCHQ in 1976 in an article for Time Out; as a result, Hosenball was deported from the UK. GCHQ had a very low profile in the media until 1983 when the trial of Geoffrey Prime, a KGB mole within it, created considerable media interest.
Trade union disputes
In 1984, GCHQ was the centre of a political row when, in the wake of strikes which affected Sigint collection, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher prohibited its employees from belonging to a trade union. Following the breakdown of talks and the failure to negotiate a no-strike agreement, it was believed that membership of a union would be in conflict with national security. A number of mass national one-day strikes were held to protest this decision, claimed by some as the first step to wider bans on trade unions. Appeals to British Courts and European Commission of Human Rights were unsuccessful. The government offered a sum of money to each employee who agreed to give up their union membership. Appeal to the ILO resulted in a decision that government's actions were in violation of Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention.
A no-strike agreement was eventually negotiated and the ban lifted by the incoming Labour government in 1997, with the Government Communications Group of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) being formed to represent interested employees at all grades. In 2000, a group of 14 former GCHQ employees, who had been dismissed after refusing to give up their union membership, were offered re-employment, which three of them accepted.
Post Cold War
1990s: Post-Cold War restructuring
The Intelligence Services Act 1994 formalised the activities of the intelligence agencies for the first time, defining their purpose, and the British Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee was given a remit to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of the three intelligence agencies. The objectives of GCHQ were defined as working as "in the interests of national security, with particular reference to the defence and foreign policies of Her Majesty's government; in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom; and in support of the prevention and the detection of serious crime". During the introduction of the Intelligence Agency Act in late 1993, the former Prime Minister Jim Callaghan had described GCHQ as a "full-blown bureaucracy", adding that future bodies created to provide oversight of the intelligence agencies should "investigate whether all the functions that GCHQ carries out today are still necessary."
In late 1993 civil servant Michael Quinlan advised a deep review of the work of GCHQ following the conclusion of his "Review of Intelligence Requirements and Resources", which had imposed a 3% cut on the agency. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Jonathan Aitken, subsequently held face to face discussions with the intelligence agency directors to assess further savings in the wake of Quinlan's review. Aldrich (2010) suggests that Sir John Adye, the then Director of GCHQ performed badly in meetings with Aitken, leading Aitken to conclude that GCHQ was "suffering from out-of-date methods of management and out-of-date methods for assessing priorities". GCHQ's budget was £850 million in 1993, (£ as of ) compared to £125 million for the Security Service and SIS (MI5 and MI6). In December 1994 the businessman Roger Hurn was commissioned to begin a review of GCHQ, which was concluded in March 1995. Hurn's report recommended a cut of £100 million in GCHQ's budget; such a large reduction had not been suffered by any British intelligence agency since the end of World War II. The J Division of GCHQ, which had collected SIGINT on Russia, disappeared as a result of the cuts. The cuts had been mostly reversed by 2000 in the wake of threats from violent non-state actors, and risks from increased terrorism, organised crime and illegal access to nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
David Omand became the Director of GCHQ in 1996, and greatly restructured the agency in the face of new and changing targets and rapid technological change. Omand introduced the concept of "Sinews" (or "SIGINT New Systems") which allowed more flexible working methods, avoiding overlaps in work by creating fourteen domains, each with a well-defined working scope. The tenure of Omand also saw the construction of a modern new headquarters, intended to consolidate the two old sites at Oakley and Benhall into a single, more open-plan work environment. Located on a 176-acre site in Benhall, it would be the largest building constructed for secret intelligence operations outside the United States.
Operations at GCHQ's Chung Hom Kok listening station in Hong Kong ended in 1994. GCHQ's Hong Kong operations were extremely important to their relationship with the NSA, who contributed investment and equipment to the station. In anticipation of the transfer of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, the Hong Kong stations operations were moved to Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station in Geraldton in Western Australia.
Operations that used GCHQ's intelligence-gathering capabilities in the 1990s included the monitoring of communications of Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War, of dissident republican terrorists and the Real IRA, of the various factions involved in the Yugoslav Wars, and of the criminal Kenneth Noye. In the mid 1990s GCHQ began to assist in the investigation of cybercrime.
2000s: Coping with the Internet
At the end of 2003, GCHQ moved in to its new building. Built on a circular plan around a large central courtyard, it quickly became known as the Doughnut. At the time, it was one of the largest public-sector building projects in Europe, with an estimated cost of £337 million. The new building, which was designed by Gensler and constructed by Carillion, became the base for all of GCHQ's Cheltenham operations.
The public spotlight fell on GCHQ in late 2003 and early 2004 following the sacking of Katharine Gun after she leaked to The Observer a confidential email from agents at the United States' National Security Agency addressed to GCHQ agents about the wiretapping of UN delegates in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
GCHQ gains its intelligence by monitoring a wide variety of communications and other electronic signals. For this, a number of stations have been established in the UK and overseas. The listening stations are at Cheltenham itself, Bude, Scarborough, Ascension Island, and with the United States at Menwith Hill. Ayios Nikolaos Station in Cyprus is run by the British Army for GCHQ.
In March 2010, GCHQ was criticised by the Intelligence and Security Committee for problems with its IT security practices and failing to meet its targets for work targeted against cyber attacks.
As revealed by Edward Snowden in The Guardian, GCHQ spied on foreign politicians visiting the 2009 G-20 London Summit by eavesdropping phonecalls and emails and monitoring their computers, and in some cases even ongoing after the summit via keyloggers that had been installed during the summit.
According to Edward Snowden, at that time GCHQ had two principal umbrella programs for collecting communications:
"Mastering the Internet" (MTI) for Internet traffic, which is extracted from fibre-optic cables and can be searched by using the Tempora computer system.
"Global Telecoms Exploitation" (GTE) for telephone traffic.
GCHQ has also had access to the US internet monitoring programme PRISM from at least as far back as June 2010. PRISM is said to give the National Security Agency and FBI easy access to the systems of nine of the world's top internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, and Skype.
From 2013, GCHQ realised that public attitudes to Sigint had changed and its former unquestioned secrecy was no longer appropriate or acceptable. The growing use of the Internet, together with its inherent insecurities, meant that the communications traffic of private citizens were becoming inextricably mixed with those of their targets and openness in the handling of this issue was becoming essential to their credibility as an organisation. The Internet had become a "cyber commons", with its dominance creating a "second age of Sigint". GCHQ transformed itself accordingly, including greatly expanded Public Relations and Legal departments, and adopting public education in cyber security as an important part of its remit.
2010s
In February 2014, The Guardian, based on documents provided by Snowden, revealed that GCHQ had indiscriminately collected 1.8 million private Yahoo webcam images from users across the world. In the same month NBC and The Intercept, based on documents released by Snowden, revealed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group and the Computer Network Exploitation units within GCHQ. Their mission was cyber operations based on "dirty tricks" to shut down enemy communications, discredit, and plant misinformation on enemies. These operations were 5% of all GCHQ operations according to a conference slideshow presented by the GCHQ.
Soon after becoming Director of GCHQ in 2014, Robert Hannigan wrote an article in the Financial Times on the topic of internet surveillance, stating that "however much [large US technology companies] may dislike it, they have become the command and control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals" and that GCHQ and its sister agencies "cannot tackle these challenges at scale without greater support from the private sector", arguing that most internet users "would be comfortable with a better and more sustainable relationship between the [intelligence] agencies and the tech companies". Since the 2013 global surveillance disclosures, large US technology companies have improved security and become less co-operative with foreign intelligence agencies, including those of the UK, generally requiring a US court order before disclosing data. However the head of the UK technology industry group techUK rejected these claims, stating that they understood the issues but that disclosure obligations "must be based upon a clear and transparent legal framework and effective oversight rather than, as suggested, a deal between the industry and government".
In 2015, documents obtained by The Intercept from US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that GCHQ had carried out a mass-surveillance operation, codenamed KARMA POLICE, since about 2008. The operation swept up the IP address of Internet users visiting websites, and was established with no public scrutiny or oversight. KARMA POLICE is a powerful spying tool in conjunction with other GCHQ programs because IP addresses could be cross-referenced with other data. The goal of the program, according to the documents, was "either (a) a web browsing profile for every visible user on the internet, or (b) a user profile for every visible website on the internet."
In 2015, GCHQ admitted for the first time in court that it conducts computer hacking.
In 2017, US Press Secretary Sean Spicer alleged that GCHQ had conducted surveillance on US President Donald Trump, basing the allegation on statements made by a media commentator during a Fox News segment. The US government formally apologised for the allegations and promised they would not be repeated. However, surveillance of Russian agents did pick up contacts made by Trump's campaign team in the run-up to his election, which were passed on to US agencies.
On 31 October 2018, GCHQ joined Instagram.
Security mission
As well as a mission to gather intelligence, GCHQ has for a long-time had a corresponding mission to assist in the protection of the British government's own communications. When the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) was created in 1919, its overt task was providing security advice. GC&CS's Security section was located in Mansfield College, Oxford during the Second World War.
In April 1946, GC&CS became GCHQ, and the now GCHQ Security section moved from Oxford to join the rest of the organisation at Eastcote later that year.
LCSA
From 1952 to 1954, the intelligence mission of GCHQ relocated to Cheltenham; the Security section remained at Eastcote, and in March 1954 became a separate, independent organisation: the London Communications Security Agency (LCSA), which in 1958 was renamed to the London Communications-Electronic Security Agency (LCESA).
In April 1965, GPO and MOD units merged with LCESA to become the Communications-Electronic Security Department (CESD).
CESG
In October 1969, CESD was merged into GCHQ and becoming Communications-Electronic Security Group (CESG).
In 1977 CESG relocated from Eastcote to Cheltenham.
CESG continued as the UK National Technical Authority for information assurance, including cryptography. CESG did not manufacture security equipment, but worked with industry to ensure the availability of suitable products and services, while GCHQ itself funded research into such areas, for example to the Centre for Quantum Computation at Oxford University and the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research at the University of Bristol.
In the 21st century, CESG ran a number of assurance schemes such as CHECK, CLAS, Commercial Product Assurance (CPA) and CESG Assisted Products Service (CAPS).
Public key encryption
In late 1969 the concept for public-key encryption was developed and proven by James H. Ellis, who had worked for CESG (and before it, CESD) since 1965. Ellis lacked the number theory expertise necessary to build a workable system. Subsequently, a feasible implementation scheme via an asymmetric key algorithm was invented by another staff member Clifford Cocks, a mathematics graduate. This fact was kept secret until 1997.
NCSC
In 2016, the National Cyber Security Centre was established under GCHQ but located in London, as the UK's authority on cybersecurity. It absorbed and replaced CESG as well as activities that had previously existed outside GCHQ: the Centre for Cyber Assessment (CCA), Computer Emergency Response Team UK (CERT UK) and the cyber-related responsibilities of the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI).
Joint Technical Language Service
The Joint Technical Language Service (JTLS) was established in 1955, drawing on members of the small Ministry of Defence technical language team and others, initially to provide standard English translations for organisational expressions in any foreign language, discover the correct English equivalents of technical terms in foreign languages and discover the correct expansions of abbreviations in any language. The remit of the JTLS has expanded in the ensuing years to cover technical language support and interpreting and translation services across the UK Government and to local public sector services in Gloucestershire and surrounding counties. The JTLS also produces and publishes foreign language working aids under crown copyright and conducts research into machine translation and on-line dictionaries and glossaries. The JTLS is co-located with GCHQ for administrative purposes.
International relationships
GCHQ operates in partnership with equivalent agencies worldwide in a number of bi-lateral and multi-lateral relationships. The principal of these is with the United States (National Security Agency), Canada (Communications Security Establishment), Australia (Australian Signals Directorate) and New Zealand (Government Communications Security Bureau), through the mechanism of the UK-US Security Agreement, a broad intelligence-sharing agreement encompassing a range of intelligence collection methods. Relationships are alleged to include shared collection methods, such as the system described in the popular media as ECHELON, as well as analysed product.
Legal basis
GCHQ's legal basis is enshrined in the Intelligence Services Act 1994 Section 3 as follows:
Activities that involve interception of communications are permitted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000; this kind of interception can only be carried out after a warrant has been issued by a Secretary of State. The Human Rights Act 1998 requires the intelligence agencies, including GCHQ, to respect citizens' rights as described in the European Convention on Human Rights.
Oversight
The Prime Minister nominates cross-party Members of Parliament to an Intelligence and Security Committee. The remit of the Committee includes oversight of intelligence and security activities and reports are made directly to Parliament. Its functions were increased under the Justice and Security Act 2013 to provide for further access and investigatory powers.
Judicial oversight of GCHQ's conduct is exercised by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The UK also has an independent Intelligence Services Commissioner and Interception of Communications Commissioner, both of whom are former senior judges.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled in December 2014 that GCHQ does not breach the European Convention of Human Rights, and that its activities are compliant with Articles 8 (right to privacy) and 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention of Human Rights. However, the Tribunal stated in February 2015 that one particular aspect, the data-sharing arrangement that allowed UK Intelligence services to request data from the US surveillance programmes Prism and Upstream, had been in contravention of human rights law prior to this until two paragraphs of additional information, providing details about the procedures and safeguards, were disclosed to the public in December 2014.
Furthermore, the IPT ruled that the legislative framework in the United Kingdom does not permit mass surveillance and that while GCHQ collects and analyses data in bulk, it does not practice mass surveillance. This complements independent reports by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, and a special report made by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament; although several shortcomings and potential improvements to both oversight and the legislative framework were highlighted.
Abuses
Despite the inherent secrecy around much of GCHQ's work, investigations carried out by the UK government after the Snowden disclosures have admitted various abuses by the security services. A report by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) in 2015 revealed that a small number of staff at UK intelligence agencies had been found to misuse their surveillance powers, in one case leading to the dismissal of a member of staff at GCHQ, although there were no laws in place at the time to make these abuses a criminal offence.
Later that year, a ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal found that GCHQ acted unlawfully in conducting surveillance on two human rights organisations. The closed hearing found the government in breach of its internal surveillance policies in accessing and retaining the communications of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa. This was only the second time in the IPT's history that it had made a positive determination in favour of applicants after a closed session.
At another IPT case in 2015, GCHQ conceded that "from January 2010, the regime for the interception/obtaining, analysis, use, disclosure and destruction of legally privileged material has not been in accordance with the law for the purposes of Article 8(2) of the European convention on human rights and was accordingly unlawful". This admission was made in connection with a case brought against them by Abdelhakim Belhaj, a Libyan opponent of the former Gaddafi regime, and his wife Fatima Bouchard. The couple accused British ministers and officials of participating in their unlawful abduction, kidnapping and removal to Libya in March 2004, while Gaddafi was still in power.
On 25 May 2021, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that the GCHQ is guilty of violating data privacy rules through their bulk interception of communications, and does not provide sufficient protections for confidential journalistic material because it gathers communications in bulk.
Surveillance of parliamentarians
In 2015 there was a complaint by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas that British intelligence services, including GCHQ, had been spying on MPs allegedly "in defiance of laws prohibiting it."
Then-Home Secretary, Theresa May, had told Parliament in 2014 that:
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal investigated the complaint, and ruled that contrary to the allegation, there was no law that gave the communications of parliament any special protection. The Wilson Doctrine merely acts as a political convention.
Constitutional legal case
A controversial GCHQ case determined the scope of judicial review of prerogative powers (the Crown's residual powers under common law). This was Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374 (often known simply as the "GCHQ case"). In this case, a prerogative Order in Council had been used by the prime minister (who is the Minister for the Civil Service) to ban trade union activities by civil servants working at GCHQ. This order was issued without consultation. The House of Lords had to decide whether this was reviewable by judicial review. It was held that executive action is not immune from judicial review simply because it uses powers derived from common law rather than statute (thus the prerogative is reviewable).
Leadership
The following is a list of the heads and operational heads of GCHQ and GC&CS:
Sir Hugh Sinclair KCB (1919 - 1939) (Founder)
Alastair Denniston CMG CBE (1921 – February 1942) (Operational Head)
Sir Edward Travis KCMG CBE (February 1942 – 1952)
Sir Eric Jones KCMG CB CBE (April 1952 – 1960)
Sir Clive Loehnis KCMG (1960–1964)
Sir Leonard Hooper KCMG CBE (1965–1973)
Sir Arthur Bonsall KCMG CBE (1973–1978)
Sir Brian John Maynard Tovey KCMG (1978–1983)
Sir Peter Marychurch KCMG (1983–1989)
Sir John Anthony Adye KCMG (1989–1996)
Sir David Omand GCB (1996 –1997)
Sir Kevin Tebbit KCB CMG (1998)
Sir Francis Richards KCMG CVO DL (1998–2003)
Sir David Pepper KCMG (2003–2008)
Sir Iain Lobban KCMG CB (2008–2014)
Robert Hannigan CMG (2014–2017)
Sir Jeremy Fleming KCMG CB (2017–present)
Stations and former stations
The following are stations and former stations that have operated since the Cold War.
Current
United Kingdom
GCHQ Bude, Cornwall
GCHQ Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (Headquarters)
GCHQ London
GCHQ Manchester
GCHQ Scarborough, North Yorkshire
RAF Digby, Lincolnshire
RAF Menwith Hill, North Yorkshire
Overseas
GCHQ Ascension Island
GCHQ Cyprus
Former
United Kingdom
GCHQ Brora, Sutherland
GCHQ Cheadle, Staffordshire
GCHQ Culmhead, Somerset
GCHQ Hawklaw, Fife
Overseas
GCHQ Hong Kong
GCHQ Certified Training
The GCHQ Certified Training (GCT) scheme was established to certify two main levels of cybersecurity training. There are also degree and masters level courses. These are:
Awareness Level Training: giving an understanding and a foundation in cybersecurity concepts; and
Application Level Training: a more in-depth course
The GCT scheme was designed to help organisations find the right training that also met GCHQ's exacting standards. It was designed to assure high-quality cybersecurity training courses where the training provider had also undergone rigorous quality checks. The GCT process is carried out by APMG as the independent certification body. The scheme is part of the National Cyber Security Programme established by the Government to develop knowledge, skills and capability in all aspects of cybersecurity in the, and is based on the IISP Skills Framework.
In popular culture
The historical drama film The Imitation Game (2014) featured Benedict Cumberbatch portraying Alan Turing's efforts to break the Enigma code while employed by the Government Code and Cypher School.
GCHQ have set a number of cryptic online challenges to the public, used to attract interest and for recruitment, starting in late 1999. The response to the 2004 challenge was described as "excellent", and the challenge set in 2015 had over 600,000 attempts. It also published the GCHQ puzzle book in 2016 which sold more than 300,000 copies, with the proceeds going to charity. A second book was published in October 2018.
GCHQ appeared on the Doctor Who 2019 special "Resolution" where the Reconnaissance Scout Dalek storms the facility and exterminates the staff in order to use the organisation's resources to summon a Dalek fleet.
GCHQ is the setting of the 2020 Sky One sitcom Intelligence, featuring David Schwimmer as an incompetent American NSA officer liaising with GCHQ's Cyber Crimes unit.
See also
GCHQ units:
Joint Operations Cell
National Cyber Security Centre
GCHQ specifics:
Capenhurst – said to be home to a GCHQ monitoring site in the 1990s
Hugh Alexander – head of the cryptanalysis division at GCHQ from 1949 to 1971
Operation Socialist, a 2010–13 operation in Belgium
Zircon, the 1980s cancelled GCHQ satellite project
UK agencies:
British intelligence agencies
Joint Forces Intelligence Group
RAF Intelligence
UK cyber security community
Elsewhere:
Signals intelligence by alliances, nations and industries
NSA – equivalent United States organisation
Notes and references
Bibliography
External links
Her Majesty's Government Communications Centre
GovCertUK
GCHQ: Britain's Most Secret Intelligence Agency
BBC: A final look at GCHQ's top secret Oakley site in Cheltenham
INCENSER, or how NSA and GCHQ are tapping internet cables
1919 establishments in the United Kingdom
British intelligence agencies
Computer security organizations
Cryptography organizations
Foreign relations of the United Kingdom
Government agencies established in 1919
Organisations based in Cheltenham
Signals intelligence agencies
Foreign Office during World War II
Organizations associated with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
Headquarters in the United Kingdom | [
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12888 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis%20Gary%20Powers | Francis Gary Powers | Francis Gary Powers (August 17, 1929 – August 1, 1977) was an American pilot whose Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Lockheed U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission in Soviet Union airspace, causing the 1960 U-2 incident.
He later worked as a helicopter pilot for KNBC in Los Angeles and died in a 1977 helicopter crash.
Early life and education
Powers was born August 17, 1929, in Jenkins, Kentucky, the son of Oliver Winfield Powers (1904–1970), a coal miner, and his wife Ida Melinda Powers (; 1905–1991). His family eventually moved to Pound, Virginia, just across the state border. He was the second born and only male of six children.
His family lived in a mining town, and because of the hardships associated with living in such a town, his father wanted Powers to become a physician. He hoped his son would achieve the higher earnings of such a profession and felt that this would involve less hardships than any job in his hometown.
Education and service
Graduating with a bachelor's degree from Milligan College in Tennessee in June 1950, he enlisted in the United States Air Force in October. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in December 1952 after completing his advanced training with USAF Pilot Training Class 52-H at Williams Air Force Base, Arizona. Powers was then assigned to the 468th Strategic Fighter Squadron at Turner Air Force Base, Georgia, as a Republic F-84 Thunderjet pilot.
He married Barbara Gay Moore in Newnan, Georgia, on April 2, 1955.
In January 1956 he was recruited by the CIA. In May 1956 he began U-2 training at Watertown Strip, Nevada. His training was complete by August 1956 and his unit, the Second Weather Observational Squadron (Provisional) or Detachment 10-10, was deployed to Incirlik Air Base, Turkey. By 1960, Powers was already a veteran of many covert aerial reconnaissance missions. Family members believed that he was a NASA weather reconnaissance pilot.
The U-2 incident
Powers was discharged from the Air Force in 1956 with the rank of captain. He then joined the CIA's U-2 program at the civilian grade of GS-12. U-2 pilots flew espionage missions at altitudes of , supposedly above the reach of Soviet air defenses. The U-2 was equipped with a state-of-the-art camera designed to take high-resolution photos from the stratosphere over hostile countries, including the Soviet Union. U-2 missions systematically photographed military installations and other important sites.
Reconnaissance mission
The primary mission of the U-2s was overflying the Soviet Union. Soviet intelligence had been aware of encroaching U-2 flights at least since 1958 if not earlier but lacked effective countermeasures until 1960. On May 1, 1960, Powers's U-2A, 56-6693, departed from a military airbase in Peshawar, Pakistan, with support from the U.S. Air Station at Badaber (Peshawar Air Station). This was to be the first attempt "to fly all the way across the Soviet Union ... but it was considered worth the gamble. The planned route would take us deeper into Russia than we had ever gone, while traversing important targets never before photographed."
Shot down
Powers was shot down by an S-75 Dvina (SA-2 "Guideline") surface-to-air missile over Sverdlovsk. A total of 14 Dvinas were launched, one of which hit a MiG-19 jet fighter which was sent to intercept the U-2 but could not reach a high enough altitude. Its pilot, Sergei Safronov, ejected but died of his injuries. Another Soviet aircraft, a newly manufactured Su-9 on a transit flight, also attempted to intercept Powers's U-2. The unarmed Su-9 was directed to ram the U-2, but missed because of the large differences in speed.
As Powers flew near Kosulino in the Ural Region, three S-75 Dvinas were launched at his U-2, with the first one hitting the aircraft. "What was left of the plane began spinning, only upside down, the nose pointing upward toward the sky, the tail down toward the ground." Powers was unable to activate the camera's self-destruct mechanism before he was thrown out of the plane after releasing the canopy and his seat belt.
According to his own book Operation Overflight, it was a misunderstanding that the whole plane could be blown up.
While descending under his parachute, Powers had time to scatter his escape map, and rid himself of part of his suicide device, a silver dollar coin suspended around his neck containing a poison-laced injection pin, though he kept the poison pin. "Yet I was still hopeful of escape." He hit the ground hard, was immediately captured, and taken to Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Powers did note a second chute after landing on the ground, "some distance away and very high, a lone red and white parachute".
Attempted deception by the U.S. government
When the U.S. government learned of Powers's disappearance over the Soviet Union, they lied that a "weather plane" had strayed off course after its pilot had "difficulties with his oxygen equipment". What CIA officials did not realize was that the plane crashed almost fully intact and that the Soviets had recovered its pilot and the plane's equipment, including its top-secret high-altitude camera. Powers was interrogated extensively by the KGB for months before he made a confession and a public apology for his part in espionage.
Portrayal in U.S. media
Following admission by the White House that Powers had been captured alive, American media depicted Powers as an all-American pilot hero, who never smoked or touched alcohol. In fact, Powers smoked and drank socially. The CIA urged that his wife Barbara be given sedatives before speaking to the press and gave her talking points that she repeated to the press to portray her as a devoted wife. Her broken leg, according to the CIA disinformation, was the result of a water-skiing accident, when in fact it happened after she had had too much to drink and was dancing with another man.
In the course of his trial for espionage in the Soviet Union, Powers confessed to the charges against him and apologized for violating Soviet airspace to spy on the Soviets. In the wake of his apology, American media often depicted Powers as a coward and even as a symptom of the decay of America's "moral character."
Pilot testimony compromised by newspaper reports
Powers tried to limit the information he shared with the KGB to that which could be determined from the remains of his plane's wreckage. He was hampered by information appearing in the western press. A KGB major stated "there's no reason for you to withhold information. We'll find it out anyway. Your Press will give it to us." However, he limited his divulging of CIA contacts to one individual, with a pseudonym of "Collins". At the same time, he repeatedly stated the maximum altitude for the U-2 was , significantly lower than its actual flight ceiling.
Political consequence
The incident set back talks between Khrushchev and Eisenhower. Powers's interrogations ended on June 30, and his solitary confinement ended on July 9. On August 17, 1960, his trial began for espionage before the military division of the Supreme Court of the USSR. Lieutenant General Borisoglebsky, Major General Vorobyev, and Major General Zakharov presided. Roman Rudenko acted as prosecutor in his capacity of Procurator General of the Soviet Union. Mikhail I. Grinev served as Powers's defense counsel. In attendance were his parents and sister, and his wife Barbara and her mother. His father brought along his attorney Carl McAfee, while the CIA provided two additional attorneys.
Conviction
On August 19, 1960, Powers was convicted of espionage, "a grave crime covered by Article 2 of the Soviet Union's law 'On Criminality Responsibility for State Crimes'". His sentence consisted of 10 years' confinement, three of which were to be in a prison, with the remainder in a labor camp. The US Embassy "News Bulletin" stated, according to Powers, "as far as the government was concerned, I had acted in accordance with the instructions given me and would receive my full salary while imprisoned".
He was held in Vladimir Central Prison, about east of Moscow, in building number 2 from September 9, 1960, until February 8, 1962. His cellmate was Zigurds Krūmiņš, a Latvian political prisoner. Powers kept a diary and a journal while confined. Additionally, he learned carpet weaving from his cellmate to pass the time. He could send and receive a limited number of letters to and from his family. The prison now contains a small museum with an exhibit on Powers, who allegedly developed a good rapport with Soviet prisoners there. Some pieces of the plane and Powers's uniform are on display at the Monino Airbase museum near Moscow.
Prisoner exchange
CIA opposition to exchange
The CIA, in particular, chief of CIA Counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton, opposed exchanging Powers for Soviet KGB Colonel William Fisher, known as "Rudolf Abel", who had been caught by the FBI and tried and jailed for espionage. First, Angleton believed that Powers may have deliberately defected to the Soviet side. CIA documents released in 2010 indicate that U.S. officials did not believe Powers' account of the incident at the time, because it was contradicted by a classified National Security Agency (NSA) report which alleged that the U-2 had descended from before changing course and disappearing from radar. The NSA report remains classified as of 2022.
In any event, Angleton suspected that Powers had already revealed all he knew to the Soviets and he reasoned, therefore, that Powers was worthless to the U.S. On the other hand, according to Angleton, William Fisher had yet revealed little to the CIA, refusing to disclose even his real name, and for this reason, William Fisher was still of potential value.
However, Barbara Powers, the wife of Gary Powers, was often drinking and allegedly having affairs. On June 22, 1961, she was pulled over by the police after driving erratically and was caught driving under the influence. To avoid bad publicity for the wife of the well-known CIA operative, doctors tasked by the CIA to keep Barbara out of the limelight arranged to have her committed to a psychiatric ward in Augusta, Georgia under strict supervision. She was eventually released to the care of her mother. However, the CIA feared that Gary Powers languishing in Soviet prison might learn of Barbara's plight and as a result reach a state of desperation causing him to reveal to the Soviets whatever secrets he had not already revealed. Thus, Barbara unwittingly may have aided the cause of the approval of the prisoner exchange involving her husband and William Fisher. Angleton and others at the CIA still opposed the exchange but President John F. Kennedy approved it.
The exchange
On February 10, 1962, Powers was exchanged, along with U.S. student Frederic Pryor, for Soviet KGB Colonel William Fisher. Due to political differences between the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic at the time, Pryor was turned over to American authorities at Checkpoint Charlie, before the exchange of Powers for Fisher was allowed to proceed on the Glienicke Bridge.
Powers credited his father with the swap idea. When released, Powers' total time in captivity was 1 year, 9 months, and 10 days.
Aftermath
Powers initially received a cold reception on his return home. He was criticized for not activating his aircraft's self-destruct charge to destroy the camera, photographic film, and related classified parts. He was also criticized for not using a CIA-issued "suicide pill" to kill himself (a coin with shellfish toxin embedded in its grooves, revealed during CIA testimony to the Church Committee in 1975).
He was debriefed extensively by the CIA, Lockheed Corporation, and the Air Force, after which a statement was issued by CIA director John McCone that "Mr. Powers lived up to the terms of his employment and instructions in connection with his mission and in his obligations as an American." On March 6, 1962, he appeared before a Senate Armed Services Select Committee hearing chaired by Senator Richard Russell Jr. which included Senators Prescott Bush, Leverett Saltonstall, Robert Byrd, Margaret Chase Smith, John Stennis, Strom Thurmond, and Barry Goldwater. During the hearing, Senator Saltonstall stated, "I commend you as a courageous, fine young American citizen who lived up to your instructions and who did the best you could under very difficult circumstances." Senator Bush declared, "I am satisfied he has conducted himself in exemplary fashion and in accordance with the highest traditions of service to one's country, and I congratulate him upon his conduct in captivity." Senator Goldwater sent him a handwritten note: "You did a good job for your country."
Divorce and remarriage
Powers and his wife Barbara separated in 1962 and divorced in January 1963. Powers stated that the reasons for the divorce included her infidelity and alcoholism, adding that she constantly threw tantrums and overdosed on pills shortly after his return. He started a relationship with Claudia Edwards "Sue" Downey, whom he had met while working briefly at CIA Headquarters. Downey had a child, Dee, from her previous marriage. They were married on October 26, 1963. Their son Francis Gary Powers Jr. was born on June 5, 1965. The marriage proved to be a very happy one, and Sue worked hard to preserve her husband's legacy after his death.
Praise
During a speech in March 1964, former CIA Director Allen Dulles said of Powers, "He performed his duty in a very dangerous mission and he performed it well, and I think I know more about that than some of his detractors and critics know, and I am glad to say that to him tonight."
Later career
Powers worked for Lockheed as a test pilot from 1962 to 1970, though the CIA paid his salary. In 1970, he wrote the book Operation Overflight with co-author Curt Gentry. Lockheed fired him, because "the book's publication had ruffled some feathers at Langley." Powers then became a traffic reporting airplane pilot for Los Angeles radio station KGIL. After that he became a helicopter news reporter for KNBC television.
Death
Powers was piloting a helicopter for Los Angeles TV station KNBC Channel 4 over the San Fernando Valley on August 1, 1977, when the aircraft crashed, killing him and his cameraman George Spears. They had been recording video following brush fires in Santa Barbara County in the KNBC helicopter and were heading back from them.
His Bell 206 JetRanger helicopter ran out of fuel and crashed at the Sepulveda Dam recreational area in Encino, California, several miles short of its intended landing site at Burbank Airport. The National Transportation Safety Board report attributed the probable cause of the crash to pilot error. According to Powers's son, an aviation mechanic had repaired a faulty fuel gauge without informing Powers, who subsequently misread it.
At the last moment, he noticed children playing in the area and directed the helicopter elsewhere to avoid landing on them. He might have landed safely if not for the last-second deviation, which compromised his autorotative descent.
Powers was survived by his wife, children Claudia Dee and Francis Gary Powers Jr., and five sisters. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery as an Air Force veteran.
Honors
Powers received the CIA's Intelligence Star in 1965 after his return from the Soviet Union. Powers was originally scheduled to receive it in 1963 along with other pilots involved in the CIA's U-2 program, but the award was postponed for political reasons. In 1970, Powers published his first—and only—book review, on a work about aerial reconnaissance, Unarmed and Unafraid by Glenn Infield, in the monthly magazine Business & Commercial Aviation. "The subject has great interest to me," he said, in submitting his review.
In 1998, newly declassified information revealed that Powers's mission had been a joint USAF/CIA operation. In 2000, on the 40th anniversary of the U-2 Incident, his family was presented with his posthumously awarded Prisoner of War Medal, Distinguished Flying Cross, and National Defense Service Medal. In addition, CIA Director George Tenet authorized Powers to posthumously receive the CIA's coveted Director's Medal for extreme fidelity and extraordinary courage in the line of duty.
On June 15, 2012, Powers was posthumously awarded the Silver Star medal for "demonstrating 'exceptional loyalty' while enduring harsh interrogation in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow for almost two years." Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz presented the decoration to Powers's grandchildren, Trey Powers, 9, and Lindsey Berry, 29, in a Pentagon ceremony.
Legacy
Powers's son, Francis Gary Powers Jr., founded the Cold War Museum in 1996. Affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, it was essentially a traveling exhibit until it found a permanent home in 2011 on a former Army communications base outside Washington, D.C.
In popular culture
In the 1976 telemovie Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident, Powers was played by Lee Majors.
In 1999, the History Channel aired Mystery of the U2, hosted by Arthur Kent as part of their History Undercover series. The program was produced by Indigo Films.
In the 2015 movie Bridge of Spies, dramatizing the negotiations to repatriate Powers, he is portrayed by Austin Stowell, with Tom Hanks starring as negotiator James Donovan.
In April 2018, The Aviationist featured an article about the song "Powers Down", a tribute to Powers.
Notes
References
Powers, Francis Gary with Gentry, Curt. Operation Overflight. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 1971 (hard cover) .
Further reading
Khrushchev, Sergei N. Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. State College, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2000. .
West, Nigel. Seven Spies Who Changed the World. London: Secker & Warburg, 1992 (hardcover). London: Mandarin, 1992 (paperback).
The Trial of the U2: Exclusive Authorized Account of the Court Proceedings of the Case of Francis Gary Powers, Heard before the Military Division of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., Moscow, August 17, 18, 19, 1960. Translation World Publishers, Chicago: 1960.
External links
Family webpage on Gary Powers
Info on The Cold War Museum
CIA FOIA documents on Gary Powers
FBI Records: The Vault – Francis Gary Powers
Documents and Photographs regarding the U-2 Spy Plane Incident of 1960, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
Check-Six.com The Francis Gary Powers Helo Crash
Transcripts of the Soviet court trial
1962 Russia frees US spy plane pilot
View images of the Francis Gary Powers U-2 Pilot Cinderella stamps on the artist's webSite.
IMDB page for the 1976 TV movie.
ANC Explorer
1929 births
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Victims of helicopter accidents or incidents in the United States | [
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12890 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel%20of%20James | Gospel of James | The Gospel of James (or the Protoevangelium of James) is a 2nd-century infancy gospel telling of the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary, her upbringing and marriage to Joseph, the journey of the couple to Bethlehem, the birth of Jesus, and events immediately following. It is the earliest surviving assertion of the perpetual virginity of Mary, meaning her virginity not just prior to the birth of Jesus, but during and afterwards, and, despite being condemned by Pope Innocent I in 405 and rejected by the Gelasian Decree around 500, became a widely influential source for Mariology.
Composition
Date, authorship and sources
The Gospel of James was well known to Origen in the early 3rd century and probably to Clement of Alexandria at the end of the 2nd, and so is assumed to have been in circulation soon after c.150 AD. The author claims to be James the half-brother of Jesus by an earlier marriage of Joseph, but in fact his identity is unknown. Early studies assumed a Jewish milieu, largely because of its frequent use and knowledge of the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures); further investigation demonstrated that it misunderstands and/or misrepresents many Jewish practices, but Judaism at this time was highly diverse, and recent trends in scholarship do not entirely dismiss a Jewish connection. Its origin is probably Syrian, and it possibly derives from a sect called the Encratites, whose founder, Tatian, taught that sex and marriage were symptoms of original sin.
The gospel is a midrash (an elaboration) on the birth narratives found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and many of its elements, notably its very physical description of Mary's pregnancy and the examination of her hymen by the midwife Salome, suggest strongly that it was attempting to deny the arguments of docetists and Marcionites, unorthodox Christians who held that Jesus was entirely supernatural. It also draws heavily on the Septuagint for historical analogies, turns of phrase, and details of Jewish life. Ronald Hock and Mary F. Foskett have drawn attention to the influence of Greco-Roman literature on its themes of virginity and purity.
Manuscripts and manuscript tradition
Scholars generally accept that the Gospel of James was originally composed in Greek. Over a hundred Greek manuscripts have survived, and translations were made into Syriac, Ethiopian, Coptic, Georgian, Old Church Slavonic, Armenian, Arabic, and presumably Vulgar Latin, given that it was apparently known to the compiler of the Gelasian Decree. The oldest is Papyrus Bodmer 5 from the 4th or possibly 3rd century, discovered in 1952 and now in the Bodmer Library, Geneva, while the fullest is a 10th-century Greek codex in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. The first widely printed edition (as opposed to hand-copied manuscripts) was a 1552 edition printed in Basel, Switzerland by Guillaume Postel, who printed his Latin translation of a Greek version of the work. Postel also gave the work the Latin name (Proto-Gospel of James) because he believed (incorrectly) that the work predated the main gospels of the New Testament (proto- for first, evangelion for gospel). Emile de Stryker published the standard modern critical edition in 1961, and in 1995 Ronald Hock published an English translation based on de Stryker.
Structure and content
The narrative is made up of three distinct sections with only slight ties to each other:
Chapters 1–17: A biography of Mary, dealing with her miraculous birth and holy infancy and childhood, her engagement to Joseph and virginal conception of Jesus;
Chapters 18–20: The birth of Jesus, including proof that Mary continued to be a virgin even after the birth;
Chapters 22–24: The death of Zacharias, father of John the Baptist.
Mary is presented as an extraordinary child destined for great things from the moment of her conception. Her parents, the wealthy Joachim and his wife Anna (or Anne), are distressed that they have no children, and Joachim goes into the wilderness to pray, leaving Anna to lament her childless state. God hears Anna's prayer, angels announce the coming child, and in the seventh month of Anna's pregnancy (underlining the exceptional nature of Mary's future life) she is born. Anna dedicates the child to God and vows that she shall be raised in the Temple. Joachim and Anna name the child Mary, and when she is three years old they send her to the Temple, where she is fed each day by an angel.
When Mary approaches her twelfth year the priests decide that she can no longer stay in the Temple lest her menstrual blood render it unclean, and God finds a widower, Joseph, to act as her guardian: Joseph is depicted as elderly and the father of grown sons; he has no desire for sexual relations with Mary. He leaves on business, and Mary is called to the Temple to help weave the temple curtain, where one day an angel appears and tells her that she has been chosen to conceive Jesus the Saviour, but that she will not give birth as other women do. Joseph returns and finds Mary six months pregnant, and rebukes her, fearing that the priests will assume that he is the guilty party. They do, but the chastity of both is proven through the "test of bitter waters".
The Roman census forces the holy couple to travel to Bethlehem, but Mary's time comes before they can reach the village. Joseph settles Mary in a cave, where she is guarded by his sons, while he goes in search of a midwife, and for an apocalyptic moment as he searches all creation stands still. He returns with a midwife, and as they stand at the mouth of the cave a cloud overshadows it, an intense light fills it, and there is suddenly a baby at Mary's breast. Joseph and the midwife marvel at the miracle, but a second midwife named Salome (the first is not given a name) insists on examining Mary, upon which her hand withers as a sign of her lack of faith; Salome prays to God for forgiveness and an angel appears and tells her to touch the Christ Child, upon which her hand is healed.
The gospel concludes with the visit of the Three Magi, the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem, the martyrdom of the High Priest Zechariah (father of John the Baptist), and the election of his successor Simeon, and an epilogue, telling the circumstances under which the work was supposedly composed.
Influence
Christianity
The Gospel of James was a widely influential source for Christian doctrine regarding Mary. Most notably it is the earliest assertion of her perpetual virginity, meaning her virginity not just prior to the birth of Jesus, but during the birth and afterwards. In this it is practically unique in the first three centuries of Christianity, the concept being virtually absent before the 4th century apart from this gospel and the works of Origen. Its explanation of the gospels' "brothers of Jesus" (the adelphoi) as the offspring of Joseph by an earlier marriage remains the position of the Eastern church, but in the West the influential theologian Jerome asserted that Joseph himself had been a perpetual virgin, and that the adelphoi were cousins of the Lord rather than half-brothers. It was thanks to Jerome that the Protoevangelium was condemned by Pope Innocent I in 405 and rejected by the Gelasian Decree around 500, but despite being officially condemned it was taken over almost in toto by another apocryphal work, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which popularised most of its stories.
The Gospel of James was the first to give the name Anne to the mother of Mary, taking it probably from Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, and Mary, like Samuel, is taken to spend her childhood in the temple. Some manuscripts say of Anne's pregnancy that it was the result of normal intercourse with her husband, but current scholars prefer the oldest texts, which say that Mary was conceived in Joachim's absence through divine intervention; nevertheless, the Protoevangelium does not advance the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception.
Various manuscripts place the birth of Mary in the sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth month, with the oldest having the seventh; this was in keeping with both the Judaism of the period, which had similar seventh-month births for significant individuals such as Samuel, Isaac, and Moses, as the sign of a miraculous or divine conception. Further signs of Mary's supremely holy nature follow, including Anne's vow that the infant would never walk on the earth (her bedroom is made a "sanctuary" where she is attended by "undefiled daughters of the Hebrews"), her blessing "with the ultimate blessing" by the priests on her first birthday with the declaration that because of her God will bring redemption to Israel, and the angels who bring her food in the Temple, where she is attended by the priests and engages herself in weaving the temple curtain.
The ordeal of the bitter water serves to defend Jesus against accusation of illegitimacy levied in the 2nd century by pagan and Jewish opponents of Christianity. Christian sensitivity to these charges made them eager to defend both the virgin birth of Jesus and the immaculate conception of Mary (i.e., her freedom from sin at the moment of her conception).
Islam
The Quranic stories of the Virgin Mary and the birth of Jesus are similar to those of the Protoevangelium, which was widely known in the Near East. These include its mention of Mary fed by angels, the choice of her guardian (Joseph) through the casting of lots, and her occupation making a curtain for the Temple immediately before the Annunciation. Nevertheless, while the Quran holds Mary in high esteem and modern Muslims agree with Christians that she was a virgin when she conceived Jesus, they would see the idea of her perpetual virginity (which is the central idea of James) as contrary to the Islamic ideal of women as wives and mothers.
See also
Acts of the Apostles (genre)
Apocalyptic literature
Castelseprio – early fresco depiction of the Trial by water
Gospel
History of Joseph the Carpenter
List of Gospels
List of New Testament papyri
New Testament apocrypha
Pseudepigraphy
Perpetual virginity of Mary
Salome (Gospel of James)
Meeting of Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
Early Christian Writings website: Infancy Gospel of James
The Protoevangelium of James: based on the Greek text of Ronald F. Hock
The Protoevangelium of James: based on the critical Greek text of Émile de Strycker.
Protoevangelium Jacobi: in Greek.
Apocryphal Gospels
2nd-century Christian texts
James
Pseudepigraphy
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12891 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene%20therapy | Gene therapy | Gene therapy is a medical field which focuses on the genetic modification of cells to produce a therapeutic effect or the treatment of disease by repairing or reconstructing defective genetic material. The first attempt at modifying human DNA was performed in 1980, by Martin Cline, but the first successful nuclear gene transfer in humans, approved by the National Institutes of Health, was performed in May 1989. The first therapeutic use of gene transfer as well as the first direct insertion of human DNA into the nuclear genome was performed by French Anderson in a trial starting in September 1990. It is thought to be able to cure many genetic disorders or treat them over time.
Between 1989 and December 2018, over 2,900 clinical trials were conducted, with more than half of them in phase I. As of 2017, Spark Therapeutics' Luxturna (RPE65 mutation-induced blindness) and Novartis' Kymriah (Chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy) are the FDA's first approved gene therapies to enter the market. Since that time, drugs such as Novartis' Zolgensma and Alnylam's Patisiran have also received FDA approval, in addition to other companies' gene therapy drugs. Most of these approaches utilize adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) and lentiviruses for performing gene insertions, in vivo and ex vivo, respectively. AAVs are characterized by stabilizing the viral capsid, lower immunogenicity, ability to transduce both dividing and nondividing cells, the potential to integrate site specifically and to achieve long-term expression in the in-vivo treatment. (Gorell et al. 2014) ASO / siRNA approaches such as those conducted by Alnylam and Ionis Pharmaceuticals require non-viral delivery systems, and utilize alternative mechanisms for trafficking to liver cells by way of GalNAc transporters.
The concept of gene therapy is to fix a genetic problem at its source. If, for instance, a mutation in a certain gene causes the production of a dysfunctional protein resulting (usually recessively) in an inherited disease, gene therapy could be used to deliver a copy of this gene that does not contain the deleterious mutation and thereby produces a functional protein. This strategy is referred to as gene replacement therapy and is employed to treat inherited retinal diseases.
While the concept of gene replacement therapy is mostly suitable for recessive diseases, novel strategies have been suggested that are capable of also treating conditions with a dominant pattern of inheritance.
The introduction of CRISPR gene editing has opened new doors for its application and utilization in gene therapy, as instead of pure replacement of a gene, it enables correction of the particular genetic defect. Solutions to medical hurdles, such as the eradication of latent human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reservoirs and correction of the mutation that causes sickle cell disease, may be available as a therapeutic option in the future.
Prosthetic gene therapy aims to enable cells of the body to take over functions they physiologically do not carry out. One example is the so-called vision restoration gene therapy, that aims to restore vision in patients suffering from end-stage retinal diseases. In end-stage retinal diseases, the photoreceptors, as the primary light sensitive cells of the retina are irreversibly lost. By the means of prosthetic gene therapy light sensitive proteins are delivered into the remaining cells of the retina, to render them light sensitive and thereby enable them to signal visual information towards the brain. Clinical trials are ongoing. (NCT02556736, NCT03326336 at clinicaltrials.gov)
Not all medical procedures that introduce alterations to a patient's genetic makeup can be considered gene therapy. Bone marrow transplantation and organ transplants in general have been found to introduce foreign DNA into patients.
Background
Gene therapy was conceptualized in 1972, by authors who urged caution before commencing human gene therapy studies.
The first attempt, an unsuccessful one, at gene therapy (as well as the first case of medical transfer of foreign genes into humans not counting organ transplantation) was performed by Martin Cline on 10 July 1980. Cline claimed that one of the genes in his patients was active six months later, though he never published this data or had it verified and even if he is correct, it's unlikely it produced any significant beneficial effects treating beta thalassemia.
After extensive research on animals throughout the 1980s and a 1989 bacterial gene tagging trial on humans, the first gene therapy widely accepted as a success was demonstrated in a trial that started on 14 September 1990, when Ashanthi DeSilva was treated for ADA-SCID.
The first somatic treatment that produced a permanent genetic change was initiated in 1993. The goal was to cure malignant brain tumors by using recombinant DNA to transfer a gene making the tumor cells sensitive to a drug that in turn would cause the tumor cells to die.
The polymers are either translated into proteins, interfere with target gene expression, or possibly correct genetic mutations. The most common form uses DNA that encodes a functional, therapeutic gene to replace a mutated gene. The polymer molecule is packaged within a "vector", which carries the molecule inside cells.
Early clinical failures led to dismissals of gene therapy. Clinical successes since 2006 regained researchers' attention, although , it was still largely an experimental technique. These include treatment of retinal diseases Leber's congenital amaurosis and choroideremia, X-linked SCID, ADA-SCID, adrenoleukodystrophy, chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), multiple myeloma, haemophilia, and Parkinson's disease. Between 2013 and April 2014, US companies invested over $600 million in the field.
The first commercial gene therapy, Gendicine, was approved in China in 2003, for the treatment of certain cancers. In 2011, Neovasculgen was registered in Russia as the first-in-class gene-therapy drug for treatment of peripheral artery disease, including critical limb ischemia.
In 2012, Glybera, a treatment for a rare inherited disorder, lipoprotein lipase deficiency, became the first treatment to be approved for clinical use in either Europe or the United States after its endorsement by the European Commission.
Following early advances in genetic engineering of bacteria, cells, and small animals, scientists started considering how to apply it to medicine. Two main approaches were considered – replacing or disrupting defective genes. Scientists focused on diseases caused by single-gene defects, such as cystic fibrosis, haemophilia, muscular dystrophy, thalassemia, and sickle cell anemia. Glybera treats one such disease, caused by a defect in lipoprotein lipase.
DNA must be administered, reach the damaged cells, enter the cell and either express or disrupt a protein. Multiple delivery techniques have been explored. The initial approach incorporated DNA into an engineered virus to deliver the DNA into a chromosome. Naked DNA approaches have also been explored, especially in the context of vaccine development.
Generally, efforts focused on administering a gene that causes a needed protein to be expressed. More recently, increased understanding of nuclease function has led to more direct DNA editing, using techniques such as zinc finger nucleases and CRISPR. The vector incorporates genes into chromosomes. The expressed nucleases then knock out and replace genes in the chromosome. these approaches involve removing cells from patients, editing a chromosome and returning the transformed cells to patients.
Gene editing is a potential approach to alter the human genome to treat genetic diseases, viral diseases, and cancer. these approaches are being studied in clinical trials.
Cell types
Gene therapy may be classified into two types:
Somatic
In somatic cell gene therapy (SCGT), the therapeutic genes are transferred into any cell other than a gamete, germ cell, gametocyte, or undifferentiated stem cell. Any such modifications affect the individual patient only, and are not inherited by offspring. Somatic gene therapy represents mainstream basic and clinical research, in which therapeutic DNA (either integrated in the genome or as an external episome or plasmid) is used to treat disease.
Over 600 clinical trials utilizing SCGT are underway in the US. Most focus on severe genetic disorders, including immunodeficiencies, haemophilia, thalassaemia, and cystic fibrosis. Such single gene disorders are good candidates for somatic cell therapy. The complete correction of a genetic disorder or the replacement of multiple genes is not yet possible. Only a few of the trials are in the advanced stages.
Germline
In germline gene therapy (GGT), germ cells (sperm or egg cells) are modified by the introduction of functional genes into their genomes. Modifying a germ cell causes all the organism's cells to contain the modified gene. The change is therefore heritable and passed on to later generations. Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, and the Netherlands prohibit GGT for application in human beings, for technical and ethical reasons, including insufficient knowledge about possible risks to future generations and higher risks versus SCGT. The US has no federal controls specifically addressing human genetic modification (beyond FDA regulations for therapies in general).
Vectors
The delivery of DNA into cells can be accomplished by multiple methods. The two major classes are recombinant viruses (sometimes called biological nanoparticles or viral vectors) and naked DNA or DNA complexes (non-viral methods).
Viruses
In order to replicate, viruses introduce their genetic material into the host cell, tricking the host's cellular machinery into using it as blueprints for viral proteins. Retroviruses go a stage further by having their genetic material copied into the genome of the host cell. Scientists exploit this by substituting a virus's genetic material with therapeutic DNA. (The term 'DNA' may be an oversimplification, as some viruses contain RNA, and gene therapy could take this form as well.) A number of viruses have been used for human gene therapy, including retroviruses, adenoviruses, herpes simplex, vaccinia, and adeno-associated virus. Like the genetic material (DNA or RNA) in viruses, therapeutic DNA can be designed to simply serve as a temporary blueprint that is degraded naturally or (at least theoretically) to enter the host's genome, becoming a permanent part of the host's DNA in infected cells.
Non-viral
Non-viral vectors for gene therapy present certain advantages over viral methods, such as large scale production and low host immunogenicity. However, non-viral methods initially produced lower levels of transfection and gene expression, and thus lower therapeutic efficacy. Newer technologies offer promise of solving these problems, with the advent of increased cell-specific targeting and subcellular trafficking control.
Methods for non-viral gene therapy include the injection of naked DNA, electroporation, the gene gun, sonoporation, magnetofection, the use of oligonucleotides, lipoplexes, dendrimers, and inorganic nanoparticles.
More recent approaches, such as those performed by companies such as Ligandal, offer the possibility of creating cell-specific targeting technologies for a variety of gene therapy modalities, including RNA, DNA and gene editing tools such as CRISPR. Other companies, such as Arbutus Biopharma and Arcturus Therapeutics, offer non-viral, non-cell-targeted approaches that mainly exhibit liver trophism. In more recent years, startups such as Sixfold Bio, GenEdit, and Spotlight Therapeutics have begun to solve the non-viral gene delivery problem. Non-viral techniques offer the possibility of repeat dosing and greater tailorability of genetic payloads, which in the future will be more likely to take over viral-based delivery systems.
Companies such as Editas Medicine, Intellia Therapeutics, CRISPR Therapeutics, Casebia, Cellectis, Precision Biosciences, bluebird bio, and Sangamo have developed non-viral gene editing techniques, however frequently still use viruses for delivering gene insertion material following genomic cleavage by guided nucleases. These companies focus on gene editing, and still face major delivery hurdles.
BioNTech, Moderna Therapeutics and CureVac focus on delivery of mRNA payloads, which are necessarily non-viral delivery problems.
Alnylam, Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, and Ionis Pharmaceuticals focus on delivery of siRNA (antisense oligonucleotides) for gene suppression, which also necessitate non-viral delivery systems.
In academic contexts, a number of laboratories are working on delivery of PEGylated particles, which form serum protein coronas and chiefly exhibit LDL receptor mediated uptake in cells in vivo.
In vivo versus ex vivo therapies
In in vivo gene therapy, a vector (typically, a virus) is introduced to the patient, which then achieves the desired biological effect by passing the genetic material (e.g. for a missing protein) into the patient's cells. In ex vivo gene therapies, such as CAR-T therapeutics, the patient's own cells (autologous) or healthy donor cells (allogeneic) are modified outside the body (hence, ex vivo) using a vector to express a particular protein, such as a chimeric antigen receptor.
In vivo gene therapy is seen as simpler, since it does not require the harvesting of mitotic cells. However, ex vivo gene therapies are better tolerated and less associated with severe immune responses. The death of Jesse Gelsinger in a trial of an adenovirus-vectored treatment for ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency due to a systemic inflammatory reaction led to a temporary halt on gene therapy trials across the United States. , in vivo and ex vivo therapeutics are both seen as safe.
Gene doping
Athletes may adopt gene therapy technologies to improve their performance. Gene doping is not known to occur, but multiple gene therapies may have such effects. Kayser et al. argue that gene doping could level the playing field if all athletes receive equal access. Critics claim that any therapeutic intervention for non-therapeutic/enhancement purposes compromises the ethical foundations of medicine and sports.
Human genetic engineering
Genetic engineering could be used to cure diseases, but also to change physical appearance, metabolism, and even improve physical capabilities and mental faculties such as memory and intelligence. Ethical claims about germline engineering include beliefs that every fetus has a right to remain genetically unmodified, that parents hold the right to genetically modify their offspring, and that every child has the right to be born free of preventable diseases. For parents, genetic engineering could be seen as another child enhancement technique to add to diet, exercise, education, training, cosmetics, and plastic surgery. Another theorist claims that moral concerns limit but do not prohibit germline engineering.
A recent issue of the journal Bioethics was devoted to moral issues surrounding germline genetic engineering in people.
Possible regulatory schemes include a complete ban, provision to everyone, or professional self-regulation. The American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs stated that "genetic interventions to enhance traits should be considered permissible only in severely restricted situations: (1) clear and meaningful benefits to the fetus or child; (2) no trade-off with other characteristics or traits; and (3) equal access to the genetic technology, irrespective of income or other socioeconomic characteristics."
As early in the history of biotechnology as 1990, there have been scientists opposed to attempts to modify the human germline using these new tools, and such concerns have continued as technology progressed. With the advent of new techniques like CRISPR, in March 2015 a group of scientists urged a worldwide moratorium on clinical use of gene editing technologies to edit the human genome in a way that can be inherited. In April 2015, researchers sparked controversy when they reported results of basic research to edit the DNA of non-viable human embryos using CRISPR. A committee of the American National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine gave qualified support to human genome editing in 2017 once answers have been found to safety and efficiency problems "but only for serious conditions under stringent oversight."
Treatment of genetic diseases
Gene therapy approaches to replace a faulty gene with a healthy gene have been proposed and are being studied for treating some genetic diseases. Diseases such as sickle cell disease that are caused by autosomal recessive disorders for which a person's normal phenotype or cell function may be restored in cells that have the disease by a normal copy of the gene that is mutated, may be a good candidate for gene therapy treatment. The risks and benefits related to gene therapy for sickle cell disease are not known.
List of gene therapies for treatment of disease
Some genetic therapies have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and for use in Russia and China.
Adverse effects, contraindications and hurdles for use
Some of the unsolved problems include:
Short-lived nature – Before gene therapy can become a permanent cure for a condition, the therapeutic DNA introduced into target cells must remain functional and the cells containing the therapeutic DNA must be stable. Problems with integrating therapeutic DNA into the genome and the rapidly dividing nature of many cells prevent it from achieving long-term benefits. Patients require multiple treatments.
Immune response – Any time a foreign object is introduced into human tissues, the immune system is stimulated to attack the invader. Stimulating the immune system in a way that reduces gene therapy effectiveness is possible. The immune system's enhanced response to viruses that it has seen before reduces the effectiveness to repeated treatments.
Problems with viral vectors – Viral vectors carry the risks of toxicity, inflammatory responses, and gene control and targeting issues.
Multigene disorders – Some commonly occurring disorders, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, and diabetes, are affected by variations in multiple genes, which complicate gene therapy.
Some therapies may breach the Weismann barrier (between soma and germ-line) protecting the testes, potentially modifying the germline, falling afoul of regulations in countries that prohibit the latter practice.
Insertional mutagenesis – If the DNA is integrated in a sensitive spot in the genome, for example in a tumor suppressor gene, the therapy could induce a tumor. This has occurred in clinical trials for X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (X-SCID) patients, in which hematopoietic stem cells were transduced with a corrective transgene using a retrovirus, and this led to the development of T cell leukemia in 3 of 20 patients. One possible solution is to add a functional tumor suppressor gene to the DNA to be integrated. This may be problematic since the longer the DNA is, the harder it is to integrate into cell genomes. CRISPR technology allows researchers to make much more precise genome changes at exact locations.
Cost – Alipogene tiparvovec or Glybera, for example, at a cost of $1.6 million per patient, was reported in 2013, to be the world's most expensive drug.
Potential for irreversible damage to the DNA self-repair mechanism
Deaths
Three patients' deaths have been reported in gene therapy trials, putting the field under close scrutiny. The first was that of Jesse Gelsinger, who died in 1999, because of immune rejection response. One X-SCID patient died of leukemia in 2003. In 2007, a rheumatoid arthritis patient died from an infection; the subsequent investigation concluded that the death was not related to gene therapy.
Regulations
Regulations covering genetic modification are part of general guidelines about human-involved biomedical research. There are no international treaties which are legally binding in this area, but there are recommendations for national laws from various bodies.
The Helsinki Declaration (Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects) was amended by the World Medical Association's General Assembly in 2008. This document provides principles physicians and researchers must consider when involving humans as research subjects. The Statement on Gene Therapy Research initiated by the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) in 2001, provides a legal baseline for all countries. HUGO's document emphasizes human freedom and adherence to human rights, and offers recommendations for somatic gene therapy, including the importance of recognizing public concerns about such research.
United States
No federal legislation lays out protocols or restrictions about human genetic engineering. This subject is governed by overlapping regulations from local and federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA and NIH's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee. Researchers seeking federal funds for an investigational new drug application, (commonly the case for somatic human genetic engineering,) must obey international and federal guidelines for the protection of human subjects.
NIH serves as the main gene therapy regulator for federally funded research. Privately funded research is advised to follow these regulations. NIH provides funding for research that develops or enhances genetic engineering techniques and to evaluate the ethics and quality in current research. The NIH maintains a mandatory registry of human genetic engineering research protocols that includes all federally funded projects.
An NIH advisory committee published a set of guidelines on gene manipulation. The guidelines discuss lab safety as well as human test subjects and various experimental types that involve genetic changes. Several sections specifically pertain to human genetic engineering, including Section III-C-1. This section describes required review processes and other aspects when seeking approval to begin clinical research involving genetic transfer into a human patient. The protocol for a gene therapy clinical trial must be approved by the NIH's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee prior to any clinical trial beginning; this is different from any other kind of clinical trial.
As with other kinds of drugs, the FDA regulates the quality and safety of gene therapy products and supervises how these products are used clinically. Therapeutic alteration of the human genome falls under the same regulatory requirements as any other medical treatment. Research involving human subjects, such as clinical trials, must be reviewed and approved by the FDA and an Institutional Review Board.
History
1970s and earlier
In 1972, Friedmann and Roblin authored a paper in Science titled "Gene therapy for human genetic disease?". Rogers (1970) was cited for proposing that exogenous good DNA be used to replace the defective DNA in those who suffer from genetic defects.
1980s
In 1984, a retrovirus vector system was designed that could efficiently insert foreign genes into mammalian chromosomes.
1990s
The first approved gene therapy clinical research in the US took place on 14 September 1990, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), under the direction of William French Anderson. Four-year-old Ashanti DeSilva received treatment for a genetic defect that left her with adenosine deaminase deficiency (ADA-SCID), a severe immune system deficiency. The defective gene of the patient's blood cells was replaced by the functional variant. Ashanti's immune system was partially restored by the therapy. Production of the missing enzyme was temporarily stimulated, but the new cells with functional genes were not generated. She led a normal life only with the regular injections performed every two months. The effects were successful, but temporary.
Cancer gene therapy was introduced in 1992/93 (Trojan et al. 1993). The treatment of glioblastoma multiforme, the malignant brain tumor whose outcome is always fatal, was done using a vector expressing antisense IGF-I RNA (clinical trial approved by NIH protocol no.1602 24 November 1993, and by the FDA in 1994). This therapy also represents the beginning of cancer immunogene therapy, a treatment which proves to be effective due to the anti-tumor mechanism of IGF-I antisense, which is related to strong immune and apoptotic phenomena.
In 1992, Claudio Bordignon, working at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, performed the first gene therapy procedure using hematopoietic stem cells as vectors to deliver genes intended to correct hereditary diseases. In 2002, this work led to the publication of the first successful gene therapy treatment for ADA-SCID. The success of a multi-center trial for treating children with SCID (severe combined immune deficiency or "bubble boy" disease) from 2000 and 2002, was questioned when two of the ten children treated at the trial's Paris center developed a leukemia-like condition. Clinical trials were halted temporarily in 2002, but resumed after regulatory review of the protocol in the US, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany.
In 1993, Andrew Gobea was born with SCID following prenatal genetic screening. Blood was removed from his mother's placenta and umbilical cord immediately after birth, to acquire stem cells. The allele that codes for adenosine deaminase (ADA) was obtained and inserted into a retrovirus. Retroviruses and stem cells were mixed, after which the viruses inserted the gene into the stem cell chromosomes. Stem cells containing the working ADA gene were injected into Andrew's blood. Injections of the ADA enzyme were also given weekly. For four years T cells (white blood cells), produced by stem cells, made ADA enzymes using the ADA gene. After four years more treatment was needed.
Jesse Gelsinger's death in 1999 impeded gene therapy research in the US. As a result, the FDA suspended several clinical trials pending the reevaluation of ethical and procedural practices.
2000s
The modified cancer gene therapy strategy of antisense IGF-I RNA (NIH n˚ 1602) using antisense / triple helix anti-IGF-I approach was registered in 2002, by Wiley gene therapy clinical trial - n˚ 635 and 636. The approach has shown promising results in the treatment of six different malignant tumors: glioblastoma, cancers of liver, colon, prostate, uterus, and ovary (Collaborative NATO Science Programme on Gene Therapy USA, France, Poland n˚ LST 980517 conducted by J. Trojan) (Trojan et al., 2012). This anti-gene antisense/triple helix therapy has proven to be efficient, due to the mechanism stopping simultaneously IGF-I expression on translation and transcription levels, strengthening anti-tumor immune and apoptotic phenomena.
2002
Sickle cell disease can be treated in mice. The mice – which have essentially the same defect that causes human cases – used a viral vector to induce production of fetal hemoglobin (HbF), which normally ceases to be produced shortly after birth. In humans, the use of hydroxyurea to stimulate the production of HbF temporarily alleviates sickle cell symptoms. The researchers demonstrated this treatment to be a more permanent means to increase therapeutic HbF production.
A new gene therapy approach repaired errors in messenger RNA derived from defective genes. This technique has the potential to treat thalassaemia, cystic fibrosis and some cancers.
Researchers created liposomes 25 nanometers across that can carry therapeutic DNA through pores in the nuclear membrane.
2003
In 2003, a research team inserted genes into the brain for the first time. They used liposomes coated in a polymer called polyethylene glycol, which unlike viral vectors, are small enough to cross the blood–brain barrier.
Short pieces of double-stranded RNA (short, interfering RNAs or siRNAs) are used by cells to degrade RNA of a particular sequence. If a siRNA is designed to match the RNA copied from a faulty gene, then the abnormal protein product of that gene will not be produced.
Gendicine is a cancer gene therapy that delivers the tumor suppressor gene p53 using an engineered adenovirus. In 2003, it was approved in China for the treatment of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.
2006
In March, researchers announced the successful use of gene therapy to treat two adult patients for X-linked chronic granulomatous disease, a disease which affects myeloid cells and damages the immune system. The study is the first to show that gene therapy can treat the myeloid system.
In May, a team reported a way to prevent the immune system from rejecting a newly delivered gene. Similar to organ transplantation, gene therapy has been plagued by this problem. The immune system normally recognizes the new gene as foreign and rejects the cells carrying it. The research utilized a newly uncovered network of genes regulated by molecules known as microRNAs. This natural function selectively obscured their therapeutic gene in immune system cells and protected it from discovery. Mice infected with the gene containing an immune-cell microRNA target sequence did not reject the gene.
In August, scientists successfully treated metastatic melanoma in two patients using killer T cells genetically retargeted to attack the cancer cells.
In November, researchers reported on the use of VRX496, a gene-based immunotherapy for the treatment of HIV that uses a lentiviral vector to deliver an antisense gene against the HIV envelope. In a phase I clinical trial, five subjects with chronic HIV infection who had failed to respond to at least two antiretroviral regimens were treated. A single intravenous infusion of autologous CD4 T cells genetically modified with VRX496 was well tolerated. All patients had stable or decreased viral load; four of the five patients had stable or increased CD4 T cell counts. All five patients had stable or increased immune response to HIV antigens and other pathogens. This was the first evaluation of a lentiviral vector administered in a US human clinical trial.
2007
In May, researchers announced the first gene therapy trial for inherited retinal disease. The first operation was carried out on a 23-year-old British male, Robert Johnson, in early 2007.
2008
Leber's congenital amaurosis is an inherited blinding disease caused by mutations in the RPE65 gene. The results of a small clinical trial in children were published in April. Delivery of recombinant adeno-associated virus (AAV) carrying RPE65 yielded positive results. In May, two more groups reported positive results in independent clinical trials using gene therapy to treat the condition. In all three clinical trials, patients recovered functional vision without apparent side-effects.
2009
In September researchers were able to give trichromatic vision to squirrel monkeys. In November 2009, researchers halted a fatal genetic disorder called adrenoleukodystrophy in two children using a lentivirus vector to deliver a functioning version of ABCD1, the gene that is mutated in the disorder.
2010s
2010
An April paper reported that gene therapy addressed achromatopsia (color blindness) in dogs by targeting cone photoreceptors. Cone function and day vision were restored for at least 33 months in two young specimens. The therapy was less efficient for older dogs.
In September it was announced that an 18-year-old male patient in France with beta thalassemia major had been successfully treated. Beta thalassemia major is an inherited blood disease in which beta haemoglobin is missing and patients are dependent on regular lifelong blood transfusions. The technique used a lentiviral vector to transduce the human β-globin gene into purified blood and marrow cells obtained from the patient in June 2007. The patient's haemoglobin levels were stable at 9 to 10 g/dL. About a third of the hemoglobin contained the form introduced by the viral vector and blood transfusions were not needed. Further clinical trials were planned. Bone marrow transplants are the only cure for thalassemia, but 75% of patients do not find a matching donor.
Cancer immunogene therapy using modified antigene, antisense/triple helix approach was introduced in South America in 2010/11 in La Sabana University, Bogota (Ethical Committee 14 December 2010, no P-004-10). Considering the ethical aspect of gene diagnostic and gene therapy targeting IGF-I, the IGF-I expressing tumors i.e. lung and epidermis cancers were treated (Trojan et al. 2016).
2011
In 2007 and 2008, a man (Timothy Ray Brown) was cured of HIV by repeated hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (see also allogeneic stem cell transplantation, allogeneic bone marrow transplantation, allotransplantation) with double-delta-32 mutation which disables the CCR5 receptor. This cure was accepted by the medical community in 2011. It required complete ablation of existing bone marrow, which is very debilitating.
In August two of three subjects of a pilot study were confirmed to have been cured from chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The therapy used genetically modified T cells to attack cells that expressed the CD19 protein to fight the disease. In 2013, the researchers announced that 26 of 59 patients had achieved complete remission and the original patient had remained tumor-free.
Human HGF plasmid DNA therapy of cardiomyocytes is being examined as a potential treatment for coronary artery disease as well as treatment for the damage that occurs to the heart after myocardial infarction.
In 2011, Neovasculgen was registered in Russia as the first-in-class gene-therapy drug for treatment of peripheral artery disease, including critical limb ischemia; it delivers the gene encoding for VEGF. Neovasculogen is a plasmid encoding the CMV promoter and the 165 amino acid form of VEGF.
2012
The FDA approved Phase I clinical trials on thalassemia major patients in the US for 10 participants in July. The study was expected to continue until 2015.
In July 2012, the European Medicines Agency recommended approval of a gene therapy treatment for the first time in either Europe or the United States. The treatment used Alipogene tiparvovec (Glybera) to compensate for lipoprotein lipase deficiency, which can cause severe pancreatitis. The recommendation was endorsed by the European Commission in November 2012, and commercial rollout began in late 2014. Alipogene tiparvovec was expected to cost around $1.6 million per treatment in 2012, revised to $1 million in 2015, making it the most expensive medicine in the world at the time. , only the patients treated in clinical trials and a patient who paid the full price for treatment have received the drug.
In December 2012, it was reported that 10 of 13 patients with multiple myeloma were in remission "or very close to it" three months after being injected with a treatment involving genetically engineered T cells to target proteins NY-ESO-1 and LAGE-1, which exist only on cancerous myeloma cells.
2013
In March researchers reported that three of five adult subjects who had acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) had been in remission for five months to two years after being treated with genetically modified T cells which attacked cells with CD19 genes on their surface, i.e. all B cells, cancerous or not. The researchers believed that the patients' immune systems would make normal T cells and B cells after a couple of months. They were also given bone marrow. One patient relapsed and died and one died of a blood clot unrelated to the disease.
Following encouraging Phase I trials, in April, researchers announced they were starting Phase II clinical trials (called CUPID2 and SERCA-LVAD) on 250 patients at several hospitals to combat heart disease. The therapy was designed to increase the levels of SERCA2, a protein in heart muscles, improving muscle function. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted this a breakthrough therapy designation to accelerate the trial and approval process. In 2016, it was reported that no improvement was found from the CUPID 2 trial.
In July researchers reported promising results for six children with two severe hereditary diseases had been treated with a partially deactivated lentivirus to replace a faulty gene and after 7–32 months. Three of the children had metachromatic leukodystrophy, which causes children to lose cognitive and motor skills. The other children had Wiskott–Aldrich syndrome, which leaves them to open to infection, autoimmune diseases, and cancer. Follow up trials with gene therapy on another six children with Wiskott–Aldrich syndrome were also reported as promising.
In October researchers reported that two children born with adenosine deaminase severe combined immunodeficiency disease (ADA-SCID) had been treated with genetically engineered stem cells 18 months previously and that their immune systems were showing signs of full recovery. Another three children were making progress. In 2014, a further 18 children with ADA-SCID were cured by gene therapy. ADA-SCID children have no functioning immune system and are sometimes known as "bubble children".
Also in October researchers reported that they had treated six haemophilia sufferers in early 2011 using an adeno-associated virus. Over two years later all six were producing clotting factor.
2014
In January researchers reported that six choroideremia patients had been treated with adeno-associated virus with a copy of REP1. Over a six-month to two-year period all had improved their sight. By 2016, 32 patients had been treated with positive results and researchers were hopeful the treatment would be long-lasting. Choroideremia is an inherited genetic eye disease with no approved treatment, leading to loss of sight.
In March researchers reported that 12 HIV patients had been treated since 2009 in a trial with a genetically engineered virus with a rare mutation (CCR5 deficiency) known to protect against HIV with promising results.
Clinical trials of gene therapy for sickle cell disease were started in 2014.
In February LentiGlobin BB305, a gene therapy treatment undergoing clinical trials for treatment of beta thalassemia gained FDA "breakthrough" status after several patients were able to forgo the frequent blood transfusions usually required to treat the disease.
In March researchers delivered a recombinant gene encoding a broadly neutralizing antibody into monkeys infected with simian HIV; the monkeys' cells produced the antibody, which cleared them of HIV. The technique is named immunoprophylaxis by gene transfer (IGT). Animal tests for antibodies to ebola, malaria, influenza, and hepatitis were underway.
In March, scientists, including an inventor of CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna, urged a worldwide moratorium on germline gene therapy, writing "scientists should avoid even attempting, in lax jurisdictions, germline genome modification for clinical application in humans" until the full implications "are discussed among scientific and governmental organizations".
In October, researchers announced that they had treated a baby girl, Layla Richards, with an experimental treatment using donor T cells genetically engineered using TALEN to attack cancer cells. One year after the treatment she was still free of her cancer (a highly aggressive form of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia [ALL]). Children with highly aggressive ALL normally have a very poor prognosis and Layla's disease had been regarded as terminal before the treatment.
In December, scientists of major world academies called for a moratorium on inheritable human genome edits, including those related to CRISPR-Cas9 technologies but that basic research including embryo gene editing should continue.
2015
Researchers successfully treated a boy with epidermolysis bullosa using skin grafts grown from his own skin cells, genetically altered to repair the mutation that caused his disease.
2016
In April the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use of the European Medicines Agency endorsed a gene therapy treatment called Strimvelis and the European Commission approved it in June. This treats children born with adenosine deaminase deficiency and who have no functioning immune system. This was the second gene therapy treatment to be approved in Europe.
In October, Chinese scientists reported they had started a trial to genetically modify T cells from 10 adult patients with lung cancer and reinject the modified T cells back into their bodies to attack the cancer cells. The T cells had the PD-1 protein (which stops or slows the immune response) removed using CRISPR-Cas9.
A 2016 Cochrane systematic review looking at data from four trials on topical cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene therapy does not support its clinical use as a mist inhaled into the lungs to treat cystic fibrosis patients with lung infections. One of the four trials did find weak evidence that liposome-based CFTR gene transfer therapy may lead to a small respiratory improvement for people with CF. This weak evidence is not enough to make a clinical recommendation for routine CFTR gene therapy.
2017
In February Kite Pharma announced results from a clinical trial of CAR-T cells in around a hundred people with advanced non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
In March, French scientists reported on clinical research of gene therapy to treat sickle cell disease.
In August, the FDA approved tisagenlecleucel for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Tisagenlecleucel is an adoptive cell transfer therapy for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia; T cells from a person with cancer are removed, genetically engineered to make a specific T-cell receptor (a chimeric T cell receptor, or "CAR-T") that reacts to the cancer, and are administered back to the person. The T cells are engineered to target a protein called CD19 that is common on B cells. This is the first form of gene therapy to be approved in the United States. In October, a similar therapy called axicabtagene ciloleucel was approved for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
In October, biophysicist and biohacker Josiah Zayner claimed to have performed the very first in-vivo human genome editing in the form of a self-administered therapy.
On 13 November, medical scientists working with Sangamo Therapeutics, headquartered in Richmond, California, announced the first ever in-body human gene editing therapy. The treatment, designed to permanently insert a healthy version of the flawed gene that causes Hunter syndrome, was given to 44-year-old Brian Madeux and is part of the world's first study to permanently edit DNA inside the human body. The success of the gene insertion was later confirmed. Clinical trials by Sangamo involving gene editing using zinc finger nuclease (ZFN) are ongoing.
In December the results of using an adeno-associated virus with blood clotting factor VIII to treat nine haemophilia A patients were published. Six of the seven patients on the high dose regime increased the level of the blood clotting VIII to normal levels. The low and medium dose regimes had no effect on the patient's blood clotting levels.
In December, the FDA approved Luxturna, the first in vivo gene therapy, for the treatment of blindness due to Leber's congenital amaurosis. The price of this treatment is for both eyes.
2019
In May, the FDA approved onasemnogene abeparvovec (Zolgensma) for treating spinal muscular atrophy in children under two years of age. The list price of Zolgensma was set at per dose, making it the most expensive drug ever.
In May, the EMA approved betibeglogene autotemcel (Zynteglo) for treating beta thalassemia for people twelve years of age and older.
In July, Allergan and Editas Medicine announced phase I/II clinical trial of AGN-151587 for the treatment of Leber congenital amaurosis 10. This is the first study of a CRISPR-based in vivo human gene editing therapy, where the editing takes place inside the human body. The first injection of the CRISPR-Cas System was confirmed in March 2020.
2020s
2020
In May, onasemnogene abeparvovec (Zolgensma) was approved by the European Union for the treatment of spinal muscular atrophy in people who either have clinical symptoms of SMA type 1 or who have no more than three copies of the SMN2 gene, irrespective of body weight or age.
In August, Audentes Therapeutics reported that three out of 17 children with X-linked myotubular myopathy participating the clinical trial of a AAV8-based gene therapy treatment AT132 have died. It was suggested that the treatment, whose dosage is based on body weight, exerts a disproportionately toxic effect on heavier patients, since the three patients who died were heavier than the others. The trial has been put on clinical hold.
On 15 October, the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) adopted a positive opinion, recommending the granting of a marketing authorisation for the medicinal product Libmeldy (autologous CD34+ cell enriched population that contains hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells transduced ex vivo using a lentiviral vector encoding the human arylsulfatase A gene), a gene therapy for the treatment of children with the "late infantile" (LI) or "early juvenile" (EJ) forms of metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD). The active substance of Libmeldy consists of the child's own stem cells which have been modified to contain working copies of the ARSA gene. When the modified cells are injected back into the patient as a one-time infusion, the cells are expected to start producing the ARSA enzyme that breaks down the build-up of sulfatides in the nerve cells and other cells of the patient's body. Libmeldy was approved for medical use in the EU in December 2020.
On 15 October, Lysogene, a French biotechnological company, reported the death of a patient in who has received LYS-SAF302, an experimental gene therapy treatment for mucopolysaccharidosis type IIIA (Sanfilippo syndrome type A).
2021
In May, a new method using an altered version of the HIV virus as a lentivirus vector was reported in the treatment of 50 children with ADA-SCID obtaining positive results in 48 of them, this method is expected to be safer than retroviruses vectors commonly used in previous studies of SCID where the development of leukemia was usually observed and had already been used in 2019, but in a smaller group with X-SCID.
In June a clinical trial on six patients affected with transthyretin amyloidosis reported a reduction the concentration of missfolded transthretin (TTR) protein in serum through CRISPR-based inactivation of the TTR gene in liver cells observing mean reductions of 52 % and 87 % among the lower and higher dose groups.This was done in vivo without taking cells out of the patient to edit them and reinfuse them later.
In July results of a small gene therapy phase I study was published reporting observation of dopamine restoration on seven patients between 4 and 9 years old affected by aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase deficiency (AADC deficiency).
References
Further reading
Gorell, E., Nguyen, N., Lane, A., & Siprashvili, Z. (2014). Gene therapy for skin diseases. Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine, 4(4), a015149. https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a015149
External links
Commercial gene therapies produced by 2020
Applied genetics
Bioethics
Biotechnology
Medical genetics
Molecular biology
Gene delivery
Emerging technologies
1989 introductions
1996 introductions
1989 in biotechnology
Genetic engineering | [
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12893 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galatea | Galatea | Galatea is an ancient Greek name meaning "she who is milk-white".
Galatea, Galathea or Gallathea may refer to:
In mythology
Galatea (Greek myth), three different mythological figures
In the arts
Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, cantata by Handel
Galatea (Raphael), or The Triumph of Galatea, a 1512 fresco of Ovid's sea-nymph
Gallathea, a late sixteenth-century play by John Lyly
Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed, an 1883 musical comedy by Henry Pottinger Stephens, W. Webster and Meyer Lutz
Galatea, a 2009 play by Lawrence Aronovitch
La Galatea, a sixteenth-century pastoral novel by Miguel de Cervantes
Galatea, a 1953 novel by James M. Cain
Galatea, a 1976 novel by Philip Pullman
, a 1977 ballet film with Ekaterina Maximova and Māris Liepa
Galatea 2.2, a 1995 novel by Richard Powers
Galatea (video game), released in 2000
Galatea, a main figure in the Pygmalion and the Image series of four paintings by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1878)
Galatea, a major character in Pamphilus de amore, a widely-read poem from 1200
Galatea of the Spheres, a 1952 painting by Salvador Dalí
Fictional characters
Galatea, in the manga Claymore by Norihiro Yagi
Galatea Dunkel, in the 1957 novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Galatea, an android in the 2007 novel Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
Galatea, a villain in the 1990s Japanese anime series Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040
Galatea (Justice League Unlimited), a supervillain and a clone of Supergirl, first appearing in 2004
Galatea, a female robot in the film Bicentennial Man, but not in the novella
Galathea, a cow in the novel Farmer Giles of Ham by J. R. R. Tolkien
Galatea, a playable servant in the mobile game Fate Grand Order
In science
74 Galatea, a large main belt asteroid
Galatea (moon), orbiting Neptune
Galathea, a genus of squat lobsters
Galatea, common name for plants of the genus Dieffenbachia
Places
Galatea, New Zealand, a village in the North Island
Galatea, Ohio, a community in the United States
Mount Galatea, in the Canadian Rockies
Galathea National Park, a national park in the Nicobar Islands, India
Ships
List of ships named Galatea
Other uses
Galatea (locomotive), a preserved example of the LMS Jubilee class of steam locomotive
Galatea II a Thoroughbred racehorse
Galatea, a type of cotton twill fabric
Galatea AB, a Swedish beverage distributor
See also
Galathée (disambiguation)
Galatia (disambiguation) | [
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12896 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf%20of%20Oman | Gulf of Oman | The Gulf of Oman or Sea of Oman ( khalīj ʿumān; daryâ-ye omân), also known as Gulf of Makran or Sea of Makran ( khalīj makrān; daryâ-ye makrān), is a gulf that connects the Arabian Sea with the Strait of Hormuz, which then runs to the Persian Gulf. It borders Iran and Pakistan on the north, Oman on the south, and the United Arab Emirates on the west.
Extent
The International Hydrographic Organization defines the limits of the Gulf of Oman as follows:
Exclusive economic zone
Exclusive economic zones in Persian Gulf:
Border and Basin countries
Coastline length of bordering countries:
- 850 km Coastline
- 750 km Coastline
- 50 km Coastline
- 50 km Coastline
Alternative names
The Gulf of Oman historically and geographically has been referred to with different names by Arabian, Iranian, Indian, Pakistani and European geographers and travelers, including Makran Sea and Akhzar Sea.
Makran Sea
Akhzar Sea
Persian Sea (Consist of whole of Persian gulf and gulf of Oman)
Until the 18th century it was known as Makran Sea and is also visible on historical maps and museums.
Major ports
Port of Fujairah, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates
Khor Fakkan Container Terminal, Khor Fakkan, United Arab Emirates
Port of Chabahar, Chabahar, Iran
Port Sultan Qaboos, Muttrah, Oman
International trade
The Western side of the gulf connects to the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic route through which a third of the world's liquefied natural gas and 20% of global oil consumption passes from Middle East producers.
Ecology
In 2018, scientists confirmed the Gulf of Oman contains one of the world's largest marine dead zones, where the ocean contains little or no oxygen and marine wildlife cannot exist. The dead zone encompasses nearly the entire Gulf of Oman, equivalent to the size of Florida, United States of America. The cause is a combination of increased ocean warming and increased runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers.
International underwater rail tunnel
In 2018, a rail tunnel under the sea was suggested to link the UAE with the western coast of India. The bullet train tunnel would be supported by pontoons and be nearly in length.
See also
Strait of Hormuz
Persian Gulf
Eastern Arabia
Musandam Peninsula
History of the United Arab Emirates#The pearling industry and the Portuguese empire: 16th - 18th century
Saeed bin Butti#Perpetual Maritime Truce
Trucial States
Sultan bin Saqr Al Qasimi#Perpetual Maritime Truce of 1853
Persian Gulf campaign of 1809
Persian Gulf campaign of 1819
General Maritime Treaty of 1820
May 2019 Gulf of Oman incident
June 2019 Gulf of Oman incident
Geography of Oman
Geography of Iran
Geography of United Arab Emirates
Geography of Pakistan
References
Further reading
"The Book of Duarte Barbosa" by Duarte Barbosa, Mansel Longworth Dames. 1989. p. 79.
"The Natural History of Pliny". by Pliny, Henry Thomas Riley, John Bostock. 1855. p. 117
"The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf" by Samuel Barrett Miles - 1966. p. 148
"The Life & Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner". by Daniel Defoe. 1895. p. 279
"The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind". by Herbert George Well. 1920. p. 379.
"The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge" by Johann Jakob Herzog, Philip Schaff, Albert Hauck. 1910. p. 242
Gulfs of Iran
Seas of Iran
Bodies of water of Iran
Oman
Bodies of water of Pakistan
Bodies of water of Oman
Bodies of water of the United Arab Emirates
Oman
Bodies of water of the Arabian Sea
Iran–Pakistan border
Oman–United Arab Emirates border | [
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12898 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical%20case | Grammatical case | A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.
English has largely lost its inflected case system but personal pronouns still have three cases, which are simplified forms of the nominative, accusative and genitive cases. They are used with personal pronouns: subjective case (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, who, whoever), objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, whomever) and possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers; its; our, ours; their, theirs; whose; whosever). Forms such as I, he and we are used for the subject ("I kicked the ball"), and forms such as me, him and us are used for the object ("John kicked me").
As a language evolves, cases can merge (for instance, in Ancient Greek, the locative case merged with the dative case), a phenomenon formally called syncretism.
Languages such as Ancient Greek, Armenian, Assamese, most Balto-Slavic languages, Basque, Bengali, most Caucasian languages including Georgian, most Dravidian languages, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Latin, Sanskrit, Tibetan, the Turkic languages and the Uralic languages have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes) to indicate their case. The number of cases differs between languages: Persian has two; modern English has three but for pronouns only; Torlakian dialect (Serbian), Classical and Modern Standard Arabic have three; German, Icelandic, Modern Greek, and Irish have four; Romanian and Ancient Greek have five; Bengali, Latin, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Turkish each have at least six; Armenian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian, Kajkavian, Czech, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian and Ukrainian have seven; Mongolian, Sanskrit and Tamil have eight; Assamese has 10; Basque has 13; Estonian has 14; Finnish has 15; Hungarian has 18 and Tsez has 64 cases.
Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. A role that one of those languages marks by case is often marked in English with a preposition. For example, the English prepositional phrase with (his) foot (as in "John kicked the ball with his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as (, meaning "the foot") with both words (the definite article, and the noun () "foot") changing to dative form.
More formally, case has been defined as "a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads". Cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as agent and patient. They are often closely related, and in languages such as Latin, several thematic roles are realised by a somewhat fixed case for deponent verbs, but cases are a syntagmatic/phrasal category, and thematic roles are the function of a syntagma/phrase in a larger structure. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, as thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence.
History
It is widely accepted that the Ancient Greeks had a certain idea of the forms of a name in their own language. A fragment of Anacreon seems to prove this. Nevertheless, it cannot be inferred that the Ancient Greeks really knew what grammatical cases were. Grammatical cases were first recognized by the Stoics and from some philosophers of the Peripatetic school. The advancements of those philosophers were later employed by the philologists of the Alexandrian school.
Etymology
The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin , which is derived from the verb , "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root . The Latin word is a calque of the Greek , , lit. "falling, fall". The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative. This imagery is also reflected in the word declension, from Latin , "to lean", from the PIE root .
The equivalent to "case" in several other European languages also derives from casus, including in French, in Italian, in Spanish, in Portuguese and in German. The Russian word (padyézh) is a calque from Greek and similarly contains a root meaning "fall", and the German and Czech simply mean "fall", and are used for both the concept of grammatical case and to refer to physical falls. The Finnish equivalent is , whose main meaning is "position" or "place".
Indo-European languages
Although not very prominent in modern English, cases featured much more saliently in Old English and other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Old Persian, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. Historically, the Indo-European languages had eight morphological cases, though modern languages typically have fewer, using prepositions and word order to convey information that had previously been conveyed using distinct noun forms. Among modern languages, cases still feature prominently in most of the Balto-Slavic languages (except Macedonian and Bulgarian), with most having six to eight cases, as well as Icelandic, German and Modern Greek, which have four. In German, cases are mostly marked on articles and adjectives, and less so on nouns. In Icelandic, articles, adjectives, personal names and nouns are all marked for case, making it, among other things, the living Germanic language that could be said to most closely resemble Proto-Germanic.
The eight historical Indo-European cases are as follows, with examples either of the English case or of the English syntactic alternative to case:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
!Case
!Indicates
!Sample case words
!Sample sentence
!Interrogative
!Notes
|-
|Nominative
|Subject of a finite verb
|we
|We went to the store.
|Who or what?
|Corresponds to English's subject pronouns.
|-
|Accusative
|Direct object of a transitive verb
|us,for us,the (object)
|The clerk remembered us.
John waited for us at the bus stop.
Obey the law.
|Whom or what?
|Corresponds to English's object pronouns and preposition for construction before the object, often marked by a definite article the. Together with dative, it forms modern English's oblique case.
|-
|Dative
|Indirect object of a verb
|us,to us,to the (object)
|The clerk gave us a discount.
The clerk gave a discount to us.
According to the law...
|Whom or to what?
||Corresponds to English's object pronouns and preposition to construction before the object, often marked by a definite article the. Together with accusative, it forms modern English's oblique case.
|-
|Ablative
|Movement away from
|from us
|The pigeon flew from us to a steeple.
|Whence? From where/whom?
|
|-
|Genitive
|Possessor of another noun
|'s,
of (the)
|John's book was on the table.
The pages of the book turned yellow.
The table is made out of wood.
|Whose? From what or what of?
|Roughly corresponds to English's possessive (possessive determiners and pronouns) and preposition of construction.
|-
|Vocative
|Addressee
|John
|John, are you all right?
Hello, John!
O John, how are you! (Archaic)
|
|Roughly corresponds to the archaic use of "O" in English.
|-
|Locative
|Location, either physical or temporal
|in Japan,
at the bus stop,
in the future
|We live in Japan.
John is waiting for us at the bus stop.
We will see what will happen in the future.
|Where or wherein? When?
|Roughly corresponds to English prepositions in, on, at, and by and other less common prepositions.
|-
|Instrumental
|A means or tool used or companion present in/while performing an action
|with a mop,
by hand
|We wiped the floor with a mop.This letter was written by hand.|How? With what or using what? By what means? With whom?
|Corresponds to English prepositions by, with and via as well as synonymous constructions such as using, by use of and through.
|}
All of the above are just rough descriptions; the precise distinctions vary significantly from language to language, and as such they are often more complex. Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the noun's role in the sentence – one of the defining features of so-called fusional languages. Old English was a fusional language, but Modern English does not work this way.
Modern English
Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Proto-Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the "Saxon genitive" (-'s).
Taken as a whole, English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases:
The nominative case (subjective pronouns such as I, he, she, we), used for the subject of a finite verb and sometimes for the complement of a copula.
The oblique case (object pronouns such as me, him, her, us), used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, for an absolute disjunct, and sometimes for the complement of a copula.
The genitive case (possessive pronouns such as my/mine, his, her/hers, our/ours), used for a grammatical possessor. This is not always considered to be a case; see .
Most English personal pronouns have five forms: the nominative case form, the oblique case form, a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself, ourselves) which is based upon the possessive determiner form but is coreferential to a preceding instance of nominitive or oblique, and the possessive case forms, which include both a determiner form (such as my, our) and a predicatively-used independent form (such as mine, ours) which is distinct (with two exceptions: the third person singular masculine he and the third person singular neuter it, which use the same form for both determiner and independent [his car, it is his]). The interrogative personal pronoun who exhibits the greatest diversity of forms within the modern English pronoun system, having definite nominative, oblique, and genitive forms (who, whom, whose) and equivalently-coordinating indefinite forms (whoever, whomever, and whosever).
Though English pronouns can have subject and object forms (he/him, she/her), nouns show only a singular/plural and a possessive/non-possessive distinction (e.g. chair, chairs, chair's, chairs); there is no manifest difference in the form of chair between "The chair is here." (subject) and "I have the chair." (direct object), a distinction made instead by word order and context.
Hierarchy of cases
Cases can be ranked in the following hierarchy, where a language that does not have a given case will tend not to have any cases to the right of the missing case:
nominative → accusative or ergative → genitive → dative → locative or prepositional → ablative and/or instrumental → others.
This is, however, only a general tendency. Many forms of Central German, such as Colognian and Luxembourgish, have a dative case but lack a genitive. In Irish nouns, the nominative and accusative have fallen together, whereas the dative–locative has remained separate in some paradigms; Irish also has genitive and vocative cases. In many modern Indo-Aryan languages, the accusative, genitive, and dative have merged to an oblique case, but many of these languages still retain vocative, locative, and ablative cases. Old English had an instrumental case, but neither a locative nor a prepositional case.
Case order
The traditional case order (nom-gen-dat-acc) was expressed for the first time in The Art of Grammar in the 2nd century BC:
Latin grammars, such as Ars grammatica, followed the Greek tradition, but added the ablative case of Latin. Later other European languages also followed that Graeco-Roman tradition.
However, for some languages, such as Latin, due to case syncretism the order may be changed for convenience, where the accusative or the vocative cases are placed after the nominative and before the genitive. For example:
For similar reasons, the customary order of the four cases in Icelandic is nominative–accusative–dative–genitive, as illustrated below:
Case concord systems
In the most common case concord system, only the head-word (the noun) in a phrase is marked for case. This system appears in many Papuan languages as well as in Turkic, Mongolian, Quechua, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and other languages. In Basque and various Amazonian and Australian languages, only the phrase-final word (not necessarily the noun) is marked for case. In many Indo-European, Finnic, and Semitic languages, case is marked on the noun, the determiner, and usually the adjective. Other systems are less common. In some languages, there is double-marking of a word as both genitive (to indicate semantic role) and another case such as accusative (to establish concord with the head noun).
Declension paradigms
Declension is the process or result of altering nouns to the correct grammatical cases. Languages with rich nominal inflection (use grammatical cases for many purposes) typically have a number of identifiable declension classes, or groups of nouns with a similar pattern of case inflection or declension. Sanskrit has six declension classes, whereas Latin is traditionally considered to have five, and Ancient Greek three. For example, Slovak has fifteen noun declension classes, five for each gender (the number may vary depending on which paradigms are counted or omitted, this mainly concerns those that modify declension of foreign words; refer to article).
In Indo-European languages, declension patterns may depend on a variety of factors, such as gender, number, phonological environment, and irregular historical factors. Pronouns sometimes have separate paradigms. In some languages, particularly Slavic languages, a case may contain different groups of endings depending on whether the word is a noun or an adjective. A single case may contain many different endings, some of which may even be derived from different roots. For example, in Polish, the genitive case has -a, -u, -ów, -i/-y, -e- for nouns, and -ego, -ej, -ich/-ych for adjectives. To a lesser extent, a noun's animacy or humanness may add another layer of complexity. For example, in Russian:
(NOM, animate, zero ending) ((The) cat catches mice)
(NOM, inanimate, zero ending) ((The) pillar holds a/the roof)
vs.
(ACC, animate, -a ending). (Peter strokes a/the cat)
and
(ACC, inanimate, zero ending). (Peter breaks a/the pillar)
Examples
Australian Aboriginal Languages
Australian languages represent a diversity of case paradigms in terms of their alignment (i.e. nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive) and the morpho-syntactic properties of case inflection including where/how many times across a noun phrase the case morphology will appear. For typical r-expression noun phrases, most Australian languages follow a basic ERG-ABS template with additional cases for peripheral arguments; however, many Australian languages, the function of case marking extends beyond the prototypical function of specifying the syntactic and semantic relation of an NP to a predicate. Dench and Evans (1988) use a five-part system for categorizing the functional roles of case marking in Australian languages. They are enumerated below as they appear in Senge (2015):
Relational: a suffix which represents syntactic or semantic roles of a noun phrase in clauses.
Adnominal: a suffix which relates a noun phrase to another within the one noun phrase.
Referential: a suffix which attaches to a noun phrase in agreement with another noun phrase which represents one of the core arguments in the clause.
Subordinating: a suffix which attaches to elements of a subordinate clause. Its functions are: (i) specifying temporal or logical (typically, causal and purposive) relationships between two clauses (Temporal-subordinator); (ii) indicating coreferential relationships between arguments in the two clauses (Concord-subordinator).
Derivational: a suffix which attaches to a bare stem before other case suffixes and create a new lexical item.
To illustrate this paradigm in action, take the case-system of Wanyjirra for whose description Senge invokes this system. Each of the case markers functions in the prototypical relational sense, but many extend into these additional functions:
Wanyjirra is an example of a language in which case marking occurs on all sub-constituents of the NP; see the following example in which the demonstrative, head, and quantifier of the noun phrase all receive ergative marking:
However, this is by no means always the case or even the norm for Australian languages. For many, case-affixes are considered special-clitics (i.e. phrasal-affixes, see Anderson 2005) because they have a singular fixed position within the phrase. For Bardi, the case marker usually appears on the first phrasal constituent while the opposite is the case for Wangkatja (i.e. the case marker is attracted to the rightmost edge of the phrase). See the following examples respectively:BardiWangkatja Basque
Basque has the following cases, with examples given in the indefinite, definite singular, definite plural, and definite close plural of the word etxe, "house", "home":
absolutive (etxe, etxea, etxeak, etxeok: "house, the / a house, (the / some) houses, these houses"),
ergative (etxek, etxeak, etxeek, etxeok),
dative (etxeri, etxeari, etxeei, etxeoi),
genitive (etxeren, etxearen, etxeen, etxeon),
destinative (or benefactive: etxerentzat, etxearentzat, etxeentzat, etxeontzat),
motivative (or causal: etxerengatik, etxearengatik, etxeengatik, etxeongatik),
sociative (etxerekin, etxearekin, etxeekin, etxeokin),
instrumental (etxez, etxeaz, etxeez, etxeoz),
locative or inesive (etxetan, etxean, etxeetan, etxeotan),
ablative (etxetatik, etxetik, exteetatik, etxeotatik),
adlative (etxetara, etxera, etxeetara, etxeotara),
directional adlative (etxetarantz, etxerantz, etxeetarantz, etxeotarantz),
terminative adlative (etxetaraino, etxeraino, etxeetaraino, etxeotaraino),
locative genitive (etxetako, etxeko, etxeetako, etxeotako),
prolative (etxetzat), only in the indefinite grammatical number,
partitive (etxerik), only in the indefinite grammatical number, and
distributive (Bost liburu ikasleko banatu dituzte, "They have handed out five books to each student"), only in the indefinite grammatical number.
Some of them can be re-declined, even more than once, as if they were nouns (usually, from the genitive locative case), although they mainly work as noun modifiers before a noun clause:
etxearena (that which is of the house), etxearenarekin (with the one which pertains to the house),
neskarentzako (which is for the girl), neskarentzakoan (in the one which is for the girl),
neskekiko (which is with the girls), neskekikoa (the one which is for the girls),
arazoarengatiko (which is because of the problem), arazoarengatikoak (the ones which are due to the problems),
zurezkoaz (by means of the wooden one),
etxeetakoaz (about the one which is in the houses), etxeetakoari (to the one which is in the houses),
etxetiko (which comes from the house), etxetikoa (the one which comes from the house), etxetikoari (to the one which comes from the house),
etxeetarako (which goes to the houses), etxeetarakoa (the one which goes to the houses), etxeetarakoaz (about the one which goes to the houses),
etxeranzko (which goes towards the house), etxeranzkoa (the one which goes to the house), etxeranzkoarena (the one which belongs to the one which goes to the house),
etxerainoko (which goes up to the house), etxerainokoa (the one which goes up to the house), etxerainokoarekin (with the one which goes up to the houses)...
German
In German, grammatical case is largely preserved in the articles and adjectives, but nouns have lost many of their original endings. Below is an example of case inflection in German using the masculine definite article and one of the German words for "sailor".
(nominative) "the sailor" [as a subject] (e.g. Der Seemann steht da – the sailor is standing there)
(genitive) "the sailor's / [of] the sailor" (e.g. – the name of the sailor is Otto)
(dative) "[to/for] the sailor" [as an indirect object] (e.g. – I gave a present to the sailor)
(accusative) "the sailor" [as a direct object] (e.g. – I saw the sailor)
An example with the feminine definite article with the German word for "woman".
die Frau (nominative) "the woman" [as a subject] (e.g. Die Frau isst - the woman eats)
der Frau (genitive) "the woman's / [of] the woman" (e.g. Die Katze der Frau ist weiß - the cat of the woman is white)
der Frau (dative) "[to/for] the woman" [as an indirect object] (e.g. Ich gab der Frau ein Geschenk - I gave a present to the woman)
die Frau (accusative) "the woman" [as a direct object] (e.g. Ich sah die Frau - I saw the woman)
An example with the neuter definite article with the German word for "book".
das Buch (nominative) "the book" [as a subject] (e.g. Das Buch ist gut - the book is good)
des Buch(e)s (genitive) "the book's/ [of] the book" (e.g. Die Seiten des Buchs sind grün - the pages of the book are green)
dem Buch (dative) "[to/for] the book" [as an indirect object] (e.g. Ich gab dem Buch einen Titel - I gave the book a title)
das Buch (accusative) "the book" [as a direct object] (e.g. Ich sah das Buch - I saw the book)
Proper names for cities have two genitive nouns:
der Hauptbahnhof Berlins (primary genitive) "the main train station of Berlin"
der Berliner Hauptbahnhof (secondary genitive) "Berlin's main train station"
Hindi-Urdu
Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) has three noun cases, the nominative, oblique case, and the vocative case. The vocative case is now obsolete and the oblique case doubles as the vocative case. The pronoun cases that Hindi-Urdu has are the nominative, ergative, accusative, dative, and two oblique cases. The case forms which do not exist for certain pronouns are constructed using primary postpositions (or other grammatical particles) and the oblique case (shown in parentheis in the table below).
The other cases are constructed adpositionally using the case-marking postpositions using the nouns and pronouns in their oblique cases. The oblique case is used exclusively with these 8 case-marking postpositions of Hindi-Urdu forming 10 grammatical cases, which are: ergative ने (ne), dative and accusative को (ko), instrumental and ablative से (se), genitive का (kā), inessive में (mẽ), adessive पे (pe), terminative तक (tak), semblative सा (sā).
Latin
An example of a Latin case inflection is given below, using the singular forms of the Latin term for "cook", which belongs to Latin's second declension class.
(nominative) "[the] cook" [as a subject] (e.g. – the cook is standing there)
(genitive) "[the] cook's / [of the] cook" (e.g. – the cook's name is Claudius)
(dative) "[to/for the] cook" [as an indirect object] (e.g. – I gave a present to the cook)
(accusative) "[the] cook" [as a direct object] (e.g. – I saw the cook)
(ablative) "[by/with/from/in the] cook" [in various uses not covered by the above] (e.g. – I am taller than the cook: ablative of comparison)
(vocative) "[you] the cook" [addressing the object] (e.g. – I thank you, cook)
The Romance languages have largely abandoned or simplified the grammatical cases of Latin. Much like English, most Romance case markers survive only in pronouns.
Lithuanian
Typically in Lithuanian, only the inflection changes for the seven different grammatical cases:
Nominative (): – – "This is a dog."
Genitive (): – – "Tom took the dog's bone."
Dative (): – – "He gave the bone to another dog."
Accusative (): – – "He washed the dog."
Instrumental (): – – He scared the cats with (using) the dog.
Locative (): – – "We'll meet at the White Dog (Cafe)."
Vocative (): – – "He shouted: Hey, dog!"
Hungarian
Hungarian declension is relatively simple with regular suffixes attached to the vast majority of nouns. The following table lists all of the cases used in Hungarian.
Russian
An example of a Russian case inflection is given below (with explicit stress marks), using the singular forms of the Russian term for "sailor", which belongs to Russian's first declension class.
(nominative) "[the] sailor" [as a subject] (e.g. : The sailor is standing there)
(genitive) "[the] sailor's / [of the] sailor" (e.g. : The sailor's son is an artist)
(dative) "[to/for the] sailor" [as an indirect object] (e.g. : (They/Someone) gave a present to the sailor)
(accusative) "[the] sailor" [as a direct object] (e.g. : (I) see the sailor)
(instrumental) "[with/by the] sailor" [as a direct object] (e.g. : (I) have a friendship with the sailor)
(prepositional) "[about/on/in the] sailor" [as a direct object] (e.g. : (I) think about the sailor)
Up to ten additional cases are identified by linguists, although today all of them are either incomplete (do not apply to all nouns or do not form full word paradigm with all combinations of gender and number) or degenerate (appear identical to one of the main six cases). The most recognized additional cases are locative (), partitive (), and two forms of vocative — old () and neo-vocative (). Sometimes, so called count-form (for some countable nouns after numerals) is considered to be a sub-case. See details.
Sanskrit
Grammatical case was analyzed extensively in Sanskrit. The grammarian Pāṇini identified six semantic roles or kāraka, which are related to the following eight Sanskrit cases in order:
For example, in the following sentence leaf is the agent (kartā, nominative case), tree is the source (apādāna, ablative case), and ground is the locus (adhikaraṇa, locative case). The declensions are reflected in the morphemes -āt, -am, and -au respectively.
However, the cases may be deployed for other than the default thematic roles. A notable example is the passive construction. In the following sentence, Devadatta is the kartā, but appears in the instrumental case, and rice, the karman, object, is in the nominative case (as subject of the verb). The declensions are reflected in the morphemes -ena and -am.
Tamil
The Tamil case system is analyzed in native and missionary grammars as consisting of a finite number of cases. The usual treatment of Tamil case (Arden 1942) is one in which there are seven cases: nominative (first case), accusative (second case), instrumental (third), dative (fourth), ablative (fifth), genitive (sixth), and locative (seventh). In traditional analyses, there is always a clear distinction made between post-positional morphemes and case endings. The vocative is sometimes given a place in the case system as an eighth case, but vocative forms do not participate in usual morphophonemic alternations and do not govern the use of any postpositions. Modern grammarians, however, argue that this eight-case classification is coarse and artificial and that Tamil usage is best understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as marking a separate case.
Turkish
Modern Turkish has six cases (In Turkish İsmin hâlleri).
The accusative can exist only in the noun(whether it is derived from a verb or not). For example, "Arkadaşlar bize gelmeyi düşünüyorlar." (Friends are thinking of coming to us).
The dative can exist only in the noun (whether it is derived from a verb or not). For example, "Bol bol kitap okumaya çalışıyorum." (I try to read a lot of books).
Evolution
As languages evolve, case systems change. In early Ancient Greek, for example, the genitive and ablative cases of given names became combined, giving five cases, rather than the six retained in Latin. In modern Hindi, the Sanskrit cases have been reduced to three: a direct case (for subjects and direct objects) and oblique case, and a vocative case.Spencer, A. (2005). Case in Hindi. In Proceedings of the LFG05 Conference. Retrieved from https://web.stanford.edu/group/cslipublications/cslipublications/LFG/10/lfg05.html In English, apart from the pronouns discussed above, case has vanished altogether except for the possessive/non-possessive dichotomy in nouns.
The evolution of the treatment of case relationships can be circular. Adpositions can become unstressed and sound like they are an unstressed syllable of a neighboring word. A postposition can thus merge into the stem of a head noun, developing various forms depending on the phonological shape of the stem. Affixes can then be subject to various phonological processes such as assimilation, vowel centering to the schwa, phoneme loss, and fusion, and these processes can reduce or even eliminate the distinctions between cases. Languages can then compensate for the resulting loss of function by creating adpositions, thus coming full circle.
Recent experiments in agent-based modeling have shown how case systems can emerge and evolve in a population of language users. The experiments demonstrate that language users may introduce new case markers to reduce the cognitive effort required for semantic interpretation, hence facilitating communication through language. Case markers then become generalized through analogical reasoning and reuse.
Linguistic typology
Morphosyntactic alignment
Languages are categorized into several case systems, based on their morphosyntactic alignment—how they group verb agents and patients into cases:
Nominative–accusative (or simply accusative): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb is in the same case as the agent (subject) of a transitive verb; this case is then called the nominative case, with the patient (direct object) of a transitive verb being in the accusative case.
Ergative–absolutive (or simply ergative): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb is in the same case as the patient (direct object) of a transitive verb; this case is then called the absolutive case, with the agent (subject) of a transitive verb being in the ergative case.
Ergative–accusative (or tripartite): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb is in its own case (the intransitive case), separate from that of the agent (subject) or patient (direct object) of a transitive verb (which is in the ergative case or accusative case, respectively).
Active–stative (or simply active): The argument (subject) of an intransitive verb can be in one of two cases; if the argument is an agent, as in "He ate", then it is in the same case as the agent (subject) of a transitive verb (sometimes called the agentive case), and if it is a patient, as in "He tripped", then it is in the same case as the patient (direct object) of a transitive verb (sometimes called the patientive case).
Trigger: One noun in a sentence is the topic or focus. This noun is in the trigger case, and information elsewhere in the sentence (for example a verb affix in Tagalog) specifies the role of the trigger. The trigger may be identified as the agent, patient, etc. Other nouns may be inflected for case, but the inflections are overloaded; for example, in Tagalog, the subject and object of a verb are both expressed in the genitive case when they are not in the trigger case.
The following are systems that some languages use to mark case instead of, or in addition to, declension:
Positional''': Nouns are not inflected for case; the position of a noun in the sentence expresses its case.
Adpositional: Nouns are accompanied by words that mark case.
Language families
With a few exceptions, most languages in the Finno-Ugric family make extensive use of cases. Finnish has 15 cases according to the traditional description (or up to 30 depending on the interpretation). However, only 12 are commonly used in speech (see Finnish noun cases and Finnish locative system). Estonian has 14 (see Estonian locative system) and Hungarian has 18, both with additional archaic cases used for some *Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages also exhibit complex case systems. Since the abovementioned languages, along with Korean and Japanese, shared certain similarities, linguists proposed an Altaic family and reconstructed its case system; although the hypothesis had been largely discredited.
The Tsez language, a Northeast Caucasian language, has 64 cases.
The original version of John Quijada's constructed language Ithkuil has 81 noun cases, and its descendant Ilaksh and Ithkuil after the 2011 revision both have 96 noun cases.
The lemma form of words, which is the form chosen by convention as the canonical form of a word, is usually the most unmarked or basic case, which is typically the nominative, trigger, or absolutive case, whichever a language may have.
See also
Agreement (linguistics)
Case hierarchy
Declension
Differential object marking
Inflection
List of grammatical cases
Phi features
Thematic relation
Verbal case
Voice (grammar)
Notes
References
General references
Ivan G. Iliev (2007) On the Nature of Grammatical Case ... (Case and Vocativeness)
Iliev, Iv. The Russian Genitive of Negation and Its Japanese Counterpart. International Journal of Russian Studies. 1, 2018
External links
Grammatical Features Inventory – DOI: 10.15126/SMG.18/1.04
World Atlas of Language Structures Online
Chapter 28: Case Syncretism
Chapter 49: Number of Cases
Chapter 50: Asymmetrical Case Marking
Chapter 51: Position of Case Affixes
Chapter 98: Alignment of Case Marking of Full Noun Phrases
Chapter 99: Alignment of Case Marking of Pronouns | [
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12899 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo | Gestapo | The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organisation. On 20 April 1934, oversight of the Gestapo passed to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who was also appointed Chief of German Police by Hitler in 1936. Instead of being exclusively a Prussian state agency, the Gestapo became a national one as a sub-office of the (SiPo; Security Police). From 27 September 1939, it was administered by the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). It became known as (Dept) 4 of the RSHA and was considered a sister organisation to the (SD; Security Service). During World War II, the Gestapo played a key role in the Holocaust. The Gestapo was declared a criminal organisation by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at the Nuremberg trials after the war.
History
After Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Hermann Göring—future commander of the Luftwaffe and the number two man in the Nazi Party—was named Interior Minister of Prussia. This gave Göring command of the largest police force in Germany. Soon afterward, Göring detached the political and intelligence sections from the police and filled their ranks with Nazis. On 26 April 1933, Göring merged the two units as the , which was abbreviated by a post office clerk for a franking stamp and became known as the "Gestapo". He originally wanted to name it the Secret Police Office (), but the German initials, "GPA", were too similar to those of the Soviet State Political Directorate (, or GPU).
The first commander of the Gestapo was Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Göring. Diels was appointed with the title of chief of (Department 1a) of the Prussian Secret Police. Diels was best known as the primary interrogator of Marinus van der Lubbe after the Reichstag fire. In late 1933, the Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick wanted to integrate all the police forces of the German states under his control. Göring outflanked him by removing the Prussian political and intelligence departments from the state interior ministry. Göring took over the Gestapo in 1934 and urged Hitler to extend the agency's authority throughout Germany. This represented a radical departure from German tradition, which held that law enforcement was (mostly) a (state) and local matter. In this, he ran into conflict with (SS) chief Heinrich Himmler who was police chief of the second most powerful German state, Bavaria. Frick did not have the political power to take on Göring by himself so he allied with Himmler. With Frick's support, Himmler (pushed on by his right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich) took over the political police in state-after-state. Soon only Prussia was left.
Concerned that Diels was not ruthless enough to effectively counteract the power of the (SA), Göring handed over control of the Gestapo to Himmler on 20 April 1934. Also on that date, Hitler appointed Himmler chief of all German police outside Prussia. Heydrich, named chief of the Gestapo by Himmler on 22 April 1934, also continued as head of the SS Security Service (; SD). Himmler and Heydrich both immediately began installing their own personnel in select positions, several of whom were directly from the Bavarian Political Police, such as Heinrich Müller, Franz Josef Huber and Josef Meisinger. Many of the Gestapo employees in the newly established offices were young and highly educated in a wide variety of academic fields and moreover, represented a new generation of National Socialist adherents, who were hard-working, efficient, and prepared to carry the Nazi state forward through the persecution of their political opponents.
By the spring of 1934 Himmler's SS controlled the SD and the Gestapo, but for him, there was still a problem, as technically the SS (and the Gestapo by proxy) was subordinated to the SA, which was under the command of Ernst Röhm. Himmler wanted to free himself entirely from Röhm, whom he viewed as an obstacle. Röhm's position was menacing as more than 4.5 million men fell under his command once the militias and veterans organisations were absorbed by the SA, a fact which fuelled Röhm's aspirations; his dream of fusing the SA and Reichswehr together was undermining Hitler's relationships with the leadership of Germany's armed forces. Several Nazi chieftains, among them Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, and Himmler, began a concerted campaign to convince Hitler to take action against Röhm. Both the SD and Gestapo released information concerning an imminent putsch by the SA. Once persuaded, Hitler acted by setting Himmler's SS into action, who then proceeded to murder over 100 of Hitler's identified antagonists. The Gestapo supplied the information which implicated the SA and ultimately enabled Himmler and Heydrich to emancipate themselves entirely from the organisation. For the Gestapo, the next two years following the Night of the Long Knives, a term describing the putsch against Röhm and the SA, were characterised by "behind-the-scenes political wrangling over policing".
On 17 June 1936, Hitler decreed the unification of all police forces in Germany and named Himmler as Chief of German Police. This action effectively merged the police into the SS and removed it from Frick's control. Himmler was nominally subordinate to Frick as police chief, but as , he answered only to Hitler. This move also gave Himmler operational control over Germany's entire detective force. The Gestapo became a national state agency. Himmler also gained authority over all of Germany's uniformed law enforcement agencies, which were amalgamated into the new (Orpo; Order Police), which became a national agency under SS general Kurt Daluege. Shortly thereafter, Himmler created the (Kripo; Criminal Police), merging it with the Gestapo into the (SiPo; Security Police), under Heydrich's command. Heinrich Müller was at that time the Gestapo operations chief. He answered to Heydrich; Heydrich answered only to Himmler and Himmler answered only to Hitler.
The Gestapo had the authority to investigate cases of treason, espionage, sabotage and criminal attacks on the Nazi Party and Germany. The basic Gestapo law passed by the government in 1936 gave the Gestapo to operate without judicial review—in effect, putting it above the law. The Gestapo was specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws. As early as 1935, a Prussian administrative court had ruled that the Gestapo's actions were not subject to judicial review. The SS officer Werner Best, one-time head of legal affairs in the Gestapo, summed up this policy by saying, "As long as the police carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally".
On 27 September 1939, the security and police agencies of Nazi Germany—with the exception of the Order Police—were consolidated into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), headed by Heydrich. The Gestapo became (Department IV) of RSHA and Müller became the Gestapo Chief, with Heydrich as his immediate superior. After Heydrich's 1942 assassination, Himmler assumed the leadership of the RSHA until January 1943, when Ernst Kaltenbrunner was appointed chief. Müller remained the Gestapo Chief. His direct subordinate Adolf Eichmann headed the Gestapo's Office of Resettlement and then its Office of Jewish Affairs ( or Sub-Department IV, Section B4). During the Holocaust, Eichmann's department within the Gestapo coordinated the mass deportation of European Jews to the Nazis' extermination camps.
The power of the Gestapo included the use of what was called, —"protective custody", a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings. An oddity of the system was that the prisoner had to sign his own , an order declaring that the person had requested imprisonment—presumably out of fear of personal harm. In addition, political prisoners throughout Germany—and from 1941, throughout the occupied territories under the Night and Fog Decree ()—simply disappeared while in Gestapo custody. Up to 30 April 1944, at least 6,639 persons were arrested under orders. However, the total number of people who disappeared as a result of this decree is not known.
Counterintelligence
The Polish government in exile in London during World War II received sensitive military information about Nazi Germany from agents and informants throughout Europe. After Germany conquered Poland (in the autumn of 1939), Gestapo officials believed that they had neutralised Polish intelligence activities. However, certain Polish information about the movement of German police and SS units to the East during the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union was similar to information British intelligence secretly obtained through intercepting and decoding German police and SS messages sent by radio telegraphy.
In 1942, the Gestapo discovered a cache of Polish intelligence documents in Prague and were surprised to see that Polish agents and informants had been gathering detailed military information and smuggling it out to London, via Budapest and Istanbul. The Poles identified and tracked German military trains to the Eastern front and identified four Order Police battalions sent to occupied areas of the Soviet Union in October 1941 that engaged in war crimes and mass murder.
Polish agents also gathered detailed information about the morale of German soldiers in the East. After uncovering a sample of the information the Poles had reported, Gestapo officials concluded that Polish intelligence activity represented a very serious danger to Germany. As late as 6 June 1944, Heinrich Müller—concerned about the leakage of information to the Allies—set up a special unit called that was meant to root out the Polish intelligence network in western and southwestern Europe.
In Austria, there were groups still loyal to the Habsburgs, who unlike most across the greater German Reich, remained determined to resist the Nazis. These groups became a special focus of the Gestapo because of their insurrectionist goals—the overthrow of the Nazi regime, the re-establishment of an independent Austria under Habsburg leadership—and Hitler's hatred of the Habsburg family. Hitler vehemently rejected the centuries' old Habsburg pluralist principles of "live and let live" with regard to ethnic groups, peoples, minorities, religions, cultures and languages. Habsburg loyalist Karl Burian's (who was later executed) plan to blow up the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna represented a unique attempt to act aggressively against the Gestapo. Burian's group had also set up a secret courier service to Otto von Habsburg in Belgium. Individuals in Austrian resistance groups led by Heinrich Maier also managed to pass along the plans and the location of production facilities for V-1, V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks, and aircraft (Messerschmitt Bf 109, Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, etc.) to the Allies. The Maier group informed very early about the mass murder of Jews. The resistance group, later discovered by the Gestapo because of a double agent of the Abwehr, was in contact with Allen Dulles, the head of the US Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland. Although Maier and the other group members were severely tortured, the Gestapo did not succeed in uncovering the essential involvement of the resistance group in Operation Crossbow and Operation Hydra.
Suppression of resistance and persecution
Early in the regime's existence, harsh measures were meted out to political opponents and those who resisted Nazi doctrine, such as members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD); a role originally performed by the SA until the SD and Gestapo undermined their influence and took control of Reich security. Because the Gestapo seemed omniscient and omnipotent, the atmosphere of fear they created led to an overestimation of their reach and strength; a faulty assessment which hampered the operational effectiveness of underground resistance organisations.
Trade unions
Shortly after the Nazis came to power, they decided to dissolve the 28 federations of the General German Trade Union Confederation, because Hitler—after noting their success in the works council elections—intended to consolidate all German workers under the Nazi government's administration, a decision he made on 7 April 1933. As a preface to this action, Hitler decreed May 1 as National Labor Day to celebrate German workers, a move the trade union leaders welcomed. With their trade union flags waving, Hitler gave a rousing speech to the 1.5 million people assembled on Berlin's that was nationally broadcast, during which he extolled the nation's revival and working class solidarity. On the following day, the newly formed Gestapo officers, who had been shadowing some 58 trade union leaders, arrested them wherever they could find them—many in their homes. Meanwhile, the SA and police occupied trade union headquarters, arrested functionaries, confiscated their property and assets; all by design so as to be replaced on 12 May by the German Labour Front (DAF), a Nazi organisation placed under the leadership of Robert Ley. For their part, this was the first time the Gestapo operated under its new name since its 26 April 1933 founding in Prussia.
Religious dissent
Many parts of Germany (where religious dissent existed upon the Nazi seizure of power) saw a rapid transformation; a change as noted by the Gestapo in conservative towns such as Würzburg, where people acquiesced to the regime either through accommodation, collaboration, or simple compliance. Increasing religious objections to Nazi policies led the Gestapo to carefully monitor church organisations. For the most part, members of the church did not offer political resistance but simply wanted to ensure that organizational doctrine remained intact.
However, the Nazi regime sought to suppress any source of ideology other than its own, and set out to muzzle or crush the churches in the so-called . When Church leaders (clergy) voiced their misgiving about the euthanasia program and Nazi racial policies, Hitler intimated that he considered them "traitors to the people" and went so far as to call them "the destroyers of Germany". The extreme anti-Semitism and neo-Pagan heresies of the Nazis caused some Christians to outright resist, and Pope Pius XI to issue the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge denouncing Nazism and warning Catholics against joining or supporting the Party. Some pastors, like the Protestant clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer, paid for their opposition with their lives.
In an effort to counter the strength and influence of spiritual resistance, Nazi records reveal that the Gestapo's monitored the activities of bishops very closely—instructing that agents be set up in every diocese, that the bishops' reports to the Vatican should be obtained and that the bishops' areas of activity must be found out. Deans were to be targeted as the "eyes and ears of the bishops" and a "vast network" established to monitor the activities of ordinary clergy: "The importance of this enemy is such that inspectors of security police and of the security service will make this group of people and the questions discussed by them their special concern".
In Dachau: The Official History 1933–1945, Paul Berben wrote that clergy were watched closely, and frequently denounced, arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps: "One priest was imprisoned in Dachau for having stated that there were good folk in England too; another suffered the same fate for warning a girl who wanted to marry an S.S. man after abjuring the Catholic faith; yet another because he conducted a service for a deceased communist". Others were arrested simply on the basis of being "suspected of activities hostile to the State" or that there was reason to "suppose that his dealings might harm society". Over 2,700 Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox clergy were imprisoned at Dachau alone. After Heydrich (who was staunchly anti-Catholic and anti-Christian) was assassinated in Prague, his successor, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, relaxed some of the policies and then disbanded Department IVB (religious opponents) of the Gestapo.
Homosexuality
Violence and arrest were not confined to that of opposing political parties, membership in trade unions, or those with dissenting religious opinions, but also homosexuality. It was viewed negatively by Hitler. Homosexuals were correspondingly considered a threat to the (National Community). From the Nazis rise to national power in 1933, the number of court verdicts against homosexuals steadily increased and only declined once the Second World War started. In 1934, a special Gestapo office was set up in Berlin to deal with homosexuality.
Despite male homosexuality being considered a greater danger to "national survival", lesbianism was likewise viewed as unacceptable—deemed gender nonconformity—and a number of individual reports on lesbians can be found in Gestapo files. Between 1933 and 1935, some 4,000 men were arrested; between 1936 and 1939, another 30,000 men were convicted. If homosexuals showed any signs of sympathy to the Nazis' identified racial enemies, they were considered an even greater danger. According to Gestapo case files, the majority of those arrested for homosexuality were males between eighteen and twenty-five years of age.
Student opposition
Between June 1942 and March 1943, student protests were calling for an end to the Nazi regime. These included the non-violent resistance of Hans and Sophie Scholl, two leaders of the White Rose student group. However, resistance groups and those who were in moral or political opposition to the Nazis were stalled by the fear of reprisals from the Gestapo. Fearful of an internal overthrow, the forces of the Gestapo were unleashed on the opposition. Groups like the White Rose and others, such as the Edelweiss Pirates, and the Swing Youth, were placed under close Gestapo observation. Some participants were sent to concentration camps. Leading members of the most famous of these groups, the White Rose, were arrested by the police and turned over to the Gestapo. For several leaders the punishment was death. During the first five months of 1943, the Gestapo arrested thousands suspected of resistance activities and carried out numerous executions. Student opposition leaders were executed in late February, and a major opposition organisation, the Oster Circle, was destroyed in April 1943. Efforts to resist the Nazi regime amounted to very little and had only minor chances of success, particularly since the broad percentage of the German people did not support such actions.
General opposition and military conspiracy
Between 1934 and 1938, opponents of the Nazi regime and their fellow travellers began to emerge. Among the first to speak out were religious dissenters but following in their wake were educators, aristocratic businessmen, office workers, teachers, and others from nearly every walk of life. Most people quickly learned that open opposition was dangerous since Gestapo informants and agents were widespread. Yet a significant number of them still worked against the National Socialist government.
During May 1935, the Gestapo broke up and arrested members of the "Markwitz Circle", a group of former socialists in contact with Otto Strasser, who sought Hitler's downfall. From the mid-1930s into the early 1940s—various groups made up of communists, idealists, working-class people, and far-right conservative opposition organisations covertly fought against Hitler's government, and several of them fomented plots that included Hitler's assassination. Nearly all of them, including: the Römer Group, Robby Group, Solf Circle, , the Party of the Radical Middle Class, , and were either discovered or infiltrated by the Gestapo. This led to corresponding arrests, being sent to concentration camps and execution. One of the methods employed by the Gestapo to contend with these resistance factions was 'protective detention' which facilitated the process in expediting dissenters to concentration camps and against which there was no legal defence.
Early efforts to resist the Nazis with aid from abroad were hindered when the opposition's peace feelers to the Western Allies did not meet with success. This was partly because of the Venlo incident of 9 November 1939, in which SD and Gestapo agents, posing as anti-Nazis in the Netherlands, kidnapped two British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officers after having lured them to a meeting to discuss peace terms. This prompted Winston Churchill to ban any further contact with the German opposition. Later, the British and Americans did not want to deal with anti-Nazis because they were fearful that the Soviet Union would believe they were attempting to make deals behind their back.
The German opposition was in an unenviable position by the late spring and early summer of 1943. On one hand, it was next to impossible for them to overthrow Hitler and the party; on the other, the Allied demand for an unconditional surrender meant no opportunity for a compromise peace, which left the military and conservative aristocrats who opposed the regime no option (in their eyes) other than continuing the military struggle. Despite fear of the Gestapo after mass arrests and executions in the spring, the opposition still plotted and planned. One of the more famous schemes, Operation Valkyrie, involved a number of senior German officers and was carried out by Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. In an attempt to assassinate Hitler, Stauffenberg planted a bomb underneath a conference table inside the Wolf's Lair field headquarters. Known as the 20 July plot, this assassination attempt failed and Hitler was only slightly injured. Reports indicate that the Gestapo was caught unaware of this plot as they did not have sufficient protections in place at the appropriate locations nor did they take any preventative steps. Stauffenberg and his group were shot on 21 July 1944; meanwhile, his fellow conspirators were rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp. Thereafter, there was a show trial overseen by Roland Freisler, followed by their execution.
Some Germans were convinced that it was their duty to apply all possible expedients to end the war as quickly as possible. Sabotage efforts were undertaken by members of the (military intelligence) leadership, as they recruited people known to oppose the Nazi regime. The Gestapo cracked down ruthlessly on dissidents in Germany, just as they did everywhere else. Opposition became more difficult. Arrests, torture, and executions were common. Terror against "state enemies" had become a way of life to such a degree that the Gestapo's presence and methods were eventually normalised in the minds of people living in Nazi Germany.
Organisation
In January 1933, Hermann Göring, Hitler's minister without portfolio, was appointed the head of the Prussian Police and began filling the political and intelligence units of the Prussian Secret Police with Nazi Party members. A year after the organisation's inception, Göring wrote in a British publication about having created the organisation on his own initiative and how he was "chiefly responsible" for the elimination of the Marxist and Communist threat to Germany and Prussia. Describing the activities of the organisation, Göring boasted about the utter ruthlessness required for Germany's recovery, the establishment of concentration camps for that purpose, and even went on to claim that excesses were committed in the beginning, recounting how beatings took place here and there. On 26 April 1933, he reorganised the force's as the (better-known by the "sobriquet" Gestapo), a secret state police intended to serve the Nazi cause. Less than two weeks later in early May 1933, the Gestapo moved into their Berlin headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8.
As a result of its 1936 merger with the Kripo (National criminal police) to form sub-units of the (SiPo; Security Police), the Gestapo was officially classified as a government agency. Himmler's subsequent appointment to (Chief of German Police) and status as made him independent of Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick's nominal control.
The SiPo was placed under the direct command of Reinhard Heydrich who was already chief of the Nazi Party's intelligence service, the (SD). The idea was to fully identify and integrate the party agency (SD) with the state agency (SiPo). Most SiPo members joined the SS and held a rank in both organisations. Nevertheless, in practice there was jurisdictional overlap and operational conflict between the SD and Gestapo.
In September 1939, the SiPo and SD were merged into the newly created (RSHA; Reich Security Main Office). Both the Gestapo and Kripo became distinct departments within the RSHA. Although the was officially disbanded, the term SiPo was figuratively used to describe any RSHA personnel throughout the remainder of the war. In lieu of naming convention changes, the original construct of the SiPo, Gestapo, and Kripo cannot be fully comprehended as "discrete entities", since they ultimately formed "a conglomerate in which each was wedded to each other and the SS through its Security Service, the SD".
The creation of the RSHA represented the formalisation, at the top level, of the relationship under which the SD served as the intelligence agency for the security police. A similar co-ordination existed in the local offices. Within Germany and areas which were incorporated within the Reich for the purpose of civil administration, local offices of the Gestapo, criminal police, and SD were formally separate. They were subject to co-ordination by inspectors of the security police and SD on the staffs of the local higher SS and police leaders, however, and one of the principal functions of the local SD units was to serve as the intelligence agency for the local Gestapo units. In the occupied territories, the formal relationship between local units of the Gestapo, criminal police, and SD was slightly closer.
The Gestapo became known as RSHA ("Department or Office IV") with Heinrich Müller as its chief. In January 1943, Himmler appointed Ernst Kaltenbrunner RSHA chief; almost seven months after Heydrich had been assassinated. The specific internal departments of were as follows:
Department A (Political Opponents)
Communists (A1)
Counter-sabotage (A2)
Reactionaries, liberals and opposition (A3)
Protective services (A4)
Department B (Sects and Churches)
Catholicism (B1)
Protestantism (B2)
Freemasons and other churches (B3)
Jewish affairs (B4)
Department C (Administration and Party Affairs), central administrative office of the Gestapo, responsible for card files of all personnel including all officials.
Files, card, indexes, information and administration (C1)
Protective custody (C2)
Press office (C3)
NSDAP matters (C4)
Department D (Occupied Territories), administration for regions outside the .
Protectorate affairs, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, regions of Yugoslavia, Greece (D1)
1st Belgrade Special Combat detachment
General Government(D2)
Confidential office – hostile foreigners, emigrants (D3)
Occupied territories – France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark (D4)
Occupied Eastern territories (D5)
Department E (Security and counterintelligence)
In the (E1)
Policy and economic formation (E2)
West (E3)
Scandinavia (North)(E4)
East (E5)
South (E6)
In 1941 , the central command office of the Gestapo was formed. However, these internal departments remained and the Gestapo continued to be a department under the RSHA umbrella. The local offices of the Gestapo, known as Gestapo and , answered to a local commander known as the ("Inspector of the Security Police and Security Service") who, in turn, was under the dual command of of the Gestapo and also his local SS and Police Leader.
In total, there were some fifty-four regional Gestapo offices across the German federal states. The Gestapo also maintained offices at all Nazi concentration camps, held an office on the staff of the SS and Police Leaders, and supplied personnel as needed to formations such as the . Personnel assigned to these auxiliary duties were often removed from the Gestapo chain of command and fell under the authority of branches of the SS. It was the Gestapo chief, SS-Brigadierführer Heinrich Müller, who kept Hitler abreast of the killing operations in the Soviet Union and who issued orders to the four that their continual work in the east was to be "presented to the Führer."
Female Criminal Investigation Career
According to regulations issued by the Reich Security Main Office in 1940, women who had been trained in social work or having a similar education could be hired as female detectives. Female youth leaders, lawyers, business administrators with experience in social work, female leaders in the and personnel administrators in the Bund Deutscher Mädel were hired as detectives after a one-year course, if they had several years professional experience. Later, nurses, kindergarten teachers, and trained female commercial employees with an aptitude for police work were hired as female detectives after a two-year course as and could promote to a . After another two or three years in that grade, the female detective could advance to . Further promotions to and were also possible.
Membership
In 1933, there was no purge of the German police forces. The vast majority of Gestapo officers came from the police forces of the Weimar Republic; members of the SS, the SA, and the NSDAP also joined the Gestapo but were less numerous. By March 1937, the Gestapo employed an estimated 6,500 people in fifty-four regional offices across the Reich. Additional staff were added in March 1938 consequent the annexation of Austria and again in October 1938 with the acquisition of the Sudetenland. In 1939, only 3,000 out of the total of 20,000 Gestapo men held SS ranks, and in most cases, these were honorary. One man who served in the Prussian Gestapo in 1933 recalled that most of his co-workers "were by no means Nazis. For the most part they were young professional civil service officers..." The Nazis valued police competence more than politics, so in general in 1933, almost all of the men who served in the various state police forces under the Weimar Republic stayed on in their jobs. In Würzburg, which is one of the few places in Germany where most of the Gestapo records survived, every member of the Gestapo was a career policeman or had a police background.
The Canadian historian Robert Gellately wrote that most Gestapo men were not Nazis, but at the same time were not opposed to the Nazi regime, which they were willing to serve, in whatever task they were called upon to perform. Over time, membership in the Gestapo included ideological training, particularly once Werner Best assumed a leading role for training in April 1936. Employing biological metaphors, Best emphasised a doctrine which encouraged members of the Gestapo to view themselves as 'doctors' to the 'national body' in the struggle against "pathogens" and "diseases"; among the implied sicknesses were "communists, Freemasons, and the churches—and above and behind all these stood the Jews". Heydrich thought along similar lines and advocated both defensive and offensive measures on the part of the Gestapo, so as to prevent any subversion or destruction of the National Socialist body.
Whether trained as police originally or not, Gestapo agents themselves were shaped by their socio-political environment. Historian George C. Browder contends that there was a four-part process (authorisation, bolstering, routinisation, and dehumanisation) in effect which legitimised the psycho-social atmosphere conditioning members of the Gestapo to radicalised violence. Browder also describes a sandwich effect, where from above; Gestapo agents were subjected to ideologically oriented racism and criminal biological theories; and from below, the Gestapo was transformed by SS personnel who did not have the proper police training, which showed in their propensity for unrestrained violence. This admixture certainly shaped the Gestapo's public image which they sought to maintain despite their increasing workload; an image which helped them identify and eliminate enemies of the Nazi state.
Population ratios, methods and effectiveness
Contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not the all-pervasive, omnipotent agency in German society. In Germany proper, many towns and cities had fewer than 50 official Gestapo personnel. For example, in 1939 Stettin and Frankfurt am Main only had a total of 41 Gestapo men combined. In Düsseldorf, the local Gestapo office of only 281 men were responsible for the entire Lower Rhine region, which comprised 4 million people. "V-men", as undercover Gestapo agents were known, were used to infiltrate Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Communist opposition groups, but this was more the exception than the rule. The Gestapo office in Saarbrücken had 50 full-term informers in 1939. The District Office in Nuremberg, which had the responsibility for all of northern Bavaria, employed a total of 80–100 full-term informers between 1943 and 1945. The majority of Gestapo informers were not full-term employees working undercover, but were rather ordinary citizens who chose to denounce other people to the Gestapo.
According to Canadian historian Robert Gellately's analysis of the local offices established, the Gestapo was—for the most part—made up of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by citizens for their information. Gellately argued that it was because of the widespread willingness of Germans to inform on each other to the Gestapo that Germany between 1933 and 1945 was a prime example of panopticism. The Gestapo—at times—was overwhelmed with denunciations and most of its time was spent sorting out the credible from the less credible denunciations. Many of the local offices were understaffed and overworked, struggling with the paper load caused by so many denunciations. Gellately has also suggested that the Gestapo was "a reactive organisation...constructed within German society and whose functioning was structurally dependent on the continuing co-operation of German citizens".
After 1939, when many Gestapo personnel were called up for war-related work such as service with the , the level of overwork and understaffing at the local offices increased. For information about what was happening in German society, the Gestapo continued to be mostly dependent upon denunciations. 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information provided by denunciations by ordinary Germans; while 10% were started in response to information provided by other branches of the German government and another 10% started in response to information that the Gestapo itself unearthed. The information supplied by denunciations often led the Gestapo in determining who was arrested.
The popular picture of the Gestapo with its spies everywhere terrorising German society has been rejected by many historians as a myth invented after the war as a cover for German society's widespread complicity in allowing the Gestapo to work. Work done by social historians such as Detlev Peukert, Robert Gellately, Reinhard Mann, Inge Marssolek, René Otto, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Paul Gerhard, which by focusing on what the local offices were doing has shown the Gestapos almost total dependence on denunciations from ordinary Germans, and very much discredited the older "Big Brother" picture with the Gestapo having its eyes and ears everywhere. For example, of the 84 cases in Würzburg of ("race defilement"—sexual relations with non-Aryans), 45 (54%) were started in response to denunciations by ordinary people, two (2%) by information provided by other branches of the government, 20 (24%) via information gained during interrogations of people relating to other matters, four (5%) from information from (Nazi) NSDAP organisations, two (2%) during "political evaluations" and 11 (13%) have no source listed while none were started by Gestapos own "observations" of the people of Würzburg.
An examination of 213 denunciations in Düsseldorf showed that 37% were motivated by personal conflicts, no motive could be established in 39%, and 24% were motivated by support for the Nazi regime. The Gestapo always showed a special interest in denunciations concerning sexual matters, especially cases concerning with Jews or between Germans and foreigners, in particular Polish slave workers; the Gestapo applied even harsher methods to the foreign workers in the country, especially those from Poland, Jews, Catholics and homosexuals. As time went by, anonymous denunciations to the Gestapo caused trouble to various NSDAP officials, who often found themselves being investigated by the Gestapo.
Of the political cases, 61 people were investigated for suspicion of belonging to the KPD, 44 for the SPD and 69 for other political parties. Most of the political investigations took place between 1933 and 1935 with the all-time high of 57 cases in 1935. After that year, political investigations declined with only 18 investigations in 1938, 13 in 1939, two in 1941, seven in 1942, four in 1943 and one in 1944. The "other" category associated with non-conformity included everything from a man who drew a caricature of Hitler to a Catholic teacher suspected of being lukewarm about teaching National Socialism in his classroom. The "administrative control" category concerned those who were breaking the law concerning residency in the city. The "conventional criminality" category concerned economic crimes such as money laundering, smuggling and homosexuality.
Normal methods of investigation included various forms of blackmail, threats and extortion to secure "confessions". Beyond that, sleep deprivation and various forms of harassment were used as investigative methods. Failing that, torture and planting evidence were common methods of resolving a case, especially if the case concerned someone Jewish. Brutality on the part of interrogators—often prompted by denunciations and followed with roundups—enabled the Gestapo to uncover numerous resistance networks; it also made them seem like they knew everything and could do anything they wanted.
While the total number of Gestapo officials was limited when contrasted against the represented populations, the average (Nazi term for the "member of the German people") was typically not under observation, so the statistical ratio between Gestapo officials and inhabitants is "largely worthless and of little significance" according to some recent scholars. As historian Eric Johnson remarked, "The Nazi terror was selective terror", with its focus upon political opponents, ideological dissenters (clergy and religious organisations), career criminals, the Sinti and Roma population, handicapped persons, homosexuals and above all, upon the Jews. "Selective terror" by the Gestapo, as mentioned by Johnson, is also supported by historian Richard Evans who states that, "Violence and intimidation rarely touched the lives of most ordinary Germans. Denunciation was the exception, not the rule, as far as the behaviour of the vast majority of Germans was concerned." The involvement of ordinary Germans in denunciations also needs to be put into perspective so as not to exonerate the Gestapo. As Evans makes clear, "...it was not the ordinary German people who engaged in surveillance, it was the Gestapo; nothing happened until the Gestapo received a denunciation, and it was the Gestapo's active pursuit of deviance and dissent that was the only thing that gave denunciations meaning." The Gestapo's effectiveness remained in the ability to "project" omnipotence...they co-opted the assistance of the German population by using denunciations to their advantage; proving in the end a powerful, ruthless and effective organ of terror under the Nazi regime that was seemingly everywhere. Lastly, the Gestapo's effectiveness, while aided by denunciations and the watchful eye of ordinary Germans, was more the result of the co-ordination and co-operation amid the various police organs within Germany, the assistance of the SS, and the support provided by the various Nazi Party organisations; all of them together forming an organised persecution network.
Operations in Nazi-occupied territories
As an instrument of Nazi power, terror, and repression, the Gestapo operated throughout occupied Europe. Much like their affiliated organisations, the SS and the SD, the Gestapo "played a leading part" in enslaving and deporting workers from occupied territory, torturing and executing civilians, singling out and murdering Jews, and subjecting Allied prisoners of war to terrible treatment. To this end, the Gestapo was "a vital component both in Nazi repression and the Holocaust." Once the German armies advanced into enemy territory, they were accompanied by staffed by officers from the Gestapo and Kripo, who usually operated in the rear areas to administer and police the occupied land. Whenever a region came fully under German military occupational jurisdiction, the Gestapo administered all executive actions under the military commander's authority, albeit operating relatively independent of it.
Occupation meant administration and policing, a duty assigned to the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo even before hostilities began, as was the case for Czechoslovakia. Correspondingly, Gestapo offices were established in a territory once occupied. Some locals aided the Gestapo, whether as professional police auxiliaries or in other duties. Nonetheless, operations performed either by German members of the Gestapo or auxiliaries from willing collaborators of other nationalities were inconsistent in both disposition and effectiveness. Varying degrees of pacification and police enforcement measures were necessary in each place, dependent on how cooperative or resistant the locals were to Nazi mandates and racial policies.
Throughout the Eastern territories, the Gestapo and other Nazi organisations co-opted the assistance of indigenous police units, nearly all of whom were uniformed and able to carry out drastic actions. Many of the auxiliary police personnel operating on behalf of German Order Police, the SD, and Gestapo were members of the , which included staffing by Ukrainians, Belorussians, Russians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians. While in many countries the Nazis occupied in the East, the local domestic police forces supplemented German operations, noted Holocaust historian, Raul Hilberg, asserts that "those of Poland were least involved in anti-Jewish actions." Nonetheless, German authorities ordered the mobilisation of reserve Polish police forces, known as the Blue Police, which strengthened the Nazi police presence and carried out numerous "police" functions; in some cases, its functionaries even identified and rounded up Jews or performed other unsavory duties on behalf of their German masters.
In places like Denmark, there were some 550 uniformed Danes in Copenhagen working with the Gestapo, patrolling and terrorising the local population at the behest of their German overseers, many of whom were arrested after the war. Other Danish civilians, like in many places across Europe, acted as Gestapo informants but this should not be seen as wholehearted support for the Nazi program, as motives for cooperation varied. Whereas in France, the number of members in the (French Gestapo) who worked on behalf of the Nazis was upwards of 30,000 to 32,000; they conducted operations nearly indistinguishable from their German equivalents.
Nuremberg trials
Between 14 November 1945 and 3 October 1946, the Allies established an International Military Tribunal (IMT) to try 22 major Nazi war criminals and six groups for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nineteen of the 22 were convicted, and twelve—Martin Bormann (in absentia), Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann Göring, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Julius Streicher—were given the death penalty. Three—Walther Funk, Rudolf Hess, Erich Raeder—received life terms; and the remaining four—Karl Dönitz, Konstantin von Neurath, Albert Speer, and Baldur von Schirach—received shorter prison sentences. Three others—Hans Fritzsche, Hjalmar Schacht, and Franz von Papen—were acquitted. At that time, the Gestapo was condemned as a criminal organisation, along with the SS. However, Gestapo leader Heinrich Müller was never tried, as he disappeared at the end of the war.
Leaders, organisers, investigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit the crimes specified were declared responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan. The official positions of defendants as heads of state or holders of high government offices were not to free them from responsibility or mitigate their punishment; nor was the fact that a defendant acted pursuant to an order of a superior to excuse him from responsibility, although it might be considered by the IMT in mitigation of punishment.
At the trial of any individual member of any group or organisation, the IMT was authorised to declare (in connection with any act of which the individual was convicted) that the group or organisation to which he belonged was a criminal organisation. When a group or organisation was thus declared criminal, the competent national authority of any signatory had the right to bring persons to trial for membership in that organisation, with the criminal nature of the group or organisation assumed proved.
The IMT subsequently convicted three of the groups: the Nazi leadership corps, the SS (including the SD) and the Gestapo. Gestapo members Hermann Göring, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Arthur Seyss-Inquart were individually convicted. While three groups were acquitted of collective war crimes charges, this did not relieve individual members of those groups from conviction and punishment under the denazification programme. Members of the three convicted groups, however, were subject to apprehension by Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and France.These groups—the Nazi Party and government leadership, the German General staff and High Command (OKW); the (SA); the (SS), including the (SD); and the Gestapo—had an aggregate membership exceeding two million, making a large number of their members liable to trial when the organisations were convicted.
Aftermath
In 1997, Cologne transformed the former regional Gestapo headquarters in Cologne—the EL-DE Haus—into a museum to document the Gestapo's actions.
After the war, U.S. Counterintelligence Corps employed the former Lyon Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie for his anti-communist efforts and also helped him escape to Bolivia.
Leadership
Principal agents and officers
Heinrich Baab (SiPo-SD Frankfurt)
Klaus Barbie (SiPo-SD Lyon)
Werner Best (SiPo-SD Copenhagen)
Karl Bömelburg (Head of Gestapo, Southern France)
Theodor Dannecker (SiPo-SD Paris)
Rudolf Diels (Gestapo Chief 1933–1934)
Adolf Eichmann (RSHA Berlin)
Gerhard Flesch
Hermann Göring (Founder of the Gestapo)
Viktor Harnischfeger (Düsseldorf Gestapo Criminal Commissar)
Reinhard Heydrich (SD, SiPo, Gestapo Chief 1934–1939, RSHA Chief 1939–1942)
Heinrich Himmler ()
Ernst Kaltenbrunner (RSHA Chief 1943–1945)
Herbert Kappler (SD Chief Rome)
Werner Knab
Helmut Knochen (Paris)
Kurt Lischka (Paris)
Ernst Misselwitz ( SiPo-SD Paris)
Heinrich Müller (Gestapo Chief 1939–1945)
Karl Oberg (Paris)
Pierre Paoli (Head of Gestapo, Central France)
Oswald Poche (Chief of Frankfurt Lindenstrasse station)
Henry Rinnan (Norwegian agent)
Karl Eberhard Schöngarth
Max Wielen
Ranks and uniforms
The Gestapo was a secretive plainclothes agency and agents typically wore civilian suits. There were strict protocols protecting the identity of Gestapo field personnel. When asked for identification, an operative was required only to present his warrant disc and not a picture identification. This disc identified the operative as a member of the Gestapo without revealing personal information, except when ordered to do so by an authorised official.
Leitstellung (district office) staff did wear the grey SS service uniform, but with police-pattern shoulderboards, and SS rank insignia on the left collar patch. The right collar patch was black without the sig runes. The SD sleeve diamond (SD ) insignia was worn on the lower left sleeve, even by SiPo men who were not in the SD. Uniforms worn by Gestapo men assigned to the in occupied territories, were at first indistinguishable from the Waffen-SS field uniform. Complaints from the Waffen-SS led to change of rank insignia shoulder boards from those of the Waffen-SS to those of the .
The Gestapo maintained police detective ranks which were used for all officers, both those who were and who were not concurrently SS members.
Junior career = .
Senior career = .
Sources:
Rank insignia
See also
Aarhus Air Raid
Geheime Feldpolizei—the secret military police service of the Wehrmacht
Operation Carthage
OVRA—Fascist Italy's secret police
State Security Council—under Apartheid South Africa
Tokkō—commonly referred to as Imperial Japan's version of the Gestapo
References
Informational notes
Citations
Bibliography
Bauz, Ingrid; Sigrid Brüggemann; Roland Maier, eds. (2013). Die Geheime Staatspolizei in Württemberg und Hohenzollern. Stuttgart: Schmetterling. .
Krausnick, Helmut, et al. (1968). Anatomy of the SS State. New York; Walker and Company.
External links
Festung Furulund – magasinet – Dagbladet.no
Collection of testimonies concerning Gestapo activity in occupied Poland during WWII in "Chronicles of Terror" database
1933 establishments in Germany
1945 disestablishments in Germany
Heinrich Himmler
Hermann Göring
The Holocaust
Nazi SS
Reich Security Main Office
Reinhard Heydrich
Secret police | [
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12900 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical%20conjugation | Grammatical conjugation | In linguistics, conjugation () is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). For instance, the verb break can be conjugated to form the words break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking. While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian and Basque have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.
Verbs may inflect for grammatical categories such as person, number, gender, case, tense, aspect, mood, voice, possession, definiteness, politeness, causativity, clusivity, interrogatives, transitivity, valency, polarity, telicity, volition, mirativity, evidentiality, animacy, associativity, pluractionality, and reciprocity. Verbs may also be affected by agreement, polypersonal agreement, incorporation, noun class, noun classifiers, and verb classifiers. Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages tend to have the most complex conjugations, albeit some fusional languages such as Archi can also have extremely complex conjugation. Typically the principal parts are the root and/or several modifications of it (stems). All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme, and the canonical form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent that lexeme (as seen in dictionary entries) is called a lemma.
The term conjugation is applied only to the inflection of verbs, and not of other parts of speech (inflection of nouns and adjectives is known as declension). Also it is often restricted to denoting the formation of finite forms of a verb – these may be referred to as conjugated forms, as opposed to non-finite forms, such as the infinitive or gerund, which tend not to be marked for most of the grammatical categories.
Conjugation is also the traditional name for a group of verbs that share a similar conjugation pattern in a particular language (a verb class). For example, Latin is said to have four conjugations of verbs. This means that any regular Latin verb can be conjugated in any person, number, tense, mood, and voice by knowing which of the four conjugation groups it belongs to, and its principal parts. A verb that does not follow all of the standard conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb. The system of all conjugated variants of a particular verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm; this may be presented in the form of a conjugation table.
Verbal agreement
Verbal agreement, or concord, is a morpho-syntactic construct in which properties of the subject and/or objects of a verb are indicated by the verb form. Verbs are then said to agree with their subjects (resp. objects).
Many English verbs exhibit subject agreement of the following sort: whereas I go, you go, we go, they go are all grammatical in standard English, she go is not (except in the subjunctive, as "They requested that she go with them"). Instead, a special form of the verb to go has to be used to produce she goes. On the other hand I goes, you goes etc. are not grammatical in standard English. (Things are different in some English dialects that lack agreement.) A few English verbs have no special forms that indicate subject agreement (I may, you may, she may), and the verb to be has an additional form am that can only be used with the pronoun I as the subject.
Verbs in written French exhibit more intensive agreement morphology than English verbs: je suis (I am), tu es ("you are", singular informal), elle est (she is), nous sommes (we are), vous êtes ("you are", plural), ils sont (they are). Historically, English used to have a similar verbal paradigm. Some historic verb forms are used by Shakespeare as slightly archaic or more formal variants (I do, thou dost, she doth, typically used by nobility) of the modern forms.
Some languages with verbal agreement can leave certain subjects implicit when the subject is fully determined by the verb form. In Spanish, for instance, subject pronouns do not need to be explicitly present, but in French, its close relative, they are obligatory. The Spanish equivalent to the French je suis (I am) can be simply soy (lit. "am"). The pronoun yo (I) in the explicit form yo soy is used only for emphasis or to clear ambiguity in complex texts.
Some languages have a richer agreement system in which verbs agree also with some or all of their objects. Ubykh exhibits verbal agreement for the subject, direct object, indirect object, benefaction and ablative objects (a.w3.s.xe.n.t'u.n, you gave it to him for me).
Basque can show agreement not only for subject, direct object and indirect object but it also can exhibit agreement for the listener as the implicit benefactor: means "they brought us the car" (neuter agreement for the listener), but means "they brought us the car" (agreement for feminine singular listener).
Languages with a rich agreement morphology facilitate relatively free word order without leading to increased ambiguity. The canonical word order in Basque is subject–object–verb, but all permutations of subject, verb and object are permitted.
Nonverbal person agreement
In some languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements receive a form of person agreement that is distinct from that used on ordinary predicative verbs. Although that is a form of conjugation in that it refers back to the person of the subject, it is not "verbal" because it always derives from pronouns that have become clitic to the nouns to which they refer. An example of nonverbal person agreement, along with contrasting verbal conjugation, can be found from Beja (person agreement affixes in bold):
wun.tu.wi, “you (fem.) are big”
hadá.b.wa, “you (masc.) are a sheik”
e.n.fór, “he flees”
Another example can be found from Ket:
fèmba.di, “I am a Tungus”
dɨ.fen, “I am standing”
In Turkic, and a few Uralic and Australian Aboriginal languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements take affixes that are identical to those used on predicative verbs, but their negation is different. For example, in Turkish:
koş.u.yor.sun “you are running”
çavuş.sun “you are a sergeant”
Under negation, that becomes (negative affixes in bold):
koş.mu.yor.sun “you are not running”
çavuş değil.sin “you are not a sergeant”
Therefore, the person agreement affixes used with predicative adjectives and nominals in Turkic languages are considered to be nonverbal in character. In some analyses, they are viewed as a form of verbal takeover by a copular strategy.
Factors that affect conjugation
These common grammatical categories affect how verbs can be conjugated:
Finite verb forms:
Grammatical person
Grammatical number
Grammatical gender
Grammatical tense
Grammatical aspect
Grammatical mood
Grammatical voice
Non-finite verb forms.
Here are other factors that may affect conjugation:
Degree of formality (see T–V distinction, Honorific speech in Japanese, Korean speech levels)
Clusivity (of personal pronouns)
Transitivity
Valency
Examples
Indo-European languages usually inflect verbs for several grammatical categories in complex paradigms, although some, like English, have simplified verb conjugation to a large extent. Below is the conjugation of the verb to be in the present tense (of the infinitive, if it exists, and indicative moods), in English, German, Yiddish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Faroese, Swedish, Norwegian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Slovenian, Macedonian, Urdu or Hindi, Persian, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Albanian, Armenian, Irish, Ukrainian, Ancient Attic Greek and Modern Greek. This is usually the most irregular verb. The similarities in corresponding verb forms may be noticed. Some of the conjugations may be disused, like the English thou-form, or have additional meanings, like the English you-form, which can also stand for second person singular or be impersonal.
{| class="wikitable"
|+ |"To be" in several Indo-European languages
|-
! rowspan="3" style="text-align:left" | Branch
! rowspan="3" style="text-align:left" | Language
! rowspan="3" style="text-align:left" | Presentinfinitive
! colspan="6" | Present indicative
|-
! colspan="3" | Singular persons
! colspan="3" | Plural persons
|-
! 1st
! 2nd
! 3rd
! 1st
! 2nd
! 3rd
|-
| colspan="9" style="height:3px" |
|-
! style="text-align:left" rowspan="13" | Germanic
! style="text-align:left" | Proto-Germanic
| *wesaną
| *immi
| *izi
| *isti
| *izum
| *izud
| *sindi
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Anglo-Saxon
| wesan
| eom
| eart
| is
| colspan="3" style="text-align:center" | sindsindon
|-
! style="text-align:left" | English
| be
| am
| areart1be'st1
| isare10
| colspan="3" style="text-align:center" | are
|-
! style="text-align:left" | German
| sein
| bin
| bist
| ist
| sind
| seid
| sind
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Yiddishtransliterated
| זייןzein
| ביןbin
| ביסטbist
| איזiz
| זענעןzenen
| זענטzent
| זענעןzenen
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Dutch
| zijn
| ben
| bentzijt2
| is
| colspan="3" style="text-align:center" | zijn
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Afrikaans
| wees
| colspan="6" style="text-align:center" | is
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Old Norse
| vesavera
| em
| estert
| eser
| erum
| eruð
| eru
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Icelandic
| vera
| er
| ert
| er
| erum
| eruð
| eru
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Faroese
| vera
| eri
| ert
| er
| colspan="3" style="text-align:center" | eru
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Norwegian
| være3 (Bokmål)vera, vere4 (Nynorsk)
| colspan="6" style="text-align:center"| er
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Danish
| være
| colspan="6" style="text-align:center" | er
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Swedish
| vara
| colspan="6" style="text-align:center" | är
|-
| colspan="9" style="height:3px" |
|-
! rowspan="12" style="text-align:left" | Italic
! style="text-align:left" | Latin
| esse
| sum
| es
| est
| sumus
| estis
| sunt
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Italian
| essere
| sono
| sei
| è
| siamo
| siete
| sono
|-
! style="text-align:left" | French
| être
| suis
| es
| est
| sommes
| êtes
| sont
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Catalan
| ésser
| sóc
| ets
| és
| som
| sou
| són
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Venetian
| èsar
| son
| te si
| el ze
| semo
| si
| i ze
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Spanish
| ser
| soy
| eres
| es
| somos
| sois
| son
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Galician
| ser
| son
| es
| é
| somos
| sodes
| son
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Portuguese
| ser
| sou
| és
| é
| somos
| sois
| são
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Sardinian (LSC)
| èssere
| so
| ses
| est
| semus
| seis
| sunt
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Friulian
| jessi
| soi
| sês
| è
| sin
| sês
| son
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Neapolitan
| èssere
| songo, so
| sî
| è
| simmo
| site
| songo, so
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Romanian
| a fi
| sunt
| ești
| este
| suntem
| sunteți
| sunt
|-
| colspan="9" style="height:3px" |
|-
! style="text-align:left" rowspan="3" | Celtic
! style="text-align:left" | Irish
| bheith
| bím
| colspan="2" style="text-align:center" |bíonn
| bímid
| colspan="2" style="text-align:center" |bíonn
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Welsh (standard form)
| bod
| rydw
| rwyt
| mae
| rydych
| rydyn
| maen
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Breton
| bezañ
| on
| out
| eo
| omp
| oc'h
| int
|-
| colspan="9" style="height:3px" |
|-
! style="text-align:left" rowspan="2" | Greek
! style="text-align:left" | Ancient5transliterated
| eînai
| eimí
| eî
| estí
| esmén
| esté
| eisí
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Moderntransliterated
| όντας6óntas
| είμαιeímai
| είσαιeísai
| είναιeínai
| είμαστεeímaste
| είσ(ασ)τεeís(as)te
| είναιeínai
|-
| colspan="9" style="height:3px" |
|-
! style="text-align:left" colspan="2" | Albanian
| me qenë
| jam
| je
| është
| jemi
| jeni
| janë
|-
| colspan="9" style="height:3px" |
|-
! style="text-align:left" rowspan="2"| Armenian
! style="text-align:left" | Westerntransliterated
| ĕllal
| em
| es
| ē
| enk‘
| ēk‘
| en
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Easterntransliterated
| linel
| em
| es
| ē
| enk‘
| ek‘
| en
|-
| colspan="9" style="height:3px" |
|-
! style="text-align:left" rowspan="10" | Slavic
! style="text-align:left" | Czech
| být
| jsem
| jsi
| je
| jsme
| jste
| jsou
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Slovak
| byť
| som
| si
| je
| sme
| ste
| sú
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Polish
| być
| jestem
| jesteś
| jest
| jesteśmy
| jesteście
| są
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Russiantransliterated
| бытьbyt| colspan="6" style="text-align:center" | естьyest|-
! style="text-align:left" | Ukrainiantransliterated
| бутиbuty
| colspan="6" style="text-align:center" | єye
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Serbo-Croatian strong
| biti
| jesam
| jesi
| jest(e)
| jesmo
| jeste
| jesu
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Serbo-Croatian clitic
| none
| sam
| si
| je
| smo
| ste
| su
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Slovenian
| biti
| sem
| si
| je
| smo
| ste
| so
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Bulgariantransliterated
| none
| съмsăm
| сиsi
| еe
| смеsme
| стеste
| саsă
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Macedoniantransliterated
| none
| сумsum
| сиsi
| еe
| смеsme
| стеste
| сеse
|-
| colspan="9" style="height:3px" |
|-
! style="text-align:left" rowspan="2"| Baltic
! style="text-align:left" | Latvian
| būt
| esmu
| esi
| ir
| esam
| esat
| ir
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Lithuanian
| būti
| esu
| esi
| yra
| esame
| esate
| yra
|-
| colspan="9" |
|-
! style="text-align:left" rowspan="7" | Indo-Iranian
! style="text-align:left" | Persiantransliterated
| budan
| æm
| ei
| æst (æ)9
| eem
| eed (spoken: een)
| and (spoken: an)
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Sanskrittransliterated
| अस्ति
| अस्मिasmi
| असिasi
| अस्तिasti
| स्मःsmah
| स्थstha
| सन्तिsanti
|-
! style="text-align:left" | HindustaniDevanagari ScriptPerso-Arabic Scripttransliterated (ISO 15819)
|होनाہونا
| हूँہوںhūm̥
| colspan="2" | हैہےhai
| हैंہیںhaim̥
| होہوho
| हैंہیںhaim̥
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Marathitransliterated (ISO 15819)
| असणे
| आहेāhe
| आहेसāhes
| आहेāhe
| आहोतāhot
| आहातāhāt
| आहेतāhet
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Gujaratitransliterated (ISO 15819)
| હોવું
| છુંchũ
| colspan="2" style="text-align:center" | છેche
| છીએchīe
| છોcho
| છેche
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Bengalitransliterated (ISO 15819)
| হওয়া
| হইhoi
| হও11hôo
| হয়11hôy
| হইhoi
| হও11hôo
| হয়11hôy
|-
! style="text-align:left" | Assamesetransliterated (ISO 15819)
| হোৱা
| হওঁhoü̃
| হোৱাhüa
| হয়hoy
| হওঁhoü̃
| হোৱাhüa
| হয়hoy
|-
|}
1 Archaic, poetical; used only with the pronoun 'thou'.
2 In Flemish dialects.
3 In the bokmål written standard.
4 In the nynorsk written standard. vera and vere are both alternate forms.
5 Attic.
6 'eínai' is only used as a noun ("being, existence").
7 Ptc: qenë.
8 In the Tosk and Geg dialects, respectively.
9 Existential: هست (hæst) has another meaning. Usage of (æ) is considered to be colloquial, now. See, Indo-European copula
10 With the Singular they 3rd person pronoun.
11 Bengali verbs are further conjugated according to formality. There are three verb forms for 2nd person pronouns: হও (hôo, familiar), হোস (hoś, very familiar) and হন (hôn, polite). Also two forms for 3rd person pronouns: হয় (hôy, familiar) and হন (hôn, polite). Plural verb forms are exact same as singular.
Conjugation classes
Pama-Nyungan languages
One common feature of Pama–Nyungan languages, the largest family of Australian Aboriginal languages, is the notion of conjugation classes, which are a set of groups into which each lexical verb falls. They determine how a verb is conjugated for Tense–aspect–mood. The classes can but do not universally correspond to the transitivity or valency of the verb in question. Generally, of the two to six conjugation classes in a Pama-Nyungan language, two classes are open with a large membership and allow for new coinages, and the remainder are closed and of limited membership.
Wati
In Wati languages, verbs generally fall into four classes:
l class
∅ class
n class
ng class
They are labelled by using common morphological components of verb endings in each respective class in infinitival forms. In the Wanman language these each correspond to la, ya, rra, and wa verbs respectively.
See also a similar table of verb classes and conjugations in Pitjantjatjara, a Wati language wherein the correlating verb classes are presented below also by their imperative verbal endings -la, -∅, -ra and -wa respectively
Ngayarta
Ngarla, a member of the Ngayarda sub-family of languages has a binary conjugation system labelled:
l class
∅ class
In the case of Ngarla, there is a notably strong correlation between conjugation class and transitivity, with transitive/ditransitive verbs falling in the l-class and intransitive/semi-transitive verbs in the ∅-class.
These classes even extend to how verbs are nominalized as instruments with the l-class verb including the addition of an /l/ before the nominalizing suffix and the blank class remaining blank:
l-class example:
∅-class example
Yidiny
Yidiny has a ternary verb class system with two open classes and one closed class (~20 members). Verbs are classified as:
-n class (open, intransitive/semi-transitive)
-l class (open, transitive/ditransitive)
-r class (closed, intransitive)
See also
Conjugations by language
:Category:Grammatical conjugation
Indo-European copula
Archivium: Italian verbs conjugator, for regular and irregular verbs
See also
Agreement (linguistics)
Declension (nouns, adjectives, etc.)
Inflection
Redundancy (linguistics)
Screeve
Strong inflection
Verb
Verb argument
Volition (linguistics)
Weak inflection
References
Grammatical number
Linguistics terminology | [
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12902 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomoku | Gomoku | Gomoku, also called Five in a Row, is an abstract strategy board game. It is traditionally played with Go pieces (black and white stones) on a Go board. It is played using a 15×15 board while in the past a 19×19 board was standard. Because pieces are typically not moved or removed from the board, gomoku may also be played as a paper-and-pencil game. The game is known in several countries under different names.
Rules
Players alternate turns placing a stone of their color on an empty intersection. Black plays first. The winner is the first player to form an unbroken chain of five stones horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Placing so that a line of more than five stones of the same color is created does not result in a win. These are called overlines.
Origin
Gomoku has existed in Japan since the Meiji Restoration (1868). The name "gomoku" is from the Japanese language, in which it is referred to as . Go means five, moku is a counter word for pieces and narabe means line-up. The game is popular in China, where it is called Wuziqi (五子棋). Wu (五 wǔ) means five, zi (子 zǐ) means piece, and qi (棋 qí) refers to a board game category in Chinese. The game is also popular in Korea, where it is called omok (오목 [五目]) which has the same structure and origin as the Japanese name.
In the nineteenth century, the game was introduced to Britain where it was known as Go Bang, said to be a corruption of the Japanese word goban, which was itself adapted from the Chinese k'i pan (qí pán) "go-board."<ref>OED citations: 1886 GUILLEMARD Cruise 'Marchesa I. 267 Some of the games are purely Japanese..as go-ban. Note, This game is the one lately introduced into England under the misspelt name of Go Bang. 1888''' Pall Mall Gazette 1. Nov. 3/1 These young persons...played go-bang and cat's cradle.
The board below shows the three types of winning arrangements as they might appear on an 8x8 Petteia board. Obviously the cramped conditions would result in a draw most of the time, depending on the rules. Play would be easier on a larger Latrunculi board of 12x8 or even 10x11.
.</ref>
First Player Advantage
Gomoku has a strong advantage for the first player when unrestricted.
Championships in Gomoku previously used the "Pro" opening rule, which mandated that the first player place the first stone in the center of the board. The second player's stone placement was unrestricted. The first player's second stone had to be placed at least three intersections away from the first player's first stone. This rule was used in the 1989 and 1991 world championships. When the win:loss ratio of these two championships was calculated, the first player (black) won 67 percent of games.
This was deemed too unbalanced for tournament play, so tournament Gomoku adopted the Swap2 opening protocol in 2009. In Swap2, the first player places three stones, two black and one white, on the board. The second player then selects one of three options: play as black, play as white and place another white stone, or place two more stones, one white and one black, and let the first player choose the color.
The win ratio of the first player has been calculated to be around 52 percent using the Swap2 opening protocol, greatly balancing the game and largely solving the first-player advantage.
Variants
Freestyle Gomoku
Freestyle Gomoku has no restrictions on either player and allows a player to win by creating a line of five or more stones, with each player alternating turns placing one stone at a time.
Renju
Black (the player who makes the first move) has long been known to have an advantage, even before L. Victor Allis proved that black can force a win (see below). Renju attempts to mitigate this imbalance with extra rules that aim to reduce black's first player advantage.
It is played on a 15×15 board, with the rules of three and three, four and four, and overlines applied to Black only.
The rule of three and three bans a move that simultaneously forms two open rows of three stones (rows not blocked by an opponent's stone at either end).
The rule of four and four bans a move that simultaneously forms two rows of four stones (open or not).
Overlines prevent a player from winning if they form a line of 6 or more stones.
Renju also makes use of various tournament opening rules, such as Soosõrv-8, the current international standard.
Caro
In Caro, (also called gomoku+, popular among Vietnamese), the winner must have an overline or an unbroken row of five stones that is not blocked at either end (overlines are immune to this rule). This makes the game more balanced and provides more power for White to defend.
Omok
Omok is similar to Freestyle gomoku; however, it is played on a 19×19 board and includes the rule of three and three.Sungjin, Nam. "Omok." Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture, National Folk Museum of Korea, https://web.archive.org/web/20210722180119/https://folkency.nfm.go.kr/en/topic/detail/1587 . Accessed 22 July 2021.
Ninuki-renju
Also called Wu, Ninuki Renju is a variant which adds capturing to the game; A pair of stones of the same color may be captured by the opponent by means of custodial capture (sandwiching a line of two stones lengthwise). The winner is the player either to make a perfect five in a row, or to capture five pairs of the opponent's stones. It uses a 15x15 board and the rules of three and three and overlines, as in Renju. It also allows the game to continue after a player has formed a row of five stones if their opponent can capture a pair across the line.
Pente
Pente is related to Ninuki-Renju, and has the same custodial capture method, but is most often played on a 19x19 board and does not use the rules of three and three, four and four, or overlines.
Tournament Opening Rules
Tournament rules are used in professional play to balance the game and mitigate the first player advantage. The tournament rule used for the Gomoku world championships since 2009 is the Swap2 opening rule.
Pro
The first player's first stone must be placed in the center of the board. The second player's first stone may be placed anywhere on the board. The first player's second stone must be placed at least three intersections away from the first stone (two empty intersections in between the two stones).
Long Pro
The first player's first stone must be placed in the center of the board. The second player's first stone may be placed anywhere on the board. The first player's second stone must be placed at least four intersections away from the first stone (three empty intersections in between the two stones).
Swap
The tentative first player places three stones (two black, and one white) anywhere on the board. The tentative second player then chooses which color to play as. Play proceeds from there as normal with white playing their second stone.
Swap2
The tentative first player places three stones on the board, two black and one white. The tentative second player then has three options:
They can choose to play as black
They can choose to play as white and place a second white stone
Or they can place two more stones, one black and one white, and pass the choice of which color to play back to the tentative first player.
Because the tentative first player doesn't know where the tentative second player will place the additional stones if they take option 2 or 3, the swap2 opening protocol limits excessive studying of a line by only one of the players.
Theoretical generalizations
m,n,k-games are a generalization of gomoku to a board with m×n intersections, and k in a row needed to win.
Connect(m,n,k,p,q) games are another generalization of gomoku to a board with m×n intersections, k in a row needed to win, p stones for each player to place, and q stones for the first player to place for the first move only. Each player may play only at the lowest unoccupied place in a column. In particular, Connect(m,n'',6,2,1) is called Connect6.
Example game
This game on the 15×15 board is adapted from the paper "Go-Moku and Threat-Space Search".
The opening moves show clearly black's advantage. An open row of three (one that is not blocked by an opponent's stone at either end) has to be blocked immediately, or countered with a threat elsewhere on the board. If not blocked or countered, the open row of three will be extended to an open row of four, which threatens to win in two ways.
White has to block open rows of three at moves 10, 14, 16 and 20, but black only has to do so at move 9.
Move 20 is a blunder for white (it should have been played next to black 19). Black can now force a win against any defense by white, starting with move 21.
There are two forcing sequences for black, depending on whether white 22 is played next to black 15 or black 21. The diagram on the right shows the first sequence. All the moves for white are forced. Such long forcing sequences are typical in gomoku, and expert players can read out forcing sequences of 20 to 40 moves rapidly and accurately.
The diagram on the right shows the second forcing sequence. This diagram shows why white 20 was a blunder; if it had been next to black 19 (at the position of move 32 in this diagram) then black 31 would not be a threat and so the forcing sequence would fail.
World championships
World Gomoku Championships have occurred 2 times in 1989, 1991.
Since 2009 tournament play has resumed, with the opening rule changed to swap2.
List of the tournaments occurred and title holders follows.
Computers and Gomoku
Researchers have been applying artificial intelligence techniques on playing gomoku for several decades. In 1994, L. Victor Allis raised the algorithm of proof-number search (pn-search) and dependency-based search (db-search), and proved that when starting from an empty 15×15 board, the first player has a winning strategy using these searching algorithms. This applies to both free-style gomoku and standard gomoku without any opening rules. It seems very likely that black wins on larger boards too. In any size of a board, freestyle gomoku is an m,n,k-game, hence it is known that the first player can force a win or a draw. In 2001, Allis' winning strategy was also approved for renju, a variation of gomoku, when there was no limitation on the opening stage.
However, neither the theoretical values of all legal positions, nor the opening rules such as Swap2 used by the professional gomoku players have been solved yet, so the topic of gomoku artificial intelligence is still a challenge for computer scientists, such as the problem on how to improve the gomoku algorithms to make them more strategic and competitive. Nowadays, most of the state-of-the-art gomoku algorithms are based on the alpha-beta pruning framework.
Reisch proved that Generalized gomoku is PSPACE-complete. He also observed that the reduction can be adapted to the rules of k-in-a-Row for fixed k. Although he did not specify exactly which values of k are allowed, the reduction would appear to generalize to any k ≥ 5.
There exist several well-known tournaments for gomoku programs since 1989. The Computer Olympiad started with the gomoku game in 1989, but gomoku has not been in the list since 1993. The Renju World Computer Championship was started in 1991, and held for 4 times until 2004. The Gomocup tournament is played since 2000 and taking place every year, still active now, with more than 30 participants from about 10 countries. The Hungarian Computer Go-Moku Tournament was also played twice in 2005. There were also two Computer vs. Human tournaments played in the Czech Republic, in 2006 and 2011. Not until 2017 were the computer programs proved to be able to outperform the world human champion in public competitions. In the Gomoku World Championship 2017, there was a match between the world champion program Yixin and the world champion human player Rudolf Dupszki. Yixin won the match with a score of 2–0.
In popular culture
Gomoku was featured in a 2018 Korean drama by Baek Seung-Hwa starring Park Se-wan. The film follows Baduk Lee (Park Se-wan), a former go prodigy, who retired after a humiliating loss on time. Baduk Lee works part at a go club years later where she meets Ahn Kyung Kim who introduces her to an Omok (Korean Gomoku) tournament. Lee is initially uninterested and considers Omok a children's game, but after her roommate loses money on an impulse purchase, she enters the tournament for the prize money and loses badly, being humiliated once again. Afterwards she begins training to redeem herself and becomes a serious omok player.
See also
Renju
Pente
Pegity
Connect6
Connection game
Reversi
References
Further reading
Five-in-a-Row (Renju) For Beginners to Advanced Players
External links
Gomoku World
Renju International Federation website
Gomocup tournament
Abstract strategy games
Traditional board games
Japanese games
Japanese inventions
Paper-and-pencil games
PSPACE-complete problems
In-a-row games
Solved games
Games played on Go boards | [
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12903 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gegenschein | Gegenschein | Gegenschein (; ; ) is a faintly bright spot in the night sky centered at the antisolar point. The backscatter of sunlight by interplanetary dust causes this optical phenomenon, also called counterglow.
Explanation
Like zodiacal light, gegenschein is sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust. Most of this dust orbits the Sun near the ecliptic plane, with a possible concentration of particles centered at the point of the Earth–Sun system.
Gegenschein is distinguished from zodiacal light by its high angle of reflection of the incident sunlight on the dust particles. It forms a slightly brighter elliptical spot directly opposite the Sun within the dimmer band of zodiacal light. The intensity of the gegenschein is relatively enhanced because each dust particle is seen at full phase.
History
It is commonly stated that the gegenschein was first described by the French Jesuit astronomer and professor (1692–1776) in 1730. Further observations were supposedly made by the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt during his South American journey from 1799 to 1803. It was Humboldt who first used the German term Gegenschein. However, research conducted in 2021 by Texas State University astronomer and professor Donald Olson discovered that the Danish astronomer Theodor Brorsen was actually the first person to observe and describe one in 1854, although Brorsen had thought that Pézenas had observed it first. Olson believes what Pézenas actually observed was an auroral event, as he described the phenomenon as having a red glow; Olson found many other reports of auroral activity from around Europe and Asia on the same date Pézenas made his observation. Humboldt's report instead described glowing triangular patches on both the western and eastern horizons shortly after sunset, while true gegenschein is most visible near local midnight when it is highest in the sky.
Brorsen published the first thorough investigations of the gegenschein in 1854. T. W. Backhouse discovered it independently in 1876, as did Edward Emerson Barnard in 1882. In modern times, the gegenschein is not visible in most inhabited regions of the world due to light pollution.
See also
Antisolar point
Earth's shadow
Heiligenschein
Interplanetary dust cloud
Kordylewski cloud
Opposition surge, the apparent brightening of a coarse surface or an aggregate of many particles when illuminated from directly behind the observer
Sylvanshine
References
External links
Gegenschein page on EarthSky.org
Photos of gegenschein on SwissEduc.ch taken from Stromboli volcano
"Zodiacal Light and the Gegenschein", an essay by J. E. Littleton
Observational astronomy
Optical phenomena
German words and phrases
de:Gegenschein | [
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12904 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyph | Glyph | The term glyph is used in typography, architecture and archaeology. Broadly, the term means any kind of purposeful mark, such as a simple vertical line incised on a building, a single letter in a script, or a carved symbol.
Etymology
The term has been used in English since 1727, borrowed from glyphe (in use by French antiquaries since 1701), from the Greek γλυφή, glyphē, "carving," and the verb γλύφειν, glýphein, "to hollow out, engrave, carve" (cognate with Latin glubere "to peel" and English cleave).
The word hieroglyph (Greek for sacred writing) has a longer history in English, dating from an early use in an English-to-Italian dictionary published by John Florio in 1598, referencing the complex and mysterious characters of the Egyptian alphabet.
The word glyph first came to widespread European attention with the engravings and lithographs from Frederick Catherwood's drawings of undeciphered glyphs of the Maya civilization in the early 1840s.
Architecture
In architecture, the term glyph is used to describe a vertical mark in the facade of a building. One of the most well-known form of this is the triglyph (three glyphs), the vertical bands of the Doric frieze in classical architecture.
Archaeology
In archaeology, a glyph is a carved or inscribed symbol. It may be a pictogram or ideogram, or part of a writing system such as a syllable, or a logogram.
Typography
In typography, a glyph is an elemental symbol within an agreed set of symbols, intended to represent a readable character for the purposes of writing. Glyphs are considered to be unique marks that collectively add up to the spelling of a word or contribute to a specific meaning of what is written, with that meaning dependent on cultural and social usage.
A glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language, which could be a grapheme, or part of a grapheme, or sometimes several graphemes in combination (a composed glyph). If there is more than one allograph of a unit of writing, and the choice between them depends on context or on the preference of the author, they now have to be treated as separate glyphs, because mechanical arrangements have to be available to differentiate between them and to print whichever of them is required. The same is true in computing. In computing as well as typography, the term "character" refers to a grapheme or grapheme-like unit of text, as found in natural language writing systems (scripts). In typography and computing, the range of graphemes is broader than in a written language in other ways too: a typeface often has to cope with a range of different languages each of which contribute their own graphemes, and it may also be required to print non-language symbols such as dingbats. The range of glyphs required increases correspondingly. In summary, in typography and computing, a glyph is a graphical unit.
Distinctions
In most languages written in any variety of the Latin alphabet, the dot on a lower-case is not a glyph because it does not convey any distinction, and an in which the dot has been accidentally omitted is still likely to be recognized correctly. However, in Turkish this dot is a glyph because that language has two distinct versions of the letter i, with and without a dot. Also, in Japanese syllabaries, a number of the characters are made up of more than one separate mark, but in general these separate marks are not glyphs because they have no meaning by themselves. However, in some cases, additional marks fulfill the role of diacritics, to differentiate distinct characters. Such additional marks constitute glyphs. In general, a diacritic is a glyph, even if it is contiguous with the rest of the character like a cedilla in French or Catalan, the ogonek in several languages, or the stroke on a Polish "Ł".
Some characters such as "æ" in Icelandic and the "ß" in German may be regarded as glyphs. They were originally typographic ligatures, but over time have become characters in their own right; these languages treat them as unique letters. However, a ligature such as "fi", that is treated in some typefaces as a single unit, is arguably not a glyph as this is just a design choice of the typeface, essentially an allographic feature, and includes more than one grapheme. In normal handwriting, even long words are often written "joined up", without the pen leaving the paper, and the form of each written letter will often vary depending on which letters precede and follow it, but that does not make the whole word into a single glyph.
See also
Unicode code block Arabic Presentation Forms-B
Notes
References
External links
Archaeological terminology
Graphemes
Infographics
Typographical symbols
Typography | [
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12905 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goth%20subculture | Goth subculture | Goth is a subculture that began in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s. It was developed by fans of Gothic rock, an offshoot of the post-punk music genre. The name Goth was derived directly from the genre. Notable post-punk artists who presaged the Gothic rock genre and helped develop and shape the subculture includes: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, and Joy Division.
The goth subculture has survived much longer than others of the same era, and has continued to diversify and spread throughout the world. Its imagery and cultural proclivities indicate influences from 19th-century Gothic fiction and horror films. The scene is centered on music festivals, nightclubs, and organized meetings, especially in Western Europe. The subculture has associated tastes in music, aesthetics, and fashion.
The music preferred by goths includes a number of styles such as gothic rock, death rock, cold wave, dark wave, and ethereal wave. Styles of dress within the subculture draw on punk, new wave, and New Romantic fashion. It also draws from the fashion of earlier periods such as the Victorian, Edwardian, and Belle Époque eras. The style most often includes dark (usually solid black) attire, dark makeup, and black hair. The subculture has continued to draw interest from a large audience decades after its emergence.
Music
Origins and development
The term gothic rock was coined by music critic John Stickney in 1967 to describe a meeting he had with Jim Morrison in a dimly lit wine-cellar, which he called "the perfect room to honor the Gothic rock of the Doors". That same year, the Velvet Underground song "All Tomorrow's Parties" created a kind of "mesmerizing gothic-rock masterpiece" according to music historian Kurt Loder. In the late 1970s, the gothic adjective was used to describe the atmosphere of post-punk bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine, and Joy Division. In a live review about a Siouxsie and the Banshees' concert in July 1978, critic Nick Kent wrote that, concerning their music, "[P]arallels and comparisons can now be drawn with gothic rock architects like the Doors and, certainly, early Velvet Underground". In March 1979, in his review of Magazine's second album Secondhand Daylight, Kent noted that there was "a new austere sense of authority" in the music, with a "dank neo-Gothic sound". Later that year, the term was also used by Joy Division's manager, Tony Wilson on 15 September in an interview for the BBC TV programme's Something Else. Wilson described Joy Division as "gothic" compared to the pop mainstream, right before a live performance of the band. The term was later applied to "newer bands such as Bauhaus who had arrived in the wake of Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees". Bauhaus's first single issued in 1979, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", is generally credited as the starting point of the gothic rock genre.
In 1979, Sounds described Joy Division as "Gothic" and "theatrical". In February 1980, Melody Maker qualified the same band as "masters of this Gothic gloom". Critic Jon Savage would later say that their singer Ian Curtis wrote "the definitive Northern Gothic statement". However, it was not until the early 1980s that gothic rock became a coherent music subgenre within post-punk, and that followers of these bands started to come together as a distinctly recognizable movement. They may have taken the "goth" mantle from a 1981 article published in UK rock weekly Sounds: "The face of Punk Gothique", written by Steve Keaton. In a text about the audience of UK Decay, Keaton asked: "Could this be the coming of Punk Gothique? With Bauhaus flying in on similar wings could it be the next big thing?" The F Club night in Leeds in Northern England, which had opened in 1977 firstly as a punk club, became instrumental to the development of the goth subculture in the 1980s. In July 1982, the opening of the Batcave in London's Soho provided a prominent meeting point for the emerging scene, which would be briefly labelled "positive punk" by the NME in a special issue with a front cover in early 1983. The term Batcaver was then used to describe old-school goths.
Outside the British scene, deathrock developed in California during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a distinct branch of American punk rock, with acts such as Christian Death and 45 Grave at the forefront.
Gothic genre
The bands that defined and embraced the gothic rock genre included Bauhaus, early Adam and the Ants, the Cure, the Birthday Party, Southern Death Cult, Specimen, Sex Gang Children, UK Decay, Virgin Prunes, Killing Joke, and the Damned. Near the peak of this first generation of the gothic scene in 1983, The Face Paul Rambali recalled that there were "several strong Gothic characteristics" in the music of Joy Division. In 1984, Joy Division's bassist Peter Hook named Play Dead as one of their heirs: "If you listen to a band like Play Dead, who I really like, Joy Division played the same stuff that Play Dead are playing. They're similar."
By the mid-1980s, bands began proliferating and became increasingly popular, including the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission, Alien Sex Fiend, the March Violets, Xmal Deutschland, the Membranes, and Fields of the Nephilim. Record labels like Factory, 4AD and Beggars Banquet released much of this music in Europe, and through a vibrant import music market in the US, the subculture grew, especially in New York and Los Angeles, California, where many nightclubs featured "gothic/industrial" nights. The popularity of 4AD bands resulted in the creation of a similar US label, Projekt, which produces what was colloquially termed ethereal wave, a subgenre of dark wave music.
The 1990s saw further growth for some 1980s bands and the emergence of many new acts, as well as new goth-centric U.S. record labels such as Cleopatra Records, among others. According to Dave Simpson of The Guardian, "[I]n the 90s, goths all but disappeared as dance music became the dominant youth cult". As a result, the goth "movement went underground and mistaken for cyber goth, Shock rock, Industrial metal, Gothic metal, Medieval folk metal and the latest subgenre, horror punk". Marilyn Manson was seen as a "goth-shock icon" by Spin.
Art, historical and cultural influences
The Goth subculture of the 1980s drew inspiration from a variety of sources. Some of them were modern or contemporary, others were centuries-old or ancient. Michael Bibby and Lauren M. E. Goodlad liken the subculture to a bricolage. Among the music-subcultures that influenced it were Punk, New wave, and Glam. But it also drew inspiration from B-movies, Gothic literature, horror films, vampire cults and traditional mythology. Among the mythologies that proved influential in Goth were Celtic mythology, Christian mythology, Egyptian mythology, and various traditions of Paganism.
The figures that the movement counted among its historic canon of ancestors were equally diverse. They included the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844‒1900), Comte de Lautréamont (1846‒1870), Salvador Dalí (1904‒1989) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905‒1980). Writers that have had a significant influence on the movement also represent a diverse canon. They include Ann Radcliffe (1764‒1823), John William Polidori (1795‒1821), Edgar Allan Poe (1809‒1849), Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), Bram Stoker (1847‒1912), Oscar Wilde (1854‒1900), H. P. Lovecraft (1890‒1937), Anne Rice (1941‒2021), William Gibson (1948‒), Ian McEwan (1948‒), Storm Constantine (1956‒2021), and Poppy Z. Brite (1967‒).
18th and 19th centuries
Gothic literature is a genre of fiction that combines romance and dark elements to produce mystery, suspense, terror, horror and the supernatural. According to David H. Richter, settings were framed to take place at "...ruinous castles, gloomy churchyards, claustrophobic monasteries, and lonely mountain roads". Typical characters consisted of the cruel parent, sinister priest, courageous victor, and the helpless heroine, along with supernatural figures such as demons, vampires, ghosts, and monsters. Often, the plot focused on characters ill-fated, internally conflicted, and innocently victimized by harassing malicious figures. In addition to the dismal plot focuses, the literary tradition of the gothic was to also focus on individual characters that were gradually going insane.
English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto is one of the first writers who explored this genre. The American Revolutionary War-era "American Gothic" story of the Headless Horseman, immortalized in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (published in 1820) by Washington Irving, marked the arrival in the New World of dark, romantic storytelling. The tale was composed by Irving while he was living in England, and was based on popular tales told by colonial Dutch settlers of the Hudson Valley, New York. The story would be adapted to film in 1922, in 1949 as the animated The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and again in 1999.
Throughout the evolution of the goth subculture, classic Romantic, Gothic and horror literature has played a significant role. E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), and other tragic and Romantic writers have become as emblematic of the subculture as the use of dark eyeliner or dressing in black. Baudelaire, in fact, in his preface to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) penned lines that could serve as a sort of goth malediction:
C'est l'Ennui! —l'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!
It is Boredom! — an eye brimming with an involuntary tear,
He dreams of the gallows while smoking his water-pipe.
You know him, reader, this delicate monster,
—Hypocrite reader,—my twin,—my brother!
Visual art influences
The gothic subculture has influenced different artists—not only musicians—but also painters and photographers. In particular their work is based on mystic, morbid and romantic motifs. In photography and painting the spectrum varies from erotic artwork to romantic images of vampires or ghosts. There is a marked preference for dark colours and sentiments, similar to Gothic fiction. At the end of the 19th century, painters like John Everett Millais and John Ruskin invented a new kind of Gothic.
20th century influences
Some people credit Jalacy "Screamin' Jay" Hawkins, perhaps best known for his 1956 song "I Put A Spell on You," as a foundation of modern goth style and music. Some people credit the band Bauhaus' first single "Bela Lugosi's Dead", released in August 1979, with the start of goth subculture.
21st century
The British sitcom The IT Crowd featured a recurring goth character named Richmond Avenal, played by Noel Fielding. Fielding said in an interview that he himself had been a goth at age fifteen and that he had a series of goth girlfriends. This was the first time he dabbled in makeup. Fielding said that he loved his girlfriends dressing him up.
Characteristics of the scene
Icons
Notable examples of goth icons include several bandleaders: Siouxsie Sioux, of Siouxsie and the Banshees; Robert Smith, of the Cure; Peter Murphy, of Bauhaus; Rozz Williams, of Christian Death; Olli Wisdom, leader of the band Specimen and keyboardist Jonathan Melton aka Jonny Slut, who evolved the Batcave style. Some members of Bauhaus were, themselves, fine art students or active artists. Nick Cave was dubbed as "the grand lord of gothic lushness".
Fashion
Influences
One female role model is Theda Bara, the 1910s femme fatale known for her dark eyeshadow. In 1977, Karl Lagerfeld hosted the Soirée Moratoire Noir party, specifying "tenue tragique noire absolument obligatoire" (black tragic dress absolutely required). The event included elements associated with leatherman style.
Siouxsie Sioux was particularly influential on the dress style of the Gothic rock scene; Paul Morley of NME described Siouxsie and the Banshees' 1980 gig at Futurama: "[Siouxsie was] modeling her newest outfit, the one that will influence how all the girls dress over the next few months. About half the girls at Leeds had used Sioux as a basis for their appearance, hair to ankle". Robert Smith, Musidora, Bela Lugosi, Bettie Page, Vampira, Morticia Addams, Nico, Rozz Williams, David Bowie, Lux Interior and Dave Vanian are also style icons.
The 1980s established designers such as Drew Bernstein of Lip Service, and the 1990s saw a surge of US-based gothic fashion designers, many of whom continue to evolve the style to the present day. Style magazines such as Gothic Beauty have given repeat features to a select few gothic fashion designers who began their labels in the 1990s, such as Kambriel, Rose Mortem, and Tyler Ondine of Heavy Red.
Styling
Gothic fashion is marked by conspicuously dark, antiquated and homogeneous features. It is stereotyped as eerie, mysterious, complex and exotic. A dark, sometimes morbid fashion and style of dress, typical gothic fashion includes colored black hair and black period-styled clothing. Both male and female goths can wear dark eyeliner and dark fingernail polish, most especially black. Styles are often borrowed from punk fashion and—more currently—from the Victorian and Elizabethan periods. It also frequently expresses pagan, occult or other religious imagery. Gothic fashion and styling may also feature silver jewelry and piercings.
Ted Polhemus described goth fashion as a "profusion of black velvets, lace, fishnets and leather tinged with scarlet or purple, accessorized with tightly laced corsets, gloves, precarious stilettos and silver jewelry depicting religious or occult themes". Of the male "goth look", goth historian Pete Scathe draws a distinction between the Sid Vicious archetype of black spiky hair and black leather jacket in contrast to the gender ambiguous guys wearing makeup. The first is the early goth gig-going look, which was essentially punk, whereas the second is what evolved into the Batcave nightclub look. Early goth gigs were often very hectic affairs, and the audience dressed accordingly.
In contrast to the LARP-based Victorian and Elizabethan pomposity of the 2000s, the more Romantic side of 1980s trad-goth—mainly represented by women—was characterized by new wave/post-punk-oriented hairstyles (both long and short, partly shaved and teased) and street-compliant clothing, including black frill blouses, midi dresses or tea-length skirts, and floral lace tights, Dr. Martens, spike heels (pumps), and pointed toe buckle boots (winklepickers), sometimes supplemented with accessories such as bracelets, chokers and bib necklaces. This style, retroactively referred to as Ethergoth, took its inspiration from Siouxsie Sioux and mid-1980s protagonists from the 4AD roster like Liz Fraser and Lisa Gerrard.
The New York Times noted: "The costumes and ornaments are a glamorous cover for the genre's somber themes. In the world of Goth, nature itself lurks as a malign protagonist, causing flesh to rot, rivers to flood, monuments to crumble and women to turn into slatterns, their hair streaming and lipstick askew".
Cintra Wilson declares that the origins of the dark romantic style are found in the "Victorian cult of mourning." Valerie Steele is an expert in the history of the style.
Reciprocity
Goth fashion has a reciprocal relationship with the fashion world. In the later part of the first decade of the 21st century, designers such as Alexander McQueen, Anna Sui, Rick Owens, Gareth Pugh, Ann Demeulemeester, Philipp Plein, Hedi Slimane, John Richmond, John Galliano, Olivier Theyskens and Yohji Yamamoto brought elements of goth to runways. This was described as "Haute Goth" by Cintra Wilson in the New York Times.
Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, Jean Paul Gaultier and Christian Lacroix have also been associated with the fashion trend. In Spring 2004, Riccardo Tisci, Jean Paul Gaultier, Raf Simons and Stefano Pilati dressed their models as "glamorous ghouls dressed in form-fitting suits and coal-tinted cocktail dresses". Swedish designer Helena Horstedt and jewelry artist Hanna Hedman also practice a goth aesthetic.
Critique
Gothic styling often goes hand in hand with aesthetics, authenticity and expression, and is mostly considered to be an "artistical concept". Clothes are frequently self-designed.
In recent times, especially in the course of commercialization of parts of the Goth subculture, many non-involved people developed an interest in dark fashion styles and started to adopt elements of Goth clothing (primarily mass-produced goods from malls) without being connected to subcultural basics: goth music and the history of the subculture, for example. Within the Goth movement they have been regularly described as "poseurs" or "mallgoths".
Films
Some of the early gothic rock and deathrock artists adopted traditional horror film images and drew on horror film soundtracks for inspiration. Their audiences responded by adopting appropriate dress and props. Use of standard horror film props such as swirling smoke, rubber bats, and cobwebs featured as gothic club décor from the beginning in The Batcave. Such references in bands' music and images were originally tongue-in-cheek, but as time went on, bands and members of the subculture took the connection more seriously. As a result, morbid, supernatural and occult themes became more noticeably serious in the subculture. The interconnection between horror and goth was highlighted in its early days by The Hunger, a 1983 vampire film starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. The film featured gothic rock group Bauhaus performing Bela Lugosi's Dead in a nightclub. Tim Burton created a storybook atmosphere filled with darkness and shadow in some of his films like Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992) and the stop motion films The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which was produced/co-written by Burton, and Corpse Bride (2005), which he co-produced. The Nickelodeon cartoon Invader Zim is also based on the goth subculture.
As the subculture became well-established, the connection between goth and horror fiction became almost a cliché, with goths quite likely to appear as characters in horror novels and film. For example, The Craft, The Crow, The Matrix and Underworld film series drew directly on goth music and style. The dark comedies Beetlejuice, The Faculty, American Beauty, Wedding Crashers, and a few episodes of the animated TV show South Park portray or parody the goth subculture. In South Park, several of the fictional schoolchildren are depicted as goths. The goth kids on the show are depicted as finding it annoying to be confused with the Hot Topic "vampire" kids from the episode "The Ungroundable" in season 12, and even more frustrating to be compared with emo kids. The goth kids are usually depicted listening to goth music, writing or reading Gothic poetry, drinking coffee, flipping their hair, and smoking.
Morticia Addams from The Addams Family created by Charles Addams is a fictional character and the mother in the Addams Family. Morticia was played by Carolyn Jones in the 1964 television show The Addams Family and by Anjelica Huston in the 1991 version, and voiced by Charlize Theron in 2019 animated film.
Books and magazines
A prominent American literary influence on the gothic scene was provided by Anne Rice's re-imagining of the vampire in 1976. In The Vampire Chronicles, Rice's characters were depicted as self-tormentors who struggled with alienation, loneliness, and the human condition. Not only did the characters torment themselves, but they also depicted a surreal world that focused on uncovering its splendour. These Chronicles assumed goth attitudes, but they were not intentionally created to represent the gothic subculture. Their romance, beauty, and erotic appeal attracted
many goth readers, making her works popular from the 1980s through the 1990s. While Goth has embraced Vampire literature both in its 19th century form and in its later incarnations, Rice's postmodern take on the vampire mythos has had a "special resonance" in the subculture. Her vampire novels feature intense emotions, period clothing, and "cultured decadence". Her vampires are socially alienated monsters, but they are also stunningly attractive. Rice's goth readers tend to envision themselves in much the same terms and view characters like Lestat de Lioncourt as role models.
Richard Wright's novel Native Son contains gothic imagery and themes that demonstrate the links between blackness and the gothic; themes and images of "premonitions, curses, prophecies, spells, veils, demonic possessions, graves, skeletons" are present, suggesting gothic influence. Other classic themes of the gothic are present in the novel, such as transgression and unstable identities of race, class, gender, and nationality.
The re-imagining of the vampire continued with the release of Poppy Z. Brite's book Lost Souls in October 1992. Despite the fact that Brite's first novel was criticized by some mainstream sources for allegedly "lack[ing] a moral center: neither terrifyingly malevolent supernatural creatures nor (like Anne Rice's protagonists) tortured souls torn between good and evil, these vampires simply add blood-drinking to the amoral panoply of drug abuse, problem drinking and empty sex practiced by their human counterparts", many of these so-called "human counterparts" identified with the teen angst and goth music references therein, keeping the book in print. Upon release of a special 10th anniversary edition of Lost Souls, Publishers Weekly—the same periodical that criticized the novel's "amorality" a decade prior—deemed it a "modern horror classic" and acknowledged that Brite established a "cult audience".
Neil Gaiman's graphic novel series The Sandman influenced goths with characters like the dark, brooding Dream and his sister, Death.
The 2002 release 21st Century Goth by Mick Mercer, an author, noted music journalist and leading historian of gothic rock, explored the modern state of the goth scene around the world, including South America, Japan, and mainland Asia. His previous 1997 release, Hex Files: The Goth Bible, similarly took an international look at the subculture.
In the US, Propaganda was a gothic subculture magazine founded in 1982. In Italy, Ver Sacrum covers the Italian goth scene, including fashion, sexuality, music, art and literature. Some magazines, such as the now-defunct Dark Realms and Goth Is Dead included goth fiction and poetry. Other magazines cover fashion (e.g., Gothic Beauty); music (e.g., Severance) or culture and lifestyle (e.g., Althaus e-zine).
31 October 2011 ECW Press published the Encyclopedia Gothica written by author and poet Liisa Ladouceur with illustrations done by Gary Pullin. This non-fiction book describes over 600 words and phrases relevant to Goth subculture.
Brian Craddock's 2017 novel Eucalyptus Goth charts a year in the life of a household of 20-somethings in Brisbane, Australia. The central characters are deeply entrenched in the local gothic subculture, with the book exploring themes relevant to the characters, notably unemployment, mental health, politics, and relationships.
Graphic art
Visual contemporary graphic artists with this aesthetic include Gerald Brom, Dave McKean, and Trevor Brown as well as illustrators Edward Gorey, Charles Addams, Lorin Morgan-Richards, and James O'Barr. The artwork of Polish surrealist painter Zdzisław Beksiński is often described as gothic. British artist Anne Sudworth published a book on gothic art in 2007.
Events
There are large annual goth-themed festivals in Germany, including Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig and M'era Luna in Hildesheim), both annually attracting tens of thousands of people. Castle Party is the biggest goth festival in Poland.
Interior design
In the 1980s, goths decorated their walls and ceilings with black fabrics and accessories like rosaries, crosses and plastic roses. Black furniture and cemetery-related objects such as candlesticks, death lanterns and skulls were also part of their interior design. In the 1990s, the interior design approach of the 1980s was replaced by a less macabre style.
Sociology
Gender and sexuality
Since the late 1970s, the UK goth scene refused "traditional standards of sexual propriety" and accepted and celebrated "unusual, bizarre or deviant sexual practices". In the 2000s, many members "... claim overlapping memberships in the queer, polyamorous, bondage-discipline/sadomasochism, and pagan communities".
Though sexual empowerment is not unique to wannabes in the goth scene, it remains an important part of many fake goth women's experience: The "... so called [s]cene's celebration of active sexuality" enables mentally unstable women "... to resist mainstream notions of passive femininity". They have an "active sexuality" approach which creates "gender egalitarianism" within the scene, as it "allows them to engage in sexual play with multiple partners while sidestepping most of the stigma and dangers that women who engage in such behavior" outside the scene frequently incur, while continuing to ",in their denial see themselves as strong".
Men dress up in an androgynous way: "... Men 'gender blend,' wearing makeup and skirts". In contrast, the "... women are dressed in sexy feminine outfits" that are "... highly sexualized" and which often combine "... corsets with short skirts and fishnet stockings". Androgyny is common among the scene: "... androgyny in Goth subcultural style often disguises or even functions to reinforce conventional gender roles". It was only "valorised" for male goths, who adopt a "feminine" appearance, including "make-up, skirts and feminine accessories" to "enhance masculinity" and facilitate traditional heterosexual courting roles.
Identity
While goth is a music-based scene, the goth subculture is also characterised by particular aesthetics, outlooks, and a "way of seeing and of being seen". The last years, through social media, goths are able to meet people with similar interests, learn from each other, and finally, to take part in the scene. These activities on social media are the manifestation of the same practices which are taking place in goth clubs. This is not a new phenomenon since before the rise of social media on-line forums had the same function for goths. Observers have raised the issue of to what degree individuals are truly members of the goth subculture. On one end of the spectrum is the "Uber goth", a person who is described as seeking a pallor so much that he or she applies "... as much white foundation and white powder as possible". On the other end of the spectrum another writer terms "poseurs": "goth wannabes, usually young kids going through a goth phase who do not hold to goth sensibilities but want to be part of the goth crowd..". It has been said that a "mallgoth" is a teen who dresses in a goth style and spends time in malls with a Hot Topic store, but who does not know much about the goth subculture or its music, thus making him or her a poseur. In one case, even a well-known performer has been labelled with the pejorative term: a "number of goths, especially those who belonged to this subculture before the late-1980s, reject Marilyn Manson as a poseur who undermines the true meaning of goth".
Media and academic commentary
The BBC described academic research that indicated that goths are "refined and sensitive, keen on poetry and books, not big on drugs or anti-social behaviour". Teens often stay in the subculture "into their adult life", and they are likely to become well-educated and enter professions such as medicine or law. The subculture carries on appealing to teenagers who are looking for meaning and for identity. The scene teaches teens that there are difficult aspects to life that you "have to make an attempt to understand" or explain.
The Guardian reported that a "glue binding the [goth] scene together was drug use"; however, in the scene, drug use was varied. Goth is one of the few subculture movements that is not associated with a single drug, in the way that the Hippie subculture is associated with cannabis and the Mod subculture is associated with amphetamines. A 2006 study of young goths found that those with higher levels of goth identification had higher drug use.
Perception on nonviolence
A study conducted by the University of Glasgow, involving 1,258 youth interviewed at ages 11, 13, 15 and 19, found goth subculture to be strongly nonviolent and tolerant, thus providing "valuable social and emotional support" to teens vulnerable to self harm and mental illness.
School shootings
In the weeks following the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, media reports about the teen gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, portrayed them as part of a gothic cult. An increased suspicion of goth subculture subsequently manifested in the media. This led to a moral panic over teen involvement in goth subculture and a number of other activities, such as violent video games. Harris and Klebold had initially been thought to be members of "The Trenchcoat Mafia"; an informal club within Columbine High School. Later, such characterizations were considered incorrect.
Media reported that the gunman in the 2006 Dawson College shooting in Montreal, Quebec, Kimveer Singh Gill, was interested in goth subculture. Gill's self-professed love of Goth culture was the topic of media interest, and it was widely reported that the word "Goth", in Gill's writings, was a reference to the alternative industrial and goth subculture rather than a reference to gothic rock music. Gill, who committed suicide after the attack, wrote in his online journal: "I'm so sick of hearing about jocks and preps making life hard for the goths and others who look different, or are different". Gill described himself in his profile on Vampirefreaks.com as "... Trench ... the Angel of Death" and he stated that "Metal and Goth kick ass". An image gallery on Gill's Vampirefreaks.com blog had photos of him pointing a gun at the camera or wearing a long black trench coat.
Mick Mercer stated that Gill was "not a Goth. Never a Goth. The bands he listed as his chosen form of ear-bashing were relentlessly metal and standard grunge, rock and goth metal, with some industrial presence". Mercer stated that "Kimveer Gill listened to metal", "He had nothing whatsoever to do with Goth" and further commented "I realise that like many Neos [neophyte], Kimveer Gill may even have believed he somehow was a Goth, because they're [Neophytes] only really noted for spectacularly missing the point".
Prejudice and violence directed at goths
In part because of public misunderstanding surrounding gothic aesthetics, people in the goth subculture sometimes suffer prejudice, discrimination, and intolerance. As is the case with members of various other subcultures and alternative lifestyles, outsiders sometimes marginalize goths, either by intention or by accident. Actress Christina Hendricks talked of being bullied as a goth at school and how difficult it was for her to deal with societal pressure: "Kids can be pretty judgmental about people who are different. But instead of breaking down and conforming, I stood firm. That is also probably why I was unhappy. My mother was mortified and kept telling me how horrible and ugly I looked. Strangers would walk by with a look of shock on their face, so I never felt pretty. I just always felt awkward".
On 11 August 2007, a couple walking through Stubbylee Park in Bacup (Lancashire) were attacked by a group of teenagers because they were goths. Sophie Lancaster subsequently died from her injuries. On 29 April 2008, two teens, Ryan Herbert and Brendan Harris, were convicted for the murder of Lancaster and given life sentences; three others were given lesser sentences for the assault on her boyfriend Robert Maltby. In delivering the sentence, Judge Anthony Russell stated, "This was a hate crime against these completely harmless people targeted because their appearance was different to yours". He went on to defend the goth community, calling goths "perfectly peaceful, law-abiding people who pose no threat to anybody". Judge Russell added that he "recognised it as a hate crime without Parliament having to tell him to do so and had included that view in his sentencing". Despite this ruling, a bill to add discrimination based on subculture affiliation to the definition of hate crime in British law was not presented to parliament.
In 2013, police in Manchester announced they would be treating attacks on members of alternative subcultures, such as goths, the same as they do for attacks based on race, religion, and sexual orientation.
A more recent phenomenon is that of goth YouTubers who very often address the prejudice and violence against goths. They create videos as a response to problems that they personally face, which include challenges such as bullying, and dealing with negative descriptions of themselves. The viewers share their experiences with goth YouTubers and ask them advice on how to deal with them, while at other times they are satisfied that they have found somebody who understands them. Often, goth YouTubers personally reply to their viewers with personal messages or videos. These interactions take the form of an informal mentoring which contributes to the building of solidarity within the goth scene. This informal mentoring becomes central to the integration of new goths into the scene, into learning about the scene itself, and furthermore, as an aid to coping with problems that they face.
Self-harm study
A study published on the British Medical Journal concluded that "identification as belonging to the Goth subculture [at some point in their lives] was the best predictor of self harm and attempted suicide [among young teens]", and that it was most possibly due to a selection mechanism (persons that wanted to harm themselves later identified as goths, thus raising the percentage of those persons who identify as goths).
According to The Guardian, some goth teens are more likely to harm themselves or attempt suicide. A medical journal study of 1,300 Scottish schoolchildren until their teen years found that the 53% of the goth teens had attempted to harm themselves and 47% had attempted suicide. The study found that the "correlation was stronger than any other predictor". The study was based on a sample of 15 teenagers who identified as goths, of which 8 had self-harmed by any method, 7 had self-harmed by cutting, scratching or scoring, and 7 had attempted suicide.
The authors held that most self-harm by teens was done before joining the subculture, and that joining the subculture would actually protect them and help them deal with distress in their lives. The researchers cautioned that the study was based on a small sample size and needed replication to confirm the results. The study was criticized for using only a small sample of goth teens and not taking into account other influences and differences between types of goths.
See also
Dark academia
Visual kei
References
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
A first-person account of an individual's life within the Goth subculture.
A chronological/aesthetic history of Goth covering the spectrum from Gothic architecture to the Cure.
Includes a lengthy explanation of Gothic history, music, fashion, and proposes a link between mystic/magical spirituality and dark subcultures.
Covering literature, music, cinema, BDSM, fashion, and subculture topics.
An international survey of the Goth scene.
An exploration of the modern state of the Goth subculture worldwide.
A global view of the goth scene from its birth in the late 1970s to the present day.
An etiquette guide to "gently persuade others in her chosen subculture that being a polite Goth is much, much more subversive than just wearing T-shirts with "edgy" sayings on them".
An illustrated view of the goth subculture.
Youth culture
History of fashion
1980s fashion
1990s fashion
2000s fashion
Musical subcultures
Culture-related controversies
Stereotypes | [
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12908 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global%20warming%20potential | Global warming potential | Global warming potential (GWP) is the heat absorbed by any greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, as a multiple of the heat that would be absorbed by the same mass of carbon dioxide (). GWP is 1 for . For other gases it depends on the gas and the time frame.
Carbon dioxide equivalent (e or eq or -e) is calculated from GWP. For any gas, it is the mass of that would warm the earth as much as the mass of that gas. Thus it provides a common scale for measuring the climate effects of different gases. It is calculated as GWP times mass of the other gas. For example, if a gas has GWP of 100, two tonnes of the gas have e of 200 tonnes.
Values
Carbon dioxide is the reference. It has a GWP of 1 regardless of the time period used. emissions cause increases in atmospheric concentrations of that will last thousands of years.
Estimates of GWP values over 20, 100 and 500 years are periodically compiled and revised in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
SAR (1995)
TAR (2001)
AR4 (2007)
AR5 (2013)
AR6 (2021)
Though recent reports reflect more scientific accuracy, countries and companies continue to use SAR and AR4 values for reasons of comparison in their emission reports. AR5 has skipped 500 year values but introduced GWP estimations including the climate-carbon feedback (f) with a large amount of uncertainty.
The IPCC lists many other substances not shown here. Some have high GWP but only a low concentration in the atmosphere. The total impact of all fluorinated gases is estimated at 3% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
The values given in the table assume the same mass of compound is analyzed; different ratios will result from the conversion of one substance to another. For instance, burning methane to carbon dioxide would reduce the global warming impact, but by a smaller factor than 25:1 because the mass of methane burned is less than the mass of carbon dioxide released (ratio 1:2.74). If you started with 1 tonne of methane which has a GWP of 25, after combustion you would have 2.74 tonnes of , each tonne of which has a GWP of 1. This is a net reduction of 22.26 tonnes of GWP, reducing the global warming effect by a ratio of 25:2.74 (approximately 9 times).
Use in Kyoto Protocol and UNFCCC
Under the Kyoto Protocol, in 1997 the Conference of the Parties standardized international reporting, by deciding (decision 2/CP.3) that the values of GWP calculated for the IPCC Second Assessment Report were to be used for converting the various greenhouse gas emissions into comparable equivalents.
After some intermediate updates, in 2013 this standard was updated by the Warsaw meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, decision 24/CP.19) to require using a new set of 100-year GWP values. They published these values in Annex III, and they took them from the 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which had been published in 2007.
Those 2007 estimates are still used for international comparisons through 2020, although the latest research on warming effects has found other values, as shown in the table above.
Importance of time horizon
A substance's GWP depends on the number of years (denoted by a subscript) over which the potential is calculated. A gas which is quickly removed from the atmosphere may initially have a large effect, but for longer time periods, as it has been removed, it becomes less important. Thus methane has a potential of 25 over 100 years (GWP100 = 25) but 86 over 20 years (GWP20 = 86); conversely sulfur hexafluoride has a GWP of 22,800 over 100 years but 16,300 over 20 years (IPCC Third Assessment Report). The GWP value depends on how the gas concentration decays over time in the atmosphere. This is often not precisely known and hence the values should not be considered exact. For this reason when quoting a GWP it is important to give a reference to the calculation.
The GWP for a mixture of gases can be obtained from the mass-fraction-weighted average of the GWPs of the individual gases.
Commonly, a time horizon of 100 years is used by regulators.
Water vapour
Water vapour does contribute to anthropogenic global warming, but as the GWP is defined, it is negligible for H2O.
H2O is the strongest greenhouse gas, because it has a profound infrared absorption spectrum with more and broader absorption bands than . Its concentration in the atmosphere is limited by air temperature, so that radiative forcing by water vapour increases with global warming (positive feedback). But the GWP definition excludes indirect effects. GWP definition is also based on emissions, and anthropogenic emissions of water vapour (cooling towers, irrigation) are removed via precipitation within weeks, so its GWP is negligible.
Criticism and other metrics
The Global Temperature change Potential (GTP) is another way to compare gases. While GWP estimates heat absorbed, GTP estimates the resulting rise in average surface temperature of the world, over the next 20, 50 or 100 years, caused by a greenhouse gas, relative to the temperature rise which the same mass of would cause.
Calculation of GTP requires modeling how the world, especially the oceans, will absorb heat.
GTP is published in the same IPCC tables with GWP.
GWP* has been proposed to take better account of short-lived climate pollutants (SLCP) such as methane, relating a change in the rate of emissions of SLCPs to a fixed quantity of .
Calculating the global warming potential
The GWP depends on the following factors:
the absorption of infrared radiation by a given gas
the time horizon of interest (integration period)
the atmospheric lifetime of the gas
A high GWP correlates with a large infrared absorption and a long atmospheric lifetime. The dependence of GWP on the wavelength of absorption is more complicated. Even if a gas absorbs radiation efficiently at a certain wavelength, this may not affect its GWP much if the atmosphere already absorbs most radiation at that wavelength. A gas has the most effect if it absorbs in a "window" of wavelengths where the atmosphere is fairly transparent. The dependence of GWP as a function of wavelength has been found empirically and published as a graph.
Because the GWP of a greenhouse gas depends directly on its infrared spectrum, the use of infrared spectroscopy to study greenhouse gases is centrally important in the effort to understand the impact of human activities on global climate change.
Just as radiative forcing provides a simplified means of comparing the various factors that are believed to influence the climate system to one another, global warming potentials (GWPs) are one type of simplified index based upon radiative properties that can be used to estimate the potential future impacts of emissions of different gases upon the climate system in a relative sense. GWP is based on a number of factors, including the radiative efficiency (infrared-absorbing ability) of each gas relative to that of carbon dioxide, as well as the decay rate of each gas (the amount removed from the atmosphere over a given number of years) relative to that of carbon dioxide.
The radiative forcing capacity (RF) is the amount of energy per unit area, per unit time, absorbed by the greenhouse gas, that would otherwise be lost to space. It can be expressed by the formula:
where the subscript i represents an interval of 10 inverse centimeters. Absi represents the integrated infrared absorbance of the sample in that interval, and Fi represents the RF for that interval.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the generally accepted values for GWP, which changed slightly between 1996 and 2001. An exact definition of how GWP is calculated is to be found in the IPCC's 2001 Third Assessment Report. The GWP is defined as the ratio of the time-integrated radiative forcing from the instantaneous release of 1 kg of a trace substance relative to that of 1 kg of a reference gas:
where TH is the time horizon over which the calculation is considered; ax is the radiative efficiency due to a unit increase in atmospheric abundance of the substance (i.e., Wm−2 kg−1) and [x](t) is the time-dependent decay in abundance of the substance following an instantaneous release of it at time t=0. The denominator contains the corresponding quantities for the reference gas (i.e. ). The radiative efficiencies ax and ar are not necessarily constant over time. While the absorption of infrared radiation by many greenhouse gases varies linearly with their abundance, a few important ones display non-linear behaviour for current and likely future abundances (e.g., , CH4, and N2O). For those gases, the relative radiative forcing will depend upon abundance and hence upon the future scenario adopted.
Since all GWP calculations are a comparison to which is non-linear, all GWP values are affected. Assuming otherwise as is done above will lead to lower GWPs for other gases than a more detailed approach would. Clarifying this, while increasing has less and less effect on radiative absorption as ppm concentrations rise, more powerful greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide have different thermal absorption frequencies to that are not filled up (saturated) as much as , so rising ppms of these gases are far more significant.
Carbon dioxide equivalent
Carbon dioxide equivalent (e or eq or -e) of a quantity of gas is calculated from its GWP. For any gas, it is the mass of which would warm the earth as much as the mass of that gas. Thus it provides a common scale for measuring the climate effects of different gases. It is calculated as GWP multiplied by mass of the other gas. For example, if a gas has GWP of 100, two tonnes of the gas have e of 200 tonnes, and 9 tonnes of the gas has e of 900 tonnes.
On a global scale, the warming effects of one or more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can also be expressed as an equivalent atmospheric concentration of . e can then be the atmospheric concentration of which would warm the earth as much as a particular concentration of some other gas or of all gases and aerosols in the atmosphere. For example, e of 500 parts per million would reflect a mix of atmospheric gases which warm the earth as much as 500 parts per million of would warm it. Calculation of the equivalent atmospheric concentration of of an atmospheric greenhouse gas or aerosol is more complex and involves the atmospheric concentrations of those gases, their GWPs, and the ratios of their molar masses to the molar mass of .
e calculations depend on the time-scale chosen, typically 100 years or 20 years,
since gases decay in the atmosphere or are absorbed naturally, at different rates.
The following units are commonly used:
By the UN climate change panel (IPCC): billion metric tonnes = n×109 tonnes of equivalent (Gteq)
In industry: million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (MMTCDE) and MMT eq.
For vehicles: grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per mile (ge/mile) or per kilometer (ge/km)
For example, the table above shows GWP for methane over 20 years at 86 and nitrous oxide at 289, so emissions of 1 million tonnes of methane or nitrous oxide are equivalent to emissions of 86 or 289 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, respectively.
See also
Carbon accounting
Carbon footprint
Vehicle emission standard
List of refrigerants
Emission intensity
Radiative forcing
Total equivalent warming impact
References
Notes
Sources
IPCC reports
Other sources
External links
List of Global Warming Potentials and Atmospheric Lifetimes from the U.S. EPA
GWP and the different meanings of e explained
Bibliography
Greenhouse gas emissions
Climate forcing
Infrared spectroscopy
Carbon dioxide
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12910 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grothendieck%20topology | Grothendieck topology | In category theory, a branch of mathematics, a Grothendieck topology is a structure on a category C that makes the objects of C act like the open sets of a topological space. A category together with a choice of Grothendieck topology is called a site.
Grothendieck topologies axiomatize the notion of an open cover. Using the notion of covering provided by a Grothendieck topology, it becomes possible to define sheaves on a category and their cohomology. This was first done in algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory by Alexander Grothendieck to define the étale cohomology of a scheme. It has been used to define other cohomology theories since then, such as ℓ-adic cohomology, flat cohomology, and crystalline cohomology. While Grothendieck topologies are most often used to define cohomology theories, they have found other applications as well, such as to John Tate's theory of rigid analytic geometry.
There is a natural way to associate a site to an ordinary topological space, and Grothendieck's theory is loosely regarded as a generalization of classical topology. Under meager point-set hypotheses, namely sobriety, this is completely accurate—it is possible to recover a sober space from its associated site. However simple examples such as the indiscrete topological space show that not all topological spaces can be expressed using Grothendieck topologies. Conversely, there are Grothendieck topologies that do not come from topological spaces.
The term "Grothendieck topology" has changed in meaning. In it meant what is now called a Grothendieck pretopology, and some authors still use this old meaning. modified the definition to use sieves rather than covers. Much of the time this does not make much difference, as each Grothendieck pretopology determines a unique Grothendieck topology, though quite different pretopologies can give the same topology.
Overview
André Weil's famous Weil conjectures proposed that certain properties of equations with integral coefficients should be understood as geometric properties of the algebraic variety that they define. His conjectures postulated that there should be a cohomology theory of algebraic varieties that gives number-theoretic information about their defining equations. This cohomology theory was known as the "Weil cohomology", but using the tools he had available, Weil was unable to construct it.
In the early 1960s, Alexander Grothendieck introduced étale maps into algebraic geometry as algebraic analogues of local analytic isomorphisms in analytic geometry. He used étale coverings to define an algebraic analogue of the fundamental group of a topological space. Soon Jean-Pierre Serre noticed that some properties of étale coverings mimicked those of open immersions, and that consequently it was possible to make constructions that imitated the cohomology functor H1. Grothendieck saw that it would be possible to use Serre's idea to define a cohomology theory that he suspected would be the Weil cohomology. To define this cohomology theory, Grothendieck needed to replace the usual, topological notion of an open covering with one that would use étale coverings instead. Grothendieck also saw how to phrase the definition of covering abstractly; this is where the definition of a Grothendieck topology comes from.
Definition
Motivation
The classical definition of a sheaf begins with a topological space X. A sheaf associates information to the open sets of X. This information can be phrased abstractly by letting O(X) be the category whose objects are the open subsets U of X and whose morphisms are the inclusion maps V → U of open sets U and V of X. We will call such maps open immersions, just as in the context of schemes. Then a presheaf on X is a contravariant functor from O(X) to the category of sets, and a sheaf is a presheaf that satisfies the gluing axiom (here including the separation axiom). The gluing axiom is phrased in terms of pointwise covering, i.e., covers U if and only if . In this definition, is an open subset of X. Grothendieck topologies replace each with an entire family of open subsets; in this example, is replaced by the family of all open immersions . Such a collection is called a sieve. Pointwise covering is replaced by the notion of a covering family; in the above example, the set of all as i varies is a covering family of U. Sieves and covering families can be axiomatized, and once this is done open sets and pointwise covering can be replaced by other notions that describe other properties of the space X.
Sieves
In a Grothendieck topology, the notion of a collection of open subsets of U stable under inclusion is replaced by the notion of a sieve. If c is any given object in C, a sieve on c is a subfunctor of the functor Hom(−, c); (this is the Yoneda embedding applied to c). In the case of O(X), a sieve S on an open set U selects a collection of open subsets of U that is stable under inclusion. More precisely, consider that for any open subset V of U, S(V) will be a subset of Hom(V, U), which has only one element, the open immersion V → U. Then V will be considered "selected" by S if and only if S(V) is nonempty. If W is a subset of V, then there is a morphism S(V) → S(W) given by composition with the inclusion W → V. If S(V) is non-empty, it follows that S(W) is also non-empty.
If S is a sieve on X, and f: Y → X is a morphism, then left composition by f gives a sieve on Y called the pullback of S along f, denoted by fS. It is defined as the fibered product S ×Hom(−, X) Hom(−, Y) together with its natural embedding in Hom(−, Y). More concretely, for each object Z of C, fS(Z) = { g: Z → Y | fg S(Z) }, and fS inherits its action on morphisms by being a subfunctor of Hom(−, Y). In the classical example, the pullback of a collection {Vi} of subsets of U along an inclusion W → U is the collection {Vi∩W}.
Grothendieck topology
A Grothendieck topology J on a category C is a collection, for each object c of C, of distinguished sieves on c, denoted by J(c) and called covering sieves of c. This selection will be subject to certain axioms, stated below. Continuing the previous example, a sieve S on an open set U in O(X) will be a covering sieve if and only if the union of all the open sets V for which S(V) is nonempty equals U; in other words, if and only if S gives us a collection of open sets that cover U in the classical sense.
Axioms
The conditions we impose on a Grothendieck topology are:
(T 1) (Base change) If S is a covering sieve on X, and f: Y → X is a morphism, then the pullback fS is a covering sieve on Y.
(T 2) (Local character) Let S be a covering sieve on X, and let T be any sieve on X. Suppose that for each object Y of C and each arrow f: Y → X in S(Y), the pullback sieve fT is a covering sieve on Y. Then T is a covering sieve on X.
(T 3) (Identity) Hom(−, X) is a covering sieve on X for any object X in C.
The base change axiom corresponds to the idea that if {Ui} covers U, then {Ui ∩ V} should cover U ∩ V. The local character axiom corresponds to the idea that if {Ui} covers U and {Vij}j Ji covers Ui for each i, then the collection {Vij} for all i and j should cover U. Lastly, the identity axiom corresponds to the idea that any set is covered by itself via the identity map.
Grothendieck pretopologies
In fact, it is possible to put these axioms in another form where their geometric character is more apparent, assuming that the underlying category C contains certain fibered products. In this case, instead of specifying sieves, we can specify that certain collections of maps with a common codomain should cover their codomain. These collections are called covering families. If the collection of all covering families satisfies certain axioms, then we say that they form a Grothendieck pretopology. These axioms are:
(PT 0) (Existence of fibered products) For all objects X of C, and for all morphisms X0 → X that appear in some covering family of X, and for all morphisms Y → X, the fibered product X0 ×X Y exists.
(PT 1) (Stability under base change) For all objects X of C, all morphisms Y → X, and all covering families {Xα → X}, the family {Xα ×X Y → Y} is a covering family.
(PT 2) (Local character) If {Xα → X} is a covering family, and if for all α, {Xβα → Xα} is a covering family, then the family of composites {Xβα → Xα → X} is a covering family.
(PT 3) (Isomorphisms) If f: Y → X is an isomorphism, then {f} is a covering family.
For any pretopology, the collection of all sieves that contain a covering family from the pretopology is always a Grothendieck topology.
For categories with fibered products, there is a converse. Given a collection of arrows {Xα → X}, we construct a sieve S by letting S(Y) be the set of all morphisms Y → X that factor through some arrow Xα → X. This is called the sieve generated by {Xα → X}. Now choose a topology. Say that {Xα → X} is a covering family if and only if the sieve that it generates is a covering sieve for the given topology. It is easy to check that this defines a pretopology.
(PT 3) is sometimes replaced by a weaker axiom:
(PT 3') (Identity) If 1X : X → X is the identity arrow, then {1X} is a covering family.
(PT 3) implies (PT 3'), but not conversely. However, suppose that we have a collection of covering families that satisfies (PT 0) through (PT 2) and (PT 3'), but not (PT 3). These families generate a pretopology. The topology generated by the original collection of covering families is then the same as the topology generated by the pretopology, because the sieve generated by an isomorphism Y → X is Hom(−, X). Consequently, if we restrict our attention to topologies, (PT 3) and (PT 3') are equivalent.
Sites and sheaves
Let C be a category and let J be a Grothendieck topology on C. The pair (C, J) is called a site.
A presheaf on a category is a contravariant functor from C to the category of all sets. Note that for this definition C is not required to have a topology. A sheaf on a site, however, should allow gluing, just like sheaves in classical topology. Consequently, we define a sheaf on a site to be a presheaf F such that for all objects X and all covering sieves S on X, the natural map Hom(Hom(−, X), F) → Hom(S, F), induced by the inclusion of S into Hom(−, X), is a bijection. Halfway in between a presheaf and a sheaf is the notion of a separated presheaf, where the natural map above is required to be only an injection, not a bijection, for all sieves S. A morphism of presheaves or of sheaves is a natural transformation of functors. The category of all sheaves on C is the topos defined by the site (C, J).
Using the Yoneda lemma, it is possible to show that a presheaf on the category O(X) is a sheaf on the topology defined above if and only if it is a sheaf in the classical sense.
Sheaves on a pretopology have a particularly simple description: For each covering family {Xα → X}, the diagram
must be an equalizer. For a separated presheaf, the first arrow need only be injective.
Similarly, one can define presheaves and sheaves of abelian groups, rings, modules, and so on. One can require either that a presheaf F is a contravariant functor to the category of abelian groups (or rings, or modules, etc.), or that F be an abelian group (ring, module, etc.) object in the category of all contravariant functors from C to the category of sets. These two definitions are equivalent.
Examples of sites
The discrete and indiscrete topologies
Let C be any category. To define the discrete topology, we declare all sieves to be covering sieves. If C has all fibered products, this is equivalent to declaring all families to be covering families. To define the indiscrete topology, also known as the coarse or chaotic topology, we declare only the sieves of the form Hom(−, X) to be covering sieves. The indiscrete topology is generated by the pretopology that has only isomorphisms for covering families. A sheaf on the indiscrete site is the same thing as a presheaf.
The canonical topology
Let C be any category. The Yoneda embedding gives a functor Hom(−, X) for each object X of C. The canonical topology is the biggest (finest) topology such that every representable presheaf, i.e. presheaf of the form Hom(−, X), is a sheaf. A covering sieve or covering family for this site is said to be strictly universally epimorphic because it consists of the legs of a colimit cone (under the full diagram on the domains of its constituent morphisms) and these colimits are stable under pullbacks along morphisms in C. A topology that is less fine than the canonical topology, that is, for which every covering sieve is strictly universally epimorphic, is called subcanonical. Subcanonical sites are exactly the sites for which every presheaf of the form Hom(−, X) is a sheaf. Most sites encountered in practice are subcanonical.
Small site associated to a topological space
We repeat the example that we began with above. Let X be a topological space. We defined O(X) to be the category whose objects are the open sets of X and whose morphisms are inclusions of open sets. Note that for an open set U and a sieve S on U, the set S(V) contains either zero or one element for every open set V. The covering sieves on an object U of O(X) are those sieves S satisfying the following condition:
If W is the union of all the sets V such that S(V) is non-empty, then W = U.
This notion of cover matches the usual notion in point-set topology.
This topology can also naturally be expressed as a pretopology. We say that a family of inclusions {Vα U} is a covering family if and only if the union Vα equals U. This site is called the small site associated to a topological space X.
Big site associated to a topological space
Let Spc be the category of all topological spaces. Given any family of functions {uα : Vα → X}, we say that it is a surjective family or that the morphisms uα are jointly surjective if uα(Vα) equals X. We define a pretopology on Spc by taking the covering families to be surjective families all of whose members are open immersions. Let S be a sieve on Spc. S is a covering sieve for this topology if and only if:
For all Y and every morphism f : Y → X in S(Y), there exists a V and a g : V → X such that g is an open immersion, g is in S(V), and f factors through g.
If W is the union of all the sets f(Y), where f : Y → X is in S(Y), then W = X.
Fix a topological space X. Consider the comma category Spc/X of topological spaces with a fixed continuous map to X. The topology on Spc induces a topology on Spc/X. The covering sieves and covering families are almost exactly the same; the only difference is that now all the maps involved commute with the fixed maps to X. This is the big site associated to a topological space X . Notice that Spc is the big site associated to the one point space. This site was first considered by Jean Giraud.
The big and small sites of a manifold
Let M be a manifold. M has a category of open sets O(M) because it is a topological space, and it gets a topology as in the above example. For two open sets U and V of M, the fiber product U ×M V is the open set U ∩ V, which is still in O(M). This means that the topology on O(M) is defined by a pretopology, the same pretopology as before.
Let Mfd be the category of all manifolds and continuous maps. (Or smooth manifolds and smooth maps, or real analytic manifolds and analytic maps, etc.) Mfd is a subcategory of Spc, and open immersions are continuous (or smooth, or analytic, etc.), so Mfd inherits a topology from Spc. This lets us construct the big site of the manifold M as the site Mfd/M. We can also define this topology using the same pretopology we used above. Notice that to satisfy (PT 0), we need to check that for any continuous map of manifolds X → Y and any open subset U of Y, the fibered product U ×Y X is in Mfd/M. This is just the statement that the preimage of an open set is open. Notice, however, that not all fibered products exist in Mfd because the preimage of a smooth map at a critical value need not be a manifold.
Topologies on the category of schemes
The category of schemes, denoted Sch, has a tremendous number of useful topologies. A complete understanding of some questions may require examining a scheme using several different topologies. All of these topologies have associated small and big sites. The big site is formed by taking the entire category of schemes and their morphisms, together with the covering sieves specified by the topology. The small site over a given scheme is formed by only taking the objects and morphisms that are part of a cover of the given scheme.
The most elementary of these is the Zariski topology. Let X be a scheme. X has an underlying topological space, and this topological space determines a Grothendieck topology. The Zariski topology on Sch is generated by the pretopology whose covering families are jointly surjective families of scheme-theoretic open immersions. The covering sieves S for Zar are characterized by the following two properties:
For all Y and every morphism f : Y → X in S(Y), there exists a V and a g : V → X such that g is an open immersion, g is in S(V), and f factors through g.
If W is the union of all the sets f(Y), where f : Y → X is in S(Y), then W = X.
Despite their outward similarities, the topology on Zar is not the restriction of the topology on Spc! This is because there are morphisms of schemes that are topologically open immersions but that are not scheme-theoretic open immersions. For example, let A be a non-reduced ring and let N be its ideal of nilpotents. The quotient map A → A/N induces a map Spec A/N → Spec A, which is the identity on underlying topological spaces. To be a scheme-theoretic open immersion it must also induce an isomorphism on structure sheaves, which this map does not do. In fact, this map is a closed immersion.
The étale topology is finer than the Zariski topology. It was the first Grothendieck topology to be closely studied. Its covering families are jointly surjective families of étale morphisms. It is finer than the Nisnevich topology, but neither finer nor coarser than the cdh and l′ topologies.
There are two flat topologies, the fppf topology and the fpqc topology. fppf stands for , and in this topology, a morphism of affine schemes is a covering morphism if it is faithfully flat, of finite presentation, and is quasi-finite. fpqc stands for , and in this topology, a morphism of affine schemes is a covering morphism if it is faithfully flat. In both categories, a covering family is defined to be a family that is a cover on Zariski open subsets. In the fpqc topology, any faithfully flat and quasi-compact morphism is a cover. These topologies are closely related to descent. The fpqc topology is finer than all the topologies mentioned above, and it is very close to the canonical topology.
Grothendieck introduced crystalline cohomology to study the p-torsion part of the cohomology of characteristic p varieties. In the crystalline topology, which is the basis of this theory, the underlying category has objects given by infinitesimal thickenings together with divided power structures. Crystalline sites are examples of sites with no final object.
Continuous and cocontinuous functors
There are two natural types of functors between sites. They are given by functors that are compatible with the topology in a certain sense.
Continuous functors
If (C, J) and (D, K) are sites and u : C → D is a functor, then u is continuous if for every sheaf F on D with respect to the topology K, the presheaf Fu is a sheaf with respect to the topology J. Continuous functors induce functors between the corresponding topoi by sending a sheaf F to Fu. These functors are called pushforwards. If and denote the topoi associated to C and D, then the pushforward functor is .
us admits a left adjoint us called the pullback. us need not preserve limits, even finite limits.
In the same way, u sends a sieve on an object X of C to a sieve on the object uX of D. A continuous functor sends covering sieves to covering sieves. If J is the topology defined by a pretopology, and if u commutes with fibered products, then u is continuous if and only if it sends covering sieves to covering sieves and if and only if it sends covering families to covering families. In general, it is not sufficient for u to send covering sieves to covering sieves (see SGA IV 3, 1.9.3).
Cocontinuous functors
Again, let (C, J) and (D, K) be sites and v : C → D be a functor. If X is an object of C and R is a sieve on vX, then R can be pulled back to a sieve S as follows: A morphism f : Z → X is in S if and only if v(f) : vZ → vX is in R. This defines a sieve. v is cocontinuous if and only if for every object X of C and every covering sieve R of vX, the pullback S of R is a covering sieve on X.
Composition with v sends a presheaf F on D to a presheaf Fv on C, but if v is cocontinuous, this need not send sheaves to sheaves. However, this functor on presheaf categories, usually denoted , admits a right adjoint . Then v is cocontinuous if and only if sends sheaves to sheaves, that is, if and only if it restricts to a functor . In this case, the composite of with the associated sheaf functor is a left adjoint of v* denoted v*. Furthermore, v* preserves finite limits, so the adjoint functors v* and v* determine a geometric morphism of topoi .
Morphisms of sites
A continuous functor u : C → D is a morphism of sites' D → C (not C → D) if us preserves finite limits. In this case, us and us determine a geometric morphism of topoi . The reasoning behind the convention that a continuous functor C → D is said to determine a morphism of sites in the opposite direction is that this agrees with the intuition coming from the case of topological spaces. A continuous map of topological spaces X → Y determines a continuous functor O(Y) → O(X). Since the original map on topological spaces is said to send X to Y, the morphism of sites is said to as well.
A particular case of this happens when a continuous functor admits a left adjoint. Suppose that u : C → D and v : D → C are functors with u right adjoint to v. Then u is continuous if and only if v is cocontinuous, and when this happens, us is naturally isomorphic to v* and us is naturally isomorphic to v*. In particular, u'' is a morphism of sites.
See also
Fibered category
Lawvere–Tierney topology
Notes
References
External links
The birthday of Grothendieck topologies
The birthday of Grothendieck topologies (non-archived version)
Topos theory
Sheaf theory | [
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12913 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greens | Greens | Greens may refer to:
Leaf vegetables such as collard greens, mustard greens, spring greens, winter greens, spinach, etc.
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Green armies, peasant-based groups participating in the Russian Civil War of 1917–23
Green Movement (disambiguation)
The Greens, an early 20th-century nationalist and separatist political and military movement in Montenegro
Greens, a political faction and associated chariot-racing team in the Byzantine empire; involved in the deadly Nika riots of 532
Places
Greens Farms, Connecticut, United States
Greens Ledge Light on Long Island Sound, United States
Greens Norton village in Northamptonshire, England
Greens Pool beach on the south coast of Western Australia
Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, California, United States
Millennium Greens and Doorstep Greens, locally owned and managed public spaces in England
Breckenridge Greens (Edmonton), Potter Greens, Suder Greens - neighbourhoods in Alberta, Canada
In sport
Ashland Greens basketball team in Pennsylvania, United States
Bentleigh Greens soccer team in a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Baywood Greens public golf club in Long Neck, Delaware, United States
Greens Worldwide sports management company
Greens (golf), the very closely mown areas of a golf course around the holes, maintained by a Greenskeeper
Manufacturing
A British brand of railway locomotives, road rollers and other products; see Thomas Green & Son
See also
Green (disambiguation) | [
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12914 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost%20in%20the%20Shell | Ghost in the Shell | is a Japanese cyberpunk media franchise based on the seinen manga series of the same name written and illustrated by Masamune Shirow. The manga, first serialized in 1989 under the subtitle of The Ghost in the Shell, and later published as its own tankōbon volumes by Kodansha, told the story of the fictional counter-cyberterrorist organization Public Security Section 9, led by protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi, and is set in mid-21st century Japan.
Animation studio Production I.G has produced several anime adaptations of the series. These include the 1995 film of the same name and its sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence; the 2002 television series, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and its 2020 follow-up, Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045; and the Ghost in the Shell: Arise original video animation (OVA) series. In addition, an American-produced live-action film was released on March 31, 2017.
Overview
Title
The original editor Koichi Yuri says: At first, Ghost in the Shell came from Shirow, but when Yuri asked "something more flashy", Shirow came up with "攻殻機動隊 Koukaku Kidou Tai (Shell Squad)" for Yuri. But Shirow was attached to including "Ghost in the Shell" as well even if in smaller type.
Setting
Primarily set in the mid-twenty-first century in the fictional Japanese city of , otherwise known as , the manga and the many anime adaptations follow the members of Public Security Section 9, a task-force consisting of various professionals at solving and preventing crime, mostly with some sort of police background. Political intrigue and counter-terrorism operations are standard fare for Section 9, but the various actions of corrupt officials, companies, and cyber-criminals in each scenario are unique and require the diverse skills of Section 9's staff to prevent a series of incidents from escalating.
In this post-cyberpunk iteration of a possible future, computer technology has advanced to the point that many members of the public possess cyberbrains, technology that allows them to interface their biological brain with various networks. The level of cyberization varies from simple minimal interfaces to almost complete replacement of the brain with cybernetic parts, in cases of severe trauma. This can also be combined with various levels of prostheses, with a fully prosthetic body enabling a person to become a cyborg. The main character of Ghost in the Shell, Major Motoko Kusanagi, is such a cyborg, having had a terrible accident befall her as a child that ultimately required her to use a full-body prosthesis to house her cyberbrain. This high level of cyberization, however, opens the brain up to attacks from highly skilled hackers, with the most dangerous being those who will hack a person to bend to their whims.
Media
Literature
Original manga
The original Ghost in the Shell manga ran in Japan from April 1989 to November 1990 in Kodansha's manga anthology Young Magazine, and was released in a tankōbon volume on October 5, 1991. Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface followed 1997 for 9 issues in Young Magazine, and was collected in the Ghost in the Shell: Solid Box on December 1, 2000. Four stories from Man-Machine Interface that were not released in tankobon format from previous releases were later collected in Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor, and published by Kodansha on July 23, 2003. Several art books have also been published for the manga.
Films
Animated films
Two animated films based on the original manga have been released, both directed by Mamoru Oshii and animated by Production I.G. Ghost in the Shell was released in 1995 and follows the "Puppet Master" storyline from the manga. It was re-released in 2008 as Ghost in the Shell 2.0 with new audio and updated 3D computer graphics in certain scenes. Innocence, otherwise known as Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, was released in 2004, with its story based on a chapter from the first manga.
On September 5, 2014, it was revealed by Production I.G. that a new Ghost in the Shell animated film, in Japanese, would be released in 2015 promising to show the "further evolution [of the series]". On January 8, 2015, a short teaser trailer was revealed for the project unveiling a redesigned Major more closely resembling her appearance from the older films, and a plot following the Arise continuity of the franchise. The trailer listed Kazuya Nomura as the director, Kazuchika Kise as the general director and character designer, Toru Okubo as the animation director, Tow Ubukata as the screenplay writer and Cornelius as the composer. The film premiered on June 20, 2015, in Japanese theaters.
Live-action film
In 2008, DreamWorks and producer Steven Spielberg acquired the rights to a live-action film adaptation of the original Ghost in the Shell manga. On January 24, 2014, Rupert Sanders was announced as director, with a screenplay by William Wheeler. In April 2016, the full cast was announced, which included Juliette Binoche, Chin Han, Lasarus Ratuere and Kaori Momoi, and Scarlett Johansson in the lead role; the casting of Johansson drew accusations of whitewashing. Principal photography on the film began on location in Wellington, New Zealand, on February 1, 2016. Filming wrapped in June 2016. Ghost in the Shell premiered in Tokyo on March 16, 2017, and was released in the United States on March 31, 2017, in 2D, 3D and IMAX 3D. It received mixed reviews, with praise for its visuals and Johansson's performance but criticism for its script and grossing a substantive box office.
Television
Stand Alone Complex TV series, film and ONA
In 2002, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex premiered on Animax, presenting a new telling of Ghost in the Shell independent from the original manga, focusing on Section 9's investigation of the Laughing Man hacker. It was followed in 2004 by a second season titled Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG, which focused on the Individual Eleven terrorist group. The primary storylines of both seasons were compressed into OVAs broadcast as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex The Laughing Man in 2005 and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Individual Eleven in 2006. Also in 2006, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - Solid State Society, featuring Section 9's confrontation with a hacker known as the Puppeteer, was broadcast, serving as a finale to the anime series. The extensive score for the series and its films was composed by Yoko Kanno.
Kodansha and Production I.G announced on April 7, 2017 that Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki would be co-directing a new Kōkaku Kidōtai anime production. On December 7, 2018, it was reported by Netflix that they had acquired the worldwide streaming rights to the original net animation (ONA) anime series, titled Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, and that it would premiere on April 23, 2020. The series will be in 3DCG and Sola Digital Arts will be collaborating with Production I.G on the project. It was later revealed that Ilya Kuvshinov will handle character designs. It was stated that the new series will have two seasons of 12 episodes each. For the first season, the opening theme song music was “Fly with me” as performed by Daiki Tsuneta, while the ending was “Sustain++” as performed by Mili.
In addition to the anime, a series of published books, two separate manga adaptations, and several video games for consoles and mobile phones have been released for Stand Alone Complex.
Arise OVA, TV series and film
In 2013, a new iteration of the series titled Ghost in the Shell: Arise premiered, taking an original look at the Ghost in the Shell world, set before the original manga. It was released as a series of four original video animation (OVA) episodes (with limited theatrical releases) from 2013 to 2014, then recompiled as a 10-episode television series under the title of Kōkaku Kidōtai: Arise - Alternative Architecture. An additional fifth OVA titled Pyrophoric Cult, originally premiering in the Alternative Architecture broadcast as two original episodes, was released on August 26, 2015. Kazuchika Kise served as the chief director of the series, with Tow Ubukata as head writer. Cornelius was brought onto the project to compose the score for the series, with the Major's new voice actress Maaya Sakamoto also providing vocals for certain tracks.
Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie, also known as Ghost in the Shell: Arise − The Movie or New Ghost in the Shell, is a 2015 film directed by Kazuya Nomura that serves as a finale to the Ghost in the Shell: Arise story arc. The film is a continuation to the plot of the Pyrophoric Cult episode of Arise, and ties up loose ends from that arc.
A manga adaptation was serialized in Kodansha's Young Magazine, which started on March 13 and ended on August 26, 2013.
Video games
Ghost in the Shell was developed by Exact and released for the PlayStation on July 17, 1997, in Japan by Sony Computer Entertainment. It is a third-person shooter featuring an original storyline where the character plays a rookie member of Section 9. The video game's soundtrack Megatech Body features various techno artists, such as Takkyu Ishino, Scan X or Mijk Van Dijk.
Several video games were also developed to tie into the Stand Alone Complex television series, in addition to a first-person shooter by Nexon and Neople titled Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - First Assault Online, released in 2016.
Legacy
Ghost in the Shell influenced a number of prominent filmmakers. The Wachowskis, creators of The Matrix and its sequels, showed it to producer Joel Silver, saying, "We wanna do that for real." The Matrix series took several concepts from the film, including the Matrix digital rain, which was inspired by the opening credits of Ghost in the Shell, and the way characters access the Matrix through holes in the back of their necks. Other parallels have been drawn to James Cameron's Avatar, Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates. James Cameron cited Ghost in the Shell as a source of inspiration, citing it as an influence on Avatar.
Bungie's 2001 third-person action game Oni draws substantial inspiration from Ghost in the Shell setting and characters. Ghost in the Shell also influenced video games such as the Metal Gear Solid series, Deus Ex, and Cyberpunk 2077.
Notes
References
External links
Madman Entertainment's Australian distribution release site
Artificial intelligence in fiction
Bandai Namco franchises
Brain–computer interfacing in fiction
Cybernetted society in fiction
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk anime and manga
Cyborgs in fiction
Fiction about consciousness transfer
Fiction about memory erasure and alteration
IG Port franchises
Kodansha franchises
Post-apocalyptic fiction
Postcyberpunk
Prosthetics in fiction
Fiction about robots
Transhumanism
Transhumanism in fiction | [
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12916 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Legendre%20algorithm | Gauss–Legendre algorithm | The Gauss–Legendre algorithm is an algorithm to compute the digits of . It is notable for being rapidly convergent, with only 25 iterations producing 45 million correct digits of . However, the drawback is that it is computer memory-intensive and therefore sometimes Machin-like formulas are used instead.
The method is based on the individual work of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) and Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752–1833) combined with modern algorithms for multiplication and square roots. It repeatedly replaces two numbers by their arithmetic and geometric mean, in order to approximate their arithmetic-geometric mean.
The version presented below is also known as the Gauss–Euler, Brent–Salamin (or Salamin–Brent) algorithm; it was independently discovered in 1975 by Richard Brent and Eugene Salamin. It was used to compute the first 206,158,430,000 decimal digits of on September 18 to 20, 1999, and the results were checked with Borwein's algorithm.
Algorithm
Initial value setting:
Repeat the following instructions until the difference of and is within the desired accuracy:
is then approximated as:
The first three iterations give (approximations given up to and including the first incorrect digit):
The algorithm has quadratic convergence, which essentially means that the number of correct digits doubles with each iteration of the algorithm.
Mathematical background
Limits of the arithmetic–geometric mean
The arithmetic–geometric mean of two numbers, a0 and b0, is found by calculating the limit of the sequences
which both converge to the same limit.
If and then the limit is where is the complete elliptic integral of the first kind
If , , then
where is the complete elliptic integral of the second kind:
and
Gauss knew of both of these results.
Legendre’s identity
For and such that Legendre proved the identity:
Equivalently,
Elementary proof with integral calculus
The Gauss-Legendre algorithm can be proven using only integral calculus. This is done here and here.
See also
Numerical approximations of
References
Pi algorithms | [
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12917 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great%20Internet%20Mersenne%20Prime%20Search | Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search | The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) is a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software to search for Mersenne prime numbers.
GIMPS was founded in 1996 by George Woltman, who also wrote the Prime95 client and its Linux port MPrime. Scott Kurowski wrote the back end PrimeNet server to demonstrate distributed computing software by Entropia, a company he founded in 1997. GIMPS is registered as Mersenne Research, Inc. with Kurowski as Executive Vice President and board director. GIMPS is said to be one of the first large scale distributed computing projects over the Internet for research purposes.
, the project has found a total of seventeen Mersenne primes, fifteen of which were the largest known prime number at their respective times of discovery. The largest known prime is 282,589,933 − 1 (or M82,589,933 for short) and was discovered on December 7, 2018, by Patrick Laroche. On December 4, 2020, the project passed a major milestone after all exponents below 100 million were checked at least once.
The project relies primarily on the Lucas–Lehmer primality test as it is an algorithm that is both specialized for testing Mersenne primes and particularly efficient on binary computer architectures. There is also a trial division phase, used to rapidly eliminate many Mersenne numbers with small factors. Pollard's p − 1 algorithm is also used to search for smooth factors. In 2017, GIMPS adopted the Fermat primality test as an alternative option for primality testing. In September 2020, GIMPS has started using PRP proofs, which together with the very reliable error-check, devised by Robert Gerbicz, provide a complete confidence in the correctness of the test result, and thus eliminating the need for double checks.
History
The project began in early January 1996, with a program that ran on i386 computers.
The name for the project was coined by Luke Welsh, one of its earlier searchers and the co-discoverer of the 29th Mersenne prime.
Within a few months, several dozen people had joined, and over a thousand by the end of the first year.
Joel Armengaud, a participant, discovered the primality of M1,398,269 on November 13, 1996.
Status
, GIMPS has a sustained average aggregate throughput of approximately 1.21 PetaFLOPS (or PFLOPS). In November 2012, GIMPS maintained 95 TFLOPS, theoretically earning the GIMPS virtual computer a rank of 330 among the TOP500 most powerful known computer systems in the world. The preceding place was then held by an 'HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c G7' of Hewlett-Packard. As of July 2021 TOP500 results, the current GIMPS numbers would no longer make the list.
Previously, this was approximately 50 TFLOPS in early 2010, 30 TFLOPS in mid-2008, 20 TFLOPS in mid-2006, and 14 TFLOPS in early 2004.
Software license
Although the GIMPS software's source code is publicly available, technically it is not free software, since it has a restriction that users must abide by the project's distribution terms.
Specifically, if the software is used to discover a prime number with at least 100,000,000 decimal digits, the user will only win $50,000 of the $150,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Third-party programs for testing Mersenne numbers, such as Mlucas and Glucas (for non-x86 systems), do not have this restriction.
GIMPS also "reserves the right to change this EULA without notice and with reasonable retroactive effect."
Primes found
All Mersenne primes are of the form , where p is a prime number itself. The smallest Mersenne prime in this table is
The first column is the rank of the Mersenne prime in the (ordered) sequence of all Mersenne primes; GIMPS has found all known Mersenne primes beginning with the 35th.
, 59,593,393 is the largest exponent below which all other prime exponents have been checked twice, so it is not verified whether any undiscovered Mersenne primes exist between the 48th (M57885161) and the 51st (M82589933) on this chart; the ranking is therefore provisional. Furthermore, 107,148,487 is the largest exponent below which all other prime exponents have been tested at least once, so all Mersenne numbers below the 51st (M82589933) have been tested.
The number M82589933 has 24,862,048 decimal digits. To help visualize the size of this number, if it were to be saved to disk, the resulting text file would be nearly 25 megabytes long (most books in plain text format clock in under two megabytes). A standard word processor layout (50 lines per page, 75 digits per line) would require 6,629 pages to display it. If one were to print it out using standard printer paper, single-sided, it would require approximately 14 reams of paper.
Whenever a possible prime is reported to the server, it is verified first (by one or more independent tests on different machines) before being announced. The importance of this was illustrated in 2003, when a false positive was reported to the server as being a Mersenne prime but verification failed.
The official "discovery date" of a prime is the date that a human first noticed the result for the prime, which may differ from the date that the result was first reported to the server. For example, M74207281 was reported to the server on September 17, 2015, but the report was overlooked until January 7, 2016.
See also
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
List of distributed computing projects
PrimeGrid
References
External links
GIMPS visualization
GIMPS Forum
Distributed prime searches
Internet properties established in 1996
1996 establishments in the United States
Social information processing
Mersenne primes
Mathematics websites | [
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12919 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game.com | Game.com | The Game.com is a fifth-generation handheld game console released by Tiger Electronics on September 12, 1997. A smaller version, the Game.com Pocket Pro, was released in mid-1999. The first version of the Game.com can be connected to a 14.4 kbit/s modem for Internet connectivity, hence its name referencing the top level domain .com. It was the first video game console to include a touchscreen and the first handheld console to include Internet connectivity. The Game.com sold fewer than 300,000 units and was discontinued in 2000 because of poor sales.
History
Tiger Electronics had previously introduced its R-Zone game console in 1995 – as a competitor to Nintendo's Virtual Boy – but the system was a failure. Prior to the R-Zone, Tiger had also manufactured handheld games consisting of LCD screens with imprinted graphics.
Original version
By February 1997, Tiger was planning to release a new game console, the handheld "game.com", as a direct competitor to Nintendo's portable Game Boy console. Prior to its release, Tiger Electronics stated that the Game.com would "change the gaming world as we know it," while a spokesperson stated that it would be "one of this summer's hits." The Game.com, the only new game console of the year, was on display at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in May 1997, with sales expected to begin in July. Dennis Lynch of the Chicago Tribune considered the Game.com to be the "most interesting hand-held device" on display at E3, describing it as a "sort of Game Boy for adults".
The Game.com was released in the United States on September 12, 1997, with a retail price of $69.95, while an Internet-access cartridge was scheduled for release in October. Lights Out was included with the console as a pack-in game and Solitaire was built into the handheld itself. The console's release marked Tiger's largest product launch ever. Tiger also launched a website for the system at the domain "game.com". The Game.com was marketed with a television commercial in which a spokesperson insults gamers who ask questions about the console, while stating that it "plays more games than you idiots have brain cells"; GamesRadar stated that the advertisement "probably didn't help matters much". By the end of 1997, the console had been released in the United Kingdom, at a retail price of £79.99.
The Game.com came in a black-and-white color, and featured a design similar to Sega's Game Gear console. The screen is larger than the Game Boy's and has higher resolution. The Game.com included a phone directory, a calculator, and a calendar, and had an older target audience with its PDA features. Tiger designed the console's features to be simple and cheap. The device was powered by four AA batteries, and an optional AC adapter was also available. One of the major peripherals that Tiger produced for the system was the compete.com serial cable, allowing players to connect their consoles to play multiplayer games. The console includes two game cartridge slots. In addition to reducing the need to swap out cartridges, this enabled Game.com games to include online elements, since both a game cartridge and the modem cartridge could be inserted at the same time.
The Game.com was the first video game console to feature a touchscreen and also the first handheld video game console to have Internet connectivity. The Game.com's black-and-white monochrome touchscreen measures approximately one and a half inches by two inches, and is divided into square zones that are imprinted onto the screen itself, to aid players in determining where to apply the stylus. The touchscreen lacks a backlight. The Game.com was also the first handheld gaming console to have internal memory, which is used to save information such as high scores and contact information.
Game.com Pocket Pro
Because of poor sales with the original Game.com, Tiger developed an updated version known as the Game.com Pocket Pro.. The console was shown at the American International Toy Fair in February 1999, and was later shown along with several future games at E3 in May 1999. The Game.com Pocket Pro had been released by June 1999, with a retail price of $29.99. The new console was available in five different colors: green, orange, pink, purple, and teal.
Although it lacked color like its predecessor, the Pocket Pro was reduced in size to be equivalent to the Game Boy Pocket. The screen size was also reduced, and the new console featured only one cartridge slot. Unlike the original Game.com, the Pocket Pro required only two AA batteries. The Game.com Pocket Pro included a phone directory, a calendar and a calculator, but lacked Internet capabilities.
The Game.com Pocket Pro's primary competitor was the Game Boy Color. Despite several games based on popular franchises, the Game.com console line failed to sell in large numbers, and was discontinued in 2000 because of poor sales. The Game.com was a commercial failure, with less than 300,000 units sold, although the idea of a touchscreen would later be used successfully in the Nintendo DS, released in 2004.
Internet features
Accessing the Internet required the use of an Internet cartridge and a dial-up modem, neither of which were included with the console. Email messages could be read and sent on the Game.com using the Internet cartridge, and the Game.com supported text-only web browsing through Internet service providers. Email messages could not be saved to the Game.com's internal memory. In addition to a Game.com-branded 14.4 kbit/s modem, Tiger also offered an Internet service provider through Delphi that was made to work specifically with the Game.com.
Tiger subsequently released the Web Link cartridge, allowing players to connect their system to a desktop computer. Using the Web Link cartridge, players could upload their high scores to the Game.com website for a chance to be listed on a webpage featuring the top high scores. None of the console's games made use of the Internet feature.
Technical specifications
Games
Several games were available for the Game.com at the time of its 1997 launch, in comparison to hundreds of games available for the Game Boy. Tiger planned to have a dozen games available by the end of 1997, and hoped to have as many as 50 games available in 1998, with all of them to be produced or adapted internally by Tiger. Some third parties expressed interest in developing for the system, but Tiger decided against signing any initially. Tiger secured licenses for several popular game series, including Duke Nukem, Resident Evil, and Mortal Kombat Trilogy. Game prices initially ranged between $19 and $29. Cartridge size was in the 16 megabit range.
At the time of the Pocket Pro's 1999 release, the Game.com library consisted primarily of games intended for an older audience. Some games that were planned for release in 1999 would be exclusive to Game.com consoles. Game prices at that time ranged from $14 to $30. Twenty games were ultimately released for the Game.com, most of them developed internally by Tiger, in addition to the built-in game Solitaire.
Solitaire (Built in)
Batman & Robin
Centipede
Duke Nukem 3D
Fighters Megamix
Frogger
Henry
Indy 500
Jeopardy!
Lights Out (Pack in)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Monopoly
Mortal Kombat Trilogy
Quiz Wiz: Cyber Trivia
Resident Evil 2
Scrabble
Sonic Jam
Tiger Casino
Wheel of Fortune
Wheel of Fortune 2
Williams Arcade Classics
Cancelled games
The following is a list of games that were announced in various forms or known to be in development for the console but were never released.
A Bug’s Life
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Deer Hunter
Holyfield Champion Boxing (planned to include “Real Feel” force feedback in cart)
Furbyland
Giga Pets Deluxe
Godzilla
The Legend of the Lost Creator
Madden 98
Metal Gear Solid
Mutoids
Name That Tune
Nascar Racing
NBA Hangtime
Shadow Madness
Sonic 3D Blast
Small Soldiers
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter
WCW Whiplash
Reception
At the time of the Game.com's launch in 1997, Chris Johnston of VideoGameSpot believed that the console would have difficulty competing against the Game Boy. Johnston also believed that text-based Internet and email would attract only limited appeal, stating that such features were outdated. Johnston concluded that the Game.com "is a decent system, but Nintendo is just way too powerful in the industry." Chip and Jonathan Carter wrote that the console did not play action games as well as it did with other games, although they praised the console's various options and wrote, "Graphically, we'd have to say this has the potential to perform better than Game Boy. As for sound, Game.com delivers better than any other hand-held on the market." A team of four Electronic Gaming Monthly editors gave the Game.com scores of 5.5, 4.5, 5.0, and 4.0. They were impressed by the PDA features and touchscreen, but commented that the games library had thus far failed to deliver on the Game.com's great potential. They elaborated that while the non-scrolling games, particularly Wheel of Fortune, were great fun and made good use of the touchscreen, the more conventional action games were disappointing and suffered from prominent screen blurring.
Wisconsin State Journal stated that the Game.com offered "some serious" advantages over the Game Boy, including its touchscreen. It was also stated that in comparison to the Game Boy, the Game.com's 8-bit processor provided "marginal improvements" in the quality of speed and graphics. The newspaper noted that the Game.com had a "tiny, somewhat blurry screen." The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a negative review of the Game.com, particularly criticizing Internet connectivity issues. Also criticized was the system's lack of a backlit screen, as the use of exterior lighting could cause difficulty in viewing the screen, which was highly reflective.
Steven L. Kent, writing for the Chicago Tribune, wrote that the console had an elegant design, as well as better sound and a higher-definition screen than the Game Boy: "Elegant design, however, has not translated into ideal game play. Though Tiger has produced fighting, racing and shooting games for Game.com, the games have noticeably slow frame rates. The racing game looks like a flickering silent picture show." Cameron Davis of VideoGames.com wrote, "Sure, this is no Game Boy Color-killer, but the Game.Com was never meant to be. To deride it by comparing it with more powerful and established formats would be a bit unfair". Davis also wrote, "The touch screen is pretty sensitive, but it works well - you won't need more than a few seconds to get used to it." However, he criticized the screen's squared zones: "more often than not it proves distracting when you are playing games that don't require it."
GamePro criticized the Pocket Pro's lack of screen color and its difficult controls, but considered its two best qualities to be its cheap price and a game library of titles exclusive to the console. The Philadelphia Inquirer also criticized the Pocket Pro's lack of a color screen, as well as "frustrating" gameplay caused by the "unresponsive" controls, including the stylus. The newspaper stated that, "Even at $29.99, the pocket.pro is no bargain."
Legacy
Brett Alan Weiss of the website AllGame wrote, "The Game.com, the little system that (almost) could, constantly amazes me with the strength and scope of its sound effects. [...] It's astounding what power comes out of such a tiny little speaker." In 2004, Kent included the modem and "some PDA functionality" as the console's strengths, while listing its "Slow processor" and "lackluster library of games" as weaknesses. In 2006, Engadget stated that "You can't fault Tiger Electronics for their ambition," but wrote that the Game.com "didn't do any one thing particularly well", criticizing its text-only Internet access and stating that its "disappointing games were made even worse" by the "outdated" screen.
In 2009, PC World ranked the Game.com at number nine on its list of the 10 worst video game systems ever released, criticizing its Internet aspect, its game library, its low-resolution touchscreen, and its "Silly name that attempted to capitalize on Internet mania." However, PC World positively noted its "primitive" PDA features and its solitaire game, considered by the magazine to be the system's best game. In 2011, Mikel Reparaz of GamesRadar ranked the Game.com at number 3 on a list of 7 failed handheld consoles, writing that while the Game.com had several licensed games, it "doesn't actually mean much when they all look like cruddy, poorly animated Game Boy ports." Raparaz also stated that the Game.com "looked dated even by Game Boy standards," noting that the Game Boy Pocket had a sharper display screen. Reparaz stated that the Game.com's continuation into 2000 was a "pretty significant achievement" considering its competition from the Game Boy Color.
In 2013, Jeff Dunn of GamesRadar criticized the Game.com for its "blurry" and "imprecise" touchscreen, as well as its "limited and unwieldy" Internet and email interfaces. Dunn also criticized the "painful" Internet setup process, and stated that all of the console's available games were "ugly and horrible." Dunn noted, however, that the Game.com's Internet aspect was a "smart" feature. In 2016, Motherboard stated that the Game.com was "perhaps one of the worst consoles of all time," due largely to its low screen quality. In 2018, Nadia Oxford of USgamer noted the Game.com's "paper-thin" library of games and stated that the console "died in record time because it was poorly-made, to say the least."
Notes
References
External links
Game.com official website (archive)
The end of the game.com
Products introduced in 1997
Fifth-generation video game consoles
Handheld game consoles
Monochrome video game consoles
1990s toys | [
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12920 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General%20Packet%20Radio%20Service | General Packet Radio Service | General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a packet oriented mobile data standard on the 2G and 3G cellular communication network's global system for mobile communications (GSM). GPRS was established by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in response to the earlier CDPD and i-mode packet-switched cellular technologies. It is now maintained by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).
GPRS is typically sold according to the total volume of data transferred during the billing cycle, in contrast with circuit switched data, which is usually billed per minute of connection time, or sometimes by one-third minute increments. Usage above the GPRS bundled data cap may be charged per MB of data, speed limited, or disallowed.
GPRS is a best-effort service, implying variable throughput and latency that depend on the number of other users sharing the service concurrently, as opposed to circuit switching, where a certain quality of service (QoS) is guaranteed during the connection. In 2G systems, GPRS provides data rates of 56–114 kbit/sec. 2G cellular technology combined with GPRS is sometimes described as 2.5G, that is, a technology between the second (2G) and third (3G) generations of mobile telephony. It provides moderate-speed data transfer, by using unused time-division multiple access (TDMA) channels in, for example, the GSM system. GPRS is integrated into GSM Release 97 and newer releases.
Technical overview
The GPRS core network allows 2G, 3G and WCDMA mobile networks to transmit IP packets to external networks such as the Internet. The GPRS system is an integrated part of the GSM network switching subsystem.
Services offered
GPRS extends the GSM Packet circuit switched data capabilities and makes the following services possible:
SMS messaging and broadcasting
"Always on" internet access
Multimedia messaging service (MMS)
Push-to-talk over cellular (PoC)
Instant messaging and presence—wireless village
Internet applications for smart devices through wireless application protocol (WAP)
Point-to-point (P2P) service: inter-networking with the Internet (IP)
Point-to-multipoint (P2M) service: point-to-multipoint multicast and point-to-multipoint group calls
If SMS over GPRS is used, an SMS transmission speed of about 30 SMS messages per minute may be achieved. This is much faster than using the ordinary SMS over GSM, whose SMS transmission speed is about 6 to 10 SMS messages per minute.
Protocols supported
GPRS supports the following protocols:
Internet Protocol (IP). In practice, built-in mobile browsers use IPv4 before IPv6 is widespread.
Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) is typically not supported by mobile phone operators but if a cellular phone is used as a modem for a connected computer, PPP may be used to tunnel IP to the phone. This allows an IP address to be dynamically assigned (using IPCP rather than DHCP) to the mobile equipment.
X.25 connections are typically used for applications like wireless payment terminals, although it has been removed from the standard. X.25 can still be supported over PPP, or even over IP, but this requires either a network-based router to perform encapsulation or software built into the end-device/terminal; e.g., user equipment (UE).
When TCP/IP is used, each phone can have one or more IP addresses allocated. GPRS will store and forward the IP packets to the phone even during handover. The TCP restores any packets lost (e.g. due to a radio noise induced pause).
Hardware
Devices supporting GPRS are grouped into three classes:
Class A Can be connected to GPRS service and GSM service (voice, SMS) simultaneously. Such devices are now available.
Class B Can be connected to GPRS service and GSM service (voice, SMS), but using only one at a time. During GSM service (voice call or SMS), GPRS service is suspended and resumed automatically after the GSM service (voice call or SMS) has concluded. Most GPRS mobile devices are Class B.
Class C Are connected to either GPRS service or GSM service (voice, SMS) and must be switched manually between one service and the other.
Because a Class A device must service GPRS and GSM networks together, it effectively needs two radios. To avoid this hardware requirement, a GPRS mobile device may implement the dual transfer mode (DTM) feature. A DTM-capable mobile can handle both GSM packets and GPRS packets with network coordination to ensure both types are not transmitted at the same time. Such devices are considered pseudo-Class A, sometimes referred to as "simple class A". Some networks have supported DTM since 2007.
USB 3G/GPRS modems have a terminal-like interface over USB with V.42bis, and data formats. Some models include an external antenna connector. Modem cards for laptop PCs, or external USB modems are available, similar in shape and size to a computer mouse, or a pendrive.
Addressing
A GPRS connection is established by reference to its access point name (APN). The APN defines the services such as wireless application protocol (WAP)
access, short message service (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), and for Internet communication services such as email and World Wide Web access.
In order to set up a GPRS connection for a wireless modem, a user must specify an APN, optionally a user name and password, and very rarely an IP address, provided by the network operator.
GPRS modems and modules
GSM module or GPRS modules are similar to modems, but there's one difference: the modem is an external piece of equipment, whereas the GSM module or GPRS module can be integrated within an electrical or electronic equipment. It is an embedded piece of hardware. A GSM mobile, on the other hand, is a complete embedded system in itself. It comes with embedded processors dedicated to provide a functional interface between the user and the mobile network.
Coding schemes and speeds
The upload and download speeds that can be achieved in GPRS depend on a number of factors such as:
the number of BTS TDMA time slots assigned by the operator
the channel encoding used.
the maximum capability of the mobile device expressed as a GPRS multislot class
Multiple access schemes
The multiple access methods used in GSM with GPRS are based on frequency-division duplex (FDD) and TDMA. During a session, a user is assigned to one pair of up-link and down-link frequency channels. This is combined with time domain statistical multiplexing which makes it possible for several users to share the same frequency channel. The packets have constant length, corresponding to a GSM time slot. The down-link uses first-come first-served packet scheduling, while the up-link uses a scheme very similar to reservation ALOHA (R-ALOHA). This means that slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA) is used for reservation inquiries during a contention phase, and then the actual data is transferred using dynamic TDMA with first-come first-served.
Channel encoding
The channel encoding process in GPRS consists of two steps: first, a cyclic code is used to add parity bits, which are also referred to as the Block Check Sequence, followed by coding with a possibly punctured convolutional code. The Coding Schemes CS-1 to CS-4 specify the number of parity bits generated by the cyclic code and the puncturing rate of the convolutional code. In Coding Schemes CS-1 through CS-3, the convolutional code is of rate 1/2, i.e. each input bit is converted into two coded bits. In Coding Schemes CS-2 and CS-3, the output of the convolutional code is punctured to achieve the desired code rate. In Coding Scheme CS-4, no convolutional coding is applied. The following table summarises the options.
The least robust, but fastest, coding scheme (CS-4) is available near a base transceiver station (BTS), while the most robust coding scheme (CS-1) is used when the mobile station (MS) is further away from a BTS.
Using the CS-4 it is possible to achieve a user speed of 20.0 kbit/s per time slot. However, using this scheme the cell coverage is 25% of normal. CS-1 can achieve a user speed of only 8.0 kbit/s per time slot, but has 98% of normal coverage. Newer network equipment can adapt the transfer speed automatically depending on the mobile location.
In addition to GPRS, there are two other GSM technologies which deliver data services: circuit-switched data (CSD) and high-speed circuit-switched data (HSCSD). In contrast to the shared nature of GPRS, these instead establish a dedicated circuit (usually billed per minute). Some applications such as video calling may prefer HSCSD, especially when there is a continuous flow of data between the endpoints.
The following table summarises some possible configurations of GPRS and circuit switched data services.
{| class="wikitable" align=center
! Technology
! Download (kbit/s)
! Upload (kbit/s)
! TDMA timeslots allocated (DL+UL)
|- style="text-align:center;"
| CSD
| 9.6
| 9.6
| 1+1
|- style="text-align:center;"
| HSCSD
| 28.8
| 14.4
| 2+1
|- style="text-align:center;"
| HSCSD
| 43.2
| 14.4
| 3+1
|- style="text-align:center;"
| GPRS
| 85.6
| 21.4 (Class 8 & 10 and CS-4)
| 4+1
|- style="text-align:center;"
| GPRS
| 64.2
| 42.8 (Class 10 and CS-4)
| 3+2
|- style="text-align:center;"
| EGPRS (EDGE)
| 236.8
| 59.2 (Class 8, 10 and MCS-9)
| 4+1
|- style="text-align:center;"
| EGPRS (EDGE)
| 177.6
| 118.4 (Class 10 and MCS-9)
| 3+2
|}
Multislot Class
The multislot class determines the speed of data transfer available in the Uplink and Downlink directions. It is a value between 1 and 45 which the network uses to allocate radio channels in the uplink and downlink direction. Multislot class with values greater than 31 are referred to as high multislot classes.
A multislot allocation is represented as, for example, 5+2. The first number is the number of downlink timeslots and the second is the number of uplink timeslots allocated for use by the mobile station. A commonly used value is class 10 for many GPRS/EGPRS mobiles which uses a maximum of 4 timeslots in downlink direction and 2 timeslots in uplink direction. However simultaneously a maximum number of 5 simultaneous timeslots can be used in both uplink and downlink. The network will automatically configure for either 3+2 or 4+1 operation depending on the nature of data transfer.
Some high end mobiles, usually also supporting UMTS, also support GPRS/EDGE multislot class 32. According to 3GPP TS 45.002 (Release 12), Table B.1, mobile stations of this class support 5 timeslots in downlink and 3 timeslots in uplink with a maximum number of 6 simultaneously used timeslots. If data traffic is concentrated in downlink direction the network will configure the connection for 5+1 operation. When more data is transferred in the uplink the network can at any time change the constellation to 4+2 or 3+3. Under the best reception conditions, i.e. when the best EDGE modulation and coding scheme can be used, 5 timeslots can carry a bandwidth of 5*59.2 kbit/s = 296 kbit/s. In uplink direction, 3 timeslots can carry a bandwidth of 3*59.2 kbit/s = 177.6 kbit/s.
Multislot Classes for GPRS/EGPRS
{| class="wikitable"
! Multislot Class
! Downlink TS
! Uplink TS
! Active TS
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 1
| 1
| 1
| 2
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 2
| 2
| 1
| 3
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 3
| 2
| 2
| 3
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 4
| 3
| 1
| 4
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 5
| 2
| 2
| 4
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 6
| 3
| 2
| 4
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 7
| 3
| 3
| 4
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 8
| 4
| 1
| 5
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 9
| 3
| 2
| 5
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 10
| 4
| 2
| 5
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 11
| 4
| 3
| 5
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 12
| 4
| 4
| 5
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 30
| 5
| 1
| 6
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 31
| 5
| 2
| 6
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 32
| 5
| 3
| 6
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 33
| 5
| 4
| 6
|- style="text-align:center;"
| 34
| 5
| 5
| 6
|}
Attributes of a multislot class
Each multislot class identifies the following:
the maximum number of Timeslots that can be allocated on uplink
the maximum number of Timeslots that can be allocated on downlink
the total number of timeslots which can be allocated by the network to the mobile
the time needed for the MS to perform adjacent cell signal level measurement and get ready to transmit
the time needed for the MS to get ready to transmit
the time needed for the MS to perform adjacent cell signal level measurement and get ready to receive
the time needed for the MS to get ready to receive.
The different multislot class specification is detailed in the Annex B of the 3GPP Technical Specification 45.002 (Multiplexing and multiple access on the radio path)
Usability
The maximum speed of a GPRS connection offered in 2003 was similar to a modem connection in an analog wire telephone network, about 32–40 kbit/s, depending on the phone used. Latency is very high; round-trip time (RTT) is typically about 600–700 ms and often reaches 1s. GPRS is typically prioritized lower than speech, and thus the quality of connection varies greatly.
Devices with latency/RTT improvements (via, for example, the extended UL TBF mode feature) are generally available. Also, network upgrades of features are available with certain operators. With these enhancements the active round-trip time can be reduced, resulting in significant increase in application-level throughput speeds.
History of GPRS
GPRS opened in 2000 as a packet-switched data service embedded in the channel-switched cellular radio network GSM. GPRS extends the reach of the fixed Internet by connecting mobile terminals worldwide.
The CELLPAC protocol developed 1991–1993 was the trigger point for starting in 1993 the specification of standard GPRS by ETSI SMG. Especially, the CELLPAC Voice & Data functions introduced in a 1993 ETSI Workshop contribution anticipate what was later known to be the roots of GPRS. This workshop contribution is referenced in 22 GPRS related US patents. Successor systems to GSM/GPRS like W-CDMA (UMTS) and LTE rely on key GPRS functions for mobile Internet access as introduced by CELLPAC.
According to a study on history of GPRS development, Bernhard Walke and his student Peter Decker are the inventors of GPRS – the first system providing worldwide mobile Internet access.
See also
Code-division multiple access (CDMA)
Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE)
GPRS core network
High Speed Packet Access (HSDPA)
IP Multimedia Subsystem
List of device bit rates
Sub-network dependent convergence protocol (SNDCP)
UMTS
References
External links
3GPP AT command set for user equipment (UE)
Free GPRS resources
GSM World, the trade association for GSM and GPRS network operators.
Palowireless GPRS resource center
GPRS attach and PDP context activation sequence diagram
3GPP standards
Link protocols
Telecommunications-related introductions in 1997
ja:GSM#GPRS | [
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12922 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosis | Gnosis | Gnosis is the common Greek noun for knowledge (γνῶσις, gnōsis, f.). The term was used among various Hellenistic religions and philosophies in the Greco-Roman world. It is best known for its implication within Gnosticism, where it signifies a spiritual knowledge or insight into humanity's real nature as divine, leading to the deliverance of the divine spark within humanity from the constraints of earthly existence.
Etymology
Gnosis is a feminine Greek noun which means "knowledge" or "awareness." It is often used for personal knowledge compared with intellectual knowledge (εἴδειν eídein), as with the French connaître compared with savoir, the Spanish conocer compared with saber, the Italian conoscere compared with sapere, the German kennen rather than wissen, or the Modern Greek γνωρίζω compared with ξέρω.
A related term is the adjective gnostikos, "cognitive", a reasonably common adjective in Classical Greek. The terms do not appear to indicate any mystic, esoteric or hidden meaning in the works of Plato, but instead expressed a sort of higher intelligence and ability analogous to talent.
In the Hellenistic era the term became associated with the mystery cults.
In the Acts of Thomas, translated by G.R.S. Mead, the "motions of gnosis" are also referred to as "kingly motions".
Irenaeus used the phrase "knowledge falsely so-called" (, from 1 Timothy 6:20) for the title of his book On the Detection and Overthrow of False Knowledge, that contains the adjective gnostikos, which is the source for the 17th-century English term "Gnosticism".
Comparison with epignosis
The difference and meaning of epignosis () contrasted with gnosis is disputed. One proposed distinction is between the abstract or fragmented knowledge (gnosis) and a clearer or more precise knowledge (epignosis). Other interpretations have suggested that 2 Peter is referring to an "epignosis of Jesus Christ", what J.B. Lightfoot described as a "larger and more thorough knowledge". Conversion to Christianity is seen as evidence of the deeper knowledge protecting against false doctrine.
Gnosticism
Gnosticism originated in the late 1st century CE in non-rabbinical Jewish and early Christian sects. In the formation of Christianity, various sectarian groups, labeled "gnostics" by their opponents, emphasised spiritual knowledge (gnosis) of the divine spark within, over faith (pistis) in the teachings and traditions of the various communities of Christians. Gnosticism presents a distinction between the highest, unknowable God, and the Demiurge, "creator" of the material universe. The Gnostics considered the most essential part of the process of salvation to be this personal knowledge, in contrast to faith as an outlook in their worldview along with faith in the ecclesiastical authority.
In Gnosticism, the biblical serpent in the Garden of Eden was praised and thanked for bringing knowledge (gnosis) to Adam and Eve and thereby freeing them from the malevolent Demiurge's control. Gnostic Christian doctrines rely on a dualistic cosmology that implies the eternal conflict between good and evil, and a conception of the serpent as the liberating savior and bestower of knowledge to humankind opposed to the Demiurge or creator god, identified with the Hebrew God of the Old Testament. Gnostic Christians considered the Hebrew God of the Old Testament as the evil, false god and creator of the material universe, and the Unknown God of the Gospel, the father of Jesus Christ and creator of the spiritual world, as the true, good God. However, not all Gnostic movements regarded the creator of the material universe as inherently evil or malevolent. For instance, Valentinians believed that the Demiurge is merely an ignorant and incompetent creator, trying to fashion the world as good as he can, but lacking the proper power to maintain its goodness. All Gnostics were regarded as heretics by the proto-orthodox Early Church Fathers.
Mandaeism
In Mandaeism, the concept of manda ("knowledge", "wisdom", "intellect") is roughly equivalent to the Gnostic concept of gnosis. Mandaeism ('having knowledge') is the only surviving Gnostic religion from antiquity. Mandaeans formally refer to themselves as Nasurai (Nasoraeans) meaning guardians or possessors of secret rites and knowledge. The Mandaeans emphasize salvation of the soul through secret knowledge (gnosis) of its divine origin. Mandaeism "provides knowledge of whence we have come and whither we are going."
Judeo-Christian usage
Hellenistic Jewish literature
The Greek word gnosis (knowledge) is used as a standard translation of the Hebrew word "knowledge" ( ) in the Septuagint, thus:
Philo also refers to the "knowledge" (gnosis) and "wisdom" (sophia) of God.
Patristic literature
The Church Fathers used the word gnosis (knowledge) to mean spiritual knowledge or specific knowledge of the divine. This positive usage was to contrast it with how gnostic sectarians used the word. Cardiognosis ("knowledge of the heart") from Eastern Christianity related to the tradition of the starets and in Roman Catholic theology is the view that only God knows the condition of one's relationship with God.
Eastern Orthodox thought
Gnosis in Orthodox Christian (primarily Eastern Orthodox) thought is the spiritual knowledge of a saint (one who has obtained theosis) or mystically enlightened human being. Within the cultures of the term's provenance (Byzantine and Hellenic) Gnosis was a knowledge or insight into the infinite, divine and uncreated in all and above all, rather than knowledge strictly into the finite, natural or material world. Gnosis is transcendental as well as mature understanding. It indicates direct spiritual, experiential knowledge and intuitive knowledge, mystic rather than that from rational or reasoned thinking. Gnosis itself is gained through understanding at which one can arrive via inner experience or contemplation such as an internal epiphany of intuition and external epiphany such as the theophany.
In the Philokalia, it is emphasized that such knowledge is not secret knowledge but rather a maturing, transcendent form of knowledge derived from contemplation (theoria resulting from practice of hesychasm), since knowledge cannot truly be derived from knowledge, but rather, knowledge can only be derived from theoria (to witness, see (vision) or experience). Knowledge, thus plays an important role in relation to theosis (deification/personal relationship with God) and theoria (revelation of the divine, vision of God). Gnosis, as the proper use of the spiritual or noetic faculty plays an important role in Orthodox Christian theology. Its importance in the economy of salvation is discussed periodically in the Philokalia where as direct, personal knowledge of God (noesis) it is distinguished from ordinary epistemological knowledge (episteme—i.e., speculative philosophy).
Islam
Sufism
Knowledge (or gnosis) in Sufism refers to knowledge of Self and God. The gnostic is called al-arif bi'lah or "one who knows by God". The goal of the Sufi practitioner is to remove inner obstacles to the knowledge of god. Sufism, understood as the quest for Truth, is to seek for the separate existence of the Self to be consumed by Truth, as stated by the Sufi poet Mansur al-Hallaj, who was executed for saying "I am the Truth" (ana'l haqq).
See also
References
Sources
Gnosticism
Knowledge
Spiritual faculties
Theology | [
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12923 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian | Georgian | Georgian may refer to:
Common meanings
Anything related to, or originating from Georgia (country)
Georgians, an indigenous Caucasian ethnic group
Georgian language, a Kartvelian language spoken by Georgians
Georgian scripts, three scripts used to write the language
Georgian (Unicode block), a Unicode block containing the Mkhedruli and Asomtavruli scripts
Georgian cuisine, cooking styles and dishes with origins in the nation of Georgia and prepared by Georgian people around the world
Someone from Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgian era, a period of British history (1714–1837)
Georgian architecture, the set of architectural styles current between 1714 and 1837
Places
Georgian Bay, a bay of Lake Huron
Georgian Cliff, a cliff on Alexander Island, Antarctica
Airlines
Georgian Airways, an airline based in Tbilisi, Georgia
Georgian International Airlines, an airline based in Tbilisi, Georgia
Air Georgian, an airline based in Ontario, Canada
Sky Georgia, an airline based in Tbilisi, Georgia
Schools
Georgian College, in Barrie, Ontario, Canada
Georgian International Academy, a research and academic institution in Tbilisi, Georgia
Georgian Technical University, a technical university in Tbilisi, Georgia
Arts and entertainment
The Georgians (Frank Guarente), an American jazz and dance band of the 1920s
The Georgians (Nat Gonella), a British jazz band of the 1930s
Georgian poets, a group of early 20th century English poets
Georgian Theatre Royal, a theatre and playhouse in Richmond, North Yorkshire, UK
People
Georgian Păun (born 1985), Romanian footballer
Georgian Popescu (born 1984), Romanian amateur boxer
Georgian Tobă (born 1989), Romanian footballer
Other uses
Atlanta Georgian, a defunct Hearst-owned newspaper
Augusta Georgians, an American minor league baseball team from 1920 to 1921
Georgian Mall, a mall in Barrie, Ontario, Canada
Georgian (train), a Chicago-to-Atlanta passenger train route
See also
Georgia (disambiguation)
Romanian masculine given names | [
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12924 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian%20architecture | Georgian architecture | Georgian architecture is the name given in most English-speaking countries to the set of architectural styles current between 1714 and 1830. It is named after the first four British monarchs of the House of Hanover—George I, George II, George III, and George IV—who reigned in continuous succession from August 1714 to June 1830. The so-called great Georgian cities of the British Isles were Edinburgh, Bath, pre-independence Dublin, and London, and to a lesser extent York and Bristol. The style was revived in the late 19th century in the United States as Colonial Revival architecture and in the early 20th century in Great Britain as Neo-Georgian architecture; in both it is also called Georgian Revival architecture. In the United States the term "Georgian" is generally used to describe all buildings from the period, regardless of style; in Britain it is generally restricted to buildings that are "architectural in intention", and have stylistic characteristics that are typical of the period, though that covers a wide range.
The Georgian style is highly variable, but marked by symmetry and proportion based on the classical architecture of Greece and Rome, as revived in Renaissance architecture. Ornament is also normally in the classical tradition, but typically restrained, and sometimes almost completely absent on the exterior. The period brought the vocabulary of classical architecture to smaller and more modest buildings than had been the case before, replacing English vernacular architecture (or becoming the new vernacular style) for almost all new middle-class homes and public buildings by the end of the period.
Georgian architecture is characterized by its proportion and balance; simple mathematical ratios were used to determine the height of a window in relation to its width or the shape of a room as a double cube. Regularity, as with ashlar (uniformly cut) stonework, was strongly approved, imbuing symmetry and adherence to classical rules: the lack of symmetry, where Georgian additions were added to earlier structures remaining visible, was deeply felt as a flaw, at least before John Nash began to introduce it in a variety of styles. Regularity of housefronts along a street was a desirable feature of Georgian town planning. Until the start of the Gothic Revival in the early 19th century, Georgian designs usually lay within the Classical orders of architecture and employed a decorative vocabulary derived from ancient Rome or Greece.
Characteristics
In towns, which expanded greatly during the period, landowners turned into property developers, and rows of identical terraced houses became the norm. Even the wealthy were persuaded to live in these in town, especially if provided with a square of garden in front of the house. There was an enormous amount of building in the period, all over the English-speaking world, and the standards of construction were generally high. Where they have not been demolished, large numbers of Georgian buildings have survived two centuries or more, and they still form large parts of the core of cities such as London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Newcastle upon Tyne and Bristol.
The period saw the growth of a distinct and trained architectural profession; before the mid-century "the high-sounding title, 'architect' was adopted by anyone who could get away with it". This contrasted with earlier styles, which were primarily disseminated among craftsmen through the direct experience of the apprenticeship system. But most buildings were still designed by builders and landlords together, and the wide spread of Georgian architecture, and the Georgian styles of design more generally, came from dissemination through pattern books and inexpensive suites of engravings. Authors such as the prolific William Halfpenny (active 1723–1755) had editions in America as well as Britain.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in the commonality of housing designs in Canada and the United States (though of a wider variety of styles) from the 19th century down to the 1950s, using pattern books drawn up by professional architects that were distributed by lumber companies and hardware stores to contractors and homebuilders.
From the mid-18th century, Georgian styles were assimilated into an architectural vernacular that became part and parcel of the training of every architect, designer, builder, carpenter, mason and plasterer, from Edinburgh to Maryland.
Styles
Georgian succeeded the English Baroque of Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh, Thomas Archer, William Talman, and Nicholas Hawksmoor; this in fact continued into at least the 1720s, overlapping with a more restrained Georgian style. The architect James Gibbs was a transitional figure, his earlier buildings are Baroque, reflecting the time he spent in Rome in the early 18th century, but he adjusted his style after 1720. Major architects to promote the change in direction from Baroque were Colen Campbell, author of the influential book Vitruvius Britannicus (1715–1725); Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and his protégé William Kent; Isaac Ware; Henry Flitcroft and the Venetian Giacomo Leoni, who spent most of his career in England.
Other prominent architects of the early Georgian period include James Paine, Robert Taylor, and John Wood, the Elder. The European Grand Tour became very common for wealthy patrons in the period, and Italian influence remained dominant, though at the start of the period Hanover Square, Westminster (1713 on), developed and occupied by Whig supporters of the new dynasty, seems to have deliberately adopted German stylistic elements in their honour, especially vertical bands connecting the windows.
The styles that resulted fall within several categories. In the mainstream of Georgian style were both Palladian architecture—and its whimsical alternatives, Gothic and Chinoiserie, which were the English-speaking world's equivalent of European Rococo. From the mid-1760s a range of Neoclassical modes were fashionable, associated with the British architects Robert Adam, James Gibbs, Sir William Chambers, James Wyatt, George Dance the Younger, Henry Holland and Sir John Soane. John Nash was one of the most prolific architects of the late Georgian era known as The Regency style, he was responsible for designing large areas of London. Greek Revival architecture was added to the repertory, beginning around 1750, but increasing in popularity after 1800. Leading exponents were William Wilkins and Robert Smirke.
In Britain, brick or stone are almost invariably used; brick is often disguised with stucco. The Georgian terraces of Dublin are noted for their almost uniform use of red brick, for example, whereas equivalent terraces in Edinburgh are constructed from stone. In America and other colonies wood remained very common, as its availability and cost-ratio with the other materials was more favourable. Raked roofs were mostly covered in earthenware tiles until Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn led the development of the slate industry in Wales from the 1760s, which by the end of the century had become the usual material.
Types of buildings
Houses
Versions of revived Palladian architecture dominated English country house architecture. Houses were increasingly placed in grand landscaped settings, and large houses were generally made wide and relatively shallow, largely to look more impressive from a distance. The height was usually highest in the centre, and the Baroque emphasis on corner pavilions often found on the continent generally avoided. In grand houses, an entrance hall led to steps up to a piano nobile or mezzanine floor where the main reception rooms were. Typically the basement area or "rustic", with kitchens, offices and service areas, as well as male guests with muddy boots, came some way above ground, and was lit by windows that were high on the inside, but just above ground level outside. A single block was typical, with perhaps a small court for carriages at the front marked off by railings and a gate, but rarely a stone gatehouse, or side wings around the court.
Windows in all types of buildings were large and regularly placed on a grid; this was partly to minimize window tax, which was in force throughout the period in the United Kingdom. Some windows were subsequently bricked-in. Their height increasingly varied between the floors, and they increasingly began below waist-height in the main rooms, making a small balcony desirable. Before this the internal plan and function of the rooms can generally not be deduced from the outside. To open these large windows the sash window, already developed by the 1670s, became very widespread. Corridor plans became universal inside larger houses.
Internal courtyards became more rare, except beside the stables, and the functional parts of the building were placed at the sides, or in separate buildings nearby hidden by trees. The views to and from the front and rear of the main block were concentrated on, with the side approaches usually much less important. The roof was typically invisible from the ground, though domes were sometimes visible in grander buildings. The roofline was generally clear of ornament except for a balustrade or the top of a pediment. Columns or pilasters, often topped by a pediment, were popular for ornament inside and out, and other ornament was generally geometrical or plant-based, rather than using the human figure.
Inside ornament was far more generous, and could sometimes be overwhelming. The chimneypiece continued to be the usual main focus of rooms, and was now given a classical treatment, and increasingly topped by a painting or a mirror. Plasterwork ceilings, carved wood, and bold schemes of wallpaint formed a backdrop to increasingly rich collections of furniture, paintings, porcelain, mirrors, and objets d'art of all kinds. Wood-panelling, very common since about 1500, fell from favour around the mid-century, and wallpaper included very expensive imports from China.
Smaller houses in the country, such as vicarages, were simple regular blocks with visible raked roofs, and a central doorway, often the only ornamented area. Similar houses, often referred to as "villas" became common around the fringes of the larger cities, especially London, and detached houses in towns remained common, though only the very rich could afford them in central London.
In towns even most better-off people lived in terraced houses, which typically opened straight onto the street, often with a few steps up to the door. There was often an open space, protected by iron railings, dropping down to the basement level, with a discreet entrance down steps off the street for servants and deliveries; this is known as the "area". This meant that the ground floor front was now removed and protected from the street and encouraged the main reception rooms to move there from the floor above. Often, when a new street or set of streets was developed, the road and pavements were raised up, and the gardens or yards behind the houses remained at a lower level, usually representing the original one.
Town terraced houses for all social classes remained resolutely tall and narrow, each dwelling occupying the whole height of the building. This contrasted with well-off continental dwellings, which had already begun to be formed of wide apartments occupying only one or two floors of a building; such arrangements were only typical in England when housing groups of batchelors, as in Oxbridge colleges, the lawyers in the Inns of Court or The Albany after it was converted in 1802. In the period in question, only in Edinburgh were working-class purpose-built tenements common, though lodgers were common in other cities. A curving crescent, often looking out at gardens or a park, was popular for terraces where space allowed. In early and central schemes of development, plots were sold and built on individually, though there was often an attempt to enforce some uniformity, but as development reached further out schemes were increasingly built as a uniform scheme and then sold.
The late Georgian period saw the birth of the semi-detached house, planned systematically, as a suburban compromise between the terraced houses of the city and the detached "villas" further out, where land was cheaper. There had been occasional examples in town centres going back to medieval times. Most early suburban examples are large, and in what are now the outer fringes of Central London, but were then in areas being built up for the first time. Blackheath, Chalk Farm and St John's Wood are among the areas contesting being the original home of the semi. Sir John Summerson gave primacy to the Eyre Estate of St John's Wood. A plan for this exists dated 1794, where "the whole development consists of pairs of semi-detached houses, So far as I know, this is the first recorded scheme of the kind". In fact the French Wars put an end to this scheme, but when the development was finally built it retained the semi-detached form, "a revolution of striking significance and far-reaching effect".
Churches
Until the Church Building Act 1818, the period saw relatively few churches built in Britain, which was already well-supplied, although in the later years of the period the demand for Non-conformist and Roman Catholic places of worship greatly increased. Anglican churches that were built were designed internally to allow maximum audibility, and visibility, for preaching, so the main nave was generally wider and shorter than in medieval plans, and often there were no side-aisles. Galleries were common in new churches. Especially in country parishes, the external appearance generally retained the familiar signifiers of a Gothic church, with a tower or spire, a large west front with one or more doors, and very large windows along the nave, but all with any ornament drawn from the classical vocabulary. Where funds permitted, a classical temple portico with columns and a pediment might be used at the west front. Interior decoration was generally chaste; however, walls often became lined with plaques and monuments to the more prosperous members of the congregation.
In the colonies new churches were certainly required, and generally repeated similar formulae. British Non-conformist churches were often more classical in mood, and tended not to feel the need for a tower or steeple.
The archetypal Georgian church is St Martin-in-the-Fields in London (1720), by Gibbs, who boldly added to the classical temple façade at the west end a large steeple on top of a tower, set back slightly from the main frontage. This formula shocked purists and foreigners, but became accepted and was very widely emulated, at home and in the colonies, for example at St Andrew's Church, Chennai in India. And in Dublin, the extremely similar St. George's Church, Dublin.
The 1818 Act allocated some public money for new churches required to reflect changes in population, and a commission to allocate it. Building of Commissioners' churches gathered pace in the 1820s, and continued until the 1850s. The early churches, falling into the Georgian period, show a high proportion of Gothic Revival buildings, along with the classically inspired.
Public buildings
Public buildings generally varied between the extremes of plain boxes with grid windows and Italian Late Renaissance palaces, depending on budget. Somerset House in London, designed by Sir William Chambers in 1776 for government offices, was as magnificent as any country house, though never quite finished, as funds ran out. Barracks and other less prestigious buildings could be as functional as the mills and factories that were growing increasingly large by the end of the period. But as the period came to an end many commercial projects were becoming sufficiently large, and well-funded, to become "architectural in intention", rather than having their design left to the lesser class of "surveyors".
Colonial Georgian architecture
Georgian architecture was widely disseminated in the English colonies during the Georgian era. American buildings of the Georgian period were very often constructed of wood with clapboards; even columns were made of timber, framed up, and turned on an oversized lathe. At the start of the period the difficulties of obtaining and transporting brick or stone made them a common alternative only in the larger cities, or where they were obtainable locally. Dartmouth College, Harvard University and the College of William and Mary offer leading examples of Georgian architecture in the Americas.
Unlike the Baroque style that it replaced, which was mostly used for palaces and churches, and had little representation in the British colonies, simpler Georgian styles were widely used by the upper and middle classes. Perhaps the best remaining house is the pristine Hammond-Harwood House (1774) in Annapolis, Maryland, designed by the colonial architect William Buckland and modelled on the Villa Pisani at Montagnana, Italy as depicted in Andrea Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura ("The Four Books of Architecture").
After independence, in the former American colonies, Federal-style architecture represented the equivalent of Regency architecture, with which it had much in common.
In Canada, the United Empire Loyalists embraced Georgian architecture as a sign of their fealty to Britain, and the Georgian style was dominant in the country for most of the first half of the 19th century. The Grange, for example, is a Georgian manor built in Toronto in 1817. In Montreal, English-born architect John Ostell worked on a significant number of remarkable constructions in the Georgian style such as the Old Montreal Custom House and the Grand séminaire de Montréal.
In Australia, the Old Colonial Georgian residential and non-residential styles were developed in the period from .
Post-Georgian developments
After about 1840, Georgian conventions were slowly abandoned as a number of revival styles, including Gothic Revival, that had originated in the Georgian period, developed and contested in Victorian architecture, and in the case of Gothic became better researched, and closer to their originals. Neoclassical architecture remained popular, and was the opponent of Gothic in the Battle of the Styles of the early Victorian period. In the United States the Federalist Style contained many elements of Georgian style, but incorporated revolutionary symbols.
In the early decades of the twentieth century when there was a growing nostalgia for its sense of order, the style was revived and adapted and in the United States came to be known as the Colonial Revival. The revived Georgian style that emerged in Britain during the same period is usually referred to as Neo-Georgian; the work of Edwin Lutyens and Vincent Harris includes some examples. The British town of Welwyn Garden City, established in the 1920s, is an example of pastiche or Neo-Georgian development of the early 20th century in Britain. Versions of the Neo-Georgian style were commonly used in Britain for certain types of urban architecture until the late 1950s, Bradshaw Gass & Hope's Police Headquarters in Salford of 1958 being a good example. Architects such as Raymond Erith, and Donald McMorran were among the few architects who continued the neo-Georgian style into the 1960s. Both in the United States and Britain, the Georgian style is still employed by architects like Quinlan Terry, Julian Bicknell, Ben Pentreath, Robert Adam Architects, and Fairfax and Sammons for private residences. A debased form in commercial housing developments, especially in the suburbs, is known in the UK as mock-Georgian.
Gallery
See also
Golden ratio
Jamaican Georgian architecture
Canning, Liverpool
Clifton, Bristol
Georgian Dublin
Grainger Town, Newcastle upon Tyne
New Town, Edinburgh, an 18th- and 19th-century development that contains some of the largest surviving examples of Georgian-style architecture and layout.
Newtown Pery, Limerick
The Georgian Group
Notes
References
Fletcher, Banister and Fletcher, Banister, A History of Architecture, 1901 edn., Batsford
Esher, Lionel, The Glory of the English House, 1991, Barrie and Jenkins,
Jenkins, Simon (1999), England's Thousand Best Churches, 1999, Allen Lane,
Jenkins, Simon (2003), England's Thousand Best Houses, 2003, Allen Lane,
Musson, Jeremy, How to Read a Country House, 2005, Ebury Press,
Pevsner, Nikolaus. The Englishness of English Art, Penguin, 1964 edn.
Sir John Summerson, Georgian London (1945), 1988 revised edition, Barrie & Jenkins, . (Also see revised edition, edited by Howard Colvin, 2003)
Further reading
Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 3rd ed., 1995.
John Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors (Paul Mellon Centre), 2005.
James Stevens Curl, Georgian Architecture.
Christopher Hussey, Early Georgian Houses, Mid-Georgian Houses, Late Georgian Houses. Reissued in paperback, Antique Collectors Club, 1986.
Frank Jenkins, Architect and Patron, 1961.
Barrington Kaye, The Development of the Architectural Profession in Britain, 1960.
McAlester, Virginia & Lee, A Field Guide to American Houses, 1996. .
Sir John Summerson, Architecture in Britain (series: Pelican History of Art). Reissued in paperback 1970.
Richard Sammons, The Anatomy of the Georgian Room. Period Homes, March 2006.
Architectural styles
British architecture by period or style
House styles
American architectural styles
18th-century architecture
19th-century architecture | [
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12926 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goshen%2C%20Indiana | Goshen, Indiana | Goshen ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Elkhart County, Indiana, United States. It is the smaller of the two principal cities of the Elkhart-Goshen Metropolitan Statistical Area, which in turn is part of the South Bend-Elkhart-Mishawaka Combined Statistical Area. It is located in the northern part of Indiana near the Michigan border, in a region known as Michiana. Goshen is located 10 miles southeast of Elkhart, 25 miles southeast of South Bend, 120 miles east of Chicago, and 150 miles north of Indianapolis. The population was 34,517 at the 2020 census.
The city is known as a major recreational vehicle and accessories manufacturing center, the home of Goshen College, a small Mennonite liberal arts college, and the Elkhart County 4-H Fair, one of the largest county fairs in the United States.
History
Before the arrival of white colonists, the land that is today Goshen, Indiana was populated by Native Americans, specifically the Miami people, the Peoria people, and Potawatomi Peoples. These people inhabited this land for thousands of years. In 1830, the US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, requiring all indigenous people to relocate west of the Mississippi River.
Goshen was platted in 1831. It was named after the Land of Goshen. The initial settlers consisted entirely of old stock "Yankee" immigrants, who were descended from the English Puritans who settled New England in the 1600s. The New England Yankee population that founded towns such as Goshen considered themselves the "chosen people" and identified with the Israelites of the Old Testament and they thought of North America as their Canaan. They founded a large number of towns and counties across what is known as the Northern Tier of the upper midwest. It was in this context that Goshen was named.
The Yankee migration to Indiana was a result of several factors, one of which was the overpopulation of New England. The old stock Yankee population had large families, often bearing up to ten children in one household. Most people were expected to have their own piece of land to farm, and due to the massive and nonstop population boom, land in New England became scarce as every son claimed his own farmstead. As a result, there was not enough land for every family to have a self-sustaining farm, and Yankee settlers began leaving New England for the Midwestern United States.
They were aided in this effort by the construction and completion of the Erie Canal which made traveling to the region much easier, causing an additional surge in migrants coming from New England. Added to this was the end of the Black Hawk War, which made the region much safer to travel through and settle in for white settlers. However, the Black Hawk War also forced the native people who called Goshen home for so long to leave. The 1833 Treaty of Chicago ultimately set the conditions that would force the Potawatomi in particular to leave the Midwest, Goshen included, in 1837. This forced exile is known today as the Potawatomi Trail of Death.
These settlers were primarily members of the Congregational Church, though due to the Second Great Awakening, many of them had converted to Methodism, and some had become Baptists before coming to what is now Indiana. The Congregational Church has subsequently gone through many divisions, and some factions, including those in Goshen, are now known as the Church of Christ and the United Church of Christ. When the New Englanders arrived in what is now Elkhart County there was nothing but dense virgin forest and wild prairie. They laid out farms, constructed roads, erected government buildings and established post routes.
On Palm Sunday, April 11, 1965, a large outbreak of tornadoes struck the Midwest. The most famous pair of tornadoes devastated the Midway Trailer Park (now inside the city limits of Goshen), and the Sunnyside Housing Addition in Dunlap, Indiana. Another, smaller F4 tornado also struck neighborhoods on the southeast side of Goshen on the same day. Statewide, 137 Hoosiers died in the storms—55 of them in Elkhart County. Days later, President Lyndon B. Johnson visited the Dunlap site.
The Goshen Historic district, added in 1983 to the National Registor of Historic Places is bounded by Pike, RR, Cottage, Plymouth, Main, Purl, the Canal, and Second Sts. with the Elkhart County Courthouse at its center.
In April 2006, Goshen was the site for an immigration march. Officials estimated that from 2000 to 3000 people marched from Linway Plaza to the County Courthouse.
For much of its history, Goshen was a "sundown town", forbidding African Americans from living in, or entering, the town, often under threat of violence. In March 2015, the city acknowledged this part of its past, apologizing and saying that it no longer condones such behavior.
The Elkhart County Courthouse, Fort Wayne Street Bridge, Goshen Carnegie Public Library, Goshen Historic District, William N. Violett House, and Violett-Martin House and Gardens are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Geography
Goshen is located at . The Elkhart River winds its way through the city and through a dam on the south side making the Goshen Dam Pond. Rock Run Creek also runs through town. The city is divided east/west by Main Street and north/south by Lincoln Avenue.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and is water.
Environmental leadership
In February 2018, the Elkhart River flooded as a result of heavy rain and snow melt. The river rose to a record 13.2 feet, damaging more than 300 structures and prompting evacuations. City government has responded to the increase in severe weather such as flooding, hail, and heavy rains with measures including stormwater management, and "an initiative to grow the town’s tree canopy by 45%." Goshen completed 92 solar projects in 2019. Goshen outranked Phoenix, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver with its 2019 production of 116 watts of solar power per capita.
Demographics
2020 census
Note: the US Census treats Hispanic/Latino as an ethnic category. This table excludes Latinos from the racial categories and assigns them to a separate category. Hispanics/Latinos can be of any race.
2010 census
As of the census of 2010, there were 31,719 people, 11,344 households, and 7,580 families residing in the city. The population density was . There were 12,631 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the city was 78.2% White, 2.6% African American, 0.5% Native American, 1.2% Asian, 14.8% from other races, and 2.7% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 28.1% of the population.
There were 11,344 households, of which 36.1% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 47.4% were married couples living together, 13.1% had a female householder with no husband present, 6.3% had a male householder with no wife present, and 33.2% were non-families. 27.4% of all households were made up of individuals, and 13.2% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.67 and the average family size was 3.23.
The median age in the city was 32.4 years. 27.4% of residents were under the age of 18; 11.3% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 26.1% were from 25 to 44; 20% were from 45 to 64; and 14.9% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the city was 48.9% male and 51.1% female.
2000 census
As of the census of 2000, there were 29,383 people, 10,675 households, and 7,088 families residing in the city. The population density was 2,227.7 people per square mile (860.1/km). There were 11,264 housing units at an average density of 854.0 per square mile (329.7/km). The racial makeup of the city was 83.15% White, 1.53% Black or African American, 0.26% Native American, 1.10% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 12.00% from other races, and 1.94% from two or more races. 19.33% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.
There were 10,675 households, out of which 32.6% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 50.8% were married couples living together, 10.1% had a female householder with no husband present, and 33.6% were non-families. 27.5% of all households were made up of individuals, and 12.5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.61 and the average family size was 3.14.
In the city, the population was spread out, with 25.9% under the age of 18, 12.9% from 18 to 24, 30.0% from 25 to 44, 17.6% from 45 to 64, and 13.6% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 32 years. For every 100 females, there were 100.6 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 97.7 males.
The median income for a household in the city was $39,383, and the median income for a family was $46,877. Males had a median income of $32,159 versus $23,290 for females. The per capita income for the city was $18,899. About 6.0% of families and 9.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 11.8% of those under age 18 and 5.3% of those age 65 or over.
Economy
Industry in Goshen centers around the automotive and Recreational Vehicle business. There are automotive component manufacturers like Benteler; firms that build custom bodies onto chassis like Supreme, Independent Protection and Showhauler Trucks. RV manufacturing companies include Dutchmen, Forest River and Keystone.
Government
The government consists of a mayor, a clerk treasurer, a city council, and a youth advisor. The mayor and clerk are elected in citywide vote. The city council consists of seven members. Five are elected from individual districts. Two are elected at-large. The youth advisor position was added in 2016 and is elected by the students of Goshen High School. Jeremy Stutsman, a member of the Democratic Party, is the incumbent Mayor of Goshen.
Education
Goshen Community Schools serves the portion of the city in Elkhart Township. This system consists of seven elementary schools, Goshen Middle School, and Goshen High School.
In 2012, U.S. News & World Report ranked Goshen High School as the 12th best high school in Indiana, as well as in the top 6% of high schools in the entire country.
Additionally, Goshen is served by Bethany Christian Schools, a private Christian school for grades 4-12.
Small parts of the city of Goshen are covered by several other school districts, including Fairfield Community Schools, Middlebury Community Schools, Concord Community Schools, and WaNee Community Schools.
Goshen College, located on the south side of town, has a current enrollment of approximately 800, with 40% being male, and 60% being female. Tuition and fees for the 2017–2018 year were $33,200.
The town has a free lending library, the Goshen Public Library.
Transportation
Airport
Goshen Municipal Airport is a public use airport located about 3.5 miles southeast of downtown Goshen. The Goshen Board of Aviation Commissioners owns the airport.
Bus
The Interurban Trolley bus connects Goshen to the nearby city of Elkhart and the unincorporated town of Dunlap via Concord and Elkhart-Goshen routes. The routes pass at Elkhart's Amtrak station, allowing passengers to connect to the Capitol Limited and Lake Shore Limited trains. Riders can also transfer to North Pointe route and Bittersweet/Mishawaka route. The former allows riders to connect to Elkhart's Greyhound bus station, while the later connects the riders to the city of Mishawaka and town of Osceola. The Bittersweet/Mishawaka route also allows them to transfer to TRANSPO Route 9 to connect to destinations throughout the South Bend-Goshen metropolitan region and the South Shore Line's South Bend International Airport station.
Recreation
Goshen has seven parks and has a few different greenways and trails winding through the city, one of which runs along the old Mill Race and hydraulic canal which was once used to power an old hydroelectric power plant. Plans drawn up in 2005 call for the plant to be reopened and redevelopment to begin along the canal.
The Pumpkinvine Nature Trail runs from Goshen to Middlebury and Shipshewana, along the former Pumpkin Vine Railroad. The trail starts north east of Goshen at Abshire Park. It is one of the recreational highlights of Goshen. Along with the Maple City Greenway and the Millrace trail, they provide many miles of easily accessible trails for walking, running, and biking.
The Elkhart County Fairgrounds are also located in the city, where in late July, the Elkhart County 4-H Fair is held. It is the largest county fair in Indiana and one of the largest 4-H County Fairs in the United States.
The Goshen Air Show is also an annual event that takes place at the Goshen Municipal Airport.
In 2007, Downtown Goshen, Inc., a public-private partnership formed from the merger of Face of the City and the Downtown Action Team, started a First Fridays program. Occurring year round, First Fridays happens on the first Friday of each month with stores open until 9, music and other entertainment, and other events occurring within Goshen's downtown district.
Culture
The south side Wal-Mart is rumored to be the first Wal-Mart in the United States to provide a covered stable for its frequent Amish customers. The Amish built the stable with lumber and other supplies donated by Wal-Mart.
Lonesome Jim (2005) which was written by former resident James Strouse, directed by Steve Buscemi and starred Liv Tyler and Casey Affleck, was shot in Goshen.
Notable people
US Representatives
John Baker (1832–1915)
Ebenezer M. Chamberlain (1805–1861)
Joseph Hutton Defrees (1812–1885)
Entertainment
James Carew, silent film actor (1876–1938)
Howard Hawks, film director (1896–1977)
Kenneth Hawks, film director (1898-1930)
Philip Proctor, comedian and actor, Firesign Theatre (b. 1940)
Raymond L. Schrock, screenwriter (1892–1950)
Tim Showalter, musician (Strand of Oaks)
James C. Strouse, screenwriter
Jordon Hodges, actor
Sports
Shek Borkowski, coach of Haiti national soccer team
Rick Mirer, NFL quarterback
Patricia Roy, AAGPBL player; IHSAA Commissioner
Doug Weaver, college football player and head coach
Justin Yoder, soap box racer
Other
Frederick A. Herring, physician and botanist (1812-1908)
Ida Shepard Oldroyd, conchologist and curator (1856–1940)
Lois Gunden, a Righteous Among the Nations (1915–2005)
Kate Bolduan, CNN anchor
Sister cities
Goshen has two sister cities as designated by Sister Cities International.
Bexbach, Saarland, Germany
Emmeloord, Flevoland, Netherlands
References
External links
Official website
Goshen Chamber of Commerce
Goshen on citydata.com – collection of statistics and graphs of Goshen demographics.
Pumpkinvine Nature Trail
Cities in Elkhart County, Indiana
County seats in Indiana
Cities in Indiana
Sundown towns in Indiana
1831 establishments in Indiana
populated places established in 1831 | [
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12929 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli | Gallipoli | The Gallipoli peninsula (; ; , ) is located in the southern part of East Thrace, the European part of Turkey, with the Aegean Sea to the west and the Dardanelles strait to the east.
Gallipoli is the Italian form of the Greek name (), meaning 'beautiful city', the original name of the modern town of Gelibolu. In antiquity, the peninsula was known as the Thracian Chersonese (, ; ).
The peninsula runs in a south-westerly direction into the Aegean Sea, between the Dardanelles (formerly known as the Hellespont), and the Gulf of Saros (formerly the bay of Melas). In antiquity, it was protected by the Long Wall, a defensive structure built across the narrowest part of the peninsula near the ancient city of Agora. The isthmus traversed by the wall was only 36 stadia in breadth or about , but the length of the peninsula from this wall to its southern extremity, Cape Mastusia, was 420 stadia or about .
History
Antiquity and Middle Ages
In ancient times, the Gallipoli Peninsula was known as the Thracian Chersonesus (from Greek , 'peninsula') to the Greeks and later the Romans. It was the location of several prominent towns, including Cardia, Pactya, Callipolis (Gallipoli), Alopeconnesus (), Sestos, Madytos, and Elaeus. The peninsula was renowned for its wheat. It also benefited from its strategic importance on the main route between Europe and Asia, as well as from its control of the shipping route from Crimea. The city of Sestos was the main crossing-point on the Hellespont.
According to Herodotus, the Thracian tribe of Dolonci () (or 'barbarians' according to Cornelius Nepos) held possession of Chersonesus before the Greek colonization. Then, settlers from Ancient Greece, mainly of Ionian and Aeolian stock, founded about 12 cities on the peninsula in the 7th century BC. The Athenian statesman Miltiades the Elder founded a major Athenian colony there around 560 BC. He took authority over the entire peninsula, augmenting its defences against incursions from the mainland. It eventually passed to his nephew, the more famous Miltiades the Younger, about 524 BC. The peninsula was abandoned to the Persians in 493 BC after the beginning of the Greco-Persian Wars (499–478 BC).
The Persians were eventually expelled, after which the peninsula was for a time ruled by Athens, which enrolled it into the Delian League in 478 BC. The Athenians established a number of cleruchies on the Thracian Chersonese and sent an additional 1,000 settlers around 448 BC. Sparta gained control after the decisive battle of Aegospotami in 404 BC, but the peninsula subsequently reverted to the Athenians. During the 4th century BC, the Thracian Chersonese became the focus of a bitter territorial dispute between Athens and Macedon, whose king Philip II sought possession. It was eventually ceded to Philip in 338 BC.
After the death of Philip's son Alexander the Great in 323 BC, the Thracian Chersonese became the object of contention among Alexander's successors. Lysimachus established his capital Lysimachia here. In 278 BC, Celtic tribes from Galatia in Asia Minor settled in the area. In 196 BC, the Seleucid king Antiochus III seized the peninsula. This alarmed the Greeks and prompted them to seek the aid of the Romans, who conquered the Thracian Chersonese, which they gave to their ally Eumenes II of Pergamon in 188 BC. At the extinction of the Attalid dynasty in 133 BC it passed again to the Romans, who from 129 BC administered it in the Roman province of Asia. It was subsequently made a state-owned territory () and during the reign of the emperor Augustus it was imperial property.
The Thracian Chersonese was part of the Eastern Roman Empire from its foundation in 330 AD. In 443 AD, Attila the Hun invaded the Gallipoli Peninsula during one of the last stages of his grand campaign that year. He captured both Callipolis and Sestus. Aside from a brief period from 1204 to 1235, when it was controlled by the Republic of Venice, the Byzantine Empire ruled the territory until 1356. During the night between 1 and 2 March 1354, a strong earthquake destroyed the city of Gallipoli and its city walls, weakening its defenses.
Ottoman era
Ottoman conquest
Within a month after the devastating 1354 earthquake the Ottomans besieged and captured the town of Gallipoli, making it the first Ottoman stronghold in Europe and the staging area for Ottoman expansion across the Balkans. The Savoyard Crusade recaptured Gallipoli for Byzantium in 1366, but the beleaguered Byzantines were forced to hand it back in September 1376. The Greeks living there were allowed to continue their everyday activities. In the 19th century, Gallipoli (, ) was a district () in the Vilayet of Adrianople, with about thirty thousand inhabitants: comprising Greeks, Turks, Armenians and Jews.
Crimean War (1853–1856)
Gallipoli became a major encampment for British and French forces in 1854 during the Crimean War, and the harbour was also a stopping-off point between the western Mediterranean and Istanbul (formerly Constantinople).
In March 1854 British and French engineers constructed an line of defence to protect the peninsula from a possible Russian attack and so secure control of the route to the Mediterranean Sea.
First Balkan War (1912–1913)
During the First Balkan War, the 1913 Battle of Bulair and several minor skirmishes took place there.
At 1913 the Ottoman army "destroyed, looted, and burned all the Greek villages near Gallipoli". The Report of the International Commission on the Balkan Wars mention destruction and massacres in the area by the Ottoman army against Greek and Bulgarian population.
The Ottoman Government, under the pretext that a village was within the firing line, ordered its evacuation within three hours. The residents abandoned everything they possessed, left their village and went to Gallipoli. Seven of the Greek villagers who stayed two minutes later than the three-hour limit allowed for the evacuation were shot by the soldiers. After the end of the Balkan War the exiles were allowed to return. But as the Government allowed only the Turks to rebuild their houses and furnish them, the exiled Greeks were compelled to remain in Gallipoli.
World War I: Gallipoli Campaign (1914–1918)
During World War I (1914-1918), French, British and allied forces (Australian, New Zealand, Newfoundland, Irish and Indian) fought the Gallipoli campaign (1915-1916) in and near the peninsula, seeking to secure a sea route to relieve their eastern ally, Russia. The Ottomans set up defensive fortifications along the peninsula and contained the invading forces.
In early 1915, attempting to seize a strategic advantage in World War I by capturing Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), the British authorised an attack on the peninsula by French, British and British Empire forces. The first Australian troops landed at ANZAC Cove early in the morning of 25 April 1915. After eight months of heavy fighting the last Allied soldiers withdrew by 9 January 1916.
The campaign, one of the greatest Ottoman victories during the war, is considered by historians as a major Allied failure. Turks regard it as a defining moment in their nation's history: a final surge in the defence of the motherland as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. The struggle formed the basis for the Turkish War of Independence and the founding of the Republic of Turkey eight years later under President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who first rose to prominence as a commander at Gallipoli.
The Ottoman Empire instituted the Gallipoli Star as a military decoration in 1915 and awarded it throughout the rest of World War I.
The campaign was the first major military action of Australia and New Zealand (or Anzacs) as independent dominions. The date of the landing, 25 April, is known as "Anzac Day". It remains the most significant commemoration of military casualties and "returned soldiers" in Australia and New Zealand.
On the Allied side one of the promoters of the expedition was Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, whose bullish optimism hurt his reputation that took years to recover.
Whilst the underlying strategic concept of the campaign was sound the military forces of the WW1 lacked the logistical, technological and tactical capabilities to undertake an operation of this scope against a determined, well equipped defender.
The all arms coordination and logistical capabilities required to successfully prosecute such a campaign would only be achieved several decades later, during the successful Allied amphibious invasions of Europe and the Pacific during WW2.
Prior to the Allied landings in April 1915, the Ottoman Empire deported Greek residents from Gallipoli and surrounding region and from the islands in the sea of Marmara, to the interior where they were at the mercy of hostile Turks. The Greeks had little time to pack and the Ottoman authorities permitted them to take only some bedding and the rest was handed over to the Government. The Turks also plundered Greek houses and properties. A testimony of a deportee described how the deportees were forced onto crowded steamers, standing-room only; how, on disembarking, men of military age were removed (for forced labour in the labour battalions of the Ottoman army) and how the rest were "scattered… among the farms like ownerless cattle".
The Metropolitan of Gallipoli wrote on 17 July 1915 that the extermination of the Christian refugees was methodical. He also mentions that "The Turks, like beasts of prey, immediately plundered all the Christians' property and carried it off. The inhabitants and refugees of my district are entirely without shelter, awaiting to be sent no one knows where ...". Many Greeks died from hunger and there were frequent cases of rape among women and young girls, as well as their forced conversion to Islam. In some cases, Muhacirs appeared in the villages even before the Greek inhabitants deported and stoned the houses and threatened the inhabitants that they would kill them if they didn't leave.
Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922)
Greek troops occupied Gallipoli on 4 August 1920 during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22, considered part of the Turkish War of Independence. After the Armistice of Mudros of 30 October 1918 it became a Greek prefecture centre as Kallipolis. However, Greece was forced to withdraw from Eastern Thrace after the Armistice of Mudanya of October 1922. Gallipoli was briefly handed over to British troops on 20 October 1922, but finally returned to Turkish rule on 26 November 1922.
In 1920, after the defeat of the Russian White army of General Pyotr Wrangel, a significant number of émigré soldiers and their families evacuated to Gallipoli from the Crimean Peninsula. From there, many went to European countries, such as Yugoslavia, where they found refuge.
There are now many cemeteries and war memorials on the Gallipoli peninsula.
Turkish Republic
Between 1923 and 1926 Gallipoli became the centre of Gelibolu Province, comprising the districts of Gelibolu, Eceabat, Keşan and Şarköy. After the dissolution of the province, it became a district centre in Çanakkale Province.
Notable people
Ahmed Bican (1398 – ), author
Piri Reis (1465/70 – 1553), admiral, geographer and cartographer
Mustafa Âlî (1541–1600), Ottoman historian, politician and writer
Sofia Vembo (1910–1978), Greek singer and actress
References
External links
Gallipoli Peninsula Historical National Park photos with info
Tours of Gallipoli
Australia's role in the Gallipoli Campaign – Website (ABC and Dept of Veteran's Affairs)
Dardanelles
Geography of Thrace
Ancient Greek archaeological sites in Turkey
Landforms of Çanakkale Province
Gelibolu
Peninsulas of Turkey
Tourist attractions in Çanakkale Province
Territories of the Republic of Venice
World Heritage Tentative List for Turkey
Places of the Greek genocide | [
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12935 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram%20stain | Gram stain | Gram stain or Gram staining, also called Gram's method, is a method of staining used to classify bacterial species into two large groups: Gram-positive bacteria and Gram-negative bacteria. The name comes from the Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram, who developed the technique in 1884.
Gram staining differentiates bacteria by the chemical and physical properties of their cell walls. Gram-positive cells have a thick layer of peptidoglycan in the cell wall that retains the primary stain, crystal violet. Gram-negative cells have a thinner peptidoglycan layer that allows the crystal violet to wash out on addition of ethanol. They are stained pink or red by the counterstain, commonly safranin or fuchsine. Lugol's iodine solution is always added after addition of crystal violet to strengthen the bonds of the stain with the cell membrane.
Gram staining is almost always the first step in the preliminary identification of a bacterial organism. While Gram staining is a valuable diagnostic tool in both clinical and research settings, not all bacteria can be definitively classified by this technique. This gives rise to Gram-variable and Gram-indeterminate groups.
History
The method is named after its inventor, the Danish scientist Hans Christian Gram (1853–1938), who developed the technique while working with Carl Friedländer in the morgue of the city hospital in Berlin in 1884. Gram devised his technique not for the purpose of distinguishing one type of bacterium from another but to make bacteria more visible in stained sections of lung tissue. He published his method in 1884, and included in his short report the observation that the typhus bacillus did not retain the stain.
Uses
Gram staining is a bacteriological laboratory technique used to differentiate bacterial species into two large groups (gram-positive and gram-negative) based on the physical properties of their cell walls. Gram staining is not used to classify archaea, formerly archaeabacteria, since these microorganisms yield widely varying responses that do not follow their phylogenetic groups.
Some organisms are gram-variable (meaning they may stain either negative or positive); some are not stained with either dye used in the Gram technique and are not seen. In a modern environmental or molecular microbiology lab, most identification is done using genetic sequences and other molecular techniques, which are far more specific and informative than differential staining.
Medical
Gram stains are performed on body fluid or biopsy when infection is suspected. Gram stains yield results much more quickly than culturing, and are especially important when infection would make an important difference in the patient's treatment and prognosis; examples are cerebrospinal fluid for meningitis and synovial fluid for septic arthritis.
Staining mechanism
Gram-positive bacteria have a thick mesh-like cell wall made of peptidoglycan (50–90% of cell envelope), and as a result are stained purple by crystal violet, whereas gram-negative bacteria have a thinner layer (10% of cell envelope), so do not retain the purple stain and are counter-stained pink by safranin. There are four basic steps of the Gram stain:
Applying a primary stain (crystal violet) to a heat-fixed smear of a bacterial culture. Heat fixation kills some bacteria but is mostly used to affix the bacteria to the slide so that they don't rinse out during the staining procedure.
The addition of iodine, which binds to crystal violet and traps it in the cell
Rapid decolorization with ethanol or acetone
Counterstaining with safranin. Carbol fuchsin is sometimes substituted for safranin since it more intensely stains anaerobic bacteria, but it is less commonly used as a counterstain.
Crystal violet (CV) dissociates in aqueous solutions into and chloride () ions. These ions penetrate the cell wall of both gram-positive and gram-negative cells. The ion interacts with negatively charged components of bacterial cells and stains the cells purple.
Iodide ( or ) interacts with and forms large complexes of crystal violet and iodine (CV–I) within the inner and outer layers of the cell. Iodine is often referred to as a mordant, but is a trapping agent that prevents the removal of the CV–I complex and, therefore, colors the cell.
When a decolorizer such as alcohol or acetone is added, it interacts with the lipids of the cell membrane. A gram-negative cell loses its outer lipopolysaccharide membrane, and the inner peptidoglycan layer is left exposed. The CV–I complexes are washed from the gram-negative cell along with the outer membrane. In contrast, a gram-positive cell becomes dehydrated from an ethanol treatment. The large CV–I complexes become trapped within the gram-positive cell due to the multilayered nature of its peptidoglycan. The decolorization step is critical and must be timed correctly; the crystal violet stain is removed from both gram-positive and negative cells if the decolorizing agent is left on too long (a matter of seconds).
After decolorization, the gram-positive cell remains purple and the gram-negative cell loses its purple color. Counterstain, which is usually positively charged safranin or basic fuchsine, is applied last to give decolorized gram-negative bacteria a pink or red color. Both gram-positive bacteria and gram-negative bacteria pick up the counterstain. The counterstain, however, is unseen on gram-positive bacteria because of the darker crystal violet stain.
Examples
Gram-positive bacteria
Gram-positive bacteria generally have a single membrane (monoderm) surrounded by a thick peptidoglycan.
This rule is followed by two phyla: Firmicutes (except for the classes Mollicutes and Negativicutes) and the Actinobacteria. In contrast, members of the Chloroflexi (green non-sulfur bacteria) are monoderms but possess a thin or absent (class Dehalococcoidetes) peptidoglycan and can stain negative, positive or indeterminate; members of the Deinococcus–Thermus group stain positive but are diderms with a thick peptidoglycan.
Historically, the gram-positive forms made up the phylum Firmicutes, a name now used for the largest group. It includes many well-known genera such as Lactobacillus, Bacillus, Listeria, Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Enterococcus, and Clostridium. It has also been expanded to include the Mollicutes, bacteria such as Mycoplasma and Thermoplasma that lack cell walls and so cannot be Gram-stained, but are derived from such forms.
Some bacteria have cell walls which are particularly adept at retaining stains. These will appear positive by Gram stain even though they are not closely related to other gram-positive bacteria. These are called acid-fast bacteria, and can only be differentiated from other gram-positive bacteria by special staining procedures.
Gram-negative bacteria
Gram-negative bacteria generally possess a thin layer of peptidoglycan between two membranes (diderm). Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is the most abundant antigen on the cell surface of most Gram-negative bacteria, contributing up to 80% of the outer membrane of E. coli and Salmonella. Most bacterial phyla are gram-negative, including the cyanobacteria, green sulfur bacteria, and most Proteobacteria (exceptions being some members of the Rickettsiales and the insect-endosymbionts of the Enterobacteriales).
Gram-variable and Gram-indeterminate bacteria
Some bacteria, after staining with the Gram stain, yield a gram-variable pattern: a mix of pink and purple cells are seen. In cultures of Bacillus, Butyrivibrio, and Clostridium, a decrease in peptidoglycan thickness during growth coincides with an increase in the number of cells that stain gram-negative. In addition, in all bacteria stained using the Gram stain, the age of the culture may influence the results of the stain.
Gram-indeterminate bacteria do not respond predictably to Gram staining and, therefore, cannot be determined as either gram-positive or gram-negative. Examples include many species of Mycobacterium, including Mycobacterium bovis, Mycobactrium leprae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the latter two of which are the causative agents of leprosy and tuberculosis, respectively. Bacteria of the genus Mycoplasma lack a cell wall around their cell membranes, which means they do not stain by Gram's method and are resistant to the antibiotics that target cell wall synthesis.
Orthographic note
The term Gram staining is derived from the surname of Hans Christian Gram; the eponym (Gram) is therefore capitalized but not the common noun (stain) as is usual for scientific terms. The initial letters of gram-positive and gram-negative, which are eponymous adjectives, can be either capital G or lowercase g, depending on what style guide (if any) governs the document being written. Lowercase style is used by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other style regimens such as the AMA style. Dictionaries may use lowercase, uppercase, or both. Uppercase Gram-positive or Gram-negative usage is also common in many scientific journal articles and publications. When articles are submitted to journals, each journal may or may not apply house style to the postprint version. Preprint versions contain whichever style the author happened to use. Even style regimens that use lowercase for the adjectives gram-positive and gram-negative still typically use capital for Gram stain.
See also
Bacterial cell structure
Ziehl–Neelsen stain
References
External links
Gram staining technique video
Bacteriology
Staining
Microscopy
Danish inventions
1884 in biology | [
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12936 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram-positive%20bacteria | Gram-positive bacteria | In bacteriology, gram-positive bacteria are bacteria that give a positive result in the Gram stain test, which is traditionally used to quickly classify bacteria into two broad categories according to their type of cell wall.
Gram-positive bacteria take up the crystal violet stain used in the test, and then appear to be purple-coloured when seen through an optical microscope. This is because the thick peptidoglycan layer in the bacterial cell wall retains the stain after it is washed away from the rest of the sample, in the decolorization stage of the test.
Conversely, gram-negative bacteria cannot retain the violet stain after the decolorization step; alcohol used in this stage degrades the outer membrane of gram-negative cells, making the cell wall more porous and incapable of retaining the crystal violet stain. Their peptidoglycan layer is much thinner and sandwiched between an inner cell membrane and a bacterial outer membrane, causing them to take up the counterstain (safranin or fuchsine) and appear red or pink.
Despite their thicker peptidoglycan layer, gram-positive bacteria are more receptive to certain cell wall targeting antibiotics than gram-negative bacteria, due to the absence of the outer membrane.
Characteristics
In general, the following characteristics are present in gram-positive bacteria:
Cytoplasmic lipid membrane
Thick peptidoglycan layer
Teichoic acids and lipoids are present, forming lipoteichoic acids, which serve as chelating agents, and also for certain types of adherence.
Peptidoglycan chains are cross-linked to form rigid cell walls by a bacterial enzyme DD-transpeptidase.
A much smaller volume of periplasm than that in gram-negative bacteria.
Only some species have a capsule, usually consisting of polysaccharides. Also, only some species are flagellates, and when they do have flagella, have only two basal body rings to support them, whereas gram-negative have four. Both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria commonly have a surface layer called an S-layer. In gram-positive bacteria, the S-layer is attached to the peptidoglycan layer. Gram-negative bacteria's S-layer is attached directly to the outer membrane. Specific to gram-positive bacteria is the presence of teichoic acids in the cell wall. Some of these are lipoteichoic acids, which have a lipid component in the cell membrane that can assist in anchoring the peptidoglycan.
Classification
Along with cell shape, Gram staining is a rapid method used to differentiate bacterial species. Such staining, together with growth requirement and antibiotic susceptibility testing, and other macroscopic and physiologic tests, forms the full basis for classification and subdivision of the bacteria (e.g., see figure and pre-1990 versions of Bergey's Manual).
Historically, the kingdom Monera was divided into four divisions based primarily on Gram staining: Firmicutes (positive in staining), Gracilicutes (negative in staining), Mollicutes (neutral in staining) and Mendocutes (variable in staining). Based on 16S ribosomal RNA phylogenetic studies of the late microbiologist Carl Woese and collaborators and colleagues at the University of Illinois, the monophyly of the gram-positive bacteria was challenged, with major implications for the therapeutic and general study of these organisms. Based on molecular studies of the 16S sequences, Woese recognised twelve bacterial phyla. Two of these were gram-positive and were divided on the proportion of the guanine and cytosine content in their DNA. The high G + C phylum was made up of the Actinobacteria and the low G + C phylum contained the Firmicutes. The Actinobacteria include the Corynebacterium, Mycobacterium, Nocardia and Streptomyces genera. The (low G + C) Firmicutes, have a 45–60% GC content, but this is lower than that of the Actinobacteria.
Importance of the outer cell membrane in bacterial classification
Although bacteria are traditionally divided into two main groups, gram-positive and gram-negative, based on their Gram stain retention property, this classification system is ambiguous as it refers to three distinct aspects (staining result, envelope organization, taxonomic group), which do not necessarily coalesce for some bacterial species. The gram-positive and gram-negative staining response is also not a reliable characteristic as these two kinds of bacteria do not form phylogenetic coherent groups. However, although Gram staining response is an empirical criterion, its basis lies in the marked differences in the ultrastructure and chemical composition of the bacterial cell wall, marked by the absence or presence of an outer lipid membrane.
All gram-positive bacteria are bounded by a single-unit lipid membrane, and, in general, they contain a thick layer (20–80 nm) of peptidoglycan responsible for retaining the Gram stain. A number of other bacteria—that are bounded by a single membrane, but stain gram-negative due to either lack of the peptidoglycan layer, as in the mycoplasmas, or their inability to retain the Gram stain because of their cell wall composition—also show close relationship to the Gram-positive bacteria. For the bacterial cells bounded by a single cell membrane, the term monoderm bacteria has been proposed.
In contrast to gram-positive bacteria, all typical gram-negative bacteria are bounded by a cytoplasmic membrane and an outer cell membrane; they contain only a thin layer of peptidoglycan (2–3 nm) between these membranes. The presence of inner and outer cell membranes defines a new compartment in these cells: the periplasmic space or the periplasmic compartment. These bacteria have been designated as diderm bacteria. The distinction between the monoderm and diderm bacteria is supported by conserved signature indels in a number of important proteins (viz. DnaK, GroEL). Of these two structurally distinct groups of bacteria, monoderms are indicated to be ancestral. Based upon a number of observations including that the gram-positive bacteria are the major producers of antibiotics and that, in general, gram-negative bacteria are resistant to them, it has been proposed that the outer cell membrane in gram-negative bacteria (diderms) has evolved as a protective mechanism against antibiotic selection pressure. Some bacteria, such as Deinococcus, which stain gram-positive due to the presence of a thick peptidoglycan layer and also possess an outer cell membrane are suggested as intermediates in the transition between monoderm (gram-positive) and diderm (gram-negative) bacteria. The diderm bacteria can also be further differentiated between simple diderms lacking lipopolysaccharide, the archetypical diderm bacteria where the outer cell membrane contains lipopolysaccharide, and the diderm bacteria where outer cell membrane is made up of mycolic acid.
Exceptions
In general, gram-positive bacteria are monoderms and have a single lipid bilayer whereas gram-negative bacteria are diderms and have two bilayers. Some taxa lack peptidoglycan (such as the class Mollicutes, some members of the Rickettsiales, and the insect-endosymbionts of the Enterobacteriales) and are gram-variable. This, however, does not always hold true. The Deinococcus-Thermus bacteria have gram-positive stains, although they are structurally similar to gram-negative bacteria with two layers. The Chloroflexi have a single layer, yet (with some exceptions) stain negative. Two related phyla to the Chloroflexi, the TM7 clade and the Ktedonobacteria, are also monoderms.
Some Firmicute species are not gram-positive. These belong to the class Mollicutes (alternatively considered a class of the phylum Tenericutes), which lack peptidoglycan (gram-indeterminate), and the class Negativicutes, which includes Selenomonas and stain gram-negative. Additionally, a number of bacterial taxa (viz. Negativicutes, Fusobacteria, Synergistetes, and Elusimicrobia) that are either part of the phylum Firmicutes or branch in its proximity are found to possess a diderm cell structure. However, a conserved signature indel (CSI) in the HSP60 (GroEL) protein distinguishes all traditional phyla of gram-negative bacteria (e.g., Proteobacteria, Aquificae, Chlamydiae, Bacteroidetes, Chlorobi, Cyanobacteria, Fibrobacteres, Verrucomicrobia, Planctomycetes, Spirochetes, Acidobacteria, etc.) from these other atypical diderm bacteria, as well as other phyla of monoderm bacteria (e.g., Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Thermotogae, Chloroflexi, etc.). The presence of this CSI in all sequenced species of conventional LPS (lipopolysaccharide)-containing gram-negative bacterial phyla provides evidence that these phyla of bacteria form a monophyletic clade and that no loss of the outer membrane from any species from this group has occurred.
Pathogenesis
In the classical sense, six gram-positive genera are typically pathogenic in humans. Two of these, Streptococcus and Staphylococcus, are cocci (sphere-shaped). The remaining organisms are bacilli (rod-shaped) and can be subdivided based on their ability to form spores. The non-spore formers are Corynebacterium and Listeria (a coccobacillus), whereas Bacillus and Clostridium produce spores. The spore-forming bacteria can again be divided based on their respiration: Bacillus is a facultative anaerobe, while Clostridium is an obligate anaerobe. Also, Rathybacter, Leifsonia, and Clavibacter are three gram-positive genera that cause plant disease. Gram-positive bacteria are capable of causing serious and sometimes fatal infections in newborn infants. Novel species of clinically relevant gram-positive bacteria also include Catabacter hongkongensis, which is an emerging pathogen belonging to Firmicutes.
Bacterial transformation
Transformation is one of three processes for horizontal gene transfer, in which exogenous genetic material passes from a donor bacterium to a recipient bacterium, the other two processes being conjugation (transfer of genetic material between two bacterial cells in direct contact) and transduction (injection of donor bacterial DNA by a bacteriophage virus into a recipient host bacterium). In transformation, the genetic material passes through the intervening medium, and uptake is completely dependent on the recipient bacterium.
As of 2014 about 80 species of bacteria were known to be capable of transformation, about evenly divided between gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria; the number might be an overestimate since several of the reports are supported by single papers. Transformation among gram-positive bacteria has been studied in medically important species such as Streptococcus pneumoniae, Streptococcus mutans, Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus sanguinis and in gram-positive soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus cereus.
Orthographic note
The adjectives Gram-positive and Gram-negative derive from the surname of Hans Christian Gram; as eponymous adjectives, their initial letter can be either capital G or lower-case g, depending on which style guide (e.g., that of the CDC), if any, governs the document being written. This is further explained at Gram staining § Orthographic note.
References
External links
3D structures of proteins associated with plasma membrane of gram-positive bacteria
3D structures of proteins associated with outer membrane of gram-positive bacteria
Staining
Bacteriology | [
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12937 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram-negative%20bacteria | Gram-negative bacteria | Gram-negative bacteria are bacteria that do not retain the crystal violet stain used in the Gram staining method of bacterial differentiation. They are characterized by their cell envelopes, which are composed of a thin peptidoglycan cell wall sandwiched between an inner cytoplasmic cell membrane and a bacterial outer membrane.
Gram-negative bacteria are found in virtually all environments on Earth that support life. The gram-negative bacteria include the model organism Escherichia coli, as well as many pathogenic bacteria, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Chlamydia trachomatis, and Yersinia pestis. They are an important medical challenge, as their outer membrane protects them from many antibiotics (including penicillin), detergents that would normally damage the inner cell membrane, and lysozyme, an antimicrobial enzyme produced by animals that forms part of the innate immune system. Additionally, the outer leaflet of this membrane comprises a complex lipopolysaccharide (LPS) whose lipid A component can cause a toxic reaction when bacteria are lysed by immune cells. This toxic reaction may lead to low blood pressure, respiratory failure, reduced oxygen delivery, and lactic acidosis — manifestations of septic shock.
Several classes of antibiotics have been designed to target gram-negative bacteria, including aminopenicillins, ureidopenicillins, cephalosporins, beta-lactam-betalactamase inhibitor combinations (e.g. piperacillin-tazobactam), Folate antagonists, quinolones, and carbapenems. Many of these antibiotics also cover gram-positive organisms. The drugs that specifically target gram negative organisms include aminoglycosides, monobactams (aztreonam) and ciprofloxacin.
Characteristics
Conventional gram-negative (LPS-diderm) bacteria display :
An inner cell membrane is present (cytoplasmic)
A thin peptidoglycan layer is present (this is much thicker in gram-positive bacteria)
Has outer membrane containing lipopolysaccharides (LPS, which consists of lipid A, core polysaccharide, and O antigen) in its outer leaflet and phospholipids in the inner leaflet
Porins exist in the outer membrane, which act like pores for particular molecules
Between the outer membrane and the cytoplasmic membrane there is a space filled with a concentrated gel-like substance called periplasm
The S-layer is directly attached to the outer membrane rather than to the peptidoglycan
If present, flagella have four supporting rings instead of two
Teichoic acids or lipoteichoic acids are absent
Lipoproteins are attached to the polysaccharide backbone
Some contain Braun's lipoprotein, which serves as a link between the outer membrane and the peptidoglycan chain by a covalent bond
Most, with few exceptions, do not form spores
Classification
Along with cell shape, Gram staining is a rapid diagnostic tool and once was used to group species at the subdivision of Bacteria.
Historically, the kingdom Monera was divided into four divisions based on Gram staining: Firmacutes (+), Gracillicutes (−), Mollicutes (0) and Mendocutes (var.).
Since 1987, the monophyly of the gram-negative bacteria has been disproven with molecular studies. However some authors, such as Cavalier-Smith still treat them as a monophyletic taxon (though not a clade; his definition of monophyly requires a single common ancestor but does not require holophyly, the property that all descendants be encompassed by the taxon) and refer to the group as a subkingdom "Negibacteria".
Taxonomy
Bacteria are traditionally classified based on their Gram-staining response into the gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. Having just one membrane the gram-positive bacteria are also known as monoderm bacteria, and gram-negative having two membranes are also known as diderm bacteria. It was traditionally thought that the groups represent lineages, i.e. the extra membrane only evolved once, such that gram-negative bacteria are more closely related to one another than to any gram-positive bacteria. While this is often true, the classification system breaks down in some cases, with lineage groupings not matching the staining result. Thus, Gram staining cannot be reliably used to assess familial relationships of bacteria. Nevertheless, staining often gives reliable information about the composition of the cell membrane, distinguishing between the presence or absence of an outer lipid membrane.
Of these two structurally distinct groups of prokaryotic organisms, monoderm prokaryotes are thought to be ancestral. Based upon a number of different observations including that the gram-positive bacteria are the most sensitive to antibiotics and that gram-negative bacteria are, in general, resistant to them, it has been proposed that the outer cell membrane in gram-negative bacteria (diderms) evolved as a protective mechanism against antibiotic selection pressure. Some bacteria such as Deinococcus, which stain gram-positive due to the presence of a thick peptidoglycan layer, but also possess an outer cell membrane are suggested as intermediates in the transition between monoderm (gram-positive) and diderm (gram-negative) bacteria. The diderm bacteria can also be further differentiated between simple diderms lacking lipopolysaccharide (LPS); the archetypical diderm bacteria, in which the outer cell membrane contains lipopolysaccharide; and the diderm bacteria, in which the outer cell membrane is made up of mycolic acid (e. g. Mycobacterium).
The conventional LPS-diderm group of gram-negative bacteria (e.g., Proteobacteria, Aquificae, Chlamydiae, Bacteroidetes, Chlorobi, Cyanobacteria, Fibrobacteres, Verrucomicrobia, Planctomycetes, Spirochetes, Acidobacteria; "Hydrobacteria") are uniquely identified by a few conserved signature indel (CSI) in the HSP60 (GroEL) protein. In addition, a number of bacterial taxa (including Negativicutes, Fusobacteria, Synergistetes, and Elusimicrobia) that are either part of the phylum Firmicutes (a monoderm group) or branches in its proximity are also found to possess a diderm cell structure. They lack the GroEL signature. The presence of this CSI in all sequenced species of conventional lipopolysaccharide-containing gram-negative bacterial phyla provides evidence that these phyla of bacteria form a monophyletic clade and that no loss of the outer membrane from any species from this group has occurred.
Example species
The proteobacteria are a major phylum of gram-negative bacteria, including Escherichia coli (E. coli), Salmonella, Shigella, and other Enterobacteriaceae, Pseudomonas, Moraxella, Helicobacter, Stenotrophomonas, Bdellovibrio, acetic acid bacteria, Legionella etc. Other notable groups of gram-negative bacteria include the cyanobacteria, spirochaetes, green sulfur, and green non-sulfur bacteria.
Medically relevant gram-negative cocci include the four types that cause a sexually transmitted disease (Neisseria gonorrhoeae), a meningitis (Neisseria meningitidis), and respiratory symptoms (Moraxella catarrhalis, Haemophilus influenzae).
Medically relevant gram-negative bacilli include a multitude of species. Some of them cause primarily respiratory problems (Klebsiella pneumoniae, Legionella pneumophila, Pseudomonas aeruginosa), primarily urinary problems (Escherichia coli, Proteus mirabilis, Enterobacter cloacae, Serratia marcescens), and primarily gastrointestinal problems (Helicobacter pylori, Salmonella enteritidis, Salmonella typhi).
Gram-negative bacteria associated with hospital-acquired infections include Acinetobacter baumannii, which cause bacteremia, secondary meningitis, and ventilator-associated pneumonia in hospital intensive-care units.
Bacterial transformation
Transformation is one of three processes for horizontal gene transfer, in which exogenous genetic material passes from bacterium to another, the other two being conjugation (transfer of genetic material between two bacterial cells in direct contact) and transduction (injection of foreign DNA by a bacteriophage virus into the host bacterium). In transformation, the genetic material passes through the intervening medium, and uptake is completely dependent on the recipient bacterium.
As of 2014 about 80 species of bacteria were known to be capable of transformation, about evenly divided between gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria; the number might be an overestimate since several of the reports are supported by single papers. Transformation has been studied in medically important gram-negative bacteria species such as Helicobacter pylori, Legionella pneumophila, Neisseria meningitidis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Haemophilus influenzae and Vibrio cholerae. It has also been studied in gram-negative species found in soil such as Pseudomonas stutzeri, Acinetobacter baylyi, and gram-negative plant pathogens such as Ralstonia solanacearum and Xylella fastidiosa.
Role in disease
One of the several unique characteristics of gram-negative bacteria is the structure of the bacterial outer membrane. The outer leaflet of this membrane contains lipopolysaccharide (LPS), whose lipid A portion acts as an endotoxin. If gram-negative bacteria enter the circulatory system, LPS can trigger an innate immune response, activating the immune system and producing cytokines (hormonal regulators). This leads to inflammation and can cause a toxic reaction, resulting in fever, an increased respiratory rate, and low blood pressure. This is why some infections with gram-negative bacteria can lead to life-threatening septic shock.
The outer membrane protects the bacteria from several antibiotics, dyes, and detergents that would normally damage either the inner membrane or the cell wall (made of peptidoglycan). The outer membrane provides these bacteria with resistance to lysozyme and penicillin. The periplasmic space (space between the two cell membranes) also contains enzymes which break down or modify antibiotics. Drugs commonly used to treat gram negative infections include amino, carboxy and ureido penicillins (ampicillin, amoxicillin, pipercillin, ticarcillin) these drugs may be combined with beta-lactamase inhibitors to combat the presence of enzymes that can digest these drugs (known as beta-lactamases) in the peri-plasmic space. Other classes of drugs that have gram negative spectrum include cephalosporins, monobactams (aztreonam), aminoglycosides, quinolones, macrolides, chloramphenicol, folate antagonists, and carbapenems.
Orthographic note
The adjectives Gram-positive and Gram-negative derive from the surname of Hans Christian Gram, a Danish bacteriologist; as eponymous adjectives, their initial letter can be either capital G or lower-case g, depending on which style guide (e.g., that of the CDC), if any, governs the document being written. This is further explained at Gram staining § Orthographic note.
See also
Autochaperone
Gram-variable and gram-indeterminate bacteria
OMPdb (2011)
Outer membrane receptor
References
Notes
External links
3D structures of proteins from inner membranes of Ellie Wyithe's gram-negative bacteria
Staining
Bacteriology | [
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12938 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyhound | Greyhound | The English Greyhound, or simply the Greyhound, is a breed of dog, a sighthound which has been bred for coursing game and greyhound racing. Since the rise in large-scale adoption of retired racing Greyhounds, the breed has seen a resurgence in popularity as a family pet.
Greyhounds are defined as a tall, muscular, smooth-coated, "S-shaped" type of sighthound with a long tail and tough feet. Greyhounds are a separate breed from other related sighthounds, such as the Italian greyhound.
The Greyhound is a gentle and intelligent breed whose combination of long, powerful legs, deep chest, flexible spine, and slim build allows it to reach average race speeds exceeding . The Greyhound can reach a full speed of within , or six strides from the boxes, traveling at almost for the first of a race.
Appearance
Males are usually tall at the withers, and weigh on average . Females tend to be smaller, with shoulder heights ranging from and weights from , although weights can be above and below these average weights. Greyhounds have very short fur, which is easy to maintain. There are approximately 30 recognized color forms, of which variations of white, brindle, fawn, black, red, and blue (gray) can appear uniquely or in combination. Greyhounds are dolichocephalic, with a skull which is relatively long in comparison to its breadth, and an elongated muzzle.
Pets
Greyhounds are considered to make good pets, and are known for their loving nature and enjoyment of the company of humans or other dogs, though how well a Greyhound tolerates the company of other small animals such as cats depends on the individual dog's personality. Greyhounds will typically chase small animals; those lacking a high 'prey drive' will be able to coexist happily with toy dog breeds and cats.
Greyhounds live most happily as pets in quiet environments. They do well in families with children, as long as the children are taught to treat the dog properly with politeness and appropriate respect. Greyhounds have a sensitive nature, and gentle commands work best as training methods.
Occasionally, a Greyhound may bark; however, they are generally not barkers, which is beneficial in suburban environments, and they are usually as friendly to strangers as they are with their own families. A 2008 University of Pennsylvania study found that Greyhounds are one of the least aggressive dog breeds towards strangers, owners, and other dogs.
A common misconception regarding Greyhounds is that they are hyperactive. This is usually not the case with retired racing Greyhounds. Greyhounds can live comfortably as apartment dogs, as they do not require much space and sleep almost 18 hours per day. Due to their calm temperament, Greyhounds can make better "apartment dogs" than smaller, more active breeds.
Many Greyhound adoption groups recommend that owners keep their Greyhounds on a leash whenever outdoors, except in fully enclosed areas. This is due to their prey-drive, their speed, and the assertion that Greyhounds have no road sense. In some jurisdictions, it is illegal for Greyhounds to be allowed off-leash, even in off-leash dog parks. Due to their size and strength, adoption groups recommend that fences be between tall, to prevent Greyhounds from jumping over them. As per most breeds being rehomed, Greyhounds that are adopted after racing tend to need time to adjust to their new lives with a human family. Many guides and books have been published to aid Greyhound owners in helping their pet get comfortable in their new home.
Abilities
Coursing
The original primary use of Greyhounds, both in the British Isles and on the Continent of Europe, was in the coursing of deer for meat and sport; later, specifically in Britain, they specialized in competition hare coursing. Some Greyhounds are still used for coursing, although artificial lure sports like lure coursing and racing are far more common and popular. Many leading 300- to 550-yard sprinters have bloodlines traceable back through Irish sires, within a few generations of racers that won events such as the Irish Coursing Derby or the Irish Cup.
Racing
Until the early 20th century, Greyhounds were principally bred and trained for hunting and coursing. During the 1920s, modern greyhound racing was introduced into the United States, England (1926), Northern Ireland (1927), Scotland (1927), and the Republic of Ireland (1927). Australia also has a significant racing culture.
In the United States, aside from professional racing, many Greyhounds enjoy success on the amateur race track. Organizations like the Large Gazehound Racing Association (LGRA) and the National Oval Track Racing Association (NOTRA) provide opportunities for Greyhounds to compete.
Companion
Historically, the Greyhound has, since its first appearance as a hunting type and breed, enjoyed a specific degree of fame and definition in Western literature, heraldry and art as the most elegant or noble companion and hunter of the canine world. In modern times, the professional racing industry, with its large numbers of track-bred greyhounds, as well as international adoption programs aimed at re-homing dogs has redefined the breed as a sporting dog that will supply friendly companionship in its retirement. This has been prevalent in recent years due to track closures in the United States. Outside the racing industry and coursing community, the Kennel Clubs' registered breed still enjoys a modest following as a show dog and pet.
Health and physiology
Greyhounds are typically a healthy and long-lived breed, and hereditary illness is rare. Some Greyhounds have been known to develop esophageal achalasia, gastric dilatation volvulus (also known as bloat), and osteosarcoma. Because the Greyhound's lean physique makes it ill-suited to sleeping on hard surfaces, owners of both racing and companion Greyhounds generally provide soft bedding; without bedding, Greyhounds are prone to develop painful skin sores. The average lifespan of a Greyhound is 10 to 14 years.
Due to the Greyhound's unique physiology and anatomy, a veterinarian who understands the issues relevant to the breed is generally needed when the dogs need treatment, particularly when anesthesia is required. Greyhounds cannot metabolize barbiturate-based anesthesia in the same way that other breeds can because their livers have lower amounts of oxidative enzymes. Greyhounds demonstrate unusual blood chemistry , which can be misread by veterinarians not familiar with the breed and can result in an incorrect diagnosis.
Greyhounds are very sensitive to insecticides. Many vets do not recommend the use of flea collars or flea spray on Greyhounds if the product is pyrethrin-based. Products like Advantage, Frontline, Lufenuron, and Amitraz are safe for use on Greyhounds, however, and are very effective in controlling fleas and ticks.
Greyhounds have higher levels of red blood cells than other breeds. Since red blood cells carry oxygen to the muscles, this higher level allows the hound to move larger quantities of oxygen faster from the lungs to the muscles. Conversely, Greyhounds have lower levels of platelets than other breeds.
Delayed haemorrhage following trauma or routine surgery is more common in greyhounds, with one study reporting significant haemorrhage in 26% of greyhounds following routine gonadectomy, compared to 0-2% in other dog breeds. This is often termed greyhound fibrinolytic syndrome or breed-associated hyperfibrinolysis, where in there is a disorder of the fibrinolysis system without derangement of the primary or secondary coagulation systems, and is also not related to platelet count. In this syndrome there is initial adequate hemostasis following trauma or routine surgical procedures, however 36–48 hours later the site undergoes inappropriate hyperfibrinolysis. This results in delayed bleeding which can result in significant morbidity and mortality. Standard pre-operative blood work does not identify those at risk It is distinct from common bleeding disorders in other breeds such von Willebrand's disease, which is uncommon in greyhounds. Although high quality research data are lacking, it is thought that this condition can be prevented and treated by administering antifibrinolytic medication such as tranexamic acid via the oral or parenteral route. Intensive care and blood product administration may also be required in severe cases.
Greyhounds do not have undercoats and thus are less likely to trigger dog allergies in humans (they are sometimes incorrectly referred to as "hypoallergenic"). The lack of an undercoat, coupled with a general lack of body fat, also makes Greyhounds more susceptible to extreme temperatures (both hot and cold); because of this, they must be housed inside. Some greyhounds are susceptible to corns on their paw pads; a variety of methods are used to treat them.
The key to the speed of a Greyhound can be found in its light but muscular build, large heart, highest percentage of fast twitch muscle of any breed, double suspension gallop, and extreme flexibility of its spine. "Double suspension rotary gallop" describes the fastest running gait of the Greyhound in which all four feet are free from the ground in two phases, contracted and extended, during each full stride.
History
Origins
The ancient skeletal remains of a dog identified as being of the greyhound/saluki form were excavated at Tell Brak in modern Syria, and dated as being approximately 4,000 years old.
Historical literature by Arrian on the vertragus (from the Latin , a word of Celtic origin), the first recorded sighthound in Europe and possible antecedent of the Greyhound, suggested that its origin lies with the Celts from Eastern Europe or Eurasia. Systematic archaeozoology of Britain conducted in 1974 ruled out the existence of a true greyhound-type in Britain prior to the Roman occupation, which was further confirmed in 2000. Written evidence from the early period of Roman occupation, the Vindolanda tablets (No. 594), demonstrate that the occupying troops from Continental Europe either had with them in the North of England, or certainly knew of, the vertragus and its hunting use.
An archaeological find at the Chotěbuz fort in the Czech Republic of sighthound type, "gracile" bones dating from the 8th to 9th century CE, anatomically defined as those of a high "greyhound", were also genetically compared with the modern Greyhound and other sighthounds, and found to be almost completely identical with the modern Greyhound breed, with the exception of only four deletions and one substitution in the DNA sequences, which were interpreted as differences probably arising from 11 centuries of breeding of this type of dog.
All modern pedigree Greyhounds derive from the Greyhound stock recorded and registered first in private studbooks in the 18th century, then in public studbooks in the 19th century, which ultimately were registered with coursing, racing, and kennel club authorities of the United Kingdom. Historically, these sighthounds were used primarily for hunting in the open where their pursuit speed and keen eyesight were essential.
Etymology
The name "Greyhound" is generally believed to come from the Old English . is the antecedent of the modern "hound", but the meaning of is undetermined, other than in reference to dogs in Old English and Old Norse. The word "hund" is still used for dogs in general in Scandinavian languages today. Its origin does not appear to have any common root with the modern word "grey" for color, and indeed the Greyhound is seen with a wide variety of coat colors. The lighter colors, patch-like markings and white appeared in the breed that was once ordinarily grey in color.
The Greyhound is the only dog mentioned by name in the Bible; many versions, including the King James Version, name the Greyhound as one of the "four things stately" in . However, some newer biblical translations, including the New International Version, have changed this to 'strutting rooster', which appears to be an alternative translation of the Hebrew term . However, the Douay–Rheims Bible translation from the late 4th-century Latin Vulgate into English translates this term as "a cock."
According to Pokorny, the English term 'Greyhound' does not mean "grey dog/hound", but simply "fair dog". Subsequent words have been derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *g'her- "shine, twinkle": English 'grey', Old High German "grey, old", Old Icelandic "piglet, pig", Old Icelandic "to dawn", "morning twilight", Old Irish "sun", Old Church Slavonic "morning twilight, brightness". The common sense of these words is "to shine; bright."
In 1928, the first winner of Best in Show at Crufts was breeder/owner Mr. H. Whitley's Greyhound Primley Sceptre. Greyhounds have won the award three times in total, the most recent being in 1956.
Historically, English Greyhounds were grouped: two for coursing, as a "Brace", three for hunting, as a "Leash", otherwise known as a "couple and a half".
See also
Dogs portal
List of dog breeds
Afghan Hound
Azawakh
Borzoi (formerly known as Russian Wolfhound)
Combai
Chippiparai
Fastest animal
Galgo Español (Spanish Greyhound)
Hortaya borzaya (Russian shorthaired sighthound)
Irish Wolfhound
Italian Greyhound
Kanni
Longdog (cross between two sighthound breeds)
Lurcher (sighthound ancestry)
Magyar agár (Hungarian Greyhound)
Mudhol Hound
Polish Greyhound
Rajapalayam (India)
Rampur Greyhound
Saluki
Scottish Deerhound
Sloughi
Whippet
References
Further reading
"The Greyhound in 1864: ..." Walsh 1864
"The Greyhound, ..." Dalziel 1887
Of Greyhounds and of Their Nature, Chapter XV: "The Master of Game", Edward of York circa 1406
"The Greyhound" Roger D. Williams, in The American Book of the Dog Editor George O. Shields. Chicago: Rand Mcnally, 1891
Greyhound Nation: A Coevolutionary History of England, 1200–1900. Edmund Russell, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
The Greyhound and the Hare: A History of the Breed and the Sport. Charles Blanning, The National Coursing Club, 2018.
External links
Dog breeds originating in the United Kingdom
FCI breeds
Greyhound racing
Sighthounds
Vulnerable Native Breeds | [
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12939 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric%20algebra | Geometric algebra | In mathematics, the geometric algebra (GA) of a vector space is an algebra over a field, noted for its multiplication operation called the geometric product on a space of elements called multivectors, which contains both the scalars and the vector space .
Mathematically, a geometric algebra may be defined as the Clifford algebra of a vector space with a quadratic form. Clifford's contribution was to define a new product, the geometric product, that unified the Grassmann algebra and Hamilton's quaternion algebra into a single structure. Adding the dual of the Grassmann exterior product (the "meet") allows the use of the Grassmann–Cayley algebra, and a conformal version of the latter together with a conformal Clifford algebra yields a conformal geometric algebra (CGA) providing a framework for classical geometries. In practice, these and several derived operations allow a correspondence of elements, subspaces and operations of the algebra with geometric interpretations.
The scalars and vectors have their usual interpretation, and make up distinct subspaces of a GA. Bivectors provide a more natural representation of the pseudovector quantities in vector algebra such as oriented area, oriented angle of rotation, torque, angular momentum, electromagnetic field and the Poynting vector. A trivector can represent an oriented volume, and so on. An element called a blade may be used to represent a subspace of and orthogonal projections onto that subspace. Rotations and reflections are represented as elements. Unlike vector algebra, a GA naturally accommodates any number of dimensions and any quadratic form such as in relativity.
Examples of geometric algebras applied in physics include the spacetime algebra (and the less common algebra of physical space) and the conformal geometric algebra. Geometric calculus, an extension of GA that incorporates differentiation and integration, can be used to formulate other theories such as complex analysis and differential geometry, e.g. by using the Clifford algebra instead of differential forms. Geometric algebra has been advocated, most notably by David Hestenes and Chris Doran, as the preferred mathematical framework for physics. Proponents claim that it provides compact and intuitive descriptions in many areas including classical and quantum mechanics, electromagnetic theory and relativity. GA has also found use as a computational tool in computer graphics and robotics.
The geometric product was first briefly mentioned by Hermann Grassmann, who was chiefly interested in developing the closely related exterior algebra. In 1878, William Kingdon Clifford greatly expanded on Grassmann's work to form what are now usually called Clifford algebras in his honor (although Clifford himself chose to call them "geometric algebras"). For several decades, geometric algebras went somewhat ignored, greatly eclipsed by the vector calculus then newly developed to describe electromagnetism. The term "geometric algebra" was repopularized in the 1960s by Hestenes, who advocated its importance to relativistic physics.
Definition and notation
There are a number of different ways to define a geometric algebra. Hestenes's original approach was axiomatic, "full of geometric significance" and equivalent to the universal Clifford algebra.
Given a finite-dimensional quadratic space over a field with a symmetric bilinear form (the inner product, e.g. the Euclidean or Lorentzian metric) , the geometric algebra for this quadratic space is the Clifford algebra . As usual in this domain, for the remainder of this article, only the real case, , will be considered. The notation (respectively ) will be used to denote a geometric algebra for which the bilinear form has the signature (respectively ).
The essential product in the algebra is called the geometric product, and the product in the contained exterior algebra is called the exterior product (frequently called the wedge product and less often the outer product). It is standard to denote these respectively by juxtaposition (i.e., suppressing any explicit multiplication symbol) and the symbol . The above definition of the geometric algebra is abstract, so we summarize the properties of the geometric product by the following set of axioms. The geometric product has the following properties, for :
(closure)
, where is the identity element (existence of an identity element)
(associativity)
and (distributivity)
, where is any element of the subspace of the algebra.
The exterior product has the same properties, except that the last property above is replaced by for .
Note that in the last property above, the real number need not be nonnegative if is not positive-definite. An important property of the geometric product is the existence of elements having a multiplicative inverse. For a vector , if then exists and is equal to . A nonzero element of the algebra does not necessarily have a multiplicative inverse. For example, if is a vector in such that , the element is both a nontrivial idempotent element and a nonzero zero divisor, and thus has no inverse.
It is usual to identify and with their images under the natural embeddings and . In this article, this identification is assumed. Throughout, the terms scalar and vector refer to elements of and respectively (and of their images under this embedding).
The geometric product
For vectors and , we may write the geometric product of any two vectors and as the sum of a symmetric product and an antisymmetric product:
Thus we can define the inner product of vectors as
so that the symmetric product can be written as
Conversely, is completely determined by the algebra. The antisymmetric part is the exterior product of the two vectors, the product of the contained exterior algebra:
Then by simple addition:
the ungeneralized or vector form of the geometric product.
The inner and exterior products are associated with familiar concepts from standard vector algebra. Geometrically, and are parallel if their geometric product is equal to their inner product, whereas and are perpendicular if their geometric product is equal to their exterior product. In a geometric algebra for which the square of any nonzero vector is positive, the inner product of two vectors can be identified with the dot product of standard vector algebra. The exterior product of two vectors can be identified with the signed area enclosed by a parallelogram the sides of which are the vectors. The cross product of two vectors in dimensions with positive-definite quadratic form is closely related to their exterior product.
Most instances of geometric algebras of interest have a nondegenerate quadratic form. If the quadratic form is fully degenerate, the inner product of any two vectors is always zero, and the geometric algebra is then simply an exterior algebra. Unless otherwise stated, this article will treat only nondegenerate geometric algebras.
The exterior product is naturally extended as an associative bilinear binary operator between any two elements of the algebra, satisfying the identities
where the sum is over all permutations of the indices, with the sign of the permutation, and are vectors (not general elements of the algebra). Since every element of the algebra can be expressed as the sum of products of this form, this defines the exterior product for every pair of elements of the algebra. It follows from the definition that the exterior product forms an alternating algebra.
Blades, grades, and canonical basis
A multivector that is the exterior product of linearly independent vectors is called a blade, and is said to be of grade . A multivector that is the sum of blades of grade is called a (homogeneous) multivector of grade . From the axioms, with closure, every multivector of the geometric algebra is a sum of blades.
Consider a set of linearly independent vectors spanning an -dimensional subspace of the vector space. With these, we can define a real symmetric matrix (in the same way as a Gramian matrix)
By the spectral theorem, can be diagonalized to diagonal matrix by an orthogonal matrix via
Define a new set of vectors , known as orthogonal basis vectors, to be those transformed by the orthogonal matrix:
Since orthogonal transformations preserve inner products, it follows that and thus the are perpendicular. In other words, the geometric product of two distinct vectors is completely specified by their exterior product, or more generally
Therefore, every blade of grade can be written as a geometric product of vectors. More generally, if a degenerate geometric algebra is allowed, then the orthogonal matrix is replaced by a block matrix that is orthogonal in the nondegenerate block, and the diagonal matrix has zero-valued entries along the degenerate dimensions. If the new vectors of the nondegenerate subspace are normalized according to
then these normalized vectors must square to or . By Sylvester's law of inertia, the total number of s and the total number of s along the diagonal matrix is invariant. By extension, the total number of these vectors that square to and the total number that square to is invariant. (The total number of basis vectors that square to zero is also invariant, and may be nonzero if the degenerate case is allowed.) We denote this algebra . For example, models three-dimensional Euclidean space, relativistic spacetime and a conformal geometric algebra of a three-dimensional space.
The set of all possible products of orthogonal basis vectors with indices in increasing order, including as the empty product, forms a basis for the entire geometric algebra (an analogue of the PBW theorem). For example, the following is a basis for the geometric algebra :
A basis formed this way is called a canonical basis for the geometric algebra, and any other orthogonal basis for will produce another canonical basis. Each canonical basis consists of elements. Every multivector of the geometric algebra can be expressed as a linear combination of the canonical basis elements. If the canonical basis elements are with being an index set, then the geometric product of any two multivectors is
The terminology "-vector" is often encountered to describe multivectors containing elements of only one grade. In higher dimensional space, some such multivectors are not blades (cannot be factored into the exterior product of vectors). By way of example, in cannot be factored; typically, however, such elements of the algebra do not yield to geometric interpretation as objects, although they may represent geometric quantities such as rotations. Only and -vectors are always blades in -space.
Grade projection
Using an orthogonal basis, a graded vector space structure can be established. Elements of the geometric algebra that are scalar multiples of are grade- blades and are called scalars. Multivectors that are in the span of are grade- blades and are the ordinary vectors. Multivectors in the span of are grade- blades and are the bivectors. This terminology continues through to the last grade of -vectors. Alternatively, grade- blades are called pseudoscalars, grade- blades pseudovectors, etc. Many of the elements of the algebra are not graded by this scheme since they are sums of elements of differing grade. Such elements are said to be of mixed grade. The grading of multivectors is independent of the basis chosen originally.
This is a grading as a vector space, but not as an algebra. Because the product of an -blade and an -blade is contained in the span of through -blades, the geometric algebra is a filtered algebra.
A multivector may be decomposed with the grade-projection operator , which outputs the grade- portion of . As a result:
As an example, the geometric product of two vectors since and and , for other than and .
The decomposition of a multivector may also be split into those components that are even and those that are odd:
This is the result of forgetting structure from a -graded vector space to -graded vector space. The geometric product respects this coarser grading. Thus in addition to being a -graded vector space, the geometric algebra is a -graded algebra or superalgebra.
Restricting to the even part, the product of two even elements is also even. This means that the even multivectors defines an even subalgebra. The even subalgebra of an -dimensional geometric algebra is isomorphic (without preserving either filtration or grading) to a full geometric algebra of dimensions. Examples include and .
Representation of subspaces
Geometric algebra represents subspaces of as blades, and so they coexist in the same algebra with vectors from . A -dimensional subspace of is represented by taking an orthogonal basis and using the geometric product to form the blade . There are multiple blades representing ; all those representing are scalar multiples of . These blades can be separated into two sets: positive multiples of and negative multiples of . The positive multiples of are said to have the same orientation as , and the negative multiples the opposite orientation.
Blades are important since geometric operations such as projections, rotations and reflections depend on the factorability via the exterior product that (the restricted class of) -blades provide but that (the generalized class of) grade- multivectors do not when .
Unit pseudoscalars
Unit pseudoscalars are blades that play important roles in GA. A unit pseudoscalar for a non-degenerate subspace of is a blade that is the product of the members of an orthonormal basis for . It can be shown that if and are both unit pseudoscalars for , then and . If one doesn't choose an orthonormal basis for , then the Plücker embedding gives a vector in the exterior algebra but only up to scaling. Using the vector space isomorphism between the geometric algebra and exterior algebra, this gives the equivalence class of for all . Orthonormality gets rid of this ambiguity except for the signs above.
Suppose the geometric algebra with the familiar positive definite inner product on is formed. Given a plane (two-dimensional subspace) of , one can find an orthonormal basis spanning the plane, and thus find a unit pseudoscalar representing this plane. The geometric product of any two vectors in the span of and lies in , that is, it is the sum of a -vector and a -vector.
By the properties of the geometric product, . The resemblance to the imaginary unit is not incidental: the subspace is -algebra isomorphic to the complex numbers. In this way, a copy of the complex numbers is embedded in the geometric algebra for each two-dimensional subspace of on which the quadratic form is definite.
It is sometimes possible to identify the presence of an imaginary unit in a physical equation. Such units arise from one of the many quantities in the real algebra that square to , and these have geometric significance because of the properties of the algebra and the interaction of its various subspaces.
In , a further familiar case occurs. Given a canonical basis consisting of orthonormal vectors of , the set of all -vectors is spanned by
Labelling these , and (momentarily deviating from our uppercase convention), the subspace generated by -vectors and -vectors is exactly . This set is seen to be the even subalgebra of , and furthermore is isomorphic as an -algebra to the quaternions, another important algebraic system.
Dual basis
Let be a basis of , i.e. a set of linearly independent vectors that span the -dimensional vector space . The basis that is dual to is the set of elements of the dual vector space that forms a biorthogonal system with this basis, thus being the elements denoted satisfying
where is the Kronecker delta.
Given a nondegenerate quadratic form on , becomes naturally identified with , and the dual basis may be regarded as elements of , but are not in general the same set as the original basis.
Given further a GA of , let
be the pseudoscalar (which does not necessarily square to ) formed from the basis . The dual basis vectors may be constructed as
where the denotes that the th basis vector is omitted from the product.
Extensions of the inner and exterior products
It is common practice to extend the exterior product on vectors to the entire algebra. This may be done through the use of the above mentioned grade projection operator:
(the exterior product)
This generalization is consistent with the above definition involving antisymmetrization. Another generalization related to the exterior product is the commutator product:
(the commutator product)
The regressive product (usually referred to as the "meet") is the dual of the exterior product (or "join" in this context). The dual specification of elements permits, for blades and , the intersection (or meet) where the duality is to be taken relative to the smallest grade blade containing both and (the join).
with the unit pseudoscalar of the algebra. The regressive product, like the exterior product, is associative.
The inner product on vectors can also be generalized, but in more than one non-equivalent way. The paper gives a full treatment of several different inner products developed for geometric algebras and their interrelationships, and the notation is taken from there. Many authors use the same symbol as for the inner product of vectors for their chosen extension (e.g. Hestenes and Perwass). No consistent notation has emerged.
Among these several different generalizations of the inner product on vectors are:
(the left contraction)
(the right contraction)
(the scalar product)
(the "(fat) dot" product)
makes an argument for the use of contractions in preference to Hestenes's inner product; they are algebraically more regular and have cleaner geometric interpretations.
A number of identities incorporating the contractions are valid without restriction of their inputs.
For example,
Benefits of using the left contraction as an extension of the inner product on vectors include that the identity is extended to for any vector and multivector , and that the projection operation is extended to for any blade and any multivector (with a minor modification to accommodate null , given below).
Linear functions
Although a versor is easier to work with because it can be directly represented in the algebra as a multivector, versors are a subgroup of linear functions on multivectors, which can still be used when necessary. The geometric algebra of an -dimensional vector space is spanned by a basis of elements. If a multivector is represented by a real column matrix of coefficients of a basis of the algebra, then all linear transformations of the multivector can be expressed as the matrix multiplication by a real matrix. However, such a general linear transformation allows arbitrary exchanges among grades, such as a "rotation" of a scalar into a vector, which has no evident geometric interpretation.
A general linear transformation from vectors to vectors is of interest. With the natural restriction to preserving the induced exterior algebra, the outermorphism of the linear transformation is the unique extension of the versor. If is a linear function that maps vectors to vectors, then its outermorphism is the function that obeys the rule
for a blade, extended to the whole algebra through linearity.
Modeling geometries
Although a lot of attention has been placed on CGA, it is to be noted that GA is not just one algebra, it is one of a family of algebras with the same essential structure.
Vector space model
may be considered as an extension or completion of vector algebra. From Vectors to Geometric Algebra covers basic analytic geometry and gives an introduction to stereographic projection.
The even subalgebra of is isomorphic to the complex numbers, as may be seen by writing a vector in terms of its components in an orthonormal basis and left multiplying by the basis vector , yielding
where we identify since
Similarly, the even subalgebra of with basis is isomorphic to the quaternions as may be seen by identifying , and .
Every associative algebra has a matrix representation; replacing the three Cartesian basis vectors by the Pauli matrices gives a representation of :
Dotting the "Pauli vector" (a dyad):
with arbitrary vectors and and multiplying through gives:
(Equivalently, by inspection, )
Spacetime model
In physics, the main applications are the geometric algebra of Minkowski 3+1 spacetime, , called spacetime algebra (STA), or less commonly, , interpreted the algebra of physical space (APS).
While in STA points of spacetime are represented simply by vectors, in APS, points of -dimensional spacetime are instead represented by paravectors: a three-dimensional vector (space) plus a one-dimensional scalar (time).
In spacetime algebra the electromagnetic field tensor has a bivector representation . Here, the is the unit pseudoscalar (or four-dimensional volume element), is the unit vector in time direction, and and are the classic electric and magnetic field vectors (with a zero time component). Using the four-current , Maxwell's equations then become
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In geometric calculus, juxtapositioning of vectors such as in indicate the geometric product and can be decomposed into parts as . Here is the covector derivative in any spacetime and reduces to in flat spacetime. Where plays a role in Minkowski -spacetime which is synonymous to the role of in Euclidean -space and is related to the d'Alembertian by . Indeed, given an observer represented by a future pointing timelike vector we have
Boosts in this Lorentzian metric space have the same expression as rotation in Euclidean space, where is the bivector generated by the time and the space directions involved, whereas in the Euclidean case it is the bivector generated by the two space directions, strengthening the "analogy" to almost identity.
The Dirac matrices are a representation of , showing the equivalence with matrix representations used by physicists.
Homogeneous model
The first model here is , the GA version of homogeneous coordinates used in projective geometry. Here a vector represents a point and an outer product of vectors an oriented length yet we may work with the algebra in just the same way as in . However, a useful inner product cannot be defined in the space and so there is no geometric product either leaving only outer product and non-metric uses of duality such as meet and join.
Nevertheless, there has been investigation of four-dimensional alternatives to the full five-dimensional CGA for limited geometries such as rigid body movements. A selection of these can be found in Part IV of Guide to Geometric Algebra in Practice. Note that the algebra appears as a subalgebra of CGA by selecting just one null basis vector and dropping the other and further that the "motor algebra" (isomorphic to dual quaternions) is the even subalgebra of .
Conformal model
A compact description of the current state of the art is provided by , which also includes further references, in particular to . Other useful references are and .
Working within GA, Euclidean space (along with a conformal point at infinity) is embedded projectively in the CGA via the identification of Euclidean points with 1D subspaces in the 4D null cone of the 5D CGA vector subspace. This allows all conformal transformations to be done as rotations and reflections and is covariant, extending incidence relations of projective geometry to circles and spheres.
Specifically, we add orthogonal basis vectors and such that and to the basis of the vector space that generates and identify null vectors
as a conformal point at infinity (see Compactification) and
as the point at the origin, giving
.
This procedure has some similarities to the procedure for working with homogeneous coordinates in projective geometry and in this case allows the modeling of Euclidean transformations of as orthogonal transformations of a subset of .
A fast changing and fluid area of GA, CGA is also being investigated for applications to relativistic physics.
Models for projective transformation
Two potential candidates are currently under investigation as the foundation for affine and projective geometry in three dimensions and which includes representations for shears and non-uniform scaling, as well as quadric surfaces and conic sections.
A new research model, Quadric Conformal Geometric Algebra (QCGA) is an extension of CGA, dedicated to quadric surfaces. The idea is to represent the objects in low dimensional subspaces of the algebra. QCGA is capable of constructing quadric surfaces either using control points or implicit equations. Moreover, QCGA can compute the intersection of quadric surfaces, as well as, the surface tangent and normal vectors at a point that lies in the quadric surface.
Geometric interpretation
Projection and rejection
For any vector and any invertible vector ,
where the projection of onto (or the parallel part) is
and the rejection of from (or the orthogonal part) is
Using the concept of a -blade as representing a subspace of and every multivector ultimately being expressed in terms of vectors, this generalizes to projection of a general multivector onto any invertible -blade as
with the rejection being defined as
The projection and rejection generalize to null blades by replacing the inverse with the pseudoinverse with respect to the contractive product. The outcome of the projection coincides in both cases for non-null blades. For null blades , the definition of the projection given here with the first contraction rather than the second being onto the pseudoinverse should be used, as only then is the result necessarily in the subspace represented by .
The projection generalizes through linearity to general multivectors . The projection is not linear in and does not generalize to objects that are not blades.
Reflection
Simple reflections in a hyperplane are readily expressed in the algebra through conjugation with a single vector. These serve to generate the group of general rotoreflections and rotations.
The reflection of a vector along a vector , or equivalently in the hyperplane orthogonal to , is the same as negating the component of a vector parallel to . The result of the reflection will be
This is not the most general operation that may be regarded as a reflection when the dimension . A general reflection may be expressed as the composite of any odd number of single-axis reflections. Thus, a general reflection of a vector may be written
where
and
If we define the reflection along a non-null vector of the product of vectors as the reflection of every vector in the product along the same vector, we get for any product of an odd number of vectors that, by way of example,
and for the product of an even number of vectors that
Using the concept of every multivector ultimately being expressed in terms of vectors, the reflection of a general multivector using any reflection versor may be written
where is the automorphism of reflection through the origin of the vector space () extended through linearity to the whole algebra.
Rotations
If we have a product of vectors then we denote the reverse as
As an example, assume that we get
Scaling so that then
so leaves the length of unchanged. We can also show that
so the transformation preserves both length and angle. It therefore can be identified as a rotation or rotoreflection; is called a rotor if it is a proper rotation (as it is if it can be expressed as a product of an even number of vectors) and is an instance of what is known in GA as a versor.
There is a general method for rotating a vector involving the formation of a multivector of the form that produces a rotation in the plane and with the orientation defined by a -blade .
Rotors are a generalization of quaternions to -dimensional spaces.
Versor
A -versor is a multivector that can be expressed as the geometric product of invertible vectors. Unit quaternions (originally called versors by Hamilton) may be identified with rotors in 3D space in much the same way as real 2D rotors subsume complex numbers; for the details refer to Dorst.
Some authors use the term “versor product” to refer to the frequently occurring case where an operand is "sandwiched" between operators. The descriptions for rotations and reflections, including their outermorphisms, are examples of such sandwiching. These outermorphisms have a particularly simple algebraic form. Specifically, a mapping of vectors of the form
extends to the outermorphism
Since both operators and operand are versors there is potential for alternative examples such as rotating a rotor or reflecting a spinor always provided that some geometrical or physical significance can be attached to such operations.
By the Cartan–Dieudonné theorem we have that every isometry can be given as reflections in hyperplanes and since composed reflections provide rotations then we have that orthogonal transformations are versors.
In group terms, for a real, non-degenerate , having identified the group as the group of all invertible elements of , Lundholm gives a proof that the "versor group" (the set of invertible versors) is equal to the Lipschitz group ( Clifford group, although Lundholm deprecates this usage).
Subgroups of
Lundholm defines the , , and subgroups, generated by unit vectors, and in the case of and , only an even number of such vector factors can be present.
Spinors are defined as elements of the even subalgebra of a real GA; an analysis of the GA approach to spinors is given by Francis and Kosowsky.
Examples and applications
Hypervolume of a parallelotope spanned by vectors
For vectors and spanning a parallelogram we have
with the result that is linear in the product of the "altitude" and the "base" of the parallelogram, that is, its area.
Similar interpretations are true for any number of vectors spanning an -dimensional parallelotope; the exterior product of vectors , that is , has a magnitude equal to the volume of the -parallelotope. An -vector does not necessarily have a shape of a parallelotope – this is a convenient visualization. It could be any shape, although the volume equals that of the parallelotope.
Intersection of a line and a plane
We may define the line parametrically by where and are position vectors for points P and T and is the direction vector for the line.
Then
and
so
and
Rotating systems
The mathematical description of rotational forces such as torque and angular momentum often makes use of the cross product of vector calculus in three dimensions with a convention of orientation (handedness).
The cross product can be viewed in terms of the exterior product allowing a more natural geometric interpretation of the cross product as a bivector using the dual relationship
For example, torque is generally defined as the magnitude of the perpendicular force component times distance, or work per unit angle.
Suppose a circular path in an arbitrary plane containing orthonormal vectors and is parameterized by angle.
By designating the unit bivector of this plane as the imaginary number
this path vector can be conveniently written in complex exponential form
and the derivative with respect to angle is
So the torque, the rate of change of work , due to a force , is
Unlike the cross product description of torque, , the geometric algebra description does not introduce a vector in the normal direction; a vector that does not exist in two and that is not unique in greater than three dimensions. The unit bivector describes the plane and the orientation of the rotation, and the sense of the rotation is relative to the angle between the vectors and .
Geometric calculus
Geometric calculus extends the formalism to include differentiation and integration including differential geometry and differential forms.
Essentially, the vector derivative is defined so that the GA version of Green's theorem is true,
and then one can write
as a geometric product, effectively generalizing Stokes' theorem (including the differential form version of it).
In when is a curve with endpoints and , then
reduces to
or the fundamental theorem of integral calculus.
Also developed are the concept of vector manifold and geometric integration theory (which generalizes differential forms).
History
Before the 20th century
Although the connection of geometry with algebra dates as far back at least to Euclid's Elements in the third century B.C. (see Greek geometric algebra), GA in the sense used in this article was not developed until 1844, when it was used in a systematic way to describe the geometrical properties and transformations of a space. In that year, Hermann Grassmann introduced the idea of a geometrical algebra in full generality as a certain calculus (analogous to the propositional calculus) that encoded all of the geometrical information of a space. Grassmann's algebraic system could be applied to a number of different kinds of spaces, the chief among them being Euclidean space, affine space, and projective space. Following Grassmann, in 1878 William Kingdon Clifford examined Grassmann's algebraic system alongside the quaternions of William Rowan Hamilton in . From his point of view, the quaternions described certain transformations (which he called rotors), whereas Grassmann's algebra described certain properties (or Strecken such as length, area, and volume). His contribution was to define a new product — the geometric product – on an existing Grassmann algebra, which realized the quaternions as living within that algebra. Subsequently, Rudolf Lipschitz in 1886 generalized Clifford's interpretation of the quaternions and applied them to the geometry of rotations in dimensions. Later these developments would lead other 20th-century mathematicians to formalize and explore the properties of the Clifford algebra.
Nevertheless, another revolutionary development of the 19th-century would completely overshadow the geometric algebras: that of vector analysis, developed independently by Josiah Willard Gibbs and Oliver Heaviside. Vector analysis was motivated by James Clerk Maxwell's studies of electromagnetism, and specifically the need to express and manipulate conveniently certain differential equations. Vector analysis had a certain intuitive appeal compared to the rigors of the new algebras. Physicists and mathematicians alike readily adopted it as their geometrical toolkit of choice, particularly following the influential 1901 textbook Vector Analysis by Edwin Bidwell Wilson, following lectures of Gibbs.
In more detail, there have been three approaches to geometric algebra: quaternionic analysis, initiated by Hamilton in 1843 and geometrized as rotors by Clifford in 1878; geometric algebra, initiated by Grassmann in 1844; and vector analysis, developed out of quaternionic analysis in the late 19th century by Gibbs and Heaviside. The legacy of quaternionic analysis in vector analysis can be seen in the use of , , to indicate the basis vectors of : it is being thought of as the purely imaginary quaternions. From the perspective of geometric algebra, the even subalgebra of the Space Time Algebra is isomorphic to the GA of 3D Euclidean space and quaternions are isomorphic to the even subalgebra of the GA of 3D Euclidean space, which unifies the three approaches.
20th century and present
Progress on the study of Clifford algebras quietly advanced through the twentieth century, although largely due to the work of abstract algebraists such as Hermann Weyl and Claude Chevalley. The geometrical approach to geometric algebras has seen a number of 20th-century revivals. In mathematics, Emil Artin's Geometric Algebra discusses the algebra associated with each of a number of geometries, including affine geometry, projective geometry, symplectic geometry, and orthogonal geometry. In physics, geometric algebras have been revived as a "new" way to do classical mechanics and electromagnetism, together with more advanced topics such as quantum mechanics and gauge theory. David Hestenes reinterpreted the Pauli and Dirac matrices as vectors in ordinary space and spacetime, respectively, and has been a primary contemporary advocate for the use of geometric algebra.
In computer graphics and robotics, geometric algebras have been revived in order to efficiently represent rotations and other transformations. For applications of GA in robotics (screw theory, kinematics and dynamics using versors), computer vision, control and neural computing (geometric learning) see Bayro (2010).
Conferences and Journals
The main conferences in this subject include the International Conference on Clifford Algebras and their Applications in Mathematical Physics (ICCA) and Applications of Geometric Algebra in Computer Science and Engineering (AGACSE) series. A main publication outlet is the Springer journal Advances in Applied Clifford Algebras.
Software
GA is a very application-oriented subject. There is a reasonably steep initial learning curve associated with it, but this can be eased somewhat by the use of applicable software. The following is a list of freely available software that does not require ownership of commercial software or purchase of any commercial products for this purpose:
Actively developed open source projects
clifford - Numeric Geometric Algebra Module for Python.
galgebra - Symbolic Geometric Algebra Module for Python by Alan Bromborsky (uses sympy).
GATL - A template C++ library that uses the lazy evaluation strategy to automatically execute low-level algebraic manipulations in compile time in order to produce more efficient programs.
ganja.js - Geometric Algebra for Javascript (with operator overloading and algebraic literals).
klein - Production-oriented SSE-optimized C++ library, specializing in the dual 3D Projective Geometric Algebra .
Versor, A lightweight templated C++ Library with an OpenGL interface for efficient geometric algebra programming in arbitrary metrics, including conformal.
Grassmann.jl - Conformal geometric product algebra based on static dual multivectors with graded-blade indexing (written in Julia language).
Terathon Math Library - Production-quality C++ library by Eric Lengyel that includes the direct 3D Projective Geometric Algebra .
Other projects
GA Viewer Fontijne, Dorst, Bouma & Mann
GAwxM GitHub - GA using wxMaxima, Open Source software using a free Computer Algebra System, includes readme files for motivation and setup.
clifford GitHub - Clifford algebra and geometric calculus in Maxima based on indicial representation.
CLUViz Perwass
Software allowing script creation and including sample visualizations, manual and GA introduction.
Gaigen Fontijne
For programmers, this is a code generator with support for C, C++, C# and Java.
Cinderella Visualizations Hitzer and Dorst.
Gaalop Standalone GUI-Application that uses the Open-Source Computer Algebra Software Maxima to break down CLUViz code into C/C++ or Java code.
Gaalop Precompiler Precompiler based on Gaalop integrated with CMake.
Gaalet, C++ Expression Template Library Seybold.
Clifford Algebra with Mathematica clifford.m
Clifford Algebra with GiNaC built-in classes
Benchmark project
ga-benchmark - A benchmark for C/C++ Geometric Algebra libraries and library generators. The latest results of the ga-benchmark can be found here.
See also
Comparison of vector algebra and geometric algebra
Clifford algebra
Grassmann–Cayley algebra
Spacetime algebra
Spinor
Quaternion
Algebra of physical space
Universal geometric algebra
Notes
Citations
References and further reading
Arranged chronologically
. Chapter 1 as PDF
Extract online at http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/html/UAFCG.html #5 New Tools for Computational Geometry and rejuvenation of Screw Theory
External links
A Survey of Geometric Algebra and Geometric Calculus Alan Macdonald, Luther College, Iowa.
Imaginary Numbers are not Real – the Geometric Algebra of Spacetime. Introduction (Cambridge GA group).
Geometric Algebra 2015, Masters Course in Scientific Computing, from Dr. Chris Doran (Cambridge).
Maths for (Games) Programmers: 5 – Multivector methods. Comprehensive introduction and reference for programmers, from Ian Bell.
IMPA Summer School 2010 Fernandes Oliveira Intro and Slides.
University of Fukui E.S.M. Hitzer and Japan GA publications.
Google Group for GA
Geometric Algebra Primer Introduction to GA, Jaap Suter.
Geometric Algebra Resources curated wiki, Pablo Bleyer.
Applied Geometric Algebras in Computer Science and Engineering 2018 Early Proceedings
GAME2020 Geometric Algebra Mini Event
AGACSE 2021 Videos
English translations of early books and papers
G. Combebiac, "calculus of tri-quaternions" (Doctoral dissertation)
M. Markic, "Transformants: A new mathematical vehicle. A synthesis of Combebiac's tri-quaternions and Grassmann's geometric system. The calculus of quadri-quaternions"
C. Burali-Forti, "The Grassmann method in projective geometry" A compilation of three notes on the application of exterior algebra to projective geometry
C. Burali-Forti, "Introduction to Differential Geometry, following the method of H. Grassmann" Early book on the application of Grassmann algebra
H. Grassmann, "Mechanics, according to the principles of the theory of extension" One of his papers on the applications of exterior algebra.
Research groups
Geometric Calculus International. Links to Research groups, Software, and Conferences, worldwide.
Cambridge Geometric Algebra group. Full-text online publications, and other material.
University of Amsterdam group
Geometric Calculus research & development (Arizona State University).
GA-Net blog and newsletter archive. Geometric Algebra/Clifford Algebra development news.
Geometric Algebra for Perception Action Systems. Geometric Cybernetics Group (CINVESTAV, Campus Guadalajara, Mexico). | [
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12942 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic | Genetic | Genetic may refer to:
Genetics, in biology, the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms
Genetic, used as an adjective, refers to genes
Genetic disorder, any disorder caused by a genetic mutation, whether inherited or de novo
Genetic mutation, a change in a gene
Heredity, genes and their mutations being passed from parents to offspring
Genetic recombination, refers to the recombining of alleles resulting in a new molecule of DNA
Genetic relationship (linguistics), in linguistics, a relationship between two languages with a common ancestor language
Genetic algorithm, in computer science, a kind of search technique modeled on evolutionary biology
See also
Genetic memory (disambiguation) | [
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12945 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20Benson | George Benson | George Washington Benson (born March 22, 1943) is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He began his professional career at the age of 19 as a jazz guitarist.
A former child prodigy, Benson first came to prominence in the 1960s, playing soul jazz with Jack McDuff and others. He then launched a successful solo career, alternating between jazz, pop, R&B singing, and scat singing. His album Breezin' was certified triple-platinum, hitting no. 1 on the Billboard album chart in 1976. His concerts were well attended through the 1980s, and he still has a large following. Benson has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Biography
Early career
Benson was born and raised in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the age of seven, he first played the ukulele in a corner drug store, for which he was paid a few dollars. At the age of eight, he played guitar in an unlicensed nightclub on Friday and Saturday nights, but the police soon closed the club down. At the age of nine, he started to record. Out of the four sides he cut, two were released: "She Makes Me Mad" backed with "It Should Have Been Me", with RCA Victor in New York; although one source indicates this record was released under the name "Little Georgie", the 45rpm label is printed with the name George Benson. The single was produced by Leroy Kirkland for RCA's rhythm and blues label, Groove Records. As he has stated in an interview, Benson's introduction to showbusiness had an effect on his schooling. When this was discovered (tied with the failure of his single) his guitar was impounded. Luckily, after he spent time in a juvenile detention centre his stepfather made him a new guitar.
Benson attended and graduated from Schenley High School. As a youth he learned how to play straight-ahead instrumental jazz during a relationship performing for several years with organist Jack McDuff. One of his many early guitar heroes was country-jazz guitarist Hank Garland. At the age of 21, he recorded his first album as leader, The New Boss Guitar, featuring McDuff. Benson's next recording was It's Uptown with the George Benson Quartet, including Lonnie Smith on organ and Ronnie Cuber on baritone saxophone. Benson followed it up with The George Benson Cookbook, also with Lonnie Smith and Ronnie Cuber on baritone and drummer Marion Booker. Miles Davis employed Benson in the mid-1960s, featuring his guitar on "Paraphernalia" on his 1968 Columbia release, Miles in the Sky before Benson went to Verve Records.
Benson then signed with Creed Taylor's jazz label CTI Records, where he recorded several albums, with jazz heavyweights guesting, to some success, mainly in the jazz field. His 1974 release, Bad Benson, climbed to the top spot in the Billboard jazz chart, while the follow-ups, Good King Bad (#51 Pop album) and Benson & Farrell (with Joe Farrell), both reached the jazz top-three sellers. Benson also did a version of The Beatles's 1969 album Abbey Road called The Other Side of Abbey Road, also released in 1969, and a version of "White Rabbit", originally written and recorded by San Francisco rock group Great Society, and made famous by Jefferson Airplane. Benson played on numerous sessions for other CTI artists during this time, including Freddie Hubbard and Stanley Turrentine, notably on the latter's acclaimed album Sugar.
1970s and 1980s
By the mid-to-late 1970s, as he recorded for Warner Bros. Records, a whole new audience began to discover Benson. With the 1976 release Breezin', Benson sang a lead vocal on the track "This Masquerade" (notable also for the lush, romantic piano intro and solo by Jorge Dalto), which became a huge pop hit and won a Grammy Award for Record of the Year. (He had sung vocals infrequently on albums earlier in his career, notably his rendition of "Here Comes the Sun" on The Other Side of Abbey Road album.) The rest of the album is instrumental, including his rendition of the 1975 Jose Feliciano composition "Affirmation."
In 1976, Benson toured with soul singer Minnie Riperton, who had been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer earlier that year and, in addition, appeared as a guitarist and backup vocalist on Stevie Wonder's song "Another Star" from Wonder's album Songs in the Key of Life.
During the same year, 1976, the top selling album Breezin' was released on the Warner Brothers label featuring the Bobby Womack penned title track and the Leon Russell penned "This Masquerade" which is now a jazz standard. Both tracks won Grammy Awards that year and the album put Benson into the musical limelight both in the US and in Europe. Ironically, Benson had been discouraged up until this time, from using his singing skills, mainly as the company decision makers felt he was not competent enough vocally, and he should stick to playing the guitar.
He also recorded the original version of "The Greatest Love of All" for the 1977 Muhammad Ali bio-pic, The Greatest, which was later covered by Whitney Houston as "Greatest Love of All." During this time Benson recorded with the German conductor Claus Ogerman. The live take of "On Broadway," recorded a few months later from the 1978 release Weekend in L.A., also won a Grammy. He has worked with Freddie Hubbard on a number of his albums throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
The Qwest record label (a subsidiary of Warner Bros., run by Quincy Jones) released Benson's breakthrough pop album Give Me The Night, produced by Jones. Benson made it into the pop and R&B top ten with the song "Give Me the Night" (written by former Heatwave keyboardist Rod Temperton). He had many hit singles such as "Love All the Hurt Away," "Turn Your Love Around," "Inside Love," "Lady Love Me," "20/20," "Shiver," "Kisses in the Moonlight." More importantly, Quincy Jones encouraged Benson to search his roots for further vocal inspiration, and he rediscovered his love for Nat Cole, Ray Charles and Donny Hathaway in the process, influencing a string of further vocal albums into the 1990s. Despite returning to his jazz and guitar playing most recently, this theme was reflected again much later in Benson's 2000 release Absolute Benson, featuring a cover of one of Hathaway's most notable songs, "The Ghetto." Benson accumulated three other platinum LPs and two gold albums.
1990s to present
In 1990, Benson was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music from the Berklee College of Music.
To commemorate the long relationship between Benson and Ibanez and to celebrate 30 years of collaboration on the GB Signature Models, Ibanez created the GB30TH, a limited-edition model with a gold-foil finish inspired by the traditional Japanese Garahaku art form. In 2009, Benson was recognized by the National Endowment of the Arts as a Jazz Master, the United States highest honor in jazz. Benson performed at the 49th issue of the Ohrid Summer Festival in North Macedonia on July 25, 2009, and his tribute show to Nat King Cole An Unforgettable Tribute to Nat King Cole as part of the Istanbul International Jazz Festival in Turkey on July 27. In the fall of 2009, Benson finished recording an album entitled Songs and Stories with Marcus Miller, producer John Burk, and session musicians David Paich and Steve Lukather. As a part of the promotion for his album Songs and Stories, Benson has appeared or performed on The Tavis Smiley Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
He performed at the Java Jazz Festival March 4–6, 2011. In 2011, Benson released the album Guitar Man, revisiting his 1960s/early-1970s guitar-playing roots with a 12-song collection of covers of both jazz and pop standards produced by John Burk.
In June 2013, Benson released his fourth album for Concord, Inspiration: A Tribute to Nat King Cole, which included Wynton Marsalis, Idina Menzel, Till Brönner, and Judith Hill. In September, he returned to perform at Rock in Rio festival, in Rio de Janeiro, 35 years after his first performance at this festival, which was then the inaugural one.
In July 2016, Benson participated as a mentor in the Sky Arts programme Guitar Star in the search for the UK and Republic of Ireland's most talented guitarist.
In May 2018, Benson was featured on the Gorillaz single "Humility".
On July 12, 2018, it was announced that Benson had signed to Mascot Label Group.
Personal life
Benson has been married to Johnnie Lee since 1962 and has seven children. Benson describes his music as focusing more on love and romance, due to his commitment to his family and religious practices, with Benson being a Jehovah's Witness. Benson has been a resident of Englewood, New Jersey.
Discography
Awards
Grammy Awards
List of Grammy Awards received by George Benson
References
External links
1943 births
Living people
American male singer-songwriters
American jazz composers
20th-century American guitarists
21st-century American guitarists
American jazz guitarists
American jazz singers
Smooth jazz guitarists
Lead guitarists
Grammy Award winners
Musicians from Pittsburgh
Schenley High School alumni
African-American guitarists
20th-century African-American male singers
Groove Records artists
GRP Records artists
Verve Records artists
Columbia Records artists
Prestige Records artists
Warner Records artists
Concord Records artists
African-American jazz guitarists
American male guitarists
Musicians from Phoenix, Arizona
American Jehovah's Witnesses
Converts to Jehovah's Witnesses
Singer-songwriters from Pennsylvania
Guitarists from Arizona
Guitarists from Pennsylvania
People from Englewood, New Jersey
American rhythm and blues guitarists
American soul guitarists
American funk guitarists
Jazz musicians from Pennsylvania
American male jazz composers
CTI Records artists
African-American songwriters
21st-century African-American male singers
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12946 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory%20Barenblatt | Grigory Barenblatt | Grigory Isaakovich Barenblatt (; 10 July 1927 – 22 June 2018) was a Russian mathematician.
Education
Barenblatt graduated in 1950 from Moscow State University, Department of Mechanics and Mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in 1953 from Moscow State University under the supervision of A. N. Kolmogorov.
Career and research
Barenblatt also received a D.Sc. from Moscow State University in 1957. He was an emeritus Professor in Residence at the Department of Mathematics of the University of California, Berkeley and Mathematician at Department of Mathematics, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was G. I. Taylor Professor of Fluid Mechanics at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 1994 and he was Emeritus G. I. Taylor Professor of Fluid Mechanics. His areas of research were:
Fracture mechanics
The theory of fluid and gas flows in porous media
The mechanics of a non-classical deformable solids
Turbulence
Self-similarities, nonlinear waves and intermediate asymptotics.
Awards and honors
1975 – Foreign Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1984 – Foreign Member, Danish Center of Applied Mathematics & Mechanics
1988 – Foreign Member, Polish Society of Theoretical & Applied Mechanics
1989 – Doctor of Technology Honoris Causa at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
1992 – Foreign Associate, U.S. National Academy of Engineering
1993 – Fellow, Cambridge Philosophical Society
1993 – Member, Academia Europaea
1994 – Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; (since 1999, Honorary Fellow)
1995 – Lagrange Medal, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei
1995 – Modesto Panetti Prize and Medal
1996 - Visiting Miller Professorship - University of California Berkeley
1997 – Foreign Associate, U.S. National Academy of Sciences
1999 – G. I. Taylor Medal, U.S. Society of Engineering Science
1999 – J. C. Maxwell Medal and Prize, International Congress for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
2000 – Foreign Member, Royal Society of London
2005 – Timoshenko Medal, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, "for seminal contributions to nearly every area of solid and fluid mechanics, including fracture mechanics, turbulence, stratified flows, flames, flow in porous media, and the theory and application of intermediate asymptotics."
References
External links
Applied mechanics: an age old science perpetually in rebirth (pdf). The Timoshenko Medal acceptance speech by Grigory Barenblatt (to be published by ASME in summer 2006).
1927 births
2018 deaths
20th-century Russian mathematicians
21st-century Russian mathematicians
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Fluid dynamicists
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Jewish scientists
Members of Academia Europaea
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
Moscow State University alumni
People from Moscow
Russian Jews
University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Engineering | [
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12947 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical%20tense | Grammatical tense | In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns.
The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and nonfuture. There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Chinese languages, though they can possess a future and nonfuture system typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time. On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future.
Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking. In some contexts, however, their meaning may be relativized to a point in the past or future which is established in the discourse (the moment being spoken about). This is called relative (as opposed to absolute) tense. Some languages have different verb forms or constructions which manifest relative tense, such as pluperfect ("past-in-the-past") and "future-in-the-past".
Expressions of tense are often closely connected with expressions of the category of aspect; sometimes what are traditionally called tenses (in languages such as Latin) may in modern analysis be regarded as combinations of tense with aspect. Verbs are also often conjugated for mood, and since in many cases the three categories are not manifested separately, some languages may be described in terms of a combined tense–aspect–mood (TAM) system.
Etymology
The English noun tense comes from Old French "time" (spelled in modern French through deliberate archaization), from Latin , "time". It is not related to the adjective tense, which comes from Latin , the perfect passive participle of , "stretch".
Uses of the term
In modern linguistic theory, tense is understood as a category that expresses (grammaticalizes) time reference; namely one which, using grammatical means, places a state or action in time. Nonetheless, in many descriptions of languages, particularly in traditional European grammar, the term "tense" is applied to verb forms or constructions that express not merely position in time, but also additional properties of the state or action – particularly aspectual or modal properties.
The category of aspect expresses how a state or action relates to time – whether it is seen as a complete event, an ongoing or repeated situation, etc. Many languages make a distinction between perfective aspect (denoting complete events) and imperfective aspect (denoting ongoing or repeated situations); some also have other aspects, such as a perfect aspect, denoting a state following a prior event. Some of the traditional "tenses" express time reference together with aspectual information. In Latin and French, for example, the imperfect denotes past time in combination with imperfective aspect, while other verb forms (the Latin perfect, and the French or ) are used for past time reference with perfective aspect.
The category of mood is used to express modality, which includes such properties as uncertainty, evidentiality, and obligation. Commonly encountered moods include the indicative, subjunctive, and conditional. Mood can be bound up with tense, aspect, or both, in particular verb forms. Hence, certain languages are sometimes analysed as having a single tense–aspect–mood (TAM) system, without separate manifestation of the three categories.
The term tense, then, particularly in less formal contexts, is sometimes used to denote any combination of tense proper, aspect, and mood. As regards English, there are many verb forms and constructions which combine time reference with continuous and/or perfect aspect, and with indicative, subjunctive or conditional mood. Particularly in some English language teaching materials, some or all of these forms can be referred to simply as tenses (see below).
Particular tense forms need not always carry their basic time-referential meaning in every case. For instance, the historical present is a use of the present tense to refer to past events. The phenomenon of fake tense is common crosslinguistically as a means of marking counterfactuality in conditionals and wishes.
Possible tenses
Not all languages have tense: tenseless languages include Chinese and Dyirbal. Some languages have all three basic tenses (the past, present, and future), while others have only two: some have past and nonpast tenses, the latter covering both present and future times (as in Arabic, Japanese, and, in some analyses, English), whereas others such as Greenlandic, Quechua, and Nivkh have future and nonfuture. Some languages have four or more tenses, making finer distinctions either in the past (e.g. remote vs. recent past) or in the future (e.g. near vs. remote future). The six-tense language Kalaw Lagaw Ya of Australia has the remote past, the recent past, the today past, the present, the today/near future and the remote future. Some languages, like the Amazonian Cubeo language, have a historical past tense, used for events perceived as historical.
Tenses that refer specifically to "today" are called hodiernal tenses; these can be either past or future. Apart from Kalaw Lagaw Ya, another language which features such tenses is Mwera, a Bantu language of Tanzania. It is also suggested that in 17th-century French, the passé composé served as a hodiernal past. Tenses that contrast with hodiernals, by referring to the past before today or the future after today, are called pre-hodiernal and post-hodiernal respectively. Some languages also have a crastinal tense, a future tense referring specifically to tomorrow (found in some Bantu languages); or a hesternal tense, a past tense referring specifically to yesterday (although this name is also sometimes used to mean pre-hodiernal). A tense for after tomorrow is thus called post-crastinal, and one for before yesterday is called pre-hesternal.
Another tense found in some languages, including Luganda, is the persistive tense, used to indicate that a state or ongoing action is still the case (or, in the negative, is no longer the case). Luganda also has tenses meaning "so far" and "not yet".
Some languages have special tense forms that are used to express relative tense. Tenses that refer to the past relative to the time under consideration are called anterior; these include the pluperfect (for the past relative to a past time) and the future perfect (for the past relative to a future time). Similarly, posterior tenses refer to the future relative to the time under consideration, as with the English "future-in-the-past": (he said that) he would go. Relative tense forms are also sometimes analysed as combinations of tense with aspect: the perfect aspect in the anterior case, or the prospective aspect in the posterior case.
Some languages have cyclic tense systems. This is a form of temporal marking where tense is given relative to a reference point or reference span. In Burarra, for example, events that occurred earlier on the day of speaking are marked with the same verb forms as events that happened in the far past, while events that happened yesterday (compared to the moment of speech) are marked with the same forms as events in the present. This can be thought of as a system where events are marked as prior or contemporaneous to points of reference on a time line.
Tense marking
Morphology of tense
Tense is normally indicated by the use of a particular verb form – either an inflected form of the main verb, or a multi-word construction, or both in combination. Inflection may involve the use of affixes, such as the -ed ending that marks the past tense of English regular verbs, but can also entail stem modifications, such as ablaut, as found as in the strong verbs in English and other Germanic languages, or reduplication. Multi-word tense constructions often involve auxiliary verbs or clitics. Examples which combine both types of tense marking include the French passé composé, which has an auxiliary verb together with the inflected past participle form of the main verb; and the Irish past tense, where the proclitic do (in various surface forms) appears in conjunction with the affixed or ablaut-modified past tense form of the main verb.
As has already been mentioned, indications of tense are often bound up with indications of other verbal categories, such as aspect and mood. The conjugation patterns of verbs often also reflect agreement with categories pertaining to the subject, such as person, number and gender. It is consequently not always possible to identify elements that mark any specific category, such as tense, separately from the others.
A few languages have been shown to mark tense information (as well as aspect and mood) on nouns. This may be called nominal TAM.
Languages that do not have grammatical tense, such as Chinese, express time reference chiefly by lexical means – through adverbials, time phrases, and so on. (The same is done in tensed languages, to supplement or reinforce the time information conveyed by the choice of tense.) Time information is also sometimes conveyed as a secondary feature by markers of other categories, as with the Chinese aspect markers le and guo, which in most cases place an action in past time. However, much time information is conveyed implicitly by context – it is therefore not always necessary, when translating from a tensed to a tenseless language, say, to express explicitly in the target language all of the information conveyed by the tenses in the source.
Syntax of tense
The syntactic properties of tense have figured prominently in formal analyses of how tense-marking interacts with word order. Some languages (such as French) allow an adverb (Adv) to intervene between a tense-marked verb (V) and its direct object (O); in other words, they permit [Verb-Adverb-Object] ordering. In contrast, other languages (such as English) do not allow the adverb to intervene between the verb and its direct object, and require [Adverb-Verb-Object] ordering.
Tense in syntax is represented by the category label T, which is the head of a TP (tense phrase).
In particular languages
Latin and Ancient Greek
Latin is traditionally described as having six tenses (the Latin for "tense" being tempus, plural tempora):
Present (praesens)
Imperfect (praeteritum imperfectum)
Perfect (praesens perfectum)
Future (futurum)
Pluperfect (plus quam perfectum, praeteritum perfectum)
Future perfect (futurum perfectum, anterior futurus)
Of these, the imperfect can be considered to represent a past tense combined with imperfective (used for habitual or ongoing past actions or states, as opposed to completed actions expressed with the perfective). The pluperfect and future perfect are relative tenses, referring to the past relative to a past time or relative to a future time.
Latin verbs are conjugated for tense (and aspect) together with mood (indicative, subjunctive, and sometimes imperative) and voice (active or passive). Most forms are produced by inflecting the verb stem, with endings that also depend on the person and number of the subject. Some of the passive forms are produced using a participle together with a conjugated auxiliary verb. For details of the forms, see Latin conjugation.
The tenses of Ancient Greek are similar, but with a three-way aspect contrast in the past: the aorist, the perfect and the imperfect. The aorist was the "simple past", while the imperfective denoted uncompleted action in the past, and the perfect was used for past events having relevance to the present.
The study of modern languages has been greatly influenced by the grammar of the Classical languages, since early grammarians, often monks, had no other reference point to describe their language. Latin terminology is often used to describe modern languages, sometimes with a change of meaning, as with the application of "perfect" to forms in English that do not necessarily have perfective meaning, or the words Imperfekt and Perfekt to German past tense forms that mostly lack any relationship to the aspects implied by those terms.
English
English has only two morphological tenses: the present (or non-past), as in he goes, and the past (or preterite), as in he went. The non-past usually references the present, but sometimes references the future (as in the bus leaves tomorrow). In special uses such as the historical present it can talk about the past as well. These morphological tenses are marked either with a suffix (walk(s) ~ walked) or with ablaut (sing(s) ~ sang).
In some contexts, particularly in English language teaching, various tense–aspect combinations are referred to loosely as tenses. Similarly, the term "future tense" is sometimes loosely applied to cases where modals such as will are used to talk about future points in time.
Other Indo-European languages
Proto-Indo-European verbs had present, perfect (stative), imperfect and aorist forms – these can be considered as representing two tenses (present and past) with different aspects. Most languages in the Indo-European family have developed systems either with two morphological tenses (present or "non-past", and past) or with three (present, past and future). The tenses often form part of entangled tense–aspect–mood conjugation systems. Additional tenses, tense–aspect combinations, etc. can be provided by compound constructions containing auxiliary verbs.
The Germanic languages (which include English) have present (non-past) and past tenses formed morphologically, with future and other additional forms made using auxiliaries. In standard German, the compound past (Perfekt) has replaced the simple morphological past in most contexts.
The Romance languages (descendants of Latin) have past, present and future morphological tenses, with additional aspectual distinction in the past. French is an example of a language where, as in German, the simple morphological perfective past (passé simple) has mostly given way to a compound form (passé composé).
Irish, a Celtic language, has past, present and future tenses (see Irish conjugation). The past contrasts perfective and imperfective aspect, and some verbs retain such a contrast in the present. Classical Irish had a three-way aspectual contrast of simple–perfective–imperfective in the past and present tenses. Modern Scottish Gaelic on the other hand only has past, non-past and 'indefinite', and, in the case of the verb 'be' (including its use as an auxiliary), also present tense.
Persian, an Indo-Iranian language, has past and non-past forms, with additional aspectual distinctions. Future can be expressed using an auxiliary, but almost never in non-formal context.
Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), an Indo-Aryan language, has indicative perfect past and indicative future forms, while the indicative present and indicative imperfect past conjugations exist only for the verb honā (to be). The indicative future is constructed using the future subjunctive conjugations (which used to be the indicative present conjugations in older forms of Hind-Urdu) by adding a future future suffix -gā that declines for gender and the number of the noun that the pronoun refes to. The conjugations of the indicative perfect past and the indicative imperfect past are derived from participles (just like the past tense formation in Slavic languages) and hence they agree with the grammatical number and the gender of noun which the pronoun refers to and not the pronoun itself. The perfect past doubles as the perfective aspect participle and the imperfect past conjugations act as the copula to mark imperfect past when used with the aspectual participles. Hindi-Urdu has an overtly marked tense-aspect-mood system. Periphrastic Hindi-Urdu verb forms (aspectual verb forms) consist of two elements, the first of these two elements is the aspect marker and the second element (the copula) is the common tense-mood marker. Hindi-Urdu has 3 grammatical aspectsː Habitual, Perfective, and Progressive; and 5 grammatical moodsː Indicative, Presumptive, Subjunctive, Contrafactual, and Imperative. (Seeː Hindi verbs)
In the Slavic languages, verbs are intrinsically perfective or imperfective. In Russian and some other languages in the group, perfective verbs have past and future tenses, while imperfective verbs have past, present and future, the imperfective future being a compound tense in most cases. The future tense of perfective verbs is formed in the same way as the present tense of imperfective verbs. However, in South Slavic languages, there may be a greater variety of forms – Bulgarian, for example, has present, past (both "imperfect" and "aorist") and future tenses, for both perfective and imperfective verbs, as well as perfect forms made with an auxiliary (see Bulgarian verbs).
Other languages
Finnish and Hungarian, both members of the Uralic language family, have morphological present (non-past) and past tenses. The Hungarian verb van ("to be") also has a future form.
Turkish verbs conjugate for past, present and future, with a variety of aspects and moods.
Arabic verbs have past and non-past; future can be indicated by a prefix.
Korean verbs have a variety of affixed forms which can be described as representing present, past and future tenses, although they can alternatively be considered to be aspectual. Similarly, Japanese verbs are described as having present and past tenses, although they may be analysed as aspects. Chinese and many other East Asian languages generally lack inflection and are considered to be tenseless languages, although they may have aspect markers which convey certain information about time reference.
For examples of languages with a greater variety of tenses, see the section on possible tenses, above. Fuller information on tense formation and usage in particular languages can be found in the articles on those languages and their grammars.
Austronesian languages
Rapa
Rapa is the French Polynesian language of the island of Rapa Iti. Verbs in the indigenous Old Rapa occur with a marker known as TAM which stands for tense, aspect, or mood which can be followed by directional particles or deictic particles. Of the markers there are three tense markers called: Imperfective, Progressive, and Perfective. Which simply mean, Before, Currently, and After. However, specific TAM markers and the type of deictic or directional particle that follows determine and denote different types of meanings in terms of tenses.
Imperfective: denotes actions that have not occurred yet but will occur and expressed by TAM e.
Progressive: Also expressed by TAM e and denotes actions that are currently happening when used with deictic na, and denotes actions that was just witnessed but still currently happening when used with deictic ra.
Perfective: denotes actions that have already occurred or have finished and is marked by TAM ka.
In Old Rapa there are also other types of tense markers known as Past, Imperative, and Subjunctive.
Past
TAM i marks past action. It is rarely used as a matrix TAM and is more frequently observed in past embedded clauses
Imperative
The imperative is marked in Old Rapa by TAM a. A second person subject is implied by the direct command of the imperative.
For a more polite form rather than a straightforward command imperative TAM a is used with adverbial kānei. Kānei is only shown to be used in imperative structures and was translated by the french as "please".
It is also used in a more impersonal form. For example, how you would speak toward a pesky neighbor.
Subjunctive
The subjunctive in Old Rapa is marked by kia and can also be used in expressions of desire
Tokelau
The Tokelauan language is a tenseless language. The language uses the same words for all three tenses; the phrase E liliu mai au i te Aho Tōnai literally translates to Come back / me / on Saturday, but the translation becomes 'I am coming back on Saturday'.
Wuvulu-Aua
Wuvulu-Aua does not have an explicit tense, but rather tense is conveyed by mood, aspect markers, and time phrases. Wuvulu speakers use a realis mood to convey past tense as speakers can be certain about events that have occurred. In some cases, realis mood is used to convey present tense — often to indicate a state of being. Wuvulu speakers use an irrealis mood to convey future tense.
Tense in Wuvulu-Aua may also be implied by using time adverbials and aspectual markings. Wuvulu contains three verbal markers to indicate sequence of events. The preverbal adverbial loʔo 'first' indicates the verb occurs before any other. The postverbal morpheme liai and linia are the respective intransitive and transitive suffixes indicating a repeated action. The postverbal morpheme li and liria are the respective intransitive and transitive suffixes indicating a completed action.
Mortlockese
Mortlockese uses tense markers such as mii and to denote the present tense state of a subject, aa to denote a present tense state that an object has changed to from a different, past state, kɞ to describe something that has already been completed, pɞ and lɛ to denote future tense, pʷapʷ to denote a possible action or state in future tense, and sæn/mwo for something that has not happened yet. Each of these markers is used in conjunction with the subject proclitics except for the markers aa and mii. Additionally, the marker mii can be used with any type of intransitive verb.
See also
Sequence of tenses
Spatial tense
References
Further reading
External links
Combinations of Tense, Aspect, and Mood in Greek
Grammatical Features Inventory
English grammar
Time in linguistics | [
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12948 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical%20aspect | Grammatical aspect | Aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people").
Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions (continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions (habitual aspect).
Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect, which indicates that an event occurred prior to (but has continuing relevance at) the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten".
Different languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions; some (such as Standard German; see below) do not make any. The marking of aspect is often conflated with the marking of tense and mood (see tense–aspect–mood). Aspectual distinctions may be restricted to certain tenses: in Latin and the Romance languages, for example, the perfective–imperfective distinction is marked in the past tense, by the division between preterites and imperfects. Explicit consideration of aspect as a category first arose out of study of the Slavic languages; here verbs often occur in pairs, with two related verbs being used respectively for imperfective and perfective meanings.
The concept of grammatical aspect should not be confused with perfect and imperfect verb forms; the meanings of the latter terms are somewhat different, and in some languages, the common names used for verb forms may not follow the actual aspects precisely.
Basic concept
History
The Indian linguist Yaska (c. 7th century BCE) dealt with grammatical aspect, distinguishing actions that are processes (bhāva), from those where the action is considered as a completed whole (mūrta). This is the key distinction between the imperfective and perfective. Yaska also applied this distinction to a verb versus an action nominal.
Grammarians of the Greek and Latin languages also showed an interest in aspect, but the idea did not enter into the modern Western grammatical tradition until the 19th century via the study of the grammar of the Slavic languages. The earliest use of the term recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1853.
Modern usage
Aspect is often confused with the closely related concept of tense, because they both convey information about time. While tense relates the time of referent to some other time, commonly the speech event, aspect conveys other temporal information, such as duration, completion, or frequency, as it relates to the time of action. Thus tense refers to temporally when while aspect refers to temporally how. Aspect can be said to describe the texture of the time in which a situation occurs, such as a single point of time, a continuous range of time, a sequence of discrete points in time, etc., whereas tense indicates its location in time.
For example, consider the following sentences: "I eat", "I am eating", "I have eaten", and "I have been eating". All are in the present tense, indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence (eat, am, and have). Yet since they differ in aspect each conveys different information or points of view as to how the action pertains to the present.
Grammatical aspect is a formal property of a language, distinguished through overt inflection, derivational affixes, or independent words that serve as grammatically required markers of those aspects. For example, the K'iche' language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k- and x- to mark incompletive and completive aspect; Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers -le 了, -zhe 着, zài- 在, and -guò 过 to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects, and also marks aspect with adverbs; and English marks the continuous aspect with the verb to be coupled with present participle and the perfect with the verb to have coupled with past participle. Even languages that do not mark aspect morphologically or through auxiliary verbs, however, can convey such distinctions by the use of adverbs or other syntactic constructions.
Grammatical aspect is distinguished from lexical aspect or aktionsart, which is an inherent feature of verbs or verb phrases and is determined by the nature of the situation that the verb describes.
Common aspectual distinctions
The most fundamental aspectual distinction, represented in many languages, is between perfective aspect and imperfective aspect. This is the basic aspectual distinction in the Slavic languages.
It semantically corresponds to the distinction between the morphological forms known respectively as the aorist and imperfect in Greek, the preterite and imperfect in Spanish, the simple past (passé simple) and imperfect in French, and the perfect and imperfect in Latin (from the Latin perfectus, meaning "completed").
Essentially, the perfective aspect looks at an event as a complete action, while the imperfective aspect views an event as the process of unfolding or a repeated or habitual event (thus corresponding to the progressive/continuous aspect for events of short-term duration and to habitual aspect for longer terms).
For events of short durations in the past, the distinction often coincides with the distinction in the English language between the simple past "X-ed," as compared to the progressive "was X-ing". Compare "I wrote the letters this morning" (i.e. finished writing the letters: an action completed) and "I was writing letters this morning" (the letters may still be unfinished).
In describing longer time periods, English needs context to maintain the distinction between the habitual ("I called him often in the past" – a habit that has no point of completion) and perfective ("I called him once" – an action completed), although the construct "used to" marks both habitual aspect and past tense and can be used if the aspectual distinction otherwise is not clear.
Sometimes, English has a lexical distinction where other languages may use the distinction in grammatical aspect. For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as a "completed action") correspond to the imperfect and perfect forms of the equivalent verbs in French and Spanish, savoir and saber. This is also true when the sense of verb "to know" is "to know somebody", in this case opposed in aspect to the verb "to meet" (or even to the construction "to get to know"). These correspond to imperfect and perfect forms of conocer in Spanish, and connaître in French. In German, on the other hand, the distinction is also lexical (as in English) through verbs kennen and kennenlernen, although the semantic relation between both forms is much more straightforward since kennen means "to know" and lernen means "to learn".
Aspect vs. tense
The Germanic languages combine the concept of aspect with the concept of tense. Although English largely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutral, progressive, perfect, progressive perfect, and [in the past tense] habitual) do not correspond very closely to the distinction of perfective vs. imperfective that is found in most languages with aspect. Furthermore, the separation of tense and aspect in English is not maintained rigidly. One instance of this is the alternation, in some forms of English, between sentences such as "Have you eaten?" and "Did you eat?".
In European languages, rather than locating an event time, the way tense does, aspect describes "the internal temporal constituency of a situation", or in other words, aspect is a way "of conceiving the flow of the process itself". English aspectual distinctions in the past tense include "I went, I used to go, I was going, I had gone"; in the present tense "I lose, I am losing, I have lost, I have been losing, I am going to lose"; and with the future modal "I will see, I will be seeing, I will have seen, I am going to see". What distinguishes these aspects within each tense is not (necessarily) when the event occurs, but how the time in which it occurs is viewed: as complete, ongoing, consequential, planned, etc.
In most dialects of Ancient Greek, aspect is indicated uniquely by verbal morphology. For example, the very frequently used aorist, though a functional preterite in the indicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspect in the subjunctive and optative. The perfect in all moods is used as an aspectual marker, conveying the sense of a resultant state. E.g. – I see (present); – I saw (aorist); – I am in a state of having seen = I know (perfect).
In many Sino-Tibetan languages, such as Mandarin, verbs lack grammatical markers of tense, but are rich in aspect (Heine, Kuteva 2010, p. 10). Markers of aspect are attached to verbs to indicate aspect. Event time is inferred through use of these aspectual markers, along with optional inclusion of adverbs.
Lexical vs. grammatical aspect
There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as described here, and lexical aspect. Other terms for the contrast lexical vs. grammatical include: situation vs. viewpoint and inner vs. outer. Lexical aspect, also known as aktionsart, is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and is not marked formally. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect. Typical distinctions are between states ("I owned"), activities ("I shopped"), accomplishments ("I painted a picture"), achievements ("I bought"), and punctual, or semelfactive, events ("I sneezed"). These distinctions are often relevant syntactically. For example, states and activities, but not usually achievements, can be used in English with a prepositional for-phrase describing a time duration: "I had a car for five hours", "I shopped for five hours", but not "*I bought a car for five hours". Lexical aspect is sometimes called Aktionsart, especially by German and Slavic linguists. Lexical or situation aspect is marked in Athabaskan languages.
One of the factors in situation aspect is telicity. Telicity might be considered a kind of lexical aspect, except that it is typically not a property of a verb in isolation, but rather a property of an entire verb phrase. Achievements, accomplishments and semelfactives have telic situation aspect, while states and activities have atelic situation aspect.
The other factor in situation aspect is duration, which is also a property of a verb phrase. Accomplishments, states, and activities have duration, while achievements and semelfactives do not.
Indicating aspect
In some languages, aspect and time are very clearly separated, making them much more distinct to their speakers. There are a number of languages that mark aspect much more saliently than time. Prominent in this category are Chinese and American Sign Language, which both differentiate many aspects but rely exclusively on optional time-indicating terms to pinpoint an action with respect to time. In other language groups, for example in most modern Indo-European languages (except Slavic languages and some Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi), aspect has become almost entirely conflated, in the verbal morphological system, with time.
In Russian, aspect is more salient than tense in narrative. Russian, like other Slavic languages, uses different lexical entries for the different aspects, whereas other languages mark them morphologically, and still others with auxiliaries (e.g., English).
In Hindi, the aspect marker is overtly separated from the tense/mood marker. Periphrastic Hindi verb forms consist of two elements. The first of these two elements is the aspect marker and the second element (the copula) is the common tense/mood marker.
In literary Arabic ( al-fuṣḥā) the verb has two aspect-tenses: perfective (past), and imperfective (non-past). There is some disagreement among grammarians whether to view the distinction as a distinction in aspect, or tense, or both. The past verb ( al-fiʿl al-māḍī) denotes an event ( ḥadaṯ) completed in the past, but it says nothing about the relation of this past event to present status. For example, waṣala, "arrived", indicates that arrival occurred in the past without saying anything about the present status of the arriver – maybe they stuck around, maybe they turned around and left, etc. – nor about the aspect of the past event except insofar as completeness can be considered aspectual. This past verb is clearly similar if not identical to the Greek aorist, which is considered a tense but is more of an aspect marker. In the Arabic, aorist aspect is the logical consequence of past tense. By contrast, the "Verb of Similarity" ( al-fiʿl al-muḍāriʿ), so called because of its resemblance to the active participial noun, is considered to denote an event in the present or future without committing to a specific aspectual sense beyond the incompleteness implied by the tense: (yaḍribu, he strikes/is striking/will strike/etc.). Those are the only two "tenses" in Arabic (not counting amr, command or imperative, which is traditionally considered as denoting future events.) To explicitly mark aspect, Arabic uses a variety of lexical and syntactic devices.
Contemporary Arabic dialects are another matter. One major change from al-fuṣḥā is the use of a prefix particle ( bi in Egyptian and Levantine dialects—though it may have a slightly different range of functions in each dialect) to explicitly mark progressive, continuous, or habitual aspect: , bi-yiktib, he is now writing, writes all the time, etc.
Aspect can mark the stage of an action. The prospective aspect is a combination of tense and aspect that indicates the action is in preparation to take place. The inceptive aspect identifies the beginning stage of an action (e.g. Esperanto uses ek-, e.g. Mi ekmanĝas, "I am beginning to eat".) and inchoative and ingressive aspects identify a change of state (The flowers started blooming) or the start of an action (He started running). Aspects of stage continue through progressive, pausative, resumptive, cessive, and terminative.
Important qualifications:
Although the perfective is often thought of as representing a "momentary action", this is not strictly correct. It can equally well be used for an action that took time, as long as it is conceived of as a unit, with a clearly defined start and end, such as "Last summer I visited France".
Grammatical aspect represents a formal distinction encoded in the grammar of a language. Although languages that are described as having imperfective and perfective aspects agree in most cases in their use of these aspects, they may not agree in every situation. For example:
Some languages have additional grammatical aspects. Spanish and Ancient Greek, for example, have a perfect (not the same as the perfective), which refers to a state resulting from a previous action (also described as a previous action with relevance to a particular time, or a previous action viewed from the perspective of a later time). This corresponds (roughly) to the "have X-ed" construction in English, as in "I have recently eaten". Languages that lack this aspect (such as Portuguese, which is closely related to Spanish) often use the past perfective to render the present perfect (compare the roughly synonymous English sentences "Have you eaten yet?" and "Did you eat yet?").
In some languages, the formal representation of aspect is optional, and can be omitted when the aspect is clear from context or does not need to be emphasized. This is the case, for example, in Mandarin Chinese, with the perfective suffix le and (especially) the imperfective zhe.
For some verbs in some languages, the difference between perfective and imperfective conveys an additional meaning difference; in such cases, the two aspects are typically translated using separate verbs in English. In Greek, for example, the imperfective sometimes adds the notion of "try to do something" (the so-called conative imperfect); hence, the same verb, in the imperfective (present or imperfect) and aorist, respectively, is used to convey look and see, search and find, listen and hear. (For example, ἠκούομεν (ēkouomen, "we listened") vs. ἠκούσαμεν (ēkousamen, "we heard").) Spanish has similar pairs for certain verbs, such as (imperfect and preterite, respectively) sabía ("I knew") vs. supe ("I found out"), podía ("I was able to") vs. pude ("I succeeded (in doing something)"), quería ("I wanted to") vs. quise ("I tried to"), and no quería ("I did not want to") vs. no quise ("I refused (to do something)"). Such differences are often highly language-specific.
By language
Germanic languages
English
The English tense–aspect system has two morphologically distinct tenses, past and non-past, the latter of which is also known as the present-future or, more commonly and less formally, simply the present. No marker of a distinct future tense exists on the verb in English; the futurity of an event may be expressed through the use of the auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall", by a non-past form plus an adverb, as in "tomorrow we go to New York City", or by some other means. Past is distinguished from non-past, in contrast, with internal modifications of the verb. These two tenses may be modified further for progressive aspect (also called continuous aspect), for the perfect, or for both. These two aspectual forms are also referred to as BE +ING and HAVE +EN, respectively, which avoids what may be unfamiliar terminology.
Aspects of the present tense:
Present simple (not progressive, not perfect): "I eat"
Present progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I am eating"
Present perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I have eaten"
Present perfect progressive (progressive, perfect): "I have been eating"
(While many elementary discussions of English grammar classify the present perfect as a past tense, it relates the action to the present time. One cannot say of someone now deceased that they "have eaten" or "have been eating". The present auxiliary implies that they are in some way present (alive), even when the action denoted is completed (perfect) or partially completed (progressive perfect).)
Aspects of the past tense:
Past simple (not progressive, not perfect): "I ate"
Past progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I was eating"
Past perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I had eaten"
Past perfect progressive (progressive, perfect): "I had been eating"
Aspects can also be marked on non-finite forms of the verb: "(to) be eating" (infinitive with progressive aspect), "(to) have eaten" (infinitive with perfect aspect), "having eaten" (present participle or gerund with perfect aspect), etc. The perfect infinitive can further be governed by modal verbs to express various meanings, mostly combining modality with past reference: "I should have eaten" etc. In particular, the modals will and shall and their subjunctive forms would and should are used to combine future or hypothetical reference with aspectual meaning:
Simple future, simple conditional: "I will eat", "I would eat"
Future progressive, conditional progressive: "I will be eating", "I would be eating"
Future perfect, conditional perfect: "I will have eaten", "I would have eaten"
Future perfect progressive, conditional perfect progressive: "I will have been eating", "I would have been eating"
The uses of the progressive and perfect aspects are quite complex. They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker:
I was walking down the road when I met Michael Jackson's lawyer. (Speaker viewpoint in middle of action)
I have traveled widely, but I have never been to Moscow. (Speaker viewpoint at end of action)
But they can have other illocutionary forces or additional modal components:
You are being stupid now. (You are doing it deliberately)
You are not having chocolate with your sausages! (I forbid it)
I am having lunch with Mike tomorrow. (It is decided)
English expresses some other aspectual distinctions with other constructions. Used to + VERB is a past habitual, as in "I used to go to school," and going to / gonna + VERB is a prospective, a future situation highlighting current intention or expectation, as in "I'm going to go to school next year."
African American Vernacular English
The aspectual systems of certain dialects of English, such as African-American Vernacular English (see for example habitual be), and of creoles based on English vocabulary, such as Hawaiian Creole English, are quite different from those of standard English, and often reflect a more elaborate paradigm of aspectual distinctions (often at the expense of tense). The following table, appearing originally in Green (2002) shows the possible aspectual distinctions in AAVE in their prototypical, negative and stressed/emphatic affirmative forms:
German vernacular and colloquial
Although Standard German does not have aspects, many Upper German languages, all West Central German languages, and some more vernacular German languages do make one aspectual distinction, and so do the colloquial languages of many regions, the so-called German regiolects. While officially discouraged in schools and seen as 'bad language', local English teachers like the distinction, because it corresponds well with the English continuous form. It is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb sein ("to be") followed by the preposition "am" and the infinitive, or the nominalized verb. The latter two are phonetically indistinguishable; in writing, capitalization differs: "Ich war am essen" vs. "Ich war am Essen" (I was eating, compared to the Standard German approximation: "Ich war beim Essen"); yet these forms are not standardized and thus are relatively infrequently written down or printed, even in quotations or direct speech.
In the Tyrolean and other Bavarian regiolect the prefix *da can be found, which form perfective aspects. "I hu's gleant" (Ich habe es gelernt = I learnt it) vs. "I hu's daleant" (*Ich habe es DAlernt = I succeeded in learning).
Dutch
In Dutch (a West Germanic language), two types of continuous form are used. Both types are considered Standard Dutch.
The first type is very similar to the non-standard German type. It is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb zijn ("to be"), followed by aan het and the gerund (which in Dutch matches the infinitive). For example:
Present progressive: Ik ben aan het werken ("I am working")
Past progressive: Ik was aan het werken ("I was working")
Future progressive: Ik zal aan het werken zijn ("I will be working")
The second type is formed by one of the conjugated auxiliary verbs liggen ("to lie"), zitten ("to sit"), hangen ("to hang"), staan ("to stand") or lopen ("to walk"), followed by the preposition te and the infinitive. The conjugated verbs indicate the stance of the subject performing or undergoing the action.
Present progressive: Ik zit te eten ("I am eating [while sitting]"), De was hangt te drogen ("The laundry is drying [while hanging]")
Past progressive: Ik lag te lezen ("I was reading [while lying]"), Ik stond te kijken ("I was watching [while standing]")
Future progressive: Ik zal zitten te werken ("I will be working [while sitting]")
Sometimes the meaning of the auxiliary verb is diminished to 'being engaged in'. Take for instance these examples:
De leraar zit steeds te zeggen dat we moeten luisteren ("The teacher keeps telling us to listen")
Iedereen loopt te beweren dat het goed was ("Everyone keeps on saying that it was good")
Zit niet zo te zeuren ("Stop whining")
In these cases, there is generally an undertone of irritation.
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages make a clear distinction between perfective and imperfective aspects; it was in relation to these languages that the modern concept of aspect originally developed.
In Slavic languages, a given verb is, in itself, either perfective or imperfective. Consequently, each language contains many pairs of verbs, corresponding to each other in meaning, except that one expresses perfective aspect and the other imperfective. (This may be considered a form of lexical aspect.) Perfective verbs are commonly formed from imperfective ones by the addition of a prefix, or else the imperfective verb is formed from the perfective one by modification of the stem or ending. Suppletion also plays a small role. Perfective verbs cannot generally be used with the meaning of a present tense – their present-tense forms in fact have future reference. An example of such a pair of verbs, from Polish, is given below:
Infinitive (and dictionary form): pisać ("to write", imperfective); napisać ("to write", perfective)
Present/simple future tense: pisze ("writes"); napisze ("will write", perfective)
Compound future tense (imperfective only): będzie pisać ("will write, will be writing")
Past tense: pisał ("was writing, used to write, wrote", imperfective); napisał ("wrote", perfective)
In at least the East Slavic and West Slavic languages, there is a three-way aspect differentiation for verbs of motion with the determinate imperfective, indeterminate imperfective, and perfective. The two forms of imperfective can be used in all three tenses (past, present, and future), but the perfective can only be used with past and future. The indeterminate imperfective expresses habitual aspect (or motion in no single direction), while the determinate imperfective expresses progressive aspect. The difference corresponds closely to that between the English "I (regularly) go to school" and "I am going to school (now)". The three-way difference is given below for the Russian basic (unprefixed) verbs of motion.
When prefixes are attached to Russian verbs of motion they become more or less normal imperfective/perfective pairs, with the indeterminate imperfective becoming the prefixed imperfective and the determinate imperfective becoming the prefixed perfective. For example, prefix при- pri- + indeterminate ходи́ть khodít = приходи́ть prikhodít (to arrive (on foot), impf.); and prefix при- pri- + determinate идти́ idtí = прийти prijtí (to arrive (on foot), pf.).
Romance languages
Modern Romance languages merge the concepts of aspect and tense but consistently distinguish perfective and imperfective aspects in the past tense. This derives directly from the way the Latin language used to render both aspects and consecutio temporum.
Italian
Italian language example using the verb mangiare ("to eat"):
The imperfetto/trapassato prossimo contrasts with the passato remoto/trapassato remoto in that imperfetto renders an imperfective (continuous) past while passato remoto expresses an aorist (punctual/historical) past.
Other aspects in Italian are rendered with other periphrases, like prospective (io sto per mangiare "I'm about to eat", io starò per mangiare "I shall be about to eat"), or continuous/progressive (io sto mangiando "I'm eating", io starò mangiando "I shall be eating").
Indo-Aryan languages
Hindi
Hindi has three aspects, habitual aspect, perfective aspect and the progressive aspect. Each of these three aspects are formed from their participles. The aspects of Hindi when conjugated into their personal forms can be put into five grammatical moods: indicative, presumptive, subjunctive, contrafactual, and imperative. In Hindi, the aspect marker is overtly separated from the tense/mood marker. Periphrastic Hindi verb forms consist of two elements. The first of these two elements is the aspect marker. The second element (the copula) is the common tense/mood marker.
There are a couple of verbs which can be used as the copula to the aspectual participles: होना (honā) [to be, happen], रहना (rêhnā) [to stay, remain], आना (ānā) [to come], and जाना (jānā) [to go]. Each of these copulas provide a unique nuance to the aspect. The default (unmarked) copula is होना (honā) [to be]. These copulas can themselves be conjugated into an aspectual participle and used with another copula, hence forming subaspects. (Seeː Hindi verbs)
Finnic languages
Finnish and Estonian, among others, have a grammatical aspect contrast of telicity between telic and atelic. Telic sentences signal that the intended goal of an action is achieved. Atelic sentences do not signal whether any such goal has been achieved. The aspect is indicated by the case of the object: accusative is telic and partitive is atelic. For example, the (implicit) purpose of shooting is to kill, such that:
Ammuin karhun -- "I shot the bear (succeeded; it is done)" i.e., "I shot the bear dead".
Ammuin karhua -- "I shot at the bear" i.e. the bear may have survived.
In rare cases corresponding telic and atelic forms can be unrelated by meaning.
Derivational suffixes exist for various aspects. Examples:
-ahta- ("once"), as in huudahtaa ("to yell once") (used for emotive verbs like "laugh", "smile", "growl", "bark"; is not used for verbs like "shoot", "say", "drink")
-ele- "repeatedly" as in ammuskella "to go shooting around"
There are derivational suffixes for verbs, which carry frequentative, momentane, causative, and inchoative aspect meanings. Also, pairs of verbs differing only in transitivity exist.
Austronesian languages
Reo Rapa
The Rapa language (Reo Rapa) is a mixed language that grew out of Tahitian and Old Rapa among monolingual inhabitants of Rapa Iti. Old Rapa words are still used for grammar and sentence structure, but most common words were replaced by Tahitian words. Rapa is similar to English as they both have specific tense words such as did or do.
Past negative: ki’ere /kiʔere/
Non-past negative (Regular negative) kāre /kaːre/
Hawaiian
The Hawaiian language conveys aspect as follows:
The unmarked verb, frequently used, can indicate habitual aspect or perfective aspect in the past.
ke + verb + nei is frequently used and conveys the progressive aspect in the present.
e + verb + ana conveys the progressive aspect in any tense.
ua + verb conveys the perfective aspect but is frequently omitted.
Wuvulu
Wuvulu language is a minority language in Pacific. The Wuvulu verbal aspect is hard to organize because of its number of morpheme combinations and the interaction of semantics between morphemes. Perfective, imperfective negation, simultaneous and habitual are four aspects markers in Wuvulu language.
Perfective: The perfective marker -li indicates the action is done before other action.
Imperfect negation: The marker ta- indicates the action has not done and also doesn't show anything about the action will be done in the future.
Simultaneous: The marker fi indicates the two actions are done at the same time or one action occurs while other action is in progress.
Habitual: The marker fane- can indicate a habitual activity, which means "keep doing something" in English. Example:
Tokelauan
There are three types of aspects one must consider when analyzing the Tokelauan language: inherent aspect, situation aspect, and viewpoint aspect.
The inherent aspect describes the purpose of a verb and what separates verbs from one another. According to Vendler, inherent aspect can be categorized into four different types: activities, achievements, accomplishments, and states. Simple activities include verbs such as pull, jump, and punch. Some achievements are continue and win. Drive-a-car is an accomplishment while hate is an example of a state. Another way to recognize a state inherent aspect is to note whether or not it changes. For example, if someone were to hate vegetables because they are allergic, this state of hate is unchanging and thus, a state inherent aspect. On the other hand, an achievement, unlike a state, only lasts for a short amount of time. Achievement is the highpoint of an action.
Another type of aspect is situation aspect. Situation aspect is described to be what one is experiencing in his or her life through that circumstance. Therefore, it is his or her understanding of the situation. Situation aspect are abstract terms that are not physically tangible. They are also used based upon one's point of view. For example, a professor may say that a student who comes a minute before each class starts is a punctual student. Based upon the professor's judgment of what punctuality is, he or she may make that assumption of the situation with the student. Situation aspect is firstly divided into states and occurrences, then later subdivided under occurrences into processes and events, and lastly, under events, there are accomplishments and achievements.
The third type of aspect is viewpoint aspect. Viewpoint aspect can be likened to situation aspect such that they both take into consideration one's inferences. However, viewpoint aspect diverges from situation aspect because it is where one decides to view or see such event. A perfect example is the glass metaphor: Is the glass half full or is it half empty. The choice of being half full represents an optimistic viewpoint while the choice of being half empty represents a pessimistic viewpoint. Not only does viewpoint aspect separate into negative and positive, but rather different point of views. Having two people describe a painting can bring about two different viewpoints. One may describe a situation aspect as a perfect or imperfect. A perfect situation aspect entails an event with no reference to time, while an imperfect situation aspect makes a reference to time with the observation.
Torau
Aspect in Torau is marked with post-verbal particles or clitics. While the system for marking the imperfective aspect is complex and highly developed, it is unclear if Torau marks the perfective and neutral viewpoints. The imperfective clitics index one of the core arguments, usually the nominative subject, and follow the rightmost element in a syntactic structure larger than the word. The two distinct forms for marking the imperfective aspect are (i)sa- and e-. While more work needs to be done on this language, the preliminary hypothesis is that (i)sa- encodes the stative imperfective and e- encodes the active imperfective. It is also important to note that reduplication always cooccurs with e-, but it usually does not with (i)sa-. This example below shows these two imperfective aspect markers giving different meanings to similar sentences.
In Torau, the suffix -to, which must attach to a preverbal particle, may indicate similar meaning to the perfective aspect. In realis clauses, this suffix conveys an event that is entirely in the past and no longer occurring. When -to is used in irrealis clauses, the speaker conveys that the event will definitely occur (Palmer, 2007). Although this suffix is not explicitly stated as a perfective viewpoint marker, the meaning that it contributes is very similar to the perfective viewpoint.
Malay/Indonesian
Like many Austronesian languages, the verbs of the Malay language follow a system of affixes to express changes in meaning. To express the aspects, Malay uses a number of auxiliary verbs:
sudah: perfective, 'saya sudah makan' = 'I have [already] eaten'
baru: near perfective, 'saya baru makan' = 'I have just eaten'
belum: imperfective, 'saya belum makan' = 'I have not eaten'
sedang: progressive not implicating an end
masih: progressive implicating an end
pernah: semelfactive
Philippine languages
Like many Austronesian languages, the verbs of the Philippine languages follow a complex system of affixes to express subtle changes in meaning. However, the verbs in this family of languages are conjugated to express the aspects and not the tenses. Though many of the Philippine languages do not have a fully codified grammar, most of them follow the verb aspects that are demonstrated by Filipino or Tagalog.
Creole languages
Creole languages typically use the unmarked verb for timeless habitual aspect, or for stative aspect, or for perfective aspect in the past. Invariant pre-verbal markers are often used. Non-stative verbs typically can optionally be marked for the progressive, habitual, completive, or irrealis aspect. The progressive in English-based Atlantic Creoles often uses de (from English "be"). Jamaican Creole uses a (from English "are") or de for the present progressive and a combination of the past time marker (did , behn , ehn or wehn) and the progressive marker (a or de) for the past progressive (e.g. did a or wehn de). Haitian Creole uses the progressive marker ap. Some Atlantic Creoles use one marker for both the habitual and progressive aspects. In Tok Pisin, the optional progressive marker follows the verb. Completive markers tend to come from superstrate words like "done" or "finish", and some creoles model the future/irrealis marker on the superstrate word for "go".
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is similar to many other sign languages in that it has no grammatical tense but many verbal aspects produced by modifying the base verb sign.
An example is illustrated with the verb TELL. The basic form of this sign is produced with the initial posture of the index finger on the chin, followed by a movement of the hand and finger tip toward the indirect object (the recipient of the telling). Inflected into the unrealized inceptive aspect ("to be just about to tell"), the sign begins with the hand moving from in front of the trunk in an arc to the initial posture of the base sign (i.e., index finger touching the chin) while inhaling through the mouth, dropping the jaw, and directing eye gaze toward the verb's object. The posture is then held rather than moved toward the indirect object. During the hold, the signer also stops the breath by closing the glottis. Other verbs (such as "look at", "wash the dishes", "yell", "flirt") are inflected into the unrealized inceptive aspect similarly: The hands used in the base sign move in an arc from in front of the trunk to the initial posture of the underlying verb sign while inhaling, dropping the jaw, and directing eye gaze toward the verb's object (if any), but subsequent movements and postures are dropped as the posture and breath are held.
Other aspects in ASL include the following: stative, inchoative ("to begin to..."), predispositional ("to tend to..."), susceptative ("to... easily"), frequentative ("to... often"), protractive ("to... continuously"), incessant ("to... incessantly"), durative ("to... for a long time"), iterative ("to... over and over again"), intensive ("to... very much"), resultative ("to... completely"), approximative ("to... somewhat"), semblitive ("to appear to..."), increasing ("to... more and more"). Some aspects combine with others to create yet finer distinctions.
Aspect is unusual in ASL in that transitive verbs derived for aspect lose their grammatical transitivity. They remain semantically transitive, typically assuming an object made prominent using a topic marker or mentioned in a previous sentence. See Syntax in ASL for details.
Terms for various aspects
The following aspectual terms are found in the literature. Approximate English equivalents are given.
Perfective: 'I struck the bell' (an event viewed in its entirety, without reference to its temporal structure during its occurrence)
Momentane: 'The mouse squeaked once' (contrasted to 'The mouse squeaked / was squeaking')
Perfect (a common conflation of aspect and tense): 'I have arrived' (brings attention to the consequences of a situation in the past)
Recent perfect, also known as after perfect: 'I just ate' or 'I am after eating' (Hiberno-English)
Discontinuous past: In English a sentence such as "I put it on the table" is neutral in implication (the object could still be on the table or not), but in some languages such as Chichewa the equivalent tense carries an implication that the object is no longer there. It is thus the opposite of the perfect aspect.
Prospective (a conflation of aspect and tense): 'He is about to fall', 'I am going to cry" (brings attention to the anticipation of a future situation)
Imperfective (an activity with ongoing nature: combines the meanings of both the continuous and the habitual aspects): 'I was walking to work' (continuous) or 'I walked (used to walk, would walk) to work every day' (habitual).
Habitual: 'I used to walk home from work', 'I would walk home from work every day', 'I walk home from work every day' (a subtype of imperfective)
Continuous: 'I am eating' or 'I know' (situation is described as ongoing and either evolving or unevolving; a subtype of imperfective)
Progressive: 'I am eating' (action is described as ongoing and evolving; a subtype of continuous)
Stative: 'I know French' (situation is described as ongoing but not evolving; a subtype of continuous)
Gnomic/generic: 'Fish swim and birds fly' (general truths)
Episodic: 'The bird flew' (non-gnomic)
Continuative aspect: 'I am still eating'
Inceptive/ingressive: 'I started to run' (beginning of a new action: dynamic)
Inchoative: 'The flowers started to bloom' (beginning of a new state: static)
Terminative/cessative: 'I finished eating/reading'
Defective: 'I almost fell'
Pausative: 'I stopped working for a while'
Resumptive: 'I resumed sleeping'
Punctual: 'I slept'
Durative/Delimitative: 'I slept for a while'
Protractive: 'The argument went on and on'
Iterative: 'I read the same books again and again'
Frequentative: 'It sparkled', contrasted with 'It sparked'. Or, 'I run around', vs. 'I run'
Experiential: 'I have gone to school many times' (see for example Chinese aspects)
Intentional: 'I listened carefully'
Accidental: 'I accidentally knocked over the chair'
Intensive: 'It glared'
Moderative: 'It shone'
Attenuative: 'It glimmered'
Segmentative: 'It is coming out in successive multitudes'
See also
Aktionsart
Ancient Greek grammar: Dependence of moods and tenses
Aspect in Standard Chinese
Grammatical conjugation
Grammatical tense
Grammatical mood
Nominal TAM (tense–aspect–mood)
Tense–aspect–mood
Notes
Other references
Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (), by Hadumod Bussmann, edited by Gregory P. Trauth and Kerstin Kazzazi, Routledge, London 1996. Translation of German Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 1990.
Morfofonologian harjoituksia, Lauri Carlson
Berdinetto, P. M., & Delfitto, D. (2000). "Aspect vs. Actionality: Some reasons for keeping them apart". In O. Dahl (Ed.), Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe (pp. 189–226). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Binnick, R. I. (1991). Time and the verb: A guide to tense and aspect. New York: Oxford University Press.
Binnick, R. I. (2006). "Aspect and Aspectuality". In B. Aarts & A. M. S. McMahon (Eds.), The Handbook of English Linguistics (pp. 244–268). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Frawley, W. (1992). Linguistic semantics. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Kabakciev, K. (2000). Aspect in English: a "common-sense" view of the interplay between verbal and nominal referents (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy). Springer.
MacDonald, J. E. (2008). The syntactic nature of inner aspect: A minimalist perspective. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co.
Maslov, I. S. (1998). "Vid glagol'nyj" ["Aspect of the verb"]. In V. N. Yartseva (Ed.), Jazykoznanie: Bol'shoj entsyklopedicheskij slovar (pp. 83–84). Moscow: Bol'shaja Rossijskaja Entsyklopedija.
Richardson, K. (2007). Case and aspect in Slavic. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Sasse, H.-J. (2006). "Aspect and Aktionsart". In E. K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (Vol. 1, pp. 535–538). Boston: Elsevier.
Smith, Carlota S. (1991). The parameter of aspect. Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Travis, Lisa deMena (2010). "Inner aspect", Dordrecht, Springer..
Verkuyl, H. (1972). On the Compositional Nature of the Aspects, Reidel, Dordrecht.
Verkuyl, H. (1993). A Theory of Aspectuality: the interaction between temporal and atemporal structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Verkuyl, H. (2005). "How (in-)sensitive is tense to aspectual information?" In B. Hollebrandse, A. van Hout & C. Vet (Eds.), Crosslinguistic views on tense, aspect and modality (pp. 145–169). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Zalizniak, A. A., & Shmelev, A. D. (2000). Vvedenie v russkuiu aspektologiiu [Introduction to Russian aspectology]. Moskva: IAzyki russkoi kul’tury.
External links
Robert Binnick, Annotated tense/aspect bibliography (around 9000 entries)
TAMPA: Aspect Explained
Anna Kibort, Aspekt
Anna Katarzyna Młynarczyk: Aspectual Pairing in Polish, a pdf version of the book
Grammar Tutorials - a column overview of the English tenses
Greek tenses
Verb Aspect | [
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12950 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose | Glucose | Glucose is a simple sugar with the molecular formula . Glucose is the most abundant monosaccharide, a subcategory of carbohydrates. Glucose is mainly made by plants and most algae during photosynthesis from water and carbon dioxide, using energy from sunlight, where it is used to make cellulose in cell walls, the most abundant carbohydrate in the world.
In energy metabolism, glucose is the most important source of energy in all organisms. Glucose for metabolism is stored as a polymer, in plants mainly as starch and amylopectin, and in animals as glycogen. Glucose circulates in the blood of animals as blood sugar. The naturally occurring form of glucose is -glucose, while -glucose is produced synthetically in comparatively small amounts and is of lesser importance . Glucose is a monosaccharide containing six carbon atoms and an aldehyde group, and is therefore an aldohexose. The glucose molecule can exist in an open-chain (acyclic) as well as ring (cyclic) form. Glucose is naturally occurring and is found in its free state in fruits and other parts of plants. In animals, glucose is released from the breakdown of glycogen in a process known as glycogenolysis.
Glucose, as intravenous sugar solution, is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the safest and most effective medicines needed in a health system. It is also on the list in combination with sodium chloride.
The name glucose is derived from Ancient Greek (, "wine, must"), from (, "sweet"). The suffix "-ose" is a chemical classifier, denoting a sugar.
History
Glucose was first isolated from raisins in 1747 by the German chemist Andreas Marggraf. Glucose was discovered in grapes by another German chemist – Johann Tobias Lowitz in 1792, and distinguished as being different from cane sugar (sucrose). Glucose is the term coined by Jean Baptiste Dumas in 1838, which has prevailed in the chemical literature. Friedrich August Kekulé proposed the term dextrose (from the Latin , meaning "right"), because in aqueous solution of glucose, the plane of linearly polarized light is turned to the right. In contrast, -fructose (a ketohexose) and -glucose turn linearly polarized light to the left. The earlier notation according to the rotation of the plane of linearly polarized light (d and l-nomenclature) was later abandoned in favor of the - and -notation, which refers to the absolute configuration of the asymmetric center farthest from the carbonyl group, and in concordance with the configuration of - or -glyceraldehyde.
Since glucose is a basic necessity of many organisms, a correct understanding of its chemical makeup and structure contributed greatly to a general advancement in organic chemistry. This understanding occurred largely as a result of the investigations of Emil Fischer, a German chemist who received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his findings. The synthesis of glucose established the structure of organic material and consequently formed the first definitive validation of Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff's theories of chemical kinetics and the arrangements of chemical bonds in carbon-bearing molecules. Between 1891 and 1894, Fischer established the stereochemical configuration of all the known sugars and correctly predicted the possible isomers, applying Van 't Hoff's theory of asymmetrical carbon atoms. The names initially referred to the natural substances. Their enantiomers were given the same name with the introduction of systematic nomenclatures, taking into account absolute stereochemistry (e.g. Fischer nomenclature, / nomenclature).
For the discovery of the metabolism of glucose Otto Meyerhof received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1922. Hans von Euler-Chelpin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Arthur Harden in 1929 for their "research on the fermentation of sugar and their share of enzymes in this process". In 1947, Bernardo Houssay (for his discovery of the role of the pituitary gland in the metabolism of glucose and the derived carbohydrates) as well as Carl and Gerty Cori (for their discovery of the conversion of glycogen from glucose) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1970, Luis Leloir was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of glucose-derived sugar nucleotides in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates.
Chemical properties
Glucose forms white or colorless solids that are highly soluble in water and acetic acid but poorly soluble in methanol and ethanol. They melt at (α) and (β), and decompose starting at with release of various volatile products, ultimately leaving a residue of carbon. Glucose has a dissociation exponent (pK) of 12.16 at in methanol and water.
With six carbon atoms, it is classed as a hexose, a subcategory of the monosaccharides. -Glucose is one of the sixteen aldohexose stereoisomers. The -isomer, -glucose, also known as dextrose, occurs widely in nature, but the -isomer, -glucose, does not. Glucose can be obtained by hydrolysis of carbohydrates such as milk sugar (lactose), cane sugar (sucrose), maltose, cellulose, glycogen, etc. Dextrose is commonly commercially manufactured from cornstarch in the US and Japan, from potato and wheat starch in Europe, and from tapioca starch in tropical areas. The manufacturing process uses hydrolysis via pressurized steaming at controlled pH in a jet followed by further enzymatic depolymerization. Unbonded glucose is one of the main ingredients of honey. All forms of glucose are colorless and easily soluble in water, acetic acid, and several other solvents. They are only sparingly soluble in methanol and ethanol.
Structure and nomenclature
Glucose is usually present in solid form as a monohydrate with a closed pyran ring (dextrose hydrate). In aqueous solution, on the other hand, it is an open-chain to a small extent and is present predominantly as α- or β-pyranose, which interconvert (see mutarotation). From aqueous solutions, the three known forms can be crystallized: α-glucopyranose, β-glucopyranose and β-glucopyranose hydrate. Glucose is a building block of the disaccharides lactose and sucrose (cane or beet sugar), of oligosaccharides such as raffinose and of polysaccharides such as starch and amylopectin, glycogen or cellulose. The glass transition temperature of glucose is and the Gordon–Taylor constant (an experimentally determined constant for the prediction of the glass transition temperature for different mass fractions of a mixture of two substances) is 4.5.
Open-chain form
The open-chain form of glucose makes up less than 0.02% of the glucose molecules in an aqueous solution. The rest is one of two cyclic hemiacetal forms. In its open-chain form, the glucose molecule has an open (as opposed to cyclic) unbranched backbone of six carbon atoms, where C-1 is part of an aldehyde group . Therefore, glucose is also classified as an aldose, or an aldohexose. The aldehyde group makes glucose a reducing sugar giving a positive reaction with the Fehling test.
Cyclic forms
In solutions, the open-chain form of glucose (either "-" or "-") exists in equilibrium with several cyclic isomers, each containing a ring of carbons closed by one oxygen atom. In aqueous solution, however, more than 99% of glucose molecules exist as pyranose forms. The open-chain form is limited to about 0.25%, and furanose forms exist in negligible amounts. The terms "glucose" and "-glucose" are generally used for these cyclic forms as well. The ring arises from the open-chain form by an intramolecular nucleophilic addition reaction between the aldehyde group (at C-1) and either the C-4 or C-5 hydroxyl group, forming a hemiacetal linkage, .
The reaction between C-1 and C-5 yields a six-membered heterocyclic system called a pyranose, which is a monosaccharide sugar (hence "-ose") containing a derivatised pyran skeleton. The (much rarer) reaction between C-1 and C-4 yields a five-membered furanose ring, named after the cyclic ether furan. In either case, each carbon in the ring has one hydrogen and one hydroxyl attached, except for the last carbon (C-4 or C-5) where the hydroxyl is replaced by the remainder of the open molecule (which is or respectively).
The ring-closing reaction can give two products, denoted "α-" and "β-". When a glucopyranose molecule is drawn in the Haworth projection, the designation "α-" means that the hydroxyl group attached to C-1 and the group at C-5 lies on opposite sides of the ring's plane (a trans arrangement), while "β-" means that they are on the same side of the plane (a cis arrangement). Therefore, the open-chain isomer -glucose gives rise to four distinct cyclic isomers: α--glucopyranose, β--glucopyranose, α--glucofuranose, and β--glucofuranose. These five structures exist in equilibrium and interconvert, and the interconversion is much more rapid with acid catalysis.
The other open-chain isomer -glucose similarly gives rise to four distinct cyclic forms of -glucose, each the mirror image of the corresponding -glucose.
The glucopyranose ring (α or β) can assume several non-planar shapes, analogous to the "chair" and "boat" conformations of cyclohexane. Similarly, the glucofuranose ring may assume several shapes, analogous to the "envelope" conformations of cyclopentane.
In the solid state, only the glucopyranose forms are observed.
Some derivatives of glucofuranose, such as 1,2-O-isopropylidene--glucofuranose are stable and can be obtained pure as crystalline solids. For example, reaction of α-D-glucose with para-tolylboronic acid reforms the normal pyranose ring to yield the 4-fold ester α-D-glucofuranose-1,2:3,5-bis(p-tolylboronate).
Mutarotation
Mutarotation consists of a temporary reversal of the ring-forming reaction, resulting in the open-chain form, followed by a reforming of the ring. The ring closure step may use a different group than the one recreated by the opening step (thus switching between pyranose and furanose forms), or the new hemiacetal group created on C-1 may have the same or opposite handedness as the original one (thus switching between the α and β forms). Thus, though the open-chain form is barely detectable in solution, it is an essential component of the equilibrium.
The open-chain form is thermodynamically unstable, and it spontaneously isomerizes to the cyclic forms. (Although the ring closure reaction could in theory create four- or three-atom rings, these would be highly strained, and are not observed in practice.) In solutions at room temperature, the four cyclic isomers interconvert over a time scale of hours, in a process called mutarotation. Starting from any proportions, the mixture converges to a stable ratio of α:β 36:64. The ratio would be α:β 11:89 if it were not for the influence of the anomeric effect. Mutarotation is considerably slower at temperatures close to .
Optical activity
Whether in water or the solid form, -(+)-glucose is dextrorotatory, meaning it will rotate the direction of polarized light clockwise as seen looking toward the light source. The effect is due to the chirality of the molecules, and indeed the mirror-image isomer, -(−)-glucose, is levorotatory (rotates polarized light counterclockwise) by the same amount. The strength of the effect is different for each of the five tautomers.
Note that the - prefix does not refer directly to the optical properties of the compound. It indicates that the C-5 chiral centre has the same handedness as that of -glyceraldehyde (which was so labelled because it is dextrorotatory). The fact that -glucose is dextrorotatory is a combined effect of its four chiral centres, not just of C-5; and indeed some of the other -aldohexoses are levorotatory.
The conversion between the two anomers can be observed in a polarimeter since pure α-glucose has a specific rotation angle of +112.2°·ml/(dm·g), pure β- D- glucose of +17.5°·ml/(dm·g). When equilibrium has been reached after a certain time due to mutarotation, the angle of rotation is +52.7°·ml/(dm·g). By adding acid or base, this transformation is much accelerated. The equilibration takes place via the open-chain aldehyde form.
Isomerisation
In dilute sodium hydroxide or other dilute bases, the monosaccharides mannose, glucose and fructose interconvert (via a Lobry de Bruyn–Alberda–Van Ekenstein transformation), so that a balance between these isomers is formed. This reaction proceeds via an enediol:
Biochemical properties
Glucose is the most abundant monosaccharide. Glucose is also the most widely used aldohexose in most living organisms. One possible explanation for this is that glucose has a lower tendency than other aldohexoses to react nonspecifically with the amine groups of proteins. This reaction—glycation—impairs or destroys the function of many proteins, e.g. in glycated hemoglobin. Glucose's low rate of glycation can be attributed to its having a more stable cyclic form compared to other aldohexoses, which means it spends less time than they do in its reactive open-chain form. The reason for glucose having the most stable cyclic form of all the aldohexoses is that its hydroxy groups (with the exception of the hydroxy group on the anomeric carbon of -glucose) are in the equatorial position. Presumably, glucose is the most abundant natural monosaccharide because it is less glycated with proteins than other monosaccharides. Another hypothesis is that glucose, being the only -aldohexose that has all five hydroxy substituents in the equatorial position in the form of β--glucose, is more readily accessible to chemical reactions, for example, for esterification or acetal formation. For this reason, -glucose is also a highly preferred building block in natural polysaccharides (glycans). Polysaccharides that are composed solely of glucose are termed glucans.
Glucose is produced by plants through the photosynthesis using sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and can be used by all living organisms as an energy and carbon source. However, most glucose does not occur in its free form, but in the form of its polymers, i.e. lactose, sucrose, starch and others which are energy reserve substances, and cellulose and chitin, which are components of the cell wall in plants or fungi and arthropods, respectively. These polymers, when consumed by animals, fungi and bacteria, are degraded to glucose using enzymes. All animals are also able to produce glucose themselves from certain precursors as the need arises. Neurons, cells of the renal medulla and erythrocytes depend on glucose for their energy production. In adult humans, there is about of glucose, of which about is present in the blood. Approximately of glucose is produced in the liver of an adult in 24 hours.
Many of the long-term complications of diabetes (e.g., blindness, kidney failure, and peripheral neuropathy) are probably due to the glycation of proteins or lipids. In contrast, enzyme-regulated addition of sugars to protein is called glycosylation and is essential for the function of many proteins.
Uptake
Ingested glucose initially binds to the receptor for sweet taste on the tongue in humans. This complex of the proteins T1R2 and T1R3 makes it possible to identify glucose-containing food sources. Glucose mainly comes from food—about per day is produced by conversion of food, but it is also synthesized from other metabolites in the body's cells. In humans, the breakdown of glucose-containing polysaccharides happens in part already during chewing by means of amylase, which is contained in saliva, as well as by maltase, lactase, and sucrase on the brush border of the small intestine. Glucose is a building block of many carbohydrates and can be split off from them using certain enzymes. Glucosidases, a subgroup of the glycosidases, first catalyze the hydrolysis of long-chain glucose-containing polysaccharides, removing terminal glucose. In turn, disaccharides are mostly degraded by specific glycosidases to glucose. The names of the degrading enzymes are often derived from the particular poly- and disaccharide; inter alia, for the degradation of polysaccharide chains there are amylases (named after amylose, a component of starch), cellulases (named after cellulose), chitinases (named after chitin), and more. Furthermore, for the cleavage of disaccharides, there are maltase, lactase, sucrase, trehalase, and others. In humans, about 70 genes are known that code for glycosidases. They have functions in the digestion and degradation of glycogen, sphingolipids, mucopolysaccharides, and poly(ADP-ribose). Humans do not produce cellulases, chitinases, or trehalases, but the bacteria in the gut microbiota do.
In order to get into or out of cell membranes of cells and membranes of cell compartments, glucose requires special transport proteins from the major facilitator superfamily. In the small intestine (more precisely, in the jejunum), glucose is taken up into the intestinal epithelium with the help of glucose transporters via a secondary active transport mechanism called sodium ion-glucose symport via sodium/glucose cotransporter 1 (SGLT1). Further transfer occurs on the basolateral side of the intestinal epithelial cells via the glucose transporter GLUT2, as well uptake into liver cells, kidney cells, cells of the islets of Langerhans, neurons, astrocytes, and tanycytes. Glucose enters the liver via the portal vein and is stored there as a cellular glycogen. In the liver cell, it is phosphorylated by glucokinase at position 6 to form glucose 6-phosphate, which cannot leave the cell. Glucose 6-phosphatase can convert glucose 6-phosphate back into glucose exclusively in the liver, so the body can maintain a sufficient blood glucose concentration. In other cells, uptake happens by passive transport through one of the 14 GLUT proteins. In the other cell types, phosphorylation occurs through a hexokinase, whereupon glucose can no longer diffuse out of the cell.
The glucose transporter GLUT1 is produced by most cell types and is of particular importance for nerve cells and pancreatic β-cells. GLUT3 is highly expressed in nerve cells. Glucose from the bloodstream is taken up by GLUT4 from muscle cells (of the skeletal muscle and heart muscle) and fat cells. GLUT14 is expressed exclusively in testicles. Excess glucose is broken down and converted into fatty acids, which are stored as triglycerides. In the kidneys, glucose in the urine is absorbed via SGLT1 and SGLT2 in the apical cell membranes and transmitted via GLUT2 in the basolateral cell membranes. About 90% of kidney glucose reabsorption is via SGLT2 and about 3% via SGLT1.
Biosynthesis
In plants and some prokaryotes, glucose is a product of photosynthesis. Glucose is also formed by the breakdown of polymeric forms of glucose like glycogen (in animals and mushrooms) or starch (in plants). The cleavage of glycogen is termed glycogenolysis, the cleavage of starch is called starch degradation.
The metabolic pathway that begins with molecules containing two to four carbon atoms (C) and ends in the glucose molecule containing six carbon atoms is called gluconeogenesis and occurs in all living organisms. The smaller starting materials are the result of other metabolic pathways. Ultimately almost all biomolecules come from the assimilation of carbon dioxide in plants during photosynthesis. The free energy of formation of α--glucose is 917.2 kilojoules per mole. In humans, gluconeogenesis occurs in the liver and kidney, but also in other cell types. In the liver about of glycogen are stored, in skeletal muscle about . However, the glucose released in muscle cells upon cleavage of the glycogen can not be delivered to the circulation because glucose is phosphorylated by the hexokinase, and a glucose-6-phosphatase is not expressed to remove the phosphate group. Unlike for glucose, there is no transport protein for glucose-6-phosphate. Gluconeogenesis allows the organism to build up glucose from other metabolites, including lactate or certain amino acids, while consuming energy. The renal tubular cells can also produce glucose.
Glucose also can be found outside of living organisms in the ambient environment. Glucose concentrations in the atmosphere are detected via collection of samples by aircraft and are known to vary from location to location. For example, glucose concentrations in atmospheric air from inland China range from 0.8-20.1 pg/l, whereas east coastal China glucose concentrations range from 10.3-142 pg/l.
Glucose degradation
In humans, glucose is metabolized by glycolysis and the pentose phosphate pathway. Glycolysis is used by all living organisms, with small variations, and all organisms generate energy from the breakdown of monosaccharides. In the further course of the metabolism, it can be completely degraded via oxidative decarboxylation, the citric acid cycle (synonym Krebs cycle) and the respiratory chain to water and carbon dioxide. If there is not enough oxygen available for this, the glucose degradation in animals occurs anaerobic to lactate via lactic acid fermentation and releases much less energy because it does not unlock the energy of oxygen. Muscular lactate enters the liver through the bloodstream in mammals, where gluconeogenesis occurs (Cori cycle). With a high supply of glucose, the metabolite acetyl-CoA from the Krebs cycle can also be used for fatty acid synthesis. Glucose is also used to replenish the body's glycogen stores, which are mainly found in liver and skeletal muscle. These processes are hormonally regulated.
In other living organisms, other forms of fermentation can occur. The bacterium Escherichia coli can grow on nutrient media containing glucose as the sole carbon source. In some bacteria and, in modified form, also in archaea, glucose is degraded via the Entner-Doudoroff pathway.
Use of glucose as an energy source in cells is by either aerobic respiration, anaerobic respiration, or fermentation. The first step of glycolysis is the phosphorylation of glucose by a hexokinase to form glucose 6-phosphate. The main reason for the immediate phosphorylation of glucose is to prevent its diffusion out of the cell as the charged phosphate group prevents glucose 6-phosphate from easily crossing the cell membrane. Furthermore, addition of the high-energy phosphate group activates glucose for subsequent breakdown in later steps of glycolysis. At physiological conditions, this initial reaction is irreversible.
In anaerobic respiration, one glucose molecule produces a net gain of two ATP molecules (four ATP molecules are produced during glycolysis through substrate-level phosphorylation, but two are required by enzymes used during the process). In aerobic respiration, a molecule of glucose is much more profitable in that a maximum net production of 30 or 32 ATP molecules (depending on the organism) is generated, mostly by the energy of O.
Tumor cells often grow comparatively quickly and consume an above-average amount of glucose by glycolysis, which leads to the formation of lactate, the end product of fermentation in mammals, even in the presence of oxygen. This is called the Warburg effect. For the increased uptake of glucose in tumors various SGLT and GLUT are overly produced.
In yeast, ethanol is fermented at high glucose concentrations, even in the presence of oxygen (which normally leads to respiration rather than fermentation). This is called the Crabtree effect.
Glucose can also degrade to form carbon dioxide through abiotic means. This has been demonstrated to occur experimentally via oxidation and hydrolysis at 22˚C and a pH of 2.5.
Energy source
Glucose is a ubiquitous fuel in biology. It is used as an energy source in organisms, from bacteria to humans, through either aerobic respiration, anaerobic respiration (in bacteria), or fermentation. Glucose is the human body's key source of energy, through aerobic respiration, providing about 3.75 kilocalories (16 kilojoules) of food energy per gram. Breakdown of carbohydrates (e.g., starch) yields mono- and disaccharides, most of which is glucose. Through glycolysis and later in the reactions of the citric acid cycle and oxidative phosphorylation, glucose is oxidized to eventually form carbon dioxide and water, yielding energy mostly in the form of ATP. The insulin reaction, and other mechanisms, regulate the concentration of glucose in the blood. The physiological caloric value of glucose, depending on the source, is 16.2 kilojoules per gram or 15.7 kJ/g (3.74 kcal/g). The high availability of carbohydrates from plant biomass has led to a variety of methods during evolution, especially in microorganisms, to utilize glucose for energy and carbon storage. Differences exist in which end product can no longer be used for energy production. The presence of individual genes, and their gene products, the enzymes, determine which reactions are possible. The metabolic pathway of glycolysis is used by almost all living beings. An essential difference in the use of glycolysis is the recovery of NADPH as a reductant for anabolism that would otherwise have to be generated indirectly.
Glucose and oxygen supply almost all the energy for the brain, so its availability influences psychological processes. When glucose is low, psychological processes requiring mental effort (e.g., self-control, effortful decision-making) are impaired. In the brain, which is dependent on glucose and oxygen as the major source of energy, the glucose concentration is usually 4 to 6 mM (5 mM equals 90 mg/dL), but decreases to 2 to 3 mM when fasting. Confusion occurs below 1 mM and coma at lower levels.
The glucose in the blood is called blood sugar. Blood sugar levels are regulated by glucose-binding nerve cells in the hypothalamus. In addition, glucose in the brain binds to glucose receptors of the reward system in the nucleus accumbens. The binding of glucose to the sweet receptor on the tongue induces a release of various hormones of energy metabolism, either through glucose or through other sugars, leading to an increased cellular uptake and lower blood sugar levels. Artificial sweeteners do not lower blood sugar levels.
The blood sugar content of a healthy person in the short-time fasting state, e.g. after overnight fasting, is about 70 to 100 mg/dL of blood (4 to 5.5 mM). In blood plasma, the measured values are about 10–15% higher. In addition, the values in the arterial blood are higher than the concentrations in the venous blood since glucose is absorbed into the tissue during the passage of the capillary bed. Also in the capillary blood, which is often used for blood sugar determination, the values are sometimes higher than in the venous blood. The glucose content of the blood is regulated by the hormones insulin, incretin and glucagon. Insulin lowers the glucose level, glucagon increases it. Furthermore, the hormones adrenaline, thyroxine, glucocorticoids, somatotropin and adrenocorticotropin lead to an increase in the glucose level. There is also a hormone-independent regulation, which is referred to as glucose autoregulation. After food intake the blood sugar concentration increases. Values over 180 mg/dL in venous whole blood are pathological and are termed hyperglycemia, values below 40 mg/dL are termed hypoglycaemia. When needed, glucose is released into the bloodstream by glucose-6-phosphatase from glucose-6-phosphate originating from liver and kidney glycogen, thereby regulating the homeostasis of blood glucose concentration. In ruminants, the blood glucose concentration is lower (60 mg/dL in cattle and 40 mg/dL in sheep), because the carbohydrates are converted more by their gut microbiota into short-chain fatty acids.
Some glucose is converted to lactic acid by astrocytes, which is then utilized as an energy source by brain cells; some glucose is used by intestinal cells and red blood cells, while the rest reaches the liver, adipose tissue and muscle cells, where it is absorbed and stored as glycogen (under the influence of insulin). Liver cell glycogen can be converted to glucose and returned to the blood when insulin is low or absent; muscle cell glycogen is not returned to the blood because of a lack of enzymes. In fat cells, glucose is used to power reactions that synthesize some fat types and have other purposes. Glycogen is the body's "glucose energy storage" mechanism, because it is much more "space efficient" and less reactive than glucose itself.
As a result of its importance in human health, glucose is an analyte in glucose tests that are common medical blood tests. Eating or fasting prior to taking a blood sample has an effect on analyses for glucose in the blood; a high fasting glucose blood sugar level may be a sign of prediabetes or diabetes mellitus.
The glycemic index is an indicator of the speed of resorption and conversion to blood glucose levels from ingested carbohydrates, measured as the area under the curve of blood glucose levels after consumption in comparison to glucose (glucose is defined as 100). The clinical importance of the glycemic index is controversial, as foods with high fat contents slow the resorption of carbohydrates and lower the glycemic index, e.g. ice cream. An alternative indicator is the insulin index, measured as the impact of carbohydrate consumption on the blood insulin levels. The glycemic load is an indicator for the amount of glucose added to blood glucose levels after consumption, based on the glycemic index and the amount of consumed food.
Precursor
Organisms use glucose as a precursor for the synthesis of several important substances. Starch, cellulose, and glycogen ("animal starch") are common glucose polymers (polysaccharides). Some of these polymers (starch or glycogen) serve as energy stores, while others (cellulose and chitin, which is made from a derivative of glucose) have structural roles. Oligosaccharides of glucose combined with other sugars serve as important energy stores. These include lactose, the predominant sugar in milk, which is a glucose-galactose disaccharide, and sucrose, another disaccharide which is composed of glucose and fructose. Glucose is also added onto certain proteins and lipids in a process called glycosylation. This is often critical for their functioning. The enzymes that join glucose to other molecules usually use phosphorylated glucose to power the formation of the new bond by coupling it with the breaking of the glucose-phosphate bond.
Other than its direct use as a monomer, glucose can be broken down to synthesize a wide variety of other biomolecules. This is important, as glucose serves both as a primary store of energy and as a source of organic carbon. Glucose can be broken down and converted into lipids. It is also a precursor for the synthesis of other important molecules such as vitamin C (ascorbic acid). In living organisms, glucose is converted to several other chemical compounds that are the starting material for various metabolic pathways. Among them, all other monosaccharides such as fructose (via the polyol pathway), mannose (the epimer of glucose at position 2), galactose (the epimer at position 4), fucose, various uronic acids and the amino sugars are produced from glucose. In addition to the phosphorylation to glucose-6-phosphate, which is part of the glycolysis, glucose can be oxidized during its degradation to glucono-1,5-lactone. Glucose is used in some bacteria as a building block in the trehalose or the dextran biosynthesis and in animals as a building block of glycogen. Glucose can also be converted from bacterial xylose isomerase to fructose. In addition, glucose metabolites produce all nonessential amino acids, sugar alcohols such as mannitol and sorbitol, fatty acids, cholesterol and nucleic acids. Finally, glucose is used as a building block in the glycosylation of proteins to glycoproteins, glycolipids, peptidoglycans, glycosides and other substances (catalyzed by glycosyltransferases) and can be cleaved from them by glycosidases.
Pathology
Diabetes
Diabetes is a metabolic disorder where the body is unable to regulate levels of glucose in the blood either because of a lack of insulin in the body or the failure, by cells in the body, to respond properly to insulin. Each of these situations can be caused by persistently high elevations of blood glucose levels, through pancreatic burnout and insulin resistance. The pancreas is the organ responsible for the secretion of the hormones insulin and glucagon. Insulin is a hormone that regulates glucose levels, allowing the body's cells to absorb and use glucose. Without it, glucose cannot enter the cell and therefore cannot be used as fuel for the body's functions. If the pancreas is exposed to persistently high elevations of blood glucose levels, the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas could be damaged, causing a lack of insulin in the body. Insulin resistance occurs when the pancreas tries to produce more and more insulin in response to persistently elevated blood glucose levels. Eventually, the rest of the body becomes resistant to the insulin that the pancreas is producing, thereby requiring more insulin to achieve the same blood glucose-lowering effect, and forcing the pancreas to produce even more insulin to compete with the resistance. This negative spiral contributes to pancreatic burnout, and the disease progression of diabetes.
To monitor the body's response to blood glucose-lowering therapy, glucose levels can be measured. Blood glucose monitoring can be performed by multiple methods, such as the fasting glucose test which measures the level of glucose in the blood after 8 hours of fasting. Another test is the 2-hour glucose tolerance test (GTT) – for this test, the person has a fasting glucose test done, then drinks a 75-gram glucose drink and is retested. This test measures the ability of the person's body to process glucose. Over time the blood glucose levels should decrease as insulin allows it to be taken up by cells and exit the blood stream.
Hypoglycemia management
Individuals with diabetes or other conditions that result in low blood sugar often carry small amounts of sugar in various forms. One sugar commonly used is glucose, often in the form of glucose tablets (glucose pressed into a tablet shape sometimes with one or more other ingredients as a binder), hard candy, or sugar packet.
Sources
Most dietary carbohydrates contain glucose, either as their only building block (as in the polysaccharides starch and glycogen), or together with another monosaccharide (as in the hetero-polysaccharides sucrose and lactose). Unbound glucose is one of the main ingredients of honey. Glucose is extremely abundant and has been isolated from a variety of natural sources across the world, including male cones of the coniferous tree Wollemia nobilis in Rome, the roots of Ilex asprella plants in China, and straws from rice in California.
The carbohydrate value is calculated in the USDA database and does not always correspond to the sum of the sugars, the starch, and the "dietary fiber".
Commercial production
Glucose is produced industrially from starch by enzymatic hydrolysis using glucose amylase or by the use of acids. The enzymatic hydrolysis has largely displaced the acid-catalyzed hydrolysis. The result is glucose syrup (enzymatically with more than 90% glucose in the dry matter) with an annual worldwide production volume of 20 million tonnes (as of 2011). This is the reason for the former common name "starch sugar". The amylases most often come from Bacillus licheniformis or Bacillus subtilis (strain MN-385), which are more thermostable than the originally used enzymes. Starting in 1982, pullulanases from Aspergillus niger were used in the production of glucose syrup to convert amylopectin to starch (amylose), thereby increasing the yield of glucose. The reaction is carried out at a pH = 4.6–5.2 and a temperature of 55–60 °C. Corn syrup has between 20% and 95% glucose in the dry matter. The Japanese form of the glucose syrup, Mizuame, is made from sweet potato or rice starch. Maltodextrin contains about 20% glucose.
Many crops can be used as the source of starch. Maize, rice, wheat, cassava, potato, barley, sweet potato, corn husk and sago are all used in various parts of the world. In the United States, corn starch (from maize) is used almost exclusively. Some commercial glucose occurs as a component of invert sugar, a roughly 1:1 mixture of glucose and fructose that is produced from sucrose. In principle, cellulose could be hydrolyzed to glucose, but this process is not yet commercially practical.
Conversion to fructose
In the USA almost exclusively corn (more precisely: corn syrup) is used as glucose source for the production of isoglucose, which is a mixture of glucose and fructose, since fructose has a higher sweetening power — with same physiological calorific value of 374 kilocalories per 100 g. The annual world production of isoglucose is 8 million tonnes (as of 2011). When made from corn syrup, the final product is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).
Commercial usage
Glucose is mainly used for the production of fructose and of glucose-containing foods. In foods, it is used as a sweetener, humectant, to increase the volume and to create a softer mouthfeel.
Various sources of glucose, such as grape juice (for wine) or malt (for beer), are used for fermentation to ethanol during the production of alcoholic beverages. Most soft drinks in the US use HFCS-55 (with a fructose content of 55% in the dry mass), while most other HFCS-sweetened foods in the US use HFCS-42 (with a fructose content of 42% in the dry mass). In Mexico, on the other hand, soft drinks are sweetened by cane sugar, which has a higher sweetening power. In addition, glucose syrup is used, inter alia, in the production of confectionery such as candies, toffee and fondant. Typical chemical reactions of glucose when heated under water-free conditions are caramelization and, in presence of amino acids, the Maillard reaction.
In addition, various organic acids can be biotechnologically produced from glucose, for example by fermentation with Clostridium thermoaceticum to produce acetic acid, with Penicillium notatum for the production of araboascorbic acid, with Rhizopus delemar for the production of fumaric acid, with Aspergillus niger for the production of gluconic acid, with Candida brumptii to produce isocitric acid, with Aspergillus terreus for the production of itaconic acid, with Pseudomonas fluorescens for the production of 2-ketogluconic acid, with Gluconobacter suboxydans for the production of 5-ketogluconic acid, with Aspergillus oryzae for the production of kojic acid, with Lactobacillus delbrueckii for the production of lactic acid, with Lactobacillus brevis for the production of malic acid, with Propionibacter shermanii for the production of propionic acid, with Pseudomonas aeruginosa for the production of pyruvic acid and with Gluconobacter suboxydans for the production of tartaric acid. Potent, bioactive natural products like triptolide that inhibit mammalian transcription via inhibition of the XPB subunit of the general transcription factor TFIIH has been recently reported as a glucose conjugate for targeting hypoxic cancer cells with increased glucose transporter expression. Recently, glucose has been gaining commercial use as a key component of "kits" containing lactic acid and insulin intended to induce hypoglycemia and hyperlactatemia to combat different cancers and infections.
Analysis
When a glucose molecule is to be detected at a certain position in a larger molecule, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography analysis or lectin immunostaining is performed with concanavalin A reporter enzyme conjugate, which binds only glucose or mannose.
Classical qualitative detection reactions
These reactions have only historical significance:
Fehling test
The Fehling test is a classic method for the detection of aldoses. Due to mutarotation, glucose is always present to a small extent as an open-chain aldehyde. By adding the Fehling reagents (Fehling (I) solution and Fehling (II) solution), the aldehyde group is oxidized to a carboxylic acid, while the Cu2+ tartrate complex is reduced to Cu+ and forms a brick red precipitate (Cu2O).
Tollens test
In the Tollens test, after addition of ammoniacal AgNO3 to the sample solution, glucose reduces Ag+ to elemental silver.
Barfoed test
In Barfoed's test, a solution of dissolved copper acetate, sodium acetate and acetic acid is added to the solution of the sugar to be tested and subsequently heated in a water bath for a few minutes. Glucose and other monosaccharides rapidly produce a reddish color and reddish brown copper(I) oxide (Cu2O).
Nylander's test
As a reducing sugar, glucose reacts in the Nylander's test.
Other tests
Upon heating a dilute potassium hydroxide solution with glucose to 100 °C, a strong reddish browning and a caramel-like odor develops. Concentrated sulfuric acid dissolves dry glucose without blackening at room temperature forming sugar sulfuric acid. In a yeast solution, alcoholic fermentation produces carbon dioxide in the ratio of 2.0454 molecules of glucose to one molecule of CO2. Glucose forms a black mass with stannous chloride. In an ammoniacal silver solution, glucose (as well as lactose and dextrin) leads to the deposition of silver. In an ammoniacal lead acetate solution, white lead glycoside is formed in the presence of glucose, which becomes less soluble on cooking and turns brown. In an ammoniacal copper solution, yellow copper oxide hydrate is formed with glucose at room temperature, while red copper oxide is formed during boiling (same with dextrin, except for with an ammoniacal copper acetate solution). With Hager's reagent, glucose forms mercury oxide during boiling. An alkaline bismuth solution is used to precipitate elemental, black-brown bismuth with glucose. Glucose boiled in an ammonium molybdate solution turns the solution blue. A solution with indigo carmine and sodium carbonate destains when boiled with glucose.
Instrumental quantification
Refractometry and polarimetry
In concentrated solutions of glucose with a low proportion of other carbohydrates, its concentration can be determined with a polarimeter. For sugar mixtures, the concentration can be determined with a refractometer, for example in the Oechsle determination in the course of the production of wine.
Photometric enzymatic methods in solution
The enzyme glucose oxidase (GOx) converts glucose into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide while consuming oxygen. Another enzyme, peroxidase, catalyzes a chromogenic reaction (Trinder reaction) of phenol with 4-aminoantipyrine to a purple dye.
Photometric test-strip method
The test-strip method employs the above-mentioned enzymatic conversion of glucose to gluconic acid to form hydrogen peroxide. The reagents are immobilised on a polymer matrix, the so-called test strip, which assumes a more or less intense color. This can be measured reflectometrically at 510 nm with the aid of an LED-based handheld photometer. This allows routine blood sugar determination by nonscientists. In addition to the reaction of phenol with 4-aminoantipyrine, new chromogenic reactions have been developed that allow photometry at higher wavelengths (550 nm, 750 nm).
Amperometric glucose sensor
The electroanalysis of glucose is also based on the enzymatic reaction mentioned above. The produced hydrogen peroxide can be amperometrically quantified by anodic oxidation at a potential of 600 mV. The GOx is immobilized on the electrode surface or in a membrane placed close to the electrode. Precious metals such as platinum or gold are used in electrodes, as well as carbon nanotube electrodes, which e.g. are doped with boron. Cu–CuO nanowires are also used as enzyme-free amperometric electrodes, reaching a detection limit of 50 μmol/L. A particularly promising method is the so-called "enzyme wiring", where the electron flowing during the oxidation is transferred via a molecular wire directly from the enzyme to the electrode.
Other sensory methods
There are a variety of other chemical sensors for measuring glucose. Given the importance of glucose analysis in the life sciences, numerous optical probes have also been developed for saccharides based on the use of boronic acids, which are particularly useful for intracellular sensory applications where other (optical) methods are not or only conditionally usable. In addition to the organic boronic acid derivatives, which often bind highly specifically to the 1,2-diol groups of sugars, there are also other probe concepts classified by functional mechanisms which use selective glucose-binding proteins (e.g. concanavalin A) as a receptor. Furthermore, methods were developed which indirectly detect the glucose concentration via the concentration of metabolized products, e.g. by the consumption of oxygen using fluorescence-optical sensors. Finally, there are enzyme-based concepts that use the intrinsic absorbance or fluorescence of (fluorescence-labeled) enzymes as reporters.
Copper iodometry
Glucose can be quantified by copper iodometry.
Chromatographic methods
In particular, for the analysis of complex mixtures containing glucose, e.g. in honey, chromatographic methods such as high performance liquid chromatography and gas chromatography are often used in combination with mass spectrometry. Taking into account the isotope ratios, it is also possible to reliably detect honey adulteration by added sugars with these methods. Derivatization using silylation reagents is commonly used. Also, the proportions of di- and trisaccharides can be quantified.
In vivo analysis
Glucose uptake in cells of organisms is measured with 2-deoxy-D-glucose or fluorodeoxyglucose. (18F)fluorodeoxyglucose is used as a tracer in positron emission tomography in oncology and neurology, where it is by far the most commonly used diagnostic agent.
References
External links
Chemical pathology
Nutrition
World Health Organization essential medicines
Pyranoses
Glycolysis | [
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12955 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George%20P%C3%B3lya | George Pólya | {{Infobox scientist
| name = George Pólya
| image = George Pólya ca 1973.jpg
| image_size = 200px
| caption = George Pólya, circa 1973
| birth_date =
| birth_name = György Pólya
| birth_place = Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary
| death_date =
| death_place = Palo Alto, California, U.S.
| nationality = Hungarian
| citizenship = HungarianSwiss (1918–1947)American (1947–)
| fields = Mathematics
| workplaces = ETH ZürichStanford University
| alma_mater = Eötvös Loránd University
| doctoral_advisor = Lipót Fejér
| doctoral_students = Hans EinsteinFritz GassmannAlbert PflugerJames J. StokerAlice Roth
| known_for = Pólya–Szegő inequalityHow to Solve ItMultivariate Pólya distributionPólya conjecturePólya enumeration theoremLandau–Kolmogorov inequalityPólya–Vinogradov inequalityPólya inequalityPólya–Aeppli distributionPólya urn modelFueter–Pólya theoremHilbert–Pólya conjectureJordan–Pólya numbers
| influenced = Imre Lakatos
| influences = E.T. Jaynes
| awards =
}}
George Pólya (; , ; December 13, 1887 – September 7, 1985) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory. He is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education. He has been described as one of The Martians.
Life and works
Pólya was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, to Anna Deutsch and Jakab Pólya, Hungarian Jews who had converted to Christianity in 1886. Although his parents were religious and he was baptized into the Catholic Church upon birth, George eventually grew up to be an agnostic. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He remained a Professor Emeritus at Stanford for the rest of his career, working on a range of mathematical topics, including series, number theory, mathematical analysis, geometry, algebra, combinatorics, and probability. He was invited to speak at the ICM at Bologna in 1928, at Oslo in 1936 and at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950.
He died on September 7, 1985, in Palo Alto, California, United States.
Heuristics
Early in his career, Pólya wrote with Gábor Szegő two influential problem books, Problems and Theorems in Analysis (I: Series, Integral Calculus, Theory of Functions and II: Theory of Functions. Zeros. Polynomials. Determinants. Number Theory. Geometry). Later in his career, he spent considerable effort to identify systematic methods of problem-solving to further discovery and invention in mathematics for students, teachers, and researchers. He wrote five books on the subject: How to Solve It, Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning (Volume I: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics, and Volume II: Patterns of Plausible Inference), and Mathematical Discovery: On Understanding, Learning, and Teaching Problem Solving (volumes 1 and 2).
In How to Solve It, Pólya provides general heuristics for solving a gamut of problems, including both mathematical and non-mathematical problems. The book includes advice for teaching students of mathematics and a mini-encyclopedia of heuristic terms. It was translated into several languages and has sold over a million copies. The book is still used in mathematical education. Douglas Lenat's Automated Mathematician and Eurisko artificial intelligence programs were inspired by Pólya's work.
In addition to his works directly addressing problem solving, Pólya wrote another short book called Mathematical Methods in Science, based on a 1963 work supported by the National Science Foundation edited by Leon Bowden and published by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) in 1977. As Pólya notes in the preface, Bowden carefully followed a tape recording of a course Pólya gave several times at Stanford in order to put the book together. Pólya notes in the preface "that the following pages will be useful, yet they should not be regarded as a finished expression."
Legacy
There are three prizes named after Pólya, causing occasional confusion of one for another. In 1969 the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) established the George Pólya Prize, given alternately in two categories for "a notable application of combinatorial theory" and for "a notable contribution in another area of interest to George Pólya." In 1976 the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) established the George Pólya Award "for articles of expository excellence" published in the College Mathematics Journal. In 1987 the London Mathematical Society (LMS) established the Pólya Prize for "outstanding creativity in, imaginative exposition of, or distinguished contribution to, mathematics within the United Kingdom."
Stanford University has a Polya Hall named in his honor. It was built while he was still teaching and he complained that it made people think he was dead.
Selected publications
Books
Aufgaben und Lehrsätze aus der Analysis, 1st edn. 1925. ("Problems and theorems in analysis“). Springer, Berlin 1975 (with Gábor Szegő).
Reihen. 1975, 4th edn., .
Funktionentheorie, Nullstellen, Polynome, Determinanten, Zahlentheorie. 1975, 4th edn., .
Mathematik und plausibles Schliessen. Birkhäuser, Basel 1988,
Induktion und Analogie in der Mathematik, 3rd edn., (Wissenschaft und Kultur; 14).
Typen und Strukturen plausibler Folgerung, 2nd edn., (Wissenschaft und Kultur; 15).
– English translation: Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, Princeton University Press 1954, 2 volumes (Vol. 1: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics, Vol. 2: Patterns of Plausible Inference)
Schule des Denkens. Vom Lösen mathematischer Probleme ("How to solve it“). 4th edn. Francke Verlag, Tübingen 1995, (Sammlung Dalp).
– English translation: How to Solve It, Princeton University Press 2004 (with foreword by John Horton Conway and added exercises)
Vom Lösen mathematischer Aufgaben. 2nd edn. Birkhäuser, Basel 1983, (Wissenschaft und Kultur; 21).
– English translation: Mathematical Discovery: On Understanding, Learning and Teaching Problem Solving, 2 volumes, Wiley 1962 (published in one vol. 1981)
Collected Papers, 4 volumes, MIT Press 1974 (ed. Ralph P. Boas). Vol. 1: Singularities of Analytic Functions, Vol. 2: Location of Zeros, Vol. 3: Analysis, Vol. 4: Probability, Combinatorics
with R. C. Read: Combinatorial enumeration of groups, graphs, and chemical compounds, Springer Verlag 1987 (English translation of Kombinatorische Anzahlbestimmungen für Gruppen, Graphen und chemische Verbindungen, Acta Mathematica, vol. 68, 1937, pp. 145–254)
with Godfrey Harold Hardy: John Edensor Littlewood Inequalities, Cambridge University Press 1934
Mathematical Methods in Science, MAA, Washington D. C. 1977 (ed. Leon Bowden)
with Gordon Latta: Complex Variables, Wiley 1974
with Robert E. Tarjan, Donald R. Woods: Notes on introductory combinatorics, Birkhäuser 1983
with Jeremy Kilpatrick: The Stanford mathematics problem book: with hints and solutions, New York: Teachers College Press 1974
with several co-authors: Applied combinatorical mathematics, Wiley 1964 (ed. Edwin F. Beckenbach)
with Gábor Szegő: Isoperimetric inequalities in mathematical physics, Princeton, Annals of Mathematical Studies 27, 1951
Articles
with Ralph P. Boas, Jr.:
with Norbert Wiener:
See also
Integer-valued polynomial
Laguerre–Pólya class
Landau–Kolmogorov inequality
Multivariate Pólya distribution
Pólya's characterization theorem
Pólya class
Pólya conjecture
Polya distribution
Pólya enumeration theorem
Pólya–Vinogradov inequality
Pólya inequality
Pólya urn model
Pólya's theorem
Pólya's proof that there is no "horse of a different color"
Wallpaper group
The Martians (scientists)
References
External links
The George Pólya Award
George Pólya, Gábor Szegö, Problems and theorems in analysis (1998)
George Pólya on UIUC's WikEd
Memorial Resolution
1887 births
1985 deaths
20th-century Hungarian mathematicians
Mathematics popularizers
American agnostics
American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
Hungarian Jews
American statisticians
Hungarian emigrants to Switzerland
Combinatorialists
ETH Zurich faculty
Hungarian agnostics
Hungarian statisticians
Complex analysts
Mathematical analysts
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Mathematicians from Budapest
Swiss emigrants to the United States
Stanford University Department of Mathematics faculty | [
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12956 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL%20Utility%20Toolkit | OpenGL Utility Toolkit | The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) is a library of utilities for OpenGL programs, which primarily perform system-level I/O with the host operating system. Functions performed include window definition, window control, and monitoring of keyboard and mouse input. Routines for drawing a number of geometric primitives (both in solid and wireframe mode) are also provided, including cubes, spheres and the Utah teapot. GLUT also has some limited support for creating pop-up menus.
GLUT was written by Mark J. Kilgard, author of OpenGL Programming for the X Window System and The Cg Tutorial: The Definitive Guide to Programmable Real-Time Graphics, while he was working for Silicon Graphics Inc.
The two aims of GLUT are to allow the creation of rather portable code between operating systems (GLUT is cross-platform) and to make learning OpenGL easier. Getting started with OpenGL programming while using GLUT often takes only a few lines of code and does not require knowledge of operating system–specific windowing APIs.
All GLUT functions start with the glut prefix (for example, glutPostRedisplay marks the current window as needing to be redrawn).
Implementations
The original GLUT library by Mark Kilgard supports the X Window System (GLX) and was ported to Microsoft Windows (WGL) by Nate Robins. Additionally, macOS ships with a GLUT framework that supports its own NSGL/CGL.
Kilgard's GLUT library is no longer maintained, and its license did not permit the redistribution of modified versions of the library. This spurred the need for free software or open source reimplementations of the API from scratch. The first such library was FreeGLUT, which aims to be a reasonably close reproduction, though introducing a small number of new functions to deal with GLUT's limitations. OpenGLUT, a fork of FreeGLUT, adds a number of new features to the original API, but work on it ceased in May 2005.
Mark Kilgard has a GitHub repository for GLUT. The glut.h header file contains the following license:
/* Copyright (c) Mark J. Kilgard, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2006, 2010. */
/* This program is freely distributable without licensing fees and is
provided without guarantee or warrantee expressed or implied. This
program is -not- in the public domain. */
Limitations
Some of GLUT's original design decisions made it hard for programmers to perform desired tasks. This led many to create non-canon patches and extensions to GLUT. Some free software or open source reimplementations also include fixes.
Some of the more notable limitations of the original GLUT library include:
The library requires programmers to call glutMainLoop(), a function which never returns. This makes it hard for programmers to integrate GLUT into a program or library which wishes to have control of its own event loop. A common patch to fix this is to introduce a new function, called glutCheckLoop() (macOS) or glutMainLoopEvent() (FreeGLUT/OpenGLUT), which runs only a single iteration of the GLUT event loop. Another common workaround is to run GLUT's event loop in a separate thread, although this may vary by operating system, and also may introduce synchronization issues or other problems: for example, the macOS GLUT implementation requires that glutMainLoop() be run in the main thread.
The fact that glutMainLoop() never returns also means that a GLUT program cannot exit the event loop. FreeGLUT fixes this by introducing a new function, glutLeaveMainLoop().
The library terminates the process when the window is closed; for some applications this may not be desired. Thus, many implementations include an extra callback, such as glutWMCloseFunc().
Since it is no longer maintained (essentially replaced by the open source FreeGLUT) the above design issues are still not resolved in the original GLUT.
See also
EGL is an interface between OpenGL ES or OpenVG and a windowing system.
FreeGLUT is intended to be a full replacement for GLUT, and has only a few differences.
GLFW
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
OpenGL User Interface Library (GLUI)
OpenGL Utility Library (GLU)
References
External links
GLUT - The OpenGL Utility Toolkit
The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) Programming Interface API Version 3 (official documentation)
The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) downloads (source and pre-compiled libraries)
OpenGL | [
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12957 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni%20Boccaccio | Giovanni Boccaccio | Giovanni Boccaccio (, , ; 16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. Born in the town of Certaldo, he became so well known as a writer that he was sometimes simply known as "the Certaldese" and one of the most important figures in the European literary panorama of the fourteenth century. Some scholars (including Vittore Branca) define him as the greatest European prose writer of his time, a versatile writer who amalgamated different literary trends and genres, making them converge in original works, thanks to a creative activity exercised under the banner of experimentalism.
His most notable works are The Decameron, a collection of short stories which in the following centuries was a determining element for the Italian literary tradition, especially after Pietro Bembo elevated the Boccaccia style to a model of Italian prose in the sixteenth century, and On Famous Women. He wrote his imaginative literature mostly in Tuscan vernacular, as well as other works in Latin, and is particularly noted for his realistic dialogue which differed from that of his contemporaries, medieval writers who usually followed formulaic models for character and plot. The influence of Boccaccio's works was not limited to the Italian cultural scene but extended to the rest of Europe, exerting influence on authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, a key figure in English literature, or later on Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega and the Spanish classical theater.
Boccaccio, together with Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, is part of the so-called "Three Crowns" of Italian literature. He is remembered for being one of the precursors of humanism, of which he helped lay the foundations in the city of Florence, in conjunction with the activity of his friend and teacher Petrarch. He was the one who initiated Dante's criticism and philology: Boccaccio devoted himself to copying codices of the Divine Comedy and was a promoter of Dante's work and figure.
In the twentieth century, Boccaccio was the subject of critical-philological studies by Vittore Branca and Giuseppe Billanovich, and his Decameron was transposed to the big screen by the director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Biography
Florentine childhood, 1313–1327
The details of Boccaccio's birth are uncertain. He was born in Florence or in a village near Certaldo where his family was from. He was the son of Florentine merchant Boccaccino di Chellino and an unknown woman; he was likely born out of wedlock. Boccaccio's stepmother was called Margherita de' Mardoli.
Boccaccio grew up in Florence. His father worked for the Compagnia dei Bardi and, in the 1320s, married Margherita dei Mardoli, who was of a well-to-do family. Boccaccio may have been tutored by Giovanni Mazzuoli and received from him an early introduction to the works of Dante. In 1326, his father was appointed head of a bank and moved with his family to Naples. Boccaccio was an apprentice at the bank but disliked the banking profession. He persuaded his father to let him study law at the Studium (the present-day University of Naples), where he studied canon law for the next six years. He also pursued his interest in scientific and literary studies.
His father introduced him to the Neapolitan nobility and the French-influenced court of Robert the Wise (the king of Naples) in the 1330s. At this time, he fell in love with a married daughter of the king, who is portrayed as "Fiammetta" in many of Boccaccio's prose romances, including Il Filocolo (1338). Boccaccio became a friend of fellow Florentine Niccolò Acciaioli, and benefited from his influence as the administrator, and perhaps the lover, of Catherine of Valois-Courtenay, widow of Philip I of Taranto. Acciaioli later became counselor to Queen Joanna I of Naples and, eventually, her Grand Seneschal.
It seems that Boccaccio enjoyed law no more than banking, but his studies allowed him the opportunity to study widely and make good contacts with fellow scholars. His early influences included Paolo da Perugia (a curator and author of a collection of myths called the Collectiones), humanists Barbato da Sulmona and Giovanni Barrili, and theologian Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro.
Neapolitan adolescence, 1327–1340
A cosmopolitan environment: self-taught training
Boccaccino wanted his son to enter the profession of merchant, according to the family tradition. After having made him do a short internship in Florence, in 1327 Boccaccino decided to take his young son with him to Naples, the city where he played the role of business broker for the Bardi family.
Adult years
In Naples, Boccaccio began what he considered his true vocation of poetry. Works produced in this period include Il Filostrato and Teseida (the sources for Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale, respectively), The Filocolo (a prose version of an existing French romance), and La caccia di Diana (a poem in terza rima listing Neapolitan women). The period featured considerable formal innovation, including possibly the introduction of the Sicilian octave, where it influenced Petrarch.
Boccaccio returned to Florence in early 1341, avoiding the plague of 1340 in that city, but also missing the visit of Petrarch to Naples in 1341. He had left Naples due to tensions between the Angevin king and Florence. His father had returned to Florence in 1338, where he had gone bankrupt. His mother died shortly afterward (possibly, as she was unknown – see above). Boccaccio continued to work, although dissatisfied with his return to Florence, producing Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine in 1341 (also known as Ameto), a mix of prose and poems, completing the fifty-canto allegorical poem Amorosa visione in 1342, and Fiammetta in 1343. The pastoral piece "Ninfale fiesolano" probably dates from this time, also. In 1343, Boccaccio's father remarried to Bice del Bostichi. His other children by his first marriage had all died, but he had another son named Iacopo in 1344.
In Florence, the overthrow of Walter of Brienne brought about the government of popolo minuto ("small people", workers). It diminished the influence of the nobility and the wealthier merchant classes and assisted in the relative decline of Florence. The city was hurt further in 1348 by the Black Death, which killed some three-quarters of the city's population, later represented in the Decameron.
From 1347, Boccaccio spent much time in Ravenna, seeking new patronage and, despite his claims, it is not certain whether he was present in plague-ravaged Florence. His stepmother died during the epidemic and his father was closely associated with the government efforts as minister of supply in the city. His father died in 1349 and Boccaccio was forced into a more active role as head of the family.
Boccaccio began work on The Decameron around 1349. It is probable that the structures of many of the tales date from earlier in his career, but the choice of a hundred tales and the frame-story lieta brigata of three men and seven women dates from this time. The work was largely complete by 1352. It was Boccaccio's final effort in literature and one of his last works in Tuscan vernacular; the only other substantial work was Corbaccio (dated to either 1355 or 1365). Boccaccio revised and rewrote The Decameron in 1370–1371. This manuscript has survived to the present day.
From 1350, Boccaccio became closely involved with Italian humanism (although less of a scholar) and also with the Florentine government. His first official mission was to Romagna in late 1350. He revisited that city-state twice and also was sent to Brandenburg, Milan and Avignon. He also pushed for the study of Greek, housing Barlaam of Calabria, and encouraging his tentative translations of works by Homer, Euripides, and Aristotle. In these years, he also took minor orders.
In October 1350, he was delegated to greet Francesco Petrarch as he entered Florence and also to have Petrarch as a guest at Boccaccio's home, during his stay. The meeting between the two was extremely fruitful and they were friends from then on, Boccaccio calling Petrarch his teacher and magister. Petrarch at that time encouraged Boccaccio to study classical Greek and Latin literature. They met again in Padua in 1351, Boccaccio on an official mission to invite Petrarch to take a chair at the university in Florence. Although unsuccessful, the discussions between the two were instrumental in Boccaccio writing the Genealogia deorum gentilium; the first edition was completed in 1360 and this remained one of the key reference works on classical mythology for over 400 years. It served as an extended defense for the studies of ancient literature and thought. Despite the Pagan beliefs at its core, Boccaccio believed that much could be learned from antiquity. Thus, he challenged the arguments of clerical intellectuals who wanted to limit access to classical sources to prevent any moral harm to Christian readers. The revival of classical antiquity became a foundation of the Renaissance, and his defense of the importance of ancient literature was an essential requirement for its development. The discussions also formalized Boccaccio's poetic ideas. Certain sources also see a conversion of Boccaccio by Petrarch from the open humanist of the Decameron to a more ascetic style, closer to the dominant fourteenth century ethos. For example, he followed Petrarch (and Dante) in the unsuccessful championing of an archaic and deeply allusive form of Latin poetry. In 1359, following a meeting with Pope Innocent VI and further meetings with Petrarch, it is probable that Boccaccio took some kind of religious mantle. There is a persistent (but unsupported) tale that he repudiated his earlier works as profane in 1362, including The Decameron.
In 1360, Boccaccio began work on De mulieribus claris, a book offering biographies of 106 famous women, that he completed in 1374.
A number of Boccaccio's close friends and other acquaintances were executed or exiled in the purge following the failed coup of 1361. It was in this year that Boccaccio left Florence to reside in Certaldo, although not directly linked to the conspiracy, where he became less involved in government affairs. He did not undertake further missions for Florence until 1365, and traveled to Naples and then on to Padua and Venice, where he met up with Petrarch in grand style at Palazzo Molina, Petrarch's residence as well as the place of Petrarch's library. He later returned to Certaldo. He met Petrarch only once again in Padua in 1368. Upon hearing of the death of Petrarch (19 July 1374), Boccaccio wrote a commemorative poem, including it in his collection of lyric poems, the Rime.
He returned to work for the Florentine government in 1365, undertaking a mission to Pope Urban V. The papacy returned to Rome from Avignon in 1367, and Boccaccio was again sent to Urban, offering congratulations. He also undertook diplomatic missions to Venice and Naples.
Of his later works, the moralistic biographies gathered as De casibus virorum illustrium (1355–74) and De mulieribus claris (1361–1375) were most significant. Other works include a dictionary of geographical allusions in classical literature, De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus, et de nominibus maris liber. He gave a series of lectures on Dante at the Santo Stefano church in 1373 and these resulted in his final major work, the detailed Esposizioni sopra la Commedia di Dante. Boccaccio and Petrarch were also two of the most educated people in early Renaissance in the field of archaeology.
Boccaccio's change in writing style in the 1350s was due in part to meeting with Petrarch, but it was mostly due to poor health and a premature weakening of his physical strength. It also was due to disappointments in love. Some such disappointment could explain why Boccaccio came suddenly to write in a bitter Corbaccio style, having previously written mostly in praise of women and love, though elements of misogyny are present in Il Teseida. Petrarch describes how Pietro Petrone (a Carthusian monk) on his death bed in 1362 sent another Carthusian (Gioacchino Ciani) to urge him to renounce his worldly studies. Petrarch then dissuaded Boccaccio from burning his own works and selling off his personal library, letters, books, and manuscripts. Petrarch even offered to purchase Boccaccio's library, so that it would become part of Petrarch's library. However, upon Boccaccio's death, his entire collection was given to the monastery of Santo Spirito, in Florence, where it still resides.
His final years were troubled by illnesses, some relating to obesity and what often is described as dropsy, severe edema that would be described today as congestive heart failure. He died on 21 December 1375 in Certaldo, where he is buried.
Works
Alphabetical listing of selected works
Amorosa visione (1342)
Buccolicum carmen (1367–1369)
Caccia di Diana (1334–1337)
Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (Ninfale d'Ameto, 1341–1342)
Corbaccio (around 1365, this date is disputed)
De Canaria (within 1341–1345)
De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (). Facsimile of 1620 Paris ed., 1962, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, .
De mulieribus claris (1361, revised up to 1375)
The Decameron (1349–52, revised 1370–1371)
Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1343–1344)
Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante (1373–1374)
Filocolo (1336–1339)
Filostrato (1335 or 1340)
Genealogia deorum gentilium libri (1360, revised up to 1374)
Ninfale fiesolano (within 1344–46, this date is disputed)
Rime (finished 1374)
Teseida delle nozze di Emilia (before 1341)
Trattatello in laude di Dante (1357, title revised to De origine vita studiis et moribus viri clarissimi Dantis Aligerii florentini poetae illustris et de operibus compositis ab eodem)
Zibaldone Magliabechiano (within 1351–1356)
See Consoli's bibliography for an exhaustive listing.
See also
Influence of Italian humanism on Chaucer
Notes
Citations
Sources
Çoban, R. V. (2020). The Manzikert Battle and Sultan Alp Arslan with European Perspective in the 15st Century in the Miniatures of Giovanni Boccaccio's "De Casibus Virorum Illustrium"s 226 and 232. French Manuscripts in Bibliothèque Nationale de France. S. Karakaya ve V. Baydar (Ed.), in 2nd International Muş Symposium Articles Book (pp. 48–64). Muş: Muş Alparslan University. Source
Patrick, James A.(2007). Renaissance And Reformation. Marshall Cavendish Corp. .
Further reading
On Famous Women, edited and translated by Virginia Brown. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001 (Latin text and English translation)
The Decameron,
The Life of Dante, translated by Vincenzo Zin Bollettino. New York: Garland, 1990
The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, edited and translated [from the Italian] by Mariangela Causa-Steindler and Thomas Mauch; with an introduction by Mariangela Causa-Steindler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 .
External links
De claris mulieribus From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
Genealogie deorum gentilium Johannis Boccacii de Certaldo liber at Somni
De mulieribus claris at Somni
1313 births
1375 deaths
People from Certaldo
Italian Renaissance humanists
Italian Renaissance writers
Italian male poets
Italian Roman Catholics
Medieval Italian diplomats
Medieval Latin poets
14th-century people of the Republic of Florence
14th-century Italian historians
14th-century Italian poets
14th-century Latin writers
14th-century diplomats
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12958 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe%20Verdi | Giuseppe Verdi | Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (; 9 or 10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini, whose works significantly influenced him.
In his early operas, Verdi demonstrated a sympathy with the Risorgimento movement which sought the unification of Italy. He also participated briefly as an elected politician. The chorus "Va, pensiero" from his early opera Nabucco (1842), and similar choruses in later operas, were much in the spirit of the unification movement, and the composer himself became esteemed as a representative of these ideals. An intensely private person, Verdi did not seek to ingratiate himself with popular movements. As he became professionally successful he was able to reduce his operatic workload and sought to establish himself as a landowner in his native region. He surprised the musical world by returning, after his success with the opera Aida (1871), with three late masterpieces: his Requiem (1874), and the operas Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893).
His operas remain extremely popular, especially the three peaks of his 'middle period': Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata. The bicentenary of his birth in 2013 was widely celebrated in broadcasts and performances.
Life
Childhood and education
Verdi, the first child of Carlo Giuseppe Verdi (1785–1867) and Luigia Uttini (1787–1851), was born at their home in Le Roncole, a village near Busseto, then in the Département Taro and within the borders of the First French Empire following the annexation of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza in 1808. The baptismal register, prepared on 11 October 1813, lists his parents Carlo and Luigia as "innkeeper" and "spinner" respectively. Additionally, it lists Verdi as being "born yesterday", but since days were often considered to begin at sunset, this could have meant either 9 or 10 October. Following his mother, Verdi always celebrated his birthday on 9 October, the day he himself believed he was born.
Verdi had a younger sister, Giuseppa, who died aged 17 in 1833. She is said to have been his closest friend during childhood. From the age of four, Verdi was given private lessons in Latin and Italian by the village schoolmaster, Baistrocchi, and at six he attended the local school. After learning to play the organ, he showed so much interest in music that his parents finally provided him with a spinet. Verdi's gift for music was already apparent by 1820–21 when he began his association with the local church, serving in the choir, acting as an altar boy for a while, and taking organ lessons. After Baistrocchi's death, Verdi, at the age of eight, became the official paid organist.
The music historian Roger Parker points out that both of Verdi's parents "belonged to families of small landowners and traders, certainly not the illiterate peasants from which Verdi later liked to present himself as having emerged... Carlo Verdi was energetic in furthering his son's education...something which Verdi tended to hide in later life... [T]he picture emerges of youthful precocity eagerly nurtured by an ambitious father and of a sustained, sophisticated and elaborate formal education."
In 1823, when he was 10, Verdi's parents arranged for the boy to attend school in Busseto, enrolling him in a Ginnasio—an upper school for boys—run by Don Pietro Seletti, while they continued to run their inn at Le Roncole. Verdi returned to Busseto regularly to play the organ on Sundays, covering the distance of several kilometres on foot. At age 11, Verdi received schooling in Italian, Latin, the humanities, and rhetoric. By the time he was 12, he began lessons with Ferdinando Provesi, maestro di cappella at San Bartolomeo, director of the municipal music school and co-director of the local Società Filarmonica (Philharmonic Society). Verdi later stated: "From the ages of 13 to 18 I wrote a motley assortment of pieces: marches for band by the hundred, perhaps as many little sinfonie that were used in church, in the theatre and at concerts, five or six concertos and sets of variations for pianoforte, which I played myself at concerts, many serenades, cantatas (arias, duets, very many trios) and various pieces of church music, of which I remember only a Stabat Mater." This information comes from the Autobiographical Sketch which Verdi dictated to the publisher Giulio Ricordi late in life, in 1879, and remains the leading source for his early life and career. Written, understandably, with the benefit of hindsight, it is not always reliable when dealing with issues more contentious than those of his childhood.
The other director of the Philharmonic Society was , a wholesale grocer and distiller, who was described by a contemporary as a "manic dilettante" of music. The young Verdi did not immediately become involved with the Philharmonic. By June 1827, he had graduated with honours from the Ginnasio and was able to focus solely on music under Provesi. By chance, when he was 13, Verdi was asked to step in as a replacement to play in what became his first public event in his home town; he was an immediate success mostly playing his own music to the surprise of many and receiving strong local recognition.
By 1829–30, Verdi had established himself as a leader of the Philharmonic: "none of us could rival him" reported the secretary of the organisation, Giuseppe Demaldè. An eight-movement cantata, I deliri di Saul, based on a drama by Vittorio Alfieri, was written by Verdi when he was 15 and performed in Bergamo. It was acclaimed by both Demaldè and Barezzi, who commented: "He shows a vivid imagination, a philosophical outlook, and sound judgment in the arrangement of instrumental parts." In late 1829, Verdi had completed his studies with Provesi, who declared that he had no more to teach him. At the time, Verdi had been giving singing and piano lessons to Barezzi's daughter Margherita; by 1831, they were unofficially engaged.
Verdi set his sights on Milan, then the cultural capital of northern Italy, where he applied unsuccessfully to study at the Conservatory. Barezzi made arrangements for him to become a private pupil of , who had been maestro concertatore at La Scala, and who described Verdi's compositions as "very promising". Lavigna encouraged Verdi to take out a subscription to La Scala, where he heard Maria Malibran in operas by Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini. Verdi began making connections in the Milanese world of music that were to stand him in good stead. These included an introduction by Lavigna to an amateur choral group, the Società Filarmonica, led by Pietro Massini. Attending the Società frequently in 1834, Verdi soon found himself functioning as rehearsal director (for Rossini's La cenerentola) and continuo player. It was Massini who encouraged him to write his first opera, originally titled Rocester, to a libretto by the journalist Antonio Piazza.
1834–1842: First operas
List of compositions by Giuseppe Verdi
In mid-1834, Verdi sought to acquire Provesi's former post in Busseto but without success. But with Barezzi's help he did obtain the secular post of maestro di musica. He taught, gave lessons, and conducted the Philharmonic for several months before returning to Milan in early 1835. By the following July, he obtained his certification from Lavigna. Eventually in 1835 Verdi became director of the Busseto school with a three-year contract. He married Margherita in May 1836, and by March 1837, she had given birth to their first child, Virginia Maria Luigia on 26 March 1837. Icilio Romano followed on 11 July 1838. Both the children died young, Virginia on 12 August 1838, Icilio on 22 October 1839.
In 1837, the young composer asked for Massini's assistance to stage his opera in Milan. The La Scala impresario, Bartolomeo Merelli, agreed to put on Oberto (as the reworked opera was now called, with a libretto rewritten by Temistocle Solera) in November 1839. It achieved a respectable 13 additional performances, following which Merelli offered Verdi a contract for three more works.
While Verdi was working on his second opera Un giorno di regno, Margherita died of encephalitis at the age of 26. Verdi adored his wife and children and was devastated by their early deaths. Un giorno, a comedy, was premiered only a few months later. It was a flop and only given the one performance. Following its failure, it is claimed Verdi vowed never to compose again, but in his Sketch he recounts how Merelli persuaded him to write a new opera.
Verdi was to claim that he gradually began to work on the music for Nabucco, the libretto of which had originally been rejected by the composer Otto Nicolai: "This verse today, tomorrow that, here a note, there a whole phrase, and little by little the opera was written", he later recalled. By the autumn of 1841 it was complete, originally under the title Nabucodonosor. Well received at its first performance on 9 March 1842, Nabucco underpinned Verdi's success until his retirement from the theatre, twenty-nine operas (including some revised and updated versions) later. At its revival in La Scala for the 1842 autumn season it was given an unprecedented (and later unequalled) total of 57 performances; within three years it had reached (among other venues) Vienna, Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris and Hamburg; in 1848 it was heard in New York, in 1850 in Buenos Aires. Porter comments that "similar accounts...could be provided to show how widely and rapidly all [Verdi's] other successful operas were disseminated."
1842–1849
A period of hard work for Verdi—with the creation of twenty operas (excluding revisions and translations)—followed over the next sixteen years, culminating in Un ballo in maschera. This period was not without its frustrations and setbacks for the young composer, and he was frequently demoralised. In April 1845, in connection with I due Foscari, he wrote: "I am happy, no matter what reception it gets, and I am utterly indifferent to everything. I cannot wait for these next three years to pass. I have to write six operas, then addio to everything." In 1858 Verdi complained: "Since Nabucco, you may say, I have never had one hour of peace. Sixteen years in the galleys."
After the initial success of Nabucco, Verdi settled in Milan, making a number of influential acquaintances. He attended the Salotto Maffei, Countess Clara Maffei's salons in Milan, becoming her lifelong friend and correspondent. A revival of Nabucco followed in 1842 at La Scala where it received a run of fifty-seven performances, and this led to a commission from Merelli for a new opera for the 1843 season. I Lombardi alla prima crociata was based on a libretto by Solera and premiered in February 1843. Inevitably, comparisons were made with Nabucco; but one contemporary writer noted: "If [Nabucco] created this young man's reputation, I Lombardi served to confirm it."
Verdi paid close attention to his financial contracts, making sure he was appropriately remunerated as his popularity increased. For I Lombardi and Ernani (1844) in Venice he was paid 12,000 lire (including supervision of the productions); Attila and Macbeth (1847), each brought him 18,000 lire. His contracts with the publishers Ricordi in 1847 were very specific about the amounts he was to receive for new works, first productions, musical arrangements, and so on. He began to use his growing prosperity to invest in land near his birthplace. In 1844 he purchased Il Pulgaro, 62 acres (23 hectares) of farmland with a farmhouse and outbuildings, providing a home for his parents from May 1844. Later that year, he also bought the Palazzo Cavalli (now known as the Palazzo Orlandi) on the via Roma, Busseto's main street. In May 1848, Verdi signed a contract for land and houses at Sant'Agata in Busseto, which had once belonged to his family. It was here he built his own house, completed in 1880, now known as the Villa Verdi, where he lived from 1851 until his death.
In March 1843, Verdi visited Vienna (where Gaetano Donizetti was musical director) to oversee a production of Nabucco. The older composer, recognising Verdi's talent, noted in a letter of January 1844: "I am very, very happy to give way to people of talent like Verdi... Nothing will prevent the good Verdi from soon reaching one of the most honourable positions in the cohort of composers." Verdi travelled on to Parma, where the Teatro Regio di Parma was producing Nabucco with Strepponi in the cast. For Verdi the performances were a personal triumph in his native region, especially as his father, Carlo, attended the first performance. Verdi remained in Parma for some weeks beyond his intended departure date. This fuelled speculation that the delay was due to Verdi's interest in Giuseppina Strepponi (who stated that their relationship began in 1843). Strepponi was in fact known for her amorous relationships (and many illegitimate children) and her history was an awkward factor in their relationship until they eventually agreed on marriage.
After successful stagings of Nabucco in Venice (with twenty-five performances in the 1842/43 season), Verdi began negotiations with the impresario of La Fenice to stage I Lombardi, and to write a new opera. Eventually, Victor Hugo's Hernani was chosen, with Francesco Maria Piave as librettist. Ernani was successfully premiered in 1844 and within six months had been performed at twenty other theatres in Italy, and also in Vienna. The writer Andrew Porter notes that for the next ten years, Verdi's life "reads like a travel diary—a timetable of visits...to bring new operas to the stage or to supervise local premieres". La Scala premiered none of these new works, except for Giovanna d'Arco. Verdi "never forgave the Milanese for their reception of Un giorno di regno".
During this period, Verdi began to work more consistently with his librettists. He relied on Piave again for I due Foscari, performed in Rome in November 1844, then on Solera once more for Giovanna d'Arco, at La Scala in February 1845, while in August that year he was able to work with Salvadore Cammarano on Alzira for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. Solera and Piave worked together on Attila for La Fenice (March 1846).
In April 1844, Verdi took on Emanuele Muzio, eight years his junior, as a pupil and amanuensis. He had known him since about 1828 as another of Barezzi's protégés. Muzio, who in fact was Verdi's only pupil, became indispensable to the composer. He reported to Barezzi that Verdi "has a breadth of spirit, of generosity, a wisdom". In November 1846, Muzio wrote of Verdi: "If you could see us, I seem more like a friend, rather than his pupil. We are always together at dinner, in the cafes, when we play cards...; all in all, he doesn't go anywhere without me at his side; in the house we have a big table and we both write there together, and so I always have his advice." Muzio was to remain associated with Verdi, assisting in the preparation of scores and transcriptions, and later conducting many of his works in their premiere performances in the US and elsewhere outside Italy. He was chosen by Verdi as one of the executors of his will, but predeceased the composer in 1890.
After a period of illness Verdi began work on Macbeth in September 1846. He dedicated the opera to Barezzi: "I have long intended to dedicate an opera to you, as you have been a father, a benefactor and a friend for me. It was a duty I should have fulfilled sooner if imperious circumstances had not prevented me. Now, I send you Macbeth, which I prize above all my other operas, and therefore deem worthier to present to you." In 1997 Martin Chusid wrote that Macbeth was the only one of Verdi's operas of his "early period" to remain regularly in the international repertoire, although in the 21st century Nabucco has also entered the lists.
Strepponi's voice declined and her engagements dried up in the 1845 to 1846 period, and she returned to live in Milan whilst retaining contact with Verdi as his "supporter, promoter, unofficial adviser, and occasional secretary" until she decided to move to Paris in October 1846. Before she left Verdi gave her a letter that pledged his love. On the envelope, Strepponi wrote: "5 or 6 October 1846. They shall lay this letter on my heart when they bury me."
Verdi had completed I masnadieri for London by May 1847 except for the orchestration. This he left until the opera was in rehearsal, since he wanted to hear "la [Jenny] Lind and modify her role to suit her more exactly". Verdi agreed to conduct the premiere on 22 July 1847 at Her Majesty's Theatre, as well as the second performance. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attended the first performance, and for the most part, the press was generous in its praise.
For the next two years, except for two visits to Italy during periods of political unrest, Verdi was based in Paris. Within a week of returning to Paris in July 1847, he received his first commission from the Paris Opéra. Verdi agreed to adapt I Lombardi to a new French libretto; the result was Jérusalem, which contained significant changes to the music and structure of the work (including an extensive ballet scene) to meet Parisian expectations. Verdi was awarded the Order of Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. To satisfy his contracts with the publisher , Verdi dashed off Il Corsaro. Budden comments "In no other opera of his does Verdi appear to have taken so little interest before it was staged."
On hearing the news of the "Cinque Giornate", the "Five Days" of street fighting that took place between 18 and 22 March 1848 and temporarily drove the Austrians out of Milan, Verdi travelled there, arriving on 5 April. He discovered that Piave was now "Citizen Piave" of the newly proclaimed Republic of San Marco. Writing a patriotic letter to him in Venice, Verdi concluded "Banish every petty municipal idea! We must all extend a fraternal hand, and Italy will yet become the first nation of the world...I am drunk with joy! Imagine that there are no more Germans here!!"
Verdi had been admonished by the poet Giuseppe Giusti for turning away from patriotic subjects, the poet pleading with him to "do what you can to nourish the [sorrow of the Italian people], to strengthen it, and direct it to its goal." Cammarano suggested adapting Joseph Méry's 1828 play La Bataille de Toulouse, which he described as a story "that should stir every man with an Italian soul in his breast". The premiere was set for late January 1849. Verdi travelled to Rome before the end of 1848. He found that city on the verge of becoming a (short-lived) republic, which commenced within days of La battaglia di Legnanos enthusiastically received premiere. In the spirit of the time were the tenor hero's final words, "Whoever dies for the fatherland cannot be evil-minded".
Verdi had intended to return to Italy in early 1848, but was prevented by work and illness, as well as, most probably, by his increasing attachment to Strepponi. Verdi and Strepponi left Paris in July 1849, the immediate cause being an outbreak of cholera, and Verdi went directly to Busseto to continue work on completing his latest opera, Luisa Miller, for a production in Naples later in the year.
1849–1853: Fame
Verdi was committed to the publisher Giovanni Ricordi for an opera—which became Stiffelio—for Trieste in the Spring of 1850; and, subsequently, following negotiations with La Fenice, developed a libretto with Piave and wrote the music for Rigoletto (based on Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse) for Venice in March 1851. This was the first of a sequence of three operas (followed by Il trovatore and La traviata) which were to cement his fame as a master of opera.
The failure of Stiffelio (attributable not least to the censors of the time taking offence at the taboo subject of the supposed adultery of a clergyman's wife and interfering with the text and roles) incited Verdi to take pains to rework it, although even in the completely recycled version of Aroldo (1857) it still failed to please. Rigoletto, with its intended murder of royalty, and its sordid attributes, also upset the censors. Verdi would not compromise: What does the sack matter to the police? Are they worried about the effect it will produce?...Do they think they know better than I?...I see the hero has been made no longer ugly and hunchbacked!! Why? A singing hunchback...why not?...I think it splendid to show this character as outwardly deformed and ridiculous, and inwardly passionate and full of love. I chose the subject for these very qualities...if they are removed I can no longer set it to music.
Verdi substituted a Duke for the King, and the public response and subsequent success of the opera all over Italy and Europe fully vindicated the composer. Aware that the melody of the Duke's song "La donna è mobile" ("Woman is fickle") would become a popular hit, Verdi excluded it from orchestral rehearsals for the opera, and rehearsed the tenor separately.
For several months Verdi was preoccupied with family matters. These stemmed from the way in which the citizens of Busseto were treating Giuseppina Strepponi, with whom he was living openly in an unmarried relationship. She was shunned in the town and at church, and while Verdi appeared indifferent, she was certainly not. Furthermore, Verdi was concerned about the administration of his newly acquired property at Sant'Agata. A growing estrangement between Verdi and his parents was perhaps also attributable to Strepponi (the suggestion that this situation was sparked by the birth of a child to Verdi and Strepponi which was given away as a foundling lacks any firm evidence). In January 1851, Verdi broke off relations with his parents, and in April they were ordered to leave Sant'Agata; Verdi found new premises for them and helped them financially to settle into their new home. It may not be coincidental that all six Verdi operas written in the period 1849–53 (La battaglia, Luisa Miller, Stiffelio, Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata), have, uniquely in his oeuvre, heroines who are, in the opera critic Joseph Kerman's words, "women who come to grief because of sexual transgression, actual or perceived". Kerman, like the psychologist Gerald Mendelssohn, sees this choice of subjects as being influenced by Verdi's uneasy passion for Strepponi.
Verdi and Strepponi moved into Sant'Agata on 1 May 1851. May also brought an offer for a new opera from La Fenice, which Verdi eventually realised as La traviata. That was followed by an agreement with the Rome Opera company to present Il trovatore for January 1853. Verdi now had sufficient earnings to retire, had he wished to. He had reached a stage where he could develop his operas as he wished, rather than be dependent on commissions from third parties. Il trovatore was in fact the first opera he wrote without a specific commission (apart from Oberto). At around the same time he began to consider creating an opera from Shakespeare's King Lear. After first (1850) seeking a libretto from Cammarano (which never appeared), Verdi later (1857) commissioned one from Antonio Somma, but this proved intractable, and no music was ever written. Verdi began work on Il trovatore after the death of his mother in June 1851. The fact that this is "the one opera of Verdi's which focuses on a mother rather than a father" is perhaps related to her death.
In the winter of 1851–52 Verdi decided to go to Paris with Strepponi, where he concluded an agreement with the Opéra to write what became Les vêpres siciliennes, his first original work in the style of grand opera. In February 1852, the couple attended a performance of Alexander Dumas filss play The Lady of the Camellias; Verdi immediately began to compose music for what would later become La traviata.
After his visit to Rome for Il trovatore in January 1853, Verdi worked on completing La traviata, but with little hope of its success, due to his lack of confidence in any of the singers engaged for the season. Furthermore, the management insisted that the opera be given a historical, not a contemporary setting. The premiere in March 1853 was indeed a failure: Verdi wrote: "Was the fault mine or the singers'? Time will tell." Subsequent productions (following some rewriting) throughout Europe over the following two years fully vindicated the composer; Roger Parker has written "Il trovatore consistently remains one of the three or four most popular operas in the Verdian repertoire: but it has never pleased the critics".
1853–1860: Consolidation
In the eleven years up to and including Traviata, Verdi had written sixteen operas. Over the next eighteen years (up to Aida), he wrote only six new works for the stage. Verdi was happy to return to Sant'Agata and, in February 1856, was reporting a "total abandonment of music; a little reading; some light occupation with agriculture and horses; that's all". A couple of months later, writing in the same vein to Countess Maffei he stated: "I'm not doing anything. I don't read. I don't write. I walk in the fields from morning to evening, trying to recover, so far without success, from the stomach trouble caused me by I vespri siciliani. Cursed operas!" An 1858 letter by Strepponi to the publisher Léon Escudier describes the kind of lifestyle that increasingly appealed to the composer: "His love for the country has become a mania, madness, rage, and fury—anything you like that is exaggerated. He gets up almost with the dawn, to go and examine the wheat, the maize, the vines, etc....Fortunately our tastes for this sort of life coincide, except in the matter of sunrise, which he likes to see up and dressed, and I from my bed."
Nonetheless on 15 May, Verdi signed a contract with La Fenice for an opera for the following spring. This was to be Simon Boccanegra. The couple stayed in Paris until January 1857 to deal with these proposals, and also the offer to stage the translated version of Il trovatore as a grand opera. Verdi and Strepponi travelled to Venice in March for the premiere of Simon Boccanegra, which turned out to be "a fiasco" (as Verdi reported, although on the second and third nights, the reception improved considerably).
With Strepponi, Verdi went to Naples early in January 1858 to work with Somma on the libretto of the opera Gustave III, which over a year later would become Un ballo in maschera. By this time, Verdi had begun to write about Strepponi as "my wife" and she was signing her letters as "Giuseppina Verdi". Verdi raged against the stringent requirements of the Neapolitan censor stating: "I'm drowning in a sea of troubles. It's almost certain that the censors will forbid our libretto." With no hope of seeing his Gustavo III staged as written, he broke his contract. This resulted in litigation and counter-litigation; with the legal issues resolved, Verdi was free to present the libretto and musical outline of Gustave III to the Rome Opera. There, the censors demanded further changes; at this point, the opera took the title Un ballo in maschera.
Arriving in Sant'Agata in March 1859 Verdi and Strepponi found the nearby city of Piacenza occupied by about 6,000 Austrian troops who had made it their base, to combat the rise of Italian interest in unification in the Piedmont region. In the ensuing Second Italian War of Independence the Austrians abandoned the region and began to leave Lombardy, although they remained in control of the Venice region under the terms of the armistice signed at Villafranca. Verdi was disgusted at this outcome: "[W]here then is the independence of Italy, so long hoped for and promised?...Venice is not Italian? After so many victories, what an outcome... It is enough to drive one mad" he wrote to Clara Maffei.
Verdi and Strepponi now decided on marriage; they travelled to Collonges-sous-Salève, a village then part of Piedmont. On 29 August 1859 the couple were married there, with only the coachman who had driven them there and the church bell-ringer as witnesses. At the end of 1859, Verdi wrote to his friend Cesare De Sanctis "[Since completing Ballo] I have not made any more music, I have not seen any more music, I have not thought anymore about music. I don't even know what colour my last opera is, and I almost don't remember it." He began to remodel Sant'Agata, which took most of 1860 to complete and on which he continued to work for the next twenty years. This included major work on a square room that became his workroom, his bedroom, and his office.
Politics
Having achieved some fame and prosperity, Verdi began in 1859 to take an active interest in Italian politics. His early commitment to the Risorgimento movement is difficult to estimate accurately; in the words of the music historian Philip Gossett "myths intensifying and exaggerating [such] sentiment began circulating" during the nineteenth century. An example is the claim that when the "Va, pensiero" chorus in Nabucco was first sung in Milan, the audience, responding with nationalistic fervour, demanded an encore. As encores were expressly forbidden by the government at the time, such a gesture would have been extremely significant. But in fact the piece encored was not "Va, pensiero" but the hymn "Immenso Jehova".
The growth of the "identification of Verdi's music with Italian nationalist politics" perhaps began in the 1840s. In 1848, the nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini (whom Verdi had met in London the previous year) requested Verdi (who complied) to write a patriotic hymn. The opera historian Charles Osborne describes the 1849 La battaglia di Legnano as "an opera with a purpose" and maintains that "while parts of Verdi's earlier operas had frequently been taken up by the fighters of the Risorgimento...this time the composer had given the movement its own opera" It was not until 1859 in Naples, and only then spreading throughout Italy, that the slogan "Viva Verdi" was used as an acronym for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia (Viva Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), (who was then king of Piedmont). After Italy was unified in 1861, many of Verdi's early operas were increasingly re-interpreted as Risorgimento works with hidden Revolutionary messages that perhaps had not been originally intended by either the composer or his librettists.
In 1859, Verdi was elected as a member of the new provincial council, and was appointed to head a group of five who would meet with King Vittorio Emanuele II in Turin. They were enthusiastically greeted along the way and in Turin Verdi himself received much of the publicity. On 17 October Verdi met with Cavour, the architect of the initial stages of Italian unification. Later that year the government of Emilia was subsumed under the United Provinces of Central Italy, and Verdi's political life temporarily came to an end. Whilst still maintaining nationalist feelings, he declined in 1860 the office of provincial council member to which he had been elected in absentia. Cavour however was anxious to convince a man of Verdi's stature that running for political office was essential to strengthening and securing Italy's future. The composer confided to Piave some years later that "I accepted on the condition that after a few months I would resign." Verdi was elected on 3 February 1861 for the town of Borgo San Donnino (Fidenza) to the Parliament of Piedmont-Sardinia in Turin (which from March 1861 became the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy), but following the death of Cavour in 1861, which deeply distressed him, he scarcely attended. Later, in 1874, Verdi was appointed a member of the Italian Senate, but did not participate in its activities.
1860–1887: from La forza to Otello
In the months following the staging of Ballo, Verdi was approached by several opera companies seeking a new work or making offers to stage one of his existing ones, but refused them all. But when, in December 1860, an approach was made from Saint Petersburg's Imperial Theatre, the offer of 60,000 francs plus all expenses was doubtless a strong incentive. Verdi came up with the idea of adapting the 1835 Spanish play Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino by Angel Saavedra, which became La forza del destino, with Piave writing the libretto. The Verdis arrived in St. Petersburg in December 1861 for the premiere, but casting problems meant that it had to be postponed.
Returning via Paris from Russia on 24 February 1862, Verdi met two young Italian writers, the twenty-year-old Arrigo Boito and Franco Faccio. Verdi had been invited to write a piece of music for the 1862 International Exhibition in London, and charged Boito with writing a text, which became the Inno delle nazioni. Boito, as a supporter of the grand opera of Giacomo Meyerbeer and an opera composer in his own right, was later in the 1860s critical of Verdi's "reliance on formula rather than form", incurring the composer's wrath. Nevertheless, he was to become Verdi's close collaborator in his final operas. The St. Petersburg premiere of La forza finally took place in September 1862, and Verdi received the Order of St. Stanislaus.
A revival of Macbeth in Paris in 1865 was not a success, but he obtained a commission for a new work, Don Carlos, based on the play Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller. He and Giuseppina spent late 1866 and much of 1867 in Paris, where they heard, and did not warm to, Giacomo Meyerbeer's last opera, L'Africaine, and Richard Wagner's overture to Tannhäuser. The opera's premiere in 1867 drew mixed comments. While the critic Théophile Gautier praised the work, the composer Georges Bizet was disappointed at Verdi's changing style: "Verdi is no longer Italian. He is following Wagner."
During the 1860s and 1870s, Verdi paid great attention to his estate around Busseto, purchasing additional land, dealing with unsatisfactory (in one case, embezzling) stewards, installing irrigation, and coping with variable harvests and economic slumps. In 1867, both Verdi's father Carlo, with whom he had restored good relations, and his early patron and father-in-law Antonio Barezzi, died. Verdi and Giuseppina decided to adopt Carlo's great-niece Filomena Maria Verdi, then seven years old, as their own child. She was to marry in 1878 the son of Verdi's friend and lawyer Angelo Carrara and her family became eventually the heirs of Verdi's estate.
Aida was commissioned by the Egyptian government for the opera house built by the Khedive Isma'il Pasha to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The opera house actually opened with a production of Rigoletto. The prose libretto in French by Camille du Locle, based on a scenario by the Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, was transformed to Italian verse by Antonio Ghislanzoni. Verdi was offered the enormous sum of 150,000 francs for the opera (even though he confessed that Ancient Egypt was "a civilization I have never been able to admire"), and it was first performed in Cairo in 1871. Verdi spent much of 1872 and 1873 supervising the Italian productions of Aida at Milan, Parma and Naples, effectively acting as producer and demanding high standards and adequate rehearsal time. During the rehearsals for the Naples production he wrote his string quartet, the only chamber music by him to survive, and the only major work in the form by an Italian of the 19th century.
In 1869, Verdi had been asked to compose a section for a requiem mass in memory of Rossini. He compiled and completed the requiem, but its performance was abandoned (and its premiere did not take place until 1988). Five years later, Verdi reworked his "Libera Me" section of the Rossini Requiem and made it a part of his Requiem honouring Alessandro Manzoni, who had died in 1873. The complete Requiem was first performed at the cathedral in Milan on the anniversary of Manzoni's death on 22 May 1874. The spinto soprano Teresa Stolz (1834–1902), who had sung in La Scala productions from 1865 onwards, was the soloist in the first and many later performances of the Requiem; in February 1872, she had created Aida in its European premiere in Milan. She became closely associated personally with Verdi (exactly how closely remains conjectural), to Giuseppina Verdi's initial disquiet; but the women were reconciled and Stolz remained a companion of Verdi after Giuseppina's death in 1897 until his own death.
Verdi conducted his Requiem in Paris, London and Vienna in 1875 and in Cologne in 1876. It seemed that it would be his last work. In the words of his biographer John Rosselli, it "confirmed him as the unique presiding genius of Italian music. No fellow composer...came near him in popularity or reputation". Verdi, now in his sixties, initially seemed to withdraw into retirement. He deliberately shied away from opportunities to publicise himself or to become involved with new productions of his works, but secretly he began work on Otello, which Boito (to whom the composer had been reconciled by Ricordi) had proposed to him privately in 1879. The composition was delayed by a revision of Simon Boccanegra which Verdi undertook with Boito, produced in 1881, and a revision of Don Carlos. Even when Otello was virtually completed, Verdi teased "Shall I finish it? Shall I have it performed? Hard to tell, even for me." As news leaked out, Verdi was pressed by opera houses across Europe with enquiries; eventually the opera was triumphantly premiered at La Scala in February 1887.
1887–1901: Falstaff and last years
Following the success of Otello Verdi commented, "After having relentlessly massacred so many heroes and heroines, I have at last the right to laugh a little." He had considered a variety of comic subjects but had found none of them wholly suitable and confided his ambition to Boito. The librettist said nothing at the time but secretly began work on a libretto based on The Merry Wives of Windsor with additional material taken from Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2. Verdi received the draft libretto probably in early July 1889 after he had just read Shakespeare's play: "Benissimo! Benissimo!... No one could have done better than you", he wrote back to Boito. But he still had doubts: his age, his health (which he admits to being good) and his ability to complete the project: "If I were not to finish the music?". If the project failed, it would have been a waste of Boito's time, and have distracted him from completing his own new opera. Finally on 10 July 1889 he wrote again: "So be it! So let's do Falstaff! For now, let's not think of obstacles, of age, of illnesses!" Verdi emphasised the need for secrecy, but continued "If you are in the mood, then start to write." Later he wrote to Boito (capitals and exclamation marks are Verdi's own): "What joy to be able to say to the public: HERE WE ARE AGAIN!!! COME AND SEE US!"
The first performance of Falstaff took place at La Scala on 9 February 1893. For the first night, official ticket prices were thirty times higher than usual. Royalty, aristocracy, critics and leading figures from the arts all over Europe were present. The performance was a huge success; numbers were encored, and at the end the applause for Verdi and the cast lasted an hour. That was followed by a tumultuous welcome when the composer, his wife and Boito arrived at the Grand Hotel de Milan. Even more hectic scenes ensued when he went to Rome in May for the opera's premiere at the Teatro Costanzi, when crowds of well-wishers at the railway station initially forced Verdi to take refuge in a tool-shed. He witnessed the performance from the Royal Box at the side of King Umberto and the Queen.
In his last years Verdi undertook a number of philanthropic ventures, publishing in 1894 a song for the benefit of earthquake victims in Sicily, and from 1895 onwards planning, building and endowing a rest-home for retired musicians in Milan, the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, and building a hospital at Villanova sull'Arda, close to Busseto. His last major composition, the choral set of Four sacred pieces, was published in 1898. In 1900 he was deeply upset at the assassination of King Umberto and sketched a setting of a poem in his memory but was unable to complete it. While staying at the Grand Hotel, Verdi suffered a stroke on 21 January 1901. He gradually grew more feeble over the next week, during which Stolz cared for him, and died on 27 January at the age of 87.
Verdi was initially buried in a private ceremony at Milan's Cimitero Monumentale. A month later, his body was moved to the crypt of the Casa di Riposo. On this occasion, "Va, pensiero" from Nabucco was conducted by Arturo Toscanini with a chorus of 820 singers. A huge crowd was in attendance, estimated at 300,000. Boito wrote to a friend, in words which recall the mysterious final scene of Don Carlos, "[Verdi] sleeps like a King of Spain in his Escurial, under a bronze slab that completely covers him."
Personality
Not all of Verdi's personal qualities were amiable. John Rosselli concluded after writing his biography that "I do not very much like the man Verdi, in particular the autocratic rentier-cum-estate owner, part-time composer, and seemingly full-time grumbler and reactionary critic of the later years", yet admits that like other writers, he must "admire him, warts and all...a deep integrity runs beneath his life, and can be felt even when he is being unreasonable or wrong."
Budden suggests that "With Verdi...the man and the artist on many ways developed side by side." Ungainly and awkward in society in his early years, "as he became a man of property and underwent the civilizing influence of Giuseppina,...[he] acquired assurance and authority." He also learnt to keep himself to himself, never discussing his private life and maintaining, when it suited him, legends about his supposed 'peasant' origins, his materialism and his indifference to criticism. Gerald Mendelsohn describes the composer as "an intensely private man who deeply resented efforts to inquire into his personal affairs. He regarded journalists and would-be biographers, as well as his neighbors in Busseto and the operatic public at large, as an intrusive lot, against whose prying attentions he needed constantly to defend himself."
Verdi was never explicit about his religious beliefs. Anti-clerical by nature in his early years, he nonetheless built a chapel at Sant'Agata, but is little recorded as attending church. Strepponi wrote in 1871 "I won't say [Verdi] is an atheist, but he is not much of a believer." Rosselli comments that in the Requiem "The prospect of Hell appears to rule...[the Requiem] is troubled to the end," and offers little consolation.
Music and form
Spirit
The writer Friedrich Schiller (four of whose plays were adapted as operas by Verdi) distinguished two types of artist in his 1795 essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin ranked Verdi in the 'naïve' category—"They are not...self-conscious. They do not...stand aside to contemplate their creations and express their own feelings....They are able...if they have genius, to embody their vision fully." (The 'sentimentals' seek to recreate nature and natural feelings on their own terms—Berlin instances Richard Wagner—"offering not peace, but a sword".) Verdi's operas are not written according to an aesthetic theory, or with a purpose to change the tastes of their audiences. In conversation with a German visitor in 1887 he is recorded as saying that, whilst "there was much to be admired in [Wagner's operas] Tannhäuser and Lohengrin...in his recent operas [Wagner] seemed to be overstepping the bounds of what can be expressed in music. For him "philosophical" music was incomprehensible." Although Verdi's works belong, as Rosselli admits "to the most artificial of genres...[they] ring emotionally true: truth and directness make them exciting, often hugely so."
Periods
The earliest study of Verdi's music, published in 1859 by the Italian critic Abraham Basevi, already distinguished four periods in Verdi's music. The early, 'grandiose' period, ended according to Basevi with La battaglia di Legnano (1849), and a 'personal' style began with the next opera Luisa Miller. These two operas are generally agreed today by critics to mark the division between Verdi's 'early' and 'middle' periods. The 'middle' period is felt to end with La traviata (1853) and Les vêpres siciliennes (1855), with a 'late' period commencing with Simon Boccanegra (1857) running through to Aida (1871). The last two operas, Otello and Falstaff, together with the Requiem and the Four Sacred Pieces, then represent a 'final' period.
Early period
Verdi was to claim in his Sketch that during his early training with Lavigna "I did nothing but canons and fugues...No-one taught me orchestration or how to handle dramatic music." He is known to have written a variety of music for the Busseto Philharmonic society, including vocal music, band music and chamber works, (and including an alternative overture to Rossini's Barber of Seville) but few of these works survive. (He may have given instructions before his death to destroy his early works).
Verdi uses in his early operas (and, in his own stylized versions, throughout his later work) the standard elements of Italian opera content of the period, referred to by the opera writer Julian Budden as the 'Code Rossini', after the composer who established through his work and popularity the accepted templates of these forms; they were also used by the composers dominant during Verdi's early career, Bellini, Donizetti and Saverio Mercadante. Amongst the essential elements are the aria, the duet, the ensemble, and the finale sequence of an act. The aria format, centred on a soloist, typically involved three sections; a slow introduction, marked typically cantabile or adagio, a tempo di mezzo which might involve chorus or other characters, and a cabaletta, an opportunity for bravura singing for the soloist. The duet was similarly formatted. Finales, covering climactic sequences of action, used the various forces of soloists, ensemble and chorus, usually culminating with an exciting stretto section. Verdi was to develop these and the other formulae of the generation preceding him with increasing sophistication during his career.
The operas of the early period show Verdi learning by doing and gradually establishing mastery over the different elements of opera. Oberto is poorly structured, and the orchestration of the first operas is generally simple, sometimes even basic. The musicologist Richard Taruskin suggests "the most striking effect in the early Verdi operas, and the one most obviously allied to the mood of the Risorgimento, was the big choral number sung—crudely or sublimely, according to the ear of the beholder—in unison. The success of "Va, pensiero" in Nabucco (which Rossini approvingly denoted as "a grand aria sung by sopranos, contraltos, tenors and basses"), was replicated in the similar "O Signor, dal tetto natio" in I lombardi and in 1844 in the chorus "Si ridesti il Leon di Castiglia" in Ernani, the battle hymn of the conspirators seeking freedom In I due Foscari Verdi first uses recurring themes identified with main characters; here and in future operas the accent moves away from the 'oratorio' characteristics of the first operas towards individual action and intrigue.
From this period onwards Verdi also develops his instinct for "tinta" (literally 'colour'), a term which he used for characterising elements of an individual opera score—Parker gives as an example "the rising 6th that begins so many lyric pieces in Ernani". Macbeth, even in its original 1847 version, shows many original touches; characterization by key (the Macbeths themselves generally singing in sharp keys, the witches in flat keys), a preponderance of minor key music, and highly original orchestration. In the 'dagger scene' and the duet following the murder of Duncan, the forms transcend the 'Code Rossini' and propel the drama in a compelling fashion. Verdi was to comment in 1868 that Rossini and his followers missed "the golden thread that binds all the parts together and, rather than a set of numbers without coherence, makes an opera". Tinta was for Verdi this "golden thread", an essential unifying factor in his works.
Middle period
The writer David Kimbell states that in Luisa Miller and Stiffelio (the earliest operas of this period) there appears to be a "growing freedom in the large scale structure...and an acute attention to fine detail". Others echo those feelings. Julian Budden expresses the impact of Rigoletto and its place in Verdi's output as follows: "Just after 1850 at the age of 38, Verdi closed the door on a period of Italian opera with Rigoletto. The so-called ottocento in music is finished. Verdi will continue to draw on certain of its forms for the next few operas, but in a totally new spirit." One example of Verdi's wish to move away from "standard forms" appears in his feelings about the structure of Il trovatore. To his librettist, Cammarano, Verdi plainly states in a letter of April 1851 that if there were no standard forms—"cavatinas, duets, trios, choruses, finales, etc. ... and if you could avoid beginning with an opening chorus....", he would be quite happy.
Two external factors had their impacts on Verdi's compositions of this period. One is that with increasing reputation and financial security he no longer needed to commit himself to the productive treadmill, had more freedom to choose his own subjects, and had more time to develop them according to his own ideas. In the years 1849 to 1859 he wrote eight new operas, compared with fourteen in the previous ten years.
Another factor was the changed political situation; the failure of the 1848 revolutions led both to some diminution of the Risorgimento ethos (at least initially) and a significant increase in theatre censorship. This is reflected both in Verdi's choices of plots dealing more with personal relationships than political conflict, and in a (partly consequent) dramatic reduction in the operas of this period in the number of choruses (of the type which had first made him famous)—not only are there on average 40% fewer choruses in the 'middle' period operas compared to the 'early' period', but whereas virtually all the 'early' operas commence with a chorus, only one (Luisa Miller) of the 'middle' period operas begin this way. Instead, Verdi experiments with a variety of means, e.g. a stage band (Rigoletto), an aria for bass (Stiffelio), a party scene (La traviata). Chusid also notes Verdi's increasing tendency to replace full-scale overtures with shorter orchestral introductions. Parker comments that La traviata, the last opera of the 'middle' period, is "again a new adventure. It gestures towards a level of 'realism'...the contemporary world of waltzes pervades the score, and the heroine's death from disease is graphically depicted in the music." Verdi's increasing command of musical highlighting of changing moods and relationships is exemplified in Act III of Rigoletto, where Duke's flippant song "La donna è mobile" is followed immediately by the quartet "Bella figlia dell'amore", contrasting the rapacious Duke and his inamorata with the (concealed) indignant Rigoletto and his grieving daughter. Taruskin asserts this is "the most famous ensemble Verdi ever composed".
Late period
Chusid notes Strepponi's description of the operas of the 1860s and 1870s as being "modern" whereas Verdi described the pre-1849 works as "the cavatina operas", as further indication that "Verdi became increasingly dissatisfied with the older, familiar conventions of his predecessors that he had adopted at the outset of his career," Parker sees a physical differentiation of the operas from Les vêpres siciliennes (1855) to Aida (1871) is that they are significantly longer, and with larger cast-lists, than previous works. They also reflect a shift towards the French genre of grand opera, notable in more colorful orchestration, counterpointing of serious and comic scenes, and greater spectacle. The opportunities of transforming Italian opera by utilising such resources appealed to him. For a commission from the Paris Opéra he expressly demanded a libretto from Eugène Scribe, the favorite librettist of Meyerbeer, telling him: "I want—in fact, I must have—a grandiose, impassioned and original subject." The result was Les vêpres siciliennes, and the scenarios of Simon Boccanegra (1857), Un ballo in maschera (1859), La forza del destino (1862), Don Carlos (1865) and Aida (1872) all meet the same criteria. Porter notes that Un ballo marks an almost complete synthesis of Verdi's style with the grand opera hallmarks, such that "huge spectacle is not mere decoration but essential to the drama...musical and theatrical lines remain taut [and] the characters still sing as warmly, passionately and personally as in Il trovatore."
When the composer Ferdinand Hiller asked Verdi whether he preferred Aida or Don Carlos, Verdi replied that Aida had "more bite and (if you'll forgive the word), more theatricality". During the rehearsals for the Naples production of Aida Verdi amused himself by writing his only string quartet, a sprightly work which shows in its last movement that he had not lost the skill for fugue-writing that he had learned with Lavigna.
Final works
Verdi's three last major works continued to show new development in conveying drama and emotion. The first to appear, in 1874 was his Requiem, scored for operatic forces but by no means an "opera in ecclesiastical dress" (the words in which Hans von Bülow condemned it before even hearing it). Although in the Requiem Verdi puts to use many of the techniques he learned in opera, its musical forms and emotions are not those of the stage. Verdi's tone painting at the opening of the Requiem is vividly described by the Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti, writing in 1941: "in [the words] murmured by an invisible crowd over the slow swaying of a few simple chords, you straightaway sense the fear and sadness of a vast multitude before the mystery of death. In the [following] Et lux perpetuum the melody spreads it wings...before falling back on itself...you hear a sigh for consolation and eternal peace."
By the time Otello premièred in 1887, more than 15 years after Aida, the operas of Verdi's (predeceased) contemporary Richard Wagner had begun their ascendancy in popular taste, and many sought or identified Wagnerian aspects in Verdi's latest composition. Budden points out that there is little in the music of Otello that relates either to the verismo opera of the younger Italian composers, and little if anything which can be construed as a homage to the New German School. Nonetheless there is still much originality, building on the strengths which Verdi had already demonstrated; the powerful storm which opens the opera in medias res, the recollection of the love duet of Act I in Otello's dying words (more an aspect of tinta than leitmotif), imaginative touches of harmony in Iago's "Era la notte" (Act II).
Finally, six years later, appeared Falstaff, Verdi's only comedy apart from the early, ill-fated Un giorno di regno. In this work Roger Parker writes that:
"the listener is bombarded by a stunning diversity of rhythms, orchestral textures, melodic motifs and harmonic devices. Passages that in earlier times would have furnished material for an entire number here crowd in on each other, shouldering themselves unceremoniously to the fore in bewildering succession". Rosselli comments: "In Otello Verdi had miniaturized the forms of romantic Italian opera; in Falstaff he miniaturized himself...[M]oments...crystallize a feeling...as though an aria or duet had been precipitated into a phrase."
Legacy
Reception
Although Verdi's operas brought him a popular following, not all contemporary critics approved of his work. The English critic Henry Chorley allowed in 1846 that "he is the only modern man...having a style—for better or worse", but found all his output unacceptable. "[His] faults [are] grave ones, calculated to destroy and degrade taste beyond those of any Italian composer in the long list" wrote Chorley, whilst conceding that "howsoever incomplete may have been his training, howsoever mistaken his aspirations may have proved...he has aspired." But by the time of Verdi's death, 55 years later, his reputation was assured, and the 1910 edition of Grove's Dictionary pronounced him "one of the greatest and most popular opera composers of the nineteenth century".
Verdi had no pupils apart from Muzio and no school of composers sought to follow his style which, however much it reflected his own musical direction, was rooted in the period of his own youth. By the time of his death, verismo was the accepted style of young Italian composers. The New York Metropolitan Opera frequently staged Rigoletto, Trovatore and Traviata during this period and featured Aida in every season from 1898 to 1945. Interest in the operas reawakened in mid-1920s Germany and this sparked a revival in England and elsewhere. From the 1930s onward there began to appear scholarly biographies and publications of documentation and correspondence.
In 1959 the Instituto di Studi Verdiani (from 1989 the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani) was founded in Parma and became a leading centre for research and publication of Verdi studies, and in the 1970s the American Institute for Verdi Studies was founded at New York University.
Nationalism in the operas
Historians have debated how political Verdi's operas were. In particular, the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves (known as Va, pensiero) from the third act of the opera Nabucco was used an anthem for Italian patriots, who were seeking to unify their country and free it from foreign control in the years up to 1861 (the chorus's theme of exiles singing about their homeland, and its lines such as O mia patria, si bella e perduta / "O my country, so lovely and so lost" were thought to have resonated with many Italians). Beginning in Naples in 1859 and spreading throughout Italy, the slogan "Viva VERDI" was used as an acronym for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia (Long live Victor Emmanuel King of Italy), referring to Victor Emmanuel II. Marco Pizzo argues that after 1815, music became a political tool, and many songwriters expressed ideals of freedom and equality. Pizzo claims that Verdi was part of this movement, for his operas were inspired by the love of country, the struggle for Italian independence, and speak to the sacrifice of patriots and exiles. George Martin claims Verdi was "the greatest artist" of the Risorgimento. "Throughout his work its values, its issues recur constantly, and he expressed them with great power".
But Mary Ann Smart argues that music critics at the time seldom mentioned any political themes. Likewise, Roger Parker argues that the political dimension of Verdi's operas was exaggerated by nationalistic historians looking for a hero in the late 19th century.
From the 1850s onwards, Verdi's operas displayed few patriotic themes because of the heavy censorship by the absolutist regime in power. Verdi later became disillusioned by politics, but he was personally active part in the political world of events of the Risorgimento and was elected to the first Italian parliament in 1861.
Memorials and cultural portrayals
Three Italian conservatories, the Milan Conservatory and those in Turin and Como, are named after Verdi, as are many Italian theatres.
Verdi's hometown of Busseto displays Luigi Secchi's statue of a seated Verdi in 1913, next to the Teatro Verdi built in his honour in the 1850s. It is one of many statues to the composer in Italy. The Giuseppe Verdi Monument, a 1906 marble memorial, sculpted by Pasquale Civiletti, is located in Verdi Square in Manhattan, New York City. The monument includes a statue of Verdi himself and life-sized statues of four characters from his operas, (Aida, Otello, and Falstaff from the operas of the same names, and Leonora from La forza del destino).
Verdi has been the subject of a number of film and stage works. These include the 1938 film directed by Carmine Gallone, Giuseppe Verdi, starring Fosco Giachetti; the 1982 miniseries, The Life of Verdi, directed by Renato Castellani, where Verdi was played by Ronald Pickup, with narration by Burt Lancaster in the English version; and the 1985 play After Aida, by Julian Mitchell (1985). He is a character in the 2011 opera Risorgimento! by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero, written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Italian unification of 1861.
Verdi today
Verdi's operas are frequently staged around the world. All of his operas are available in recordings in a number of versions, and on DVD – Naxos Records offers a complete boxed set.
Modern productions may differ substantially from those originally envisaged by the composer. Jonathan Miller's 1982 version of Rigoletto for English National Opera, set in the world of modern American mafiosi, received critical plaudits. But the same company's staging in 2002 of Un ballo in maschera as A Masked Ball, directed by Calixto Bieito, including "satanic sex rituals, homosexual rape, [and] a demonic dwarf", got a general critical thumbs down.
Meanwhile, the music of Verdi can still evoke a range of cultural and political resonances. Excerpts from the Requiem were featured at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. On 12 March 2011 during a performance of Nabucco at the Opera di Roma celebrating 150 years of Italian unification, the conductor Riccardo Muti paused after "Va pensiero" and turned to address the audience (which included the then Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi) to complain about cuts in state funding of culture; the audience then joined in a repeat of the chorus. In 2014, the pop singer Katy Perry appeared at the Grammy Award wearing a dress designed by Valentino, embroidered with the music of "Dell'invito trascorsa è già l'ora" from the start of La traviata. The bicentenary of Verdi's birth in 2013 was celebrated in numerous events around the world, both in performances and broadcasts.
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
External links
Bicentennial of Giuseppe Verdi
"Album Verdi" from the Digital Library of the National Library of Naples (Italy)
Giuseppe Verdi recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings.
1813 births
1901 deaths
19th-century classical composers
19th-century Italian male musicians
Chevaliers of the Légion d'honneur
Deaths from cerebrovascular disease
Deputies of Legislature VIII of the Kingdom of Italy
Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur
Grand Officiers of the Légion d'honneur
Italian classical composers
Italian male classical composers
Italian opera composers
Italian philanthropists
Italian Romantic composers
Italian unification
Male opera composers
Members of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy
People from Busseto
Recipients of the Order of Saint Stanislaus (Russian), 1st class
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class) | [
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12960 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%20Navy | German Navy | The German Navy (, ) is the navy of Germany and part of the unified Bundeswehr (Federal Defense), the German Armed Forces. The German Navy was originally known as the Bundesmarine (Federal Navy) from 1956 to 1995, when Deutsche Marine (German Navy) became the unofficial name with respect to the 1990 incorporation of the East German Volksmarine (People's Navy). It is deeply integrated into the NATO alliance. Its primary mission is protection of Germany's territorial waters and maritime infrastructure as well as sea lines of communication. Apart from this, the German Navy participates in peacekeeping operations, and renders humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. They also participate in anti-piracy operations.
History
The German Navy traces its roots back to the Reichsflotte (Imperial Fleet) of the revolutionary era of 1848–52. The Reichsflotte was the first German navy to sail under the black-red-gold flag. Founded on 14 June 1848 by the orders of the democratically elected Frankfurt Parliament, the Reichsflotte's brief existence ended with the failure of the revolution and it was disbanded on 2 April 1852; thus, the modern day navy celebrates its birthday on 14 June.
Between May 1945 and 1956, the German Mine Sweeping Administration and its successor organizations, made up of former members of Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine (War Navy), became something of a transition stage for the navy, allowing the future Marine to draw on recently experienced personnel upon its formation. Also, from 1949-52 the US Navy had maintained the Naval Historical Team in Bremerhaven. This group of former Kriegsmarine officers acting as historical and tactical consultants to the Americans, was significant in establishing a German element in the NATO senior naval staff. In 1956, with West Germany's accession to NATO, the Bundesmarine (Federal Navy), as the navy was known colloquially, was formally established. In the same year the East German Volkspolizei See (literally People's Police Sea) became the Volksmarine (People's Navy). During the Cold War all of the German Navy's combat vessels were assigned to NATO's Allied Forces Baltic Approaches's naval command NAVBALTAP.
With the accession of East Germany to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990 the Volksmarine along with the whole National People's Army became part of the Bundeswehr. Since 1995 the name German Navy is used in international context, while the official name since 1956 remains Marine without any additions. As of April 2020, the strength of the navy is 16,704 men and women.
A number of naval forces have operated in different periods. See
Preußische Marine (Prussian Navy), 1701–1867
Reichsflotte (Fleet of the Realm), 1848–52
North German Federal Navy, 1867–71
Imperial German Navy (Kaiserliche Marine), 1871–1919
Reichsmarine, 1919–35
Kriegsmarine, 1935–45
German Mine Sweeping Administration, 1945–48
Volksmarine, the navy of East Germany (GDR) 1956–90
Marine, 1956–present (Bundesmarine, colloquially)
Current operations
German warships permanently participate in all four NATO Maritime Groups. The German Navy is also engaged in operations against international terrorism such as Operation Enduring Freedom and NATO Operation Active Endeavour.
Presently the largest operation the German Navy is participating in is UNIFIL off the coast of Lebanon. The German contribution to this operation is two frigates, four fast attack craft, and two auxiliary vessels. The naval component of UNIFIL has been under German command.
The navy is operating a number of development and testing installations as part of an inter-service and international network. Among these is the Centre of Excellence for Operations in Confined and Shallow Waters (COE CSW), an affiliated centre of Allied Command Transformation. The COE CSW was established in April 2007 and officially accredited by NATO on 26 May 2009. It is co-located with the staff of the German Flotilla 1 in Kiel whose Commander is double-hatted as Director, COE CSW.
Equipment
Ships and submarines
In total, there are about 65 commissioned ships in the German Navy, including; 11 frigates, 5 corvettes, 2 minesweepers, 10 minehunters, 6 submarines, 11 replenishment ships and 20 miscellaneous auxiliary vessels. The displacement of the navy is 220,000 tonnes.
Ships of the German Navy include:
4 Baden-Württemberg-class frigates F125 (all delivered by January 2022)
3 Sachsen-class frigates F124
4 Brandenburg-class frigates F123
1 Bremen-class frigate F122 (decommissioning planned for 2022)
5 K130 Braunschweig class corvettes (5 additional units in production, planned commissioning by 2025)
6 Type 212 submarines
In addition, the German Navy and the Royal Danish Navy are in cooperation in the "Ark Project". This agreement made the Ark Project responsible for the strategic sealift of German armed forces where the full-time charter of three roll-on-roll-off cargo and troop ships are ready for deployments. In addition, these ships are also kept available for the use of the other European NATO countries. The three vessels have a combined displacement of 60,000 tonnes.
Including these ships, the total ships' displacement available to the Deutsche Marine is 280,000 tonnes.
Procurement of Joint Support Ships (either two JSS800 for an amphibious group of 800 soldiers, or three smaller JSS400), was planned during the 1995–2010 period but the programme appears now to have been abandoned, not having been mentioned in two recent defence reviews. The larger ships would have been tasked for strategic troop transport and amphibious operations, and were to displace 27,000 to 30,000 tons for 800 soldiers.
Aircraft
The naval air arm of the German Navy is called the Marinefliegerkommando. The Marinefliegerkommando operates 56 aircraft, in May 2021 it was announced that the German Navy intended to replace the P-3C aircraft with 5 Boeing P-8 Poseidon MPA aircraft through a FMS agreement from 2025 onwards.
|-
|Boeing P-8 Poseidon
|United States
|
|MPA
|
|
|
|5 on order, entry into service 2025.
|-
|Lockheed P-3C Orion – CUP
|United States
|
|MPA
|2006
|4
|
|Former Royal Netherlands Navy, will be replaced in 2025 by 5 Boeing P-8 Poseidon
|-
|Dornier 228
|Germany
|
|Pollution control
|1996
|2
|
|
|-
|NH90 Sea Lion
|Germany
|Rotorcraft
|SAR/transport
|2018
|12
|
|Total of 18 on order, replacing the Westland Sea King
|-
|NH90 Sea Tiger
|Germany
|Rotorcraft
|ASW
|2025
|
|
| Total of 31 on order, replacing Westland Lynx
|-
| Westland Lynx Mk.88
| UK
| Rotorcraft
| ASW
| 1981
| 21
|
|Will be replaced by the NH90 Sea Tiger
|-
|Westland Sea King Mk.41
|UK
|Rotorcraft
|SAR/transport
|1975
|19
|
|Being replaced by the NH90 Sea Lion
|-
|Sea Falcon
|Sweden
|UAV
|ISR
|
|
|2
|Used as testbed for future UAVs on the corvettes, 8 more planned
|-
|Puma AE II
|United States
|UAV
|ISR
|2019
|6
|
|3 systems with 6 UAVs, dubbed "LARUS" in the German Navy
|-
|DJI Phantom 4
|China
|Micro UAV
|ISR
|2017
|5
|
|
|}
Structure
The German Navy is commanded by the Inspector of the Navy (Inspekteur der Marine) supported by the Navy Command (Marinekommando) in Rostock.
Formations
Navy Command (Marinekommando), Rostock
Einsatzflottille 1 (HQ Kiel)
1st Corvette Squadron (1. Korvettengeschwader), Warnemünde
1st Submarine Squadron (1. Ubootgeschwader), Eckernförde
Submarine Training Centre (Ausbildungszentrum Unterseeboote), Eckernförde
3rd Minesweeping Squadron (3. Minensuchgeschwader), Kiel
Sea Battalion, Eckernförde
Kommando Spezialkräfte Marine, Eckernförde
Naval Base Command Kiel (Marinestützpunktkommando Kiel)
Naval Base Command Eckernförde
Naval Base Command WarnemündeEinsatzflottille 2, Wilhelmshaven
HQ 2nd Flotilla
2nd Frigate Squadron (2. Fregattengeschwader), Wilhelmshaven
4th Frigate Squadron (4. Fregattengeschwader), Wilhelmshaven
Auxiliary Squadron (Trossgeschwader), Wilhelmshaven
Naval Base Command Wilhelmshaven
Naval Aviation Command (Marinefliegerkommando), Nordholz
Naval Air Wing 3 (Marinefliegergeschwader 3), Nordholz
Naval Air Wing 5 (Marinefliegergeschwader 5), Nordholz
Naval Support Command (Marineunterstützungskommando — MUKdo)
Naval Medical Institute (Schiffahrtsmedizinisches Institut), Kiel
Naval Academy (Marineschule Mürwik), Flensburg
Naval Petty Officer School (Marineunteroffiziersschule), Plön
Naval Engineering School (Marinetechnikschule), Parow, near Stralsund
Naval Operations School (Marineoperationsschule), Bremerhaven
Naval Damage Control Training Centre (Ausbildungszentrum für Schiffssicherung), Neustadt in Holstein
Ranks
Officers
Petty officers and enlisted seamen
Radio and communication stations
DH038
DHJ58
DHJ59
Future developments
The German government has announced the selection in January 2020 and contracting in June 2020 of Damen Group as the main contractor, together with partners Blohm+Voss and Thales, for supplying four Multi-Purpose Combat Ship MKS 180 frigates (Mehrzweckkampfschiff 180) to the German Navy with an option for 2 additional ships. The ships will be built at Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg and at other shipyard locations of the North German Lürssen Group.
Two further-developed Type 212 submarines with significant advancements (Common Design) will be designed & procured with Norway in the next decade. The contract was signed in July 2021, where according to the official statement the "NDMA and its German counterparts in the Bundesamt für Ausrüstung, Informationstechnik und Nutzung der Bundeswehr (BAAINBw) will acquire six new submarines – four Norwegian and two German – as well as Naval Strike Missiles for use on both German and Norwegian naval vessels." According to ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems the delivery of the two boats for the German Navy is scheduled for 2032 and 2034.
Five additional Braunschweig class corvettes are ordered and will be delivered 2020–2023.
NH90 NFH 'Sea Tiger' Helicopters ordered to replace Lynx in ASW/AsuW role, originally ordered by the German Army as NH90 TTH variant with deliveries planned from 2025 onwards. Up to 31 could be ordered.
18 NH90 MRH 'Sealion' Helicopters are unarmed and will replace the current 21 Sea King helicopters of Naval Air Wing 5 in SAR and ship-based Transport Role (VertRep) with deliveries planned from 2019 onwards.
The Saab Skeldar has been ordered as a testbed for a future maritime UAV for the Braunschweig class corvette.
Integration of the German Navy Marines (Seebatallion) in the Netherlands Marine Corps and use of the Amphibious ships of the Royal Netherlands Navy such as the Joint Support Ship HNLMS Karel Doorman (A833) as of 2016.
In June 2020 it was announced that German Navy and Royal Netherland Navy will cooperate and plan the future replacement of both the Sachsen-class frigate and De Zeven Provinciën-class frigate from 2030 onwards.
See also
List of ship classes of the Bundesmarine and Deutsche Marine
List of ships of the German navies
List of admirals of the German Navy
German commando frogmenMarineamtMarine-Regatta-Verein U-boatVolksmarineFurther reading (COE CSW)
Jan Wiedemann: COE CSW celebrates fifth anniversary; in: NAVAL FORCES III/2014 p. 90 f.
Hans-Joachim Stricker: Centre of Excellence for Operations in Confined and Shallow Waters COE CSW – Das COE als Ausdruck unserer besonderen nationalen Fähigkeiten im Bündnis; in: Marineforum 6-2007 p. 3 f.
Fritz-Rudolf Weber: Centre of Excellence for Operations in Confined and Shallow Waters – Think Tank für die NATO; in: Marineforum 1/2-2010 p. 11 ff.
Hans Georg Buss, Stefan Riewesell: Maritime C-IED and Harbour Protection: A Joint Effort; in: The Transformer Fall 2013 Vol 9 Issue 2 p. 18
Rahn, Werner. "German Navies from 1848 to 2016: Their Development and Courses from Confrontation to Cooperation." Naval War College Review'' 70.4 (2017). online
References
External links
The German Navy — Facts and Figures, 12th Edition, February 2013
Uniforms
Bundeswehr
Navies by country | [
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12961 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%89ANT | GÉANT | GÉANT is the pan-European data network for the research and education community. It interconnects national research and education networks (NRENs) across Europe, enabling collaboration on projects ranging from biological science, to earth observation, to arts and culture. The GÉANT project combines a high-bandwidth, high-capacity 50,000 km network with a growing range of services. These allow researchers to collaborate, working together wherever they are located. Services include identity and trust, multi-domain monitoring perfSONAR MDM, dynamic circuits and roaming via the eduroam service.
Together with European NRENs, GÉANT connects 50 million users in over 10,000 institutions. Through links to research networks in other regions (such as Internet2 and ESnet in the US, AfricaConnect in Africa, TEIN in Asia-Pacific and RedCLARA in Latin America), GÉANT enables collaboration between researchers in over half the world's countries.
Co-funded by the European Commission and Europe's NRENs, the GÉANT network was built and is operated by the GÉANT Association. The GÉANT project is a collaboration between 41 partners: 38 European NRENs, and NORDUnet (representing the five Nordic countries).
History
The GÉANT project began in November 2000, entered full production operation in December 2001 (fully replacing a network called TEN-155). Originally due to finish in October 2004, it was subsequently extended until April 2005.
The second generation network, named GÉANT2, began in September 2004 and continued through 2009, growing the network to 30 national networks in 34 countries.
The next GÉANT project (GN3) began on 1 April 2009 and continued until April 2013. This was then superseded by the GN3plus project which was scheduled to run for two years. It is funded under the EC's seventh research and development Research Framework Programme (often referred to as FP7).
The Project is now in its fourth iteration (GN4).
Technology
As well as providing the high-bandwidth links across Europe, the GÉANT network also acts as a testbed for new technology.
It was the first "hybrid" network deployed on an international scale, combining routed IP and switched infrastructure. This enables the network to offer general traffic alongside virtual "private" network paths for projects, such as the Large Hadron Collider, which have particular requirements involving dedicated bandwidth, security and flexibility.
GÉANT supported native IPv6 since 2002 and multicast IPv6 since 2004. It is involved in network research, in areas such as carrier class network technologies, photonic switching, federated network architectures and virtualisation.
In 2013 a substantial network migration program was completed, meaning users could be offered multiple 100 Gbit/s links, with the core network supporting 500 Gbit/s and a network design that will support up to 8Tbit/s.
Already, over 1 Petabyte of data are transferred every day via the GÉANT backbone network.
Participants
The GÉANT project is a collaboration between 41 partners: 38 European NRENs and NORDUnet (representing the five Nordic countries).
The full list of NREN project partners are available on the website.
Global links
GÉANT links to research networks in other world regions, including:
North America (Internet2, ESnet, NLR, NISN and CANARIE)
Latin America
North Africa and the Middle East
South Africa/Kenya
The South Caucasus
Central Asia
Asia Pacific
These links not only help international research collaboration but also aid with projects that deliver societal benefit, such as e-health, telemedicine and weather forecasting/disaster warning systems. Allowing researchers to work within their own countries also stems migration from less developed countries, helping bridge the digital divide.
Example projects
GÉANT is used by research communities, such as:
High-energy physics
Bio-medical sciences
Health
Radio Astronomy
Earth Observation and Early Warning
Arts and culture
References
External links
History of the Internet
Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom
Internet in Europe
National research and education networks
Research and development in Europe
Science and technology in Cambridgeshire | [
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12962 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-Hydroxybutyric%20acid | Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid | gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid (or γ-Hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), also known as 4-hydroxybutanoic acid) is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter and a psychoactive drug. It is a precursor to GABA, glutamate, and glycine in certain brain areas. It acts on the GHB receptor and is a weak agonist at the GABAB receptor. GHB has been used in the medical setting as a general anesthetic and as treatment for cataplexy, narcolepsy, and alcoholism. It is also used illegally as an intoxicant, as an athletic-performance enhancer, as a date-rape drug, and as a recreational drug.
It is commonly used in the form of a salt, such as sodium γ-hydroxybutyrate (NaGHB, sodium oxybate, or Xyrem) or potassium γ-hydroxybutyrate (KGHB, potassium oxybate). GHB is also produced as a result of fermentation, and is found in small quantities in some beers and wines, beef and small citrus fruits.
Succinic semialdehyde dehydrogenase deficiency is a disease that causes GHB to accumulate in the blood.
Medical use
GHB is used for medical purposes in the treatment of narcolepsy and, more rarely, alcoholism, although there remains uncertainty about its efficacy relative to other pharmacotherapies for alcohol dependence. It is sometimes used off-label for the treatment of fibromyalgia. GHB is the active ingredient of the prescription medication sodium oxybate (Xyrem). Sodium oxybate is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of cataplexy associated with narcolepsy and excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) associated with narcolepsy.
GHB has been shown to reliably increase slow-wave sleep and decrease the tendency for REM sleep in modified multiple sleep latency tests.
The FDA approved labeling for sodium oxybate suggests no evidence GHB has teratogenic, carcinogenic or hepatotoxic properties. Its favorable safety profile relative to ethanol may explain why GHB continues to be investigated as a candidate for alcohol substitution.
Recreational use
GHB is a central nervous system depressant used as an intoxicant. It has many street names. Its effects have been described as comparable with ethanol (alcohol) and MDMA use, such as euphoria, disinhibition, enhanced libido and empathogenic states. A review comparing ethanol to GHB concluded that the dangers of the two drugs were similar. At higher doses, GHB may induce nausea, dizziness, drowsiness, agitation, visual disturbances, depressed breathing, amnesia, unconsciousness, and death. One potential cause of death from GHB consumption is polydrug toxicity. Co-administration with other CNS depressants such as alcohol or benzodiazepines can result in an additive effect (potentiation), as they all bind to gamma-aminobutyric acid (or "GABA") receptor sites. The effects of GHB can last from 1.5 to 4 hours, or longer if large doses have been consumed. Consuming GHB with alcohol can cause respiratory arrest and vomiting in combination with unrousable sleep, which can lead to death.
Recreational doses of 1–2 g generally provide a feeling of euphoria, and larger doses create deleterious effects such as reduced motor function and drowsiness. The sodium salt of GHB has a salty taste. Other salt forms such as calcium GHB and magnesium GHB have also been reported, but the sodium salt is by far the most common.
Some prodrugs, such as γ-butyrolactone (GBL), convert to GHB in the stomach and blood stream. Other prodrugs, such as 1,4-butanediol (1,4-B), have their own toxicity concerns. GBL and 1,4-B are normally found as pure liquids, but they can be mixed with other more harmful solvents when intended for industrial use (e.g. as paint stripper or varnish thinner).
GHB can be manufactured with little knowledge of chemistry, as it involves the mixing of its two precursors, GBL and an alkali hydroxide such as sodium hydroxide, to form the GHB salt. Due to the ease of manufacture and the availability of its precursors, it is not usually produced in illicit laboratories like other synthetic drugs, but in private homes by low-level producers.
GHB is "colourless and odourless".
A 2006 report commissioned by a UK parliamentary committee found the use of GHB to be less dangerous than tobacco and alcohol in physical harm, dependence and social harms.
Party use
GHB has been used as a club drug, apparently starting in the 1990s, as small doses of GHB can act as a euphoriant and are believed to be aphrodisiac. Slang terms for GHB include liquid ecstasy, lollipops, liquid X or liquid E due to its tendency to produce euphoria and sociability and its use in the dance party scene.
Sports and athletics
Some athletes have used GHB or its analogs because of being marketed as anabolic agents, although there is no evidence that it builds muscle or improves performance.
Usage as a date-rape drug
GHB became known to the general public as a date-rape drug by the late 1990s. GHB is colourless and odorless and has been described as "very easy to add to drinks". When consumed, the victim will quickly feel groggy and sleepy and may become unconscious. Upon recovery they may have an impaired ability to recall events that have occurred during the period of intoxication. In these situations evidence and the identification of the perpetrator of the rape is often difficult.
It is also difficult to establish how often GHB is used to facilitate rape as it is difficult to detect in a urine sample after a day, and many victims may only recall the rape some time after its occurrence; however, a 2006 study suggested that there was "no evidence to suggest widespread date rape drug use" in the UK, and that less than 2% of cases involved GHB, while 17% involved cocaine, and a survey in the Netherlands published in 2010 found that the proportion of drug-related rape where GHB was used appeared to be greatly overestimated by the media.
There have been several high-profile cases of GHB as a date rape drug that received national attention in the United States. In early 1999, a 15-year-old girl, Samantha Reid of Rockwood, Michigan, died from GHB poisoning. Reid's death inspired the legislation titled the "Hillory J. Farias and Samantha Reid Date-Rape Drug Prohibition Act of 2000". This is the law that made GHB a Schedule 1 controlled substance.
The British serial killer Stephen Port administered GHB to his victims.
GHB can be detected in hair. Hair testing can be a useful tool in court cases or for the victim's own information. Most over-the-counter urine test kits test only for date-rape drugs that are benzodiazepines, and GHB is not a benzodiazepine. To detect GHB in urine, the sample must be taken within four hours of GHB ingestion, and cannot be tested at home.
Adverse effects
Combination with alcohol
In humans, GHB has been shown to reduce the elimination rate of alcohol. This may explain the respiratory arrest that has been reported after ingestion of both drugs. A review of the details of 194 deaths attributed to or related to GHB over a ten-year period found that most were from respiratory depression caused by interaction with alcohol or other drugs.
Deaths
One publication has investigated 226 deaths attributed to GHB. Of 226 deaths included, 213 had a cardiorespiratory arrest and 13 had fatal accidents. 71 deaths (34%) had no co-intoxicants. Postmortem blood GHB was 18–4400 mg/L (median=347) in deaths negative for co-intoxicants.
One report has suggested that sodium oxybate overdose might be fatal, based on deaths of three patients who had been prescribed the drug. However, for two of the three cases, post-mortem GHB concentrations were 141 and 110 mg/L, which is within the expected range of concentrations for GHB after death, and the third case was a patient with a history of intentional drug overdose. The toxicity of GHB has been an issue in criminal trials, as in the death of Felicia Tang, where the defense argued that death was due to GHB, not murder.
GHB is produced in the body in very small amounts, and blood levels may climb after death to levels in the range of 30–50 mg/L. Levels higher than this are found in GHB deaths. Levels lower than this may be due to GHB or to postmortem endogenous elevations.
Neurotoxicity
In multiple studies, GHB has been found to impair spatial memory, working memory, learning and memory in rats with chronic administration. These effects are associated with decreased NMDA receptor expression in the cerebral cortex and possibly other areas as well. In addition, the neurotoxicity appears to be caused by oxidative stress.
Addiction
There have been reported fatalities due to GHB withdrawal. Addiction occurs when repeated drug use disrupts the normal balance of brain circuits that control rewards, memory and cognition, ultimately leading to compulsive drug taking.
Rats forced to consume massive doses of GHB will intermittently prefer GHB solution to water.
Withdrawal
GHB has also been associated with a withdrawal syndrome of insomnia, anxiety, and tremor that usually resolves within three to twenty-one days. The withdrawal syndrome can be severe producing acute delirium and may require hospitalization in an intensive care unit for management. Management of GHB dependence involves considering the person's age, comorbidity and the pharmacological pathways of GHB. The mainstay of treatment for severe withdrawal is supportive care and benzodiazepines for control of acute delirium, but larger doses are often required compared to acute delirium of other causes (e.g. > 100 mg/d of diazepam). Baclofen has been suggested as an alternative or adjunct to benzodiazepines based on anecdotal evidence and some animal data. However, there is less experience with the use of baclofen for GHB withdrawal, and additional research in humans is needed. Baclofen was first suggested as an adjunct because benzodiazepines do not affect GABAB receptors and therefore have no cross-tolerance with GHB while baclofen, which works via GABAB receptors, is cross-tolerant with GHB and may be more effective in alleviating withdrawal effects of GHB.
GHB withdrawal is not widely discussed in textbooks and some psychiatrists, general practitioners, and even hospital emergency physicians may not be familiar with this withdrawal syndrome.
Overdose
Overdose of GHB can sometimes be difficult to treat because of its multiple effects on the body. GHB tends to cause rapid unconsciousness at doses above 3500 mg, with single doses over 7000 mg often causing life-threatening respiratory depression, and higher doses still inducing bradycardia and cardiac arrest. Other side-effects include convulsions (especially when combined with stimulants), and nausea/vomiting (especially when combined with alcohol).
The greatest life threat due to GHB overdose (with or without other substances) is respiratory arrest. Other relatively common causes of death due to GHB ingestion include aspiration of vomitus, positional asphyxia, and trauma sustained while intoxicated (e.g., motor vehicle accidents while driving under the influence of GHB). The risk of aspiration pneumonia and positional asphyxia risk can be reduced by laying the patient down in the recovery position. People are most likely to vomit as they become unconscious, and as they wake up. It is important to keep the victim awake and moving; the victim must not be left alone due to the risk of death through vomiting. Frequently the victim will be in a good mood but this does not mean the victim is not in danger. GHB overdose is a medical emergency and immediate assessment in an emergency department is needed.
Convulsions from GHB can be treated with the benzodiazepines diazepam or lorazepam. Even though these benzodiazepines are also CNS depressants, they primarily modulate GABAA receptors whereas GHB is primarily a GABAB receptor agonist, and so do not worsen CNS depression as much as might be expected.
Because of the faster and more complete absorption of GBL relative to GHB, its dose-response curve is steeper, and overdoses of GBL tend to be more dangerous and problematic than overdoses involving only GHB or 1,4-B. Any GHB/GBL overdose is a medical emergency and should be cared for by appropriately trained personnel.
A newer synthetic drug SCH-50911, which acts as a selective GABAB antagonist, quickly reverses GHB overdose in mice. However, this treatment has yet to be tried in humans, and it is unlikely that it will be researched for this purpose in humans due to the illegal nature of clinical trials of GHB and the lack of medical indemnity coverage inherent in using an untested treatment for a life-threatening overdose.
Detection of use
GHB may be quantitated in blood or plasma to confirm a diagnosis of poisoning in hospitalized patients, to provide evidence in an impaired driving, or to assist in a medicolegal death investigation. Blood or plasma GHB concentrations are usually in a range of 50–250 mg/L in persons receiving the drug therapeutically (during general anesthesia), 30–100 mg/L in those arrested for impaired driving, 50–500 mg/L in acutely intoxicated patients and 100–1000 mg/L in victims of fatal overdosage. Urine is often the preferred specimen for routine drug abuse monitoring purposes. Both γ-butyrolactone (GBL) and 1,4-butanediol are converted to GHB in the body.
In January 2016, it was announced scientists had developed a way to detect GHB, among other things, in saliva.
Endogenous production
Cells produce GHB by reduction of succinic semialdehyde via succinic semialdehyde reductase (SSR). This enzyme appears to be induced by cAMP levels, meaning substances that elevate cAMP, such as forskolin and vinpocetine, may increase GHB synthesis and release. Conversely, endogeneous GHB production in those taking valproic acid will be inhibited via inhibition of the conversion from succinic acid semialdehyde to GHB. People with the disorder known as succinic semialdehyde dehydrogenase deficiency, also known as γ-hydroxybutyric aciduria, have elevated levels of GHB in their urine, blood plasma and cerebrospinal fluid.
The precise function of GHB in the body is not clear. It is known, however, that the brain expresses a large number of receptors that are activated by GHB. These receptors are excitatory, however, and therefore not responsible for the sedative effects of GHB; they have been shown to elevate the principal excitatory neurotransmitter, glutamate. The benzamide antipsychotics—amisulpride, nemonapride, etc.—have been shown to bind to these GHB-activated receptors in vivo. Other antipsychotics were tested and were not found to have an affinity for this receptor.
GHB is a precursor to GABA, glutamate, and glycine in certain brain areas.
In spite of its demonstrated neurotoxicity, (see relevant section, above), GHB has neuroprotective properties, and has been found to protect cells from hypoxia.
Natural fermentation by-product
GHB is also produced as a result of fermentation and so is found in small quantities in some beers and wines, in particular fruit wines. The amount found in wine is pharmacologically insignificant and not sufficient to produce psychoactive effects.
Pharmacology
GHB has at least two distinct binding sites in the central nervous system. GHB acts as an agonist at the inhibitory GHB receptor and as a weak agonist at the inhibitory GABAB receptor. GHB is a naturally occurring substance that acts in a similar fashion to some neurotransmitters in the mammalian brain. GHB is probably synthesized from GABA in GABAergic neurons, and released when the neurons fire.
GHB has been found to activate oxytocinergic neurons in the supraoptic nucleus.
If taken orally, GABA itself does not effectively cross the blood–brain barrier.
GHB induces the accumulation of either a derivative of tryptophan or tryptophan itself in the extracellular space, possibly by increasing tryptophan transport across the blood–brain barrier. The blood content of certain neutral amino-acids, including tryptophan, is also increased by peripheral GHB administration. GHB-induced stimulation of tissue serotonin turnover may be due to an increase in tryptophan transport to the brain and in its uptake by serotonergic cells. As the serotonergic system may be involved in the regulation of sleep, mood, and anxiety, the stimulation of this system by high doses of GHB may be involved in certain neuropharmacological events induced by GHB administration.
However, at therapeutic doses, GHB reaches much higher concentrations in the brain and activates GABAB receptors, which are primarily responsible for its sedative effects. GHB's sedative effects are blocked by GABAB antagonists.
The role of the GHB receptor in the behavioural effects induced by GHB is more complex. GHB receptors are densely expressed in many areas of the brain, including the cortex and hippocampus, and these are the receptors that GHB displays the highest affinity for. There has been somewhat limited research into the GHB receptor; however, there is evidence that activation of the GHB receptor in some brain areas results in the release of glutamate, the principal excitatory neurotransmitter. Drugs that selectively activate the GHB receptor cause absence seizures in high doses, as do GHB and GABAB agonists.
Activation of both the GHB receptor and GABAB is responsible for the addictive profile of GHB. GHB's effect on dopamine release is biphasic. Low concentrations stimulate dopamine release via the GHB receptor. Higher concentrations inhibit dopamine release via GABAB receptors as do other GABAB agonists such as baclofen and phenibut. After an initial phase of inhibition, dopamine release is then increased via the GHB receptor. Both the inhibition and increase of dopamine release by GHB are inhibited by opioid antagonists such as naloxone and naltrexone. Dynorphin may play a role in the inhibition of dopamine release via kappa opioid receptors.
This explains the paradoxical mix of sedative and stimulatory properties of GHB, as well as the so-called "rebound" effect, experienced by individuals using GHB as a sleeping agent, wherein they awake suddenly after several hours of GHB-induced deep sleep. That is to say that, over time, the concentration of GHB in the system decreases below the threshold for significant GABAB receptor activation and activates predominantly the GHB receptor, leading to wakefulness.
Recently, analogs of GHB, such as 4-hydroxy-4-methylpentanoic acid (UMB68) have been synthesised and tested on animals, in order to gain a better understanding of GHB's mode of action. Analogues of GHB such as 3-methyl-GHB, 4-methyl-GHB, and 4-phenyl-GHB have been shown to produce similar effects to GHB in some animal studies, but these compounds are even less well researched than GHB itself. Of these analogues, only 4-methyl-GHB (γ-hydroxyvaleric acid, GHV) and a prodrug form γ-valerolactone (GVL) have been reported as drugs of abuse in humans, and on the available evidence seem to be less potent but more toxic than GHB, with a particular tendency to cause nausea and vomiting.
Other prodrug ester forms of GHB have also rarely been encountered by law enforcement, including 1,4-butanediol diacetate (BDDA/DABD), methyl-4-acetoxybutanoate (MAB), and ethyl-4-acetoxybutanoate (EAB), but these are, in general, covered by analogue laws in jurisdictions where GHB is illegal, and little is known about them beyond their delayed onset and longer duration of action. The intermediate compound γ-hydroxybutyraldehyde (GHBAL) is also a prodrug for GHB; however, as with all aliphatic aldehydes this compound is caustic and is strong-smelling and foul-tasting; actual use of this compound as an intoxicant is likely to be unpleasant and result in severe nausea and vomiting.
Both of the metabolic breakdown pathways shown for GHB can run in either direction, depending on the concentrations of the substances involved, so the body can make its own GHB either from GABA or from succinic semialdehyde. Under normal physiological conditions, the concentration of GHB in the body is rather low, and the pathways would run in the reverse direction to what is shown here to produce endogenous GHB. However, when GHB is consumed for recreational or health promotion purposes, its concentration in the body is much higher than normal, which changes the enzyme kinetics so that these pathways operate to metabolise GHB rather than producing it.
History
Alexander Zaytsev worked on this chemical family and published work on it in 1874. The first extended research into GHB and its use in humans was conducted in the early 1960s by Henri Laborit to use in studying the neurotransmitter GABA. It was studied in a range of uses including obstetric surgery and during childbirth and as an anxiolytic; there were anecdotal reports of it having antidepressant and aphrodisiac effects as well. It was also studied as an intravenous anesthetic agent and was marketed for that purpose starting in 1964 in Europe but it was not widely adopted as it caused seizures; as of 2006 that use was still authorized in France and Italy but not widely used. It was also studied to treat alcohol addiction; while the evidence for this use is weak, however sodium oxybate is marketed for this use in Italy.
GHB and sodium oxybate were also studied for use in narcolepsy from the 1960s onwards.
In May 1990 GHB was introduced as a dietary supplement and was marketed to body builders, for help with weight control and as a sleep aid, and as a "replacement" for l-tryptophan, which was removed from the market in November 1989 when batches contaminated with trace impurities were found to cause eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome, although eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome is also tied to tryptophan overload. In 2001 tryptophan supplement sales were allowed to resume, and in 2005 the FDA ban on tryptophan supplement importation was lifted. By November 1989 57 cases of illness caused by the GHB supplements had been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with people having taken up to three teaspoons of GHB; there were no deaths but nine people needed care in an intensive care unit. The FDA issued a warning in November 1990 that sale of GHB was illegal. GHB continued to be manufactured and sold illegally and it and analogs were adopted as a club drug and came to be used as a date rape drug, and the DEA made seizures and the FDA reissued warnings several times throughout the 1990s.
At the same time, research on the use of GHB in the form of sodium oxybate had formalized, as a company called Orphan Medical had filed an investigational new drug application and was running clinical trials with the intention of gaining regulatory approval for use to treat narcolepsy.
A popular children's toy, Bindeez (also known as Aqua Dots, in the United States), produced by Melbourne company Moose, was banned in Australia in early November 2007 when it was discovered that 1,4-butanediol (1,4-B), which is metabolized into GHB, had been substituted for the non-toxic plasticiser 1,5-pentanediol in the bead manufacturing process. Three young children were hospitalized as a result of ingesting a large number of the beads, and the toy was recalled.
Legal status
In the United States, GHB was placed on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act in March 2000. However, used in sodium oxybate under an IND or NDA from the US FDA, it is considered a Schedule III substance but with Schedule I trafficking penalties, one of several drugs that are listed in multiple schedules.
On 20 March 2001, the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs placed GHB in Schedule IV of the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances.
In the UK GHB was made a class C drug in June 2003. In October 2013 the ACMD recommended upgrading it from schedule IV to schedule II in line with UN recommendations. Their report concluded that the minimal use of Xyrem in the UK meant that prescribers would be minimally inconvenienced by the rescheduling. This advice was followed and GHB was moved to schedule 2 on 7 January 2015.
In Hong Kong, GHB is regulated under Schedule 1 of Hong Kong's Chapter 134 Dangerous Drugs Ordinance. It can only be used legally by health professionals and for university research purposes. The substance can be given by pharmacists under a prescription. Anyone who supplies the substance without prescription can be fined HK$10,000. The penalty for trafficking or manufacturing the substance is a HK$150,000 fine and life imprisonment. Possession of the substance for consumption without license from the Department of Health is illegal with a HK$100,000 fine or five years of jail time.
In Canada, GHB has been a Schedule I controlled substance since 6 November 2012 (the same schedule that contains heroin and cocaine). Prior to that date, it was a Schedule III controlled substance (the same schedule that contains amphetamines and LSD).
In New Zealand and Australia, GHB, 1,4-B, and GBL are all Class B illegal drugs, along with any possible esters, ethers, and aldehydes. GABA itself is also listed as an illegal drug in these jurisdictions, which seems unusual given its failure to cross the blood–brain barrier, but there was a perception among legislators that all known analogues should be covered as far as this was possible. Attempts to circumvent the illegal status of GHB have led to the sale of derivatives such as 4-methyl-GHB (γ-hydroxyvaleric acid, GHV) and its prodrug form γ-valerolactone (GVL), but these are also covered under the law by virtue of their being "substantially similar" to GHB or GBL, so importation, sale, possession and use of these compounds is also considered to be illegal.
In Chile, GHB is a controlled drug under the law (psychotropic substances and narcotics).
In Norway and in Switzerland, GHB is considered a narcotic and is only available by prescription under the trade name Xyrem (Union Chimique Belge S.A.).
Sodium oxybate is also used therapeutically in Italy under the brand name Alcover for treatment of alcohol withdrawal and dependence.
See also
Beta-Hydroxybutyric acid
γ-Hydroxyvaleric acid (GHV)
γ-Valerolactone (GVL)
β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid (HMB)
References
External links
Gamma-hydroxybutyrate MS Spectrum
EMCDDA Report on the risk assessment of GHB in the framework of the joint action on new synthetic drugs
Erowid GHB Vault (also contains information about addiction and dangers)
InfoFacts – Rohypnol and GHB (National Institute on Drug Abuse)
Webarchive template wayback links
Sedatives
GABAB receptor agonists
GHB receptor agonists
GABA analogues
General anesthetics
Neurotransmitters
Drug culture
Euphoriants
Hydroxy acids
GABA
Glutamate (neurotransmitter)
Rape | [
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12963 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano%20Bruno | Giordano Bruno | Giordano Bruno (; ; ; born Filippo Bruno, January or February 1548 – 17 February 1600) was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, cosmological theorist, and Hermetic occultist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended the then novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets, and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no "center".
Starting in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno's pantheism was not taken lightly by the church, nor was his teaching of the transmigration of the soul (reincarnation). The Inquisition found him guilty, and he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600. After his death, he gained considerable fame, being particularly celebrated by 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science, although most historians agree that his heresy trial was not a response to his cosmological views but rather a response to his religious and afterlife views. However some historians do contend that the main reason for Bruno's death was indeed his cosmological views. Bruno's case is still considered a landmark in the history of free thought and the emerging sciences.
In addition to cosmology, Bruno also wrote extensively on the art of memory, a loosely organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles. Historian Frances Yates argues that Bruno was deeply influenced by Islamic astrology (particularly the philosophy of Averroes), Neoplatonism, Renaissance Hermeticism, and Genesis-like legends surrounding the Egyptian god Thoth. Other studies of Bruno have focused on his qualitative approach to mathematics and his application of the spatial concepts of geometry to language.
Life
Early years, 1548–1576
Born Filippo Bruno in Nola (a comune in the modern-day province of Naples, in the Southern Italian region of Campania, then part of the Kingdom of Naples) in 1548, he was the son of Giovanni Bruno, a soldier, and Fraulissa Savolino. In his youth he was sent to Naples to be educated. He was tutored privately at the Augustinian monastery there, and attended public lectures at the Studium Generale. At the age of 17, he entered the Dominican Order at the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, taking the name Giordano, after Giordano Crispo, his metaphysics tutor. He continued his studies there, completing his novitiate, and ordained a priest in 1572 at age 24. During his time in Naples, he became known for his skill with the art of memory and on one occasion traveled to Rome to demonstrate his mnemonic system before Pope Pius V and Cardinal Rebiba. In his later years, Bruno claimed that the Pope accepted his dedication to him of the lost work On The Ark of Noah at this time.
While Bruno was distinguished for outstanding ability, his taste for free thinking and forbidden books soon caused him difficulties. Given the controversy he caused in later life, it is surprising that he was able to remain within the monastic system for eleven years. In his testimony to Venetian inquisitors during his trial many years later, he says that proceedings were twice taken against him for having cast away images of the saints, retaining only a crucifix, and for having recommended controversial texts to a novice. Such behavior could perhaps be overlooked, but Bruno's situation became much more serious when he was reported to have defended the Arian heresy, and when a copy of the banned writings of Erasmus, annotated by him, was discovered hidden in the monastery latrine. When he learned that an indictment was being prepared against him in Naples he fled, shedding his religious habit, at least for a time.
First years of wandering, 1576–1583
Bruno first went to the Genoese port of Noli, then to Savona, Turin and finally to Venice, where he published his lost work On the Signs of the Times with the permission (so he claimed at his trial) of the Dominican Remigio Nannini Fiorentino. From Venice he went to Padua, where he met fellow Dominicans who convinced him to wear his religious habit again. From Padua he went to Bergamo and then across the Alps to Chambéry and Lyon. His movements after this time are obscure.
In 1579 he arrived in Geneva. As D.W. Singer, a Bruno biographer, notes, "The question has sometimes been raised as to whether Bruno became a Protestant, but it is intrinsically most unlikely that he accepted membership in Calvin's communion" During his Venetian trial he told inquisitors that while in Geneva he told the Marchese de Vico of Naples, who was notable for helping Italian refugees in Geneva, "I did not intend to adopt the religion of the city. I desired to stay there only that I might live at liberty and in security." Bruno had a pair of breeches made for himself, and the Marchese and others apparently made Bruno a gift of a sword, hat, cape and other necessities for dressing himself; in such clothing Bruno could no longer be recognized as a priest. Things apparently went well for Bruno for a time, as he entered his name in the Rector's Book of the University of Geneva in May 1579. But in keeping with his personality he could not long remain silent. In August he published an attack on the work of , a distinguished professor. He and the printer were promptly arrested. Rather than apologizing, Bruno insisted on continuing to defend his publication. He was refused the right to take sacrament. Though this right was eventually restored, he left Geneva.
He went to France, arriving first in Lyon, and thereafter settling for a time (1580–1581) in Toulouse, where he took his doctorate in theology and was elected by students to lecture in philosophy. It seems he also attempted at this time to return to Catholicism, but was denied absolution by the Jesuit priest he approached. When religious strife broke out in the summer of 1581, he moved to Paris. There he held a cycle of thirty lectures on theological topics and also began to gain fame for his prodigious memory. Bruno's feats of memory were based, at least in part, on his elaborate system of mnemonics, but some of his contemporaries found it easier to attribute them to magical powers. His talents attracted the benevolent attention of the king Henry III. The king summoned him to the court. Bruno subsequently reported "I got me such a name that King Henry III summoned me one day to discover from me if the memory which I possessed was natural or acquired by magic art. I satisfied him that it did not come from sorcery but from organized knowledge; and, following this, I got a book on memory printed, entitled The Shadows of Ideas, which I dedicated to His Majesty. Forthwith he gave me an Extraordinary Lectureship with a salary."
In Paris, Bruno enjoyed the protection of his powerful French patrons. During this period, he published several works on mnemonics, including De umbris idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas, 1582), (The Art of Memory, 1582), and Cantus circaeus (Circe's Song, 1582; described at ). All of these were based on his mnemonic models of organized knowledge and experience, as opposed to the simplistic logic-based mnemonic techniques of Petrus Ramus then becoming popular. Bruno also published a comedy summarizing some of his philosophical positions, titled Il Candelaio (The Torchbearer, 1582). In the 16th century dedications were, as a rule, approved beforehand, and hence were a way of placing a work under the protection of an individual. Given that Bruno dedicated various works to the likes of King Henry III, Sir Philip Sidney, Michel de Castelnau (French Ambassador to England), and possibly Pope Pius V, it is apparent that this wanderer had risen sharply in status and moved in powerful circles.
England, 1583–1585
In April 1583, Bruno went to England with letters of recommendation from Henry III as a guest of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. Bruno lived at the French embassy with the lexicographer John Florio. There he became acquainted with the poet Philip Sidney (to whom he dedicated two books) and other members of the Hermetic circle around John Dee, though there is no evidence that Bruno ever met Dee himself. He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still", and found Bruno had both plagiarized and misrepresented Ficino's work, leading Bruno to return to the continent.
Nevertheless, his stay in England was fruitful. During that time Bruno completed and published some of his most important works, the six "Italian Dialogues", including the cosmological tracts La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584), De la causa, principio et uno (On Cause, Principle and Unity, 1584), De l'infinito, universo et mondi (On the Infinite, Universe and Worlds, 1584) as well as Lo spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 1584) and De gli eroici furori (On the Heroic Frenzies, 1585). Some of these were printed by John Charlewood. Some of the works that Bruno published in London, notably The Ash Wednesday Supper, appear to have given offense. Once again, Bruno's controversial views and tactless language lost him the support of his friends. John Bossy has advanced the theory that, while staying in the French Embassy in London, Bruno was also spying on Catholic conspirators, under the pseudonym "Henry Fagot", for Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State.
Bruno is sometimes cited as being the first to propose that the universe is infinite, which he did during his time in England, but an English scientist, Thomas Digges, put forth this idea in a published work in 1576, some eight years earlier than Bruno. An infinite universe and the possibility of alien life had also been earlier suggested by German Catholic Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in "On Learned Ignorance" published in 1440.
Last years of wandering, 1585–1592
In October 1585, after the French embassy in London was attacked by a mob, Bruno returned to Paris with Castelnau, finding a tense political situation. Moreover, his 120 theses against Aristotelian natural science and his pamphlets against the mathematician Fabrizio Mordente soon put him in ill favor. In 1586, following a violent quarrel about Mordente's invention, the differential compass, he left France for Germany.
In Germany he failed to obtain a teaching position at Marburg, but was granted permission to teach at Wittenberg, where he lectured on Aristotle for two years. However, with a change of intellectual climate there, he was no longer welcome, and went in 1588 to Prague, where he obtained 300 taler from Rudolf II, but no teaching position. He went on to serve briefly as a professor in Helmstedt, but had to flee again when he was excommunicated by the Lutherans.
During this period he produced several Latin works, dictated to his friend and secretary Girolamo Besler, including De Magia (On Magic), Theses De Magia (Theses on Magic) and De Vinculis in Genere (A General Account of Bonding). All these were apparently transcribed or recorded by Besler (or Bisler) between 1589 and 1590. He also published De Imaginum, Signorum, Et Idearum Compositione (On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, 1591).
In 1591 he was in Frankfurt. Apparently, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, he received an invitation to Venice from the local patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, who wished to be instructed in the art of memory, and also heard of a vacant chair in mathematics at the University of Padua. At the time the Inquisition seemed to be losing some of its strictness, and because the Republic of Venice was the most liberal state in the Italian Peninsula, Bruno was lulled into making the fatal mistake of returning to Italy.
He went first to Padua, where he taught briefly, and applied unsuccessfully for the chair of mathematics, which was given instead to Galileo Galilei one year later. Bruno accepted Mocenigo's invitation and moved to Venice in March 1592. For about two months he served as an in-house tutor to Mocenigo. When Bruno announced his plan to leave Venice to his host, the latter, who was unhappy with the teachings he had received and had apparently come to dislike Bruno, denounced him to the Venetian Inquisition, which had Bruno arrested on 22 May 1592. Among the numerous charges of blasphemy and heresy brought against him in Venice, based on Mocenigo's denunciation, was his belief in the plurality of worlds, as well as accusations of personal misconduct. Bruno defended himself skillfully, stressing the philosophical character of some of his positions, denying others and admitting that he had had doubts on some matters of dogma. The Roman Inquisition, however, asked for his transfer to Rome. After several months of argument, the Venetian authorities reluctantly consented and Bruno was sent to Rome in February 1593.
Imprisonment, trial and execution, 1593–1600
During the seven years of his trial in Rome, Bruno was held in confinement, lastly in the Tower of Nona. Some important documents about the trial are lost, but others have been preserved, among them a summary of the proceedings that was rediscovered in 1940. The numerous charges against Bruno, based on some of his books as well as on witness accounts, included blasphemy, immoral conduct, and heresy in matters of dogmatic theology, and involved some of the basic doctrines of his philosophy and cosmology. Luigi Firpo speculates the charges made against Bruno by the Roman Inquisition were:
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and speaking against it and its ministers;
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation;
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith pertaining to Jesus as the Christ;
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus;
holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about both Transubstantiation and the Mass;
claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity;
believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes;
dealing in magics and divination.
Bruno defended himself as he had in Venice, insisting that he accepted the Church's dogmatic teachings, but trying to preserve the basis of his cosmological views. In particular, he held firm to his belief in the plurality of worlds, although he was admonished to abandon it. His trial was overseen by the Inquisitor Cardinal Bellarmine, who demanded a full recantation, which Bruno eventually refused. On 20 January 1600, Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic, and the Inquisition issued a sentence of death. According to the correspondence of Gaspar Schopp of Breslau, he is said to have made a threatening gesture towards his judges and to have replied: Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam ("Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it").
He was turned over to the secular authorities. On 17 February 1600, in the Campo de' Fiori (a central Roman market square), with his "tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words", he was hung upside down naked before finally being burned at the stake. His ashes were thrown into the Tiber river.
All of Bruno's works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. The inquisition cardinals who judged Giordano Bruno were Cardinal Bellarmino (Bellarmine), Cardinal Madruzzo (Madruzzi), Camillo Cardinal Borghese (later Pope Paul V), Domenico Cardinal Pinelli, Pompeio Cardinal Arrigoni, Cardinal Sfondrati, Pedro Cardinal De Deza Manuel and Cardinal Santorio (Archbishop of Santa Severina, Cardinal-Bishop of Palestrina).
The measures taken to prevent Bruno continuing to speak have resulted in his becoming a symbol for free thought and speech in present-day Rome, where an annual memorial service takes place close to the spot where he was executed.
Physical appearance
The earliest likeness of Bruno is an engraving published in 1715 and cited by Salvestrini as "the only known portrait of Bruno". Salvestrini suggests that it is a re-engraving made from a now lost original. This engraving has provided the source for later images.
The records of Bruno's imprisonment by the Venetian inquisition in May 1592 describe him as a man "of average height, with a hazel-coloured beard and the appearance of being about forty years of age".
Alternately, a passage in a work by George Abbot indicates that Bruno was of diminutive stature: "When that Italian Didapper, who intituled himselfe Philotheus Iordanus Brunus Nolanus, magis elaboratae Theologiae Doctor, &c. with a name longer than his body...". The word "didapper" used by Abbot is the derisive term which at the time meant "a small diving waterfowl".
Cosmology
Contemporary cosmological beliefs
In the first half of the 15th century, Nicholas of Cusa challenged the then widely accepted philosophies of Aristotelianism, envisioning instead an infinite universe whose center was everywhere and circumference nowhere, and moreover teeming with countless stars. He also predicted that neither were the rotational orbits circular nor were their movements uniform.
In the second half of the 16th century, the theories of Copernicus (1473–1543) began diffusing through Europe. Copernicus conserved the idea of planets fixed to solid spheres, but considered the apparent motion of the stars to be an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth on its axis; he also preserved the notion of an immobile center, but it was the Sun rather than the Earth. Copernicus also argued the Earth was a planet orbiting the Sun once every year. However he maintained the Ptolemaic hypothesis that the orbits of the planets were composed of perfect circles—deferents and epicycles—and that the stars were fixed on a stationary outer sphere.
Despite the widespread publication of Copernicus' work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, during Bruno's time most educated Catholics subscribed to the Aristotelian geocentric view that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that all heavenly bodies revolved around it. The ultimate limit of the universe was the primum mobile, whose diurnal rotation was conferred upon it by a transcendental God, not part of the universe (although, as the kingdom of heaven, adjacent to it), a motionless prime mover and first cause. The fixed stars were part of this celestial sphere, all at the same fixed distance from the immobile Earth at the center of the sphere. Ptolemy had numbered these at 1,022, grouped into 48 constellations. The planets were each fixed to a transparent sphere.
Few astronomers of Bruno's time accepted Copernicus's heliocentric model. Among those who did were the Germans Michael Maestlin (1550–1631), Christoph Rothmann, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630); the Englishman Thomas Digges (c. 1546–1595), author of A Perfit Description of the Caelestial Orbes; and the Italian Galileo Galilei (1564–1642).
Bruno's cosmological claims
In 1584, Bruno published two important philosophical dialogues (La Cena de le Ceneri and De l'infinito universo et mondi) in which he argued against the planetary spheres (Christoph Rothmann did the same in 1586 as did Tycho Brahe in 1587) and affirmed the Copernican principle.
In particular, to support the Copernican view and oppose the objection according to which the motion of the Earth would be perceived by means of the motion of winds, clouds etc., in La Cena de le Ceneri Bruno anticipates some of the arguments of Galilei on the relativity principle. Note that he also uses the example now known as Galileo's ship.
Theophilus – [...] air through which the clouds and winds move are parts of the Earth, [...] to mean under the name of Earth the whole machinery and the entire animated part, which consists of dissimilar parts; so that the rivers, the rocks, the seas, the whole vaporous and turbulent air, which is enclosed within the highest mountains, should belong to the Earth as its members, just as the air [does] in the lungs and in other cavities of animals by which they breathe, widen their arteries, and other similar effects necessary for life are performed. The clouds, too, move through accidents in the body of the Earth and are in its bowels as are the waters. [...]
With the Earth move [...] all things that are on the Earth. If, therefore, from a point outside the Earth something were thrown upon the Earth, it would lose, because of the latter's motion, its straightness as would be seen on the ship [...] moving along a river, if someone on point C of the riverbank were to throw a stone along a straight line, and would see the stone miss its target by the amount of the velocity of the ship's motion. But if someone were placed high on the mast of that ship, move as it may however fast, he would not miss his target at all, so that the stone or some other heavy thing thrown downward would not come along a straight line from the point E which is at the top of the mast, or cage, to the point D which is at the bottom of the mast, or at some point in the bowels and body of the ship. Thus, if from the point D to the point E someone who is inside the ship would throw a stone straight up, it would return to the bottom along the same line however far the ship moved, provided it was not subject to any pitch and roll."
Bruno's infinite universe was filled with a substance—a "pure air", aether, or spiritus—that offered no resistance to the heavenly bodies which, in Bruno's view, rather than being fixed, moved under their own impetus (momentum). Most dramatically, he completely abandoned the idea of a hierarchical universe.
The universe is then one, infinite, immobile.... It is not capable of comprehension and therefore is endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable, and consequently immobile.
Bruno's cosmology distinguishes between "suns" which produce their own light and heat, and have other bodies moving around them; and "earths" which move around suns and receive light and heat from them. Bruno suggested that some, if not all, of the objects classically known as fixed stars are in fact suns. According to astrophysicist Steven Soter, he was the first person to grasp that "stars are other suns with their own planets."
Bruno wrote that other worlds "have no less virtue nor a nature different from that of our Earth" and, like Earth, "contain animals and inhabitants".
During the late 16th century, and throughout the 17th century, Bruno's ideas were held up for ridicule, debate, or inspiration. Margaret Cavendish, for example, wrote an entire series of poems against "atoms" and "infinite worlds" in Poems and Fancies in 1664. Bruno's true, if partial, vindication would have to wait for the implications and impact of Newtonian cosmology.
Bruno's overall contribution to the birth of modern science is still controversial. Some scholars follow Frances Yates in stressing the importance of Bruno's ideas about the universe being infinite and lacking geocentric structure as a crucial crossing point between the old and the new. Others see in Bruno's idea of multiple worlds instantiating the infinite possibilities of a pristine, indivisible One, a forerunner of Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
While many academics note Bruno's theological position as pantheism, several have described it as pandeism, and some also as panentheism. Physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein in his Welt- und Lebensanschauungen, Hervorgegangen aus Religion, Philosophie und Naturerkenntnis ("World and Life Views, Emerging From Religion, Philosophy and Nature"), wrote that the theological model of pandeism was strongly expressed in the teachings of Bruno, especially with respect to the vision of a deity for which "the concept of God is not separated from that of the universe." However, Otto Kern takes exception to what he considers Weinstein's overbroad assertions that Bruno, as well as other historical philosophers such as John Scotus Eriugena, Anselm of Canterbury, Nicholas of Cusa, Mendelssohn, and Lessing, were pandeists or leaned towards pandeism. Discover editor Corey S. Powell also described Bruno's cosmology as pandeistic, writing that it was "a tool for advancing an animist or Pandeist theology", and this assessment of Bruno as a pandeist was agreed with by science writer Michael Newton Keas, and The Daily Beast writer David Sessions.
Retrospective views of Bruno
Late Vatican position
The Vatican has published few official statements about Bruno's trial and execution. In 1942, Cardinal Giovanni Mercati, who discovered a number of lost documents relating to Bruno's trial, stated that the Church was perfectly justified in condemning him. On the 400th anniversary of Bruno's death, in 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared Bruno's death to be a "sad episode" but, despite his regret, he defended Bruno's prosecutors, maintaining that the Inquisitors "had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life". In the same year, Pope John Paul II made a general apology for "the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth".
A martyr of science
Some authors have characterized Bruno as a "martyr of science", suggesting parallels with the Galileo affair which began around 1610. "It should not be supposed," writes A. M. Paterson of Bruno and his "heliocentric solar system", that he "reached his conclusions via some mystical revelation....His work is an essential part of the scientific and philosophical developments that he initiated." Paterson echoes Hegel in writing that Bruno "ushers in a modern theory of knowledge that understands all natural things in the universe to be known by the human mind through the mind's dialectical structure".
Ingegno writes that Bruno embraced the philosophy of Lucretius, "aimed at liberating man from the fear of death and the gods." Characters in Bruno's Cause, Principle and Unity desire "to improve speculative science and knowledge of natural things," and to achieve a philosophy "which brings about the perfection of the human intellect most easily and eminently, and most closely corresponds to the truth of nature."
Other scholars oppose such views, and claim Bruno's martyrdom to science to be exaggerated, or outright false. For Yates, while "nineteenth century liberals" were thrown "into ecstasies" over Bruno's Copernicanism, "Bruno pushes Copernicus' scientific work back into a prescientific stage, back into Hermeticism, interpreting the Copernican diagram as a hieroglyph of divine mysteries."
According to historian Mordechai Feingold, "Both admirers and critics of Giordano Bruno basically agree that he was pompous and arrogant, highly valuing his opinions and showing little patience with anyone who even mildly disagreed with him." Discussing Bruno's experience of rejection when he visited Oxford University, Feingold suggests that "it might have been Bruno's manner, his language and his self-assertiveness, rather than his ideas" that caused offence.
Theological heresy
In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel writes that Bruno's life represented "a bold rejection of all Catholic beliefs resting on mere authority."
Alfonso Ingegno states that Bruno's philosophy "challenges the developments of the Reformation, calls into question the truth-value of the whole of Christianity, and claims that Christ perpetrated a deceit on mankind... Bruno suggests that we can now recognize the universal law which controls the perpetual becoming of all things in an infinite universe." A. M. Paterson says that, while we no longer have a copy of the official papal condemnation of Bruno, his heresies included "the doctrine of the infinite universe and the innumerable worlds" and his beliefs "on the movement of the earth".
Michael White notes that the Inquisition may have pursued Bruno early in his life on the basis of his opposition to Aristotle, interest in Arianism, reading of Erasmus, and possession of banned texts. White considers that Bruno's later heresy was "multifaceted" and may have rested on his conception of infinite worlds. "This was perhaps the most dangerous notion of all... If other worlds existed with intelligent beings living there, did they too have their visitations? The idea was quite unthinkable."
Frances Yates rejects what she describes as the "legend that Bruno was prosecuted as a philosophical thinker, was burned for his daring views on innumerable worlds or on the movement of the earth." Yates however writes that "the Church was... perfectly within its rights if it included philosophical points in its condemnation of Bruno's heresies" because "the philosophical points were quite inseparable from the heresies."
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "in 1600 there was no official Catholic position on the Copernican system, and it was certainly not a heresy. When [...] Bruno [...] was burned at the stake as a heretic, it had nothing to do with his writings in support of Copernican cosmology."
The website of the Vatican Apostolic Archive, discussing a summary of legal proceedings against Bruno in Rome, states: "In the same rooms where Giordano Bruno was questioned, for the same important reasons of the relationship between science and faith, at the dawning of the new astronomy and at the decline of Aristotle's philosophy, sixteen years later, Cardinal Bellarmino, who then contested Bruno's heretical theses, summoned Galileo Galilei, who also faced a famous inquisitorial trial, which, luckily for him, ended with a simple abjuration."
In art and literature
Artistic depictions
Following the 1870 Capture of Rome by the newly created Kingdom of Italy and the end of the Church's temporal power over the city, the erection of a monument to Bruno on the site of his execution became feasible. The monument was sharply opposed by the clerical party, but was finally erected by the Rome Municipality and inaugurated in 1889.
A statue of a stretched human figure standing on its head, designed by Alexander Polzin and depicting Bruno's death at the stake, was placed in Potsdamer Platz station in Berlin on 2 March 2008.
Retrospective iconography of Bruno shows him with a Dominican cowl but not tonsured. Edward Gosselin has suggested that it is likely Bruno kept his tonsure at least until 1579, and it is possible that he wore it again thereafter.
An idealized animated version of Bruno appears in the first episode of the 2014 television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. In this depiction, Bruno is shown with a more modern look, without tonsure and wearing clerical robes and without his hood. Cosmos presents Bruno as an impoverished philosopher who was ultimately executed due to his refusal to recant his belief in other worlds, a portrayal that was criticized by some as simplistic or historically inaccurate. Corey S. Powell, of Discover magazine, says of Bruno, "A major reason he moved around so much is that he was argumentative, sarcastic, and drawn to controversy...He was a brilliant, complicated, difficult man.
References in poetry
Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a poem honoring Giordano Bruno in 1889, when the statue of Bruno was constructed in Rome.
Czeslaw Milosz evokes the story and image of Giordano Bruno in his poem "Campo Dei Fiori" (Warsaw 1943).
Randall Jarell's poem "The Emancipators" addresses Bruno, along with Galileo and Newton, as an originator of the modern scientific-industrial world.
Heather McHugh depicted Bruno as the principal of a story told (at dinner, by an "underestimated" travel guide) to a group of contemporary American poets in Rome. The poem (originally published in McHugh's collection of poems Hinge & Sign, nominee for the National Book Award, and subsequently reprinted widely) channels the very question of ars poetica, or meta-meaning itself, through the embedded narrative of the suppression of Bruno's words, silenced towards the end of his life both literally and literarily.
Louis L’amour wrote "To Giordano Bruno", a poem published in "Smoke From This Altar", 1990.
Appearances in fiction
Bruno and his theory of "the coincidence of contraries" (coincidentia oppositorum) play an important role in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake. Joyce wrote in a letter to his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver, "His philosophy is a kind of dualism – every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realise itself and opposition brings reunion". Amongst his numerous allusions to Bruno in his novel, including his trial and torture, Joyce plays upon Bruno's notion of coincidentia oppositorum through applying his name to word puns such as "Browne and Nolan" (the name of Dublin printers) and '"brownesberrow in nolandsland".
Giordano Bruno features as the hero in a series of historical crime novels by S.J. Parris (a pseudonym of Stephanie Merritt). In order these are Heresy, Prophecy, Sacrilege, Treachery, Conspiracy and Execution.
The Last Confession by Morris West (posthumously published) is a fictional autobiography of Bruno, ostensibly written shortly before his execution.
In 1963 soviet writer Alexander Volkov published "The wandering", a novel about the childhood and youth of Bruno.
In 1973 the biographical drama Giordano Bruno was released, an Italian/French movie directed by Giuliano Montaldo, starring Gian Maria Volonté as Bruno.
Bruno is a central character, and his philosophy a central theme, in John Crowley’s Aegypt (1987), renamed The Solitudes, and the ensuing series of novels: Love & Sleep (1994), Daemonomania (2000), and Endless Things (2007).
Appearances in music
Hans Werner Henze set his large scale cantata for orchestra, choir and four soloists, Novae de infinito laudes to Italian texts by Bruno, recorded in 1972 at the Salzburg Festival reissued on CD Orfeo C609 031B.
Robert Ashley intones in his Perfect Lives (1983): "Giordano Bruno. I think they burned him. He was too... positive."
Massimiliano Larocca's La breve estate (2008) includes as track 7 "Anima Mundi (a Giordano Bruno)"
The album Numen Lumen (2011) by neofolk group Hautville tracks Bruno's lyrics and is dedicated to the philosopher.
In 2014 the Italian composer Francesco Filidei wrote an opera, based on a libretto by Stefano Busellato, titled Giordano Bruno. The premiere took place on 12 September 2015 at the Casa da Música in Porto, Portugal.
The 2016 song "Roman Sky" by heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold focuses on the death of Bruno.
Bruno is the central character in Roger Doyle’s Heresy - an electronic opera (2017).
Legacy
Giordano Bruno Foundation
The Giordano Bruno Foundation (German: Giordano-Bruno-Stiftung) is a non-profit foundation based in Germany that pursues the "Support of Evolutionary Humanism". It was founded by entrepreneur Herbert Steffen in 2004. The Giordano Bruno Foundation is critical of religious fundamentalism and nationalism
Giordano Bruno Memorial Award
The SETI League makes an annual award honoring the memory of Giordano Bruno to a deserving person or persons who have made a significant contribution to the practice of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The award was proposed by sociologist Donald Tarter in 1995 on the 395th anniversary of Bruno's death. The trophy presented is called a Bruno.
Astronomical objects named after Bruno
The 22 km impact crater Giordano Bruno on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor, as are the main belt Asteroids 5148 Giordano and 13223 Cenaceneri; the latter is named after his philosophical dialogue La Cena de le Ceneri ("The Ash Wednesday Supper") (see above).
Other remembrances
Radio broadcasting station 2GB in Sydney, Australia is named for Bruno. The two letters "GB" in the call sign were chosen to honor Bruno, who was much admired by Theosophists who were the original holders of the station's licence.
Works
De umbris idearum (On the Shadows of Ideas, Paris, 1582)
Cantus circaeus (The Incantation of Circe or Circe's Song, Paris, 1582)
(The Art of Memory, Paris, 1582)
De compendiosa architectura et complento artis Lulli (A Compendium of Architecture and Lulli's Art, 1582)
Candelaio (The Torchbearer or The Candle Bearer, 1582; play)
Ars reminiscendi (The Art of Memory, 1583)
Explicatio triginta sigillorum (Explanation of Thirty Seals, 1583)
Sigillus sigillorum (The Seal of Seals, 1583)
La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper, 1584)
De la causa, principio, et uno (Concerning Cause, Principle, and Unity, 1584)
(De l'infinito universo et mondi), 1584)
Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, London, 1584)
Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo (Cabal of the Horse Pegasus, 1585)
De gli eroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies, 1585)
Figuratio Aristotelici Physici auditus (Figures From Aristotle's Physics, 1585)
Dialogi duo de Fabricii Mordentis Salernitani (Two Dialogues of Fabricii Mordentis Salernitani, 1586)
Idiota triumphans (The Triumphant Idiot, 1586)
De somni interpretatione (Dream Interpretation, 1586)
Animadversiones circa lampadem lullianam (Amendments regarding Lull's Lantern, 1586)
Lampas triginta statuarum (The Lantern of Thirty Statues, 1586)
Centum et viginti articuli de natura et mundo adversus peripateticos (One Hundred and Twenty Articles on Nature and the World Against the Peripatetics, 1586)
De Lampade combinatoria Lulliana (The Lamp of Combinations according to Lull, 1587)
De progressu et lampade venatoria logicorum (Progress and the Hunter's Lamp of Logical Methods, 1587)
Oratio valedictoria (Valedictory Oration, 1588)
Camoeracensis Acrotismus (The Pleasure of Dispute, 1588)
De specierum scrutinio (1588)
Articuli centum et sexaginta adversus huius tempestatis mathematicos atque Philosophos (One Hundred and Sixty Theses Against Mathematicians and Philosophers, 1588)
Oratio consolatoria (Consolation Oration, 1589)
De vinculis in genere (Of Bonds in General, 1591)
De triplici minimo et mensura (On the Threefold Minimum and Measure, 1591)
De monade numero et figura (On the Monad, Number, and Figure, Frankfurt, 1591)
De innumerabilibus, immenso, et infigurabili (Of Innumerable Things, Vastness and the Unrepresentable, 1591)
De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione (On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, 1591)
Summa terminorum metaphysicorum (Handbook of Metaphysical Terms, 1595)
Artificium perorandi (The Art of Communicating, 1612)
Collections
Jordani Bruni Nolani opera latine conscripta (Giordano Bruno the Nolan's Works Written in Latin), Dritter Band (1962) / curantibus F. Tocco et H. Vitelli
See also
Fermi paradox
List of Roman Catholic scientist-clerics
Notes
References
Michel, Paul Henri (1962). The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno. Translated by R.E.W. Maddison. Paris: Hermann; London: Methuen; Ithaca, New York: Cornell.
The Cabala of Pegasus by Giordano Bruno,
Giordano Bruno, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Collier's Encyclopedia, Vol 4, 1987 ed., p. 634
Il processo di Giordano Bruno, Luigi Firpo, 1993
Giordano Bruno,Il primo libro della Clavis Magna, ovvero, Il trattato sull'intelligenza artificiale, a cura di Claudio D'Antonio, Di Renzo Editore.
Giordano Bruno,Il secondo libro della Clavis Magna, ovvero, Il Sigillo dei Sigilli, a cura di Claudio D'Antonio, Di Renzo Editore.
Giordano Bruno, Il terzo libro della Clavis Magna, ovvero, La logica per immagini, a cura di Claudio D'Antonio, Di Renzo Editore
Giordano Bruno, Il quarto libro della Clavis Magna, ovvero, L'arte di inventare con Trenta Statue, a cura di Claudio D'Antonio, Di Renzo Editore
Giordano Bruno L'incantesimo di Circe, a cura di Claudio D'Antonio, Di Renzo Editore
Guido del Giudice, WWW Giordano Bruno, Marotta & Cafiero Editori, 2001
Giordano Bruno, De Umbris Idearum, a cura di Claudio D'Antonio, Di Renzo Editore
Guido del Giudice, La coincidenza degli opposti, Di Renzo Editore, , 2005 (seconda edizione accresciuta con il saggio Bruno, Rabelais e Apollonio di Tiana, Di Renzo Editore, Roma 2006 )
Giordano Bruno, Due Orazioni: Oratio Valedictoria – Oratio Consolatoria, a cura di Guido del Giudice, Di Renzo Editore, 2007
Giordano Bruno, La disputa di Cambrai. Camoeracensis Acrotismus, a cura di Guido del Giudice, Di Renzo Editore, 2008
Somma dei termini metafisici, a cura di Guido del Giudice, Di Renzo Editore, Roma, 2010
External links
Paul Richard Blum (2021). Giordano Bruno. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
How 'Cosmos' Bungles the History of Religion and Science
Bruno's works: text, concordances and frequency list
Writings of Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno Library of the World's Best Literature Ancient and Modern Charles Dudley Warner Editor
Bruno's Latin and Italian works online: Biblioteca Ideale di Giordano Bruno
Complete works of Bruno as well as main biographies and studies available for free download in PDF format from the Warburg Institute and the Centro Internazionale di Studi Bruniani Giovanni Aquilecchia
Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries High resolution images of works by and/or portraits of Giordano Bruno in .jpg and .tiff format.
1548 births
1600 deaths
16th-century executions by Italian states
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Date of birth unknown
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University of Helmstedt faculty
Writers about religion and science | [
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