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17129 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kahl%C3%BAa | Kahlúa | Kahlúa () is a brand of coffee liqueur owned by the Pernod Ricard company and produced in Veracruz, Mexico. The drink contains rum, sugar, and arabica coffee.
History
Pedro Domecq began producing Kahlúa in 1936. It was named Kahlúa, meaning "House of the Acolhua people" in the Veracruz Nahuatl language. Jules Berman was the first importer of the liqueur to the United States, earning him the nickname "Mr. Kahlua".
The company merged in 1994 with Allied Lyons to become Allied Domecq. In turn, that company was partially acquired in 2005 by Pernod Ricard, the largest spirits distributor in the world since its merger with the Swedish Vin & Sprit in March 2008.
Since 2004, the alcohol content of Kahlúa is 20.0%; earlier versions had 26.5%. In 2002, a more expensive, high-end product called "Kahlúa Especial" became available in the United States, Canada and Australia after previously being offered only in duty-free markets. Made with arabica coffee beans grown in Veracruz, Mexico, Kahlúa Especial has an alcohol content of 36%, has a lower viscosity, and is less sweet than the regular version.
In January 2019, the brand launched a new eco-program with an aim to source 100% of its coffee sustainably by the year 2022. Director of sustainable development Billy King plans to "bring positive change to the lives of Mexican coffee farmers and their families". At the time, Kahlua said that social cohesion, gender equality and education within coffee-growing communities were other key focuses for the program.
In 2021 Kahlúa introduced a new bottle design. It also reduced the alcohol content to 16% "to address 'evolving' consumer trends towards conscious drinking and lower-alcohol options/"
Uses
Kahlúa is used to make cocktails or drink neat or on ice. Some people use it when baking desserts, and/or as a topping for ice cream, cakes, and cheesecakes.
It is mixed in several ways, often with different combinations of milk, cream, coffee and cocoa.
Because Kahlúa is made from coffee beans, it contains caffeine. According to the company, "Kahlúa contains about 100ppm caffeine, which means about 100mg/litre of product. So, for a standard 1.5oz [45ml] drink of Kahlúa there would be about 5mg of caffeine. Just to put it in perspective, a 8oz [240ml] brewed coffee can contain up to about 200mg of caffeine."
Kahlúa is a key ingredient in several notable cocktails:
Alfonso Xiii
Espresso Martini
White Russian
Black Russian
Mind Eraser
B-52
Baby Guinness
Brave Bull
Colorado Bulldog
Dirty Mother
Kahlúa Sour
Moose Milk
Mudslide
Spanish coffee
Awards
Kahlúa and Kahlúa Especial have received accolades from international spirit ratings organizations. The San Francisco World Spirits Competition awarded the Kahlúa Especial three silver medals between 2005 and 2007 and a bronze in 2009. The Beverage Testing Institute gave the Especial a score of 85 in 2007.
See also
List of cocktails
List of coffee liqueurs
Milk and Alcohol
References
External links
Official product website
Coffee liqueurs
Mexican alcoholic drinks
Mexican brands
Pernod Ricard brands
Products introduced in 1936
Alcoholic drink brands | [
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17130 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelsey%20Grammer | Kelsey Grammer | Allen Kelsey Grammer (born February 21, 1955) is an American actor, comedian, producer, director and writer, best known for his two-decade-long portrayal of psychiatrist Dr. Frasier Crane on the NBC sitcom Cheers and its spin-off Frasier, for which he won four Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. He is also known for his performance in the political drama series Boss for which he won a Golden Globe Award, and the period drama series The Last Tycoon, as well as having a recurring guest role as the voice of Sideshow Bob in The Simpsons, with additional voice roles in Anastasia (1997) and Toy Story 2 (1999). He has also appeared in various television shows such as 30 Rock, Modern Family, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Grammer is also known for his work in theatre, acting alongside Christopher Plummer and James Earl Jones in Othello, and Macbeth on Broadway. In 1983, he starred alongside Mandy Patinkin in Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George at Playwrights Horizons, Off-Broadway. He has also starred in productions of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street playing the title character, and My Fair Lady as Professor Henry Higgins. In 2010 he received his first Tony Award nomination for his performance in La Cage aux Folles. In 2016, Grammer won a Tony Award as a producer of The Color Purple. In 2019, Grammer starred as Don Quixote in a production of Man of La Mancha at the London Coliseum. In the course of his career in television Grammer has won five Primetime Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, one Daytime Emmy Award and one Tony Award; additionally, he has also worked as a television producer, director, and writer.
Early life
Allen Kelsey Grammer was born on February 21, 1955, in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, the son of Sally (née Cranmer; 1928–2008), a singer and actress, and Frank Allen Grammer Jr. (d. 1968), a musician and owner of a coffee shop and a bar and grill called Greer's Place. He had one younger sister, Karen.
Grammer's personal life has been surrounded by family tragedies. He was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents, Gordon and Evangeline Cranmer, in New Jersey. The family later moved to Pompano Beach, Florida, and shortly afterwards, when Kelsey was twelve years old, his grandfather died of cancer. In 1968, his father was murdered in a home invasion. In 1975, his sister was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in Colorado Springs. In 1980, his two teenage half-brothers died in a scuba diving accident.
Grammer attended Pine Crest School, a private preparatory school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was there that he first began to sing and perform on stage. Grammer won a scholarship to study drama at the Juilliard School. He was a member of Group 6 from 1973 to 1975. Owing to his sister's murder, however, Grammer failed to attend classes and was eventually expelled. According to his interview with the Cayman Compass in 2019, Grammer described himself as "a Caribbean kid" who "was born in St. Thomas, USVI, and I have been back and forth a lot, gone to the Bahamas a lot, St. John and the Virgin Islands and the BVI."
Career
Theatre
After leaving Juilliard, Grammer had a three-year internship with the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego in the late 1970s before a stint in 1980 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He made his Broadway debut in 1981 as "Lennox" in Macbeth, taking the lead role when Philip Anglim withdrew after receiving negative reviews. Grammer then played Michael Cassio in a Broadway revival of Othello, with James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer. In 1983 he performed in the demo of the Stephen Sondheim–James Lapine production Sunday in the Park with George, starring Mandy Patinkin.
In April-June of 1992, he played the title role in Richard II, staged at the Mark Taper Forum at the Los Angeles Music Center In 2000, Grammer again played Macbeth on Broadway, in a production that closed after only 10 days.
On April 18, 2010, Grammer made his Broadway musical debut playing the role of Georges in a revival of the Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical La Cage aux Folles at the Longacre Theatre. Grammer starred alongside Douglas Hodge for which they both were nominated for Tony Awards for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical. Grammer was described by critics as "equally fine", "delivering an assured and charming leading turn".
In March 2015, Grammer originated the roles of Charles Frohman and Captain Hook in the Broadway premiere of the musical Finding Neverland continuing with the roles through June 28, 2015. He returned to the stage from January 19 to April 3, 2016. Most recently he made an appearance in the West End production of Big Fish. In 2016, Grammer won a Tony Award as a producer of The Color Purple. In 2019, Grammer starred as Don Quixote in a production of Man of La Mancha at the London Coliseum.
Film and television
In 1984, Grammer first appeared as Dr. Frasier Crane in the NBC sitcom Cheers. Grammer's former Juilliard classmate and Broadway co-star Mandy Patinkin suggested Grammer to the New York casting director, and he got what was supposed to be a six-episode job, but ended up as a regular cast member. Cheers was created by James Burrows and aired on NBC from September 30, 1982, to May 20, 1993. The show is set in a bar named Cheers in Boston where a group of locals meet to drink, relax, and socialize. The character of Frasier first appears in the third season and continues to appear until the final season of the series, which aired in May 1993.
Grammer has provided the voice of Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons, winning an Emmy Award for his work in the episode "The Italian Bob", his fifth Emmy win. He has appeared in twenty-two episodes from the show's beginning in 1989 through 2019's "Bobby, It's Cold Outside".
In September 1993 the character became the center of the spin-off Frasier, which became one of the most successful spin-offs in television history. In addition to starring, he also directed more than 30 episodes, especially during the second half of the series, and sang the closing theme "Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs." Frasier was nominated for and won many awards during its 11-year run, concluding in May 2004. In the show Frasier has moved from Boston to Seattle and works as a radio psychiatrist alongside his producer Roz (Peri Gilpin). The show also starred David Hyde Pierce as Niles, Frasier's brother, and John Mahoney as his father, Martin Crane. Jane Leeves plays his father's health care worker Daphne Moon. The show was a critical hit, and received the most Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Comedy Series. This record has never been broken, with Modern Family tying the record. Grammer himself received 10 Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his role in Frasier, winning four times, tying him with Carroll O'Connor, Michael J. Fox and Jim Parsons for the most wins for Primetime Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Comedy Series. In February 2021, it was announced that Grammer would reprise the character in a revival set to air on the streaming service Paramount+.
In 1995, Grammer voiced Dr. Frankenollie in the Mickey Mouse short Runaway Brain (1995), and it was nominated for Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. He later starred in the lead role as Lt. Commander Thomas "Tom" Dodge in the film Down Periscope (1996), and voiced Vladimir "Vlad" Vanya Voinitsky Vasilovich in the 20th Century Fox's critically acclaimed animated movie Anastasia (1997). In 1999, Grammer voiced the main antagonist Stinky Pete in Pixar's Golden Globe Award-winning Toy Story 2 (1999). He also provided voice work for several other animated television series and direct-to-video films, such as Barbie of Swan Lake, Bartok the Magnificent, the title character in the short-lived animated series Gary the Rat and the narrator of Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas. He also voiced Dr. Ivan Krank in Disney's Teacher's Pet (2004).
In 2001, he negotiated a $700,000-per-episode salary for Frasier. The series lasted 11 seasons running from 1993 to 2004. His 20-year run playing Dr. Frasier Crane (in both Cheers and Fraiser) ties a length set by James Arness in playing Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke from 1955 to 1975 but was surpassed by Richard Belzer in playing Det. John Munch on Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit since 1993. Frasier Crane also had a crossover appearance in 1992 Wings episode "Planes, Trains, & Visiting Cranes".
The show featured a variety of guest stars from Cheers including Ted Danson, Shelley Long, Woody Harrelson, Rhea Perlman, George Wendt and John Ratzenberger. Bebe Neuwirth appears in a recurring role throughout the series as Frasier's ex-wife Lilith. Other guest stars include Laura Linney, James Earl Jones, Nathan Lane, Patrick Stewart, Patrick Macnee, Derek Jacobi, Michael Keaton, Laurie Metcalf, Jean Smart and Eva Marie Saint. One of Frasier 's in-jokes was its use of celebrities as guest stars who were put through on Frasier's radio program as callers seeking advice.
In 2004, he played Ebenezer Scrooge in the musical television film A Christmas Carol.
Work post-Frasier
In 2005, Grammer returned to television. He produced and appeared in an American adaptation of the British show The Sketch Show, which aired on Fox. The main cast consisted of Malcolm Barrett, Kaitlin Olson, Mary Lynn Rajskub and Paul F. Tompkins, as well as Lee Mack from the British version of the show. Grammer appeared in only short opening and closing segments in each episode. Many of the sketches from the British version were re-created, such as the "California Dreamin'", "English Course", and "Sign Language" sketches. Only six episodes of the show were made, and it was cancelled after only four of them had aired.
In 2007, Grammer starred with Patricia Heaton in the American sitcom Back to You, which Fox cancelled after its first season. His next attempt, ABC's Hank, fared even worse. It was cancelled after only five episodes had aired. Grammer later commented, "Honestly, it just wasn't very funny."
In 2011 and 2012, Grammer found temporary success in the Starz drama series Boss as a fictional mayor of Chicago in the mold of Richard J. Daley which premiered in October 2011. It was his first dramatic TV series. At the 2012 Golden Globe Awards Kelsey Grammer won the award for Best Actor in a Television Series Drama for his role on Boss. The show ran for 18 episodes over two seasons.
In 2010–2012, Grammer guest starred as a comical version of himself in three episodes of the NBC show 30 Rock alongside Jane Krakowski and Jack McBrayer.
In 2014 Grammer returned to sitcom television in Partners with comedian Martin Lawrence. The Lionsgate-produced show was written and executive produced by Robert L. Boyett and Robert Horn, known for writing hit shows like Family Matters, Living Single, Full House, Designing Women, and Perfect Strangers. Despite this, the show was cancelled after its first season. Later that same year, Grammer starred in several films such as Bonaparte in The Expendables 3 (2014) and as Harold Attinger in Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014).
The following year in 2015, he played Buckley in Best of Enemies (2015) and appeared in the National Geographic TV film Killing Jesus (2015) as Herod the Great, a film in which he both played a role and narrated. More recent work includes a role as Harry Hamilton in the Netflix film Like Father with Kristen Bell (2018) and as a detective opposite Nicolas Cage in Grand Isle (2019).
Other work
Grammer's voice has been featured in many commercials. One of the earliest was a 1998 commercial for Honey Nut Cheerios, where he voices the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. Since 2006, Grammer has provided the voice for television commercials advertising Hyundai. In 2008, Grammer reprised his role of Dr. Frasier Crane in a commercial for Dr Pepper (Frasier and Cheers co-star Bebe Neuwirth also reprised her role as Lilith Sternin in the same commercial, albeit in voice only).
In 2015 Grammer and John Lithgow lent their voices to the critically acclaimed documentary Best of Enemies as William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal, respectively. The documentary surrounds the events around the televised debates between intellectuals Vidal and Buckley during the 1968 United States presidential election. The film premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary but did not make the final cut.
Filmography
Film
Television
Theater
Video games
Production work
Director
Producer
Grammer's production company, Grammnet Productions, produces the sitcom Girlfriends, its spinoff The Game, the drama Medium, and many other projects.
Personal life
Grammer has been married four times and has seven children and one grandchild . His first marriage, to dance instructor Doreen Alderman, lasted from 1982 to 1990, although they were separated for the last six years of that period. They have one daughter, actress Spencer Grammer (born October 9, 1983). Through Spencer, Grammer has one grandson, Emmett Emmanual Hesketh (born October 10, 2011).
After his divorce from Alderman, Grammer had a daughter, Kandace Greer Grammer ("Greer Grammer"; born February 15, 1992), with hair and makeup stylist Barrie Buckner. Greer was a cast member on MTV's show Awkward.
His second marriage, to Leigh-Anne Csuhany in September 1992, lasted one year. Grammer filed for an annulment when Csuhany was three months pregnant and evicted her from their home. The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Grammer claimed she was abusive and fired a gun at him.
In 1994, he met 28-year-old Tammi Baliszewski, also known as Tammi Alexander, at a bar in Manhattan Beach, California. In December 1994, they appeared together on the cover of People magazine, announcing their engagement and Grammer's substance abuse problems.
In August 1997, Grammer married his third wife, dancer and model Camille Donatacci. They met on a blind date in 1996. They have a daughter, born October 2001, and a son, born August 2004, both born to a surrogate mother. During their marriage, several of Grammer and Donatacci's homes were featured in magazines, including ones in Malibu, California (February 2001, InStyle), Maui (May 2004, InStyle), Long Island, New York (April 2008, InStyle), Bachelor Gulch, Colorado (Architectural Digest), and Bel Air, Los Angeles (Architectural Digest). In New York City, they lived at 15 Central Park West. It was announced on July 1, 2010, that Grammer had filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Grammer and Donatacci's divorce was finalized on February 10, 2011.
On August 12, 2010, Grammer announced that he was going to be a father for the fifth time with girlfriend Kayte Walsh, an English flight attendant 25 years his junior, daughter of former footballer Alan Walsh. However, in October, Grammer announced that Walsh had miscarried six weeks earlier. The couple announced their engagement in December 2010, and married at The Plaza Hotel in New York City on February 25, 2011, two weeks after the dissolution Grammer's third marriage . Grammer and Walsh have a daughter, born July 2012, and two sons, born July 2014 and November 2016.
Murder of Karen Grammer
On July 1, 1975, Freddie Glenn, Michael Corbett, and one other man abducted, raped, and murdered Grammer's younger sister, 18-year-old Karen Grammer. Grammer, then 20, identified her body. He and his sister had been close, and he was devastated by her death; his later bouts of alcoholism and drug addiction were fueled in part by guilt and depression. In a 2012 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Grammer said he would be willing to forgive the perpetrators if they would take responsibility for the crime, but that they all continued to say they were innocent. In the same interview, Grammer expressed his loss of faith for a few years after Karen's death. He subsequently forgave Glenn in a 2014 parole hearing after being convinced of Glenn's contrition, but refused to support his release, saying that it would "be a betrayal of my sister's life". He named his daughter Spencer Karen Grammer in part for his sister. Karen Grammer's murder and the investigation by the Colorado Springs Police Department was the subject of the episode "Animal Nature" of the Investigation Discovery series Homicide Hunter.
Politics
Grammer is a supporter of the Republican Party and endorses the Tea Party movement on economic issues such as small government and lower taxes; City A.M. described him as "one of Hollywood's best-known Republicans, a rare spark of red in a blue sea of Democrats". While a New York magazine profile published in 2010 described him as pro-choice, Grammer in 2015 posted an Instagram photo of himself with his wife Kayte wearing a T-shirt by the pro-life group Abort73. Grammer is supportive of same-sex marriage, stating "I think marriage is up to two people who love each other". He has expressed skepticism on the scientific consensus on climate change, comparing the California wildfires to alleged global cooling from his youth and expressing skepticism on the 2011 and 2018 climate meetings. Additionally, he stated in a 2016 interview with The Guardian that the person he admired most was Vladimir Putin "Because he is so comfortably who he is." He also expressed support for Britain leaving the European Union, urging them to move forward with it.
Grammer has labeled Washington politicians a "bunch of clowns". He has expressed an interest in some day running for United States Congress, Mayor of New York City, and the presidency. Grammer was a guest at President George W. Bush's first inauguration. Grammer endorsed Rudy Giuliani in the 2008 presidential primary and later campaigned for John McCain in the general election. Grammer promoted RightNetwork, a conservative start-up American television network. He endorsed Michele Bachmann for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. After Mitt Romney won the nomination, Grammer endorsed him. He supported Ben Carson's candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, although he endorsed Donald Trump when the latter was selected.
Health problems
Grammer has a history of substance abuse. In 1988, Grammer was charged with drunk driving and cocaine possession and sentenced to 30 days in jail. In August 1990, Grammer was charged again with cocaine possession and was sentenced to three years' probation, fined $500, and required to perform 300 hours of community service. In January 1991, Grammer was given an additional two years' probation for violating his original probation through additional cocaine use. In September 1996, he crashed his Dodge Viper while intoxicated, and subsequently checked into the Betty Ford Center (an alcohol rehabilitation clinic) for 30 days. The cast and producers of both Frasier and Cheers held interventions to help him. Grammer's personal problems affected his work; co-star Bebe Neuwirth and writer Ken Levine cited delays with rehearsals and filming due to his erratic behavior. Writer Dan O'Shannon recalled, however, that
Grammer credits his religion for helping him through with his struggles with alcohol and drug use, as well as his personal tragedies.
On May 31, 2008, while paddleboarding with his then-wife Camille in Hawaii, Grammer experienced a heart attack. Their personal assistant, Scott MacLean was essential in saving his life. Grammer was discharged on June 4, 2008, and was said to be "resting comfortably" at his Hawaiian residence. Seven weeks after the attack, Grammer told Entertainment Tonight that, although at the time his spokesman described the attack as mild, it was in fact more severe, almost leading to his death, as his heart had stopped. Grammer thought Fox's decision to cancel his TV sitcom Back to You contributed to his health problems, stating that "It was a very stressful time for me, and a surprise that it was cancelled. But you know, everything that doesn't kill us—which it almost did—makes us stronger!"
Legal issues
In 1988, Grammer was arrested for possession of one-quarter gram of cocaine, after being pulled over in a traffic stop for driving with expired plates in North Hollywood. A year earlier, he had been arrested for a DUI in Van Nuys, and would go on to serve 14 days of a 30-day sentence, as well as 10 days of community service, after failing to comply with the requirements of his parole in 1990. In 1990 Grammer was sentenced to 90 days' house arrest, ordered to pay a $500 fine, underwent drug and alcohol abuse counseling, and performed 300 hours of community service for his 1988 cocaine possession case.
In 1995, Grammer was accused of sleeping with his child's underage babysitter. A grand jury chose not to indict the actor saying, "The young woman's delay of more than a year in pressing charges against Mr. Grammer made it difficult to support her claim", according to the County Prosecutor Nicholas L. Bissell Jr. Grammer released a statement saying, "I have said from the outset that there was no basis for the allegations". In 1996, Grammer's ex-girlfriend, Cerlette Lamme, sued him for defamation of character and invasion of privacy over content he included in his autobiography So Far. In 1998, Grammer filed a lawsuit against Internet Entertainment Group (IEG), which Grammer claimed had stolen from his home a videotape of him sleeping with a woman. IEG countersued Grammer, denying it was in possession of such a tape, and Grammer's suit was eventually dropped. IEG President Seth Warshavsky later said, "We have been presented with another Kelsey Grammer tape. But we have no plans to air it. We are still evaluating it at this time."
Awards and nominations
Grammer won a number of Emmys, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Golden Globes for his work on Frasier. He was the first American actor ever to be nominated for multiple Emmy awards for portraying the same character on three different television shows (Cheers, Frasier, and Wings). In 2010, Grammer received his first Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical for his acclaimed performance in La Cage Aux Folles opposite Douglas Hodge. In 2016, he received his second Tony Award nomination and first win for Best Revival of a Musical as a producer for The Color Purple. On May 22, 2001, he was presented with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for television. In 1999 he received a nomination from Directors Guild of America award for directing the episode Frasier. At the Golden Globes, he has received nine nominations winning three times.
References
Further reading
Grammer, Kelsey. So Far. New York: Viking Press, 1995. Print. . . His Autobiography.
External links
1955 births
20th-century American male actors
21st-century American male actors
American soap opera actors
American male comedians
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male stage actors
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American male voice actors
American people convicted of drug offenses
American people of British descent
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American television directors
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Conservatism in the United States | [
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17131 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemerovo | Kemerovo | Kemerovo () is an industrial city and the administrative center of Kemerovo Oblast, Russia, located at the confluence of the Iskitim and Tom Rivers, in the major coal mining region of the Kuznetsk Basin. Its population was 532,981 in the 2010 Census; 484,754 in the 2002 Census; 520,263 in the 1989 Census.
The city was known as Shcheglovsk until March 27, 1932.
History
Kemerovo is an amalgamation of, and successor to, several older Russian settlements. A waypoint named Verkhotomsky ostrog was established nearby in 1657 on a road from Tomsk to Kuznetsk fortress. In 1701, the settlement of Shcheglovsk was founded on the left bank of the Tom; soon it became a village. By 1859, seven villages existed where modern Kemerovo is now: Shcheglovka (or Ust-Iskitimskoye), Kemerovo (named in 1734), Yevseyevo, Krasny Yar, Kur-Iskitim (Pleshki), Davydovo (Ishanovo), and Borovaya. In 1721, coal was discovered in the area. The first coal mines were established in 1907, later a chemical plant was established in 1916. By 1917, the population of Shcheglovo had grown to around 4,000 people.
The area's further development was boosted by the construction of a railway between Yurga and Kolchugino (now Leninsk-Kuznetsky) with a connection between Topki and Shcheglovo. Shcheglovo was granted town status on May 9, 1918, which is now considered to be the date of Kemerovo's founding; and was later known as Shcheglovsk. The town became the central location for the Kuzbass Autonomous Industrial Colony which was established there in 1921. 650 workers from 20 different countries settled there and set up what became the Kemerovo Coke Chemical Plant. Some of their descendants visited the modern factory in 2011. On May 27, 1932, Shcheglovsk was renamed Kemerovo and became the administrative center of Kemerovo Oblast in 1943. In March 2018, 60 people were killed when a fire broke out in a shopping mall in the town.
Etymology
The city was named after the village of Kemerovo, named after the surname of the first settlers of the Kemerovs. The ending "ovo" suggests a toponymic transition through a personal name. The village gave its name to the Kemerovo mine that arose under it. In 1925, the city of Scheglovsk was formed from two neighboring villages Kemerovo and Scheglovo, which in 1932 was renamed to Kemerovo after the name of the mine. According to another version, the name is based on the Turkic word kemer - "cliff, coast, cliff". The inhabitants of the city are called: Kemerovochanin, Kemerovochanka, Kemerovochane.<ref>Алабугина Ю. В.с Новый орфографический словарь русского языка с приложением. — М.: АСТ, 2016. — С. 411.</ref>
Administrative and municipal status
Kemerovo is the administrative center of the oblast and, within the framework of administrative divisions, it also serves as the administrative center of Kemerovsky District, even though it is not a part of it. As an administrative division, it is incorporated separately as Kemerovo City Under Oblast Jurisdiction—an administrative unit with a status equal to that of the districts. As a municipal division, Kemerovo City Under Oblast Jurisdiction is incorporated as Kemerovsky Urban Okrug.
Economy
The industrialization of Kemerovo was driven and underpinned by coal mining and by the heavy industry based on the availability of coal. It remains an important industrial city, built up during the Soviet period, with important steel, aluminum and machinery based manufacturing plants along with chemical, fertilizer, and other manufacturing industries. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the city's industries have experienced a severe decline, creating high levels of unemployment. Major companies based in the city include Siberian Business Union.
Transportation
Public transport
The public transport network of Kemerovo consists of 70 city bus routes (including 6 seasonal), 63 suburban (including 35 seasonal), 53 public taxi routes (including 2 seasonal), 5 tram, and 9 trolleybus routes.
686 transport units enter the streets of the city every day, including:
201 buses of city and suburban routes;
364 units of route taxis;
121 units of electric transport.
The fare in public transport is 20 rubles, in express buses - 21 rubles, in fixed-route taxis - 22 rubles (as of March 24, 2019). Free Wi-Fi was used in all Kemerovo trams to attract passenger traffic.
Air transportation
The city is served by Kemerovo International Airport that reside 2.5 kilometres to the south-east of the city. It has one runway with artificial turf of class B that length is 3200 meters. The airport is named after the Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, a native of Kuzbass. There are two bus routes to the airport - 101 and 126.
Railway transportation
Kemerovo is linked to western Russia by a branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway and has the Kemerovo Railway station.
Education
Six higher education institutions are located in Kemerovo: Kemerovo State University, Kuzbass State Technical University, Kemerovo Institute of Food Industry (University), Kemerovo State Medical Academy, Kemerovo State Institute of Culture, Kemerovo Agricultural Institute and Kuzbass Economy and Justice Institute.
Sports
The public interest for bandy is widespread in Russia. 26,000 watched the opening game of the 2011–12 Russian Bandy League when local club Kuzbass played against Dynamo Moscow and Kuzbass is among the very best in the Russian Bandy League. The 2007 Bandy World Championship was held in the city. Female bandy only exists in a few places in Russia. Now Kemerovo is about to start it up. Moscow already had two multi-use indoor arenas where bandy can be played. Kemerovo got the first one in Russia specifically built for bandy (today also Khabarovsk and Ulyanovsk have it). Kuzbass plays the matches in the league at Khimik Stadium because of the big public interest. That arena has a capacity of 32000. As it also is equipped with artificial ice, Kemerovo has the best infrastructure for developing bandy in Russia.
Since 2013 there has been a "bandy on boots" tournament for national diasporas living in Kuzbass.
Climate
Kemerovo's position gives it a humid continental climate (Köppen Dfb'') with average temperatures varying from in January to in July and relatively low precipitation of around annually.
City Symbols
Coat of Arms
The heraldic description of the coat of arms of the city of Kemerovo is the following: in the crossed scarlet and black field, there is a narrow golden belt in the form of two diverging heads of grain ears, behind them there is a golden cogwheel that goes down; there is a silver retort in the middle, its neck tilted to the right.
The figures of the coat of arms of the city of Kemerovo symbolize the historically established main directions of the industrial development of the city:
retort - chemical industry;
cogwheel - mechanical engineering;
ears of corn - the fertility of the land associated with the use of mineral fertilizers produced at the chemical enterprises of the city.
The colors used in the coat of arms symbolize:
scarlet (red) - work, courage, energy, and strength;
black color - wisdom, as well as the main wealth of the region, the center of which is the city of Kemerovo, - coal;
silver (white) - pure thoughts, reliability, and kindness;
gold (yellow) - wealth and prosperity.
Flag
The flag of the city of Kemerovo is based on the city's coat of arms and repeats its symbolism. It is a rectangular double-sided panel with a width to length ratio of 2:3. It displays figures from the coat of arms of the city of Kemerovo. The colors used are red, black, yellow, and white.
Emblem
The emblem of Kemerovo displays the monument of Mikhailo Volkov, the discoverer of coal in the area. The sculpture of Mikhailo Volkov displayed on the pedestal fragment styled like a rock. Behind the monument, there is a black triangle that symbolizes a spoil tip. The inscription of the city's name ("Кемерово" in Russian) resides on the diagonal from the left bottom side of the triangle. In the black part of the triangle, the year of the foundation of the city is displayed - "1918".
Numismatics
In 2018 Bank of Russia issued into circulation the commemorative silver coin in denomination of 3 rubles "Centenary of the Foundation of Kemerovo" which displays the statue of Mikhailo Volkov.
Notable people
Yuri Arbachakov, boxer
Maria Barakova, mezzo-soprano; winner of Glinka and Tchaikovsky classical music competitions
Andreas Beck, association football player
Diana Borisova, rhythmic gymnast
Julia Chernogorova, British Bake Off contestant
Marina Domashenko, opera singer
Vyacheslav Ivanenko, retired race walker
Alexei Leonov, cosmonaut; honorable citizen of Kemerovo
Anatoliy Malykhin, mixed martial artist (ONE Championship, current interim ONE Heavyweight World Champion)
Alexandra Merkulova, retired rhythmic gymnast
Slava Mogutin, artist
Wladimir Sukhatsky, TV-producer
Aman Tuleyev, governor of Kemerovo Oblast
Nikolai Knyzhov, NHL player for the San Jose Sharks
Artem Vakhitov, kickboxer
Yuliya Karimova, Russian-born Azerbaijani volleyball player
Twin towns – sister cities
Kemerovo is twinned with:
Salgótarján, Hungary
Gallery
See also
Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, Kemerovo
References
Notes
Sources
External links
Official website of Kemerovo
Kemerovo Business Directory
Cities and towns in Kemerovo Oblast
Populated places established in 1701
1701 establishments in Asia | [
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17133 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channels%20of%20the%20Hawaiian%20Islands | Channels of the Hawaiian Islands | In an archipelago like the Hawaiian Islands the water between islands is typically called a channel or passage. Described here are the channels between the islands of Hawaiʻi, arranged from northwest to southeast.
Kaulakahi Channel
The Kaulakahi Channel separates the islands of Niʻihau and Kauaʻi. It is wide. Kaulakahi translates to "the single flame (streak of color)."
Kaʻieʻie Waho Channel
The Kaʻieʻie Waho Channel, also called the Kauai Channel, separates the islands of Kauaʻi and Oʻahu, at a distance of . Kaʻieʻie Waho means "Outer Kaʻieʻie," named after the ʻieʻie vine (Freycinetia arborea). The maximum depth of the channel is over 11000 feet.
Kaiwi Channel
The Kaiwi Channel (also known as the Molokai Channel) separates the islands of Oʻahu and Molokaʻi, and is wide. Maximum depth is . Ka Iwi means "the bone." There are annual paddleboarding and outrigger canoe paddling contests which traverse this channel; swimming the channel is one of the seven challenges in the Oceans Seven open water swimming series.
Kalohi Channel
The Kalohi Channel is the stretch of water separating Lānaʻi and Molokaʻi. Depth of water in this channel is about and width is . This is one of the less treacherous channels between islands in the archipelago, although strong winds and choppy sea conditions are frequent. Kalolohia Beach on the Lānaʻi coast is also known as "Shipwreck Beach" because of a wreck on the reef there. Kalohi means "the slowness."
Pailolo Channel
The Pailolo Channel separates the islands of Molokaʻi and Maui. Some at its narrowest, it is one of the windiest and roughest in the Hawaiian Islands.
ʻAuʻau Channel
The ʻAuʻau Channel is one of the most protected areas of ocean in the Hawaiian Islands, lying between Lānaʻi and Maui. The channel is also protected by Molokaʻi to the north, and Kahoʻolawe to the south. The depth of the channel reaches , and its width is . ʻAuʻau channel is a whale-watching center in the Hawaiian Islands. Humpback whales migrate approximately 3,500 miles (5600 km) from Alaskan waters each autumn and spend the northern hemisphere winter months in the protected waters of the channel.
ʻAuʻau translates to "to take a bath," referring to its calm bath-like conditions.
Kealaikahiki Channel
The Kealaikahiki Channel is the 17 mile channel between Lānaʻi and Kahoʻolawe. It literally means "the road to Tahiti", both figuratively and literally, as Tahiti lies generally southward of its orientation. Known informally as the "Tahiti Express" for its strength in that direction.
ʻAlalākeiki Channel
The ʻAlalākeiki Channel separates the islands of Kahoʻolawe and Maui, at a distance of 7 miles. ʻAlalākeiki means "crying baby."
ʻAlenuihāhā Channel
The ʻAlenuihāhā separates the island of Hawaiʻi and the island of Maui. The maximum depth of this channel is , and the channel is 30 miles wide. There is a significant wind funnel effect in the channel, which is subject to scientific investigations. ʻAlenuihāhā means "great billows smashing."
Minor Channels and Alternate Names
Lahaina Roads
The middle of the ʻAuʻau channel off Lahaina is known as the Lahaina Roads. Once filled with whalers when Lahaina was a capital for that industry, Lahaina Roads were later adopted as an alternate anchorage for the main U.S. Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor. However, Lahaina was not used, and the bulk of the fleet remained moored in Pearl Harbor. The Roads are still a common moorage for oceangoing cruise ships and naval vessels of many flags, including the U.S., whose passengers and crews add to the tourists visiting the island.
Kumukahi Channel
The Kumukahi Channel separates the islands of Niʻihau and Lehua. Kumukahi means "first beginning."
Hoʻomoʻa Channel
The Hoʻomoʻa Channel separates the islands of Lehua and Nihoa. Hoʻomoʻa means "to cook."
Hawaiʻiloa Channel
The Hawaiʻiloa Channel to the northwest of the islands of Nihoa. Named after Hawaiʻiloa, hero of an ancient Hawaiian legend about the settling of the Hawaiian Islands.
References
Sources
Channels of Hawaii | [
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0.0359688289... |
17134 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemp%20Town | Kemp Town | Kemp Town Estate, also known as Kemp Town, is a 19th-century Regency architecture residential estate in the east of Brighton in East Sussex, England, UK. It consists of Arundel Terrace, Lewes Crescent, Sussex Square, Chichester Terrace, and the Kemp Town Enclosures (the gardens). The estate was conceived and financed by Thomas Read Kemp, designed by Charles Busby and Amon Henry Wilds, and constructed by Thomas Cubitt. Work began in 1823 and it was completed in 1855. It has given its name to the larger Kemptown region of Brighton.
History
Kemp Town Estate was designed by Charles Busby and Amon Henry Wilds and constructed by Thomas Cubitt. Building work started in 1823 on Arundel Terrace, Chichester Terrace, Lewes Crescent and Sussex Square. Chichester Terrace incorporated the earlier Chichester House. In 1837 Thomas Kemp fled the country to escape his creditors. The project continued under Cubitt with the support of the Fifth Earl of Bristol. It was completed in 1855, with Sussex Square larger than London's Grosvenor Square and at the time the biggest housing crescent in Britain. The original estate is a good example of Regency architecture.
The gardens which form Sussex Square and Lewes Crescent, separated by Eastern Road, are known formally as the Kemp Town Enclosures. Work began on the Enclosures in 1823. Early works led by Henry Philips included the landscaping of the gardens and the addition of a tunnel to the esplanade.
At around the same time, Brighton's neighbour Hove was expanding on the western boundary of Brighton, with the development of the Brunswick Estate which featured similar though smaller Regency-style properties, and its own market, police station, riding school and (as in Kemp Town) small mews streets for staff housing.
Modern times
It has given its name to the larger Kemptown region of Brighton. The majority of the original estate is now demarcated by the modern Kemp Town Conservation Area as defined by the local authority, Brighton and Hove City Council.
The Enclosures are owned communally by the freeholders of the 105 houses which make up the Kemp Town Estate.
Below and to the east of Kemp Town, at beach level, is now Brighton Marina, and Black Rock the site of a former lido.
Gallery
References
General references
Detailed history of (all of) Kemptown
External links
"Who's been living in my house?", a history of the residential occupation of the estate
Houses completed in 1855
Areas of Brighton and Hove
Conservation areas in England
Crescents (architecture) | [
0.17251595854759216,
-0.10041076689958572,
0.46806707978248596,
-0.8295416831970215,
0.5692564249038696,
-0.06964392215013504,
-0.43366387486457825,
-0.22019833326339722,
-0.5313186645507812,
-0.19429001212120056,
-0.5022354125976562,
-0.35132789611816406,
0.060420792549848557,
0.853324949... |
17135 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky%20Derby | Kentucky Derby | The Kentucky Derby is a horse race held annually in Louisville, Kentucky, United States, almost always on the first Saturday in May, capping the two-week-long Kentucky Derby Festival. The competition is a Grade I stakes race for three-year-old Thoroughbreds at a distance of at Churchill Downs. Colts and geldings carry and fillies .
It is dubbed "The Run for the Roses", stemming from the blanket of roses draped over the winner. It is also known in the United States as "The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports" or "The Fastest Two Minutes in Sports" because of its approximate duration. It is the first leg of the American Triple Crown, followed by the Preakness Stakes, and then the Belmont Stakes. Of the three Triple Crown races, the Kentucky Derby has the distinction of having been run uninterrupted since its inaugural race in 1875. The race was rescheduled to September 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Preakness and Belmont Stakes races had taken hiatuses in 1891–1893 and 1911–1912, respectively. Even with the Olympics and major professional sports leagues canceled at those points, the Derby, Preakness, and Belmont took place during the Great Depression and both World Wars.
A horse must win all three races to win the Triple Crown. In the 2015 listing of the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities (IFHA), the Kentucky Derby tied with the Whitney Handicap as the top Grade 1 race in the United States outside the Breeders' Cup races.
The attendance at the Kentucky Derby ranks first in North America and usually surpasses the attendance numbers of all other stakes races including the Preakness Stakes, Belmont Stakes, and the Breeders' Cup.
History
In 1872, Col. Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr., grandson of William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition, traveled to England, visiting Epsom in Surrey where The Derby had been running annually since 1780. From there, Clark went on to Paris, France, where a group of racing enthusiasts had formed the French Jockey Club in 1863. They had organized the Grand Prix de Paris at Longchamp, which at the time was the greatest race in France. Returning home to Kentucky, Clark organized the Louisville Jockey Club to raise money for building quality racing facilities just outside the city. The track would soon become known as Churchill Downs, named for John and Henry Churchill, who provided the land for the racetrack. The naming went official in 1937.
The Kentucky Derby was first run at miles (12 furlongs; 2.4 km) the same distance as the Epsom Derby, before changing lengths in 1896 to its current miles (10 furlongs; 2 km). On May 17, 1875, in front of an estimated crowd of 10,000 people, a field of 15 three-year-old horses contested the first Derby. Under jockey Oliver Lewis, a colt named Aristides, who was trained by future Hall of Famer Ansel Williamson, won the inaugural Derby. Later that year, Lewis rode Aristides to a second-place finish in the Belmont Stakes.
Initially a successful venue, the track ran into financial difficulties due to a protracted, gambling-related horseman boycott removing it from the upper echelons of racing that would last until the Winn era (see below). In 1894 the New Louisville Jockey Club was incorporated with the new capitalization and improved facilities. Despite this, the business floundered until 1902, when a syndicate led by Col. Matt Winn of Louisville acquired the facility. Under Winn, Churchill Downs prospered, and the Kentucky Derby then became the preeminent stakes race for three-year-old thoroughbred horses in North America.
Thoroughbred owners began sending their successful Derby horses to compete in two other races. These two are the Preakness Stakes at the Pimlico Race Course, in Baltimore, and the Belmont Stakes in Elmont, New York. The three races offered large purses, and in 1919 Sir Barton became the first horse to win all three races. However, the term Triple Crown didn't come into use for another eleven years. In 1930, when Gallant Fox became the second horse to win all three races, sportswriter Charles Hatton brought the phrase into American usage. Fueled by the media, public interest in the possibility of a "superhorse" that could win the Triple Crown began in the weeks leading up to the Derby. Two years after the term went in use, the race (until that time ran in mid-May since inception) changed the date to the first Saturday in May. This change allows for a specific schedule for the Triple Crown races. Since 1931, the order of Triple Crown races has been the Kentucky Derby first, followed by the Preakness Stakes and then the Belmont Stakes. Before 1931, eleven times the Preakness was run before the Derby. On May 12, 1917, and again on May 13, 1922, the Preakness and the Derby took place on the same day. On eleven occasions the Belmont Stakes was run before the Preakness Stakes, and in 2020, the Belmont was run first, then the Kentucky Derby, and the Preakness Stakes last.
On May 16, 1925, the first live radio broadcast of the Kentucky Derby aired on WHAS as well as on WGN in Chicago. On May 7, 1949, the first television coverage of the Kentucky Derby took place, produced by WAVE-TV, the NBC affiliate in Louisville. This coverage was aired live in the Louisville market and sent to NBC as a kinescope newsreel recording for national broadcast. On May 3, 1952, the first national television coverage of the Kentucky Derby took place, aired from then-CBS affiliate WHAS-TV. In 1954, the purse exceeded US$100,000 for the first time. In 1968, Dancer's Image became the first horse to win the race and then faced disqualification. A urine test revealed traces of phenylbutazone (an anti-inflammatory painkiller drug) inside Dancer's Image. Forward Pass won after a protracted legal battle by the owners of Dancer's Image (which they lost). Forward Pass thus became the eighth winner for Calumet Farm. Unexpectedly, the regulations at Kentucky thoroughbred race tracks were changed some years later, allowing horses to run on phenylbutazone. In 1970, Diane Crump became the first female jockey to ride in the Derby, finishing 15th aboard Fathom.
The fastest time ever run in the Derby was in 1973 at 1:59.4 minutes, when Secretariat broke the record set by Northern Dancer in 1964 – a record time yet to be topped. Also during that race, he did something unique in Triple Crown races: for each successive quarter ran, his times were faster. Although the races do not record times for non-winners, in 1973 Sham finished second, two and a half lengths behind Secretariat in the same race. Using the thoroughbred racing convention of one length equaling one-fifth of a second to calculate Sham's time, he also finished in under two minutes. Another sub-two-minute finish, only the third, was set in 2001 by Monarchos at 1:59.97, the first year the race used hundredths of seconds instead of fifths in timing.
In 2005, the purse distribution for the Derby changed, so that horses finishing fifth would henceforth receive a share of the purse; previously only the first four finishers did so.
The Kentucky Derby began offering $3 million in purse money in 2019. Churchill Downs officials have cited the success of historical race wagering terminals at their Derby City Gaming facility in Louisville as a factor behind the purse increase. The Derby first offered a $1 million purse in 1996; then doubled to $2 million in 2005.
In 2020, The Kentucky Derby was postponed from May 2 to September 5 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the second time in history the race had been postponed, the other being in 1945. Churchill Downs used a new singular 20-stall starting gate for the 2020 Kentucky Derby, replacing the previous arrangement that used a standard 14-stall gate and an auxiliary six-stall gate. The old setup contributed to congestion at the start of the race, especially in the gap between the two gates.
The Kentucky Derby is the oldest continuously held major sporting event in the United States (1875).
Attendance
Millions of people from around the world bet at various live tracks and online sportsbooks. In 2017, a crowd of 158,070 watched Always Dreaming win the Derby, making it the seventh biggest attendance in the history of the racetrack. The track reported a wagering total of $209.2 million from all the sources on all the races on the Kentucky Derby Day program. It was a 9 percent increase compared to the total of $192.6 million in 2016 and an increase of 8 percent over the previous record set in 2015 of $194.3 million. TwinSpires, a platform for betting online and a partner of the Kentucky Derby and the Breeders' Cup, recorded $32.8 million in handle on the Churchill Down races for the Kentucky Derby Day program. This record was a 22 percent increase over the preceding year. On the Kentucky Derby race alone, the handle of TwinSpires was $20.1 million, which is a 22 percent rise compared to the prior year.
The race often draws celebrities. HM Queen Elizabeth II, on a visit to the United States, joined the racegoers at Churchill Downs in 2007.
Sponsorship
The 2004 Kentucky Derby marked the first time that jockeys—as a result of a court order—were allowed to wear corporate advertising logos on their clothing.
Norman Adams has been the designer of the Kentucky Derby Logo since 2002. On February 1, 2006, the Louisville-based fast-food company Yum! Brands, Inc. announced a corporate sponsorship deal to call the race "The Kentucky Derby presented by Yum! Brands." In 2018 Woodford Reserve replaced Yum! Brands as the presenting sponsor.
Traditions
In addition to the race itself, several traditions play a significant role in the Derby atmosphere. The mint julep—an iced drink consisting of bourbon, mint, and sugar syrup—is the traditional beverage of the race. The historic beverage comes served in an ice-frosted silver julep cup. However, most Churchill Downs patrons sip theirs from souvenir glasses (first offered in 1939 and available in revised form each year since) printed with all previous Derby winners. Also, burgoo, a thick stew of beef, chicken, pork, and vegetables, is a popular Kentucky dish served at the Derby.
The infield—a spectator area inside the track—offers general admission prices but little chance of seeing much of the race, particularly before the jumbotron installation in 2014. Instead, revelers show up in the infield to party with abandon. By contrast, "Millionaire's Row" refers to the expensive box seats that attract the rich, the famous and the well-connected. Women appear in elegant outfits lavishly accessorized with large, elaborate hats. Following the Call to the Post, as the horses start to parade before the grandstands, the University of Louisville Cardinal Marching Band plays Stephen Foster's "My Old Kentucky Home". This song is a tradition which began in 1921. The event attracts spectators from a large area, flying in hundreds of private aircraft to Louisville International Airport.
The Derby is frequently referred to as "The Run for the Roses", because a lush blanket of 554 red roses is awarded to the Kentucky Derby winner each year. The tradition originated in 1883 when New York City socialite E. Berry Wall presented roses to ladies at a post-Derby party. Churchill Downs founder and president, Col. M. Lewis Clark, attended that event. This gesture is believed to have led Clark to the idea of making the rose the race's official flower. However, it was not until 1896 that any recorded account referred to draping roses on the Derby winner. The Governor of Kentucky awards the garland and the Kentucky Derby Trophy. Pop vocalist Dan Fogelberg composed the song "Run for the Roses", released in time for the 1980 running of the race.
Riders Up!
"Riders Up!" is the traditional command from the Paddock Judge for jockeys to mount their horses in advance of the upcoming race. Since 2012, a dignitary or celebrity attendee recites this phrase.
Festival
In the weeks preceding the race, numerous activities took place for the Kentucky Derby Festival. Thunder Over Louisville—an airshow and fireworks display—generally begins the festivities in earnest two weeks before the Derby.
Records
Speed record:
Mile and a Quarter: 1:59.4 – Secretariat (1973)
Mile and a Half: 2:34.5 – Spokane (1889)
Margin of Victory:
8 lengths – Old Rosebud (1914), Johnstown (1939), Whirlaway (1941), Assault (1946)
Most wins by a jockey:
5 – Eddie Arcaro (1938, 1941, 1945, 1948, 1952)
5 – Bill Hartack (1957, 1960, 1962, 1964, 1969)
3 – John Velazquez (2011, 2017, 2020)
Most wins by a trainer:
6 – Bob Baffert (1997, 1998, 2002, 2015, 2018, 2020)
6 – Ben A. Jones (1938, 1941, 1944, 1948, 1949, 1952)
Most wins by an owner:
8 – Calumet Farm (1941, 1944, 1948, 1949, 1952, 1957, 1958, 1968)
Longest shot to win the Derby:
91 to 1 – Donerail (1913)
Miscellaneous:
In 2010, Calvin Borel set a new record, being the first jockey to win 3 out of 4 consecutive Kentucky Derbys.
In 2018, Justify became the first horse since Apollo in 1882, to win the Derby without having raced as a two-year-old.
In 2019, Country House won the Kentucky Derby after Maximum Security was disqualified.
Winners
Triple Crown winners are in bold.
Notes
designates a filly.
Sire lines
the Darley Arabian (1700c) sire line (all branched through the Eclipse (1764) line) produced 129 Derby winners (121 colts, 5 geldings, 3 fillies), including all winners from 1938 to present. The main branches of this sire line are:
the King Fergus (1775) branch (all branched through the Voltigeur (1847) line), produced 14 winners. His sire line continued primarily through his son Vedette (1854) with 12 winners, due to his sons Speculum (1865) with 6 winners (nearly exclusively through Sundridge (1898) with 5 winners, most recently Count Turf in 1951) and Galopin (1872) with 6 winners (exclusively through St. Simon (1881), most recently Go For Gin in 1994).
the Potoooooooo (1773) branch produced 115 winners (all branched through the Waxy (1790) line), including all winners from 1995 to present. The primary branch of this sire line is through Whalebone (1807), which has produced 110 winners. In turn, the primary branch continues through Sir Hercules (1826), which has produced 88 winners (including all winners since 2006), and then the Birdcatcher (1833) branch which produced 76 winners. From Birdcatcher, the branch of The Baron (1842) has produced 66 winners, of which 64 winners trace to Stockwell (1849). Stockwell's son Doncaster (1870) sired Bend Or (1877), whose sire line accounts for 62 winners. The main branch of the Bend Or sire line continued through his son Bona Vista (1889) with 53 winners, exclusively through the Phalaris (1913) line, which has dominated in the last several decades (including all winners from 2006 to present) through the following sons:
the Pharamond (1925) branch (4 winners all through the Tom Fool (1949) line, most recently Silver Charm in 1997);
the Sickle (1924) branch (22 winners all branched through the Native Dancer (1950) line, nearly exclusively through Raise a Native (1961) with 21 winners, continued primarily through Mr Prospector (1970) with 14 winners (through 8 different sons: Fusaichi Pegasus, winner of the 2000 Kentucky Derby, and 7 other sons through their progeny (most recently Country House in 2019), with his son Fappiano (1977) accounting for 6 winners (most recently Always Dreaming in 2017));
the Pharos (1920) branch (27 winners all branched through the Nearco (1935) line, through his sons Royal Charger (1942), Nearctic (1954), and Nasrullah (1940)). The Royal Charger branch produced 5 winners (most recently Barbaro in 2006), the Nearctic branch produced 8 winners, exclusively through his son Northern Dancer (1961) with his win in the 1964 Kentucky Derby, and direct male progeny of 7 winners (most recently Medina Spirit in 2021), while the Nasrullah branch produced 14 winners primarily due to his son Bold Ruler (1954) with 10 winners (most recently California Chrome in 2014).
Special notes:
The Waxy (1790) branch produced two main lines: the primary branch of Whalebone (1807) which produced 110 winners, and the secondary branch of Whisker (1812) which produced 5 winners (exclusively through the King Tom (1851) line), most recently 1909 Kentucky Derby winner Wintergreen.
An offshoot of the Whalebone (1807) branch, the Camel (1822) branch (18 winners exclusively through the Touchstone (1831) line), produced 2005 Kentucky Derby winner Giacomo through his grandson Orlando's (1841) branch. Since then, each winner of the Kentucky Derby has gone through Whalebone's more frequent sire line branch of Sir Herecules (1826). The Orlando branch (6 winners exclusively through the Himyar (1875) line) is the less common of the two branches derived through Camel. Orlando's brother Newminster (1848) produced 12 winners (primarily through the Hyperion (1930) line with 8 winners), most recently Chateaugay in 1963.
The Sir Hercules (1826) branch produced two main lines: the primary branch of Birdcatcher (1833) which produced 76 winners, and the secondary branch of Faugh-a-Ballagh (1841) which produced 12 winners (exclusively through the Leamington (1853) line), most recently 1908 Kentucky Derby winner Stone Street.
The Birdcatcher (1833) branch produced two main lines: the primary branch of The Baron (1842) which produced 66 winners, and the secondary branch of Oxford (1857) which produced 10 winners (primarily through the Swynford (1907) line with 8 winners), most recently 1965 Kentucky Derby winner Lucky Debonair.
The Bend Or (1877) branch produced two main lines: the primary branch of Bona Vista (1889) which produced 53 winners, and the secondary branch of Ormonde (1883) which produced 8 winners (exclusively through the Teddy (1913) line), most recently 1957 Kentucky Derby winner Iron Liege.
the Byerley Turk (1680c) sire line produced 11 winners (8 colts, 3 geldings). The main branches of this sire (all branched through the Herod (1758) line) are:
the Highflyer (1774) branch produced 1 winner, most recently Macbeth II in 1888
the Florizel (1768) branch produced 3 winners (all branched through the Lexington (1850) line), most recently Manuel in 1899
the Woodpecker (1773) branch produced 7 winners (all branched through the Buzzard (1787) line). The main branches of this sire line are:
the Castrel (1801) branch produced 1 winner, most recently Kingman in 1891
the Selim (1802) branch produced 6 winners (all branched through the Glencoe (1831) line). The main branches of this sire line are:
the Star Davis (1849) branch produced 1 winner, most recently Day Star in 1878
the Vandal (1850) branch produced 5 winners (all branched through the Virgil (1864) line), most recently Alan-a-Dale in 1902
the Godolphin Arabian (1724c) sire line produced 7 winners (6 colts, 1 gelding). The main branches of this sire (all branched through the West Australian (1850) line) are:
the Solon (1861) branch produced 3 winners, including:
the Barcaldine (1878) branch produced 1 winner, most recently Omar Khayyam in 1917
the Arbitrator (1874) branch produced 2 winners (all branched through The Finn (1912) line), most recently Flying Ebony in 1925
the Australian (1858) branch produced 4 winners, including:
Baden-Baden (1874), winner of the 1877 Kentucky Derby
the Waverly (1870) branch produced 1 winner, most recently Montrose in 1887
the Spendthrift (1876) branch produced 2 winners (all branched through the Man o' War (1917) line), most recently War Admiral in 1937
Kentucky Derby winners with male-line descendants including other Kentucky Derby winners
Northern Dancer (1964 winner) – 7 colts; most recently Medina Spirit (2021)
Ben Brush (1896 winner) - 3 winners (2 colts, 1 filly); most recently Whiskery (1927)
Seattle Slew (1977 winner) – 3 colts; most recently California Chrome (2014)
Unbridled (1990 winner) – 3 winners (2 colts, 1 gelding); most recently American Pharoah (2015)
Hindoo (1881 winner) – 2 colts; most recently Alan-a-Dale (1902)
Bold Venture (1936 winner) – 2 colts; most recently Middleground (1950)
Reigh Count (1928 winner) – 2 colts; most recently Count Turf (1951)
Pensive (1944 winner) – 2 colts; most recently Needles (1956)
Majestic Prince (1969 winner) – 2 colts; most recently Super Saver (2010)
Halma (1895 winner) – 1 colt; Alan-a-Dale (1902)
Leonatus (1883 winner) – 1 colt; Pink Star (1907)
Bubbling Over (1926 winner) – 1 colt; Burgoo King (1932)
Gallant Fox (1930 winner) – 1 colt; Omaha (1935)
Count Fleet (1943 winner) – 1 colt; Count Turf (1951)
Ponder (1949 winner) – 1 colt; Needles (1956)
Determine (1954 winner) – 1 colt; Decidedly (1962)
Swaps (1955 winner) – 1 colt; Chateaugay (1963)
Grindstone (1996 winner) – 1 gelding; Mine That Bird (2009)
See also
Kentucky Oaks
Kentucky Derby Festival
American thoroughbred racing top attended events
Kentucky Derby top four finishers
List of graded stakes at Churchill Downs
"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved", a seminal example of New Journalism by Hunter S. Thompson.
Triple Crown Productions
Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing
Grand Slam of Thoroughbred Racing
List of attractions and events in the Louisville metropolitan area
Derby Pie
List of Kentucky Derby broadcasters
References
Further reading
David Domine, Insiders' Guide to Louisville. Guilford, Connecticut: Globe-Pequot Press, 2010.
James C. Nicholson, The Kentucky Derby: How the Run for the Roses Became America's Premier Sporting Event. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2012.
External links
Kentucky Derby Museum
The Courier-Journals Derby Site
History of the Kentucky Derby
ESPN.com – attending the Kentucky Derby
Kentucky Derby News
1875 establishments in Kentucky
Annual sporting events in the United States
Churchill Downs horse races
Flat horse races for three-year-olds
Grade 1 stakes races in the United States
Graded stakes races in the United States
Kentucky culture
May sporting events
Recurring sporting events established in 1875
Sports competitions in Louisville, Kentucky
Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing | [
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17138 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword | Keyword | Keyword may refer to a word or a sort of phrase that can be associated with a particular subject, document or moment. It is used to explore or run specific searches in the title, in subject, in write ups, in documents and for internet search.
In context of programming language, a keyword is a closely related or associated word that is reserved by a program because, the word has a special meaning that defines commands and specific parameters for that code set.
In SEO terminology for digital marketing, a keyword is used to describe a word or group of words that the Internet uses to perform search engine or search bar exploration.
Computing
Keyword (Internet search), a word or phrase typically used by bloggers or online content creator to rank a web page on a particular topic
Index term, a term used as a keyword to documents in an information system such as a catalog or a search engine
Keyword advertising, a form of online advertising
Keyword clustering, a search engine optimization technique
A reserved word in a programming language
Other
Keyword (linguistics), word which occurs in a text more often than we would expect to occur by chance alone
Keyword (rhetoric), a word that academics use to reveal the internal structure of an author's reasoning
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 1973 non-fiction book by Raymond Williams
"Keyword" (Tohoshinki song), a 2008 J-pop song | [
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17139 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX-87 | FX-87 | FX-87 is a polymorphic typed functional language based on a system for static program analysis in which every expression has two static properties: a type and an effect. In a study done by MIT, FX-87 yields similar performance results as functional languages on programs that do not contain side effects (Fibonacci, Factorial). FX-87 did yield a great performance increase when matching DNA sequences.
KFX is the kernel language of FX-87. It was described in 'Polymorphic Effect Systems', J.M. Lucassen et al., Proceedings of the 15th Annual ACM Conference POPL, ACM 1988, pp. 47–57.
References
Programming languages
Academic programming languages | [
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17140 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katal | Katal | The katal (symbol: kat) is the unit of catalytic activity in the International System of Units (SI). It is a derived SI unit for quantifying the catalytic activity of enzymes (that is, measuring the enzymatic activity level in enzyme catalysis) and other catalysts.
The katal is invariant of the measurement procedure, but the measured numerical value is not; the value depends on the experimental conditions. Therefore, to define the quantity of a catalyst in katals, the rate of conversion of a defined chemical reaction is specified as moles reacted per second. One katal of trypsin, for example, is that amount of trypsin which breaks one mole of peptide bonds in one second under specified conditions.
Definition
One katal refers to an enzyme catalysing the reaction of one mole of substrate per second. Because this is such a large unit for most enzymatic reactions, the nanokatal (nkat) is used in practice.
The katal is not used to express the rate of a reaction; that is expressed in units of concentration per second, as moles per liter per second. Rather, the katal is used to express catalytic activity, which is a property of the catalyst.
SI multiples
History
The General Conference on Weights and Measures and other international organizations recommend use of the katal. It replaces the non-SI enzyme unit of catalytic activity. The enzyme unit is still more commonly used than the katal, especially in biochemistry. The adoption of the katal has been slow.
Origin
The name "katal" has been used for decades. The first proposal to make it an SI unit came in 1978, and it became an official SI unit in 1999. The name comes from the Ancient Greek κατάλυσις (katalysis), meaning "dissolution"; the word "catalysis" itself is a Latinized form of the Greek word.
References
External links
Unit "katal" for catalytic activity (IUPAC Technical Report) Pure Appl. Chem. Vol. 73, No. 6, pp. 927–931 (2001)
SI derived units
Units of catalytic activity
Units of chemical measurement | [
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17143 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koala | Koala | The koala or, inaccurately, koala bear (Phascolarctos cinereus) is an arboreal herbivorous marsupial native to Australia. It is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae and its closest living relatives are the wombats. The koala is found in coastal areas of the mainland's eastern and southern regions, inhabiting Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. It is easily recognisable by its stout, tailless body and large head with round, fluffy ears and large, spoon-shaped nose. The koala has a body length of and weighs . Fur colour ranges from silver grey to chocolate brown. Koalas from the northern populations are typically smaller and lighter in colour than their counterparts further south. These populations possibly are separate subspecies, but this is disputed.
Koalas typically inhabit open Eucalyptus woodland, the leaves of these trees make up most of their diet. Because this eucalypt diet has limited nutritional and caloric content, koalas are largely sedentary and sleep up to 20 hours a day. They are asocial animals, and bonding exists only between mothers and dependent offspring. Adult males communicate with loud bellows that intimidate rivals and attract mates. Males mark their presence with secretions from scent glands located on their chests. Being marsupials, koalas give birth to underdeveloped young that crawl into their mothers' pouches, where they stay for the first six to seven months of their lives. These young koalas, known as joeys, are fully weaned around a year old. Koalas have few natural predators and parasites, but are threatened by various pathogens, such as Chlamydiaceae bacteria and the koala retrovirus.
Because of its distinctive appearance, the koala is recognised worldwide as a symbol of Australia. They were hunted by Indigenous Australians and depicted in myths and cave art for millennia. The first recorded encounter between a European and a koala was in 1798, and an image of the animal was published in 1810 by naturalist George Perry. Botanist Robert Brown wrote the first detailed scientific description of the koala in 1814, although his work remained unpublished for 180 years. Popular artist John Gould illustrated and described the koala, introducing the species to the general British public. Further details about the animal's biology were revealed in the 19th century by several English scientists. Koalas are listed as a vulnerable species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Among the many threats to their existence are habitat destruction caused by agriculture, urbanisation, droughts and associated bushfires, some related to climate change. In February of 2022, the koala was officially listed as endangered in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Queensland.
Etymology
The word koala comes from the Dharug gula, meaning no water. Although the vowel 'u' was originally written in the English orthography as "oo" (in spellings such as coola or koolah — two syllables), later became "oa" and is now pronounced in three syllables, possibly in error.
Adopted by white settlers, "koala" became one of several hundred Aboriginal loan words in Australian English, where it was also commonly referred to as "native bear", later "koala bear", for its supposed resemblance to a bear. It is also one of several Aboriginal words that made it into International English, alongside e.g. "didgeridoo" and "kangaroo." The generic name, Phascolarctos, is derived from the Greek words phaskolos "pouch" and arktos "bear". The specific name, cinereus, is Latin for "ash coloured".
Taxonomy and evolution
The koala was given its generic name Phascolarctos in 1816 by French zoologist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville, who would not give it a specific name until further review. In 1819, German zoologist Georg August Goldfuss gave it the binomial Lipurus cinereus. Because Phascolarctos was published first, according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, it has priority as the official name of the genus. French naturalist Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest proposed the name Phascolarctos fuscus in 1820, suggesting that the brown-coloured versions were a different species than the grey ones. Other names suggested by European authors included Marodactylus cinereus by Goldfuss in 1820, P. flindersii by René Primevère Lesson in 1827, and P. koala by John Edward Gray in 1827.
The koala is classified with wombats (family Vombatidae) and several extinct families (including marsupial tapirs, marsupial lions and giant wombats) in the suborder Vombatiformes within the order Diprotodontia. The Vombatiformes are a sister group to a clade that includes macropods (kangaroos and wallabies) and possums. The ancestors of vombatiforms were likely arboreal, and the koala's lineage was possibly the first to branch off around 40 million years ago during the Eocene.
The modern koala is the only extant member of Phascolarctidae, a family that once included several genera and species. During the Oligocene and Miocene, koalas lived in rainforests and had less specialised diets. Some species, such as the Riversleigh rainforest koala (Nimiokoala greystanesi) and some species of Perikoala, were around the same size as the modern koala, while others, such as species of Litokoala, were one-half to two-thirds its size. Like the modern species, prehistoric koalas had well developed ear structures which suggests that long-distance vocalising and sedentism developed early. During the Miocene, the Australian continent began drying out, leading to the decline of rainforests and the spread of open Eucalyptus woodlands. The genus Phascolarctos split from Litokoala in the late Miocene and had several adaptations that allowed it to live on a specialised eucalyptus diet: a shifting of the palate towards the front of the skull; larger molars and premolars; smaller pterygoid fossa; and a larger gap between the molar and the incisor teeth.
P. cinereus may have emerged as a dwarf form of the giant koala (P. stirtoni). The reduction in the size of large mammals has been seen as a common phenomenon worldwide during the late Pleistocene, and several Australian mammals, such as the agile wallaby, are traditionally believed to have resulted from this dwarfing. A 2008 study questions this hypothesis, noting that P. cinereus and P. stirtoni were sympatric during the middle to late Pleistocene, and possibly as early as the Pliocene. The fossil record of the modern koala extends back at least to the middle Pleistocene.
Genetics and variations
Three subspecies are recognised: the Queensland koala (Phascolarctos cinereus adustus, Thomas 1923), the New South Wales koala (Phascolarctos cinereus cinereus, Goldfuss 1817), and the Victorian koala (Phascolarctos cinereus victor, Troughton 1935). These forms are distinguished by pelage colour and thickness, body size, and skull shape. The Queensland koala is the smallest of the three, with shorter, silver fur and a shorter skull. The Victorian koala is the largest, with shaggier, brown fur and a wider skull. The boundaries of these variations are based on state borders, and their status as subspecies is disputed. A 1999 genetic study suggests that the variations represent differentiated populations with limited gene flow between them, and that the three subspecies comprise a single evolutionarily significant unit. Other studies have found that koala populations have high levels of inbreeding and low genetic variation. Such low genetic diversity may have been a characteristic of koala populations since the late Pleistocene. Rivers and roads have been shown to limit gene flow and contribute to the genetic differentiation of southeast Queensland populations. In April 2013, scientists from the Australian Museum and Queensland University of Technology announced they had fully sequenced the koala genome.
Characteristics and adaptations
The koala is a stocky animal with a large head and vestigial or non-existent tail. It has a body length of and a weight of , making it among the largest arboreal marsupials. Koalas from Victoria are twice as heavy as those from Queensland. The species is sexually dimorphic, with males 50% larger than females. Males are further distinguished from females by their more curved noses and the presence of chest glands, which are visible as hairless patches. As in most marsupials, the male koala has a bifurcated penis, and the female has two lateral vaginas and two separate uteri. The male's penile sheath contains naturally occurring bacteria that play an important role in fertilisation. The female's pouch opening is tightened by a sphincter that keeps the young from falling out.
The pelage of the koala is thicker and longer on the back, and shorter on the belly. The ears have thick fur on both the inside and outside. The back fur colour varies from light grey to chocolate brown. The belly fur is whitish; on the rump it is dappled whitish, and darker at the back. The koala has the most effective insulating back fur of any marsupial and is highly resilient to wind and rain, while the belly fur can reflect solar radiation. The koala's curved, sharp claws are well adapted for climbing trees. The large forepaws have two opposable digits (the first and second, which are opposable to the other three) that allow them to grasp small branches. On the hindpaws, the second and third digits are fused, a typical condition for members of the Diprotodontia, and the attached claws (which are still separate) are used for grooming. As in humans and other primates, koalas have friction ridges on their paws. The animal has a sturdy skeleton and a short, muscular upper body with proportionately long upper limbs that contribute to its climbing and grasping abilities. Additional climbing strength is achieved with thigh muscles that attach to the shinbone lower than other animals. The koala has a cartilaginous pad at the end of the spine that may make it more comfortable when it perches in the fork of a tree.
The koala has one of the smallest brains in proportion to body weight of any mammal, being 60% smaller than that of a typical diprotodont, weighing only on average. The brain's surface is fairly smooth, typical for a "primitive" animal. It occupies only 61% of the cranial cavity and is pressed against the inside surface by cerebrospinal fluid. The function of this relatively large amount of fluid is not known, although one possibility is that it acts as a shock absorber, cushioning the brain if the animal falls from a tree. The koala's small brain size may be an adaptation to the energy restrictions imposed by its diet, which is insufficient to sustain a larger brain. Because of its small brain, the koala has a limited ability to perform complex, unfamiliar behaviours. For example, when presented with plucked leaves on a flat surface, the animal cannot adapt to the change in its normal feeding routine and will not eat the leaves. The koala's olfactory senses are normal, and it is known to sniff the oils of individual branchlets to assess their edibility. Its nose is fairly large and covered in leathery skin. Its round ears provide it with good hearing, and it has a well-developed middle ear. A koala's vision is not well developed, and its relatively small eyes are unusual among marsupials in that the pupils have vertical slits. Koalas make use of a novel vocal organ to produce low-pitched sounds (see social spacing, below). Unlike typical mammalian vocal cords, which are folds in the larynx, these organs are placed in the velum (soft palate) and are called velar vocal cords.
The koala has several adaptations for its eucalypt diet, which is of low nutritive value, of high toxicity, and high in dietary fibre. The animal's dentition consists of the incisors and cheek teeth (a single premolar and four molars on each jaw), which are separated by a large gap (a characteristic feature of herbivorous mammals). The incisors are used for grasping leaves, which are then passed to the premolars to be snipped at the petiole before being passed to the highly cusped molars, where they are shredded into small pieces. Koalas may also store food in their cheek pouches before it is ready to be chewed. The partially worn molars of middle-aged koalas are optimal for breaking the leaves into small particles, resulting in more efficient stomach digestion and nutrient absorption in the small intestine, which digests the eucalyptus leaves to provide most of the animal's energy. A koala sometimes regurgitates the food into the mouth to be chewed a second time.
Unlike kangaroos and eucalyptus-eating possums, koalas are hindgut fermenters, and their digestive retention can last for up to 100 hours in the wild, or up to 200 hours in captivity. This is made possible by the extraordinary length of their caecum— long and in diameter—the largest proportionally of any animal. Koalas can select which food particles to retain for longer fermentation and which to pass through. Large particles typically pass through more quickly, as they would take more time to digest. While the hindgut is proportionally larger in the koala than in other herbivores, only 10% of the animal's energy is obtained from fermentation. Since the koala gains a low amount of energy from its diet, its metabolic rate is half that of a typical mammal, although this can vary between seasons and sexes. They are able to digest the toxins present in eucalyptus leaves due to their production of cytochrome P450, which breaks down these poisons in the liver. The koala conserves water by passing relatively dry faecal pellets high in undigested fibre, and by storing water in the caecum.
Distribution and habitat
The koala's geographic range covers roughly , and 30 ecoregions. It extends throughout eastern and southeastern Australia, encompassing northeastern, central and southeastern Queensland, eastern New South Wales, Victoria, and southeastern South Australia. The koala was reintroduced near Adelaide and on several islands, including Kangaroo Island and French Island. The population on Magnetic Island represents the northern limit of its range. Fossil evidence shows that the koala's range stretched as far west as southwestern Western Australia during the late Pleistocene. Koalas were introduced to Western Australia at Yanchep. They were likely driven to extinction in these areas by environmental changes and hunting by Indigenous Australians. In South Australia, koalas were only known to exist in recent times in the lower South East, with a remnant population in the Bangham Forest between Bordertown and Naracoorte, until introduced to the Mount Lofty Ranges in the 20th-century. Doubts have been cast on Eyre's identification as koala pelt a girdle being worn by an Aboriginal man, the only evidence of their existence elsewhere in the State.
Koalas can be found in habitats ranging from relatively open forests to woodlands, and in climates ranging from tropical to cool temperate. In semi-arid climates, they prefer riparian habitats, where nearby streams and creeks provide refuge during times of drought and extreme heat.
Ecology and behaviour
Foraging and activities
Koalas are herbivorous, and while most of their diet consists of eucalypt leaves, they can be found in trees of other genera, such as Acacia, Allocasuarina, Callitris, Leptospermum, and Melaleuca. Though the foliage of over 600 species of Eucalyptus is available, the koala shows a strong preference for around 30. They tend to choose species that have a high protein content and low proportions of fibre and lignin. The most favoured species are Eucalyptus microcorys, E. tereticornis, and E. camaldulensis, which, on average, make up more than 20% of their diet. Despite its reputation as a fussy eater, the koala is more generalist than some other marsupial species, such as the greater glider. Since eucalypt leaves have a high water content, the koala does not need to drink often; its daily water turnover rate ranges from 71 to 91 ml/kg of body weight. Although females can meet their water requirements from eating leaves, larger males require additional water found on the ground or in tree hollows. When feeding, a koala holds onto a branch with hindpaws and one forepaw while the other forepaw grasps foliage. Small koalas can move close to the end of a branch, but larger ones stay near the thicker bases. Koalas consume up to of leaves a day, spread over four to six feeding sessions. Despite their adaptations to a low-energy lifestyle, they have meagre fat reserves and need to feed often.
Because they get so little energy from their diet, koalas must limit their energy use and sleep or rest 20 hours a day. They are predominantly active at night and spend most of their waking hours feeding. They typically eat and sleep in the same tree, possibly for as long as a day. On very hot days, a koala may climb down to the coolest part of the tree which is cooler than the surrounding air. The koala hugs the tree to lose heat without panting. On warm days, a koala may rest with its back against a branch or lie on its stomach or back with its limbs dangling. During cold, wet periods, it curls itself into a tight ball to conserve energy. On windy days, a koala finds a lower, thicker branch on which to rest. While it spends most of the time in the tree, the animal descends to the ground to move to another tree. The koala usually grooms itself with its hindpaws, but sometimes uses its forepaws or mouth.
Social spacing
Koalas are asocial animals and spend just 15 minutes a day on social behaviours. In Victoria, home ranges are small and have extensive overlap, while in central Queensland they are larger and overlap less. Koala society appears to consist of "residents" and "transients", the former being mostly adult females and the latter males. Resident males appear to be territorial and dominate others with their larger body size. Alpha males tend to establish their territories close to breeding females, while younger males are subordinate until they mature and reach full size. Adult males occasionally venture outside their home ranges; when they do so, dominant ones retain their status. When a male enters a new tree, he marks it by rubbing his chest gland against the trunk or a branch; males have occasionally been observed to dribble urine on the trunk. This scent-marking behaviour probably serves as communication, and individuals are known to sniff the base of a tree before climbing. Scent marking is common during aggressive encounters. Chest gland secretions are complex chemical mixtures—about 40 compounds were identified in one analysis—that vary in composition and concentration with the season and the age of the individual.
Adult males communicate with loud bellows—low pitched sounds that consist of snore-like inhalations and resonant exhalations that sound like growls. These sounds are thought to be generated by unique vocal organs found in koalas. Because of their low frequency, these bellows can travel far through air and vegetation. Koalas may bellow at any time of the year, particularly during the breeding season, when it serves to attract females and possibly intimidate other males. They also bellow to advertise their presence to their neighbours when they enter a new tree. These sounds signal the male's actual body size, as well as exaggerate it; females pay more attention to bellows that originate from larger males. Female koalas bellow, though more softly, in addition to making snarls, wails, and screams. These calls are produced when in distress and when making defensive threats. Young koalas squeak when in distress. As they get older, the squeak develops into a "squawk" produced both when in distress and to show aggression. When another individual climbs over it, a koala makes a low grunt with its mouth closed. Koalas make numerous facial expressions. When snarling, wailing, or squawking, the animal curls the upper lip and points its ears forward. During screams, the lips retract and the ears are drawn back. Females bring their lips forward and raise their ears when agitated.
Agonistic behaviour typically consists of squabbles between individuals climbing over or passing each other. This occasionally involves biting. Males that are strangers may wrestle, chase, and bite each other. In extreme situations, a male may try to displace a smaller rival from a tree. This involves the larger aggressor climbing up and attempting to corner the victim, which tries either to rush past him and climb down or to move to the end of a branch. The aggressor attacks by grasping the target by the shoulders and repeatedly biting him. Once the weaker individual is driven away, the victor bellows and marks the tree. Pregnant and lactating females are particularly aggressive and attack individuals that come too close. In general, however, koalas tend to avoid energy-wasting aggressive behaviour.
Reproduction and development
Koalas are seasonal breeders, and births take place from the middle of spring through the summer to early autumn, from October to May. Females in oestrus tend to hold their heads further back than usual and commonly display tremors and spasms. However, males do not appear to recognise these signs, and have been observed to mount non-oestrous females. Because of his much larger size, a male can usually force himself on a female, mounting her from behind, and in extreme cases, the male may pull the female out of the tree. A female may scream and vigorously fight off her suitors, but will submit to one that is dominant or is more familiar. The bellows and screams that accompany matings can attract other males to the scene, obliging the incumbent to delay mating and fight off the intruders. These fights may allow the female to assess which is dominant. Older males usually have accumulated scratches, scars, and cuts on the exposed parts of their noses and on their eyelids.
The koala's gestation period lasts 33–35 days, and a female gives birth to a single joey (although twins occur on occasion). As with all marsupials, the young are born while at the embryonic stage, weighing only . However, they have relatively well-developed lips, forelimbs, and shoulders, as well as functioning respiratory, digestive, and urinary systems. The joey crawls into its mother's pouch to continue the rest of its development. Unlike most other marsupials, the koala does not clean her pouch.
A female koala has two teats; the joey attaches itself to one of them and suckles for the rest of its pouch life. The koala has one of the lowest milk energy production rates in relation to body size of any mammal. The female makes up for this by lactating for as long as 12 months. At seven weeks of age, the joey's head grows longer and becomes proportionally large, pigmentation begins to develop, and its sex can be determined (the scrotum appears in males and the pouch begins to develop in females). At 13 weeks, the joey weighs around and its head has doubled in size. The eyes begin to open and fine fur grows on the forehead, nape, shoulders, and arms. At 26 weeks, the fully furred animal resembles an adult, and begins to poke its head out of the pouch.
As the young koala approaches six months, the mother begins to prepare it for its eucalyptus diet by predigesting the leaves, producing a faecal pap that the joey eats from her cloaca. The pap is quite different in composition from regular faeces, resembling instead the contents of the caecum, which has a high concentration of bacteria. Eaten for about a month, the pap provides a supplementary source of protein at a transition time from a milk to a leaf diet. The joey fully emerges from the pouch for the first time at six or seven months of age, when it weighs . It explores its new surroundings cautiously, clinging to its mother for support. By nine months, it weighs over and develops its adult fur colour. Having permanently left the pouch, it rides on its mother's back for transportation, learning to climb by grasping branches. Gradually, it spends more time away from its mother, who becomes pregnant again after 12 month when the young is now around.. Her bond with her previous offspring is permanently severed and she longer longer allows it to suckle. Young will continue to live near their mother for the next 6–12 months.
Females become sexually mature at about three years of age and can then become pregnant; in comparison, males reach sexual maturity when they are about four years old, although they can produce sperm as early as two years. While the chest glands can be functional as early as 18 months of age, males do not begin scent-marking behaviours until they reach sexual maturity. Because the offspring have a long dependent period, female koalas usually breed in alternate years. Favourable environmental factors, such as a plentiful supply of high-quality food trees, allow them to reproduce every year.
Health and mortality
Koalas may live from 13 to 18 years in the wild. While female koalas usually live this long, males may die sooner because of their more hazardous lives. Koalas usually survive falls from trees and immediately climb back up, but injuries and deaths from falls do occur, particularly in inexperienced young and fighting males. Around six years of age, the koala's chewing teeth begin to wear down and their chewing efficiency decreases. Eventually, the cusps disappear completely and the animal will die of starvation. Koalas have few predators; dingos and large pythons may prey on them; birds of prey (such as powerful owls and wedge-tailed eagles) are threats to young. Koalas are generally not subject to external parasites, other than ticks in coastal areas. Koalas may also suffer mange from the mite Sarcoptes scabiei, and skin ulcers from the bacterium Mycobacterium ulcerans, but neither is common. Internal parasites are few and largely harmless. These include the tapeworm Bertiella obesa, commonly found in the intestine, and the nematodes Marsupostrongylus longilarvatus and Durikainema phascolarcti, which are infrequently found in the lungs. In a three-year study of almost 600 koalas admitted to the Australian Zoo Wildlife Hospital in Queensland, 73.8% of the animals were infected with at least one species of the parasitic protozoal genus Trypanosoma, the most common of which was T. irwini.
Koalas can be subject to pathogens such as Chlamydiaceae bacteria, which can cause keratoconjunctivitis, urinary tract infection, and reproductive tract infection. Such infections are widespread on the mainland, but absent in some island populations. The koala retrovirus (KoRV) may cause koala immune deficiency syndrome (KIDS) which is similar to AIDS in humans. Prevalence of KoRV in koala populations suggests a trend spreading from the north to the south of Australia. Northern populations are completely infected, while some southern populations (including Kangaroo Island) are free.
The animals are vulnerable to bushfires due to their slow movements and the flammability of eucalypt trees. The koala instinctively seeks refuge in the higher branches, where it is vulnerable to intense heat and flames. Bushfires also fragment the animal's habitat, which restricts their movement and leads to population decline and loss of genetic diversity. Dehydration and overheating can also prove fatal. Consequently, the koala is vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Models of climate change in Australia predict warmer and drier climates, suggesting that the koala's range will shrink in the east and south to more mesic habitats.
Human relations
History
The first written reference of the koala was recorded by John Price, servant of John Hunter, the Governor of New South Wales. Price encountered the "cullawine" on 26 January 1798, during an expedition to the Blue Mountains, although his account was not published until nearly a century later in Historical Records of Australia. In 1802, French-born explorer Francis Louis Barrallier encountered the animal when his two Aboriginal guides, returning from a hunt, brought back two koala feet they were intending to eat. Barrallier preserved the appendages and sent them and his notes to Hunter's successor, Philip Gidley King, who forwarded them to Joseph Banks. Similar to Price, Barrallier's notes were not published until 1897. Reports of the first capture of a live "koolah" appeared in The Sydney Gazette in August 1803. Within a few weeks Flinders' astronomer, James Inman, purchased a specimen pair for live shipment to Joseph Banks in England. They were described as 'somewhat larger than the Waumbut (Wombat)'. These encounters helped provide the impetus for King to commission the artist John Lewin to paint watercolours of the animal. Lewin painted three pictures, one of which was subsequently made into a print that was reproduced in Georges Cuvier's Le Règne Animal (The Animal Kingdom) (first published in 1817) and several European works on natural history.
Botanist Robert Brown was the first to write a detailed scientific description of the koala in 1803, based on a female specimen captured near what is now Mount Kembla in the Illawarra region of New South Wales. Austrian botanical illustrator Ferdinand Bauer drew the animal's skull, throat, feet, and paws. Brown's work remained unpublished and largely unnoticed, however, as his field books and notes remained in his possession until his death, when they were bequeathed to the British Museum (Natural History) in London. They were not identified until 1994, while Bauer's koala watercolours were not published until 1989. British surgeon Everard Home included details of the koala based on eyewitness accounts of William Paterson, who had befriended Brown and Bauer during their stay in New South Wales. Home, who in 1808 published his report in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, gave the animal the scientific name Didelphis coola.
The first published image of the koala appeared in George Perry's (1810) natural history work Arcana. Perry called it the "New Holland Sloth" on account of its perceived similarities to the Central and South American tree-living mammals of genus Bradypus. His disdain for the koala, evident in his description of the animal, was typical of the prevailing early 19th-century British attitude about the primitiveness and oddity of Australian fauna: ... the eye is placed like that of the Sloth, very close to the mouth and nose, which gives it a clumsy awkward appearance, and void of elegance in the combination ... they have little either in their character or appearance to interest the Naturalist or Philosopher. As Nature however provides nothing in vain, we may suppose that even these torpid, senseless creatures are wisely intended to fill up one of the great links of the chain of animated nature ...
Naturalist and popular artist John Gould illustrated and described the koala in his three-volume work The Mammals of Australia (1845–1863) and introduced the species, as well as other members of Australia's little-known faunal community, to the general British public. Comparative anatomist Richard Owen, in a series of publications on the physiology and anatomy of Australian mammals, presented a paper on the anatomy of the koala to the Zoological Society of London. In this widely cited publication, he provided the first careful description of its internal anatomy, and noted its general structural similarity to the wombat. English naturalist George Robert Waterhouse, curator of the Zoological Society of London, was the first to correctly classify the koala as a marsupial in the 1840s. He identified similarities between it and its fossil relatives Diprotodon and Nototherium, which had been discovered just a few years before. Similarly, Gerard Krefft, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney, noted evolutionary mechanisms at work when comparing the koala to its ancestral relatives in his 1871 The Mammals of Australia.
The first living koala in Britain arrived in 1881, purchased by the Zoological Society of London. As related by prosecutor to the society, William Alexander Forbes, the animal suffered an accidental demise when the heavy lid of a washstand fell on it and it was unable to free itself. Forbes used the opportunity to dissect the fresh female specimen, thus was able to provide explicit anatomical details on the female reproductive system, the brain, and the liver—parts not previously described by Owen, who had access only to preserved specimens. Scottish embryologist William Caldwell—well known in scientific circles for determining the reproductive mechanism of the platypus—described the uterine development of the koala in 1884, and used the new information to convincingly place the koala and the monotremes into an evolutionary time frame.
Cultural significance
The koala is well known worldwide and is a major draw for Australian zoos and wildlife parks. It has been featured in advertisements, games, cartoons, and as soft toys. It benefited the national tourism industry by over an estimated billion Australian dollars in 1998, a figure that has since grown. In 1997, half of visitors to Australia, especially those from Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, sought out zoos and wildlife parks; about 75% of European and Japanese tourists placed the koala at the top of their list of animals to see. According to biologist Stephen Jackson: "If you were to take a straw poll of the animal most closely associated with Australia, it's a fair bet that the koala would come out marginally in front of the kangaroo". Factors that contribute to the koala's enduring popularity include its childlike body proportions and teddy bear-like face.
The koala is featured in the Dreamtime stories and mythology of Indigenous Australians. The Tharawal people believed that the animal helped row the boat that brought them to the continent. Another myth tells of how a tribe killed a koala and used its long intestines to create a bridge for people from other parts of the world. This narrative highlights the koala's status as a game animal and the length of its intestines. Several stories tell of how the koala lost its tail. In one, a kangaroo cuts it off to punish the koala for being lazy and greedy. Tribes in both Queensland and Victoria regarded the koala as a wise animal and sought its advice. Bidjara-speaking people credited the koala for turning barren lands into lush forests. The animal is also depicted in rock carvings, though not as much as some other species.
Early European settlers in Australia considered the koala to be a prowling sloth-like animal with a "fierce and menacing look". At the beginning of the 20th century, the koala's reputation took a more positive turn, largely due to its growing popularity and depiction in several widely circulated children's stories. It is featured in Ethel Pedley's 1899 book Dot and the Kangaroo, in which it is portrayed as the "funny native bear". Artist Norman Lindsay depicted a more anthropomorphic koala in The Bulletin cartoons, starting in 1904. This character also appeared as Bunyip Bluegum in Lindsay's 1918 book The Magic Pudding. Perhaps the most famous fictional koala is Blinky Bill. Created by Dorothy Wall in 1933, the character appeared in several books and has been the subject of films, TV series, merchandise, and a 1986 environmental song by John Williamson. The first Australian stamp featuring a koala was issued by the Commonwealth in 1930. A television ad campaign for Australia's national airline Qantas, starting in 1967 and running for several decades, featured a live koala (voiced by Howard Morris), who complained that too many tourists were coming to Australia and concluded "I hate Qantas". The series has been ranked among the greatest commercials of all time.
The song "Ode to a Koala Bear" appears on the B-side of the 1983 Paul McCartney/Michael Jackson duet single Say Say Say. A koala is the main character in Hanna-Barbera's The Kwicky Koala Show and Nippon Animation's Noozles, both of which were animated cartoons of the early 1980s. Food products shaped like the koala include the Caramello Koala chocolate bar and the bite-sized cookie snack Koala's March. Dadswells Bridge in Victoria features a tourist complex shaped like a giant koala and the Queensland Reds rugby team has a koala as its mascot. The Platinum Koala and Australian Silver Koala coins feature the animal on the reverse and Elizabeth II on the obverse.
The drop bear is an imaginary creature in contemporary Australian folklore featuring a predatory, carnivorous version of the koala. This hoax animal is commonly spoken about in tall tales designed to scare tourists. While koalas are typically docile herbivores, drop bears are described as unusually large and vicious marsupials that inhabit treetops and attack unsuspecting people (or other prey) that walk beneath them by dropping onto their heads from above.
Koala diplomacy
Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, visited the Koala Park Sanctuary in Sydney in 1934 and was "intensely interested in the bears". His photograph, with Noel Burnet, the founder of the park, and a koala, appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald. After World War II, when tourism to Australia increased and the animals were exported to zoos overseas, the koala's international popularity rose. Several political leaders and members of royal families had their pictures taken with koalas, including Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Harry, Crown Prince Naruhito, Crown Princess Masako, Pope John Paul II, US President Bill Clinton, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and South African President Nelson Mandela
At the 2014 G20 Brisbane summit, hosted by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, many world leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Barack Obama were photographed holding koalas. The event gave rise to the term "koala diplomacy", which then became the Oxford Word of the Month for December 2016.
The term also includes the loan of koalas by the Australian government to overseas zoos in countries such as Singapore and Japan, as a form of "soft power diplomacy", in a manner similar to the "panda diplomacy" practised by China.
Conservation issues
The koala was originally classified as Least Concern on the Red List, and reassessed as Vulnerable in 2014. In the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Queensland, the species was listed under the EPBC Act in February 2022 as endangered by extinction. The described population was determined in 2012 to be "a species for the purposes of the EPBC Act 1999" in Federal legislation.
Australian policymakers had declined a 2009 proposal to include the koala in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. In 2012, the Australian government listed koala populations in Queensland and New South Wales as Vulnerable, because of a 40% population decline in the former and a 33% decline in the latter. A 2017 WWF report found a 53% decline per generation in Queensland, and a 26% decline in New South Wales. The koala population in South Australia and Victoria and appear to be abundant; however, the Australian Koala Foundation (AKF) argued that the exclusion of Victorian populations from protective measures was based on a misconception that the total koala population was 200,000, whereas they believed in 2012 that it was probably less than 100,000. AKF estimated in 2022 that there could be as few as 43,000 individuals. This is compared with 8 to 10 million at the start of the 20th century.
The koala was heavily hunted by European settlers in the early 20th century, largely for its thick, soft fur. More than two million pelts are estimated to have left Australia by 1924. Pelts were in demand for use in rugs, coat linings, muffs, and as trimming on women's garments. The first successful efforts at conserving the species were initiated by the establishment of Brisbane's Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary and Sydney's Koala Park Sanctuary in the 1920s and 1930s. The owner of the latter park, Noel Burnet, became the first to successfully breed koalas and earned a reputation as the foremost contemporary authority on the marsupial.
One of the biggest anthropogenic threats to the koala is habitat destruction and fragmentation. In coastal areas, the main cause of this is urbanisation, while in rural areas, habitat is cleared for agriculture. Native forest trees are also taken down to be made into wood products. In 2000, Australia ranked fifth in the world by deforestation rates, having cleared . The distribution of the koala has shrunk by more than 50% since European arrival, largely due to fragmentation of habitat in Queensland. Nevertheless, koalas live in many protected areas.
While urbanisation can pose a threat to koala populations, the animals can survive in urban areas provided enough trees are present. Urban populations have distinct vulnerabilities: collisions with vehicles and attacks by domestic dogs. To reduce road deaths, government agencies have been exploring various wildlife crossing options, such as the use of fencing to channel animals toward an underpass, in some cases adding a ledge as walkway to an existing culvert. Dogs kill about 4,000 animals every year. Injured koalas are often taken to wildlife hospitals and rehabilitation centres. In a 30-year retrospective study performed at a New South Wales koala rehabilitation centre, trauma (usually resulting from a motor vehicle accident or dog attack) was found to be the most frequent cause of admission, followed by symptoms of Chlamydia infection.
See also
Fauna of Australia
List of monotremes and marsupials of Australia
Sam (koala), a female koala known for being rescued during the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009
References
External links
Arkive – images and movies of the koala Phascolarctos cinereus
Animal Diversity Web – Phascolarctos cinereus
iNaturalist crowdsourced koala sighting photos (mapped, graphed)
Koala Science Community
"Koala Crunch Time" – an ABC documentary (2012)
"Koalas deserve full protection"
Cracking the Koala Code – a PBS Nature documentary (2012)
The Aussie Koala Ark Conservation Project
Articles containing video clips
Clawed herbivores
Extant Middle Pleistocene first appearances
Herbivorous mammals
Mammals described in 1817
Mammals of New South Wales
Mammals of Queensland
Mammals of South Australia
Mammals of Victoria (Australia)
Marsupials of Australia
Vombatiforms | [
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17147 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer%20micro | Killer micro | A killer micro is a microprocessor-based machine that infringes on mini, mainframe, or supercomputer performance turf. It originally referred to the replacement of vector supercomputers built with bipolar technology by Massively Parallel Processors (MPP) assembled from a larger number of lower performing microprocessors. These systems faced initial skepticism, based on the assumption that applications do not have significant parallelism, because of Amdahl's law, but the success of early systems such as nCUBE and the fast progress in microprocessor performance following Moore's law led to a fast replacement.
Taken from the title of Eugene Brooks' (of Lawrence Livermore Lab) talk "Attack of the Killer Micros" at Supercomputing 1990. This title was probably chosen after the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes cult film.
References
External links
The Attack of the 'Killer Micros'
Microcomputers
Supercomputers | [
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17148 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer%20poke | Killer poke | In computer jargon, a killer poke is a method of inducing physical hardware damage on a machine or its peripherals by the insertion of invalid values, via, for example, BASIC's POKE command, into a memory-mapped control register. The term is typically used to describe a family of fairly well known tricks that can overload the analog electronics in the CRT monitors of computers lacking hardware sanity checking (notable examples being the IBM Portable and Commodore PET.)
Specific examples
Commodore PET
The PET-specific killer poke is connected to the architecture of that machine's video rasterizer circuits. In early PETs, writing a certain value to the memory address of a certain I/O register (POKE 59458,62) made the machine able to display text on the screen much faster. When the PET range was revamped with updated hardware, it was discovered that performing the old trick on the new hardware led to strange behavior by the new video chip, which could cause signal contention and possibly damage the PET's integrated CRT monitor. However this is not known to have ever caused any permanent damage to the monitor.
Commodore 1541 Disk Drive
The Commodore 64 had an optional external 5-1/4" floppy drive. The Commodore 1541 contained a 6502 microprocessor which was used to run Commodore DOS and also to manage the drive mechanism. The drives stored data on 40 tracks (#0–39), and the stepper motor could be manually controlled through BASIC by PRINT#-ing "MEMORY-WRITE" commands to the drive (which correspond to the POKE command of BASIC, but write to the drive's internal memory and I/O registers, not those of the computer itself). If the drive was at either end of its range (track 0 or track 39) and it was commanded to continue moving, there was no software or firmware method to prevent drive damage. Continued "knocking" of the drive head against the stop would throw the mechanism out of alignment. The problem was exacerbated by copy protection techniques that used non-standard disk formats with unusual track counts. The Commodore 1571 had an optical head stop instead of a mechanical one.
TRS-80 Model III
The TRS-80 Model III had the ability to switch between a 32-character-wide display and a 64-character display. Doing so actuated a relay in the video hardware, accomplished by writing to a specific memory-mapped control register. Programs that repeatedly switched between 32- and 64-character modes at high speed (either on purpose or accidentally) could permanently damage the video hardware. While this is not a single "killer poke", it demonstrates a software failure mode that could permanently damage the hardware.
Cassette tape relay
The TRS-80 Color Computer, IBM PC, IBM PCjr, Nascom, MSX, Amstrad CPC, and BBC Micro from Acorn Computers all contained a built-in relay for controlling an external tape recorder. Toggling the motor control relay in a tight loop would reduce the relay's longevity.
Commodore Amiga
The floppy drive of the Commodore Amiga personal computer could be made to produce noises of various pitches by making the drive heads move back and forth. A program existed which could play El Cóndor Pasa, more or less correctly, on the Amiga's floppy drive. As some sounds relied on the head assembly hitting the stop, this gradually sent the head out of alignment.
LG CD-ROM drives
Certain models of LG CD-ROM drives with specific firmware used an abnormal command for "update firmware": the "clear buffer" command usually used on CD-RW drives. Linux uses this command to tell the difference between CD-ROM and CD-RW drives. Most CD-ROM drives dependably return an error for the unsupported CD-RW command, but the faulty drives interpreted it as "update firmware", causing them to stop working (or, in casual parlance, to be "bricked").
MSi Laptops UEFI
Systemd mounts variables used by Unified Extensible Firmware Interface on Linux system's sysfs as writable by the root user of a system. As a result, it is possible for the root user of a system to completely brick a system with a non-conforming UEFI implementation (specifically some MSi laptops) by using the rm command to delete the /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ directory, or recursively delete the root directory.
Game Boy
The Game Boy's LCD screen can be turned off by game software. Doing so outside of the vertical blanking interval can allegedly damage the hardware.
Dragon 32
The Dragon 32 CPU clock speed was defined by a programmable clock divider which could be programmed by the user to increase the CPU speed by 50% or 100% and theoretically, 150% (though selecting this speed caused the system to crash.) The installed CPU, the 6809E was originally rated at 1Mhz with the Dragon 32 running at 0.89Mhz. A speed uplift to 1.33Mhz appeared mostly stable whereas an uplift to 1.78Mhz would cause video sync to be lost. It was publicised at the time that the increased heat produced by the speed increase would eventually damage the CPU. POKE 65495, 0 allowed for double speed with graphics still displayed properly. POKE 65497, 0 lost video sync.
See also
HCF (Halt and Catch Fire)
Pentium F00F bug
Scratch monkey
Stuxnet, malware designed to cause physical wear in industrial centrifuges
Bricking, the act of misconfiguring a device so as to make it cease functioning
CIH (computer virus)
References
External links
Commodore PET killer poke discussion
Computer jargon
Hardware bugs
Denial-of-service attacks | [
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17149 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill%20file | Kill file | A kill file (also killfile, bozo bin or twit list) is a file used by some Usenet reading programs to discard articles matching some unwanted patterns of subject, author, or other header lines. Adding a person or subject to one's kill file means that person or topic will be ignored by one's newsreader in the future. By extension, the term may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in other media.
Kill files were first implemented in Larry Wall's rn. Sometimes more than one kill file will be used. Some newsreader programs also allow the user to specify a time period to keep an author in the kill file.
Newer newsreader software like Gnus often provides a more advanced form of filter known as a score file, which can use multiple rules to determine which articles are shown. Web-based forums usually have a similar feature called an ignore list, which hides any posts by a specific user.
History
Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1986 of his wish for improvements to an offline reader for the Byte Information Exchange online service: "What I really need, though, is a program that will ... sort through the messages, assigning some to a priority file and others to the bit bucket depending on subject matter and origin".
Media
In William Gibson's novel Idoru, the virtual community Hak Nam is built around an "inverted killfile" and is modeled on Kowloon Walled City.
See also
Circular File
Email filtering
Shadow banning
Usenet Death Penalty
References
External links
Kill file entry in the Jargon File
Kill file definition entry at NewsDemon.com
Usenet | [
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17151 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobaud | Kilobaud | Kilobaud may refer to:
One thousand baud
P.H.I.R.M., a 1980s computer hacking group originally known as Kilobaud
Kilobaud Microcomputing, a homebrew computer magazine from the 1980s | [
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17152 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobit | Kilobit | The kilobit is a multiple of the unit bit for digital information or computer storage. The prefix kilo- (symbol k) is defined in the International System of Units (SI) as a multiplier of 103 (1 thousand), and therefore,
1 kilobit = = 1000 bits.
The kilobit has the unit symbol kbit or kb.
Using the common byte size of 8 bits, 1 kbit is equal to 125 bytes.
The kilobit is commonly used in the expression of data rates of digital communication circuits as kilobits per second (kbit/s or kb/s), or abbreviated as kbps, as in, for example, a 56 kbps PSTN circuit, or a 512 kbit/s broadband Internet connection.
The unit symbol kb (lowercase 'b') is typographically similar to the international standard unit symbol for the kilobyte, i.e. kB (upper case 'B'). The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) recommends the symbol bit instead of b. The prefix kilo- is often used in fields of computer science and information technology with a meaning of multiplication by 1024 instead of 1000, contrary to international standards, in conjunction with the base unit byte and bit, in which case it is to be written as Ki-, with a capital letter K, e.g., 1 Kibit = 1024 bits. The decimal SI definition, 1 kbit/s = 1000 bit/s, is used uniformly in the context of telecommunication transmission speeds.
The kilobit is closely related to the much less used kibibit, a unit multiple derived from the binary prefix kibi- (symbol Ki) of the same order of magnitude, which is equal to = 1024 bits, or approximately 2% larger than the kilobit. Despite the definitions of these new prefixes, meant for binary-based quantities of storage by international standards organizations, memory semiconductor chips are still marketed using the metric prefix names to designate binary multiples.
See also
Data-rate units
Orders of magnitude (data)
SI prefix
References
Units of information | [
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17154 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit%20Carson | Kit Carson | Christopher Houston Carson (December 24, 1809 – May 23, 1868) was an American frontiersman. He was a fur trapper, wilderness guide, Indian agent, and U.S. Army officer. He became a frontier legend in his own lifetime by biographies and news articles, and exaggerated versions of his exploits were the subject of dime novels. His understated nature belied confirmed reports of his fearlessness, combat skills, tenacity, and profound effect on the westward expansion of the United States. Although he was famous for much of his life, historians in later years have written that Kit Carson did not like, want, or even fully understand the celebrity that he experienced during his life.
Carson left home in rural Missouri at 16 to become a mountain man and trapper in the West. In the 1830s, he accompanied Ewing Young on an expedition to Mexican California and joined fur-trapping expeditions into the Rocky Mountains. He lived among and married into the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes.
In the 1840s, Carson was hired as a guide by John C. Frémont, whose expeditions covered much of California, Oregon, and the Great Basin area. Frémont mapped and wrote reports and commentaries on the Oregon Trail to assist and encourage westward-bound pioneers, and Carson achieved national fame through those accounts. Under Frémont's command, Carson participated in the conquest of California from Mexico at the beginning of the Mexican–American War. Later in the war, Carson was a scout and courier who was celebrated for his rescue mission after the Battle of San Pasqual and for his coast-to-coast journey from California to Washington, DC to deliver news of the conflict in California to the government. In the 1850s, he was appointed as the Indian agent to the Ute Indians and the Jicarilla Apaches.
During the American Civil War, Carson led a regiment of mostly Hispanic volunteers from New Mexico on the side of the Union at the Battle of Valverde in 1862. When the Confederate threat was eliminated in New Mexico, Carson led forces to suppress the Navajo, Mescalero Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes by destroying their food sources. He was breveted a Brigadier General and took command of Fort Garland, Colorado. He was there only briefly, as poor health forced him to retire from military life.
Carson was married three times and had ten children. He died at Fort Lyon of an aortic aneurysm on May 23, 1868. He is buried in Taos, New Mexico next to his third wife, Josefa.
During the late nineteenth century, Kit Carson became a legendary symbol of America's frontier experience, which influenced twentieth century erection of statues and monuments, public events and celebrations, imagery by Hollywood, and the naming of geographical places. In recent years, Kit Carson has also become a symbol of the United States' mistreatment of its indigenous peoples.
Early life (1809–1829)
Christopher Houston Carson was born on December 24, 1809, near Richmond, Madison County, Kentucky. His parents were Lindsay Carson and his second wife, Rebecca Robinson. Lindsay had five children by his first wife, Lucy Bradley, and ten more children by Rebecca. Lindsay Carson had a Scots-Irish Presbyterian background (there is no evidence of this). He was a farmer, a cabin builder, and a veteran of the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. He fought Indians on the American frontier and lost two fingers on his left hand in a battle with the Fox and Sauk Indians.
The Christmas Eve occasion of Christopher "Kit" Houston Carson's birth was an interesting experience. Captain Christopher Houston and his family had an annual family tradition to celebrate Christmas by having a party at their fashionable home in Hunting Creek, Houstonville. In addition to their own family, the Houstons would always invite friends and close neighbors. It was to that occasion that Lindsay and Rebecca Carson were invited. Lindsay's wife, Rebecca, was expecting the imminent birth of their sixth child. Early in the evening, the hostess, Mrs. Sarah Houston noticed that Rebecca Carson seemed to be in some distress and knowing of her expectant child, she took Rebecca upstairs where she could be in a more comforting environment and attended by a helpful attendant, a woman who was an African-American slave. It was not long until the sound of a new pair of strong lungs sounded out the alarm that a new child had been born to Lindsay and Rebecca Carson. The new mother and father decided quickly their son should be named Christopher Houston Carson after Captain Christopher Houston, and because of his small size, to give him the nickname "Kit."
The Carson family moved to Boone's Lick, Howard County, Missouri, when Kit was about one year old. The family settled on a tract of land owned by the sons of Daniel Boone, who had purchased the land from the Spanish. The Boone and Carson families became good friends and worked and socialized together and intermarried. Lindsay's oldest son, William, married Boone's grand-niece, Millie Boone, in 1810. Their daughter Adaline became Kit's favorite playmate.
Missouri was then the frontier of American westward expansionism; cabins were "forted" with tall stockade fences to defend against Indian attacks. As men worked in the fields, sentries were posted with weapons to protect the farmers. Carson wrote in his Memoirs, "For two or three years after our arrival, we had to remain forted and it was necessary to have men stationed at the extremities of the fields for the protection of those that were laboring."
In 1818, Lindsay Carson died instantly when a tree limb fell on him while he was clearing a field. Kit was about eight years old. Despite being penniless, his mother took care of her children alone for four years. She then married Joseph Martin, a widower with several children. Kit was a young teenager and did not get along with his stepfather. The decision was made to apprentice him to David Workman, a saddler in Franklin, Missouri. Kit wrote in his Memoirs that Workman was "a good man, and I often recall the kind treatment I received."
Franklin was situated at the eastern end of the Santa Fe Trail, which had opened two years earlier. Many of the customers at the saddle shop were trappers and traders from whom Carson heard stirring tales of the West. Carson found work in the saddlery not to his taste: he once stated that "the business did not suit me, and I concluded to leave."
Santa Fe Trail
In August 1826, against his mother's wishes, Kit ran away from his apprenticeship. He went west with a caravan of fur trappers and tended their livestock. They made their trek over the Santa Fe Trail to Santa Fe, the capital of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, reaching their destination in November 1826. He settled in Taos.
Carson lived with Mathew Kinkead, a trapper and explorer who had served with Carson's older brothers during the War of 1812. Carson was mentored by Kinkead in learning the skills of a trapper and learning the necessary languages for trade. Eventually, he became fluent in Spanish and several Indian languages.
Workman put an advertisement in a local newspaper back in Missouri. He wrote that he would give a one-cent reward to anyone who brought the boy back to Franklin. No one claimed the reward. It was a bit of a joke, but Carson was free. The advertisement featured the first printed description of Carson: "Christopher Carson, a boy about 16 years old, small of his age, but thick set; light hair, ran away from the subscriber, living in Franklin, Howard county, Missouri, to whom he had been bound to learn the saddler's trade."
Between 1827 and 1829, Carson worked as cook, translator, and wagon driver in the southwest. He also worked at a copper mine near the Gila River, in southwestern New Mexico. In later life, Carson never mentioned any women from his youth. There are only three specific women mentioned in his writing: Josefa Jaramillo, his third and last wife; a comrade's mother in Washington, DC; and Mrs. Ann White, killed by Indians after the White massacre.
Mountain man (1829–1841)
At the age of 19, Carson began his career as a mountain man. He traveled through many parts of the American West with famous mountain men like Jim Bridger and Old Bill Williams. He spent the winter of 1828–1829 as a cook for Ewing Young in Taos. He joined Young's trapping expedition of 1829. The leadership of Young and the experience of the venture are credited with shaping Carson's early life in the mountains.
In August 1829, the party went into Apache territory along the Gila River. The expedition was attacked, which was Carson's first experience of combat. Young's party continued on to Alta California; trapped and traded in California from Sacramento in the north to Los Angeles in the south; and returned to Taos, New Mexico, in April 1830 after it had trapped along the Colorado River.
Carson joined a wagon train rescue party after entering Taos, and although the perpetrators had fled the scene of atrocities, Young had the opportunity to witness Carson's horsemanship and courage. Carson joined another expedition, led by Thomas Fitzpatrick and William Levin, in 1831. Fitzpatrick, Levin, and his trappers went north to the central Rocky Mountains. Carson would hunt and trap in the West for about ten years. He was known as a reliable man and a good fighter.
Life for Carson as a mountain man was not easy. After collecting beavers from traps, he had to hold onto them for months at a time until the annual Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, held in remote areas of the West like the banks of the Green River in Wyoming. With the money received for the pelts, the necessities of an independent life, including fish hooks, flour and tobacco, were procured. As there was little or no medical access in the varied regions in which he worked, Carson had to dress his wounds and nurse himself. Conflict with Indians sometimes occurred. Carson's primary clothing was then deer skins that had stiffened after being left outdoors for a time. The suit offered some protection against weapons used by the Indians.
Grizzly bears were one of the mountain man's greatest enemies. An incident involving the animals happened to Carson in 1834 as he was hunting an elk alone. Two bears crossed paths with him and quickly chased him up a tree. One of the bears tried to make him fall by shaking the tree but was unsuccessful and eventually went away. Carson returned to his camp as fast as he could. He wrote in his Memoirs: "[The bear] finally concluded to leave, of which I was heartily pleased, never having been so scared in my life."
The last rendezvous was held in 1840. At that time, the fur trade began to drop off. Fashionable men in London, Paris, and New York City wanted silk hats, instead of beaver hats. In addition, beaver populations across North America were declining rapidly from overexploitation. Carson knew that it was time to find other work. He wrote in his Memoirs, "Beaver was getting scarce, it became necessary to try our hand at something else."
In 1841, he was hired at Bent's Fort, in Colorado, at the largest building on the Santa Fe Trail. Hundreds of people worked or lived there. Carson hunted buffalo, antelope, deer, and other animals to feed the people. He was paid one dollar a day. He returned to Bent's Fort several times during his life to provide meat for the fort's residents again.
Indian fighter
Carson was 19 when he set off with Ewing Young's expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1829. In addition to furs and the company of free-spirited, rugged mountain men, Carson sought action and adventure. He found what he was looking for in killing and scalping Indians. Carson probably killed and took the scalp of his first Indian when he was 19, during Ewing Young's expedition.
Carson's Memoirs are replete with stories about hostile Indian encounters with the memoirist. In January 1833, for example, warriors of the Crow tribe stole nine horses from Carson's camp. Carson and two other men sprayed the Crow camp with gunfire, killing most of the Crow. Carson wrote in his Memoirs, "During our pursuit for the lost animals, we suffered considerably but, the success of having recovered our horses and sending many a redskin to his long home, our sufferings were soon forgotten."
Carson viewed the Blackfoot nation as a hostile tribe and believed that it posed the greatest threat to his livelihood, safety, and life. He hated the Blackfeet and killed them at every opportunity. The historian David Roberts has written: "It was taken for granted that the Blackfeet were bad Indians; to shoot them whenever he could was a mountain man's instinct and duty."
Carson had several encounters with the Blackfoot. His last battle with the Blackfoot took place in spring 1838. He was traveling with about one hundred mountain men led by Jim Bridger. In Montana Territory, the group found a teepee with three Indian corpses inside. The three had died of smallpox. Bridger wanted to move on, but Carson and the other young men wanted to kill the Blackfoot. They found the Blackfoot village and killed ten Blackfoot warriors. The Blackfoot found some safety in a pile of rocks but were driven away. It is not known how many Blackfoot died in this incident. The historian David Roberts wrote that "if anything like pity filled Carson's breast as, in his twenty-ninth year, he beheld the ravaged camp of the Blackfoot, he did not bother to remember it." Carson wrote in his Memoirs that the battle was "the prettiest fight I ever saw."
Carson's notions about Indians softened over the years. He found himself more and more in their company as he grew older, and his attitude towards them became more respectful and humane. He urged the government to set aside lands called reservations for their use. As an Indian agent, he saw to it that those under his watch were treated with honesty and fairness and clothed and fed properly. The historian David Roberts believes his first marriage, to an Arapaho woman named Singing Grass, "softened the stern and pragmatic mountaineer's opportunism."
Expeditions with Frémont (1842–1848)
In April 1842, Carson went back to his childhood home in Missouri to put his daughter Adaline in the care of relatives. On the return trip, Carson met John C. Frémont aboard a steamboat on the Missouri River. Frémont was a US Army officer in the Corps of Topographical Engineers who was about to lead an expedition into the West. After a brief conversation, Frémont hired Carson as a guide at $100 a month. It was the best-paying job of Carson's life. Frémont wrote, "I was pleased with him and his manner of address at this first meeting. He was a man of medium height, broad-shouldered, and deep-chested, with a clear steady blue eye and frank speech and address; quiet and unassuming."
First expedition, 1842
In 1842, Carson guided Frémont across the Oregon Trail to South Pass, Wyoming. It was their first expedition into the West together. The purpose of this expedition was to map and describe the Oregon Trail as far as South Pass. A guidebook, maps, and other paraphernalia would be printed for westward-bound migrants and settlers. After the five-month trouble-free mission was accomplished, Frémont wrote his government reports, which made Carson's name known across the United States, and spurred a migration of settlers westward to Oregon via the Oregon Trail.
Second expedition, 1843
In 1843, Carson agreed to join Frémont's second expedition. Carson guided Frémont across part of the Oregon Trail to the Columbia River in Oregon. The purpose of the expedition was to map and describe the Oregon Trail from South Pass, Wyoming, to the Columbia River. They also sidetripped to Great Salt Lake in Utah by using a rubber raft to navigate the waters. On the way to California, the party suffered from bad weather in the Sierra Nevada Mountains but was saved by Carson's good judgement and his skills as a guide and found American settlers who fed them. The expedition then headed to California, which was illegal and dangerous because California was Mexican territory. The Mexican government ordered Frémont to leave. Frémont finally went back to Washington, DC. The government liked his reports but ignored his illegal trip into Mexico. Frémont was made a captain. The newspapers nicknamed him "The Pathfinder."
During the expedition, Frémont trekked into the Mojave Desert. His party met a Mexican man and boy, who both told Carson that Native Americans had ambushed their party of travelers. The male travelers were killed; the women travelers were staked to the ground, sexually mutilated, and killed. The murderers then stole the Mexicans' 30 horses. Carson and a mountain man friend, Alexis Godey, went after the murderers. They took two days to find them. Both rushed into their camp and killed and scalped two of the murderers. The stolen horses were recovered and returned to the Mexican man and boy. That deed brought Carson even greater fame and confirmed his status as a western hero in the eyes of the American people.
Third expedition, 1845
In 1845, Carson guided Frémont on their third expedition (there would be a fourth but without Carson). From Westport Landing, Missouri, they crossed the Rockies, passed the Great Salt Lake, and down the Humboldt River to the Sierra Nevada of California and Oregon. Frémont made scientific plans, included artist Edward Kern to his corps, but from the outset the expedition appeared to be political in nature. Frémont may have been working under secret government orders since US President Polk wanted Alta California for the United States. Once in California, Frémont started to rouse the American settlers into a patriotic fervor. The Mexican General Jose Castro at Monterey ordered him to leave. On Gavilan Mountain Frémont erected a makeshift fort and raised the American Flag in defiance before departing north. The party moved into the Sacramento River Valley past Mount Shasta, surveying into Oregon, fighting Indians along the way, and camped near Klamath Lake. Near here, a messenger from Washington, DC, caught up with Fremont and made it clear that Polk wanted California.
On 30 March 1846, while traveling north along the Sacramento Valley, Fremont's party met Americans who claimed that a group of Native Americans was planning to attack settlers. Frémont's party set about searching for Native Americans. On April 5 1846, Frémont's party spotted a Wintu village and launched an unprovoked attack, resulting in the deaths of approximately 120 to 300 men, women, and children and the displacement of many more in what is known as the Sacramento River massacre.
Carson, later stated that "It was a perfect butchery."
At Klamath Lake, in southern Oregon, Frémont's party was hit in a revenge attack by 15–20 Indians on the night of May 9, 1846. Two or three men in camp were killed. The attackers fled after a brief struggle. Carson was angry that his friends had been killed. He took an ax and avenged the death of his friends by chopping away at a dead Indian's face. Frémont wrote, "He knocked his head to pieces." In retaliation for the attack, a few days later Frémont's party massacred a village of Klamath people along the Williamson River during the Klamath Lake massacre. The entire village was razed and at least 14 people were killed. There was no evidence that the village in question had anything to do with the previous attack.
Bear Flag Revolt
In June 1846, Frémont and Carson participated in a California uprising against Mexico, the Bear Flag Revolt. Mexico ordered all Americans to leave California. American settlers in California wanted to be free of the Mexican government and declared California an independent republic. The American rebels found the courage to oppose Mexico because they had Frémont, who had written an oath of allegiance, and his troops behind them. Frémont and his men were able to give some protection to the Americans. He ordered Carson to execute an old Mexican man, José de los Reyes Berreyesa, and his two adult nephews, who had been captured when they stepped ashore at San Francisco Bay to prevent them from notifying Mexico about the uprising.
Frémont worked hard to win California for the United States, for a time fashioning himself as its military governor until he was replaced by General Kearney, who outranked him.
During 1846–1848, Carson served as courier traveling three times from California to the East and back. Frémont wrote, "This was a service of great trust and honor... and great danger also." In 1846, dispatched with military records for the Secretary of War in Washington, DC, Carson took the Gila Trail, but was met on the trail by General Kearney, who ordered him to hand his dispatches to others bound east, and return to California as his much needed guide. In early 1847, Carson was ordered east from California again with more dispatches for Washington, D.C., where he arrived by June. Returning to California via a short visit with his family in Taos, he followed the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. He was dispatched a third time as government courier leaving Los Angeles May 1848 via the Old Spanish Trail and reached Washington, D.C. with important military messages, which included official report of the discovery of gold in California.
Newspapers reported on Carson's travels with some exaggeration, including that he had been killed by plains Indians in July 1848. Lt. George Brewerton accompanied Carson on part of this trip and published in Harper's Magazine (1853) an account that added to Kit's now growing celebrity status. In 1848, as his fame grew, a Baltimore hat maker offered a "Kit Carson Cap", "after the unique style of the domestic one worn by that daring pioneer". A new steamboat, named the Kit Carson, was built for the Mississippi-Ohio river trade, "with qualities of great speed. At the St. Louis Jockey Club, one could bet on a horse, "as swift as the wind", named "Kit Carson".
Mexican–American War (1846–1848)
Lasting from 1846 to 1848, the Mexican–American War was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico. After the war, Mexico was forced to sell the territories of Alta California and New Mexico to the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
One of Carson's best-known adventures took place during this war. In December 1846, Carson was ordered by General Stephen W. Kearny to guide him and his troops from Socorro, New Mexico, to San Diego, California. Mexican soldiers attacked Kearny and his men near the village of San Pasqual, California.
Kearny was outnumbered. He knew that he could not win and so ordered his men to take cover on a small hill. On the night of December 8, Carson, a naval lieutenant, Edward Fitzgerald Beale, and an Indian scout left Kearny to bring reinforcements from San Diego, away. Carson and the lieutenant removed their shoes because they made too much noise and walked barefoot through the desert. Carson wrote in his Memoirs, "Finally got through, but had the misfortune to lose our shoes. Had to travel over a country covered with prickly pear and rocks, barefoot."
By December 10, Kearny believed that reinforcements would not arrive. He planned to break through the Mexican lines the next morning, but 200 mounted American soldiers arrived in San Pasqual late that night. They swept the area driving the Mexicans away. Kearny was in San Diego on December 12.
Ranching, family life, and herding sheep (1848–1853)
After the Mexican-American War transferred California and New Mexico to the United States, Carson returned to Taos to attempt to transition into a career as businessman and rancher. He developed a small rancho at Rayado, east of Taos, and raised beef. He brought his daughter Adaline from Missouri to join Josefa and the family in a period where family life settled the frontiersman. Josefa loved to sew, and he bought her an early sewing machine, one of the first Singer models, a resourceful tool for their expanding family. She managed the household, in the tradition of the Hispanic women of New Mexico, while he continued shorter travels. In the summer of 1850, he sold a herd of horses to the military, delivered at Ft. Laramie, Wyoming. The following year, he took wagons on a trading expedition to Missouri and back along the Santa Fe Trail. In 1852, for old times sake, he and a few of the veteran trappers made a loop trapping expedition through Colorado and Wyoming.
In mid-1853, Carson left New Mexico with 7,000 thin legged churro sheep for the California Trail across Wyoming, Utah, Nevada into California. He was taking them to settlers in northern California and southern Oregon. Carson had with him six "Spaniards," experienced New Mexicans from the haciendas of the Rio Abajo to herd the sheep. Upon his arrival in Sacramento, he was surprised to learn of his elevation, again, to a hero of the Conquest of California; over the rest of his life he would be embarrassingly recognized as a celebrated frontiersman, an image developed by publications of varied accuracy.
Books and dime novels (1847–1859)
Carson's fame spread throughout the United States with government reports, dime novels, newspaper accounts, and word of mouth. The first accounts of Kit published for popular audiences were extracts from Fremont's explorations reports as reprinted in period newspapers. Fremont's journals appeared in the early 1840s, as modified by Jesse Benton Fremont into romantic accounts of the uncharted West. Newspapers throughout the US and England reprinted excerpts about wild tales of buffalo hunts, vast new landscapes, and indigenous peoples. Kit's heroics enlivened the pages. In June 1847, Jesse Benton Fremont helped Kit prepare a brief autobiography, the first, published as an interview in the Washington, D.C. Union, and reprinted by newspapers across the country.
Charles E. Averill (1830–1852), 'the youthful novelist," published a magazine article for Holden's Dollar Magazine, April 1848, that he expanded into a novel advertised as Kit Carson, the Prince of the Gold Hunters; or the Adventures of the Sacramento; a Tale of the New Eldorado, Founded on Actual Facts, an even more fantastic tale exploiting Kit's rising fame. It arrived on bookstore shelves by May 1849, in time for the California Gold Rush demand for narratives (fictional or not) on the trail to California. Averill's pioneers are in awe of Carson: "Kit Carson!...the famous hunter and adventurer of the Great West, the hardy explorer of the trackless wilderness…the prince of backwoodsmen" arrives to guide them. When later asked about the book, Kit Carson said "every statement made [by Averill] is false."
Similarly, Emerson Bennett (1822–1905), a prolific novelist of sensational romances, wrote an overland trail account where fictional Kit Carson joins a California bound wagon train. Arriving in bookstores in January 1849, his The Prairie Flower, or Adventures in the Far West exploited the Kit myth, and, like Averill, quickly followed with a sequel. In each novel, the Westering immigrants are in awe of the famous Kit Carson. Both novelists sensationalized fictional Kit as "Indian fighter," with gruesome trashy accounts as "red-skins" "bite the dust" (Averill, Gold Hunter). For example, of one victim, Averill wrote, "blood gushed in a copious stream from his nostrils"; while Bennett wrote "Kit Carson, like an embodied spirit of battle, thundered past me on his powerful charger, and bending forward in his saddle, with a motion quick as lightning itself, seized the scalp lock of my antagonist in one hand, and with the other completely severed his head from his body, which he bore triumphantly away" (Bennett, Prairie Flower, p. 64). The novelists' gruesome, gory and sensationalized woolly West descriptions would keep readers turning the pages, and buying more bucket-of-blood fictional accounts of Carson, especially during the coming age of dime novels.
Indian captive Mrs. Ann White
Kit Carson's reaction to his depiction in these first novels is suggested by the account of events around the fate of Mrs. Ann White. In 1849, as he moved to civilian life at Taos and Rayado, Carson was asked to guide soldiers on the trail of Mrs. Ann White, her baby daughter, and "negro servant," who had been captured by Jicarilla Apaches and Utes. The commanding officer, Captain William Grier of the 1st Cavalry Regiment, ignored Carson's advice about an immediate rescue attempt after catching the Jicarillas unaware, but after a shot was fired, the order was given to attack, and the Jicarillas had started to flee. As Carson describes it in his autobiography, "In about 200 yards, pursuing the Indians, the body of Mrs. White was found, perfectly warm, had not been killed more than five minutes - shot through the heart by an arrow.... I am certain that if the Indians had been charged immediately on our arrival she would have been saved." Her child and servant were taken away by the fleeing Jicarillas and killed shortly after the attack, according to a 1850 report by James S. Calhoun, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New Mexico.
A soldier in the rescue party wrote: "Mrs. White was a frail, delicate, and very beautiful woman, but having undergone such usage as she suffered nothing but a wreck remained; it was literally covered with blows and scratches. Her countenance even after death indicated a hopeless creature. Over her corpse, we swore vengeance upon her persecutors."
Carson discovered a fictional book, possibly by Averill, about himself in the Apache camp. He wrote in his Memoirs: "In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds, and I have often thought that Mrs. White would read the same, and knowing that I lived near, she would pray for my appearance and that she would be saved." The real Kit Carson had met the fictional Kit Carson and was deeply upset at his inability to have saved Mrs. White, for he had failed to live up to the growing myth around himself. He was sorry for the rest of his life that he had not rescued Mrs. White; the dime-novel Kit would have saved her.
Memoirs
In 1854, Lt. Brewerton encouraged Kit Carson to send him a sketch of his life, and offered to polish it into a book. Carson dictated a "memoir" of some 33,000 words over the next few years, but moved on to another collaborator. Friend Jesse B. Turley was engaged in late 1856 to help Kit prepare the memoir and after a year's work sent the rough manuscript to a New York publisher. In 1858, Dr. DeWitte Clinton Peters (1829–1876), a U. S. Army surgeon who had met Kit in Taos, acquired the manuscript and with Charles Hatch Smith (1829–1882), a Brooklyn lawyer turned music teacher, sometime preacher, and author(of his books, one critic wrote: "not by any means a second Bulwer or Thackeray") rewrote it for publication. The biography was titled Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself. When the book was read to Carson, he said, "Peters laid it on a leetle too thick." Originally offered by subscription by Smith's publisher, W. R. C. Clark & Co., New York City, it quickly earned rave reviews, not for its prose but its subject matter. The first run, a pricey $2.50 gilt edition or $4 antiqued copy, included a note signed (maybe) by Carson authenticating the story and the authorization given Dr. Peters for the work. The Peters (with the help of Smith) biography had expanded the slim Memoirs by five times (to 534 pages), with much edited in filler, moralizing, and tedium. A cheaper edition was published in 1859, followed by two imitations that stole the market. In 1860, Charles Burdett, "a writer of no particular distinction," wrote a biography based on the Dr. Peters work, published as The Life of Kit Carson, the Great Western Hunter. The great house of inexpensive novels and questionable nonfiction, Beadle's Dime Library, in 1861, brought out The Life and Times of Kit Carson, the Rocky Mountain Scout and Guide by Edward S. Ellis, one of the stable of writers used by the firm. A popular, shorter work, it also used the Dr. Peters biography, which itself Peters revised in 1874 to bring the biography up to Carson's 1868 death. It is unknown if Carson profited from any of these publications based on his memoirs.
In 1905, among the estate of Dr. Peter's son in Paris, was located the original Kit Carson memoir. This was published with little comment in 1926, followed by a revised or "polished" version in 1935, and, finally, in 1968, a solidly annotated edition edited by Harvey Lewis Carter, who had cleared up much of the background about the manuscript. Kit Carson's memoir is the most important source about his life, to 1858, but as Carter notes, Kit was too brief, had lapses in memory, and his chronology was fallible. One frustrated author wrote of the Carson memoir that it "is as skinny as a hairless Chihuahua dog and as bald of details as a white egg."
Dime novels
During the last half of the nineteenth century inexpensive novels and pseudo-nonfiction met the need of readers looking for entertainment. Among the major publishing firms was the house of Beadle, opened 1860. One study, "Kit Carson and Dime Novels, the Making of a Legend" by Darlis Miller, notes some 70 dime novels about Kit were either published, re-published with new titles, or incorporated into new works over the period 1860–1901. The usual blood-and-thunder tales exploited Kit Carson's name to sell copies. When competition threatened the house of Beadle, a word-smith said they "just kill more Indians" per page to increase sales. Skewed images of the personalities and place are exemplified by the Beadle title: Kiowa Charley, The White Mustanger; or, Rocky Mountain Kit's Last Scalp Hunt (1879) in which an older Kit is said to have "ridden into Sioux camps unattended and alone, had ridden out again, but with the scalps of their greatest warriors at his belt." Edward Ellis, biographer of Kit, wrote under the pseudonym of J. F. C. Adams The Fighting Trapper or Kit Carson to the Rescue (1879), another lurid work without any hint of reality.
By the 1880s, the shoot-em-up gunslinger was replacing the frontiersman tales, but of those in the new generation, one critic notes, "where Kit Carson had been represented as slaying hundreds of Indians, the [new] dime novel hero slew his thousands, with one hand tied behind him." The dime novel's impact was the blurring of the real Kit Carson by creating a mythic character. In fiction, according to historian of literature Richard Etulain, "the small, wiry Kit Carson becomes a ring-tailed roarer, a gigantic Samson…a strong-armed demigods [who] could be victorious and thus pave the way for western settlement."
Indian Agent (1854–1861)
Between January 1854 and May 1861, Kit Carson served as one of the first Federal Indian Agents in the Far West. He sold his interest in the Rayado ranch and opened an office in a room of his Taos home, gratis—the office would be perpetually underfunded. He was responsible for the Maoche Ute people, Jicarilla Apache, and Taos Pueblo in a vast expanse of northern New Mexico Territory (which then included southwest Colorado). His duties were broad and insurmountable: "prevent conflict as far as possible, to persuade the Indians to submit to the government's will, and to solve problems arising from contact between Indians and whites."
The seven years as agent is probably the best documented of his life because of the correspondence, weekly and annual reports, and special filings required by the position (he had a private secretary because he could not write; some believe the secretary took the dictation also for his memoir). He summarized meetings with tribes, almost a daily occurrence when home, disputes over who stole whose cow, and the day to day effort to help with food, clothes and presents for tribes. He negotiated a halt of Plains tribes killing Taos Pueblo Indians desiring the traditional hunt of buffalo near Raton. Carson had the advantage of knowing at least fourteen Indian dialects as well as was a master of sign language.
One complex issue was captives. For example, captives stolen from Navajo by Ute were sold in the New Mexico settlements, or of a white child from central Texas settlements taken captive by Plains tribes then sold in New Mexico. As agent, Carson intervened.
Much of Carson's work as agent has been overlooked because of the focus on his mountain man explorer or blood and thunder image. This was a significant period for him as well as the region, which experienced a large folk migration of Hispanos into Indian lands, as well as the Colorado gold rush and its impact on the tribes. Carson's view of the best future for the nomadic Indian evolved. By the late 1850s, he recommended, to make way for the increasing number of white settlers, they should give up hunting and become herders and farmers, be provided with missionaries to Christianize them, and move onto reserves in their homeland but distant from settlements with their bad influence of ardent spirits, disease, and unscrupulous Hispanos and Anglos. Carson predicted, "If permitted to remain as they are, before many years they will be utterly extinct."
Military career (1861–1868)
In April 1861, when the American Civil War broke out, many officers from the South in the United States Army resigned their commissions and offered their services to the Confederate States of America or their home states. Some of those officers were then serving in New Mexico Territory and included James Longstreet and Richard S. Ewell, both of whom gained senior rank in the Army of Northern Virginia, and Henry Hopkins Sibley. Arriving in Richmond, Sibley persuaded President Jefferson Davis to appoint him a brigadier general and lead a brigade of mounted cavalry to conquer New Mexico Territory and possibly Colorado Territory, southern California and the northern parts of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua.
When Confederate forces captured southern New Mexico Territory. The Union military commander, Colonel Edward Canby, ordered the governor to call for volunteers to defend the territory. Carson resigned his position as agent to the Ute Indian Tribe and volunteered to defend the Territory. Mindful that Carson had experienced military discipline as an army scout under Fremont and, later, with General Stephen Kearny during the War with Mexico, the governor appointed Carson the Lieutenant Colonel of the First New Mexico Volunteer Infantry. During the summer of 1861, Carson worked to organize the regiment of approximately one thousand men, most of whom were from prominent Hispanic families, at Fort Union in northeast New Mexico Territory. On September 21, the regiment's colonel resigned, and Carson assumed command.
Action Against the Confederates
Canby had reservations about the fighting qualities of the volunteers and believed that his regular infantry were at a disadvantage in the vastness of New Mexico to the mounted Confederate cavalry. He decided to avoid fighting the Texans in the open field and strengthened the stone and adobe walls of his southern bastion, Fort Craig (about one hundred miles north of Mesilla. In January 1862, concluding that the Texans would invade northward up the Rio Grande River Valley, Canby consolidated most of his regular infantry and New Mexico volunteer regiments at Fort Craig. Following orders, Carson marched his First New Mexico regiment south from Albuquerque to form part of the fort's garrison.
On February 19, 1862, Carson led his regiment east across the Rio Grande to occupy high ground across from Fort Craig to protect the post from a Confederate turning move. The next day, Canby joined Carson's regiment with the bulk of the regulars. However, when Texan artillery fire panicked troops from the Second New Mexico Volunteers, Canby withdrew most of his force back to the fort. Carson and his regiment remained on the east bank of the Rio Grande to protect the left flank of the Union line.
Two days later, the Confederate force sought to cross the Rio Grande to the west bank at the Valverde ford, about six miles north of Fort Craig. Canby deployed regulars and Colorado volunteer units as his front line. He assigned Carson's regiment to a support position behind the regulars on the left and, later in the fight, the center of the Union line.
Later in the day, Carson crossed to the east side of the river toward the Confederates. He advanced his regiment four hundred yards along the right flank of the Union line until ordered to withdraw. After the day long battle, the Union force retreated to Fort Craig where Carson reported one enlisted man killed, one wounded, and eleven missing.
Following the Battle at Valverde, the Confederates moved north up the Rio Grande. In late March, Colorado volunteers destroyed the Confederate supply trains at the Battle at Glorieta Pass, necessitating that the Texans abandon their invasion of New Mexico Territory. Canby took the regulars north from Fort Craig to harass the retreating Confederates and herd them back to Texas. Carson and his regiment remained in Fort Craig. Although the starving Confederates passed a few miles to the west of the fort, Canby, seeing no need to risk a pitched battle with a defeated and retreating foe, did not order Carson to confront the Confederate column. Carson and his regiment remained in Fort Craig through the spring and summer of 1862.
Canby held Carson's regiment in reserve at the Battle at Valverde and assigned it and other New Mexico volunteer regiments to passively garrison Fort Craig while he used regulars and Colorado volunteer troops to herd the Texans out of the territory. He believed that the Hispanic volunteers would not stand up to the Texans in combat. Canby reported that the "people of the Territory, with few exceptions, I believe, are loyal, but they are apathetic in disposition," which explained their "tardiness" in volunteering. He contended that he could "place no reliance upon any volunteer force that can be raised, unless strongly supported by regular troops." Carson concurred. He co-signed a letter stating "that without the support and protection of the Regular Army of the United States they [New Mexicans] are entirely unable to protect the public property in the Territory or the lives of such officers, civil and military, as may be left among them after the withdrawal of the regular forces..."
Rounding Up the Mescalero Apaches
To confront the Texans, in 1861, Canby had consolidated his available force by pulling in the garrisons from posts built to control the Apache and Navajo Indians. When Canby ordered his troops to abandon Fort Stanton (about eighty miles east of Fort Craig) in August 1861, about two hundred of the approximately five hundred Mescalero Apache Indians were subsisting on rations distributed to them by the army. With those supplies no longer available, some of the nine bands of Mescalero Apache Indians began raiding ranches and communities near their homeland in the Capitan Mountains.
Brigadier General James Carleton, of the First California Volunteer Cavalry, succeeded Canby as military commander of the territory in the fall of 1862. He then sent Carson and five companies of his regiment to occupy and re-build Fort Stanton. Carleton's confidential orders of October 12, 1862 to Carson, in part, read:
All Indian men of that tribe [Mescalero Apache] are to be killed whenever and wherever you find them: the
women and children will not be harmed, but you will take them prisoners and feed them at Fort Stanton...
Carleton felt that "this severity in the long run will be the most humane course that could be pursued toward these Indians." He intended to re-settle the Mescalero Apache Indians from their traditional lands in the Capitan Mountains to a reservation along the Pecos River at Bosque Redondo, near present-day Fort Sumner. In Carleton's vision, the government would teach the hunting-and-gathering Mescalero bands the arts of agriculture thereby keeping them from marauding outside the reservation.
Before Carson arrived at Fort Stanton, Company H, commanded by Captain James Graydon, encountered a band of about thirty Mescalero Apache Indians under chiefs Manuelito and Jose Largo at Gallinas Springs on October 20, 1862. According to Major Arthur Morrison, Graydon "deceived" the Indians by offering them provisions and then shot and killed the two chiefs and nine others and wounded another twenty. Carson's inquiry into the matter came to naught when Graydon, months later, died of a wound received in a duel.
However, the shock of these killings, along with the fight between two companies of the First California Volunteer Cavalry from Fort Fillmore and a band of Apaches in Dog Canyon near Alamogordo, induced most of the surviving Mescalero chiefs to surrender to Carson. By March 1863, the army had settled the few hundred surviving Mescalero Apache Indians on Bosque Redondo near the newly built Fort Sumner. Perhaps a hundred of the Mescalero Apache Indians, such as the band led by Santana, either fled to Mexico or joined other Apache tribes to the west.
Campaign against Navajo
Carleton had chosen a bleak site on the Pecos River for his reservation, which was called Bosque Redondo (Round Grove). He chose the site for the Apaches and Navajos because it was far from white settlements. He also wanted the Apaches and Navajo to act as a buffer for any aggressive acts committed upon the white settlements from Kiowas and Comanches to the east of Bosque Redondo. He thought also that the remoteness and desolation of the reservation would discourage white settlement.
The Mescalero Apaches walked to the reservation. By March 1863, 400 Apaches had settled around nearby Fort Sumner. Others had fled west to join fugitive bands of Apaches. By mid-summer, many of the people were planting crops and doing other farm work.
On July 7, Carson, with little heart for the Navajo roundup, started the campaign against the tribe. His orders were almost the same as those for the Apache roundup: he was to shoot all males on sight and to take the women and children captives. No peace treaties were to be made until all Navajo were on the reservation.
Carson searched far and wide for the Navajo. He found their homes, fields, animals, and orchards, but the Navajo were experts at disappearing quickly and hiding in their vast lands. The roundup proved frustrating for Carson. He was in his fifties and tired and ill. By autumn 1863, Carson started to burn the Navajo homes and fields and remove their animals from the area. The Navajo would starve if the destruction continued, and 188 surrendered and were sent to Bosque Redondo. Life at the Bosque had turned grim, and murders took place. The Apaches and Navajos fought. The water in the Pecos contained minerals that gave people cramps and stomach aches. Residents had to walk to find firewood.
Battle of Canyon de Chelly
Carson wanted to take a winter break from the campaign. Major General Carleton refused and ordered him to invade the Canyon de Chelly, where many Navajos had taken refuge. The historian David Roberts writes, "Carson's sweep through the Canyon de Chelly in the winter of 1863–1864 would prove to be the decisive action in the Campaign."
The Canyon de Chelly was a sacred place for the Navajo. They believed that it would now be their strongest sanctuary, and 300 Navajo took refuge on the canyon rim, called Fortress Rock. They resisted Carson's invasion by building rope ladders and bridges, lowering water pots into a stream, and keeping quiet and out of sight. The 300 Navajo survived the invasion. In January 1864, Carson swept through the Canyon with his forces, including Captain Albert Pfeiffer. The thousands of peach trees in the canyon were cut down. Few Navajo were killed or captured. Carson's invasion, however, proved to the Navajo that the United States could invade their territory at any time. Many Navajo surrendered at Fort Defiance, Arizona.
By March 1864, there were 3,000 refugees at Fort Canby. An additional 5,000 arrived in the camp. They were suffering from the intense cold and hunger. Carson asked for supplies to feed and clothe them and forced the thousands of Navajo to walk to Bosque Redondo. Many died along the way. Stragglers in the rear were shot and killed. In Navajo history, the horrific trek is known as Long Walk of the Navajo. By 1866, reports indicated that Bosque Redondo was a complete failure, Major General Carleton was fired, and Congress started investigations. In 1868, a treaty was signed, and the Navajo were allowed to return to their homeland. Bosque Redondo was closed.
First Battle of Adobe Walls
On November 25, 1864, Carson led his forces against the southwestern tribes at the First Battle of Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle. Adobe Walls was an abandoned trading post that had been blown up by its inhabitants to prevent a takeover by hostile Indians. Combatants at the First Battle were the US Army and Indian scouts against Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches. It was one of the largest engagements fought on the Great Plains.
The battle was the result of General Carleton's belief that Indians were responsible for the continuing attacks on settlers along the Santa Fe Trail. He wanted to punish them and brought in Carson to do the job. With most of the army engaged elsewhere during the American Civil War, the protection that the settlers sought was almost nonexistent. Carson led 260 cavalry, 75 infantry, and 72 Ute and Jicarilla Apache Army scouts. In addition, he had two mountain howitzers.
On the morning of November 25, Carson discovered and attacked a Kiowa village of 176 lodges. After destroying the village, he moved forward to Adobe Walls. Carson found other Comanche villages in the area and realized he would face a very large force of Native Americans. A Captain Pettis estimated that 1,200 to 1,400 Comanche and Kiowa began to assemble. That number would swell, according to some accounts, to an implausible 3,000. Four to five hours of battle ensued. When Carson ran low on ammunition and howitzer shells, he ordered his men to retreat to a nearby Kiowa village, where they burned the village and many fine buffalo robes. His Indian scouts killed and mutilated four elderly and weak Kiowas.
First Adobe Walls, northeast of Stinnett in Hutchinson County, Texas, was Carson's last military engagement and ended inconclusively. Three of Carson's men died, and twenty-one were wounded. More than 100 warriors lost their lives, and 200 were wounded.
The retreat to New Mexico then began with few deaths among Carson's men. General Carleton wrote to Carson: "This brilliant affair adds another green leaf to the laurel wreath which you have so nobly won in the service of your country."
Personal life
In 1847, the future General William Tecumseh Sherman met Carson in Monterey, California. Sherman wrote: "His fame was then at its height,... and I was very anxious to see a man who had achieved such feats of daring among the wild animals of the Rocky Mountains, and still wilder Indians of the plains.... I cannot express my surprise at beholding such a small, stoop-shouldered man, with reddish hair, freckled face, soft blue eyes, and nothing to indicate extraordinary courage or daring. He spoke but little and answered questions in monosyllables."
Colonel Edward W. Wynkoop wrote: "Kit Carson was five feet five and one half-inches tall, weighed about 140 pounds, of nervy, iron temperament, squarely built, slightly bow-legged, and those members apparently too short for his body. But, his head and face made up for all the imperfections of the rest of his person. His head was large and well-shaped with yellow straight hair, worn long, falling on his shoulders. His face was fair and smooth as a woman's with high cheekbones, straight nose, a mouth with a firm, but somewhat sad expression, a keen, deep-set but beautiful, mild blue eye, which could become terrible under some circumstances, and like the warning of the rattlesnake, gave notice of attack. Though quick-sighted, he was slow and soft of speech, and posed great natural modesty."
Lieutenant George Douglas Brewerton made one coast-to-coast dispatch-carrying trip to Washington, DC, with Carson. Brewerton wrote: "The Kit Carson of my imagination was over six feet high—a sort of modern Hercules in his build—with an enormous beard, and a voice like a roused lion.... The real Kit Carson I found to be a plain, simple... man; rather below the medium height, with brown, curling hair, little or no beard, and a voice as soft and gentle as a woman's. In fact, the hero of a hundred desperate encounters, whose life had been mostly spent amid wilderness, where the white man is almost unknown, was one of Dame Nature's gentleman...."
Freemasonry
Carson joined Freemasonry in the Santa Fe Territory of New Mexico, petitioning in Montezuma Lodge No. 101. He was initiated an Entered Apprentice on April 22, 1854, passed to the degree of Fellowcraft June 17, 1854, and raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason December 26, 1854, just two days after his 42nd birthday. Carson, together with several other Freemasons in Taos, petitioned to charter Bent Lodge No. 204 (now Bent Lodge # 42) from the Grand Lodge of Missouri AF&AM, a request that was granted on June 1, 1860, with Kit elected Junior Warden of the lodge. Kit Carson served as Senior Warden the following year and would have served as Worshipful Master, but the lodge went dark due to the Civil War.
The Masonic fraternity continued to serve him and his family well after his death. In 1908, the Grand Lodge of New Mexico erected a wrought iron fence around his family burial plot. The following year, the Grand Lodge of New Mexico granted a new charter to Bent Lodge 42 and challenged the Lodge to purchase and preserve Kit's home. More than a century later, the Museum of Kit Carson's House is still managed by Bent Lodge.
Marriages
Carson was married three times. His first two wives were Native American. His third wife was born of an old Hispanic family in Taos, New Mexico, then part of the Republic of Mexico. Carson was the father of ten children. He never wrote about his first two marriages in his Memoirs. He may have thought he would be known as a "squaw man," which was not welcomed by polite society.
In 1836, Carson met an Arapaho woman, Waanibe (Singing Grass, or Grass Singing), at a mountain man rendezvous held along the Green River in Wyoming. Singing Grass was a lovely young woman, and many mountain men were in love with her. Carson was forced to fight a duel with a French trapper, Chouinard, for Waanibe's hand in marriage. Carson won but had a very narrow escape. The French trapper's bullet singed his hair. The duel was one of the best known stories about Carson in the 19th century.
Carson married Singing Grass. She tended to his needs and went with him on his trapping trips. They had a daughter, Adaline (or Adeline). Singing Grass died after she had given birth to Carson's second daughter circa 1841. His second child did not live long. In 1843, in Taos, New Mexico, Singing Grass fell into a boiling kettle of soap and subsequently died.
Carson's life as a mountain man was too hard for a little girl and so he took Adaline to live with his sister Mary Ann Carson Rubey in St. Louis, Missouri. Adaline was taught in a school for girls. Carson brought her West when she was a teenager. She married and divorced a George Stilts of St. Louis. In 1858, she went to the California goldfields. Adaline died in 1860 or after 1862, probably in Mono County, California.
In 1841, Carson married a Cheyenne woman, Making-Out-Road. They were together only a short time. Making-Out-Road divorced him in the way of her people by putting Adaline and all of Carson's property outside their tent. Making-Out-Road left Carson to travel with her people through the West.
About 1842, Carson met Josefa Jaramillo, the daughter of a prominent Mexican couple living in Taos. To marry her, Carson left the Presbyterian Church for the Catholic Church. He married the 14-year-old Josefa on February 6, 1843. They had eight children.
Illiteracy
Despite being fluent in multiple European and Indian languages, Carson was illiterate. He was embarrassed by that and tried to hide it. In 1856, he dictated his Memoirs to another and stated:
"I was a young boy in the school house when the cry came, Injuns! I jumped to my rifle and threw down my spelling book, and thar it lies."
Carson enjoyed having other people read to him and preferred the poetry of George Gordon, Lord Byron. Carson thought that Sir Walter Scott's long poem, The Lady of the Lake was "the finest expression of outdoor life." Carson eventually learned to write "C. Carson," but it was very difficult for him. He made his mark on official papers, and it was then witnessed by a clerk or other official.
Final days
When the Civil War ended, and the Indian Wars campaigns were in a lull, Carson was appointed brevet brigadier general (dated March 13, 1865) and appointed commandant of Ft. Garland, Colorado, in the heart of Ute territory. Carson had many Ute friends in the area and assisted in government relations.
After being mustered out of the army, Carson took up ranching, settling at Boggsville in Bent County. In 1868, at the urging of Washington and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Carson journeyed to Washington, DC, where he escorted several Ute Chiefs to meet with the US President to plead for assistance to their tribe.
Soon after his return, his wife, Josefa, died from complications after she gave birth to their eighth child. Her death was a crushing blow to Carson. He died a month later, age 58, on May 23, 1868, in the presence of Dr. Tilton and his friend Thomas Boggs in the surgeon's quarters at Fort Lyon, Colorado. His last words were "Goodbye, friends. Adios, compadres." The cause of his death was abdominal aortic aneurysm. His resting place is Taos, New Mexico.
Kit Carson as symbol and myth, 1900–1960
In 1950, professor Henry Nash Smith published his classic Virgin Land, the American West as Symbol and Myth. A new type of study, one that looked at literature to understand the general public's view of the frontier, and its creation myth and symbols. To Smith, Kit Carson represented the symbolic mountain man image created first in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, the pathfinder who went into the wilderness as advance pioneer for civilization. Smith details the creation of mythic Kit as a national hero, as well as "Indian fighter, the daredevil horseman, the slayer of grizzly bears, the ancestor of the hundreds of two-gun men who came later decades to people the Beadle dime novels." Other writers defined two distinct Kits portrayed in nineteenth century literature, of myth vs. reality. During the first half of the twentieth century, the general public put those beliefs in the mythic Kit Carson into popular actions by erecting monuments and statues, holding public celebrations, and supporting early movies and television.
Monuments and statues
The first Kit Carson monument, that erected in Santa Fe in 1885 at the Federal courthouse, was a simple stone obelisk with inscriptions including the words "pathfinder, pioneer, soldier," and "He Led the Way." Union Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic, led the fund raising and dedicated it "to remember the brave deeds of a pioneer and patriot who fought for his country."
The first statues were erected in Colorado. In 1911, the granddaughter of Kit Carson unveiled an equestrian statue at the community park near the state capitol, Denver. It "honored the great explorer" and was inscribed as well with "He Led the Way." In Trinidad, Colorado, the Daughters of the American Revolution and Boy Scouts of America led fund raising for the bronze statue of Kit Carson in the city's new Kit Carson Park, placed in 1913.
Californians followed with a statue of Kit Carson on Olvera Street in Los Angeles, and a bronze representation of a tree trunk with "Carson 1844" inscribed on it, placed at Carson Pass in the Sierra Nevada. Both represented him as the explorer. Other statues or monuments followed, in California, Washington, D.C. by Isidore Konti, Nevada, and elsewhere.
Early movies and television
Grand popular culture imagery of Carson, expressed through Hollywood cinema, began with the 1928 silent film Kit Carson from Paramount, a purported real-like story of Kit Carson, the famous scout and guide, and the conquest of California. It was followed with a talking movie series begun in 1933, with 12 chapters, titled Fighting with Kit Carson with a cast including Johnny Mack Brown (as Kit), Noah Beery Sr. and Jr with "plenty of stunts and action." Paramount's crew converted the series into a feature-length film, Fighting with Kit Carson, in 1946. These popular matinee Westerns strove for entertainment, not for accuracy, and exploit the Kit Carson name and myth.
The Kit Carson character played minor roles in other 1930s Westerns like the 1936 Sutter's Gold, loosely about the California gold discovery, and the 1939 Mutiny on the Black Hawk, an odd Western with a mutiny on a slave ship that lands in California with Kit Carson and others ready to save the day. The 1940 western titled Kit Carson stars Jon Hall (as Kit), Dana Andrews (as Fremont), and others. Kit joins Captain John Fremont to guide a wagon train just as Mexican General Castro orders all Americans from California, then the conquest of California begins, a tale enlivened with gratuitous Indian attacks. Filmed in Kayenta, Arizona and nearby Monument Valley, Navajo were hired as part of the crew.
From 1951 to 1955, the television show The Adventures of Kit Carson ran for 105 episodes. He was a buckskin-clad heroic character who fights robbers, villains, the bad guys. Bill Williams (actor), who played Kit, complained that the show lacked the drama of the real Kit because of censors, NAFBRAT, wanting to eliminate violence from children's show. "Its all in the history books," Williams told the press, "the real Kit should be tough," fighting bears and mountain lions. He was a "famous Indian fighter." To him, TV Kit was "a sissy on horseback." Television appearances of mythic Kit Carson include episodes of Death Valley Days. In 1966, the actor Phillip Pine played Carson with Michael Pate as fellow Fremont scout Frenchy Godey in the episode "Samaritans, Mountain Style" of the syndicated series, Death Valley Days, hosted by Robert Taylor. In the story line, Carson and Godey stop to help a settler in dire straits. Carson continued to be a popular subject for Disney Productions and PBS documentaries.
"Kit Carson Days" celebrations
The celebration of a community's past was a popular event by early in the twentieth century. A mountain man or "Kit Carson" themed history celebration was one of many that began to appear. They were not events to retell the accurate life of Kit Carson, but the mythic Kit. Alamosa, Colorado, Taos, New Mexico, Jackson, California and elsewhere all had begun hosting "Kit Carson Days" celebrations by the 1930s. The event would have a mountain man camp, part of a living history spectacle, and include muzzle loading musket firing.
By the 1960s, Escondido, California’s "Kit Carson Days" celebration included a reenactment of the "Battle of San Pasqual" and Indian dances at Kit Carson Park. Some advertised an emphasis on family fun, with children at the end of a parade—the "Kiddie Carson" parade—and young women competing to be "Kittie Carson." Some events closed by the 1970s because of problems with security, especially in small towns that had to fend with weekend visitors that arrived not for the history fun, but to deal drugs, biker gang disruption, and the broad based accusations of "hippie" take over. Because of COVID-19, none were scheduled for 2020.
Historic preservation
In 1907, the Daughters of the American Revolution began placing monuments along the Santa Fe Trail and other sites that Kit Carson had known. For example, the DAR guides noted the monument to Kit Carson at Santa Fe and his and Josefa's home in Taos and the nearby cemetery, where his grave had been marked by the Grand Army of the Republic (G. A. R.). Though structures that Carson would have known had been preserved pre-1950, full scale historic preservation projects of sites specifically significant for their association with Kit Carson did not begin until 1950s.
In 1952, the Masonic Lodge of Taos, which had inherited the Carson home, restored and opened his classic adobe house as the Kit Carson Home and Museum, one representative of the early 19th century architecture and Hispano family setting but significant because of Carson. In 1952, too, the state of New Mexico acquired the grave site and established Kit Carson State Park and Memorial Cemetery. The museum emphasized the early career, from around 1843, when the Carsons bought the home, into the 1850s. Nearby, the former site of his Rayado home, acquired by the Boy Scouts of America, was reconstructed in spirit if not accuracy (no original architectural documents are extant) during the 1950s, too.
Media portrayals
Harry Carey played Carson in the 1936 film Sutter's Gold.
Jon Hall played Carson in the 1940 Western film Kit Carson.
Bill Williams played Carson in the TV mini-series 1951–1955 The Adventures of Kit Carson.
Rip Torn played Carson in the 1986 miniseries Dream West.
Carson was the inspiration for a same-named character in the popular Italian comic book series Tex Willer.
Carson is a supporting character in Willa Cather's novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop.
Carson is a vital supporting character in Flashman and the Redskins, an installment of the Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser.
Reputation
The 1970 publication of Dee Brown's best-selling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee opened the eyes of the reading public to the tragic history of Native Americans and the role of Kit Carson in the Navajo wars did not look good. Over the last fifty years, echoing Brown, other writers, fiction and nonfiction, have split the mythic tale from Henry Nash Smith's Kit Carson as symbol of America's heroic narrative of opening the West to create that of Kit Carson as symbol for how the nation mistreated its indigenous peoples.
In 1973, during the annual Taos Fiesta, protesters declared that Kit Carson should be stripped of historical honors, his grave at Taos threatened with exhumation, and the renaming of Kit Carson State Park was demanded. Taos led in reconsideration, in a public forum, as to whether Carson was the hero of old or a "blood thirsty imperialist." To one group represented, the American Indian Movement, Kit Carson was responsible for the murder, or genocide of Native Americans. A subsequent history symposium, in 1993 in Taos, tried to enlighten and explain the frontiersman, to air various views. Invited, the Navajo refused to attend. Voicing one extreme view, an anthropologist remarked, "It's like trying to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler."
Respected New Mexico historian Marc Simmons published the best of the pieces presented at the 1993 conference. He started with the history of vandalizing of Carson related sites, the painting of a black swastika on his grave and the scratching of the word "killer" on a nearby marker, of the defacing of the Kit Carson monument in Santa Fe. He related how a young professor at Colorado College was successful in demanding that a period photograph of Carson be removed from the ROTC office; how a tourist told a journalist at the Carson home in Taos, "I will not go into the home of that racist, genocidal killer"; and a Navajo at a trading post said, "No one here will talk about Kit Carson. He was a butcher." Other examples were presented, then Simmons followed with a brief explanation of Carson and his times, a theme expanded by Tom Dunlay in, what Simmons calls a magisterial, balanced treatment of the world of Kit Carson & the Indians (2000).
In the early twenty-first century, best-selling writers Hampton Sides and David Roberts have reappraised the Carson reputation in their works, have explained the complex image of Kit Carson. While a heroic image or reputation of Carson is expressed in the earlier, 1968, biography by Harvey Carter, the older narrative has been revised by both Sides and Roberts: In 1968, Carter stated: “In respect to his actual exploits and his actual character, however, Carson was not overrated. If history has to single out one person from among the Mountain Men to receive the admiration of later generations, Carson is the best choice. He had far more of the good qualities and fewer of the bad qualities than anyone else in that varied lot of individuals.” In 2000, David Roberts wrote, "Carson's trajectory, over three and a half decades, from thoughtless killer of Apaches and Blackfeet to defender and champion of the Utes, marks him out as one of the few frontiersmen whose change of heart toward the Indians, born not of missionary theory but of first hand experience, can serve as an exemplar for the more enlightened policies that sporadically gained the day in the twentieth century." In 2006, Sides said that Carson believed the Native Americans needed reservations as a way of physically separating and shielding them from white hostility and white culture. He is said to have viewed the raids on white settlements as driven by desperation, "committed from absolute necessity when in a starving condition." Indian hunting grounds were disappearing as waves of white settlers filled the region.
A final statement from biographer Roberts, 2000: "the fate in recent years of Kit Carson's reputation makes for a more perverse lesson in the vicissitudes of fame."
Legacy
Carson's home in Taos, New Mexico, is the Kit Carson Home and Museum. His tourist attraction grave is nearby in the former Kit Carson State Park, now managed as a city park. A Kit Carson monument obelisk (1885) stands at the Santa Fe, New Mexico federal building park. The Kit Carson marker of bronze, dedicated to his 1844 trip, is in Carson Pass, California. A 1913 statue of Kit Carson stands at Trinidad, Colorado’s Kit Carson Park. In Denver, a statue of a mounted Kit Carson once atop the Mac Monnies Pioneer Monument was removed and stored in 2020.
Carson National Forest in New Mexico was named for him, as well as a county and a town in Colorado. A river and valley in Nevada are named for Carson as well as the state's capital, Carson City. The Carson Plain in southwest Arizona was named for him.
Kit Carson Peak, Colorado in the Sangre de Cristo range, Kit Carson Mesa in Colfax County, New Mexico, Carson Pass in Alpine county, California, and Carson Peak in Mono County, California were named for him.
Fort Carson, Colorado, an army post near Colorado Springs, was named after him during World War II by the popular vote of the men training there. Kit Carson Park in Escondido, California and in Taos, New Mexico are named for him. Innumerable streets, businesses, and lesser geographical features were given his name.
In 2014 there was a petition to rename Kit Carson Park in Taos, NM Red Willow Park. Despite the support of the Taos Pueblo and the residents of Taos Valley the park was not renamed and still bears the Kit Carson moniker. A review in 2020 by a Taos columnist chronicled the attempts in Taos to rename Kit Carson park which failed, in part, because of the large Hispanic population that disagreed with the attack on its one-time community member, that the Taos Pueblo peoples that survived years of attack by Navajo did not see the story of the Navajo wars in the same light as the Carson detractors, and a community of historians who argue that Kit Carson was hardly a "genocidal killer of Indians."
See also
Kit Carson Scouts
Kit Carson Mesa
References
Bibliography
Cleland, Robert Glass (1950). This Reckless Breed of Men: The Trappers and Fur Traders of the Southwest. New York City: Knopf.
Reidhead, S.J. "Kit Carson: The Legendary Frontiersman Remains an American Hero" HistoryNet.com June 12, 2006
Roberts, S. A., Roberts, C. A., & Chilton, K. (2004). A history of New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Further reading
External links
Guide to the Kit Carson Papers at The Bancroft Library
Kit Carson Papers – Missouri History Museum
"Narrative of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains." By John Charles Frémont. Published 1845.
"The Daring Adventures of Kit Carson and Fremont, Among Buffaloes, Grizzlies." By John Charles Frémont. Published 1888.
"The First, and a Little-known, 1847 Biography of Kit Carson"
"The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself" (1858) by De Witt C. Peters, at Project Gutenberg and at Internet Archive.
Kit Carson papers, Vault MSS 513 at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University
"A West Won by 'Blood and Thunder NPR (2006).
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17155 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirin | Kirin | Kirin may refer to:
Mythology and fiction
Qilin or Kirin, a mythical creature known in various East Asian cultures
Ki-rin (Dungeons & Dragons), a type of monster in D&D
Kirin, a type of monster in Monster Hunter
Kirin, a type of creature in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic series
Places
Jilin or Kirin, a province in northeastern China
Jilin City or Kirin, a city in the province of Jilin, China
Kirin, Croatia, a settlement in Vrginmost
Companies and products
Kirin Company, a Japanese beverages company
Brasil Kirin, a Brazilian brewery and beverage company
Kyowa Hakko Kirin, a Japanese pharmaceutical company
Kirin, a series of SoCs produced by HiSilicon
Sports
Kirin Cup, an association football tournament organised in Japan
Kirin Open, a Japanese golf tournament from 1974 to 2001
Other uses
Kirin (manga), a 1987 Japanese manga series
Kirin (chess), a fairy chess piece
Kirin language or Kili, a Tungusic language of Russia and China
People with the name
Ivica Kirin (born 1970), former Interior Minister of Croatia
Kirin J. Callinan (born 1986), Australian singer and songwriter
Kirin Kiki (1943–2018), Japanese TV and film actress
Kirin Narayan (born 1959), Indian-born American anthropologist and writer
Kirin Kotecha, a character in Emmerdale
See also
Girin (disambiguation)
Keirin, a form of motor-paced cycle racing
Kirin no Tsubasa, a 2012 Japanese film
Kirino (disambiguation)
Kylin (disambiguation)
Qilin (disambiguation)
Xilin (disambiguation) | [
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17156 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipper | Kipper | A kipper is a whole herring, a small, oily fish, that has been split in a butterfly fashion from tail to head along the dorsal ridge, gutted, salted or pickled, and cold-smoked over smouldering wood chips (typically oak).
In Britain, Ireland and some regions of North America, kippers are most commonly consumed for breakfast. In Great Britain, kippers, along with other preserved smoked or salted fish such as the bloater and buckling, were also once commonly enjoyed as a high tea or supper treat, most popularly with inland and urban working-class populations before World War II.
Terminology
The English philologist and ethnographer Walter William Skeat derives the word from the Old English kippian, to spawn. The word has various possible parallels, such as Icelandic kippa which means "to pull, snatch" and the Germanic word kippen which means "to tilt, to incline". Similarly, the Middle English kipe denotes a basket used to catch fish. Another theory traces the word kipper to the kip, or small beak, that male salmon develop during the breeding season.
As a verb, kippering ("to kipper") means to preserve by rubbing with salt or other spices before drying in the open air or in smoke.
Originally applied to the preservation of surplus fish (particularly those known as "kips," harvested during spawning runs), kippering has come to mean the preservation of any fish, poultry, beef or other meat in like manner. The process is usually enhanced by cleaning, filleting, butterflying or slicing the food to expose maximum surface area to the drying and preservative agents.
Bucklings, bloaters and kippers
All three are types of smoked herring. Buckling is hot-smoked whole; bloaters are cold-smoked whole; kippers are split and gutted, and then cold-smoked.
Origin
Although the exact origin of the kipper is unknown, this process of slitting, gutting, and smoke-curing fish is well documented. According to Mark Kurlansky, "Smoked foods almost always carry with them legends about their having been created by accident—usually the peasant hung the food too close to the fire, and then, imagine his surprise the next morning when …". For instance Thomas Nashe wrote in 1599 about a fisherman from Lothingland in the Great Yarmouth area who discovered smoking herring by accident. Another story of the accidental invention of kipper is set in 1843, with John Woodger of Seahouses in Northumberland, when fish for processing was left overnight in a room with a smoking stove. These stories and others are known to be untrue because the word "kipper" long predates this. Smoking and salting of fish—in particular of spawning salmon and herring—which are caught in large numbers in a short time and can be made suitable for edible storage by this practice predates 19th-century Britain and indeed written history, probably going back as long as humans have been using salt to preserve food.
Colouring
A kipper is also sometimes referred to as a red herring, although particularly strong curing is required to produce a truly red kipper.
The term appears in a mid-13th century poem by the Anglo-Norman poet Walter of Bibbesworth, "He eteþ no ffyssh But heryng red." Samuel Pepys used it in his diary entry of 28 February 1660: "Up in the morning, and had some red herrings to our breakfast, while my boot-heel was a-mending, by the same token the boy left the hole as big as it was before."
The dyeing of kippers was introduced as an economy measure in the First World War by avoiding the need for the long smoking processes. This allowed the kippers to be sold quickly, easily and for a substantially greater profit. Kippers were originally dyed using a coal tar dye called brown FK (the FK is an abbreviation of "for kippers"), kipper brown or kipper dye. Today, kippers are usually brine dyed using a natural annatto dye, giving the fish a deeper orange/yellow colour. European Community legislation limits the acceptable daily intake (ADI) of Brown FK to 0.15 mg/kg. Not all fish caught are suitable for the dyeing process, with mature fish more readily sought, because the density of their flesh improves the absorption of the dye. An orange kipper is a kipper that has been dyed orange.
Kippers from the Isle of Man and some Scottish producers are not dyed; the smoking time is extended in the traditional manner.
Preparation
"Cold-smoked" fish that have not been salted for preservation must be cooked before being eaten safely (they can be boiled, fried, grilled, jugged or roasted, for instance). "Kipper snacks" (see below) are precooked and may be eaten without further preparation. In general, oily fish are preferred for smoking as the heat is evenly dispersed by the oil, and the flesh resists flaking apart like drier species.
In the United Kingdom, kippers are often served for breakfast, and much less often at lunch or dinner. In the United States, where kippers are much less commonly eaten than in the UK, they are almost always sold as either canned "kipper snacks" or in jars found in the refrigerated foods section.
Kippers industry
Kippers produced in the Isle of Man are exported around the world. Thousands are produced annually in the town of Peel, where two kipper houses, Moore's Kipper Yard (founded 1882) and Devereau and Son (founded 1884), smoke and export herring.
Mallaig, once the busiest herring port in Europe, is famous for its traditionally smoked kippers, as well as Stornoway kippers and Loch Fyne kippers. The harbour village of Craster in Northumberland is famed for Craster kippers, which are prepared in a local smokehouse, sold in the village shop and exported around the world.
Black's Harbour, New Brunswick, Canada, is one of the world's largest producers of herring.
Related terms
The Manx word for kipper is , literally red herring; the Irish term is scadán dearg with the same meaning.
Kipper time is the season in which fishing for salmon in the River Thames is forbidden in Great Britain by an Act of Parliament; this period was originally the period 3 May to 6 January but has changed since. Kipper season refers (particularly among fairground workers, market workers, taxi drivers and the like) to any lean period in trade, particularly the first three or four months of the year.
The sailors of the Royal Canadian Navy use the term kippers as a slang for members of the Royal Navy.
The term kippering is used in slang to mean being immersed in a room filled with cigarette or other tobacco smoke.
The English (UK) idiom [to be] 'Stitched (or 'Done') up like a kipper' is commonly used to describe a situation where a person has (depending on context) been 'fitted up' or 'framed'; 'used', unfairly treated or betrayed; or cheated out of something, with no possibility of correcting the 'wrong' done.
In the children's books The Railway Series, and in the television show Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, The Flying Kipper is a nickname for a fast fish train usually pulled by Henry the Green Engine.
The United States Department of Agriculture defines "Kippered Beef" as a cured dry product similar to beef jerky but not as dry.
See also
Fish preservation
Herring as food
Kipper tie
List of dried foods
List of smoked foods
Red herring, an irrelevant distraction
Smoked fish
Solomon Gundy
Notes
References
Further reading
Bannerman, A. McK. (2001) Kippers Torry Advisory Note No. 48, FAO, Rome.
External links
"The lure of red herring", history of smoked fish varieties.
Isle of Man Kipper Museum
National Library of Scotland: SCOTTISH SCREEN ARCHIVE (archive films relating to the production of kippers)
E154 Brown FK
Nicky Duffy, Guardian Unlimited
Kippers, the breakfast dish that fell out of favour, are back on British menus The Guardian, 7 April 2012.
Japanese cuisine
Dried fish
Food preservation
Fish processing
Manx cuisine
Oily fish
Smoked fish
Animal-based seafood
British seafood dishes
Breakfast
Irish cuisine
North American cuisine | [
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17157 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipsigis%20people | Kipsigis people | The Kipsigis (spelt phonetically proper as Kipsigiis), are a South Eastern Nilotic people who predominantly live in western region of Kenya within the larger Kericho District of the former Rift Valley province. Their eponym roughly translates as 'a repductively sucessful bunch'. The IBEAC company and the British colonial government referred to the Kipsigis people as 'Lumbwa' and 'Kwavi'. The Kipsigis people speak the Kipsigis language; a Nilotic language which falls under the Nandi-Markweta cluster of the Kalenjin languages.. The Kipsigis together with other linguistically and culturally related peoples now identify as Kalenjin, an identity they have been collectively using since the 1950s. The Kipsigis people in census and other statistics are the most populous compared to their akin tribes of Kalenjin.
The Kipsigis people live predominantly in a region politically known as South Rift Region and includes Bomet County and Kericho County. There are other cluster of settlement of the Kipsigis people in Nandi, Nakuru county and Narok counties of Kenya and also in North Western Tanzania. The pre-colonial traditional occupations of the Kipsigis included semi-pastoral herding, military expeditions, and farming sorghum and millet. Post-colonial Kipsigis today still live predominantly in their historical tribal territory on the Western Highlands of Kenya at an altitude of 1500he Kipsigis are also famous for their great singing talent having produced many musicians in both secular and religious music industry. to 2000m; they mainly grow tea, undertake dairy farming and farm maize. They also grow wheat, pyrethrum and coffee. The Kipsigis are also famous for their great singing talent; perhaps more than any other Kalenjin sub-ethnicities, having produced many musicians in both secular and religious music industry with a far reaching appeal within the Kenyan community and among the Kalenjin diaspora. Kipsigis has also produced Olympian medalists and renowned atheletes who have garned various trophies and medals.
Origin, Establishment and Precolonial History
Origin
The Maliri people originally from Omo Valley in Ethiopia immigrated into Kenya and Uganda, breaking into groups in the following order: Merile and Pokotozek. Merile reverted to Southern Ethiopia. Pokotozek moved to a region between Mount Cherangany and Mount Moroto and then to Lake Baringo thus disturbing a community called Oropom (an aboriginal and indigenous community to the region) who thus dispersed in various directions (Turkwel excursion, Uasin Ngishu excursion which was likely adopted to the Maasai and Oropom,- an excursion which shrunk to a region they had already been occupying around Chemorongit hills and South of Mount Moroto hills). Pokotozek went on to defeat Lloikop Maasai at Baringo and thus Pokotozek broke into two, a community called Chok or the Suk who occupied Baringo while another branch moved west and called itself Sebei. The Chok or Suk are then known to have transformed from being farmers into pastoralists and as the two factions developed, Chok consumed Suk and the new confederation became known as Pokot. Neighbouring the Maliri descendant groups were the Lumbwa (although this community could have been confused for other groups such as Siger/Sengwer), Sekker/Siger/Sengwer and Karamojong.
From local folk lore, the Kipsigis were initially a single group and identity with the Nandi as 'Chemwal' until 1800 (or possibly five decades to a century earlier) when the community was separated by a wedge of Uas Nkishu Maasai in Kipchorian River (River Nyando); the resulting community south of Nandi hills (Kipkelion) became Kipsgis.
The Nandi account is that the ancestors of Nandi migrated from Mount Elgon under the leadership of Kakipoch. It is observed from the Nandi oral traditions that Lumbwa clans
joined them later, thus implying that the Nandi adopted groups of people probably perhaps the Sirikwa, Datooga or Tugen. The latter is the most probable as original Kipsigis clans such as Kipasisek are found among the Tugen people. Linguistically, the Kipsigis language is closely related to other Kalenjin languages and in fact, members of all of Kalenjin ethnicities can communicate effectively with each other. There is however a connection between the Kalenjin languages and Somali in the staggering proportion; these includes shared and borrowed words, semantics, phonology and pragmatics. This suggests that in the least, the Kipsigis and Kalenjin at large may have a genetic ancestry among the Semitic Somali.
Apparently, Kipsigis folk lore describes a people who used to inhabit most of the land the Kipsigis would later take up; they call them Sirikwa and the descriptions of their culture, atire and economic practices depict Sirikwa culture thus implying that the Kipsigis may have interacted with the Iraqw.
Culture
The Kipsigis observe a monotheistic version of Assianism, the belief system maintained by many of the Kalenjin people. In the polytheistic system observed by most Kalenjin, the deities Asis and Tororot are each considered major deities, while multiple other deities exist independently to one another. In the Kipsigis' monotheistic belief system, Asis is instead considered the single supreme deity and the other deities are considered Asis' attributes, rather than independent entities.
Culture among the Kipsigis shows little change over time. Cultural values include superstition, spiritualism, and the sacred and cyclical nature of life. The Kipsigis believe all elements of the natural world are connected, that good deeds never go unnoticed, and that bad deeds lead to consequences in various forms.
Kipsigis Language and Kipsigis Oral Tradition
The Kipsigis people practice oral tradition; many of their stories involve a creature known as Chemosi, who is often portrayed as a carnivorous beast with the ability to speak the Kipsigis' or Kalenjin's language. Usually, Chemosi stories involve children who disobey their elder siblings, parents, or community members and are then lost in a forest. There Chemosi finds them, takes them to its residence, and commands them to perform a performing art while it prepares to roast and eat them. The stories usually end with the abducted children's families arriving just in time to save them. Among the Nandi the Chemosi is referred to as Chemosit and as Kododoelo, Ngoloko or Duba by various other communities of Kenya, Uganda and parts of Congo. In western culture, the Chemosi is referred to as Nandi bear and is conflated with a creature that the Nandi call Kerit.
Other mythological beasts are also commonly discussed among the Kipsigis. One legend from Chepsongwor describes a dragon named Lulu which shone a light at night that could be seen from miles away. According to the legend, in the 1930s a group of big game hunters went to Lulu's cave and took the dragon and its eggs as their bounty.
A western adventurer Edgar Beecher Bronson claims to have seen a creature that he notes the Lumbwa people referred to as Dingonek. He describes a fearsome-looking water creature whose features include an armadillo-like, leopard-patterned, hippo-sized back and a leopard's head with two large protruding fangs. He reports that the Lumbwa and the Wadoko peoples spoke of such a creature in the Maggori River then provides an account of his sighting of the said creature. His is the only account of such a creature. Neither are such descriptions found in the folklore of the Kipsigis or neighboring communities though he may have derived the name from the Kipsigis and Nandi terms for a crocodile - Ting'ong'et.
Another reported beast is the Mur-ngetunyit, which literally means 'a darkened or blackened lion beast. Reported sightings are described too unclearly to tell whether it might have actually been a more common animal, such as the cheetah.
Naming
The names of male Kipsigis members have four parts. The first two are given at birth. They include a first name based on the time, place, or weather at the time of birth (usually preceded by the prefix 'Kip'), as well as a second name based on an attribute of a reincarnated ancestor. The third name is borrowed from a local hero. Finally, the fourth name is based on the name of the member's father, and is only awarded following his initiation.
Genealogical organisation (Ortiinweek)
Kipsigis clans are exclusively a Nandi system of patriachiarchal kinship that the Kipsigis naturally took up.
The ancestors, notably the patriarch Kakipoch, immigrated the Nandi-Kipsigis population to Uasin Ngishu county. Formulation of the clan system is thought to have come about due to interaction with Lumbwa people or perhaps Tugen people. The purpose of creating clans as it seems was to prevent marriages between individuals who share a patriarchal relationship to the third generation (marriages being mainly heterosexual but with a lesbian marriage in context). Clans also projected various professionalism and probably adopted identities where for instance, certain clans were exclusively priests, others were exclusively smiths, others exclusively hunters and gathers while others had other particular peculiarities. With the breakage of Nandi-Kipsigis unity, the Kipsigis took up the Kipsigis identity, while the Nandi took up the Chemwal identity only later to acquire Nandi eponym from the Swahili traders and the Kipsigis assuming Lumbwa eponym from scholars and British imperialists.
Since, the Kipsigis went on to adopt many clans mostly from Abagusii to the effect that residents of Bomet town and its environs are exclusively Abugusii adoptees. The totems are personified and animated identities based on mammals and birds including: lion (Ng'etundo), buffalo (Zoet), snake (Ndaret/Komut-get), hyena (Kimagetiet), baboon (MÖseet), Crested Cranes (Kong'onyot), hare (Kiplekweet), Dik-Dik (Cheptirgikyet) and the dog/coyote/kayote (Ng'okto).
Astronomy and calendar
The Milky Way is known as Poit'ap kechei (literally sea of stars), the morning star – Tapoiyot, the midnight star – Kokeliet, and Orion's Belt – Kakipsomok. The Milky Way was traditionally perceived as a great lake in which children are bathing and playing. Furthermore, the movement of stars was sometimes linked to earthly concerns. For example, the appearance or non-appearance of the Pleiades indicated whether or not to expect a good or a bad harvest. Sometimes superstitions were held regarding certain events. A halo was traditionally said to represent a cattle stockade. At least as of the early 20th century, a break occurring on the east side was considered to be unlucky while one on the west side was seen to be lucky. A comet was at the same time regarded as the precursor of a great misfortune.
The Kipsigis call a month 'Arawet', which is also the term for our satellite, the moon. A year is called 'Kenyit' which can be derived from the phrase 'Ki-nyit' meaning 'to accomplish, to fill in'. A year was marked by the order of months and more importantly by ceremonial and religious celebration of the yearly harvest which was held at the various shrines. This event being analogous to a practice observed by most of the other Africans has inspired the Kwanza festivities celebrated by predominantly by people of African descent in the United States. Kenyit started in February. It had two seasons known as olto (pl. oltosiek) and was divided into twelve months, arawet (pl. arawek). In place of a decade is the order of Ibinda which is usually between 10 and 17 years. In place of a century is the completion of the age set which takes between 100 and 120 years.
The first season of the year, olt-ap-iwot (iwotet), was the wet season and ran from March to August. The dry season, olt-ap-keme (kemeut), ran from September to February. The kipsunde and kipsunde oieng harvest ceremonies were held in September and October respectively to mark the change in Seasons.
Months (arawek) and Seasons
Geo-Political organisation
Em/emet
Em or emet, was the highest recognized geographic division among the Kipsigis. It spans a geopolitical region demarcated as being a jurisdiction of the Kipsigis entitled to ultimate sovereignty (but shared and entitled to the Nandi as well). This unit was identifiable as a political institution but the main work of civil control and administration was done by the kokwotinwek (plural of kokwet). Linguistic evidence indicates that this form of societal organization dates back to their Southern Nilotic heritage. It is believed that the Southern Nilotes of two thousand years ago cooperated in loose supra-clan groupings, called *e:m. It was a prestigious factor and symbol of unity, peace and prosperity.
The Office of the King (Oorgoiiyoot)
Operational in Nandi, the Orkoiyot institution was communed to Kipsigis in 1890, after the ousting and assassination of Kimnyole Arap Turgat. Kimnyole sent his three sons (Kipchomber arap Koilege, Arap Boisyo and Arap Buigut) to Kipsigis who immediately began to establish a Kipsigis confederation, each of them establishing kingly homesteads with servants, messengers and reception parlors.
The office of the Oorgoiiyoot was dissolved after the Lumbwa Treaty.
Kokwet
Kokwet was the most significant political and judicial unit among the Kipsigis. The governing body of each kokwet was its kok (village council). Kokwet denotes a geographic cluster of settlement similar in concept to a village. It was established once there was a settlement pattern group of families. Such settlements were initiated by a few pioneer groups who usually were derived from men of the same genealogical organisation (oret) or age group from the same seclusion home or initiation year (botuumisyek).
Kok elders were the local authority for allocating land for cultivation; they were the body to whom the ordinary member of the community would look for a decision in a dispute or problem which defied solution by direct agreement between the parties.
The office of Kook (Village Sittings)
The office of the village elders was native to the Kipsigis and the elders. It consisted of retired army officers who were usually old, rich and with a reputation of wisdom in passing judgement. Their sittings were usually leisurely in the afternoon over a large pot of Nubian gin. With regard to administration and justice, a plaintiff or messengers would convey their aggrievances or messages to the elders and thus, a congregation was called on a date. Such a congregation depending on the nature could be all inclusive of the immediate community or it could only be attended by men.
Military organisation
This was the responsibility and role of initiated men. There were various posts delegated to this men by custom including: those who should protect women and children at home, spies (Yotiik, Seegeik and Sogooldaiik), the generals (Kiptayat/Kiptaiinik)and the procession ranks (Ng'anymetyeet, Pirtiich, Oldimdo/Lumweet and Kipeelbany). Each soldier in their various posts had a division among four including Ngetunyo, Kebeni/Kebeny and some other two. There were yearly mock up practice for warring called Kaambageet. The Kipsigis armies were not exclusive but all inclusive. Their response time was instantaneous but each individual assumed regular roles in the community which earned a reputation of being insurmountable.
The arms of the fighting men usually consisted of a spear, shield, sword and club. By the late 19th century, up to four kinds of spears, representing various eras and areas were in use. In Nandi, the eren-gatiat, of the Sirkwa era was still in use though only by old men. It had a short and small leaf-shaped blade with a long socketed shank and a long butt. Two types of the Maasai era spear, known as ngotit, were also in use. Those of the eastern, northern and southern counties had long narrow blades with long iron butt, short socket and short shaft. Those of the central county (emgwen) had short broad blades with short iron butts. In the western counties, a spear that had a particularly small head, a long shaft and no butt was in use, it was known as ndirit. The pastoral Pokot carried two Maasai era spears, known as ngotwa while the agricultural sections armed themselves with a sword, known as chok.
Archery was also very much a prominent skill practised among the Kipsigis for purposes ranging from agriculture to defence and security. There were an array of arrows for various specialties such as for shooting a bull for blood, hunting arrows and defensive arrows meant either as a deterrent by causing mortal wounds or others meant to get stuck in the victim while others were poisoned and thus each of the arrow types were used depending on the occasion. Soongoolyet, an ostrich feather was a prominent headgear for the Kipsigis.
Precolonial History
Breaking away from the former Chemwal enthicity and becoming Kipsigis in about 1790's and 1800's, the Kipsigis population grew from an estimated population of less than five hundren in what is today's, Fort Tenan. From here, they acquired millitary resillience against the neigbouring Luo who would go on to call them Jalang'o because of this new commorant attribute. They also fought Kisii communities out of today's Kabianga in Kericho West District and Easterwards against the Maasai who ocupied parts of Kipkelion, Kericho and Londiani. The expansion of the Kipsigis territory was rapid and violent and by 1890's as Orkoiyot institition was established, Kipsigis territory extended from Nandi Hills in the North to Sotik in the South, with a thin waisted region in Bureti.
Kaplelach age-set and the Holocaust of Maaggoori
The Kaplelach age-set of between 1870 and to their annihilation in about 1890 are majorly portrayed as a generation who had issues of systematic indiscipline in war and who had grown invincible and believed they would thrash any opponents. They are infamously narrated to have instigated horrid ordeals on the neighboring communities. One such example is found in oral traditions of how the legion of Kaplelach armies raided a community of Maasai people and killed everyone in the affected locality, then went on to cut the ears of Maasai women so that they would get hold of the beautiful ornaments; they also cut their feet and hands to remove bells and other ornaments and left them to be eaten by crocodiles in River Amalo.
Their next target was the Abagusii community. They banded their armies together and began preparing to raid. The new difference from other generations was that the Kaplelach wanted to eject Abagusii and kill anyone in site while the other generations usually would just instead run stealth stock theft that ensured the besieged remained with some cattle to milk. They then defied warnings of diviners and the rebuke of the elders and ventured to Abagusii land. The first phase of the raid (in Mugirango and Kitutu) was successful, but then two leaders ended up in a disagreement over whether they should continue on to the neighbouring Luo community. A smaller party decided to disband while the majority proceeded on.
Knowing that the Kipsigis had crossed into Luo-land the Gusii alerted their neighbours by blowing their war horn and beating their drums, and then lay in ambush on the eastern edge of Manga Escarpment. At dawn a large "kelele" was heard, it was the Luo chasing the Kipsigis out of their land. As the raiders ascended the escarpment along the valley of the Charachani River, they fell upon the Gusii at Getwanyi in Kitutu. With both communities against them they suffered an untold number of casualties. Very few managed to escape. Some of the survivors hid among the corpses of their fellow tribesmen, while others, jumped into the river and hid in the swamps until nightfall.
So great was the loss that the Kipsigis elders ordered a ‘premature’ initiation of young boys into warriors, and encouraged young men to marry early so as to increase the population of the tribe.
Menya Arap Kisiara
Menya Araap Kisiara is seen and narrated as an excellent diplomat and war hero among the Kipsigis and is credited for thwarting Maasai who used to inhabit larger portions of Kericho county and southwards. Ever since the Chemwal arrived in River Kipchorian and split after running into Siria Maasai thus becoming Kipsigis and Nandi, Kipsigis community had had Siria Maasai as an equal adversary who would be in peace and war from time to time. Significant battles are recalled to have been fought in Iltianit(Londiani), fought in Kericho, Chemoiben, and then Siriat in Sotik. In a duel estimated from oral traditions to have taken place in 1770's to where Kaplong town in Sotik is situated today, Menya led an army to war against the Maasai in order to resolve land disputes and territorial privileges. The war ensued for a number of weeks to a couple of months and for the most part, both sides lost many warriors and many were injured. Towards the end, Menya called in a truce and overnight, amassed aid and reinforcements from Kipsigis warriors across the whole of Kipsigis. On returning to the ultimate and decisive battle, he easily outwitted the Maasai with an army of an estimated 3000 warriors or more. Maasai conceded defeat and resolved to vacate what constitutes today most if not all of Bomet County and Narok West Constituency.
Orgoik
'Orgoik' (plural) or 'sigular', Orgoiyoot is any clansperson of the Talaai clan spread across Nandi, Kipsigis, Tugen and Marakwet and it translates literally as 'foreseer' or 'prophet'. In Kipsigis, most of the Talaai clansmen can identify a patrilineal genealogy to three sons of Kimnyole Araap Turgat namely: Kipchomber Araap Koilege, Chebochok Kiptonui Araap Boisyo and Araap Buiygut; Koitalel Araap Samoei was their younger sibling. The three brothers were sent by their father, Araap Turgat to Kipsigis nation shortly before his assassination by the Nandi people. Their benefactor was their uncle, Araap Kiroisi of Sotik.
Considered special and thought to have out-of-worldly powers, the three were pushed into leadership and for the first time in Kipsigis history, they were able to hold positions that can be equalled to a king or leaders of autonomous regions. Their influence led to expansion of the Kipsigis territory adding to the achievements of Menya Araap Kisiara. They were also considered herbal medicinemen and thus acquired wealth from war reparation and pay for medical services. They went on to have very sedentary lifestyles with their homesteads employing several servants and a primitive equivalent of slaves.
Following Lumbwa treaty between Kipsigis and The British, the three brothers got arrested and would later on about 1903 be deported to Kikuyu-land while their siblings and immediate families consisting of about 700 individuals were banished to Gwassi in Homa Bay County and stayed there excommunicated between 1934 and 1962. They were later on resettled in Kablilo, Sigowet-Soin, Kiptere, Ainamoi, Belgut and some few in Emgwen.
Among the Kipsigis, there is speculative talk that implicates Daniel Arap Moi and Jomo Kenyatta as having relations with the Orgoik.
Kipchomber arap Koilege
He lived in Cheriri in Kiptere before he was imprisoned by the British and sent to Rusinga island of Kisumu. He was instrumental in dispersing Luo people from Kiptere to Sondu. Among the Kipsigis, and perhaps among all the other Kalenjin, Arap Koilege is believed to have blessed Kenyatta Jomo and handed to him his attire which included a hide, a belt colloquially called 'Kenyatet', a head gear among others after which, Koilege asked Kenyatta to visit a leader of the Maasai who was a Laibon. The attire was worn by Jomo very many ceremonial times when he was the president of Kenya. Today, Jomo Kenyatta's traditional attire is burried with him in a muselium in Kenya's National Assembly building in Nairobi.
Chebochok Kiptonui arap Boisio
Chebochock was the son to Kimyole Arap Turgat. After Kimnyole was ousted and assassinated by the Nandi, Chebochok and his two brothers found refuge among the Kipsigis people while Koitalel Arap Samoei found refuge among the Tugen people. Chebochock Kiptonui arap Boisio settled in Londiani. He established himself a kingly estate. He empowered and commandeered Kipsigis armies to acquire land towards Laikipia.
He is reported or speculated to have fathered a boy to a widow who used to herd cattle, she was known as Wambui. The boy is reported to have been named Johnstone Peter Kamau. She then moved to a farm in Nyeri where she married Muigai but who later divorced her because of issues associated with cuckoldry.
In 1913, Chebochok Kiptonui Arap Boiso and his two brothers were banished to Fort Hall and Nyeri. Coincidentally, Wambui was assigned the role to look after the three brothers by the Europeans.
Kibuigut
Mugenik Araap Sitonik
He was the cousin to Koitalel arap Samoei and lived in village called Sotik to where Sotik town is currently situated. He gave prophecies that the Kipsigis still hold in great anticipation and record. It is remarked how correctly he prophesied about his Village becoming what is Sotik Town today. He also prophesied of the enlargement of the Kipsigis territory and a subclassification of the Kipsigis as per the colour of the teeth, and a second revisitation of the 'white' people.{
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Westernization and Colonial period
Westernization to Christianity
Catholic Church
The Catholic Church had its sentinel at Kericho to where Kenya's second-largest diocese is located in Kericho. The Catholic Church is perhaps one of the most aggressively accepted denominations among the Kipsigis because of their relaxed attitude of culture and the romanticised preservation of Kalenjin mythologies plus Christianisation of Kalenjin traditional religion where aspects of religion and the Kipsigis manner of worship was taken up and accepted. For instance, a Catholic church parish is colloquially called 'Kapkoros'.
One notable priest nicknamed Chemasus by the Kipsigis is most famous for converting Kipsigis into Christianity by indoctrination that it is allowed to drink alcohol (Nubian gin in this case) but in moderacy and that Asis is the same as Yahweh thus in the Catholic parishes in Kipsigis, it is not wrong to call the Israel/Christian God Cheptalel or Asis or any other attributes of Asis.
Africa Inland Mission
Africa Inland Mission established their first centres in Cheptenye in Belgut (a church and a rescue/education centre for girls/young woman rescued from female genital mutilation and initiation) and in Tenwek in Bomet. The group later broke into Africa Gospel Church'and Africa Inland Church, with the latter establishing themselves mostly among the Nandi and in Litein. Africa Gospel Church became the de facto Christian denomination especially in Belgut and in Bomet. Africa Inland Mission took a more reformatory approach where converts had to completely disassociate with traditional religion and traditional life; male adult converts were baptised with only one wives of their choice while the others would not. Unlike the Catholic church, Asisian religion was expressly not be faceted to Christianity.
Impact and Implications of Westernization/Christianization
Heritage
Culture
As a result of neglect of heritage, the culture of the Kipsigis became quickly westernised.
Health and education
Imperial rule
The Kipsigis especially of Cheptenye in Sosiot and Tenwek in Bomet had been coerced by the British through the Africa Inland Mission to give up Orgoik in exchange for scholarships and a peace treaty with British. This was easily arrived at with the leadership of Tenkwek AIM clergy, who led the propaganda against the Orgoik. The Christian missionaries employed extensive deceit to paint the Kipsigis spiritual leaders (Orgoik) as evil so that they could also get a better foothold on the beliefs of the Kipsigis. The Christian missionaries misrepresented that the few converts that they had converted to Christianity represented the Kipsigis nation. Part of this propaganda was to associate the Orgoik with the failures and disasters that had faced the Kipsigis including the failed battle of Mogori.
The British then prepared the Lumbwa Treaty and subsequently arrested all the Orgoik and their families and put them in Kericho cells. The British facilitated the few Kipsigis, who had been blackmailed and deceived to convert their religion, met at Kipkelion town, then called Lumbwa, and deliberated a treaty in the form and make of Kipsigis traditions under a custom called Muuma or Mummiat. It is detailed that the British promised together with this few Kipsigis to collaborate and not harm each other then they went on to savour a dog in two parts and each party buried their half. The British then exiled the spiritual leaders of the Kipsigis to Russinga Island in Kisumu. This atrocity against the Kipsigis nation has never been redeemed to date. In their anger, it is said that the Orgoik cursed the Kipsigis and the Nandi (Mee Kipsigis ne-ki mee tereet, ko me Nandi ne-ki mee Sotet: May the Kipsigiss die the manner of broken pot and may the Nandi die the manner of a broken calabash)
In 1905, the year the colonial authorities were at war with the Nandi, another successful campaign was being waged directly to the south against the Kipsigis. During the next few years, some 520 square kilometres of Kipsigis grazing land in an area known as Sotik were alienated to Europeans. In 1933 , the Kenya Land Commission approved the alienations, but expressed sympathy for the Kipsigis, who, it was noted, “have an excellent war record and merit generous treatment.” In compensation for the Kipsigis claim to Sotik, the commission recommended that the colonial authorities refrain from alienating Chepalungu, an area of about 390 square kilometres that local Europeans had wanted as an addition to the White Highlands.
Sotik Massacre
There is a popular narrative among those who are fond of romanticising history that Sotik District was created as a European buffer zone to keep apart four warring groups, the Kipsigis, Kisii, Maasai, and Luo. They argue that it was believed the coming of Europeans, and the establishment of commercial farming would prove of benefit as a “civilising” influence. Originally not part of the White Highlands, Sotik District was a Y-shaped strip of land about 50 miles and in some places not more than three miles wide, carved out of the Native Reserve. Sotik was Abugusii and Maasai territory before 1800 but, under a treaty promulgated by Menya Araap Kisiara, the Maasai were pushed to Trans-Mara, and in the 1830s the arrival of the three sons of arap Turgat from Nandi, led to a forceful and violent eviction of the Abagusii from the reaches of Bureti (Kapkatet), Keroka which means “look at home” in Kipsigis dialect.
During the second half of the 19th Century, the Kipsigis country appears to have suffered periods of famine, epidemics, and drought. In such situations, Kipsigis turned to the Abagusii for food, which was exchanged for livestock, or other trade items such as bows and arrows. In more severe cases of need, the Kipsigis sold their children in exchange for wimbi flour and, probably sheep and goats. In their present homeland, the Kipsigis had lived in symbiotic relationship with their neighbours though there were frequent altercations. In times of peace, the Kipsigis engaged in thriving trade with the Abagusii, Luo, Maasai, and their kinsmen the Nandi. Due to their love for cattle, however, they frequently raided all their neighbouring communities for cattle, except the Nandi. This resulted in repeated conflicts and wars with their neighbours. Raids and counter-raids between the Kipsigis and their neighbours were the order of the day at the advent of colonial rule.
Following the arrival of the British, the Kipsigis rallied alongside the Nandis to fight against the building of the Kenya-Uganda Railway. Koitalei Arap Samoei is one of Kenya’s greatest leaders in the history of our struggle for independence from British colonial rule. Born in 1860, Koitalel succeeded his father as the supreme leader of the Nandi people at the age of 25, proving to be a courageous and prophetic leader. He led an 11-year resistance against the British from 1894.
Seeing the long-drawn-out resistance of the Nandi led by Koitalel, the notorious Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, vowed to break the impasse. In the middle of 1905, a punitive raid led by Major Pope Hennessy massacred 1,850 men, women, and children who were rounded up and fired upon indiscriminately with a Maxim gun and other weapons. The massacre was ostensibly in retaliation against the refusal by the Sotik people to heed an ultimatum by the British government to return cattle stolen from the Maasai.
Some months later on 19 October 1905, Colonel Meinertzhagen tricked Koitalel into what was effectively an ambush and shot him at point-blank range, killing him on the spot and the rest of his entourage. With Koitalel dead, the Nandi resistance was neutralised, and the British proceeded to terrorise the Kipsigis and Nandi, evicting them from their land and sending them to areas that were unfit for human habitation. In a report appearing in the London Gazette of 13 March 1908, Lieutenant Edgar G. Harrison is quoted as saying, “The expedition resulted in the pacification of the country, a fertile and valuable district of the Protectorate, and the safeguarding of our friendly tribes from future molestation.”
The Sotik massacre and the assassination of Koitalel were directly linked to the setting aside of Sotik for European settlement and the colonial system of forced labour, punitive taxes for Africans, economic, and racial segregation. It is disingenuous to argue that it was a buffer zone to keep warring African tribes apart.
The philosophy of the British colonial administration is aptly summarised in this excerpt from the National Archives, Kew Gardens, London:“It was a Roman Catholic missionary who explained to his native converts that there was no doubt as to their equal with white men in heaven, but that the white man was at least 1,000 years ahead of them in civilisation, and that made a difference on earth. We cannot ignore that or expect a Kenyan settler to do so either. By all means, let us work towards the ultimate elimination of that difference, but in the process let us not be tempted to wander from the high road of facts into the by ways of unreality.” ACC Parkinson, 5.3.1930.In August 2020, following the murder of Gerge Floyd, Claudia Webbe, Member of Parliament for Leicester East wrote in a letter addressed to UK's Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson about Sotik Massacre and asked that the event should be taught in British schools.
Big game
For some time after the Nandi resistance, the Uganda protectorate was marketed in the western nations as a wild get-away destination for Big-Game enthusiasts. The Kipsigis' land strategically had the forested Sotik plains which wild life roamed freely. The Kipsigis people at the time being called 'Lumbwa' had its warriors become porters to assist big-game hunters to kill various animals.
Theodore Roosevelt recorded using the 405 Whinchester ammunition as the effective 'cure' against the ferocious Sotik lion.
Nandi Protest of 1923
A number of factors taking place in the early 1920s led to what has come to be termed the Nandi Protest or Uprisings of 1923. It was the first expression of organised resistance by the Nandi since the wars of 1905–06.
Primary contributing factors were the land alienation of 1920 and a steep increase in taxation, taxation tripled between 1909 and 1920 and because of a change in collection date, two taxes were collected in 1921. The Kipsigis and Nandi refused to pay and this amount was deferred to 1922. Further, due to fears of a spread of rinderpest following an outbreak, a stock quarantine was imposed on the Nandi Reserve between 1921 and 1923. The Nandi, prevented from selling stock outside the Reserve, had no cash, and taxes had to go unpaid. Normally, grain shortages in Nandi were met by selling stock and buying grain. The quarantine made this impossible. The labour conscription that took place under the Northey Circulars only added to the bitterness against the colonial government.
All these things contributed to a buildup of antagonism and unrest toward the government between 1920 and 1923. In 1923, the saget ab eito (sacrifice of the ox), a historically significant ceremony where leadership of the community was transferred between generations, was to take place. This ceremony had always been followed by an increased rate of cattle raiding as the now formally recognised warrior age-set sought to prove its prowess. The approach to a saget ab eito thus witnessed expressions of military fervour and for the ceremony all Nandi males would gather in one place.
Alarmed at the prospect and as there was also organised protest among the Kikuyu and Luo at that time, the colonial government came to believe that the Orkoiyot was planning to use the occasion of the Saget ab eito of 1923 as a cover under which to gather forces for a massive military uprising. On 16 October 1923, several days before the scheduled date for the saget ab eito, the Orkoiyot Barsirian Arap Manyei and four other elders were arrested and deported to Meru. Permission to hold the ceremony was withdrawn and it did not take place, nor has it ever taken place since. The Orkoiyot Barsirian Arap Manyei would spend the next forty years in political detention, becoming Kenya's, and possibly Africa's, longest-serving political prisoner.
Independence and Post-independence
Culture
After the Lumbwa treaty, the Kipsigis exercised a shift into Christianity and almost abandoned their culture. This took place in association with the Catholic Church which had its grounds in Kericho Town and Kaplong; Africa Inland Church which had its ground in Litein and Africa Gospel Church which had its grounds in Cheptenye, Sosiot – currently Cheptenye Boys' High School and Cheptenye AGC church and also in Tenwek, Bomet.
The Kipsigis have ceased naming their children by ancestral reincarnation because missionaries led them to believe it was an evil practice. Birth time naming still continue and as such, boys and girls are still named by the "Kip-" and "Chep-" names which usually makes up their second name. Girls and young women have ceased to be initiated or circumcised which subsequently, has led to the loss of "Tab-" naming. Boys and young men still circumcise and initiate and thus the "Arap-" naming system has been retained albeit the fact that the Kenyan Registra bodies all only for 25 characters of which the Arap title would lead to an excess, hence they only use cerfix to Arap naming system. The later version of Arap naming makes up the surname for initiated men and boys. The first names for the Kipsigis are the secular and gospel names traded from western cultures though the missionaries and pop-culture.
Currently among its youth, the Kipsigis are exercising a shift to pop culture. This is evident in the shift to initiation ceremonies held in conjunction with the various churches called banda en tililindo against the traditional Kipgaa. It is also evident in the robust gospel and secular music scene unlike any in Kalenjin.
Of the many customs that Kipsigis kept and performed, the current most prominent are the circumcision and initiation of boys and marriage by elopement and thus the current Kipsigis are nothing like their ancestors. To make it worse, the Kipsigis have a high-level of security and departmentalisation of information and knowledge on their customs thus leading to constant misinterpretation and attrition of their culture.
The Kipsigis view "happiness" as a lack of negative experiences, indicating a quiet and calm state. This convention under the culture and positive psychology studies when contrasted to other indigenous communities of the gives researchers an obstacle in obtaining a qualitative or quantitative measure of happiness.
Music, Film and written Arts
Contemporary Kalenjin music has long been influenced by the Kipsigis leading to Kericho's perception as a cultural innovation center in Kenya and effectively in the Great-Lakes Region of Africa. The secular music scene is the pioneering and perhaps the most decorative and celebrated in Kipsigis and effectively in Kalenjin.
A song "Chemirocha III" collected by ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey in 1950 from the Kipsigis was written in honour of Jimmie Rodgers. The song's title is an approximation of the musician's name. According to legend, tribe members were exposed to Rodgers' music through British soldiers during World War II. Impressed by his yodelling, they envisioned Rodgers as "a faun, half-man and half-antelope."
Kimursi, an actor in the 1950 adventure film: King Solomon's Mines, is credited as being of Kipsigis ethnicity. In the cast, he took on the role of Khiva
Emerging socio-cultural trends and dynamics
HIV/AIDS
In the 1980s, some of the first reports of HIV were reported in Kenya in Mombasa and in the decades that followed, the virus has infected many people and killed many too. 1% of the Kenyan population is believed to be infected as of 2020. The Kipsigis people have emphasised male circumcision as a precautionary measure of reducing HIV transmissions. The Kipsigis also like many other Kenyan communities have become educated on the matter; stigma has reduced by a big margin and only limited to isolated events. The infected individuals are being actively monitored by health institutions and adhere to ARV medication.
Cancer and carcinogenic food/drinks
The rural Kipsigis communities stereotypically take tea several times a day and preferably at very hot temperatures (about 72-degree Celsius). They also celebrate sour milk known colloquially as Mursiik and usually take it with vegetables and a thick paste of cooked maize/millet flour known colloquially as Kimyeet and Ugali in Swahili. Mursiik, in particular, has been highlighted by Tenwek Hospital to cause throat cancer especially in Bomet. Another thesis put forward by a district hospital in Busia, Western Kenya, points out that not only that caffeine is carcinogenic but at the intervals and volume of consumption plus the preferable temperatures of beverages such as tea and coffee are dangerous combination of risk factors causing the increasingly common cases of various cancers and throat cancer in particular.
Although the reports and research put forward highlights caffeine beverages and sour milk, it is also imperative to consider that a significant demographic of the Kipsigis population are popular with indigenous Nubian gin brew and also with recognised alcoholic brands and thus this combination plus the popularity of hot beverages, caffeine beverages and Mursiik could also be a risk factor to consider.
Population Chart and Demographics
In the 2009 Kenya census, the Kipsigis population was 1,916,000 individuals; this made them the most populous entitiy of the Kalenjin confederation throughout the Great Lakes Region. In the 2019 Kenya census, the Kipsigis were 1, 932,000. This figure implies a plateauing phase of population growth. It is believed that this is because polygamy had been abolished until 2018; also that the Kenyan economy is slowing and life is becoming expensive due to Uhuru Kenyatta's government look east policy and extravagant borrowing.
Bomet County is believed to have the highest life expectancy in Kenya. Mzee Barnabas Kiptanui Arap Rob who is believed to have been born in 1879 was mystified as to have achieved longevity. He died in 2017 aged 133.
Diaspora
Kipsigis community today has a diaspora presence predominantly in United States of America, United Kingdom, Australia, France, UAE, Tanzania and South Sudan. A majority of the diaspora of Kipsigis origin are educated and well-qualified, usually with well-paying jobs. It is observed that like most other Kenyan diaspora, the Kipsigis diaspora have a positive attitude toward Kenya and more so on the Emet ab Kipsigis.
Together with other Kalenjin elite diaspora, there is an organisation called 'Kwaneet' which usually operates a televised or teleconferenced programs on Kass media group.
Sports
Notable Kipsigis athletes (deceased, alive, retired and active) include:
Wilson Kiprugut arap Chumo, Kenya's pioneering athlete/Olympian in 1964; participated barefoot; won a gold medal
Paul Kipsiele Koech
Mercy Cherono
Joyce Chepchumba
Edwin Cheruiyot Soi
David Kimutai Rotich
Peter Cheruiyot Kirui
William Chirchir
John Cheruiyot Korir
Cornelius Chirchir
Lineth Chepkurui
Kipkurui Misoi
Robert Kiprono Cheruiyot
Hellen Chepngeno
Faith Chepngetich Kipyegon
Emily Chebet
Paskalia Chepkorir Kipkoech
John Korir Kipsang
The Kipsigis are not usually known to excel or even participate in soccer but Nicholas Kipkirui (Harambee Stars player contracted to Gor Mahia), Dominic Kiprono (contracted to Zoo Kericho F.C) and Isaac Kipyegon (contracted to Zoo Kericho F.C) are changing this stereotype.
Agriculture and agri-politics
Politics
Community Politics
The Kipsigis community is a rich political arena. Bomet County has been selected by a university based in Nairobi as a jurisdiction in which its Political Science department actively monitors. The Kipsigis present themselves in a united political front but Bomet County has been observed to promote quality politics. Radio stations such as Kass fm, Chamgei fm and Kitwek fm play a very important political role by way of hosting leaders and holding thematic political discussions.
The Kipsigis aspire to present Kenya a president. In part, some Kipsigis estimate anonymously that they have done so since Jomo Kenyatta (whom the Kipsigis sometimes refer to as Kipkemo) is alleged to be the biological son to Chebochok Kiptonui arap Boisio. During Daniel Moi's regime, the Kipsigis had Dr. Taaitta Towett who was being groomed by Daniel Toroitich arap Moi to become his successor but he later defected onto a leftist front and thus Daniel Moi engaged Towett in politics of attrition. Daniel Moi thus began grooming Professor Jonathan Kimetet arap Ngeno. Professor Jonathan was faced with opposition by culturalists who sidelined him as a man who had been initiated through Kimuutaat, a derogative term for the initiations held in conjunction with churches. William Kipchirchir Samoei arap Ruto whose origin and ethnicity is Kipsigis from the Komosi clan in Sigowet-Soin, is currently set to contend for the presidency in 2022.
The Kipsigis believe that they have supernatural impediment to their aspiration. This including the curses made by Oorgooiik as they were banished by British government, Christian AIM and Catholic churches and Kipsigis community followed by Lumbwa Treaty. Another superstitious impediment is believed to be the lost Kaplelach age-set who were decimated in River Maggori (River Migori) and thus there is an interest to demarcate a memorial cemetery for the killed soldiers. Apparently, there is a belief, too, that the remains of Oorgooiik in Nyeri and Meru should be returned to Kipsigis.
Prominent leadership
Presidency
Dr. William Kipchirchir Samoei araap Ruto is from the Kipsigis ethnicity and was the Member of Parliament for Eldoret North Constituency, Cabinet Minister for Education]] and Cabinet Cabinet Minister for Agriculture. He is the incumbent Deputy President of Kenya and has been serving in this role since 2013. His second term began in 2018 and will end in 2022. He has been deputising for the 4th president of Kenya, Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta.
Ambassadors
Francis Sigey (Kibororek): Ambassador of Kenya to Nigeria
Joshua Terer (KipKesbaek): Ambassador of Kenya to India
Speaker of Parliament
Moses Kiprono arap Keino (Kipkelezek clan): Third Speaker of the Parliament of Kenya from 1988 until 1991
Professor Jonathan Kimetet arap Ng'eno (Becherek clan): Fourth Speaker of the Parliament of Kenya from 1991 until 1993
Cabinet Ministers and Cabinet Secretaries
There have been a number of cabinet ministers and cabinet secretaries from the Kipsigis ethnicity. A number of them include
Dr. Taaitta Toweett (Zoigoeek Clan): Labour and Housing (1961), Lands, Survey & Town Planning (1962), Education (1974) and Housing and Social Services (1974)
Prof. Jonathan Kimetet Araap Ngeno (Bechereek Clan): Education (1974), Housing and Social Services
John Koech (): East Africa Comminuty
Frankline Bett (Moochoeek Clan): Roads and Transportation
Davis Chirchir (): Engineering and Petroleum (2013-207)
Eng. John Mosonik(): Transport (2013-2017)
Charles Keter(): Energy (2017-2022)
Assistant Ministers and Principal Secretaries
Members of Parliament
Governors and Deputy Governors from the Kipsigis Ethnicity
Aruasa Evalyn Chepkirui (): Deputy Governor, Narok County
Susan Kikwai (): Deputy Governor, Kericho County
Redress for violations by British colonial government
In 2017, a consortium from the Kipsigis community organised by Professor Paul Kiprono Chepkwony and lead by Karim Ahmad Khan sought redress for human rights violations committed by the British government during the colonial period. The plaintiffs were more than 100,000 ethnic Kipsigis victims and the members of Talai Clan
Provisions for Oorgoiik and Their Plight
The Talai clansmen returned or continued to peacefully live with Kipsigis people after independence. After the sinister campaign of AIM and Catholic church the Talai clansmen were sidelined and hated but today, they exist peacefully with the Kipsigis and take upon the identity of the Kipsigis equally like any other clansmen. Notably, the residents of Chepalungu constituency (today's Sotik and Chepalungu constituencies) voted in Tamason Barmalel, the grandson of Koitalel Arap Samoei, as their MP between 1969 and 1974.
Apparently, allocations of land made by the Kenyan Government under Taaita Towet and Daniel arap Moi to the Talai clansmen has been reported to be grabbed and commercialised by corrupt agents and thus, those living in Kericho live in wanting situations and poverty.
Mau Settlement and Political Evictions
Conflicts and Violence
The Kipsigis are known to be welcoming and hospitable but with a reputation to raise alarm and mobilise militant ranks in a short response time possible if attacked. Traditionally, they used to raid Abagusii, Maasai and Luo for cattle and for adoption of entire families or villages.
In recent history, the Kipsigis have ceased to instigate cattle rustling (or people rustling!) as it has become an outdated and illegal practice. It is however observed that cattle rustling still occurs especially in Sotik where organised goons between Abagusii and Kipsigis delinquents operate systematic cattle theft. This thus creates a negative attitude among the Abagusii toward the Kipsigis and thus build up tensions that explode in conflicts most probably during post-elections. The government is also known to favour the Abagusii by giving them policing agents such as Anti-stock theft and General Service Units who arbitrarily and punitively beat up the residents of Sotik (while the real answer could most possibly be found by intensifying intelligence operations to nab the organised goons).
After independence and with the Kalenjin consciousness, the Kipsigis along with other highland nilotes have political unity that which is the target of political dynasties.
Most notably is the Mau forest government residence program that was perpetuated by Mwai Kibaki's government under the ministry of lands which saw many Kipsigis acquire land in Mau forest only for them to be forcefully evicted by the same government in 2008 and by Uhuru Kenyatta's government in 2018–2019. The evictions were violent, inconsiderate and uncompensated.
After a comprehensive risk assessment of social, economic and political factors that increase the likelihood of genocide in Kenya, the Sentinel Project's May 2011 report identified several risk factors including; a low degree of democracy, isolation from the international community, high levels of military expenditure, severe government discrimination or active repression of native groups, socioeconomic deprivation combined with group-based inequality and a legacy of intergroup hatred among other risk factors.
1992 Skirmishes
In 1991, multi-party democracy was a contentious issue as Kikuyu people had been angered by Moi's regime and associated aggressively authoritarian rule. The Kikuyu associated Kipsigis to Daniel Moi and then demonised them as retrogressive and enemies of democracy. The Kikuyu primarily supported Kenneth Matiba and in retaliation, the Kipsigis supported Daniel Moi.
The buildup of tension and hate resulted in pre-election ethnicity-based violence of 1992 where in Kipkelion constituencies, the Kipsigis torched houses of non-Kipsigis (excluding Nandi and other Kalenjin). This affected majorly the Kikuyu and Kisii people plus also Luo people. 5,000 people were killed and another 75,000 displaced in the Rift Valley Province, with the town of Molo being an epicenter of the violence. The conflict was primarily between the Kalenjin and Kikuyu communities with Land ownership cited as one of key reasons for the conflict. The Kisii in Kipkelion fled to Nyanza, where they found refuge among their kin. As a result, the Kisii people bordering Bureti, Sotik and Narok West constituencies retaliated against the Kipsigis. This resulted in skirmishes in the region; primarily associated with groups of fighters from both ethnicities holding sentinel.
2018 Maa-Kipsigis Skirmmishes
The Maasai and the Kipsigis have historically and traditionally antagonised each other right from and a period earlier than the Maasai era. This usually manifested as cattle raids, eventual battles and the subsequent southward thwarting and ejection of the Maasai. After Kenya's independence, there have been periodic tensions between the Maasai and the Kipsigis which have backgrounds in history and traditions and fuelled by political incitement especially during the elections period. Politicians have been said to fuel the clashes with their remarks, both in public forums and on social media. In 2018 for instance, Narok County Senator Ledama Olekina, part of the Maasai community, has been criticised for remarks about the evictions.
In 2018 particularly, the Uhuru government under the Minister of Lands evicted a section of the Mau Complex settlers who are mainly of Kipsigis ethnicity. The evictions were particularly forceful, inconsiderate, inhuman and without compensation. A major section of the Maasai leaders supported the evictions and are said or known to have committed hate speech. In the wake of the polarisation, the Maasai are reported to have attacked Kipsigis evictees and in retaliation, Kipsigis men in Narok and Bomet counties retaliated. The battles implored the use of crude or/and traditional weaponry including nuts (a nut used to fit to a screw fitted onto a wooden handle about a foot and a half long), spears, bows and arrows, swords and torches (or at least, petrol/gasoline and lighters).
Following the 2018 evictions and Maasai-Kipsigis clashes, several human-rights defenders came together to file a paper in protest of the human-rights violations committed by the Kenyan government in evicting people from the forests; it said in part, "The actions of the Government of Kenya in forcibly evicting tens of thousands of people from forests violates a range of human rights, which are contained in international instruments to which Kenya is a State Party." Kenyan lawyer Leonard Sigey Bett filed a petition with the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands challenging the evictions. It is however imperative to note that Environmental conservation groups generally support the eviction of people from the forest, but only if the exercise is done amicably and humanely.
Science and academia
It is observed that among the Kipsigis, knowledge is measured binomially where to be thought of as knowledgeable, ng’om, one has to display the application of the corresponding knowledge. In academia, the 'Kipsigis' word or eponym has inspired the nomenclature of an extinct genus of East African antelope from the middle Miocene (Kipsigicerus). Other academic terms associated with the Kipsigis include: Acraea sotikensis and Sotik lion (Panthera leo melanochaita).
Dr. Taaitta Araap Toweett was a Kipsigis elite and political leader. He was awarded scholarship by the Kipsigis County Council in 1955 to the South Devon Technical College, Torquay, to study for a diploma in public and social administration. He obtained a B.A. (1956) and B.A. (Hons) 1959 from the University of South Africa. On his return from Britain in 1957, he was appointed Community Development Officer for Nandi District, the first African CDO to be recruited locally in Kenya. During this period was the editor of the Kipsigis vernacular magazine Ngalek Ap Kipsigisiek, published quarterly. He was one of the eight original Africans elected to the Legislative Council in 1958 as Member for the Southern Area, a constituency comprising mainly Kipsigis and Maasai Districts. He formed Kalenjin Political Alliance Party that later on got into an alliance with KADU. He served on the Dairy Board and played a crucial role in the foundation of the co-operative movement nationally. In 1960, 1962, 1963 he attended the Lancaster House Conferences held in London to draft Kenya's Constitution, paving the way for complete self-rule. Before Kenya's independence, he was appointed Assistant Minister for Agriculture (1960), Minister of Labour and Housing in 1961 and Minister of Lands, Surveys and Town Planning in 1962. After Kenya's Independence, he was appointed Minister for Education in 1969, Minister for Housing and Social Services in 1974, Minister for Education in 1976. He was also elected President of the 19th General Assembly of UNESCO (1976–78). In 1977, he finished his PhD thesis on "A Study of Kalenjin Linguistics". In 1980, he was appointed as the chairperson of Kenya Literature Bureau. In 1983–1985, he served as the Charperson, Kenya Airways after which he was appointed the chairperson, Kenya Seed Company. He also served as a Director of the Kenya Times newspaper and went on to edit and publish his own newspaper, Voice of Rift Valley between 1997 and 2000.
Professor Jonathan Kimetet Araap Ngeno was a Kipsigis elite who was sponsored by African Inland Church from Litein to study in the United States. He was invited back to Kenya and reintegrated by Daniel arap Moi to achieve political attrition over Dr. Taaitta Toweett. He was appointed to Ministerial positions and was elected the Fourth Speaker of the Parliament of Kenya succeeding coincidentally his baghuleita (a male agemate who was initiated in the same seclusion home), Moses Kiprono arap Keino.
In the 1990s, Professor Davy Kiprotich Koech by then the Director of Kenya Medical Research Institute and Dr. Arthur O. Obel, the Chief Research Officer published in two medical journals the initial results of the newfound drug "Kemron" that was perceived from the preliminary study of 10 patients to cure AIDS. The drug was introduced in a public ceremony presided by Kenya's former President, Daniel Toroitch Arap Moi and the work of the new wonder drug discovered was hailed as a major step against HIV/AIDS.Kemron was the trade name for a low-dose of alpha interferon, manufactured form of a natural body chemical in a tablet form that dissolves in the mouth. Clinical trials of Kemron funded by WHO in five African Countries did not find any health benefits reported by Kemri Scientists. Thereafter, WHO in a press release in its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, termed Kemron as an experimental drug of unproven benefit for HIV/AIDS treatment. The American National Institute of Health concluded that no one had been able to duplicate the effects claimed by scientists behind Kemron drug. In 1998 Prof. Davy Koech led the Commission of Inquiry into the Education System of Kenya. Hosted by Kenya Broadcasting Cooperation (KBC) in 2019, Prof. Koech cited bad peer review on his experimental drug and that he was currently overseeing reexamination of the Kemron drug and further research in China.
Professor Richard Kiprono Mibey has discovered more than 120 species of fungi, made major input to the discovery of environmentally friendly fungi for bio-control of the obnoxious water hyacinth weed in Lake Victoria has contributed to the preservation of rare and highly specialised micro-fungi of Kenyan plants.
Professor Paul Kiprono Chepkwony, the incumbent governor of Kericho County has declared in a Kenyan comedy show, Churchill Show (hosted in Tea Hotel Kericho in 2018) a lengthy list pending and granted patents on various fields of Biochemistry.
Professor Moses King'eno Rugut is a Kenyan Research Scientist and the current C.E.O the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation. He sits in the board of National Quality Control Laboratory, Kenya Agricultural & Livestock Research Organization, committee member on Drug Registration at Pharmacy & Poisons Board since 1999 and National Museums of Kenya. He also served as the Director General of the defunct KARI that was de-gazetted and was preceded by a newly established state agency KALRO and as Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology before being appointed the chief executive officer, National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation. He was awarded Head of State's Commendations in the year 2008 for his distinguished service to the nation and subsequently awarded with the Order of the Grand Warrior, OGW in the year 2016 Prof. Moses Rugut has authored, co-authored or authored publications alongside other authors. Some of these publications include: Seroepidemiological survey of Taenia saginata cysticercosis in Kenya; Diagnosis of Taenia saginata cysticercosis in Kenyan cattle by antibody and antigen ELISA; Anthelmintic resistance amongst sheep and goats in Kenya and Epidemiology and control of ruminant helminths in the Kericho Highlands of Kenya.
Gladys Chepkirui Ngetich is a Kenyan engineer of Kipsigis origin, and a Rhodes scholar pursuing a doctorate degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. She is the recipient of the Tanenbaum Fellowship and the Babaroa Excellence Award. In 2018, Ngetich was credited with a patent in collaboration with Rolls-Royce Plc. Her research work has been in BBC Science and the Oxford Science Blog and Medium. She received the ASME IGTI Young Engineer Turbo Expo Participation Award, for her paper at the 2018 Annual American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) conference. In September 2018, Business Daily Africa named Ngitech among its "Top 40 Under 40 Women in Kenya in 2018". In 2019 she started investigating sustainable space science using a Schmidt Science Fellowship. Ngetich is the co-founder of the ILUU, a Nairobi-based non-profit that aims to inspire girls and women.
Academic institutions
Emet ab Kipsigis hosts the main campuses of University of Kabianga, Kenya Highlands Evangelical University and Bomet University. It also hosts Kericho Teachers' College.
Places of interest
Kipsigis Hill: Overlooking Londiani junction, the hill is sacred to the Kipsigis and of both cultural and historical importance to the Kipsigis ethnicity. It was here were the first circumcisions were practised.
Kericho town: This the most populous town of the Kipsigis nation and as such also regarded as the socio cultural centre of the Kalenjin. This town is the capital of Kericho County. This is a high altitude town with fertile soils that has seen the establishment of many tea farms in the area. The tea leaves from this town are of the highest international quality for its brightness, attractive colour, brisk flavor and textures of fragrant leaves. Some of the largest tea companies including Unilever Kenya, James Finlay and Williamson tea are based here. Kericho hosts Africa's largest Sikh Gurudwara and the second largest Catholic cathedral in Kenya. Gurdwara Sahib is built on the site of the home and workshop of Kericho Wagon Works founder Sant Baba Puran Singh Ji of Kericho. Chandarana Records, a pioneer of Benga music and the Kenyan music recording industry is based in Kericho town.
Sotik town: The home of the Kipsigis prophet, Mugenik.{
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Sosiot town: Located in Belgut, Sosiot is a town of ancient antiquity to the Kipsigis. The name sossiot refers to an instrument that is used to clean gourds. It may imply that this area where the town is located originally had a proliferation of the sossiot tree whose branches are used to make this cleaning instrument which is also named after the tree.
Bomet town: Formerly known as Soot''', it is the Capital of Bomet County and the Sister city to Milwaukee. It hosts Tenwek community (Tenwek Hospital, Tenwek Boys' High School, Chebonei Girls' High School, Tenwek Africa Gospel Church and Tenwek Hydroelectric dam) that was established by Africa Inland Mission and currently associated and branded by Africa Gospel Church.
Fort Ternan: A prehistoric site where Kenyapithecus fossils were first discovered by Louis Leakey in 1962. There is a museum about 15 km from Fort Ternan Town.
Kapkatet town: The current centre of Kipsigis community. It hosts a dedicated Kipsigis museum and Tengecha schools dedicated to the Kipsigis chief Cheborge arap Tengecha. It also hosts University of Kabianga, Kapkatet campus.
References
Bibliography
A. C. Hollis. The Nandi: Their Language and Folklore. Clarendon Press: Oxford 1909.
Ember and Ember. Cultural Anthropology''. Pearson Prentice Hall Press: New Jersey 2007.
Kosibon, Elijah Kipngetich (2018). An Oral Narrative about Kapchebereek Clan Among the Kipsigis People of Kenya to His Son Dr. Festus Kipkorir Ngetich. Unpublished.
Burnette C. Fish and Gerald W. Fish: The Kalenjin Heritage; Traditional Religious and Social Practices: World Gospel Mission and William Carey Library. 1995, 1996.
Manners, Robert A. The Kipsigis of Kenya: Culture Change in a 'model' East African Tribe. In Three African Tribes in Transition. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1950.
Mwanzi, Henry A. A History of the Kipsigis. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1977
Ochardson, Ian Q. "Supernatural Beliefs of the Lumbwa." Political Record DC/KER/3/1. District Commissioner's Office, Kericho: 1918.
External links
Kalenjin
Ethnic groups in Kenya
Nilotic peoples | [
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17160 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife | Knife | A knife (plural knives; from Old Norse 'knife, dirk') is a tool or weapon with a cutting edge or blade, usually attached to a handle or hilt. One of the earliest tools used by humanity, knives appeared at least 2.5 million years ago, as evidenced by the Oldowan tools. Originally made of wood, bone, and stone (such as flint and obsidian), over the centuries, in step with improvements in both metallurgy and manufacturing, knife blades have been made from copper, bronze, iron, steel, ceramic, and titanium. Most modern knives have either fixed or folding blades; blade patterns and styles vary by maker and country of origin.
Knives can serve various purposes. Hunters use a hunting knife, soldiers use the combat knife, scouts, campers, and hikers carry a pocket knife; there are kitchen knives for preparing foods (the chef's knife, the paring knife, bread knife, cleaver), table knives (butter knives and steak knives), weapons (daggers or switchblades), knives for throwing or juggling, and knives for religious ceremony or display (the kirpan).
Parts
A modern knife consists of:
the blade
the handle
the point – the end of the knife used for piercing
the edge – the cutting surface of the knife extending from the point to the heel
the grind – the cross section shape of the blade
the spine – the thickest section of the blade; on a single-edged knife, the side opposite the edge; on a two-edged knife, more toward the middle
the fuller – a groove added to make the blade lighter
the ricasso – the flat section of the blade located at the junction of the blade and the knife's bolster or guard
the guard – the barrier between the blade and the handle which prevents the hand from slipping forward onto the blade and protects the hand from the external forces that are usually applied to the blade during use
the hilt or butt – the end of the handle utilized for blunt force
the lanyard – a strap used to secure the knife to the wrist
The blade edge can be plain or serrated, or a combination of both. Single-edged knives may have a reverse edge or false edge occupying a section of the spine. These edges are usually serrated and are used to further enhance function.
The handle, used to grip and manipulate the blade safely, may include a tang, a portion of the blade that extends into the handle. Knives are made with partial tangs (extending part way into the handle, known as "stick tangs") or full tangs (extending the full length of the handle, often visible on top and bottom). There is also the enterçado construction method present in antique knives from Brazil, such as the Sorocaban Knife, which consists in riveting a repurposed blade to the ricasso of a bladeless handle. The handle may include a bolster, a piece of heavy material (usually metal) situated at the front or rear of the handle. The bolster, as its name suggests, is used to mechanically strengthen the knife.
Blade
Knife blades can be manufactured from a variety of materials, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. Carbon steel, an alloy of iron and carbon, can be very sharp. It holds its edge well, and remains easy to sharpen, but is vulnerable to rust and stains. Stainless steel is an alloy of iron, chromium, possibly nickel, and molybdenum, with only a small amount of carbon. It is not able to take quite as sharp an edge as carbon steel, but is highly resistant to corrosion. High carbon stainless steel is stainless steel with a higher amount of carbon, intended to incorporate the better attributes of carbon steel and stainless steel. High carbon stainless steel blades do not discolor or stain, and maintain a sharp edge. Laminated blades use multiple metals to create a layered sandwich, combining the attributes of both. For example, a harder, more brittle steel may be sandwiched between an outer layer of softer, tougher, stainless steel to reduce vulnerability to corrosion. In this case, however, the part most affected by corrosion, the edge, is still vulnerable. Damascus steel is a form of pattern welding with similarities to laminate construction. Layers of different steel types are welded together, but then the stock is manipulated to create patterns in the steel.
Titanium is a metal that has a better strength-to-weight ratio, is more wear resistant, and more flexible than steel. Although less hard and unable to take as sharp an edge, carbides in the titanium alloy allow them to be heat-treated to a sufficient hardness. Ceramic blades are hard, brittle, and lightweight: they may maintain a sharp edge for years with no maintenance at all, but are as fragile as glass and will break if dropped on a hard surface. They are immune to common corrosion, and can only be sharpened on silicon carbide sandpaper and some grinding wheels. Plastic blades are not especially sharp and typically serrated. They are often disposable.
Steel blades are commonly shaped by forging or stock removal. Forged blades are made by heating a single piece of steel, then shaping the metal while hot using a hammer or press. Stock removal blades are shaped by grinding and removing metal. With both methods, after shaping, the steel must be heat treated. This involves heating the steel above its critical point, then quenching the blade to harden it. After hardening, the blade is tempered to remove stresses and make the blade tougher. Mass manufactured kitchen cutlery uses both the forging and stock removal processes. Forging tends to be reserved for manufacturers' more expensive product lines, and can often be distinguished from stock removal product lines by the presence of an integral bolster, though integral bolsters can be crafted through either shaping method.
Knives are sharpened in various ways. Flat ground blades have a profile that tapers from the thick spine to the sharp edge in a straight or convex line. Seen in cross section, the blade would form a long, thin triangle, or where the taper does not extend to the back of the blade, a long thin rectangle with one peaked side. Hollow ground blades have concave, beveled edges. The resulting blade has a thinner edge, so it may have better cutting ability for shallow cuts, but it is lighter and less durable than flat ground blades and will tend to bind in deep cuts. Serrated blade knives have a wavy, scalloped or saw-like blade. Serrated blades are more well suited for tasks that require aggressive 'sawing' motions, whereas plain edge blades are better suited for tasks that require push-through cuts (e.g., shaving, chopping, slicing).
Many knives have holes in the blade for various uses. Holes are commonly drilled in blades to reduce friction while cutting, increase single-handed usability of pocket knives, and, for butchers' knives, allow hanging out of the way when not in use.
Fixed-blade features
A fixed blade knife, sometimes called a sheath knife, does not fold or slide, and is typically stronger due to the tang, the extension of the blade into the handle, and lack of moving parts.
Folding blade features
A folding knife connects the blade to the handle through a pivot, allowing the blade to fold into the handle. To prevent injury to the knife user through the blade accidentally closing on the user's hand, folding knives typically have a locking mechanism. Different locking mechanisms are favored by various individuals for reasons such as perceived strength (lock safety), legality, and ease of use.
Popular locking mechanisms include:
Slip joint – Found most commonly on traditional pocket knives, the opened blade does not lock, but is held in place by a spring device that allows the blade to fold if a certain amount of pressure is applied.
Lockback – Also known as the spine lock, the lockback includes a pivoted latch affixed to a spring, and can be disengaged only by pressing the latch down to release the blade.
Linerlock – Invented by Michael Walker, a Linerlock is a folding knife with a side-spring lock that can be opened and closed with one hand without repositioning the knife in the hand. The lock is self-adjusting for wear.
Compression Lock – A variant of the Liner Lock, it uses a small piece of metal at the tip of the lock to lock into a small corresponding impression in the blade. This creates a lock that doesn't disengage when the blade is torqued, instead of becoming more tightly locked. It is released by pressing the tab of metal to the side, to allow the blade to be placed into its groove set into the handle.
Frame Lock – Also known as the integral lock or monolock, this locking mechanism was invented by a custom knifemaker Chris Reeve for the Sebenza as an update to the liner lock. The frame lock works in a manner similar to the liner lock but uses a partial cutout of the actual knife handle, rather than a separate liner inside the handle to hold the blade in place.
Collar lock – found on Opinel knives.
Button Lock – Found mainly on automatic knives, this type of lock uses a small push-button to open and release the knife.
Axis Lock – A locking mechanism exclusively licensed to the Benchmade Knife Company. A cylindrical bearing is tensioned such that it will jump between the knife blade and some feature of the handle to lock the blade open.
Arc Lock – A locking mechanism exclusively licensed to SOG Specialty Knives. It differs from an axis lock in that the cylindrical bearing is tensioned by a rotary spring rather than an axial spring.
Ball Bearing Lock – A locking mechanism exclusively licensed to Spyderco. This lock is conceptually similar to the axis and arc locks but the bearing is instead a ball bearing.
Tri-Ad Lock – A locking mechanism exclusively licensed to Cold Steel. It is a form of lockback which incorporates a thick steel stop pin between the front of the latch and the back of the tang to transfer force from the blade into the handle.
PickLock – A round post on the back base of the blade locks into a hole in a spring tab in the handle. To close, manually lift (pick) the spring tab (lock) off the blade post with your fingers, or in "Italian Style Stilettos" swivel the bolster (hand guard) clockwise to lift the spring tab off the blade post.
Another prominent feature of many folding knives is the opening mechanism. Traditional pocket knives and Swiss Army knives commonly employ the nail nick, while modern folding knives more often use a stud, hole, disk, or flipper located on the blade, all of which have the benefit of allowing the user to open the knife with one hand.
The "wave" feature is another prominent design, which uses a part of the blade that protrudes outward to catch on one's pocket as it is drawn, thus opening the blade; this was patented by Ernest Emerson and is not only used on many of the Emerson knives, but also on knives produced by several other manufacturers, notably Spyderco and Cold Steel.
Automatic or switchblade knives open using the stored energy from a spring that is released when the user presses a button or lever or other actuator built into the handle of the knife. Automatic knives are severely restricted by law in the UK and most American states.
Increasingly common are assisted opening knives which use springs to propel the blade once the user has moved it past a certain angle. These differ from automatic or switchblade knives in that the blade is not released by means of a button or catch on the handle; rather, the blade itself is the actuator. Most assisted openers use flippers as their opening mechanism. Assisted opening knives can be as fast or faster than automatic knives to deploy.
Common locking mechanisms
In the lock back, as in many folding knives, a stop pin acting on the top (or behind) the blade prevents it from rotating clockwise. A hook on the tang of the blade engages with a hook on the rocker bar which prevents the blade from rotating counter-clockwise. The rocker bar is held in position by a torsion bar. To release the knife the rocker bar is pushed downwards as indicated and pivots around the rocker pin, lifting the hook and freeing the blade.
When negative pressure (pushing down on the spine) is applied to the blade all the stress is transferred from the hook on the blade's tang to the hook on the rocker bar and thence to the small rocker pin. Excessive stress can shear one or both of these hooks rendering the knife effectively useless. Knife company Cold Steel uses a variant of the lock back called the Tri-Ad Lock which introduces a pin in front of the rocker bar to relieve stress on the rocker pin, has an elongated hole around the rocker pin to allow the mechanism to wear over time without losing strength and angles the hooks so that the faces no longer meet vertically.
The bolt in the bolt lock is a rectangle of metal that is constrained to slide only back and forward. When the knife is open a spring biases the bolt to the forward position where it rests above the tang of the blade preventing the blade from closing. Small knobs extend through the handle of the knife on both sides allowing the user to slide the bolt backward freeing the knife to close. The Axis Lock used by knife maker Benchmade is functionally identical to the bolt lock except that it uses a cylinder rather than a rectangle to trap the blade. The Arc Lock by knife maker SOG is similar to the Axis Lock except the cylinder follows a curved path rather than a straight path.
In the liner lock, an "L"-shaped split in the liner allows part of the liner to move sideways from its resting position against the handle to the centre of the knife where it rests against the flat end of the tang. To disengage, this leaf spring is pushed so it again rests flush against the handle allowing the knife to rotate. A frame lock is functionally identical but instead of using a thin liner inside the handle material uses a thicker piece of metal as the handle and the same split in it allows a section of the frame to press against the tang.
Sliding blade features
A sliding knife is a knife that can be opened by sliding the knife blade out the front of the handle. One method of opening is where the blade exits out the front of the handle point-first and then is locked into place (an example of this is the gravity knife). Another form is an OTF (out-the-front) switchblade, which only requires the push of a button or spring to cause the blade to slide out of the handle and lock into place. To retract the blade back into the handle, a release lever or button, usually the same control as to open, is pressed. A very common form of sliding knife is the sliding utility knife (commonly known as a stanley knife or boxcutter).
Handle
The handles of knives can be made from a number of different materials, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. Handles are produced in a wide variety of shapes and styles. Handles are often textured to enhance grip.
Wood handles provide good grip and are warm in the hand, but are more difficult to care for. They do not resist water well, and will crack or warp with prolonged exposure to water. Modern stabilized and laminated woods have largely overcome these problems. Many beautiful and exotic hardwoods are employed in the manufacture of custom and some production knives. In some countries it is now forbidden for commercial butchers' knives to have wood handles, for sanitary reasons.
Plastic handles are more easily cared for than wooden handles, but can be slippery and become brittle over time.
Injection molded handles made from higher grade plastics are composed of polyphthalamide, and when marketed under trademarked names such as Zytel or Grivory, are reinforced with Kevlar or fiberglass. These are often used by major knife manufacturers.
Rubber handles such as Kraton or Resiprene-C are generally preferred over plastic due to their durable and cushioning nature.
Micarta is a popular handle material on user knives due to its toughness and stability. Micarta is nearly impervious to water, is grippy when wet, and is an excellent insulator. Micarta has come to refer to any fibrous material cast in resin. There are many varieties of micarta available. One very popular version is a fiberglass impregnated resin called G-10.
Leather handles are seen on some hunting and military knives, notably the KA-BAR. Leather handles are typically produced by stacking leather washers, or less commonly, as a sleeve surrounding another handle material. Russian manufacturers often use birchbark in the same manner.
Skeleton handles refers to the practice of using the tang itself as the handle, usually with sections of material removed to reduce weight. Skeleton handled knives are often wrapped with parachute cord or other wrapping materials to enhance grip.
Stainless steel and aluminum handles are durable and sanitary, but can be slippery. To counter this, premium knife makers make handles with ridges, bumps, or indentations to provide extra grip. Another problem with knives that have metal handles is that, since metal is an excellent heat-conductor, these knives can be very uncomfortable, and even painful or dangerous, when handled without gloves or other protective handwear in (very) cold climates.
More exotic materials usually only seen on art or ceremonial knives include: Stone, bone, mammoth tooth, mammoth ivory, oosik (walrus penis bone), walrus tusk, antler (often called stag in a knife context), sheep horn, buffalo horn, teeth, and mop (mother of pearl or "pearl"). Many materials have been employed in knife handles.
Handles may be adapted to accommodate the needs of people with disabilities. For example, knife handles may be made thicker or with more cushioning for people with arthritis in their hands. A non-slip handle accommodates people with palmar hyperhidrosis.
Types
Weapons
As a weapon, the knife is universally adopted as an essential tool. It is the essential element of a knife fight. For example:
Ballistic knife: A specialized combat knife with a detachable gas- or spring-propelled blade that can be fired to a distance of several feet or meters by pressing a trigger or switch on the handle.
Bayonet: A knife-shaped close-quarters combat weapon designed to attach to the muzzle of a rifle or similar weapon.
Butterfly knife: A folding pocket knife also known as a "balisong" or "batangas" with two counter-rotating handles where the blade is concealed within grooves in the handles.
Combat knife: Any knife intended to be used by soldiers in the field, as a general-use tool, but also for fighting.
Dagger: A single-edged or double-edged combat knife with a central spine and edge(s) sharpened their full length, used primarily for thrusting or stabbing. Variations include the Stiletto and Push dagger. See List of daggers for a more detailed list.
Fighting knife: A knife with a blade designed to inflict a lethal injury in a physical confrontation between two or more individuals at very short range (grappling distance). Well known examples include the Bowie knife, Ka-Bar combat knife, and the Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife.
Genoese knife: produced from the 12th century with a guardless handle
Karambit: A knife with a curved blade resembling a tiger's claw, and a handle with one or two safety holes.
Rampuri: An Indian gravity knife having a single-edged blade roughly long.
Shiv: A crudely made homemade knife out of everyday materials, especially prevalent in prisons among inmates. An alternate name in some prisons is shank.
Sword: An evolution of the knife with a lengthened and strengthened blade used primarily for mêlée combat and hunting.
Throwing knife: A knife designed and weighted for throwing.
Trench knife: Purpose-made or improvised knives, intended for close-quarter fighting, particularly in trench warfare; some have a d-shaped integral hand guard.
Sports equipment
Throwing knife: A knife designed and weighted for throwing.
Utensils
A primary aspect of the knife as a tool includes dining, used either in food preparation or as cutlery. Examples of this include:
Bread knife: A knife with a serrated blade for cutting bread
Boning knife: A knife used for removing the bones of poultry, meat, and fish.
Butcher's Knife: A knife designed and used primarily for the butchering and/or dressing of animals.
Carving knife: A knife for carving large cooked meats such as poultry, roasts, hams, and other large cooked meats.
Chef's knife: Also known as a French knife, a cutting tool used in preparing food
Cleaver: A large knife that varies in its shape but usually resembles a rectangular-bladed hatchet. It is used mostly for hacking through bones as a kitchen knife or butcher knife, and can also be used for crushing via its broad side, typically garlic.
Electric knife: An electrical device consisting of two serrated blades that are clipped together, providing a sawing action when powered on
Kitchen knife: Any knife, including the chef's knife, that is intended to be used in food preparation
Oyster knife: Has a short, thick blade for prying open oyster shells
Mezzaluna: A two-handled arc-shaped knife used in a rocking motion as a herb chopper or for cutting other foods
Paring or Coring Knife: A knife with a small but sharp blade used for cutting out the cores from fruit.
Rocker knife is a knife that cuts with a rocking motion, which is primarily used by people whose disabilities prevent them from using a fork and knife simultaneously.
Table knife or Case knife: A piece of cutlery, either a butter knife, steak knife, or both, that is part of a table setting, accompanying the fork and spoon
Tools
As a utility tool the knife can take many forms, including:
Bowie knife: Commonly, any large sheath knife, or a specific style of large knife popularized by Jim Bowie.
Bushcraft knife: A sturdy, normally fixed blade knife used while camping in the wilderness.
Camping Knife: A camping knife is used for camping and survival purposes in a wilderness environment.
Head knife or Round knife: A knife with a semicircular blade used since antiquity to cut leather.
Crooked knife: Sometimes referred to as a "curved knife", "carving knife" or in the Algonquian language the "mocotaugan" is a utilitarian knife used for carving.
Diver's knife: A knife adapted for use in diving and water sports and a necessary part of standard diving dress.
Electrician's knife: A short-bladed knife used to cut electrical insulation.
Folding Knife: A folding knife is a knife with one or more blades that fit inside the handle that can still fit in a pocket. It is also known as a jackknife or jack-knife.
Hunting knife: A knife used to dress large game.
Kiridashi: A small Japanese knife having a chisel grind and a sharp point, used as a general-purpose utility knife.
Linoleum knife: is a small knife that has a short, stiff blade with a curved point and a handle and is used to cut linoleum or other sheet materials.
Machete: A large heavy knife used to cut through thick vegetation such as sugar cane or jungle undergrowth; it may be used as an offensive weapon.
Marking knife: A woodworking tool used for marking out workpieces.
Palette knife: A knife, or frosting spatula, lacking a cutting edge, used by artists for tasks such as mixing and applying paint and in cooking for spreading icing.
Paper knife: Or a "letter opener" it is a knife made of metal or plastic, used for opening mail.
Pocket knife: a folding knife designed to be carried in a pants pocket. Subtypes include:
Lockback knife: a folding knife with a mechanism that locks the blade into the open position, preventing accidental closure while in use
Multi-tool and Swiss Army knife, which combine a folding knife blade with other tools and implements, such as pliers, scissors, or screwdrivers
Produce knife: A knife with a rectangular profile and a blunt front edge used by grocers to cut produce.
Rigging knife: A knife used to cut rigging in sailing vessels.
Scalpel: A medical knife, used to perform surgery.
Straight razor: A reusable knife blade used for shaving hair.
Survival knife: A sturdy knife, sometimes with a hollow handle filled with survival equipment.
Switchblade: A knife with a folding blade that springs out of the grip when a button or lever on the grip is pressed.
Utility knife: A short knife with a replaceable (typically) triangular blade, used for cutting sheet materials including card stock, paperboard, and corrugated fiberboard, also called a boxcutter knife or boxcutter
Wood carving knife and whittling knives: Knives used to shape wood in the arts of wood carving and whittling, often with short, thin replaceable blades for better control.
Craft knife: A scalpel-like form of non-retractable utility knife with a (typically) long handle and a replaceable pointed blade, used for precise, clean cutting in arts and crafts, often called an X-acto knife in the US and Canada after the popular brand name.
Traditional and religious implements
Athame: A typically black-handled and double-edged ritual knife used in Wicca and other derivative forms of Neopagan witchcraft. (see also Boline).
Dirk: A long bladed thrusting dagger worn by Scottish Highlanders for customary and ceremonial purposes.
Katar: An Indian push dagger sometimes used ceremonially.
Kilaya: A dagger used in Tibetan Buddhist rituals.
Kirpan: A ceremonial knife that all baptised Sikhs must wear as one of the five visible symbols of the Sikh faith (Kakars)
Kris: A dagger used in Indo-Malay cultures, often by nobility and sometimes in religious rituals
Kukri: A Nepalese knife used as a tool and weapon
Maguro bōchō: A traditional Japanese knife with a long specialized blade that is used to fillet large ocean fish.
Puukko: A traditional Finnish style woodcraft belt-knife used as a tool rather than a weapon
Seax: A Germanic single-edged knife, dagger or short sword used both as a tool and as a weapon.
Sgian-dubh: A small knife traditionally worn with the Highland and Isle dress (Kilt) of Scotland.
Ulu: An Inuit woman's all-purpose knife.
Yakutian knife: A traditional Yakuts knife used as a tool for wood carving and meat or fish cutting. Can be used as a part of yakutian ethnic costume.
Rituals and superstitions
The knife plays a significant role in some cultures through ritual and superstition, as the knife was an essential tool for survival since early man. Knife symbols can be found in various cultures to symbolize all stages of life; for example, a knife placed under the bed while giving birth is said to ease the pain, or, stuck into the headboard of a cradle, to protect the baby; knives were included in some Anglo-Saxon burial rites, so the dead would not be defenseless in the next world. The knife plays an important role in some initiation rites, and many cultures perform rituals with a variety of knives, including the ceremonial sacrifices of animals. Samurai warriors, as part of bushido, could perform ritual suicide, or seppuku, with a tantō, a common Japanese knife. An athame, a ceremonial knife, is used in Wicca and derived forms of neopagan witchcraft.
In Greece, a black-handled knife placed under the pillow is used to keep away nightmares. As early as 1646 reference is made to a superstition of laying a knife across another piece of cutlery being a sign of witchcraft. A common belief is that if a knife is given as a gift, the relationship of the giver and recipient will be severed. Something such as a small coin, dove or a valuable item is exchanged for the gift, rendering "payment."
Legislation
Knives are typically restricted by law, because they are often used in crime, although restrictions vary greatly by country or state and type of knife. For example, some laws prohibit carrying knives in public while other laws prohibit private ownership of certain knives, such as switchblades.
See also
Arbelos, a geometric figure named after a shoemaker's knife
Dirk
Knife fight
List of culinary knife cuts
List of blade materials
Sword
Zombie knife
References
External links
Lithics
Melee weapons | [
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17163 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knockout | Knockout | A knockout (abbreviated to KO or K.O.) is a fight-ending, winning criterion in several full-contact combat sports, such as boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, mixed martial arts, karate, some forms of taekwondo and other sports involving striking, as well as fighting-based video games. A full knockout is considered any legal strike or combination thereof that renders an opponent unable to continue fighting.
The term is often associated with a sudden traumatic loss of consciousness caused by a physical blow. Single powerful blows to the head (particularly the jawline and temple) can produce a cerebral concussion or a carotid sinus reflex with syncope and cause a sudden, dramatic KO. Body blows, particularly the liver punch, can cause progressive, debilitating pain that can also result in a KO.
In boxing and kickboxing, a knockout is usually awarded when one participant falls to the canvas and is unable to rise to their feet within a specified period of time, typically because of exhaustion, pain, disorientation, or unconsciousness. For example, if a boxer is knocked down and is unable to continue the fight within a ten-second count, they are counted as having been knocked out and their opponent is awarded the KO victory.
In mixed martial arts (MMA) competitions, no time count is given after a knockdown, as the sport allows submission grappling as well as ground and pound. If a fighter loses consciousness ("goes limp") as a result of legal strikes, it is declared a KO. Even if the fighter loses consciousness for a brief moment and wakes up again to continue to fight, the fight is stopped and a KO is declared. As many MMA fights can take place on the mat rather than standing, it is possible to score a KO via ground and pound, a common victory for grapplers.
In fighting games such as Street Fighter and Tekken, a player scores a knockout by fully depleting the opponent's health bar, with the victor being awarded the round. The player who wins the most rounds, either by scoring the most knockouts or by having more vitality remaining when time expires during each round, wins the match. This differs from combat sports in reality, where a knockout ends the match immediately. However, some fighting games aim for a more realistic experience, with titles like Fight Night adhering to the rules of professional boxing, although technically they are classified as sports games, and share many of the same features as NFL and NBA video games.
Technical knockout
A technical knockout (TKO or T.K.O.), or stoppage, is declared when the referee decides during a round that a fighter cannot safely continue the match for any reason. Certain sanctioning bodies also allow the official attending physician at ringside to stop the fight as well. In many regions, a TKO is declared when a fighter is knocked down three times in one round.
In MMA bouts, the referee may declare a TKO if a fighter cannot intelligently defend him/herself while being repeatedly struck.
Double knockout
A double knockout, both in real-life combat sports and in fighting-based video games, occurs when both fighters trade blows and knock each other out simultaneously and are both unable to continue fighting. In such cases, the match is declared a draw. In fighting games such as Street Fighter, Dead or Alive, and Tekken, a draw is counted as a loss for both players.
Physical characteristics
Little is known as to what exactly causes one to be knocked unconscious, but many agree it is related to trauma to the brain stem. This usually happens when the head rotates sharply, often as a result of a strike. There are three general manifestations of such trauma:
a typical knockout, which results in a sustained (three seconds or more) loss of consciousness (comparable to general anesthesia, in that the recipient emerges and has lost memory of the event).
a "flash" knockout, when a very transient (less than three seconds) loss of consciousness occurs (in the context of a knock-down) and the recipient often maintains awareness and memory of the combat.
a "stunning", a "dazing" or a fighter being "KO'ed on his feet", when basic consciousness is maintained (and the fighter never leaves his feet) despite a general loss of awareness and extreme distortions in proprioception, balance, visual fields, and auditory processing. Referees are taught specifically to watch for this state, as it cannot be improved by sheer willpower and usually means the fighter is already concussed and unable to safely defend himself.
A basic principle of boxing and other combat sports is to defend against this vulnerability by keeping both hands raised about the face and the chin tucked in. This may still be ineffective if the opponent punches effectively to the solar plexus.
A fighter who becomes unconscious from a strike with sufficient knockout power is referred to as having been knocked out or KO'd (kay-ohd). Losing balance without losing consciousness is referred to as being knocked down ("down but not out"). Repeated blows to the head, regardless of whether they cause loss of consciousness, may in severe cases cause strokes or paralysis in the immediacy, and over time have been linked to permanent neurodegenerative diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy ("punch-drunk syndrome"). Because of this, many physicians advise against sports involving knockouts.
Knockdown
A knockdown occurs when a fighter touches the floor of the ring with any part of the body other than the feet following a hit, but is able to rise back up and continue fighting. The term is also used if the fighter is hanging on to the ropes, caught between the ropes, or is hanging over the ropes and is unable to fall to the floor and cannot protect himself. A knockdown triggers a count by the referee (normally to 10); if the fighter fails the count, then the fight is ended as a KO.
A flash knockdown is a knockdown in which the fighter hits the canvas but recovers quickly enough that a count is not started.
Knockout records
Top 10 boxers by most KOs
Billy Bird (138)
Archie Moore (132)
Young Stribling (129)
Sam Langford (128)
Buck Smith (120)
Kid Azteca (114)
George Odwell (111)
Sugar Ray Robinson, Alabama Kid (108)
Peter Maher (107)
Sandy Saddler (103)
Top 10 boxing champions (including interims) by KO percentage
Inactive National Boxing Association, World Colored Boxing Championship as well as list on List of current world boxing champions and European Boxing Union.
Edwin Valero, Artur Beterbiev (100%)
Deontay Wilder, Gervonta Davis, Ángel Acosta (95%)
Jonathan Guzmán (92%)
Carlos Zárate Serna, Dmitry Kudryashov, Yuniel Dorticos (90%)
Anthony Joshua, Rocky Marciano, Wilfredo Gómez, Aaron Pryor, Gary Mason, Shannon Briggs, Khaosai Galaxy (88%)
Vitali Klitschko, Gennady Golovkin, Errol Spence Jr., Naoya Inoue, Jaime Munguia (87%)
Eduard Troyanovsky, Oleksandr Gvozdyk, Gerald McClellan, Miguel Berchelt, In-Chul Baek, David Benavidez (85%)
Naseem Hamed, Alfonso Zamora, Frank Bruno, David Haye, George Foreman, Alberto Machado (84%)
Top 10 MMA fighters by most KOs
Travis Fulton (115)
Igor Vovchanchyn (41)
Travis Wiuff (39)
Joe Riggs (37)
Gilbert Yvel (34)
Alexander Shlemenko (32)
Paul Daley (31)
Mirko Filipovic (30)
Melvin Manhoef (29)
Wanderlei Silva (27)
Top 10 MMA (champions, challengers) fighters by KO percentage
Fighters from inactive Pride Fighting Championships and active UFC/Bellator plus champions and former champions from other organizations.
Melvin Manhoef (93.33%)
Derrick Lewis (88.89%)
Jimi Manuwa (88.23%)
Mark Hunt (87.50%)
Conor McGregor (81%)
Cristiane Justino (76.43%)
Cain Velasquez (73.33%)
Yann Decoopman (72%)
Thiago Santos, Junior Dos Santos (71%)
Most consecutive KOs
Boxing: LaMar Clark (42)<p>Note: Considering Clark's unbeaten run of 44–0 with 44 knockouts, one should take into account he faced limited to no opposition; his first bout with a top-ten ranked opponent, who happened to be Bartolo Soni (12–2–1), ended with a TKO loss for him. Two other notable cases of highly questionable consecutive knockout records in boxing history were Peter McNeeley, running 36–1 with 30 knockouts before facing recently paroled Mike Tyson (41–1–0), and Richie Melito, who built up a record of 18–0 with 17 knockouts and was dubbed the "White Tyson" before Bert Cooper (34–17) stopped him. Less notable but nevertheless mentionable cases include Don Steele, running 41–0 with 38 KOs before facing off Brian Nielsen (38–0), and Faruq Saleem, running 38–0 with 32 KOs before he faced casual actor Shawn McLean (3–4–0).
MMA: Travis Fulton (10)
Most 1st round KOs and most consecutive 1st round KOs
Boxing: Peter Maher (50)
Consecutive/Boxing: Ali Raymi (22)
MMA: Travis Fulton (68) Joe Riggs (26)
Consecutive/MMA: Igor Vovchanchyn, Travis Fulton (7)
Top 10 K-1 and K-2 kickboxers by most KOs
Changpuek Kiatsongrit (178)
Andy Souwer (98)
Ramon Dekkers (95)
Badr Hari (92)
Mike Zambidis (86)
Branko Cikatic (82)
Manson Gibson (80)
Peter Aerts (79)
Rob Kaman (77)
Buakaw Banchamek, Tyrone Spong (73)
Boxing's 50 knockout club (professional boxers with 50 or more knockouts)
Billy Bird 138
Archie Moore 132
Young Stribling 126
Sam Langford 126
Buck Smith 120
Kid Azteca 114
George Odwell 111
Sugar Ray Robinson 108
Alabama Kid 108
Peter Maher (boxer) 107
Sandy Saddler 103
Henry Armstrong 101
Joe Gans 100
Jimmy Wilde 98
Jorge Castro (boxer) 90
Tiger Jack Fox 89
Jock McAvoy 88
Julio César Chávez 86
Yori Boy Campas 83
Chalky Wright 83
Tommy Freeman 83
Jose Luis Ramirez 82
Charles Ledoux 81
Ted Kid Lewis 80
Fritzie Zivic 80
Rubén Olivares 79
George Godfrey 77
George Chaney 76
Torpedo Billy Murphy 76
Ceferino Garcia 74
Primo Carnera 72
Benny Bass 72
Rodolfo Gonzalez (boxer) 71
Tommy Ryan 71
Roberto Durán 70
Benny Leonard 70
Jesus Pimentel 68
Fred Fulton 68
Earnie Shavers 68
George Foreman 68
Joe Jeanette 68
Bill Brennan (boxer) 68
Lou Brouillard 67
Tommy Gomez 67
Pedro Carrasco 66
Billy Petrolle 66
Marcel Cerdan 66
Jack Dillon 66
Lee Savold 65
Willie Pep 65
Elmer Ray 64
George Chuvalo 63
Carlos Zárate Serna 63
Frank Moody 63
Eduardo Lausse 62
Alexis Arguello 62
Jack Kid Berg 61
Barbados Joe Walcott 61
Larry Gains 61
Adilson Rodrigues 61
Mickey Walker (boxer) 60
Freddie Steele 60
Ike Williams 60
Cleveland Williams 60
Gregorio Peralta 60
Tami Mauriello 60
Max Baer (boxer) 59
Young Peter Jackson 59
Carlos Monzon 59
Joe Knight (boxer) 59
Ricardo Moreno 59
Panama Al Brown 59
Kid Pascualito 59
James Red Herring 58
Eric Esch 58
Tony Galento 57
John Henry Lewis 57
Pascual Perez (boxer) 57
Charley White 57
Kid Williams 57
Len Harvey 57
Jose Luis Castillo 57
Bob Fitzsimmons 57
Tiger Flowers 56
Georges Carpentier 56
Pedro Montanez 56
Irish Bob Murphy 56
Charles Kid McCoy 55
Dixie Kid 55
Gorilla Jones 55
Freddie Mills 55
Manuel Ortiz (boxer) 54
Marcel Thil 54
Solly Krieger 54
Jose Napoles 54
Bennie Briscoe 53
Obie Walker 53
Peter Kane 53
Wladimir Klitschko 53
Shannon Briggs 53
Eugene Criqui 53
Joe Louis 52
Mike McTigue 52
Philadelphia Jack O'Brien 52
Lew Jenkins 52
Marvin Hagler 52
Rocky Graziano 52
Ezzard Charles 52
Arturo Godoy 51
Kid Chocolate 51
Packey McFarland 51
Jimmy Slattery 51
Abe Attell 51
Miguel Angel Castellini 51
Jorge Vaca 51
Jorge Paez 51
Marco Antonio Rubio 51
Charley Burley 50
Jose Legra 50
Eder Jofre 50
See also
Boxing styles and technique
Chin (combat sports)
Full contact karate
Punch (combat)
Punching power
Taekwondo
References
External links
KO statistics of Mike Tyson, Wladimir Klitschko, Earnie Shavers, George Foreman and other heavyweight boxers
All famous MMA knockouts
The differences between knockouts and concussions; a simple discussion for beginning boxers
https://archive.today/20130505222319/http://www.cyberboxingzone.com/cbzforum/showthread.php?1450-Most-Knockouts-Career
Martial arts terminology
Boxing rules and regulations | [
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17165 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalahari%20Desert | Kalahari Desert | The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa extending for , covering much of Botswana, and parts of Namibia and South Africa.
It is not to be confused with the Angolan, Namibian, and South African Namib coastal desert, whose name is of Khoekhoegowab origin and means "vast place".
Etymology
Kalahari is derived from the Tswana word Kgala, meaning "the great thirst", or Kgalagadi, meaning "a waterless place"; the Kalahari has vast areas covered by red sand without any permanent surface water.
History
The Kalahari Desert was not always a dry desert. The fossil flora and fauna from Gcwihaba Cave in Botswana indicates that the region was much wetter and cooler at least from 30 to 11 thousand BP, especially after 17,500 BP.
Geography
Drainage of the desert is by dry black valleys, seasonally inundated pans and the large salt pans of the Makgadikgadi Pan in Botswana and Etosha Pan in Namibia. The only permanent river, the Okavango, flows into a delta in the northwest, forming marshes that are rich in wildlife. Ancient dry riverbeds—called omuramba—traverse the central northern reaches of the Kalahari and provide standing pools of water during the rainy season.
A semi-desert, with huge tracts of excellent grazing after good rains, the Kalahari supports more animals and plants than a true desert, such as the Namib Desert to the west. There are small amounts of rainfall and the summer temperature is very high. The driest areas usually receive of rain per year, and the wettest just a little over . The surrounding Kalahari Basin covers over extending farther into Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and encroaching into parts of Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Numerous pans exist within the Kalahari, including the Groot-vloer Pan and Verneukpan where evidence of a wetter climate exists in the form of former contouring for capturing of water. This and other pans, as well as river bottoms, were written about extensively at Sciforums by an article by Walter Wagner regarding the extensive formerly wet areas of the Kalahari. The Kalahari is extensive and extends farther north where abandoned extensive roadways also exist.
Climate
North and east, approximately where the dry forests, savannahs and salt lakes prevail, the climate is sub-humid rather than semi-arid. South and west, where the vegetation is predominantly xeric savanna or even a semi-desert, the climate is "Kalaharian" semi-arid. The Kalaharian climate is subtropical (average annual temperature greater than or equal to 18 °C, at peaks reaching 40 °C and above, with mean monthly temperature of the coldest month strictly below 18 °C), and is semi-arid with the dry season during the "cold" season, the coldest six months of the year. It is the southern tropical equivalent of the Sahelian climate with the wet season during summer. The altitude has been adduced as the explanation why the Kalaharian climate is not tropical; its altitude ranges from 600 to 1600 meters (and generally from 800 to 1200 meters), resulting in a cooler climate than that of the Sahel or Sahara. For example, winter frost is common from June to August, something rarely seen in the warmer Sahelian regions. For the same reason, summer temperatures certainly can be very hot, but not in comparison to regions of low altitude in the Sahel or Sahara, where some stations record average temperatures of the warmest month around 38 °C, whereas the average temperature of the warmest month in any region in the Kalahari never exceeds 29 °C, though daily temperatures occasionally reach up to close to (44.8 °C at Twee Rivieren Rest Camp in 2012).
The dry season lasts eight months or more, and the wet season typically from less than one month to four months, depending on location. The southwestern Kalahari is the driest area, in particular a small region located towards the west-southwest of Tsaraxaibis (Southeast of Namibia). The average annual rainfall ranging from around 110 mm (close to aridity) to more than 500 mm in some areas of the north and east. During summer time in all regions rainfall may go with heavy thunderstorms. In the driest and sunniest parts of the Kalahari, over 4,000 hours of sunshine are recorded annually on average.
In the Kalahari, there are two main mechanisms of atmospheric circulation, dominated by the Kalahari High anticyclone:
The North and North-west of the Kalahari is subject to the alternation "Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ)/"Continental Trade winds". The ITCZ is the meeting area of the boreal trade winds with their austral counterparts what meteorologists call "Meteorological equator" and the sailors "Doldrum" or "Pot-au-noir" : the ITCZ generates rains in the wet season, whereas the continental trade winds cause the dry season;
The rest of the Kalahari is subject to the maritime trade winds, that largely shed their moisture as they cross up and over the Southern African Great Escarpment before arriving over the Kalahari.
There are huge subterranean water reserves beneath parts of the Kalahari; the Dragon's Breath Cave, for example, is the largest documented non-subglacial underground lake. Such reserves may be in part the residues of ancient lakes; the Kalahari Desert was once a much wetter place. The ancient Lake Makgadikgadi dominated the area, covering the Makgadikgadi Pan and surrounding areas, but it drained or dried out some 10,000 years ago. It may have once covered as much as . In ancient times, there was sufficient moisture for farming, with dikes and dams collecting the water. These are now filled with sediment, breached, or no longer in use, though they can be readily seen via Google Earth.
The Kalahari has had a complex climatic history over the past million or so years, in line with major global changes. Changes in the last 250,000 years have been reconstructed from various data sources, and provide evidence of both former extensive lakes and periods drier than now. During the latter the area of the Kalahari has expanded to include parts of western Zimbabwe, Zambia and Angola.
Vegetation and flora
Due to its low aridity, the Kalahari supports a variety of flora. The native flora includes acacia trees and many other herbs and grasses. The kiwano fruit, also known as the horned melon, melano, African horned cucumber, jelly melon, or hedged gourd, is endemic to a region in the Kalahari Desert (specific region unknown).
Even where the Kalahari "desert" is dry enough to qualify as a desert in the sense of having low precipitation, it is not strictly speaking a desert because it has too dense a ground cover. The main region that lacks ground cover is in the southwest Kalahari (southeast of Namibia, northwest of South Africa and southwest of Botswana) in the south of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. For instance in the ZF Mgcawu District Municipality of South Africa, total vegetation cover may be as low as 30.72% on non-protected (from cattle grazing) farmlands south of Twee Rivieren Rest Camp and 37.74% in the protected (from cattle grazing) South African side of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park: these southernmost Kalahari xeric savanna areas are truly semi-deserts. However, in all the remaining Kalahari, except on salt pans during the dry season, the vegetation cover can be clearly denser, up to almost 100% in some limited areas.
In an area of about 600,000 km2 in the south and west of the Kalahari, the vegetation is mainly xeric savanna. This area is the ecoregion identified by World Wide Fund for Nature as Kalahari xeric savanna AT1309. Typical savanna grasses include Schmidtia, Stipagrostis, Aristida, and Eragrostis; these are interspersed with trees such as camelthorn (Acacia erioloba), grey camelthorn (Acacia haematoxylon), shepherd's tree (Boscia albitrunca), blackthorn (Acacia mellifera), and silver cluster-leaf (Terminalia sericea).
In certain areas where the climate is drier, it becomes a true semi-desert with ground not entirely covered by vegetation: "open" as opposed to "closed" vegetation. Examples include the north of the ZF Mgcawu District Municipality, itself in the north of South Africa, and the Keetmanshoop Rural in the southeast of Namibia. In the north and east, there are dry forests covering an area of over 300,000 km2 in which Rhodesian teak and several species of acacia are prominent. These regions are termed Kalahari Acacia-Baikiaea woodlands AT0709.
Outside the Kalahari "desert", but in the Kalahari basin, a halophytic vegetation to the north is adapted to pans, lakes that are completely dry during the dry season, and maybe for years during droughts, such as in Etosha (Etosha Pan halophytics AT0902) and Makgadikgadi (Zambezian halophytics AT0908).
A totally different vegetation is adapted to the perennial fresh water of the Okavango Delta, an ecoregion termed Zambezian flooded grasslands AT0907.
Fauna
The Kalahari is home to many migratory birds and animals. Previously havens for wild animals from elephants to giraffes, and for predators such as lions and cheetahs, the riverbeds are now mostly grazing spots, though leopards and cheetahs can still be found. The area is now heavily grazed and cattle fences restrict the movement of wildlife. Among deserts of the Southern Hemisphere, the Kalahari most closely resembles some Australian deserts in its latitude and its mode of formation.
Although there are few endemic species, a wide variety of species are found in the region, including large predators such as the lion (Panthera leo), cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), leopard (Panthera pardus), spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), brown hyena (Parahyaena brunnea), and African wild dog (Lycaon pictus pictus). Birds of prey include the secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius), martial eagle (Polemaetus bellicosus) and other eagles, the giant eagle owl (Bubo lacteus) and other owls, falcons, goshawks, kestrels, and kites. Other animals include wildebeest, springbok and other antelopes, porcupines (Hystrix africaeaustralis) and ostriches (Struthio camelus).
Some of the areas within the Kalahari are seasonal wetlands, such as the Makgadikgadi Pans of Botswana. This area, for example, supports numerous halophilic species, and in the rainy season, tens of thousands of flamingos visit these pans.
The biggest threat to wildlife are the fences erected to manage herds of grazing cattle, a practice which also removes the plant cover of the savanna itself. Cattle ranchers will also poison or hunt down predators from the rangeland, particularly targeting jackals and wild dogs.
Protected areas
The following protected areas were established in the Kalahari:
Central Kalahari Game Reserve
Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park
Khutse Game Reserve
Tswalu Kalahari
Population
The San people have lived in the Kalahari for 20,000 years as hunter-gatherers. They hunt wild game with bows and poison arrows and gather edible plants, such as berries, melons and nuts, as well as insects. The San get most of their water requirements from plant roots and desert melons found on or under the desert floor. They often store water in the blown-out shells of ostrich eggs. The San live in huts built from local materials—the frame is made of branches, and the roof is thatched with long grass. Most of their hunting and gathering techniques replicate pre-historic tribes. Bantu-speaking Tswana, Kgalagadi, and Herero and a small number of European settlers also live in the Kalahari desert. The city of Windhoek is situated in the Kalahari Basin.
Kalahari, San and diamonds
In 1996, De Beers evaluated the potential of diamond mining at Gope. In 1997, the eviction of the San and Bakgalagadi tribes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve from their land began.
In 2006, a Botswana High Court ruled in favor of the San and Bakgalagadi tribes in the reserve, finding that their eviction was unlawful. The Government of Botswana granted a permit to De Beers' Gem Diamonds/Gope Exploration Company (Pty) Ltd. to conduct mining activities within the reserve.
Settlements within the Kalahari
Botswana
Gaborone
Ghanzi
Orapa
Tshabong
Tshane
Namibia
Gobabis
Mariental
South Africa
Noenieput
Rietfontein
See also
Karoo
Kgalagadi (disambiguation)
References
Further reading
External links
"Cry of the Kalahari"
Kalahari desert's forgotten influence on carbon levels
Botswana–Namibia relations
Deserts of Botswana
Deserts of Namibia
Deserts of South Africa
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17166 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katanga%20Province | Katanga Province | Katanga was one of the four large provinces created in the Belgian Congo in 1914.
It was one of the eleven provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1966 and 2015, when it was split into the Tanganyika, Haut-Lomami, Lualaba, and Haut-Katanga provinces. Between 1971 and 1997 (during the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko when Congo was known as Zaïre), its official name was Shaba Province.
Katanga's area encompassed . Farming and ranching are carried out on the Katanga Plateau. The eastern part of the province is considered to be a rich mining region, which supplies cobalt, copper, tin, radium, uranium, and diamonds. The region's former capital, Lubumbashi, is the second-largest city in the Congo.
History
Copper mining in Katanga dates back over 1,000 years, and mines in the region were producing standard-sized ingots of copper for international transport by the end of the 10th century CE.
In the 1890s, the province was beleaguered from the south by Cecil Rhodes' Northern Rhodesia, and from the north by the Belgian Congo, the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium. Msiri, the King of Katanga, held out against both, but eventually Katanga was subsumed by the Belgian Congo.
After 1900, the Societe Generale de Belgique practically controlled all of the mining in the province through Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK). This included uranium, radium, copper, cobalt, zinc, cadmium, germanium, manganese, silver, gold, and tin.
In 1915, a deposit of pitchblende and other uranium minerals of a higher grade than had ever been found before anywhere in the world and higher than any found since were discovered at Shinkolobwe. The discovery was kept secret by UMHK. After World War I ended a factory was built at Olen; the secrecy was lifted at the end of 1922 with the announcement of the production of the first gram of radium from the pitchblende. By the start of World War II, the mining companies "constituted a state within the Belgian Congo". The Shinkolobwe mine near Jadotville (now Likasi) was at the centre of the Manhattan Project.
In 1960, after the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called Republic of the Congo) gained independence from Belgium, the UMHK, Moise Tshombe and Godefroid Munongo supported the secession of Katanga province from the Congo. This was supported by Belgium but opposed by the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. This led to the assassination of Lumumba and the Katanga Crisis (or "Congo Crisis"), which lasted from 1960 to 1965. The breakaway State of Katanga existed from 1960 to 1963.
In 2005, the new constitution specified that Katanga was to be split up into separately administered provinces.
Militias such as Mai Mai Kata Katanga led by Gédéon Kyungu Mutanga fought for Katanga to secede, and his group briefly took over the provincial capital Lubumbashi in 2013.
In 2015, Katanga Province was split into the constitutional provinces of Tanganyika, Haut-Lomami, Lualaba, and Haut-Katanga.
Economy
Copper mining is an important part of the economy of Katanga province. Cobalt mining by individual contractors is also prevalent. A number of reasons have been advanced for the failure of the vast mineral wealth of the province to increase the overall standard of living. The local provincial budget was US$440 million in 2011.
Mining
Lubumbashi, the mining capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a hub for many of the country's biggest mining companies. The Democratic Republic of Congo produces "more than 3 percent of the world’s copper and half its cobalt, most of which comes from Katanga".
Major mining concessions include Tilwezembe and Kalukundi.
Mining companies
Gécamines, (La Générale des Carrières et des Mines, the former UMHK), the state-owned copper-cobalt mining company, had monopoly concessions in the province.
Katanga Mining Ltd TSX:KAT operates a major mining complex in Katanga province, producing refined copper and cobalt with the "potential of becoming Africa’s largest copper producer and the world’s largest cobalt producer". Katanga Mining Ltd is majority-owned by Swiss commodity trader Glencore DCC. A joint venture of Katanga Mining (75%) and Gécamines (25%) began mining Tilwezembe, an open-pit copper and cobalt mine, in 2007.
Geography
The province bordered Angola and formed the entire Congolese border with Zambia. It also bordered Tanzania – although on Lake Tanganyika rather than on land. Katanga has a wet and dry season. Rainfall is about .
The province was divided in 2015 into five successor provinces, based on the districts of Katanga at that time:
Education and medical care
The University of Lubumbashi, located in the northern part of Lubumbashi city, is the largest university in the province and one of the largest in the country.
TESOL, the English Language School of Lubumbashi, is a secondary school that serves the expatriate community. It was founded in 1987 on the grounds of the French School, Lycée Français Blaise Pascal, which suspended operations in 1991 with a new French School starting in 2009.
Katanga province has the highest rate of infant mortality in the world, with 184 of 1000 babies born expected to die before the age of five.
Transportation
The Congo Railway provides Katanga Province with limited railway service centered on Lubumbashi. Reliability is limited. Lubumbashi International Airport is located northeast of Lubumbashi. In April 2014, a train derailment killed 63 people.
People
Laurent-Désiré Kabila, former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Moise Tshombe, former president of the breakaway State of Katanga
Barbara Kanam, popular singer
Frédéric Kibassa Maliba, former opposition leader and president of UDPS
Odilon Kafitwe wa pa Bowa, former national minister of Zaire and leader of UFERI
Lunda Bululu, former prime minister of Zaire
Godefroid Munongo, politician
See also
Central African Copperbelt
Congo Free State
Congo Pedicle
List of governors of Katanga
Lubumbashi history and timeline
Msiri
Stairs Expedition to Katanga
State of Katanga
References
External links
The United Nations and the Congo
WorldStatesmen- Congo (Kinshasa)
The Bank Notes of Katanga
Rush and Ruin: The Devastating Mineral Trade in Southern Katanga
Former provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1966–2015)
Haut-Lomami
Tanganyika Province
1966 establishments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
2015 disestablishments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Provinces of the Belgian Congo | [
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17168 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathmandu | Kathmandu | Kathmandu (; , ), officially the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (), is the capital and the most populous city of Nepal with 845,767 inhabitants living in 105,649 households in 2021 and 2.9 million people in its urban agglomeration. It is located in the Kathmandu Valley, a large valley in the high plateaus in central Nepal, at an altitude of . It is the second largest city proper in Himalayan hill region after Srinagar, and the largest Metropolitan region in the Himalayan hill region.
The city is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world, founded in 2nd century CE. The valley was historically called the "Nepal Mandala" and has been the home of the Newar people, a cosmopolitan urban civilization in the Himalayan foothills. The city was the royal capital of the Kingdom of Nepal and hosts palaces, mansions, and gardens of the Nepalese aristocracy. It has been home to the headquarters of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) since 1985. Today, it is the seat of government of the Nepalese republic, established in 2008, and is part of the Bagmati Province.
Kathmandu is and has been for many years the centre of Nepal's history, art, culture, and economy. It has a multi-ethnic population within a Hindu and Buddhist majority. Religious and cultural festivities form a major part of the lives of people residing in Kathmandu. Tourism is an important part of the economy in the city. In 2013, Kathmandu was ranked third among the top ten upcoming travel destinations in the world by TripAdvisor, and ranked first in Asia. The city is considered the gateway to the Nepalese Himalayas and is home to several World Heritage Sites: the Durbar Square, Swayambhunath, Boudhanath and Pashupatinath. Kathmandu valley is growing at 4 percent per year according to the World Bank in 2010, making it one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in South Asia, and the first region in Nepal to face the unprecedented challenges of rapid urbanization and modernization at a metropolitan scale.
Historic areas of Kathmandu were severely damaged by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in April 2015. Some of the buildings have been restored while some remain in the process of reconstruction.
Etymology
The indigenous Nepal Bhasa term for Kathmandu is Yen. The Nepali name Kathmandu comes from Kasthamandap, which stood in the Durbar Square. In Sanskrit, () means "wood" and () means "pavilion". This public pavilion, also known as Maru Satta in Newari, was rebuilt in 1596 by Biseth in the period of King Laxmi Narsingh Malla. The three-storey structure was made entirely of wood and used no iron nails nor supports. According to legends, all the timber used to build the pagoda was obtained from a single tree. The structure collapsed during a major earthquake in April 2015.
The colophons of ancient manuscripts, dated as late as the 20th century, refer to Kathmandu as in Nepal Mandala. Mahānagar means "great city". The city is called in a vow that Buddhist priests still recite to this day. Thus, Kathmandu is also known as . During medieval times, the city was sometimes called Kāntipur (). This name is derived from two Sanskrit words – and . is a word that stands for "beauty" and is mostly associated with light and means place, thus giving it the meaning, "City of light".
Among the indigenous Newar people, Kathmandu is known as Yeṃ Deśa (), and Patan and Bhaktapur are known as Yala Deśa () and Khwopa Deśa () respectively. "Yen" is the shorter form of Yambu (), which originally referred to the northern half of Kathmandu. The older northern settlements were referred to as Yambi while the southern settlement was known as Yangala.
The spelling "Katmandu" was often used in older English-language text. More recently, however, the spelling "Kathmandu" has become more common in English.
History
Archaeological excavations in parts of Kathmandu have found evidence of ancient civilizations. The oldest of these findings is a statue, found in Maligaon, that was dated at 185 AD. The excavation of Dhando Chaitya uncovered a brick with an inscription in Brahmi script. Archaeologists believe it is two thousand years old. Stone inscriptions are a ubiquitous element at heritage sites and are key sources for the history of Nepal.
The earliest Western reference to Kathmandu appears in an account of Jesuit Fathers the Portuguese Jesuit, Fr. Joao Cabral who passed through the Kathmandu Valley in the spring of 1628 and was received graciously by the king of that time, probably King Lakshminarasimha Malla of Kathmandu on their way from Tibet to India, and reported that they reached "Cadmendu", the capital of Nepal kingdom.
Ancient history
The ancient history of Kathmandu is described in its traditional myths and legends. According to Swayambhu Purana, present-day Kathmandu was once a huge and deep lake named "Nagdaha", as it was full of snakes. The lake was cut drained by Bodhisatwa Manjushree with his sword, and the water was evacuated out from there. He then established a city called Manjupattan, and made Dharmakar the ruler of the valley land. After some time, a demon named Banasur closed the outlet, and the valley again turned into a lake. Then Lord Krishna came to Nepal, killed Banasur, and again drained out the water. He brought some Gopals along with him and made Bhuktaman the king of Nepal.
Kotirudra Samhita of Shiva Purana, Chapter 11, Shloka 18 refers to the place as Nayapala city, which was famous for its Pashupati Shivalinga. The name Nepal probably originates from this city Nayapala.
Very few historical records exists of the period before medieval Licchavi rulers. According to Gopalraj Vansawali, a genealogy of Nepali monarchy, the rulers of Kathmandu Valley before the Licchavis were Gopalas, Mahispalas, Aabhirs, Kiratas, and Somavanshi. The Kirata dynasty was established by Yalamber. During the Kirata era, a settlement called Yambu existed in the northern half of old Kathmandu. In some of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Kathmandu is still called Yambu. Another smaller settlement called Yengal was present in the southern half of old Kathmandu, near Manjupattan. During the reign of the seventh Kirata ruler, Jitedasti, Buddhist monks entered Kathmandu valley and established a forest monastery at Sankhu.
Licchavi era
The Licchavis from the Indo-Gangetic plain migrated north and defeated the Kirats, establishing the Licchavi dynasty, circa 400 AD. During this era, following the genocide of Shakyas in Lumbini by Virudhaka, the survivors migrated north and entered the forest monastery lora masquerading as Koliyas. From Sankhu, they migrated to Yambu and Yengal (Lanjagwal and Manjupattan) and established the first permanent Buddhist monasteries of Kathmandu. This created the basis of Newar Buddhism, which is the only surviving Sanskrit-based Buddhist tradition in the world. With their migration, Yambu was called Koligram and Yengal was called Dakshin Koligram during most of the Licchavi era.
Eventually, the Licchavi ruler Gunakamadeva merged Koligram and Dakshin Koligram, founding the city of Kathmandu. The city was designed in the shape of Chandrahrasa, the sword of Manjushri. The city was surrounded by eight barracks guarded by Ajimas. One of these barracks is still in use at Bhadrakali (in front of Singha Durbar). The city served as an important transit point in the trade between India and Tibet, leading to tremendous growth in architecture. Descriptions of buildings such as Managriha, Kailaskut Bhawan, and Bhadradiwas Bhawan have been found in the surviving journals of travellers and monks who lived during this era. For example, the famous 7th-century Chinese traveller Xuanzang described Kailaskut Bhawan, the palace of the Licchavi king Amshuverma. The trade route also led to cultural exchange as well. The artistry of the Newar people—the indigenous inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley—became highly sought after during this era, both within the Valley and throughout the greater Himalayas. Newar artists travelled extensively throughout Asia, creating religious art for their neighbours. For example, Araniko led a group of his compatriot artists through Tibet and China. Bhrikuti, the princess of Nepal who married Tibetan monarch Songtsän Gampo, was instrumental in introducing Buddhism to Tibet.
Malla era
The Licchavi era was followed by the Malla era. Rulers from Tirhut, upon being attacked by Muslims, fled north to the Kathmandu valley. They intermarried with Nepali royalty, and this led to the Malla era. The early years of the Malla era were turbulent, with raids and attacks from Khas and Turk Muslims. There was also a devastating earthquake which claimed the lives of a third of Kathmandu's population, including the king Abhaya Malla. These disasters led to the destruction of most of the architecture of the Licchavi era (such as Mangriha and Kailashkut Bhawan), and the loss of literature collected in various monasteries within the city. Despite the initial hardships, Kathmandu rose to prominence again and, during most of the Malla era, dominated the trade between India and Tibet. Nepali currency became the standard currency in trans-Himalayan trade.
During the later part of the Malla era, Kathmandu Valley comprised four fortified cities: Kantipur, Lalitpur, Bhaktapur, and Kirtipur. These served as the capitals of the Malla confederation of Nepal. These states competed with each other in the arts, architecture, esthetics, and trade, resulting in tremendous development. The kings of this period directly influenced or involved themselves in the construction of public buildings, squares, and temples, as well as the development of waterspouts, the institutionalisation of trusts (called guthis), the codification of laws, the writing of dramas, and the performance of plays in city squares. Evidence of an influx of ideas from India, Tibet, China, Persia, and Europe among other places can be found in a stone inscription from the time of king Pratap Malla. Books have been found from this era that describe their tantric tradition (e.g. Tantrakhyan), medicine (e.g. Haramekhala), religion (e.g. Mooldevshashidev), law, morals, and history. Amarkosh, a Sanskrit-Nepal Bhasa dictionary from 1381 AD, was also found. Architecturally notable buildings from this era include Kathmandu Durbar Square, Patan Durbar Square, Bhaktapur Durbar Square, the former durbar of Kirtipur, Nyatapola, Kumbheshwar, the Krishna temple, and others.
Medieval era
Early Shah rule
The Gorkha Kingdom ended the Malla confederation after the Battle of Kathmandu in 1768. This marked the beginning of the modern era in Kathmandu. The Battle of Kirtipur was the start of the Gorkha conquest of the Kathmandu Valley. Kathmandu was adopted as the capital of the Gorkha empire, and the empire itself was dubbed Nepal. During the early part of this era, Kathmandu maintained its distinctive culture. Buildings with characteristic Nepali architecture, such as the nine-story tower of Basantapur, were built during this era. However, trade declined because of continual war with neighbouring nations. Bhimsen Thapa supported France against Great Britain; this led to the development of modern military structures, such as modern barracks in Kathmandu. The nine-storey tower Dharahara was originally built during this era.
Rana rule
Rana rule over Nepal started with the Kot massacre of 1846, which occurred near Hanuman Dhoka Durbar. During this massacre, most of Nepal's high-ranking officials were massacred by Jung Bahadur Rana and his supporters. Another massacre, the Bhandarkhal Massacre, was also conducted by Kunwar and his supporters in Kathmandu. During the Rana regime, Kathmandu's alliance shifted from anti-British to pro-British; this led to the construction of the first buildings in the style of Western European architecture. The most well-known of these buildings include Singha Durbar, Garden of Dreams, Shital Niwas, and the old Narayanhiti palace. The first modern commercial road in the Kathmandu Valley, the New Road, was also built during this era. Trichandra College (the first college of Nepal), Durbar High School (the first modern school of Nepal), and Bir Hospital (the first hospital of Nepal) were built in Kathmandu during this era. Education was only accessible to the privileged class. Rana rule was marked by despotism, economic exploitation and religious persecution.
Geography
Kathmandu is in the northwestern part of the Kathmandu Valley to the north of the Bagmati River and covers an area of . The average elevation is above sea level. The city is bounded by several other municipalities of the Kathmandu valley: south of the Bagmati by Lalitpur Metropolitan City (Patan), with which it forms one urban area surrounded by a ring road, to the southwest by Kirtipur and to the east by Madyapur Thimi. To the north the urban area extends into several municipalities; Nagarjun, Tarakeshwor, Tokha, Budhanilkantha, Gokarneshwor and Kageshwori Manohara. However, the urban agglomeration extends well beyond the neighbouring municipalities, e.g. to Bhaktapur, and nearly covers the entire Kathmandu Valley.
Kathmandu is dissected by eight rivers, the main river of the valley, the Bagmati and its tributaries, of which the Bishnumati, Dhobi Khola, Manohara Khola, Hanumante Khola, and Tukucha Khola are predominant. The mountains from where these rivers originate are in the elevation range of , and have passes which provide access to and from Kathmandu and its valley. An ancient canal once flowed from Nagarjuna hill through Balaju to Kathmandu; this canal is now extinct.
The city of Kathmandu and the surrounding valley are in the Deciduous Monsoon Forest Zone (altitude range of ), one of five vegetation zones defined for Nepal. The dominant tree species in this zone are oak, elm, beech, maple and others, with coniferous trees at higher altitude.
Kathmandu administration
Kathmandu and adjacent cities are composed of neighbourhoods, which are utilized quite extensively and more familiar among locals. However, administratively the city is divided into 32 wards, numbered from 1 to 32. Earlier, there were 35 wards which made it the metropolitan city with the largest number of the wards.
Kathmandu agglomeration
The Kathmandu Valley was one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in South Asia with 2.5 million population by 2010. There is no officially defined agglomeration of Kathmandu. The urban area of the Kathmandu valley is split among three different districts (second level of administrative divisions within a province), which extend very little beyond the valley fringe, except towards the southern ranges, which have a comparatively small population. They have the three highest population densities in the country. These 3 districts are administered by 21 local level bodies; 2 metropolitan cities (Kathmandu and Lalitpur), 16 municipalities and 3 rural municipalities. The following data table describes these districts which likely would be considered an agglomeration:
Climate
Five major climatic regions are found in Nepal. Of these, Kathmandu Valley is in the Warm Temperate Zone (elevation ranging from ), where the climate is fairly temperate, atypical for the region. This zone is followed by the Cool Temperate Zone with elevation varying between . Under Köppen's climate classification, portions of the city with lower elevations have a humid subtropical climate (Cwa), while portions of the city with higher elevations generally have a subtropical highland climate (Cwb). In the Kathmandu Valley, which is representative of its valley's climate, the average summer temperature varies from . The average winter temperature is .
The city generally has a climate with warm days followed by cool nights and mornings. Unpredictable weather is expected, given that temperatures can drop to or less during the winter. During a 2013 cold front, the winter temperatures of Kathmandu dropped to , and the lowest temperature was recorded on 10 January 2013, at . Rainfall is mostly monsoon-based (about 65% of the total concentrated during the monsoon months of June to September), and decreases substantially () from eastern Nepal to western Nepal. Rainfall has been recorded at about for the Kathmandu valley, and averages for the city of Kathmandu. On average humidity is 75%. The chart below is based on data from the Nepal Bureau of Standards & Meteorology, Weather Meteorology for 2005. The chart provides minimum and maximum temperatures during each month. The annual amount of precipitation was for 2005, as per monthly data included in the table above. The decade of 2000–2010 saw highly variable and unprecedented precipitation anomalies in Kathmandu. This was mostly due to the annual variation of the southwest monsoon. For example, 2001 recorded only of precipitation due to an extraordinarily weak monsoon season. In contrast, 2003 was the wettest year ever in Kathmandu, totaling over of precipitation due to an exceptionally strong monsoon season.
Air quality
Air pollution is a major issue in the Kathmandu Valley thereby earning the nickname "The Dust Bowl". According to the 2016 World Health Organization's Ambient Air Pollution Database, the annual average PM2.5 (particulate matter) concentration in 2013 was 49 μg/m3, which is 4.9 times higher than recommended by the World Health Organization. Starting in early 2017, the Government of Nepal and the Embassy of the United States in Kathmandu have monitored and publicly share real-time air quality data. In Nepal and Kathmandu, the annual premature deaths due to air pollution reached 37,399 and 9,943 respectively, according to a Republica news report published on 23 November 2019. This indicates, around a quarter of the total deaths due to air pollution in Nepal are in Kathmandu.
Government and public services
Civic administration
Kathmandu Municipal Corporation (KMC) is the chief nodal agency for the administration of Kathmandu. The Municipality of Kathmandu was upgraded to a metropolitan city in 1995.
Metropolitan Kathmandu is divided into five sectors: the Central Sector, the East Sector, the North Sector, the City Core and the West Sector. For civic administration, the city is further divided into 35 administrative wards. The Council administers the Metropolitan area of Kathmandu city through its 177 elected representatives and 20 nominated members. It holds biannual meetings to review, process and approve the annual budget and make major policy decisions. The ward's profile documents for the 35 wards prepared by the Kathmandu Metropolitan Council is detailed and provides information for each ward on population, the structure and condition of houses, the type of roads, educational, health and financial institutions, entertainment facilities, parking space, security provisions, etc. It also includes lists of development projects completed, on-going and planned, along with informative data about the cultural heritage, festivals, historical sites and the local inhabitants. Ward 16 is the largest, with an area of 437.4 ha; ward 26 is the smallest, with an area of 4 ha.
Kathmandu is the headquarters of the surrounding Kathmandu District. The city of Kathmandu forms this district along with 10 other municipalities, namely Budanilkantha, Chandragiri, Dakshinkali, Gokarneshwar, Kageshwari Manohara, Kirtipur, Nagarjun, Shankharapur, Tarakeshwar and Tokha.
Law and order
The Metropolitan Police is the main law enforcement agency in the city. It is headed by a commissioner of police. The Metropolitan Police is a division of the Nepal Police, and the administrative control lies with the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Fire service
The fire service, known as the Barun Yantra Karyalaya (), opened its first station in Kathmandu in 1937 with a single-vehicle. An iron tower was erected to monitor the city and watch for a fire. As a precautionary measure, firemen were sent to the areas which were designated as accident-prone areas. In 1944, the fire service was extended to the neighbouring cities of Lalitpur and Bhaktapur. In 1966, a fire service was established in Kathmandu central airport. In 1975, a West German government donation added seven fire engines to Kathmandu's fire service. The fire service in the city is also overlooked by an international non-governmental organization, the Firefighters Volunteer Association of Nepal (FAN), which was established in 2000 with the purpose of raising public awareness about fire and improving safety.
Electricity and water supply
Electricity in Kathmandu is regulated and distributed by the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA). Water supply and sanitation facilities are provided by the Kathmandu Upatyaka Khanepani Limited (KUKL). There is a severe shortage of water for household purposes such as drinking, bathing, cooking and washing and irrigation. People have been using bottled mineral water, water from tank trucks and from the ancient dhunge dharas () for all the purposes related to water. The city water shortage should be solved by the completion of the much plagued Melamchi Water Supply Project by the end of 2019.
Waste management
Waste management may be through composting in municipal waste management units, and at houses with home composting units. Both systems are common and established in India and neighbouring countries.
Demographics
Kathmandu's urban cosmopolitan character has made it the most populous city in Nepal. According to the National Population Census of 2011, the total population of Kathmandu city was 975,543 in 254,292 households with an annual growth rate of 6.12% with respect to the population figure of 2001. 70% of the total population residing in Kathmandu are aged between 15 and 59.
In one decade, the population increased from 427,045 in 1991 to 671,805 in 2001. The population was projected to reach 915,071 in 2011 and 1,319,597 by 2021. To keep up this population growth, the KMC-controlled area of expanded to in 2001. With this new area, the population density which was 85 in 1991 remained 85 in 2001; it is likely to jump to 111 in 2011 and 161 in 2021.
Ethnic groups
The largest ethnic group is the native Newars, whose various caste groups combined have a population of 25%. Almost equal in population is the Bahuns with 24%, while the Chhetri population is 18%. Other groups in Kathmandu include the Janajatis, including the Tamang (8%), Magar (4%), Gurung (3%) , Rai (2%) and Limbu (1%). More recently, other hill ethnic groups and caste groups from Terai have come to represent a substantial proportion of the city's population, and there are even around 12,000 Marwadis, mainly merchants.
According to data from 2011, the major religions in Kathmandu city are Hinduism 81.3%, Buddhism 9%, Islam 4.4% and other 5.2%.
The linguistic profile of Kathmandu underwent drastic changes during the Shah dynasty's rule because of its strong bias towards the Hindu culture. Sanskrit language therefore was preferred and people were encouraged to learn it even by attending Sanskrit learning centres in Terai. Sanskrit schools were specially set up in Kathmandu and in the Terai region to inculcate traditional Hindu culture and practices originated from Nepal. As of the 2011 census, 61.26% of the city spoke Nepali, 19.00% Newar, 5.55% Tamang, 2.82% Maithili, 1.81% Hindi, 1.60% Bhojpuri, 1.23% Gurung, 1.16% Magar and 1.04% Sherpa as their first language. English is also understood by many.
Architecture and cityscape
The ancient trade route between India and Tibet that passed through Kathmandu enabled a fusion of artistic and architectural traditions from other cultures to be amalgamated with local art and architecture. The monuments of Kathmandu City have been influenced over the centuries by Hindu and Buddhist religious practices. The architectural treasure of the Kathmandu valley has been categorized under the well-known seven groups of heritage monuments and buildings. In 2006 UNESCO declared these seven groups of monuments as a World Heritage Site (WHS). The seven monuments zones cover an area of , with the buffer zone extending to . The Seven Monument Zones inscribed originally in 1979 and with a minor modification in 2006 are the Durbar squares of Hanuman Dhoka, Patan and Bhaktapur, the Hindu temples of Pashupatinath and Changunarayan, the Buddhist stupas of Swayambhunath and Boudhanath.
Durbar Squares
The literal meaning of Durbar Square is a "place of palaces." There are three preserved Durbar Squares in Kathmandu valley and one unpreserved in Kirtipur. The Durbar Square of Kathmandu is in the old city and has heritage buildings representing four kingdoms (Kantipur, Lalitpur, Bhaktapur, Kirtipur); the earliest being the Licchavi dynasty. The complex has 50 temples and is distributed in two quadrangles of the Durbar Square. The outer quadrangle has the Kasthamandap, Kumari Ghar, and Shiva-Parvati Temple; the inner quadrangle has the Hanuman Dhoka palace. The squares were severely damaged in the April 2015 earthquake.
Hanuman Dhoka is a complex of structures with the royal palace of the Malla kings and of the Shah dynasty. It is spread over five acres. The eastern wing, with ten courtyards, is the oldest part, dating to the mid-16th century. It was expanded by King Pratap Malla in the 17th century with many temples. The royal family lived in this palace until 1886 when they moved to Narayanhiti Palace. The stone inscription outside is in fifteen languages.
Kumari Ghar is a palace in the centre of the Kathmandu city, next to the Durbar square where a royal Kumari selected from several Kumaris resides. Kumari, or Kumari Devi, is the tradition of worshipping young pre-pubescent girls as manifestations of the divine female energy or devi in South Asian countries. In Nepal the selection process is very rigorous. Previously, during the time of the monarchy, the queen and the priests used to appoint the proposed Kumari with delicate process of astrological examination and physical examination of 32 'gunas'. The china (), an ancient Hindu astrological report, of the Kumari and the reigning king, was ought to be similar. The Kumari is believed to be a bodily incarnation of the goddess Taleju (the Nepali name for Durga) until she menstruates, after which it is believed that the goddess vacates her body. Serious illness or a major loss of blood from an injury also causes her to revert to common status. The current Kumari, Trishna Shakya, age three at the time of appointment, was installed in September 2017 succeeding Matina Shakya who was the first Kumari of Kathmandu after the end of the monarchy.
Kasthamandap is a three-storeyed temple enshrining an image of Gorakhnath. It was built in the 16th century in pagoda style. The name of Kathmandu is a derivative of the word Kasthamandap. It was built under the reign of King Laxmi Narsingha Malla. Kasthamandap stands at the intersection of two ancient trade routes linking India and Tibet at Maru square. It was originally built as a rest house for travellers.
Pashupatinath temple
The Pashupatinath Temple () is a famous 5th century Hindu temple dedicated to Lord Shiva. Located on the banks of the Bagmati River, the Pashupatinath Temple is the oldest Hindu temple in Kathmandu. It served as the seat of national deity, Lord Pashupatinath, until Nepal was secularized. However, a significant part of the temple was destroyed by Mughal invaders in the 14th century and little or nothing remains of the original 5th-century temple exterior. The temple as it stands today was built in the 19th century, although the image of the bull and the black four-headed image of Pashupati are at least 300 years old. The temple is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Shivaratri, or the night of Lord Shiva, is the most important festival that takes place here, attracting thousands of devotees and sadhus.
Believers in Pashupatinath (mainly Hindus) are allowed to enter the temple premises, but non-Hindu visitors are allowed to view the temple only from the across the Bagmati River. The priests who perform the services at this temple have been Brahmins from Karnataka in southern India since the time of Malla king Yaksha Malla. This tradition is believed to have been started at the request of Adi Shankaracharya who sought to unify the states of Bharatam, a region in south Asia believed to be ruled by a mythological king Bharat, by encouraging cultural exchange. This procedure is followed in other temples around India, which were sanctified by Adi Shankaracharya.
The temple is built in the pagoda style of architecture, with cubic constructions and carved wooden rafters (tundal) on which they rest, and two-level roofs made of copper and gold.
Boudhanath
Boudhanath (; also written as Bouddhanath, Bodhnath, Baudhanath or the Khāsa Chaitya), is one of the holiest Buddhist sites in Nepal, along with the Swayambhunath. It is a very popular tourist site. Boudhanath is known as Khāsti by Newars and as Bauddha or Bodhnāth by speakers of Nepali. About from the centre and northeastern outskirts of Kathmandu, the stupa's massive mandala makes it one of the largest spherical stupas in Nepal. Boudhanath became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.
The base of the stupa has 108 small depictions of the Dhyani Buddha Amitabha. It is surrounded with a brick wall with 147 niches, each with four or five prayer wheels engraved with the mantra, om mani padme hum. At the northern entrance where visitors must pass is a shrine dedicated to Ajima, the goddess of smallpox. Every year the stupa attracts many Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims who perform full body prostrations in the inner lower enclosure, walk around the stupa with prayer wheels, chant, and pray. Thousands of prayer flags are hoisted up from the top of the stupa downwards and dot the perimeter of the complex. The influx of many Tibetan refugees from China has seen the construction of over 50 Tibetan gompas (monasteries) around Boudhanath.
Swayambhu
Swayambhunath () is a Buddhist stupa atop a hillock at the northwestern part of the city. This is among the oldest religious sites in Nepal. Although the site is considered Buddhist, it is revered by both Buddhists and Hindus. The stupa consists of a dome at the base; above the dome, there is a cubic structure with the eyes of Buddha looking in all four directions. There are pentagonal toran above each of the four sides, with statues engraved on them. Behind and above the torana there are thirteen tiers. Above all the tiers, there is a small space above which lies a gajur.
Rani Pokhari
Ranipokhari () is a historic artificial pond nestled in the heart of Kathmandu. It was built by king Pratap Malla in 1670 AD for his beloved queen after she lost her son and could not recover from her loss. A large stone statue of an elephant in the south signifies the image of Pratap Malla and his two sons. Balgopaleshwor Temple stands still inside the temple above the pond. Rani Pokhari is opened once a year during the final day of Tihar i.e. Bhai Tika and Chhath festival. The world's largest Chhath takes place every year in Ranipokhari. The pond is one of Kathmandu's most famous landmarks and is known for its religious and aesthetic significance.However, Ranipokhari is now under development, which began in 2019 and is expected to be finished next year, according to reports.
Culture
Arts
Kathmandu valley the City of Newars is described as "an enormous treasure house of art and sculptures", which are made of wood, stone, metal, and terracotta, and found in profusion in temples, shrines, stupas, gompas, chaityas and palaces. The art objects are also seen in street corners, lanes, private courtyards and in open ground. Most art is in the form of icons of gods and goddesses. Kathmandu valley has had this art treasure for a very long time, but received worldwide recognition only after the country opened to the outside world in 1950.
The religious art of Nepal and Kathmandu in particular consists of an iconic symbolism of the Mother Goddesses such as: Bhavani, Durga, Gaja-Lakshmi, Hariti-Sitala, Mahsishamardini, Saptamatrika (seven mother goddesses), and Sri-Lakshmi (wealth-goddess). From the 3rd century BCE, apart from the Hindu gods and goddesses, Buddhist monuments from the Ashokan period (it is said that Ashoka visited Nepal in 250 BC) have embellished Nepal in general and the valley in particular. These art and architectural edifices encompass three major periods of evolution: the Licchavi or classical period (500 to 900 AD), the post-classical period (1000 to 1400 AD), with strong influence of the Palla art form; the Malla period (1400 onwards) that exhibited explicitly tantric influences coupled with the art of Tibetan Demonology.
A broad typology has been ascribed to the decorative designs and carvings created by the people of Nepal. These artists have maintained a blend of Hinduism and Buddhism. The typology, based on the type of material used are: stone art, metal art, wood art, terracotta art, and painting.
Museums
Kathmandu is home to a number of museums and art galleries, including the National Museum of Nepal and the Natural History Museum of Nepal. Nepal's art and architecture is an amalgamation of two ancient religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. These are amply reflected in the many temples, shrines, stupas, monasteries, and palaces in the seven well-defined Monument Zones of the Kathmandu valley are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This amalgamation is also reflected in the planning and exhibitions in museums and art galleries throughout Kathmandu and its sister cities of Patan and Bhaktapur. The museums display unique artefacts and paintings from the 5th century CE to the present day, including archaeological exportation.
Museums and art galleries in Kathmandu include:
The National Museum
The Natural History Museum
Hanuman Dhoka Palace Complex
The Kaiser Library
The National Art Gallery
The NEF-ART (Nepal Fine Art) Gallery
The Nepal Art Council Gallery
Narayanhiti Palace Museum
The Taragaon Museum
The National Museum is in the western part of Kathmandu, near the Swayambhunath stupa in a historical building constructed in the early 19th century by General Bhimsen Thapa. It is the most important museum in the country, housing an extensive collection of weapons, art and antiquities of historic and cultural importance. The museum was established in 1928 as a collection house of war trophies and weapons, and the initial name of this museum was Chhauni Silkhana, meaning "the stone house of arms and ammunition". Given its focus, the museum contains many weapons, including locally made firearms used in wars, leather cannons from the 18th–19th century, and medieval and modern works in wood, bronze, stone and paintings.
The Natural History Museum is in the southern foothills of Swayambhunath hill and has a sizeable collection of different species of animals, butterflies, and plants. The museum is noted for its display of species, from prehistoric shells to stuffed animals.
The Tribhuvan Museum contains artifacts related to King Tribhuvan (1906–1955). It has a variety of pieces including his personal belongings, letters, and papers, memorabilia related to events he was involved in and a rare collection of photos and paintings of Royal family members. The Mahendra Museum is dedicated to the King Mahendra (1920–1972). Like the Tribhuvan Museum, it includes his personal belongings such as decorations, stamps, coins and personal notes and manuscripts, but it also has structural reconstructions of his cabinet room and office chamber. The Hanumandhoka Palace, a lavish medieval palace complex in the Durbar, contains three separate museums of historic importance. These museums include the Birendra museum, which contains items related to the second-last monarch, King Birendra.
The enclosed compound of the Narayanhiti Palace Museum is in the north-central part of Kathmandu. "Narayanhiti" () comes from Narayana (), a form of the Hindu god Lord Vishnu, and Hiti (), meaning "water spout" (the temple of lord Vishnu is opposite to the palace, and the water spout is east of the main entrance to the precinct). The current palace building was built in 1970 in front of the old palace, built in 1915, in the form of a contemporary pagoda. It was built on the occasion of the marriage of the then crown prince and heir apparent to the throne, Birendra. The southern gate of the palace is at the crossing of Prithvipath and Durbar Marg roads. The palace area covers and is fully secured with gates on all sides. This palace was the scene of the Nepali royal massacre. After the fall of the monarchy, it has been converted into a museum.
The Taragaon Museum presents the modern history of the Kathmandu valley. It seeks to document 50 years of research and cultural heritage conservation of the Kathmandu Valley, documenting what artists, photographers, architects, and anthropologists from abroad had contributed in the second half of the 20th century. The actual structure of the museum showcases restoration and rehabilitation efforts to preserve the built heritage of Kathmandu. It was designed by Carl Pruscha (master-planner of the Kathmandu Valley) in 1970 and constructed in 1971. Restoration works began in 2010 to rehabilitate the Taragaon hostel into the Taragaon Museum. The design uses local brick along with modern architectural design elements, as well as the use of circle, triangles and squares. The museum is within a short walk from the Boudhanath stupa, which itself can be seen from the museum tower.
Art galleries
Kathmandu is a centre for art in Nepal, displaying the work of contemporary artists in the country and also collections of historical artists. Patan in particular is an ancient city noted for its fine arts and crafts. Art in Kathmandu is vibrant, demonstrating a fusion of traditionalism and modern art, derived from a great number of national, Asian, and global influences. Nepali art is commonly divided into two areas: the idealistic traditional painting known as Paubhas in Nepal and perhaps more commonly known as Thangkas in Tibet, closely linked to the country's religious history and on the other hand the contemporary western-style painting, including nature-based compositions or abstract artwork based on Tantric elements and social themes of which painters in Nepal are well noted for. Internationally, the British-based charity, the Kathmandu Contemporary Art Centre is involved with promoting arts in Kathmandu.
Kathmandu houses many notable art galleries. The NAFA Gallery, operated by the Arts and crafts Department of the Nepal Academy is housed in Sita Bhavan, a neo-classical old Rana palace.
The Srijana Contemporary Art Gallery, inside the Bhrikutimandap Exhibition grounds, hosts the work of contemporary painters and sculptors, and regularly organizes exhibitions. It also runs morning and evening classes in the schools of art. Also of note is the Moti Azima Gallery, in a three-storied building in Bhimsenthan which contains an impressive collection of traditional utensils and handmade dolls and items typical of a medieval Newar house, giving an important insight into Nepali history. The J Art Gallery near the former royal palace in Durbarmarg displays the artwork of eminent, established Nepali painters. The Nepal Art Council Gallery, in the Babar Mahal, on the way to Tribhuvan International Airport contains artwork of both national and international artists and extensive halls regularly used for art exhibitions.
Literature
The National Library of Nepal is located in Patan. It is the largest library in the country with more than 70,000 books in English, Nepali, Sanskrit, Hindi, and Nepal Bhasa. The library is in possession of rare scholarly books in Sanskrit and English dating from the 17th century AD. Kathmandu also contains the Kaiser Library, in the Kaiser Mahal on the ground floor of the Ministry of Education building. This collection of around 45,000 books is derived from a personal collection of Kaiser Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana. It covers a wide range of subjects including history, law, art, religion, and philosophy, as well as a Sanskrit manual of Tantra, which is believed to be over 1,000 years old. The 2015 earthquake caused severe damage to the Ministry of Education building, and the contents of the Kaiser Library have been temporarily relocated.
The Asa Archives are also noteworthy. They specialize in medieval history and religious traditions of the Kathmandu valley. The archives, in Kulambhulu, have a collection of some 6,000 loose-leaf handwritten books and 1,000 palm-leaf manuscripts (mostly in Sanskrit or Nepal Bhasa) and a manuscript dated to 1464.
Cinema and theatre
Kathmandu is home to Nepali cinema and theatres. The city contains several theatres, including the National Dance Theatre in Kanti Path, the Ganga Theatre, the Himalayan Theatre and the Aarohan Theater Group founded in 1982. The M. Art Theater is based in the city. The Gurukul School of Theatre organizes the Kathmandu International Theater Festival, attracting artists from all over the world. A mini theatre has been opened at the Hanumandhoka Durbar Square, established by the Durbar Conservation and Promotion Committee.
Kathmandu has a number of cinemas (old single screen establishments and some new multiplexes) showing Nepali, Bollywood and Hollywood films. Some old establishments include Vishwajyoti Cinema Hall, Jai Nepal Hall, Kumari Cinema Hall, Gopi Krishna Cinema Hall and Guna Cinema Hall. Kathmandu also houses some international standard cinema theatres and multiplexes, such as QFX Cinemas, Cine De Chef, Fcube Cinemas, Q's Cinemas, Big Movies, BSR Movies and many more.
Music
Kathmandu is the center of music and dance in Nepal, and these art forms are integral to understanding the city. Musical performances are organized in cultural venues. Music is a part of the traditional aspect of Kathmandu. Gunla is the traditional music festival according to Nepal Sambat. Newar music originated in Kathmandu. Furthermore, music from all over Nepal can be found in Kathmandu.
A number of hippies visited Kathmandu during the 1970s and introduced Rock and Roll, rock, and jazz to the city. Kathmandu is noted internationally for its jazz festival, popularly known as Jazzmandu. It is the only jazz festival in the Himalayan region and was established in March 2002. The festival attracts musicians from countries worldwide, such as Australia, Denmark, United States, Benin, and India.
The city has been referenced in numerous songs, including works by Cat Stevens ('Katmandu', Mona Bone Jakon (1970)), Bob Seger ('Katmandu', Beautiful Loser (1975)), Rush ('A Passage to Bangkok', Pulling into Kathmandu; 2112, 1976), John Lennon ('Nobody Told Me' (1984, posthumously)), Krematorij ('Kathmandu', Three Springs (2000)), Fito Páez (Tráfico por Katmandú – "Traffic through Kathmandu") and Cavalcade ('Kathmandu Kid') 2019.
Cuisine
The staple food of most people in Kathmandu is dal bhat. This consists of rice and lentil soup, generally served with vegetable curries, achar and sometimes Chutney. Momo, a type of Nepali version of Tibetan dumpling, has become prominent in Nepal with many street vendors and restaurants selling it. It is one of the most popular fast foods in Kathmandu. Various Nepali variants of momo including buff (i.e. buffalo) momo, chicken momo, and vegetarian momo are famous in Kathmandu.
Most of the cuisines found in Kathmandu are non-vegetarian. However, the practice of vegetarianism is not uncommon, and vegetarian cuisines can be found throughout the city. Consumption of beef is very uncommon and considered taboo in many places. Buff (meat of water buffalo) is very common. There is a strong tradition of buff consumption in Kathmandu, especially among Newars, which is not found in other parts of Nepal. Consumption of pork was considered taboo until a few decades ago. Due to the intermixing with Kirat cuisine from eastern Nepal, pork has found a place in Kathmandu dishes. A fringe population of devout Hindus and Muslims consider it taboo. The Muslims forbid eating buff as from Quran while Hindus eat all varieties except beef as they consider cow to be a goddess and symbol of purity. The chief lunch/snack for locals and visitors is mostly Momo or Chowmein.
Kathmandu had only one western-style restaurant in 1955. A large number of restaurants in Kathmandu have since opened, catering Nepali cuisine, Tibetan cuisine, Chinese cuisine and Indian cuisine in particular. Many other restaurants have opened to accommodate locals, expatriates, and tourists. The growth of tourism in Kathmandu has led to culinary creativity and the development of hybrid foods to accommodate for tourists such as American chop suey, which is a sweet-and-sour sauce with crispy noodles with a fried egg commonly added on top and other westernized adaptations of traditional cuisine. Continental cuisine can be found in selected places. International chain restaurants are rare, but some outlets of Pizza Hut and KFC have recently opened there. It also has several outlets of the international ice-cream chain Baskin-Robbins.
Kathmandu has a larger proportion of tea drinkers than coffee drinkers. Tea, locally known as Chiya, is widely served but is extremely weak by western standards. It is richer and contains tea leaves boiled with milk, sugar, and spices. Tea shops that specially serve tea with other snacks are widely available. Alcohol is widely drunk, and there are numerous local variants of alcoholic beverages. Drinking and driving is illegal, and authorities have a zero-tolerance policy. Ailaa and thwon (alcohol made from rice) are the alcoholic beverages of Kathmandu, found in all the local bhattis (alcohol serving eateries). Chhyaang, tongba (fermented millet or barley) and raksi are alcoholic beverages from other parts of Nepal which are found in Kathmandu. However, shops and bars in Kathmandu widely sell western and Nepali beers.
Festivals
Most of the fairs and festivals in Kathmandu originated in the Malla period or earlier. Traditionally, these festivals were celebrated by Newars. In recent years, these festivals have found wider participation from other Kathmanduites as well. As the capital of the Nepal, various national festivals are celebrated in Kathmandu. With mass migration to the city, the cultures of Khas from the west, Kirats from the east, Bon/Tibetan from the north, and Mithila from the south meet in the capital and mingle harmoniously. The festivities such as the Ghode (horse) Jatra, Indra Jatra, Dashain Durga Puja festivals, Shivratri and many more are observed by all Hindu and Buddhist communities of Kathmandu with devotional fervor and enthusiasm. Social regulation in the codes enacted incorporates Hindu traditions and ethics. These were followed by the Shah kings and previous kings, as devout Hindus and protectors of the Buddhist religion.
Cultural continuity has been maintained for centuries in the exclusive worship of goddesses and deities in Kathmandu and the rest of the country. These deities include the Ajima, Taleju (or Tulja Bhavani or Taleju Bhawani) and her other form : Digu Taleju (or Degu Taleju) and Kumari (the living goddess). The artistic edifices have now become places of worship in the everyday life of the people, therefore a roster is maintained to observe annual festivals. There are 133 festivals held in the year.
Some of the traditional festivals observed in Kathmandu, apart from those previously mentioned, are Bada Dashain, Tihar, Chhath, Maghe Sankranti, Nag Panchami, Janai Purnima, Pancha Dan, Teej/Rishi Panchami, Pahan Charhe, Jana Baha Dyah Jatra (White Machchhendranath Jatra), and Matatirtha Aunsi.
Religions
Hinduism
Hinduism is one of the indigenous beliefs of the city. Assumedly, together with the kingdom of Licchhavi (c. 400 to 750), Hinduism and the endogam social stratification of the caste was established in Kathmandu Valley. The Pashupatinath Temple, Changu Narayan Temple, and the Kasthamandap are of particular importance to Hindus. Other notable Hindu temples in Kathmandu and the surrounding valley include Bajrayogini Temple, Dakshinkali Temple, Guhyeshwari Temple, and the Shobha Bhagawati shrine.
The Bagmati River which flows through Kathmandu is considered a holy river both by Hindus and Buddhists, and many Hindu temples are on the banks of this river. The importance of the Bagmati also lies in the fact that Hindus are cremated on its banks, and Kirants are buried in the hills by its side. According to the Nepali Hindu tradition, the dead body must be dipped three times into the Bagmati before cremation. The chief mourner (usually the first son) who lights the funeral pyre must take a holy riverwater bath immediately after cremation. Many relatives who join the funeral procession also take bath in the Bagmati or sprinkle the holy water on their bodies at the end of cremation as the Bagmati is believed to purify people spiritually.
Buddhism
Buddhism was brought into Kathmandu with the arrival of Buddhist monks during the time of Buddha (c. 563 – 483 BCE). They established a forest monastery in Sankhu. This monastery was renovated by Shakyas after they fled genocide from Virudhaka (r. 491–461 BCE).
During the Hindu Lichchavi era (c. 400 to 750), various monasteries and orders were created which successively led to the formation of Newar Buddhism, which is still practiced in the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Sanskrit.
Legendary Princess Bhrikuti (7th-century) and artist Araniko (1245–1306 CE) from that tradition of Kathmandu valley played a significant role in spreading Buddhism in Tibet and China. There are over 108 traditional monasteries (Bahals and Baháʼís) in Kathmandu based on Newar Buddhism. Since the 1960s, the permanent Tibetan Buddhist population of Kathmandu has risen significantly so that there are now over fifty Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in the area. Also, with the modernization of Newar Buddhism, various Theravada Bihars have been established.
Kirat Mundhum
Kirant Mundhum is one of the indigenous animistic practices of Nepal. It is practiced by the Kirat people. Some animistic aspects of Kirant beliefs, such as ancestor worship (worship of Ajima) are also found in Newars of Kirant origin. Ancient religious sites believed to be worshipped by ancient Kirats, such as Pashupatinath, Wanga Akash Bhairabh (Yalambar) and Ajima are now worshipped by people of all Dharmic religions in Kathmandu. Kirats who have migrated from other parts of Nepal to Kathmandu practice Mundhum in the city.
Other religions
Sikhism is practiced primarily in Gurudwara at Kupundole. An earlier temple of Sikhism is also present in Kathmandu which is now defunct.
Jainism is practiced by a small community. A Jain temple is present in Gyaneshwar, where Jains practice their faith.
According to the records of the Spiritual Assembly of the Baháʼís of Nepal, there are approximately 300 followers of the Baháʼí Faith in Kathmandu valley. They have a national office in Shantinagar, Baneshwor. The Baháʼís also have classes for children at the National Centre and other localities in Kathmandu.
It is said that in Kathmandu alone there are 170 Christian churches. Christian missionary hospitals, welfare organizations, and schools are also operating. Nepali citizens who served as soldiers in Indian and British armies, who had converted to Christianity while in service, on return to Nepal continue to practice their religion. They have contributed to the spread of Christianity and the building of churches in Nepal and in Kathmandu, in particular.
Education
The oldest modern school in Nepal, the Durbar High School, and the oldest college, the Tri-Chandra College, are both in Kathmandu. The largest (according to number of students and colleges), the oldest and most distinguished university in Nepal the Tribhuvan University, located in Kirtipur. The second largest university, Kathmandu University (KU), is in Dhulikhel, Kavre on the outskirts of Kathmandu. It is the second oldest university in Nepal, established in November 1991. Not surprisingly the best schools and colleges of Nepal are located in Kathmandu and its adjoining cities. Every year thousands of students from all over Nepal arrive at Kathmandu to get admission in the various schools and colleges. One of the key concerns of educationists and concerned citizens is the massive outflux of students from Nepal to outside Nepal for studies. Every year thousands of students apply for No Objection Certificates for studying abroad. Consultancy firms specializing in preparing students to go abroad can be found in all prominent locations. The reason for such an outflux range from perceived low quality of education, political instability, fewer opportunities in the job market, opportunities for earning while learning abroad and better job prospects with an international degree.
Healthcare
Healthcare in Kathmandu is the most developed in Nepal, and the city and surrounding valley is home to some of the best hospitals and clinics in the country. Bir Hospital is the oldest, established in July 1889 by Bir Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana. Notable hospitals include Bir Hospital, Nepal Medical College and Teaching Hospital (Jorpati), Tribhuvan University Institute of Medicine (Teaching Hospital), Patan Hospital, Kathmandu Model Hospital, Scheer Memorial Hospital, Om Hospital, Norvic Hospital, Grande International Hospital, Nobel Hospital and many more.
The city is supported by specialist hospitals/clinics such as Shahid Shukraraj Tropical Hospital, Shahid Gangalal Foundation, Kathmandu Veterinary Hospital, Nepal Eye Hospital, Kanti Children's Hospital, Nepal International Clinic (Travel and Mountain Medicine Center), Neuro Center, Spinal Rehabilitation center and Bhaktapur Cancer Hospital. Most of the general hospitals are in the city center, although several clinics are elsewhere in Kathmandu district.
Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology is an Ophthalmological hospital in Kathmandu. It pioneered the production of low cost intraocular lenses (IOLs), which are used in cataract surgery. The team of Dr. Sanduk Ruit in Tilganga pioneered sutureless small-incision cataract surgery (SICS), a technique which has been used to treat 4 million of the world's 20 million people with cataract blindness.
Medical colleges
Institute of Medicine, the central college of Tribhuvan University is the first medical college of Nepal and is in Maharajgunj, Kathmandu. It was established in 1972 and started to impart medical education from 1978. Other major institutions include Patan Academy of Health Sciences, Kathmandu Medical College, Nepal Medical College, KIST Medical College, Nepal Army Institute of Health Sciences, National Academy of Medical Sciences (NAMS) and Kathmandu University School of Medical Sciences (KUSMS), are also in or around Kathmandu.
Economy
The location and terrain of Kathmandu have played a significant role in the development of a stable economy which spans millennia. The city is in an ancient lake basin, with fertile soil and flat terrain. This geography helped form a society based on agriculture. This, combined with its location between India and China, helped establish Kathmandu as an important trading centre over the centuries. Kathmandu's trade is an ancient profession that flourished along an offshoot of the Silk Road which linked India and Tibet. From centuries past, Lhasa Newar merchants of Kathmandu have conducted trade across the Himalaya and contributed to spreading art styles and Buddhism across Central Asia. Other traditional occupations are farming, metal casting, woodcarving, painting, weaving, and pottery.
Kathmandu is the most important industrial and commercial centre in Nepal. The Nepal Stock Exchange, the head office of the national bank, the chamber of commerce, as well as head offices of national and international banks, telecommunication companies, the electricity authority, and various other national and international organizations are in Kathmandu. The major economic hubs are the New Road, Durbar Marg, Ason and Putalisadak.
The economic output of the metropolitan area of around Rs. 550 billion approximately per year alone is worth more than one third of national GDP (nominal), while the per capita income of $2200 is approximately three times the national average. Kathmandu exports handicrafts, artworks, garments, carpets, pashmina, paper; trade accounts for 21% of its revenues. Manufacturing is also important and accounts for 19% of the revenue that Kathmandu generates. Garments and woolen carpets are the most notable manufactured products. Other economic sectors in Kathmandu include agriculture (9%), education (6%), transport (6%), and hotels and restaurants (5%). Kathmandu is famous for lokta paper and pashmina shawls.
Tourism
Tourism is considered another important industry in Nepal. This industry started around 1950, as the country's political makeup changed and ended the country's isolation from the rest of the world. In 1956, air transportation was established and the Tribhuvan Highway, between Kathmandu and Raxaul (at India's border), was started. Separate organizations were created in Kathmandu to promote this activity; some of these include the Tourism Development Board, the Department of Tourism and the Civil Aviation Department. Furthermore, Nepal became a member of several international tourist associations. Establishing diplomatic relations with other nations further accentuated this activity. The hotel industry, travel agencies, training of tourist guides, and targeted publicity campaigns are the chief reasons for the remarkable growth of this industry in Nepal, and in Kathmandu in particular. Since then, tourism in Nepal has thrived. It is the country's most important industry. Tourism is a major source of income for most of the people in the city, with several hundred thousand visitors annually. Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims from all over the world visit Kathmandu's religious sites such as Pashupatinath, Swayambhunath, Boudhanath, Changunarayan and Budhanilkantha. From a mere 6,179 tourists in 1961/62, the number increased to 491,504 in 1999/2000. In economic terms, the foreign exchange registered 3.8% of the GDP in 1995/96 but then started declining. Following the end of the Maoist insurgency, there was a significant rise in the number of tourist arrivals, with 509,956 tourists recorded in 2009. Since then, tourism has improved as the country transitioned into a republic. The high level of tourism is attributed to the natural grandeur of the Himalayas and the rich cultural heritage of the country.The neighbourhood of Thamel is Kathmandu's primary "traveller's ghetto", packed with guest houses, restaurants, shops, and bookstores, catering to tourists. Another neighbourhood of growing popularity is Jhamel, a name for Jhamsikhel that was coined to rhyme with Thamel. Jhochhen Tol, also known as Freak Street, is Kathmandu's original traveller's haunt, made popular by the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s; it remains a popular alternative to Thamel. Ason is a bazaar and ceremonial square on the old trade route to Tibet, and provides a fine example of a traditional neighbourhood.
With the opening of the tourist industry after the change in the political scenario of Nepal in 1950, the hotel industry drastically improved. Now Kathmandu boasts several luxuries such as the Hyatt Regency, Dwarika's, Hotel Yak & Yeti, The Everest Hotel, Hotel Radisson, Hotel De L'Annapurna, The Malla Hotel, Shangri-La Hotel (not operated by the Shangri-La Hotel Group) and Hotel Shanker. There are several four-star hotels such as Akama Hotel, Hotel Vaishali, Hotel Narayani, The Blue Star and Grand Hotel. The Garden Hotel, Hotel Ambassador, and Aloha Inn are among the three-star hotels in Kathmandu. Hotels like Hyatt Regency, De L'Annapurna, and Yak & Yeti are among the five-star hotels with casinos as well.
Transport
Road
The total length of roads in Nepal is recorded to be , as of 2003–04. This fairly large network has helped the economic development of the country, particularly in the fields of agriculture, horticulture, vegetable farming, industry and also tourism. In view of the hilly terrain, transportation takes place in Kathmandu are mainly by road and air. Kathmandu is connected by the Tribhuvan Highway to the south connecting India, Prithvi Highway to the west and Araniko Highway to the north connecting China. The BP Highway connects Kathmandu to the eastern part of Nepal through Sindhuli. The fast-track is under construction which will be the shortest route to connect Terai with the valley.
Sajha Yatayat provides regular bus services throughout Kathmandu and the surrounding valley. Other bus companies including micro-bus companies operate several unscheduled routes. Trolleybusses used to operate on the route between Tripureshwor and Suryabinayak on a 13-kilometer route.
Air
The main international airport serving Kathmandu valley is the Tribhuvan International Airport, about from the city centre and is operated by the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal. It has two terminals, one domestic and one international. At present, it connects 30 cities around the globe in Europe, Asia and the Middle East such as Istanbul, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Dhaka, Paro, Lhasa, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Since 2013, Turkish Airlines connects Istanbul to Kathmandu. Oman Air also connects Muscat to Kathmandu since 2010. Nepal Airlines started flying to Tokyo-Narita from 2 March 2020. Regionally, several Nepali airlines operate from the city, including Buddha Air, Nepal Airlines, Shree Airlines and Yeti Airlines to other major towns across Nepal.
Ropeways
Ropeways are another important transportation means in hilly terrain. A ropeway operated between Kathmandu and Hetauda over a length of which carried 25 tonnes of goods per hour. It has since been discontinued due to poor carrying capacity and maintenance issues. During the Rana period, a ropeway was constructed between Mathatirtha in Kathmandu to Dhorsing in Makawanpur of over in length, which carried a cargo of 8 tonnes per hour. At present, a cable car service is operated in Kathmandu in Chandragiri Hills.
Media
Kathmandu is the television hub of Nepal. Nepal Television, established in 1985, is the oldest and most-watched television channel in Nepal, as is government-owned NTV PLUS and also Kantipur Television, Image Channel, Sagarmatha Television, Himalaya TV, AP1 TV and other channels.
The headquarters of many of the country's news outlets are also in the city including Kathmandu Tribune, the government-owned Gorkhapatra (the oldest national daily newspaper in Nepal), The Kathmandu Post, Nepali Times, Kantipur Publications and its paper Kantipur, Naya Patrika, The Himalayan Times, Karobar Economic Daily, Aarthik Abhiyan National Daily and Jana Aastha National Weekly.
Nepal Republic Media, the publisher of myRepublica, joined a publishing alliance with the International Herald Tribune (IHT), to publish the Asia Pacific Edition of IHT from Kathmandu from 20 July 2011. There is a state-run National News Agency (RSS).
Radio Nepal is a state-run organization that operates national and regional radio stations. These stations are: Hits FM, Radio Kantipur, HBC 94 FM, Radio Sagarmatha and Image FM. The BBC also has an FM broadcasting station in Kathmandu. Few Community radio stations such as Radio Pratibodh – 102.4 MHz, Radio Upatyaka – 87.6 MHz etc. also broadcast within the valley.
Sports
Football and cricket are the most popular sports among the younger generation in Nepal and there are several stadiums in the city. The sport is governed by the National Sports Council from its headquarters in Kathmandu. The only international football stadium in the city is the Dasharath Rangasala, a multi-purpose stadium used mostly for football matches and cultural events, in the neighbourhood of Tripureshwor. It is the largest stadium in Nepal with a capacity of 25,000 spectators, built in 1956. Martyr's Memorial League is also held in this ground every year. The stadium was renovated with Chinese aid before the 8th South Asian Games were held in Kathmandu and floodlights were installed. Kathmandu is home to the oldest football clubs of Nepal such as Ranipokhari Corner Team (RCT), Sankata Club and New Road Team (NRT). Other prominent clubs include Manang Marsyangdi Club, Machhindra FC, Tribhuvan Army Club (TAC) and Nepal Police Club.
Kathmandu is also home of some of the oldest cricket clubs in Nepal, such as Yengal Sports Club. Kathmandu Kings XI represents Kathmandu in the Everest Premier League.
International relations and organizations
The Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC), in order to promote international relations, has established an International Relations Secretariat (IRC). KMC's first international relationship was established in 1975 with the city of Eugene, Oregon, United States. This activity has been further enhanced by establishing formal relationships with 8 other cities: Matsumoto City (Nagano Prefecture, Japan), Rochester (New York City), Yangon (formerly Rangoon, Myanmar), Xi'an (Shaanxi, China), Minsk (Belarus), and Pyongyang (North Korea). KMC's constant endeavour is to enhance its interaction with SAARC countries, other international agencies and many other major cities of the world to achieve better urban management and developmental programs for Kathmandu. Kathmandu is home to several international and regional organizations, including the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
Twin towns – sister cities
Kathmandu is twinned with:
Amargadhi
Boulder, United States
Chandannath
Chengdu, China
Eugene, United States
Fredericksburg, United States
Lhasa, China
Matsumoto, Japan
Melamchi
Pakhribas
Pyongyang, North Korea
Ramgram
Rochester, United States
Varanasi, India
Xi'an, China
Yangon, Myanmar
Proposed sister cities
Bangkok, Thailand
Notable people
King Tribhuvan
King Mahendra
King Birendra
Bhimsen Thapa, Prime Minister of Nepal
Jung Bahadur Rana, Prime Minister of Nepal
Rana Jang Pande, Prime Minister of Nepal
Gehendra Sumsher Rana, first scientist of Nepal
Laxmi Prasad Devkota, writer
Four martyrs of Nepal:
Dharma Bhakta Mathema
Dashrath Chand
Shukraraj Shastri
Gangalal Shrestha
Madan Krishna Shrestha, actor and comedian
Hari Bansha Acharya, actor and comedian
Manisha Koirala, Bollywood actress
Rajesh Hamal, actor
Amrita Acharia, actress
Curtis Waters, recording artist
Anuradha Koirala, social activist
Pushpa Basnet, social activist
Pardeep Bastola, Nepali movie actor
Baikuntha Manandhar, marathon runner
Narendra Man Singh, footballer
Paras Khadka, cricketer
Sushma Shakya, artist
Gagan Thapa, politician
Prakash Man Singh, politician
Priyanka Karki, actress
Gallery
See also
Kathmandu District
Kathmandu Valley
References
Further reading
Beal, Samuel (1884). Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, by Hiuen Tsiang. 2 vols. Translated by Samuel Beal. London. 1884. Reprint: Delhi. Oriental Books Reprint Corporation. 1969.
Nanjio, Bunyiu (1883). A Catalogue of the Chinese Translation of the Buddhist Pantheon. Oxford at the Clarendon Press.
Shaha, Rishikesh (1992). Ancient and Medieval Nepal. Manohar Publications, New Delhi. .
Snellgrove, David (1987). Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists & Their Tibetan Successors. Two Volumes. Shambhala Publications, Boston. (v. 1); (v. 2).
Tamot, Kashinath, and Ian Alsop. (2001). "A Kushan-period Sculpture from the reign of Jaya Varma, CE 184/185, Kathmandu, Nepal." (2001). Asianart.com
Tamot, Kashinath, and Ian Alsop. (date unknown. Update of previous article). "A Kushan-period Sculpture from the reign of Jaya Varman, CE 185, Kathmandu, Nepal." Asianart.com
Watters, Thomas. (1904–05). On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India. (629–645 CE). Royal Asiatic Society. Second Indian Edition. Munshhiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi. (1973).
Turkish Airlines - News - turkishairlines.com
External links
.
Capitals in Asia
Metropolitan cities in Nepal
Nepal municipalities established in 1953
K
Populated places established in the 8th century BC | [
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17169 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kington%20Magna | Kington Magna | Kington Magna is a village and civil parish in the Blackmore Vale area of Dorset, England, about southwest of Gillingham.
History
The name Kington Magna means 'great King's Town'; it derives from cyne- (later cyning) and tūn, Old English for 'royal estate or manor'. The affix magna, Latin for great, was added to distinguish it from Little Kington, a smaller settlement nearby. In 1086 in the Domesday Book these were recorded together in three entries as Chintone, which had 27 households and a total taxable value of 13 geld units, and was in the hundred of Gillingham. In 1243 it was recorded as Magna Kington. Most of the current buildings in the village are no older than the seventeenth century. In 1851 a Primitive Methodist chapel was built in the village; it was on Chapel Hill, which runs parallel to Church Hill. In 1860 a pottery was established at Bye Farm, north of the main village; it manufactured tiles, drainpipes, bricks, and chimney and flower pots. The parish church of All Saints was restored and enlarged in 1862; most of the building, except for the late 15th-century west tower, was rebuilt. Near the church is a pond which was a medieval fishpond.
Geography
The parish covers about and, as well as the main village, includes the small settlement of Nyland in the west. The main village is sited on the slopes of a Corallian limestone hill, overlooking the flat Oxford Clay valley of the small River Cale, which drains into the Stour. In 1906 Sir Frederick Treves wrote in his Highways & Byways in Dorset that the village "straggles down hill like a small mountain stream."
Demography
In the 2011 census the parish had 180 dwellings, 169 households and a population of 389.
Transport
The nearest railway station is in Gillingham. Trains run on the Exeter to Waterloo line.
References
External links
Villages in Dorset | [
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17171 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiosk | Kiosk | Historically, a kiosk () was a small garden pavilion open on some or all sides common in Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and in the Ottoman Empire from the 13th century onward. Today, several examples of this type of kiosk still exist in and around the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, and they can be seen in Balkan countries.
The word is used in English-speaking countries for small booths offering goods and services. In Australia they usually offer food service. Freestanding computer terminals dispensing information are called interactive kiosks.
Etymology
Etymological data points to the Middle Persian word kōšk 'palace, portico' as the origin, via Turkish köşk 'pavilion' and French kiosque or Italian chiosco.
History and origins
A kiosk is an open summer-house or pavilion usually having its roof supported by pillars with screened or totally open walls. As a building type, it was first introduced by the Seljuks as a small building attached to the main mosque, which consisted of a domed hall with open arched sides. This architectural concept gradually evolved into a small yet grand residence used by Ottoman sultans, the most famous examples of which are quite possibly the Tiled Kiosk ("Çinili Köşk" in Turkish) and Baghdad Kiosk ("Bağdat Köşkü" in Turkish). The former was built in 1473 by Mehmed II ("the Conqueror") at the Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, and consists of a two storey building topped with a dome and having open sides overlooking the gardens of the palace. The Baghdad Koshk was also built at the Topkapı Palace in 1638–39, by Sultan Murad IV. The building is again domed, offering direct views onto the gardens and park of the Palace as well as the architecture of the city of Istanbul.
Sultan Ahmed III (1703–1730) also built a glass room of the Sofa Kiosk at the Topkapı Palace incorporating some Western elements, such as the gilded brazier designed by Duplessis père, which was given to the Ottoman ambassador by King Louis XV of France.
The first English contact with Turkish Kiosk came through Lady Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul, who in a letter written on 1 April 1717 to Anne Thistlethwayte, mentions a "chiosk" describing it as "raised by 9 or 10 steps and enclosed with gilded lattices".
European monarchs adopted the building type. Stanisław Leszczyński, king of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV, built kiosks for himself based on his memories of his captivity in Turkey. These kiosks were used as garden pavilions serving coffee and beverages but later were converted into band stands and tourist information stands decorating most European gardens, parks and high streets.
Conservatories were in the form of corridors connecting the Pavilion to the stables and consisting of a passage of flowers covered with glass and linked with orangery, a greenhouse, an aviary, a pheasantry and hothouses. The influence of Muslim and Islamo-Indian forms appears clearly in these buildings and particularly in the pheasantry where its higher part is an adaptation of the kiosks found on the roof of Allahabad Palace, as illustrated by Thomas Daniell. Today's conservatories incorporate many elements of Islamic architecture, although modern art forms have shifted from the classical art forms that were used in earlier times.
Small shops and cafés
In the Western hemisphere and in English-speaking countries, a kiosk is also a booth with an open window on one side. Some vendors operate from kiosks (see mall kiosk), selling small, inexpensive consumables such as newspapers, magazines, lighters, street maps, cigarettes, live and frozen fishing bait and confections.
In Australia, the word is commonly used for small buildings that are used to dispense mainly take-away food and drinks, on beaches, in shopping arcades or in parks. Since the 21st century, many of these have been upgraded and serve fancier food and barista-made coffee.
An information kiosk (or information booth) dispenses free information in the form of maps, pamphlets, and other literature, and/or advice offered by an attendant.
Interactive kiosks
An electronic kiosk (or computer kiosk or interactive kiosk) houses a computer terminal that often employs custom kiosk software designed to function while preventing users from accessing system functions. Indeed, kiosk mode describes such a mode of software operation. Computerized kiosks may store data locally, or retrieve it from a computer network. Some computer kiosks provide a free, informational public service, while others serve a commercial purpose (see mall kiosk). Touchscreens, trackballs, computer keyboards, and pushbuttons are all typical input devices for interactive computer kiosk. Touchscreen kiosks are commercially used as industrial appliances, reducing lines, eliminating paper, improving efficiency and service. Their uses are unlimited from refrigerators to airports, health clubs, movie theaters and libraries.
Gallery
See also
Automated Retail
Automated teller machine
Bandstand
Belvedere (structure)
Dubai Smart Police Stations
Fotomat
Gazebo
Pavilions
Chahartaq (architecture)
Self-service kiosk
Telephone booth
Vending machine
References
External links
Advertising techniques
Advertising tools
Marketing techniques
Promotion and marketing communications | [
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17174 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowbot%20Information%20Service | Knowbot Information Service | The Knowbot Information Service (KIS), also known as netaddress, is an Internet user search engine that debuted in December 1989. Although it searched users, not content, it could be argued to be the first search engine on the Internet as it queried more than a single network for information. It provided a uniform user interface to a variety of remote directory services such as whois, finger, X.500, and MCI Mail. By submitting a single query to KIS, a user can search a set of remote white pages services and see the results of the search in a uniform format. There are several interfaces to the KIS service including e-mail and telnet. Another KIS interface imitates the Berkeley whois command.
KIS consists of two distinct types of modules that interact with each other (typically across a network) to provide the service. One module is a user agent module that runs on the KIS mail host machine. The second module is a remote server module (possibly on a different machine) that interrogates various database services across the network and provides the results to the user agent module in a uniform fashion. Interactions between the two modules can be via messages between knowbots or by actual movement of knowbots.
External links
http://www.ou.edu/research/electron/internet/knowbot.htm
http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/home/koe/index.html
Internet Protocol based network software
1989 software
Internet search engines
History of the Internet | [
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17176 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS%20principle | KISS principle | KISS, an acronym for keep it simple, stupid, is a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. The KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore, simplicity should be a key goal in design, and unnecessary complexity should be avoided. The phrase has been associated with aircraft engineer Kelly Johnson. The term "KISS principle" was in popular use by 1970. Variations on the phrase include: "Keep it simple, silly", "keep it short and simple", "keep it short and sweet", "keep it simple and straightforward", "keep it small and simple", "keep it simple, soldier",, "keep it simple, sailor", or "keep it sweet and simple".
Origin
The acronym was reportedly coined by Kelly Johnson, lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works (creators of the Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes, among many others).
While popular usage has transcribed it for decades as "Keep it simple, stupid", Johnson transcribed it as "Keep it simple stupid" (no comma), and this reading is still used by many authors.
The principle is best exemplified by the story of Johnson handing a team of design engineers a handful of tools, with the challenge that the jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field under combat conditions with only these tools. Hence, the "stupid" refers to the relationship between the way things break and the sophistication available to repair them.
The acronym has been used by many in the U.S. military, especially the U.S. Navy and United States Air Force, and in the field of software development.
Variants
The principle most likely finds its origins in similar minimalist concepts, such as:
Occam's razor
Leonardo da Vinci's "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication";
Shakespeare's "Brevity is the soul of wit";
Mies Van Der Rohe's "Less is more";
Bjarne Stroustrup's "Make Simple Tasks Simple!";
Johan Cruyff's "Playing football is very simple but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is" or;
Antoine de Saint Exupéry's "It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away";
Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, urged his designers to "Simplify, then add lightness";
Attributed to Albert Einstein, although this may be an editor's paraphrase of a lecture he gave., "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler".
Heath Robinson machines and Rube Goldberg's machines, intentionally overly-complex solutions to simple tasks or problems, are humorous examples of "non-KISS" solutions.
Usage
In film animation
Master animator Richard Williams explains the KISS principle in his book The Animator's Survival Kit, and Disney's Nine Old Men write about it in Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, a considerable work of the genre. The problem faced is that inexperienced animators may "over-animate" in their works, that is, a character may move too much and do too much. Williams urges animators to "KISS".
In software development
Don't repeat yourself (DRY)
Minimalism (computing)
Unix philosophy
Arch Linux
Slackware Linux
Chartjunk
List of software development philosophies
Reduced instruction set computing
Rule of least power
There's more than one way to do it
Worse is better (Less is more)
You aren't gonna need it (YAGNI)
In politics
Keep It Simple Solutions, New Brunswick, a minor political party in New Brunswick, Canada
Keep It Straight and Simple Party, a minor political party in South Africa
See also
BLUF (communication)
Concision
Elegance
The Fox and the Cat (fable)
It's the economy, stupid
Less is more
Mini survival kit – a minimal "bug-out bag" or survival kit
Muntzing
Occam's razor
Perfect is the enemy of good
Simple living
Simplicity
Ultralight backpacking
References
External links
Kiss Principle
The KISS Principles for ORM Products
Adages
Software development philosophies
Programming principles
Simple living
Design | [
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17177 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit | Kit | Kit may refer to:
Places
Kitt, Indiana, US, formerly Kit
Kit, Iran, a village in Mazandaran Province
Kit Hill, Cornwall, England
People
Kit (given name), a list of people and fictional characters
Barys Kit (1910–2018), Russian-born American rocket scientist
Animals
Young animals:
A short form of kitten, a young cat
A young beaver
A young ferret
A young fox
A young mink
A young rabbit
A young raccoon
A young skunk
A young squirrel
A young wolverine
Old collective noun for a group of pigeons flying together
Kinds of sets
Standard equipment and attire in sports:
Kit (association football)
Kit (rugby football)
Kit (of components), a set of components such as
Electronic kit
Kit car or component car
Testing kit (disambiguation)
Other uses
Kit lens, a low-end SLR camera lens
Kit violin or kit, a small stringed musical instrument
Tropical Storm Kit (disambiguation)
Whale (film), 1970, Bulgarian title
See also
KIT (disambiguation)
Kits (disambiguation)
St. Kitts, an island in the Caribbean Sea | [
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17178 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KL0 | KL0 | Kernel Language 0 (KL0) is a sequential logic programming language based on Prolog, used in the ICOT Fifth generation computer project.
References
Prolog programming language family
Japanese inventions | [
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17179 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KL1 | KL1 | KL1, or Kernel Language 1 is an experimental AND-parallel version of KL0 developed for the ICOT Fifth Generation Computer project. KL1 is an implementation of Flat GHC (a subset of the Guarded Horn Clauses language by Kazunori Ueda), making it a parallelised Prolog variant.
References
External links
The KLIC Association, home of the KLIC KL1 to C compiler - last update circa 1999. (The klic.org domain expired and was replaced by a gift company some time between 2010 and 2012; the above link has been adjusted to point to the most recent copy at the Internet Archive.)
Further reading
"Design of the Kernel Language for the Parallel Inference Machine", U. Kazunori et al., Computer J (December 1990).
Prolog programming language family
Japanese inventions | [
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17180 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klamath%20people | Klamath people | The Klamath people are a Native American tribe of the Plateau culture area in Southern Oregon and Northern California. Today Klamath people are enrolled in the federally recognized tribes:
Klamath Tribes (Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin (Yahuskin) Band of Northern Paiute Indians), Oregon
Quartz Valley Indian Community (Klamath, Karuk (Karok), and Shasta (Chasta) people), California.
History
Pre-contact
The Klamath people lived in the area around the Upper Klamath Lake (E-ukshi - “Lake”) and the Klamath, Williamson (Kóke - “River”), Wood River (E-ukalksini Kóke), and Sprague (Plaikni Kóke - “River Uphill”) rivers. They subsisted primarily on fish and gathered roots and seeds. While there was knowledge of their immediate neighbors, apparently the Klamath were unaware of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. Gatschet has described this position as leaving the Klamath living in a "protracted isolation" from outside cultures.
North of their tribal territory lived the Molala (Kuikni maklaks), in the northeast and east in the desert-like plains were various Northern Paiute bands (Shá'ttumi, collective term for Northern Paiute, Bannock and Northern Shoshone) - among them the Goyatöka Band ("Crayfish Eaters"), direct south their Modoc kin (Mo'dokni maklaks - "Southern People, i.e. Tule Lake People") with whom they shared the Modoc Plateau, in the southwest were living Shasta peoples (S[h]asti maklaks) and the Klamath River further downstream the Karuk and Yurok (both: Skatchpalikni - "People along the Scott River"), in the west and northwest were the Latgawa ("Upland Takelma") (according to Spier: Walumskni - "Enemy") and Takelma/Dagelma ("Lowland/River Takelma") (more likely both were called: Wálamsknitumi, Wálamskni maklaks - “Rogue River People”). Beyond the Cascade Range (Yámakisham Yaina - “mountains of the Northerners”) in the Rogue River Valley (Wálamsh) lived the "Rogue "River" Athabascan (Wálamsknitumi, Wálamskni maklaks - “Rogue River People”) and further south along the Pit River (Moatuashamkshini/Móatni Kóke - "River of the Southern Dwellers") lived the Achomawi and Atsugewi (both called: Móatuash maklaks - "Southern Dweller", or "Southern People").
The Klamath were known to raid neighboring tribes, such as the Achomawi on the Pit River, and occasionally to take prisoners as slaves. They traded with the Wasco-Wishram at The Dalles. However, scholars such as Alfred L. Kroeber and Leslie Spier consider these slaving raids by the Klamath to begin only with the acquisition of the horse.
These natives made southern Oregon their home for long enough to witness the eruption of Mount Mazama. It was a legendary volcanic mountain who is the creator of Crater Lake (giˑw), now considered to be a beautiful natural formation.
Contact
In 1826, Peter Skene Ogden, an explorer for the Hudson's Bay Company, first encountered the Klamath people, and he was trading with them by 1829. The United States frontiersman Kit Carson admired their arrows, which were reported to be able to shoot through a house.
Treaty with the United States
The Klamaths, Modocs, and the Yahooskin (Yahuskin) Band of Northern Paiute (in Paiute known as: Goyatöka - "Crayfish eaters"), which was erroneously called Upper Sprague River Snakes believed to be a Band of Snake Indians, the collective name given to the Northern Paiute, Bannock, and Shoshone Native American tribes, signed a treaty with the United States in 1864, establishing the Klamath Reservation to the northeast of Upper Klamath Lake. This area was largely part of the traditional territory controlled by the ă′ukuckni Klamath band. The treaty required the tribes to cede the land in the Klamath Basin, bounded on the north by the 44th parallel, to the United States. In return, the United States was to make a lump sum payment of $35,000, and annual payments totalling $80,000 over 15 years, as well as providing infrastructure and staff for the reservation. The treaty provided that, if the Indians drank or stored intoxicating liquor on the reservation, the payments could be withheld; the United States could also locate additional tribes on the reservation in the future. The tribes requested Lindsay Applegate as the agent to represent the United States to them. The Indian agent estimated the total population of the three tribes at about 2,000 when the treaty was signed.
Post-treaty history
Since termination of recognition of their tribal sovereignty in 1954 (with federal payments not disbursed until 1961), the Klamath and neighboring tribes have reorganized their government and revived tribal identity. The Klamath, along with the Modoc and Yahooskin, have formed the federally recognized Klamath Tribes confederation. Their tribal government is based in Chiloquin, Oregon.
Some Klamath live on the Quartz Valley Indian Community in Siskiyou County, California.
Culture
Subdivisions
Traditionally there were several cultural subdivisions among the Klamath, based on the location of their residency within the Klamath Basin. Despite this, the five recognized "tribelets" (the Klamath Tribes count six) mutually considered each other the same ethnic group, about 1,200 people in total. Like many Indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, the Klamath lived a semi-sedentary life. Winter settlements were in permanent locations that were reoccupied annually. Construction of the earth-lodges would begin in Autumn, with materials salvaged from abandoned, dilapidated buildings made in previous years. Leslie Spier has detailed some of the winter settlement patterns for Klamath as follows:
The towns are not isolated, compact groups of houses, but stretch along the banks for half a mile or more. In fact, the settlements on Williamson river below the Sprague river junction form a practically continuous string of houses for five or six miles, the house pits being, in many spots, crowded close together. Informants insisted that many of these were occupied at the same time. When we consider that these earth-lodges may have housed several families, there is strong suggestion of a considerable population.
Ǎ’ukckni („Klamath Marsh People“ or „Klamath Marsh-Williamson River People“)
P'laikni (“Sprague River Valley People” or “Upland Klamath”, lit. “highland dwellers”)
Kowa’cdikni („Agency Lake/Marsh Lake People“)
Du’kwakni („[Lower] Williamson River People“)
Gu’mbǒtkni („Pelican Bay People“)
Iu’laloηkni („Klamath Falls (Link River) People“)
Marriage
Marriage was a unique practice for the Klamath, compared to neighboring cultures found in the borderlands of modern Oregon, California, Nevada and Idaho. For example, unlike the Hupa, Karok, and Yurok, the Klamath didn't hold formal talks between families for a bride price. Especially notable was the cultural norm that allowed wives to leave husbands, as they were "in no sense chattel ... and certainly cannot be disposed of as a possession."
Ethnobotany
The Klamath use Apocynum cannabinum as a fiber and eat the roots of Lomatium canbyi. They use the rootstocks of Sagittaria cuneata as food. They use Carex, weaving the leaves into mats, using the juice of the pith as a beverage, eating the fresh stems for food and using the tuberous base of the stem for food.
Dentalium
Dentalium shells were common among the Klamath prior to colonization. Compared to other native cultures dentalium didn't hold as much financial use among the Klamath. However, longer shells were generally held to be more valuable. Nonetheless these shells were esteemed primarily for as jewelry and personal adornment. Septum piercings were commonly given to younger members of Klamath families to allow inserting dentalium. Some individuals wouldn't however use any shells in their septum. Spier gives the following account for their usage:
The septum of the nose is pierced and the ear lobes, the latter twice or even more frequently. Both sexes insert dentalium shells horizontally through the septum ... Ear pendants are a group of four dentalia hung in a bunch by their tips.
The use of dentalium in septum piercings, in addition to other means of ornamentation, was common among the Wasco-Wishram as well.
Classifications
The Klamath people are grouped with the Plateau Indians—the peoples who originally lived on the Columbia River Plateau. They were most closely linked with the Modoc people.
Language
The Klamath spoke one dialect of the Klamath–Modoc language - the northern or "fi-ukshikni" dialect, the other - the "southern" dialect being spoken by the Modoc people, who lived south of the Klamath. Once thought to be a language isolate, Klamath–Modoc is now considered a member of the Plateau Penutian language family.
Both the Klamath and the Modoc called themselves maqlaqs, maqlags or Maklaks meaning "people". When they wanted to distinguish between themselves they added knii ("people from/of"), the Klamath were called ?ewksiknii, "people of the [Klamath] Lake", and the Modoc were called moowatdal'knii, "people of the south".
Notable Klamath people
Natalie Ball (b. 1980), interdisciplinary artist
See also
Indian Reorganization Act
Notes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
Annual report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the year 1865: Reports of Agents in Oregon Washington: United States Office of Indian Affairs, 1865.
Hodge, Frederick Webb. Handbook of American Indians north of Mexico. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907.
Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); .
Waldman, Carl. Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. New York: Checkmark, 1999.
External links
Klamath Reservation General Council
Southern Oregon Digital Archives
Native American tribes in Oregon
Native American tribes in California
Plateau Penutian languages
Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Plateau
American slave owners | [
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17186 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klerer%E2%80%93May%20System | Klerer–May System | The Klerer–May System is a programming language developed in the mid-1960s, oriented to numerical scientific programming, whose most notable feature is its two-dimensional syntax based on traditional mathematical notation.
For input and output, the Klerer–May system used a Friden Flexowriter modified to allow half-line motions for subscripts and superscripts. The character set included digits, upper-case letters, subsets of 14 lower-case Latin letters and 18 Greek letters, arithmetic operators (+ − × / |) and punctuation (. , ( )), and eight special line-drawing characters (resembling ╲ ╱ ⎜ _ ⎨ ⎬ ˘ ⁔) used to construct multi-line brackets and symbols for summation, products, roots, and for multi-line division or fractions.
The system was intended to be forgiving of input mistakes, and easy to learn; its reference manual was only two pages.
The system was developed by Melvin Klerer and Jack May at Columbia University's Hudson Laboratories in Dobbs Ferry, New York, for the Office of Naval Research, and ran on GE-200 series computers.
References
Further reading
History of computing
Programming languages created in the 1960s
Procedural programming languages | [
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17188 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KL-ONE | KL-ONE | KL-ONE (pronounced "kay ell won") is a knowledge representation system in the tradition of semantic networks and frames; that is, it is a frame language. The system is an attempt to overcome semantic indistinctness in semantic network representations and to explicitly represent conceptual information as a structured inheritance network.
Overview
There is a whole family of KL-ONE-like systems. One of the innovations that KL-ONE initiated was the use of a deductive classifier, an automated reasoning engine that can validate a frame ontology and deduce new information about the ontology based on the initial information provided by a domain expert.
Frames in KL-ONE are called concepts. These form hierarchies using subsume-relations; in the KL-ONE terminology a super class is said to subsume its subclasses.
Multiple inheritance is allowed. Actually a concept is said to be well-formed only if it inherits from more than one other concept. All concepts, except the top concept (usually THING), must have at least one super class.
In KL-ONE descriptions are separated into two basic classes of concepts: primitive and defined. Primitives are domain concepts that are not fully defined. This means that given all the properties of a concept, this is not sufficient to classify it. They may also be viewed as incomplete definitions. Using the same view, defined concepts are complete definitions. Given the properties of a concept, these are necessary and sufficient conditions to classify the concept.
The slot-concept is called roles and the values of the roles are role-fillers. There are several different types of roles to be used in different situations. The most common and important role type is the generic RoleSet that captures the fact that the role may be filled with more than one filler.
See also
Ontology language
References
Artificial intelligence
Knowledge representation
Ontology languages | [
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17190 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipchoge%20Keino | Kipchoge Keino | Kipchoge Hezekiah Keino (born 17 January 1940) is a retired Kenyan track and field athlete. He was the chairman of the Kenyan Olympic Committee (KOC) until 29 September 2017. A two-time Olympic gold medalist, Keino was among the first in a long line of successful middle and long distance runners to come from the country and has helped and inspired many of his fellow countrymen and women to become the athletics force that they are today. In 2000, he became an honorary member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In 2012, he was one of 24 athletes inducted as inaugural members of the IAAF Hall of Fame.
Early life
Keino was born in Kipsamo, Nandi District, Kenya. His name, Kipchoge, is a Nandi language expression for "born near the grain storage shed". His parents died when he was a youngster and he was raised by an aunt. After finishing school, he joined the Kenya Police. Before taking up athletics, he played rugby.
Athletic career
He began his international career at the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth, Western Australia where he came eleventh in the three miles. At the 1964 Summer Olympics he finished fifth in 5000 m and just missed qualification for the 1500 m final.
On 27 August 1965, Keino lowered the 3000 m world record by over 6 seconds to 7:39.6 in his first attempt at the distance. He won two gold medals (1500 and 5000 metres) at the inaugural All-Africa Games. Later in that year, he broke the 5000 m world record held by Ron Clarke, clocking 13:24.2. At the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica, he won both the mile run and three-mile run. In the next Commonwealth Games, Keino won the 1500 metres and was third in the 5000 metres.
At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, he won the 1500 metres gold medal (defeating American favourite and world record holder Jim Ryun by 20 metres, the largest winning margin in the history of the event) and 5000 m silver medal. Four years later, he won the 3000 metres steeplechase gold and 1500 metres silver at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. He retired in 1973. He is on the cover of the October 1968 issue of Track and Field News, the first issue following the Olympics. He shared the cover of the September 1969 issue with Naftali Bon.
After athletics
With his wife, Phyllis Keino, he has dedicated significant efforts to humanitarian work in Eldoret, Kenya. They have established the Lewa Children's Home for orphans, the KipKeino Primary School in 1999, and the Kip Keino Secondary School in 2009.
For his work with orphans, he shared Sports Illustrated magazine's "Sportsmen and Sportswomen of the Year" award in 1987 with seven others, characterized as "Athletes Who Care". In 1996, Kipchoge Keino Stadium in Eldoret was named after him.
In 2007, he was made an honorary Doctor of Law by the University of Bristol. Earlier, Egerton University in Nakuru had awarded him an honorary degree. In July 2012, he received further recognition from the City of Bristol after the Kenyan Olympic Committee, under his presidency, made Bristol the training base for its athletes in preparation for the London 2012 Olympics. In 2012, Kipchoge Keino was among the inductees in the IAAF Hall of fame. The Bristol City Council awarded him freedom of the city, making him the first to receive this honour from Bristol since Sir Winston Churchill
On 5 August 2016, at the Olympic opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Keino was awarded the first Olympic Laurel, for outstanding service to the Olympic movement.
On 14 May 2021, Jovian asteroid 39285 Kipkeino, discovered by astronomers at Spacewatch in 1997, was .
Personal life
Keino resides on a farm in Eldoret Kenya where he controls and runs a charitable organization for orphans. He is married to Phyllis Keino. Their son Martin was a two-time NCAA champion and highly successful pace-setter.
References
External links
https://kipkeinofoundation.org/
Beijing 2008 dazzles, as we 'flashback' to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and a triumphant Kipchoge Keino, Posted On: 2008-08-08.
1940 births
Living people
People from Nandi County
Kenyan male long-distance runners
Kenyan male middle-distance runners
Kenyan male steeplechase runners
International Olympic Committee members
Olympic athletes of Kenya
Athletes (track and field) at the 1964 Summer Olympics
Athletes (track and field) at the 1968 Summer Olympics
Athletes (track and field) at the 1972 Summer Olympics
Olympic gold medalists for Kenya
Olympic silver medalists for Kenya
Laureus World Sports Awards winners
Commonwealth Games gold medallists for Kenya
Commonwealth Games bronze medallists for Kenya
Commonwealth Games medallists in athletics
Athletes (track and field) at the 1962 British Empire and Commonwealth Games
Athletes (track and field) at the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games
Athletes (track and field) at the 1970 British Commonwealth Games
Recipients of the Olympic Order
Medalists at the 1972 Summer Olympics
Medalists at the 1968 Summer Olympics
Olympic gold medalists in athletics (track and field)
Olympic silver medalists in athletics (track and field)
African Games gold medalists for Kenya
African Games medalists in athletics (track and field)
Athletes (track and field) at the 1965 All-Africa Games
Humanitarians | [
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17193 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knud%20Rasmussen | Knud Rasmussen | Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen (; 7 June 1879 – 21 December 1933) was a Greenlandic–Danish polar explorer and anthropologist. He has been called the "father of Eskimology" and was the first European to cross the Northwest Passage via dog sled. He remains well known in Greenland, Denmark and among Canadian Inuit.
Early years
Rasmussen was born in Jakobshavn, Greenland, the son of a Danish missionary, the vicar Christian Rasmussen, and an Inuit–Danish mother, Lovise Rasmussen (née Fleischer). He had two siblings.
Rasmussen spent his early years in Greenland among the Kalaallit where he learned to speak Kalaallisut, hunt, drive dog sleds and live in harsh Arctic conditions. "My playmates were native Greenlanders; from the earliest boyhood I played and worked with the hunters, so even the hardships of the most strenuous sledge-trips became pleasant routine for me."
He was later educated in Lynge, North Zealand, Denmark. Between 1898 and 1900 he pursued an unsuccessful career as an actor and opera singer.
Career
He went on his first expedition in 1902–1904, known as The Danish Literary Expedition, with Jørgen Brønlund, Harald Moltke and Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, to examine Inuit culture. After returning home he went on a lecture circuit and wrote The People of the Polar North (1908), a combination travel journal and scholarly account of Inuit folklore. In 1908, he married Dagmar Andersen.
In 1910, Rasmussen and friend Peter Freuchen established the Thule Trading Station at Cape York (Qaanaaq), Greenland, as a trading base. The name Thule was chosen because it was the most northerly trading post in the world, literally the "Ultima Thule". Thule Trading Station became the home base for a series of seven expeditions, known as the Thule Expeditions, between 1912 and 1933.
The Thule expeditions
The First Thule Expedition (1912, Rasmussen and Freuchen) aimed to test Robert Peary's claim that a channel divided Peary Land from Greenland. They proved this was not the case in a remarkable journey across the inland ice that almost killed them. Clements Markham, president of the Royal Geographical Society, called the journey the "finest ever performed by dogs." Freuchen wrote personal accounts of this journey (and others) in Vagrant Viking (1953) and I Sailed with Rasmussen (1958).
The Second Thule Expedition (1916–1918) was larger with a team of seven men, which set out to map a little-known area of Greenland's north coast. This journey was documented in Rasmussen's account Greenland by the Polar Sea (1921). The trip was beset with two fatalities, the only in Rasmussen's career, namely Thorild Wulff and Hendrik Olsen. The Third Thule Expedition (1919) was depot-laying for Roald Amundsen's polar drift in Maud. The Fourth Thule Expedition (1919–1920) was in east Greenland where Rasmussen spent several months collecting ethnographic data near Angmagssalik.
Rasmussen's "greatest achievement" was the massive Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–1924) which was designed to "attack the great primary problem of the origin of the Eskimo race." A ten volume account (The Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–1924 (1946)) of ethnographic, archaeological and biological data was collected, and many artifacts are still on display in museums in Denmark. The team of seven first went to eastern Arctic Canada where they began collecting specimens, taking interviews (including the shaman Aua, who told him of Uvavnuk), and excavating sites.
Rasmussen left the team and traveled for 16 months with two Inuit hunters by dog sled across North America to Nome, Alaska – he tried to continue to Russia but his visa was refused. He was the first European to cross the Northwest Passage via dog sled. His journey is recounted in Across Arctic America (1927), considered today a classic of polar expedition literature. This trip has also been called the "Great Sled Journey" and was dramatized in the Canadian film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006).
For the next seven years Rasmussen traveled between Greenland and Denmark giving lectures and writing. In 1931, he went on the Sixth Thule Expedition, designed to consolidate Denmark's claim on a portion of eastern Greenland that was contested by Norway.
The Seventh Thule Expedition (1933) was meant to continue the work of the sixth, but Rasmussen contracted pneumonia after an episode of food poisoning attributed to eating kiviaq, dying a few weeks later in Copenhagen at the age of 54. During this expedition Rasmussen worked on the film The Wedding of Palo, which Rasmussen wrote the screenplay for. The film was directed by Friedrich Dalsheim and completed in 1934 under the Danish title Palos brudefærd.
Honors
In addition to several capes and glaciers, Knud Rasmussen Range in Greenland is named after him.
He was awarded an Honorary Fellowship from the American Geographical Society in 1912, and its Daly Medal in 1924. The Royal Geographical Society awarded him their Founder's Gold Medal in 1923 and the Royal Danish Geographical Society their Hans Egede Medal in 1924. He was made honorary doctor at the University of Copenhagen in 1924, and the University of St Andrews in 1927.
Bibliography
The People of the Polar North (1908)
Greenland by the Polar Sea: The Story of the Thule Expedition from Melville Bay to Cape Morris Jesup (1921)
Eskimo Folk Tales (1921)
Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition (1927)
The Fifth Thule Expedition (1946–52) 10 volumes
Notes
Further reading
Bown, Stephen R. White Eskimo: Knud Rasmussen's Fearless Journey into the Heart of the Arctic (Da Capo, 2015). xxvi, 341 pp.
Cruwys, Elizabeth (2003). "Rasmussen, Knud (1879–1933)", in Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia, volume 3.
Malaurie, Jean (1982). The Last Kings of Thule: With the Polar Eskimos, as They Face Their Destiny, trans. Adrienne Folk.
Markham, Clements R. (1921). The Lands of Silence: A History of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration. Cambridge University Press.
External links
Biography of Knud Rasmussen on Inuit.uqam.ca
Aviation Studies in Greenland Report by Knud Rasmussen et. al. at Dartmouth College Library
1879 births
1933 deaths
Burials at Vestre Cemetery, Copenhagen
Danish ethnologists
Explorers of the Arctic
Greenlandic Inuit people
Greenlandic people of Danish descent
Greenlandic polar explorers
People from Ilulissat
People from Hundested
Exploration of the Arctic | [
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17195 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knute%20Rockne | Knute Rockne | Knute Kenneth Rockne ( ; March 4, 1888 – March 31, 1931) was a Norwegian-American player and coach of American football at the University of Notre Dame. Leading Notre Dame for 13 seasons, Rockne would accumulate over 100 wins and three national championships.
Rockne is regarded as one of the greatest coaches in college football history. His biography at the College Football Hall of Fame, where he was inducted in 1951, identifies him as "without question, American football's most-renowned coach". Rockne helped to popularize the forward pass and made the Notre Dame Fighting Irish a major factor in college football.
In 1931, at the age of 43, Rockne died in a plane crash.
Early life
Knute Rockne was born Knut Larsen Rokne, in Voss, Norway, to smith and wagonmaker Lars Knutson Rokne (1858–1912) and his wife, Martha Pedersdatter Gjermo (1859–1944). He emigrated to Chicago with his parents when he was five years old. He grew up in the Logan Square area of Chicago, on the northwest side of the city. Rockne learned to play football in his neighborhood and later played end in a local group called the Logan Square Tigers. He attended Lorenz Brentano elementary school, and North West Division High School in Chicago where he played football and ran track.
After Rockne graduated from high school, he took a job as a mail dispatcher with the post office in Chicago for four years. When he was 22, he had saved enough money to continue his education. He headed to Notre Dame in Indiana to finish his schooling. Rockne excelled as a football end there, winning All-American honors in 1913. Rockne worked as a lifeguard at Cedar Point in the summer of 1913.
Rockne helped to transform the college game in a single contest. On November 1, 1913, the Notre Dame squad stunned the highly regarded Army team 35–13 in a game played at West Point. Led by quarterback Charlie "Gus" Dorais and Rockne, the Notre Dame team attacked the Cadets with an offense that featured both the expected powerful running game but also long and accurate downfield forward passes from Dorais to Rockne. This game was not the "invention" of the forward pass, but it was the first major contest in which a team used the forward pass regularly throughout the game.
Professional career
At Notre Dame, Rockne was educated as a chemist and he graduated in 1914 with a degree in pharmacy. After graduating, he was the laboratory assistant to noted polymer chemist Julius Arthur Nieuwland at Notre Dame and helped out with the football team, but rejected further work in chemistry after receiving an offer to coach football. In 1914, he was recruited by Peggy Parratt to play for the Akron Indians. There Parratt had Rockne playing both end and halfback and teamed with him on several successful forward pass plays during their title drive. Knute wound up in Massillon, Ohio, in 1915 along with former Notre Dame teammate Dorais to play with the professional Massillon Tigers. Rockne and Dorais brought the forward pass to professional football from 1915 to 1917 when they led the Tigers to the championship in 1915. Pro Football in the Days of Rockne by Emil Klosinski maintains the worst loss ever suffered by Rockne was in 1917. He coached the "South Bend Jolly Fellows Club" when they lost 40–0 to the Toledo Maroons.
Notre Dame coach
While many trace Knute Rockne's debut as a Notre Dame football coach to the war-torn 1918 season, or in 1914 when he became an assistant coach under Jesse Harper, his first position was actually for the Corby and Sorin Hall football teams as a student-athlete in 1912 and 1913. These teams represented residence halls on the University grounds that competed against one other in various sports, the most popular of which was football. The term for these competitions is colloquially known as interhall sports. Ironically, while Rockne holds the highest winning-percentage of any major college football coach, his overall record in the interhall football league was a paltry 2–5–4 across two seasons.
During 13 years as head coach, Rockne led Notre Dame to 105 victories, 12 losses, five ties and three consensus national championships, which included five undefeated and untied seasons.<ref>Portions of this section are adapted from Murray Sperber's book Shake Down The Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football</ref> Rockne posted the highest all-time winning percentage (.881) for a major college football coach. His schemes utilized the eponymous Notre Dame Box offense and the 7–2–2 defense. Rockne's box included a shift. The backfield lined up in a T-formation, then quickly shifted into a box to the left or right just as the ball was snapped.
Rockne was also shrewd enough to recognize that intercollegiate sports had a show-business aspect. Thus he worked hard promoting Notre Dame football to make it financially successful. He used his considerable charm to court favor from the media, which then consisted of newspapers, wire services and radio stations and networks, to obtain free advertising for Notre Dame football. He was very successful as an advertising pitchman for South Bend-based Studebaker and other products. He eventually received an annual income of $75,000 from Notre Dame.
1918–1930
During the war-torn season of 1918, Rockne took over from his predecessor Jesse Harper and posted a 3–1–2 record, losing only to the Michigan Aggies. He made his coaching debut on September 28, 1918, against Case Tech in Cleveland, earning a 26–6 victory. In the backfield were Leonard Bahan, George Gipp, and Curly Lambeau. In Gipp, Rockne had an ideal handler of the forward pass.
Rockne handled the line and Gus Dorais handled the backfield of the 1919 team. The team went undefeated and was a national champion, though the championship is not recognized by Notre Dame.
Gipp died on December 14, 1920, just two weeks after being elected Notre Dame's first All-American by Walter Camp. He likely contracted strep throat and pneumonia while giving punting lessons after his final game, on November 20 against Northwestern University. Since antibiotics were not available in the 1920s, treatment options for such infections were limited and they could be fatal even to the young and healthy. It was while on his hospital bed and speaking to Rockne that he is purported to have delivered the line "win just one for the Gipper".
John Mohardt led the 1921 Notre Dame team to a 10-1 record with 781 rushing yards, 995 passing yards, 12 rushing touchdowns, and nine passing touchdowns. Grantland Rice wrote, "Mohardt could throw the ball to within a foot or two of any given space" and noted that the 1921 Notre Dame team "was the first team we know of to build its attack around a forward passing game, rather than use a forward passing game as a mere aid to the running game". Mohardt had both Eddie Anderson and Roger Kiley at end to receive his passes.
The national champion 1924 team included the "Four Horsemen" backfield of Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden. The line was known as the "Seven Mules". The Irish capped an undefeated 10–0 season with a victory over Stanford in the Rose Bowl.
For all his success, Rockne also made what an Associated Press writer called "one of the greatest coaching blunders in history". Instead of coaching his 1926 team against Carnegie Tech, Rockne traveled to Chicago for the Army–Navy Game to "write newspaper articles about it, as well as select an All-America football team". Carnegie Tech used the coach's absence as motivation for a 19–0 win; the upset likely cost the Irish a chance for a national title.
The 1928 team lost to national champion Georgia Tech. "I sat at Grant Field and saw a magnificent Notre Dame team suddenly recoil before the furious pounding of one man–Peter Pund", said Rockne. "Nobody could stop him. I counted 20 scoring plays that this man ruined." Rockne wrote of an attack on his coaching in the Atlanta Journal, "I am surprised that a paper of such fine, high standing [as yours] would allow a zipper to write in his particular vein ... the article by Fuzzy Woodruff was not called for."
On November 10, 1928, the Fighting Irish were tied with Army 0–0 at the end of the half. Rockne entered the locker room and told the team the words he heard on Gipp's deathbed in 1920: "I've got to go, Rock. It's all right. I'm not afraid. Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are going wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go in there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, Rock. But I'll know about it, and I'll be happy." This inspired the team, who then won the game 12–6. The phrase "Win one for the Gipper" was later used as a political slogan by Ronald Reagan, who in 1940 portrayed Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American.Both the 1929 and the 1930 teams went undefeated and were national champions. According to interviews, Rockne considered his 1929 team his strongest overall. Rockne also said he considered his 1930 team to have been his best offensively before the departure of Jumping Joe Savoldi. Rockne was struck with illness in 1929, and the de facto head coach was assistant Tom Lieb. Rockne's all-time All-America backfield was Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, George Gipp, and George Pfann.
Personal life
Rockne met Bonnie Gwendoline Skiles (1891–1956) of Kenton, Ohio, an avid gardener, while the two were employed at Cedar Point. Bonnie was the daughter of George Skiles and Huldah Dry. The two married at Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Sandusky, Ohio, on July 14, 1914, with Father William F. Murphy officiating and Gus Dorais as best man. They had four children: Knute Lars Jr., William Dorias, Mary Jeane and John Vincent. Rockne converted from the Lutheran to the Roman Catholic faith on November 20, 1925. The Rev. Vincent Mooney, C.S.C., baptized Rockne in the Log Chapel on Notre Dame's campus.
Plane crash and public reaction
Rockne died in the crash of a Transcontinental & Western Air airliner in Kansas on March 31, 1931, while en route to participate in the production of the film The Spirit of Notre Dame (released October 13, 1931). He had stopped in Kansas City to visit his two sons, Bill and Knute Jr., who were in boarding school there at the Pembroke-Country Day School. A little over an hour after taking off from Kansas City, one of the Fokker Trimotor's wings broke up in flight. The cause of the damage was determined to be that the plane's plywood outer skin was bonded to the ribs and spars with water-based aliphatic resin glue and flight in rain had caused the bond to deteriorate to the point that sections of the plywood suddenly separated. The plane crashed into a wheat field near Bazaar, Kansas, killing Rockne and seven others.EAApilot magazine, August 2016
Coincidentally, Jess Harper was a friend of Rockne and also the coach whom Rockne had replaced at Notre Dame. Harper lived about from the spot of the crash and he was called to make positive identification of Rockne's body. A memorial dedicated to the victims stands on the spot where the plane crashed. The memorial is surrounded by a wire fence with wooden posts and was maintained for many years by James Heathman, who, at the age of 13 in 1931, was one of the first people to arrive at the site of the crash.
Rockne's unexpected death startled the nation and triggered a national outpouring of grief, comparable to the deaths of presidents. President Herbert Hoover called Rockne's death "a national loss".Hoover, Herbert, President of the United States, message to Mrs. Knute Rockne, 119 – "Message of Sympathy on the Death of Knute Rockne", April 1, 1931, Washington, D.C., cited on the web site of The American Presidency Project King Haakon VII of Norway, Rockne's birthplace, posthumously knighted Rockne and sent a personal envoy (Olaf Bernts, Norwegian consul in Chicago) to Rockne's massive funeral. More than 100,000 people lined the route of his funeral procession, and the funeral was broadcast live on network radio across the United States and in Europe as well as parts of South America and Asia.
Upon arrival at Highland Cemetery in South Bend, six of his players from the previous year (Marty Brill, Tom Yarr, Frank Carideo, Marchy Schwartz, Tom Conley and Larry Mullins) carried him to his final resting place. Rockne was buried in Highland Cemetery in South Bend, the city adjacent to the Notre Dame campus.
Driven by the public feeling for Rockne, the crash story played out at length in nearly all the nation's newspapers and public demand for an inquiry into the crash's causes and circumstances ensued.Johnson, Randy, M.A. (Ph.D. candidate, Ohio Univ., Athens, OH; certified airline transport pilot & flight instructor), "The 'Rock': The Role of the Press in Bringing About Change in Aircraft Accident Policy.", Journal of Air Transportation World Wide, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2000, Aviation Institute, University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The national outcry over the disaster that killed Rockne and seven others triggered sweeping changes to aircraft design, manufacturing, operation, inspection, maintenance, regulation and crash investigation, igniting a safety revolution that ultimately transformed airline travel worldwide from one of the most dangerous forms of travel to one of the safest.
Legacy
Rockne was not the first coach to use the forward pass, but he helped popularize it nationally. Most football historians agree that a few schools, notably St. Louis University (under coach Eddie Cochems), Michigan, Carlisle and Minnesota, had passing attacks in place before Rockne arrived at Notre Dame. The great majority of passing attacks, however, consisted solely of short pitches and shovel passes to stationary receivers. Additionally, few of the major Eastern teams that constituted the power center of college football at the time used the pass. In the summer of 1913, while he was a lifeguard on the beach at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, Rockne and his college teammate and roommate Gus Dorais worked on passing techniques. These were employed in games by the 1913 Notre Dame squad and subsequent Harper- and Rockne-coached teams and included many features common in modern passing, including having the passer throw the ball overhand and having the receiver run under a football and catch the ball in stride. That fall, Notre Dame upset heavily favored Army 35–13 at West Point thanks to a barrage of Dorais-to-Rockne long downfield passes. The game played an important role in displaying the potency of the forward pass and "open offense" and convinced many coaches to add pass plays to their play books. The game is dramatized in the movies Knute Rockne, All American and The Long Gray Line. In May 1949, Knute Rockne appeared in the Master Man story on Kid Eternity comics, Vol 1, number 15.
Coaching tree
Rockne's coaching tree includes:
Eddie Anderson: played for Notre Dame (1919–1921), head coach for Iowa (1939–1949)
Hunk Anderson: played for Notre Dame (1918–1921), head coach for Notre Dame (1931–1933), NC State (1934–1936)
Joe Bach: played for Notre Dame (1923–1924), head coach for Duquesne (1934), Pittsburgh Pirates/Steelers (1935–1936; 1952–1953)
Charlie Bachman: played for Notre Dame (1914–1916), head coach for Kansas State (1920–1927), Florida (1928–1932), Michigan State (1933–1946)
Dutch Bergman: played for Notre Dame (1915–1916; 1919), head coach for Catholic (1930–1940), Washington Redskins (1943)
Frank Carideo: played for Notre Dame (1928–1930), head coach for Missouri (1932–1934)
Stan Cofall: played for Notre Dame (1914–1916), head coach for Wake Forest (1928).
Chuck Collins: played for Notre Dame (1922–1924), head coach for North Carolina (1926–1933).
Jim Crowley: played for Notre Dame (1922–1924), head coach for Michigan State (1928–1932), Fordham (1933–1941).
Gus Dorais: played for Notre Dame (1910–1913), assistant for Notre Dame (1919), head coach for Gonzaga (1920–1924).
Rex Enright: played for Notre Dame (1923–1925), head coach for South Carolina (1938–1942; 1946–1955).
Noble Kizer: played for Notre Dame (1922–1924), head coach for Purdue (1930–1936)
Elmer Layden: played for Notre Dame (1922–1924), head coach for Duquesne (1927–1933), Notre Dame (1934–1940)
Frank Leahy: played for Notre Dame (1928–1930), head coach for Boston College (1939–1940), Notre Dame (1941–1943; 1946–1953).
Tom Lieb: played for Notre Dame (1919–1922), head coach for Loyola Los Angeles (1930–1938), Florida (1940–1945).
Slip Madigan: played for Notre Dame (1916–1917; 1919), head coach for Saint Mary's (1921–1939) Iowa (1943–1944)
Harry Mehre: played for Notre Dame (1919–1921), head coach for Georgia (1928–1937), Ole Miss (1938–1945).
Don Miller: played for Notre Dame (1922–1924), assistant for Georgia Tech (1925–1928), Ohio State (1929–1932).
Edgar Miller: played for Notre Dame (1922–1924), head coach for Navy (1931–1933)
Chuck Riley: played for Notre Dame (1927), head coach for New Mexico (1931–1933)
Marchmont Schwartz: played for Notre Dame (1929–1931), head coach for Creighton (1935–1939), Stanford (1942–1950).
Buck Shaw: played for Notre Dame (1919–1921), head coach for NC State (1924), Nevada (1925–1928), San Francisco 49ers ( 1946–1954 ), Philadelphia Eagles ( 1958– 1960 ).
Maurice J. "Clipper" Smith: played for Notre Dame (1917–1920), head coach for Gonzaga (1925–1928), Villanova (1936–1942)
Harry Stuhldreher: played for Notre Dame (1922–1924), head coach for Villanova (1925–1935), Wisconsin (1936–1948).
Frank Thomas: played for Notre Dame (1920–1922), head coach for Alabama (1931–1946)
Adam Walsh: played for Notre Dame (1922–1924), head coach for Santa Clara (1925–1928), Bowdoin (1935–1942; 1947–1958)
Earl Walsh: played for Notre Dame (1919–1921), head coach for Fordham (1942).
John Weibel: played for Notre Dame (1923–1924), assistant for Vanderbilt (1925–1926), Duquesne (1927).
Chet A. Wynne: played for Notre Dame (1919–1921), head coach for Creighton (1923–1929), Auburn (1930–1933), Kentucky (1934–1937).
Larry Mullins: played for Notre Dame (1927-1930), head coach at St. Benedict's College (1932 to 1936), Loyola University of New Orleans (1937 to 1939), and St. Ambrose University (1940, 1947-1950).
Memorials
Notre Dame memorializes him in the Knute Rockne Memorial Building, an athletics facility built in 1937, as well as the main football stadium.
His name appears on streets in South Bend and in Stevensville, Michigan, (where Rockne had a summer home), and a travel plaza on the Indiana Toll Road.
The Rockne Memorial near Bazaar, Kansas at the site of the airliner crash memorializes Rockne and the seven others who died with him. It was erected by the late Easter Heathman, who as a boy was a crash eyewitness and was among the first to respond at the scene. Every five years since the crash, a memorial ceremony is held there and at a nearby schoolhouse, drawing relatives of the victims and Rockne and Notre Dame fans from around the world. Now part of the Heathman family estate, it is accessible only by arrangement or during memorial commemorations.
The Matfield Green rest stop travel plaza (center foyer) on the Kansas Turnpike near Bazaar and the airliner crash site where Rockne was killed used to have a large, glassed-in exhibit commemorating Rockne (chiefly), the other crash victims, and the crash itself. The memorial was taken down during renovations of the travel plaza.
Allentown Central Catholic High School in Allentown, Pennsylvania dedicated its gymnasium, Rockne Hall, to Knute Rockne.
Taylorville, Illinois dedicated the street next to the football field as "Knute Rockne Road".
The town of Rockne, Texas was named to honor him. In 1931, the children of Sacred Heart School were given the opportunity to name their town. A vote was taken, with the children electing to name the town after Rockne, who had died in a plane crash earlier that year. On March 10, 1988, Rockne opened its post office for one day during which a Knute Rockne 22-cent commemorative stamp was issued. A life-size bust of Rockne was unveiled on March 4, 2006.
The Studebaker automobile company of South Bend marketed the Rockne automobile from 1931 to 1933. It was a separate product line of Studebaker and priced in the low-cost market.
Symphonic composer Ferde Grofe composed a musical suite in Rockne's honor shortly after the coach's death.
In 1940, actor Pat O'Brien portrayed Rockne in the Warner Brothers film Knute Rockne, All American, in which Rockne used the phrase "win one for the Gipper" in reference to the death bed request of George Gipp, played by Ronald Reagan.
The short film I Am an American (1944) featured Rockne as a foreign-born citizen
Rockne was enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame in 1951 as a charter member and in the Indiana Football Hall of Fame.
In 1988, the United States Postal Service honored Rockne with a 22-cent commemorative postage stamp. President Ronald Reagan, who played George Gipp in the movie Knute Rockne, All American, gave an address at the Athletic & Convocation Center at the University of Notre Dame on March 9, 1988, and officially unveiled the Rockne stamp.
In 1988, Rockne was inducted posthumously into the Scandinavian-American Hall of Fame held during Norsk Høstfest.
A biographical musical of Rockne's life premiered at the Theatre at the Center in Munster, Indiana on April 3, 2008. The musical is based on a play and mini-series by Buddy Farmer.
The U.S. Navy named a ship in the Liberty ship class after Knute Rockne in 1943. The SS Knute Rockne was scrapped in 1972.
A statue of Rockne, as well as Ara Parseghian, both by the sculptor Armando Hinojosa of Laredo, Texas, are located on the Notre Dame campus.
He was inducted into the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame as a member of the Class of 2014.
Head coaching record
See also
List of teachers portrayed in films
References
Further reading
Brondfield, Jerry. Rockne: The Coach, the Man, the Legend (1976, reissued 2009)
Carter, Bob, Sports Century Biography:"Knute Rockne was Notre Dame's master motivator,", Special to ESPN.com
Cavanaugh, Jack. The Gipper: George Gipp, Knute Rockne, and the Dramatic Rise of Notre Dame Football (2010)
Harmon, Daniel E. Notre Dame Football (The Rosen Publishing Group, 2013).
Lindquist, Sherry C. M. Memorializing Knute Rockne at the University of Notre Dame: Collegiate Gothic Architecture and Institutional Identity", Winterthur Portfolio (Spring 2012), 46#1 pp 1–24. . .
Lovelace, Delos Wheeler. Rockne of Notre Dame (1931)
Norsk Biografisk leksikon (NBL)
Robinson, Ray. Rockne of Notre Dame: The Making of a Football Legend (1999)
Rockne, Knute K. Coaching. (Devin-Adair, 1925).
Sperber, Murray, Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football (1993)
Stewart, Mark. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish (Norwood House Press, 2011)
Stuhldreher, Harry. Knute Rockne, Man Builder (Grosset & Dunlap, 1931)
External links
Knute Rockne letters to Eugene Roberts, MSS 7691 at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University
1888 births
1931 deaths
Accidental deaths in Kansas
Akron Indians (Ohio League) players
American football ends
Coaches of American football from Illinois
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Converts to Roman Catholicism from Lutheranism
Dispatchers
Fort Wayne Friars players
Massillon Tigers players
Norwegian emigrants to the United States
Norwegian players of American football
Notre Dame Fighting Irish athletic directors
Notre Dame Fighting Irish football coaches
Notre Dame Fighting Irish football players
Sportspeople from Chicago
Sportspeople from Sandusky, Ohio
People from Voss
Players of American football from Chicago
University of Notre Dame faculty
Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in the United States
Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in 1931
Catholics from Ohio | [
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17198 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kariba%20Dam | Kariba Dam | The Kariba Dam is a double curvature concrete arch dam in the Kariba Gorge of the Zambezi river basin between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The dam stands tall and long. The dam forms Lake Kariba, which extends for and holds of water.
Construction
The dam was constructed on the orders of the Government of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, a 'federal colony' within the British Empire. The double curvature concrete arch dam was designed by Coyne et Bellier and constructed between 1955 and 1959 by Impresit of Italy at a cost of $135,000,000 for the first stage with only the Kariba South power cavern. Final construction and the addition of the Kariba North Power cavern by Mitchell Construction was not completed until 1977 due to largely political problems for a total cost of $480,000,000. During construction, 86 men lost their lives.
The dam was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother on 17 May 1960.
Power generation
The Kariba Dam supplies of electricity to parts of both Zambia (the Copperbelt) and Zimbabwe and generates per annum. Each country has its own power station on the north and south bank of the dam respectively. The south station belonging to Zimbabwe has been in operation since 1960 and had six generators of capacity each for a total of .
On November 11, 2013 it was announced by Zimbabwe's Finance Minister, Patrick Chinamasa that capacity at the Zimbabwean (South) Kariba hydropower station would be increased by 300 megawatts. The cost of upgrading the facility has been supported by a $319m loan from China. The deal is a clear example of Zimbabwe's "Look East" policy, which was adopted after falling out with Western powers. Construction on the Kariba South expansion began in mid-2014 and was initially expected to be complete in 2019.
In March 2018, president Emmerson Mnangagwa commissioned the completed expansion of Kariba South Hydroelectric Power Station. The addition of two new turbines, brings to at capacity at this station to . The expansion work was done by Sinohydro, at a cost of US$533 million. Work started in 2014, and was completed in March 2018.
The north station belonging to Zambia has been in operation since 1976, and has four generators of each for a total of ; work to expand this capacity by an additional to was completed in December 2013. Two additional 180 MW generators were added.
Location
The Kariba Dam project was planned and carried out by the Government of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The Federation was often referred to as the Central African Federation (CAF). The CAF was a 'federal colony' within the British Empire in southern Africa that existed from 1953 to the end of 1963, comprising the former self-governing British colony of Southern Rhodesia and the former British protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Northern Rhodesia had decided earlier in 1953 (before the Federation was founded) to build a dam within its territory, on the Kafue River, a major tributary of the Zambezi. It would have been closer to Northern Rhodesia's Copperbelt, which was in need of more power. This would have been a cheaper and less grandiose project, with a smaller environmental impact. Southern Rhodesia, the richest of the three, objected to a Kafue dam and insisted that the dam be sited instead at Kariba. Also, the capacity of the Kafue dam was much lower than that at Kariba. Initially the dam was managed and maintained by the Central African Power Corporation. The Kariba Dam is now owned and operated by the Zambezi River Authority, which is jointly and equally owned by Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Since Zambia's independence, three dams have been built on the Kafue River: the Kafue Gorge Upper Dam, Kafue Gorge Lower Dam and the Itezhi-Tezhi Dam.
Environmental impacts
Population displacement and resettlement
The creation of the reservoir forced resettlement of about 57,000 Tonga people living along the Zambezi on both sides.
There are many different perspectives on how much resettlement aid was given to the displaced Tonga. British author David Howarth described the efforts in Northern Rhodesia:
Anthropologist Thayer Scudder, who has studied these communities since the late 1950s, wrote:
American writer Jacques Leslie, in Deep Water (2005), focused on the plight of the people displaced by Kariba Dam, and found the situation little changed since the 1970s. In his view, Kariba remains the worst dam-resettlement disaster in African history.
Basilwizi Trust
In an effort to regain control of their lives, the local people who were displaced by the Kariba dam's reservoir formed the Basilwizi Trust in 2002. The Trust seeks mainly to improve the lives of people in the area through organizing development projects and serving as a conduit between the people of the Zambezi Valley and their country's decision-making process.
River ecology
The Kariba Dam controls 90% of the total runoff of the Zambezi River, thus changing the downstream ecology dramatically.
Wildlife rescue
From 1958 to 1961, Operation Noah captured and removed around 6,000 large animals and numerous small ones threatened by the lake's rising waters.
Recent activity
On 6 February 2008, the BBC reported that heavy rain could lead to a release of water from the dam, which would force 50,000 people downstream to evacuate.
Rising levels led to the opening of the floodgates in March 2010, requiring the evacuation of 130,000 people who lived in the floodplain, and causing concerns that flooding would spread to nearby areas.
In March 2014, at a conference organized by the Zambezi River Authority, engineers warned that the foundations of the dam had weakened and there was a possibility of dam failure unless repairs were made.
On 3 October 2014 the BBC reported that “The Kariba Dam is in a dangerous state. Opened in 1959, it was built on a seemingly solid bed of basalt. But, in the past 50 years, the torrents from the spillway have eroded that bedrock, carving a vast crater that has undercut the dam's foundations. … engineers are now warning that without urgent repairs, the whole dam will collapse. If that happened, a tsunami-like wall of water would rip through the Zambezi valley, reaching the Mozambique border within eight hours. The torrent would overwhelm Mozambique's Cahora Bassa Dam and knock out 40% of southern Africa's hydroelectric capacity. Along with the devastation of wildlife in the valley, the Zambezi River Authority estimates that the lives of 3.5 million people are at risk.”
In June 2015 The Institute of Risk Management South Africa completed a Risk Research Report entitled Impact of the failure of the Kariba Dam. It concluded: "Whilst we can debate whether the Kariba
Dam will fail, why it might occur and when, there is no doubt that the impact across the region would be devastating."
In January 2016 it was reported that water levels at the dam had dropped to 12% of capacity. Levels fell by , which is just above the minimum operating level for hydropower. Low rainfalls and overuse of the water by the power plants have left the reservoir near empty, raising the prospect that both Zimbabwe and Zambia will face water shortages.
In July and September 2018, The Lusaka Times reported that work had started relating to the plunge pool and cracks in the dam wall.
On 22 February 2019 Bloomberg reported "Zambia has reduced hydropower production at the Kariba Dam because of rapidly declining water levels" but "Zambia doesn’t anticipate power cuts as a result of shortages". On 5 August that year, the same publication reported that the reservoir was near empty, and that it may have to stop hydropower production.
As of November 2020 the water level in the Kariba reservoir has remained steady around the 25% capacity, up from nearly half that in November 2019. The Zambezi River Authority has stated that it is optimistic about rainfall estimates for the 2020/2021 rainfall season, allocating an increased amount of water for power production. As it sits now, the reservoir is holding 15.77 billion cubic meters of water, with the water line sitting at around 478.30 metres (1,569.23 ft), just above the minimum capacity for power generation of 475.50 metres (1,560.04 ft).
See also
Cahora Bassa Dam
Nyami Nyami
List of largest power stations in the world
List of crossings of the Zambezi River
References
External links
Dams in Zambia
Dams in Zimbabwe
Lake Kariba
Zambezi River
Arch dams
Buildings and structures in Mashonaland West Province
Dams completed in 1959
1959 establishments in Northern Rhodesia
1959 establishments in Southern Rhodesia
1959 establishments in Africa
Tourist attractions in Zambia
Tourist attractions in Zimbabwe
Rhodesia–Zambia relations
Zambia–Zimbabwe border
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17199 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keilhauite | Keilhauite | Keilhauite (also known as yttrotitanite) is a variety of the mineral titanite of a brownish black color, related to titanite in form. It consists chiefly of silicon dioxide, titanium dioxide, calcium oxide, and yttrium oxide. The variety was described in 1841 and named for Baltazar Mathias Keilhau (1797–1858) a Norwegian geologist.
Keilhauite has a chemical formula of . It differs from titanite only in that calcium is substituted by up to 10 percent .
References
Calcium minerals
Titanium minerals
Yttrium minerals
Lanthanide minerals
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17202 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsley%20Amis | Kingsley Amis | Sir Kingsley William Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986). His biographer, Zachary Leader, called Amis "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He is the father of the novelist Martin Amis. In 2008, The Times ranked him ninth on a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Life and career
Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham, south London, the only child of William Robert Amis (1889–1963), a clerk for the mustard manufacturer Colman's in the City of London, and his wife Rosa Annie (née Lucas). The Amis grandparents were wealthy. William Amis's father, the glass merchant Joseph James Amis, owned a mansion called Barchester at Purley, then part of Surrey. Amis considered J. J. Amis – always called "Pater" or "Dadda" – "a jokey, excitable, silly little man," whom he "disliked and was repelled by". His wife Julia "was a large, dreadful, hairy-faced creature... whom [Amis] loathed and feared. His mother's parents (her father an enthusiastic collector of books employed at a gentleman's outfitters, being "the only grandparent [Amis] cared for") lived at Camberwell. Amis hoped to inherit much of his grandfather's library, but Amis was only permitted by his grandmother to take five volumes, on condition he wrote "from his grandfather's collection" on the flyleaf of each.
Amis was raised at Norbury – in his later estimation "not really a place, it's an expression on a map [–] really I should say I came from Norbury station." In 1940, the Amises moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. He was educated at the City of London School (as his father had been) on a scholarship, after his first year, and in April 1941 was admitted to St John's College, Oxford, also on a scholarship, where he read English. It was there he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. While at Oxford in June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, although he broke with communism in 1956, in view of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Joseph Stalin in his speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences. In July 1942, he was called up for national service and served in the Royal Corps of Signals. He returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. Although he worked hard and earned a first in English in 1947, he had decided by then to give much of his time to writing.
In 1946 he met Hilary Bardwell. They married in 1948 after she became pregnant with their first child, Philip. Amis initially arranged for her to have a back-street abortion, but changed his mind, fearing for her safety. He was a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea from 1949 to 1961. Two other children followed: Martin in August 1949 and Sally in January 1954.
Days after Sally's birth, Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim, was published to great acclaim. Critics felt it had caught the flavour of Britain in the 1950s and ushered in a new style of fiction. By 1972, its impressive sales in Britain had been matched by 1.25 million paperback copies sold in the United States. It was translated into 20 languages, including Polish, Hebrew, Korean, and Serbo-Croat. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis became one of the writers known as the Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim was among the first British campus novels, setting a precedent for later generations of writers such as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobson. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement.
In 1958–1959 Amis made the first of two visits to the United States, as Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University and a visiting lecturer in other north-eastern universities. On returning to Britain, he fell into a rut, and he began looking for another post. After 13 years at Swansea, Amis became a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1961, but regretted the move within a year, finding Cambridge an academic and social disappointment. He resigned in 1963, intent on moving to Majorca, although he actually moved no further than London.
In 1963, Hilary discovered that Amis was having an affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hilary and Amis separated in August and he went to live with Howard, divorcing Hilary and marrying Howard in 1965. In 1968 he moved with Howard to Lemmons, a house in Barnet, north London. She and Amis divorced in 1983.
In his last years, Amis shared a house with Hilary and her third husband, Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock. Martin's memoir Experience contains much about the life, charm and decline of his father.
Amis was knighted in 1990. In August 1995 he fell, suffering a suspected stroke. After apparently recovering, he worsened and died on 22 October 1995 at St Pancras Hospital, London. He was cremated and his ashes laid to rest at Golders Green Crematorium.
Literary work
Amis is widely known as a comic novelist of life in mid to late 20th-century Britain, but his literary work covered many genres – poetry, essays, criticism, short stories, food and drink, anthologies, and several novels in genres such as science fiction and mystery. His career initially developed in an inverse pattern to that of his close friend Philip Larkin's. Before becoming known as a poet, Larkin had published two novels; Amis originally sought to be a poet and turned to novels only after publishing several volumes of verse. He continued throughout his career to write poetry, in a straightforward, accessible style that often masks a nuance of thought.
Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), satirises the highbrow academic set of an unnamed university, through the eyes of a struggling young lecturer of history. It was widely perceived as part of the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s, in reacting against stultification of conventional British life, although Amis never encouraged this interpretation. Amis's other novels of the 1950s and early 1960s likewise depict contemporary situations drawn from his own experience. That Uncertain Feeling (1955) features a young provincial librarian (perhaps with an eye to Larkin working as a librarian in Hull) and his temptation to adultery. I Like It Here (1958) takes a contemptuous view of "abroad", after Amis's own travels on the Continent with a young family. Take a Girl Like You (1960) steps away from the immediately autobiographical, but remains grounded in the concerns of sex and love in ordinary modern life, tracing the courtship and ultimate seduction of the heroine by a young schoolmaster.
With The Anti-Death League (1966), Amis begins to show some of the experimentation – in content, if not style – that marked much of his work in the 1960s and 1970s. His departure from the strict realism of his early comedic novels is not so abrupt as might first appear. He had been avidly reading science fiction since a boy and developed that interest in the Christian Gauss Lectures of 1958, while visiting Princeton University. These were published that year as New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, giving a serious yet light-handed treatment of what the genre had to say about man and society. Amis was especially keen on the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, and in New Maps of Hell coined the term "comic inferno" to describe a type of humorous dystopia, exemplified in the works of Robert Sheckley. He further displayed his devotion to the genre in editing, with the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, the science-fiction anthology series Spectrum I–V, which drew heavily upon 1950s numbers of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.
Though not explicitly science fiction, The Anti-Death League takes liberties with reality not found in Amis's earlier novels. It introduces a speculative bent that continued to develop in others of his genre novels such as The Green Man (1969) (mystery/horror) and The Alteration (1976) (alternative history). Much of this speculation concerned the improbability of the existence of any benevolent deity involved in human affairs. In The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, The Alteration and elsewhere, including poems such as "The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment" and "New Approach Needed", Amis showed frustration with a God who could lace the world with cruelty and injustice, and championed the preservation of ordinary human happiness – in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure – against the demands of any cosmological scheme. Amis's religious views appear in a response, reported in his Memoirs. To the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's question, "You atheist?" Amis replied, "It's more that I hate Him."
During this time, Amis had not turned completely away from the comedic realism of Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You. I Want It Now (1968) and Girl, 20 (1971) both depict the "swinging" atmosphere of London in the late 1960s, in which Amis certainly participated, though neither book is strictly autobiographical. Girl, 20, for instance, is set in the world of classical (and pop) music, in which Amis had no part. The book's noticeable command of music terminology and opinion shows Amis's amateur devotion to music and almost journalistic capacity to explore a subject that interested him. That intelligence is similarly displayed, for instance, in the ecclesiastical matters in The Alteration, for Amis was neither a Roman Catholic nor a devotee of any church.
Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Amis regularly produced essays and criticism, principally for periodical publication. Some were collected in 1968 into What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Essays, in which Amis's wit and literary and social opinions were displayed on books such as Colin Wilson's The Outsider (panned), Iris Murdoch's début novel Under the Net (praised), and William Empson's Milton's God (inclined to agreement). Amis's opinions on books and people tended to appear, and often were, conservative, and yet, as the title essay of the collection shows, he was not merely reverent of "the classics" and of traditional morals, but more disposed to exercise his own rather independent judgement in all things.
Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, which he admired, in the late 1960s, when he began composing critical works connected with the fictional spy, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. In 1965, he wrote the popular James Bond Dossier under his own name. That same year, he wrote The Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym "Lt Col. William ('Bill') Tanner", Tanner being M's Chief of Staff in many of Fleming's Bond novels. In 1968 Amis wrote Colonel Sun, which was published under the pseudonym "Robert Markham".
Amis's literary style and tone changed significantly after 1970, with the possible exception of The Old Devils, a Booker Prize winner. Several critics found him old-fashioned and misogynistic. His Stanley and the Women, an exploration of social sanity, could be said to instance these traits. Others said that his output lacked the humanity, wit and compassion of earlier work.
This period also saw Amis as an anthologist, displaying a wide knowledge of all kinds of English poetry. The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), which he edited, was a revision of an original volume done by W. H. Auden. Amis took it in a markedly new direction: Auden had interpreted light verse to include "low" verse of working-class or lower-class origin, regardless of subject matter, while Amis defined light verse as essentially light in tone, though not necessarily simple in composition. The Amis Anthology (1988), a personal selection of his favourite poems, grew out of his work for a London newspaper, in which he selected a poem a day and gave it a brief introduction.
Amis was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, for Ending Up (1974) and Jake's Thing (1978), and finally, as prizewinner, for The Old Devils in 1986.
In 2008, The Times ranked Kingsley Amis 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Personal life
Political views
As a young man at Oxford, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and left it in 1956. He later described this stage of his political life as "the callow Marxist phase that seemed almost compulsory in Oxford." Amis remained nominally on the Left for some time after the war, declaring in the 1950s that he would always vote for the Labour Party.
Amis eventually moved further right, a development he discussed in the essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967); his conservatism and anti-communism can be seen in works like the dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980). In 1967, Amis, Robert Conquest, John Braine and several other authors signed a letter to The Times entitled "Backing for U.S. Policies in Vietnam", supporting the US government in the Vietnam War. He spoke at the Adam Smith Institute, arguing against government subsidy to the arts.
Character
By his own admission and according to his biographers, Amis was a serial adulterer for much of his life. This was a major contributory factor in the breakdown of his first marriage. A famous photograph of a sleeping Amis on a Yugoslav beach shows the slogan (written in lipstick by wife Hilary) on his back "1 Fat Englishman – I fuck anything."
In one memoir, Amis wrote, "Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time". He suggests this reflects a naïve tendency in readers to apply the behaviour of his characters to himself. In fact he enjoyed drink and spent a good deal of time in pubs. Hilary Rubinstein, who accepted Lucky Jim for Victor Gollancz, commented, "I doubted whether Jim Dixon would have gone to the pub and drunk ten pints of beer.... I didn't know Kingsley very well, you see." Clive James commented: "All on his own, he had the weekly drinks bill of a whole table at the Garrick Club even before he was elected. After he was, he would get so tight there that he could barely make it to the taxi." Amis was, however, adamant in his belief that inspiration did not come from a bottle: "Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work." This matches a disciplined approach to writing. For "many years" Amis imposed a rigorous daily schedule on himself, segregating writing and drink. Mornings were spent on writing, with a minimum daily output of 500 words. Drinking began about lunchtime, when this had been achieved. Such self-discipline was essential to Amis's prodigious output.
Yet according to James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social and became a way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour towards Hilly. "Amis had turned against himself deliberately.... It seems fair to guess that the troubled grandee came to disapprove of his own conduct." His friend Christopher Hitchens said: "The booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm as well as of his health."
Antisemitism
Amis had an unclear relationship with antisemitism, which he sometimes expressed but also disliked and opposed. He occasionally speculated on the commonly advanced Jewish stereotypes. Antisemitism was sometimes present in his conversations and letters to friends and associates, such as "The great Jewish vice is glibness, fluency ... also possibly just bullshit, as in Marx, Freud, Marcuse", or "Chaplin [who was not Jewish] is a horse's arse. He's a Jeeeew you see, like the Marx Brothers, like Danny Kaye." It is a minor theme in his Stanley and the Women novel about a paranoid schizophrenic. As for the cultural complexion of the United States, Amis had this to say: "I've finally worked out why I don't like Americans ... . Because everyone there is either a Jew or a hick." Amis himself described his antisemitism as "very mild".
Family
Amis's first, 15-year marriage was to Hilary Bardwell, the daughter of a civil servant, by whom he had two sons and one daughter: Philip Amis, a graphics designer; Martin Amis, a novelist; and Sally Amis, who died in 2000.
Amis was married a second time, to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard from 1965 to 1983, with whom he had no children. At the end of that marriage, he went to live with his former wife Hilary and her third husband, in a deal brokered by their two sons Philip and Martin to ensure he could be cared for until his death.
Partial bibliography
Poetry
1947 Bright November
1953 A Frame of Mind
1954 Poems: Fantasy Portraits
1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946–1956
1962 The Evans County
1968 A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957–1967
1979 Collected Poems 1944–78
Fiction
Novels
c. 1948 The Legacy (unpublished)
1954 Lucky Jim
1955 That Uncertain Feeling
1958 I Like It Here
1960 Take a Girl Like You
1963 One Fat Englishman
1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest)
1966 The Anti-Death League
1968 Colonel Sun: a James Bond Adventure (pseud. Robert Markham)
1968 I Want It Now
1969 The Green Man
1971 Girl, 20
1973 The Riverside Villas Murder
1974 Ending Up
1975 The Crime of the Century
1976 The Alteration
1978 Jake's Thing
1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek
1984 Stanley and the Women
1986 The Old Devils
1988 Difficulties with Girls
1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill
1991 We Are All Guilty
1992 The Russian Girl
1994 You Can't Do Both
1995 The Biographer's Moustache
c. 1995 Black and White (unfinished)
Short fiction collections
1962 My Enemy's Enemy
1980 Collected Short Stories
1991 Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories
Other short fiction
1960 "Hemingway in Space" (short story), Punch, December 1960
Non-fiction
1957 Socialism and the Intellectuals, a Fabian Society pamphlet
1960 New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction
1965 The James Bond Dossier
1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007 (pseud. Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner)
1970 What Became of Jane Austen?, and Other Questions
1972 On Drink
1974 Rudyard Kipling and His World
1983 Everyday Drinking
1984 How's Your Glass?
1990 The Amis Collection
1991 Memoirs
1997 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (name in part a pun as he was sometimes called "Kingers" or "The King" by friends and family, as told by his son Martin in his memoir Experience)
2001 The Letters of Kingsley Amis, Edited by Zachary Leader
2008 Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, Introduction by Christopher Hitchens (an omnibus edition of On Drink, Everyday Drinking and How's Your Glass?)
Editor
1961-66 Spectrum anthology series (ed. with Robert Conquest)(Five volumes)
1978 The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (ed.)
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction (ed.)
References
Sources
Kingsley Amis's Troublesome Fun, Michael Dirda. The Chronicle of Higher Education 22 June 2007. B9-B11.
External links
"Kingsley Amis in the Great Tradition and in Our Time," by Robert H. Bell, Williams College. Introduction to Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, ed. Robert H. Bell, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998.
Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
"The Serious Comedian", by Tom Chatfield, Prospect, a review of Zachary Leader's biography.
"The old devil" – article on Amis by Mark Steyn in The New Criterion
The Amis Inheritance—Profile on Martin and Kingsley Amis by Charles McGrath from New York Times Magazine (22 April 2007).
Kingsley Amis Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Kingsley Amis Literary Estate
1922 births
1995 deaths
Academics of Swansea University
Alumni of St John's College, Oxford
Kingsley
Anthologists
Booker Prize winners
British Army personnel of World War II
English social commentators
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
Communist Party of Great Britain members
English science fiction writers
English short story writers
English spy fiction writers
Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge
Knights Bachelor
People educated at the City of London School
People from Clapham
Royal Corps of Signals soldiers
Science fiction critics
British speculative fiction critics
British speculative fiction editors
20th-century English novelists
Golders Green Crematorium
20th-century English poets
English male novelists
20th-century pseudonymous writers
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17204 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana | Kana | The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include: (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese; the most prominent magana system being ; the two descendants of man'yōgana, (2) cursive , and (3) angular . There are also , which are historical variants of the now standard hiragana. In current usage, 'kana' can simply mean hiragana and katakana.
Katakana, with a few additions, are also used to write Ainu. A number of systems exist to write the Ryūkyūan languages, in particular Okinawan, in hiragana. Taiwanese kana were used in Taiwanese Hokkien as glosses (ruby text or furigana) for Chinese characters in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule.
Each kana character (syllabogram) corresponds to one sound in the Japanese language, unlike kanji regular script corresponding to meaning (logogram). That is why the character system is named kana, literally "false name". Apart from the five vowels, this is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus), such as ka, ki, etc., or V (vowel), such as a, i, etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n. This structure has led some scholars to label the system moraic instead of syllabic, because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to represent a CVC syllable with coda (i.e. CVn, CVm, CVng), a CVV syllable with complex nucleus (i.e. multiple or expressively long vowels), or a CCV syllable with complex onset (i.e. including a glide, CyV, CwV).
Due to the limited number of phonemes in Japanese, as well as the relatively rigid syllable structure, the kana system is a very accurate representation of spoken Japanese.
Etymology
'Kana' is a compound of and , which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'.
As the name suggests, 'kana' were "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to which were "true" kanji used for their meanings. In current usage, however, since such "false" kanji have long been obsolete, and phonetic kanji are now only restricted to what is known specifically as ateji, the term 'kana' simply refers to hiragana and katakana, and it contrasts with kanji altogether.
Terms
Although the term 'kana' is now commonly understood as hiragana and katakana, it actually has broader application as listed below:
or : a syllabary.
or : phonetic kanji used as syllabary characters, historically used by men (who were more educated).
: the most prominent system of magana.
: cursive man'yōgana.
, , , or : a syllabary derived from simplified sōgana, historically used by women (who were less educated), historically sorted in Iroha order.
or : obsolete variants of hiragana.
or : a syllabary derived by using bits of characters in man'yōgana, historically sorted in gojūon order.
: hiragana and katakana, as opposed to kanji.
: magana for transcribing Japanese words, using, strict or loose, Chinese-derived readings (on'yomi). For example, would be spelt as , with two magana with on'yomi for ya and ma; likewise, spelt as 比登 for hi and to.
: magana for transcribing Japanese words, using native words ascribed to kanji (native "readings" or kun'yomi). For example, would be spelt as , with three magana with kun'yomi for ya, ma and to; likewise, spelt as 夏樫 for natsu and kashi.
, , or : kanji used for meanings, historically used by men (who were more educated).
: mixed script including only kanji and katakana.
Hiragana and katakana
The following table reads, in gojūon order, as a, i, u, e, o (down first column), then ka, ki, ku, ke, ko (down second column), and so on. n appears on its own at the end. Asterisks mark unused combinations.
There are presently no kana for ye, yi or wu, as corresponding syllables do not occur natively in modern Japanese.
The (ye) sound is believed to have existed in pre-Classical Japanese, mostly before the advent of kana, and can be represented by the man'yōgana kanji 江. There was an archaic Hiragana () derived from the man'yōgana ye kanji 江, which is encoded into Unicode at code point U+1B001 (𛀁), but it is not widely supported. It is believed that e and ye first merged to ye before shifting back to e during the Edo period. As demonstrated by 17th century-era European sources, the syllable we (ゑ・ヱ ) also came to be pronounced as (ye). If necessary, the modern orthography allows [je] (ye) to be written as いぇ (イェ), but this usage is limited and nonstandard.
The modern Katakana e, エ, derives from the man'yōgana 江, originally pronounced ye; a "Katakana letter Archaic E" () derived from the man'yōgana 衣 (e) is encoded into Unicode at code point U+1B000 (𛀀), due to being used for that purpose in scholarly works on classical Japanese.
Some gojūon tables published during the 19th century list additional Katakana in the ye (), wu () and yi () positions. These are not presently used, and the latter two sounds never existed in Japanese. They were added to Unicode in version 14.0 in 2021. These sources also list (Unicode U+1B006, 𛀆) in the Hiragana yi position, and in the ye position.
Although removed from the standard orthography with the gendai kanazukai reforms, wi and we still see stylistic use, as in ウヰスキー for whisky and ヱビス or ゑびす for Japanese kami Ebisu, and Yebisu, a brand of beer named after Ebisu. Hiragana wi and we are preserved in certain Okinawan scripts, while katakana wi and we are preserved in the Ainu language.
wo is preserved only as the accusative particle, normally occurring only in hiragana.
si, ti, tu, hu, wi, we and wo are often romanized respectively as shi, chi, tsu, fu, i, e and o instead, according to contemporary pronunciation.
Diacritics
Syllables beginning with the voiced consonants [g], [z], [d] and [b] are spelled with kana from the corresponding unvoiced columns (k, s, t and h) and the voicing mark, dakuten. Syllables beginning with [p] are spelled with kana from the h column and the half-voicing mark, handakuten.
Note that the か゚, カ゚ and remaining entries in the rightmost column, though they exist, are not used in standard Japanese orthography.
zi, di, and du are often transcribed into English as ji, ji, and zu instead, respectively, according to contemporary pronunciation.
Usually, [va], [vi], [vu], [ve], [vo] are represented respectively by バ[ba], ビ[bi], ブ[bu], ベ[be], and ボ[bo], for example, in loanwords such as バイオリン (baiorin "violin"), but (less usually) the distinction can be preserved by using [w-] with voicing marks or by using [wu] and a vowel kana, as in ヴァ(ヷ), ヴィ(ヸ), ヴ, ヴェ(ヹ), and ヴォ(ヺ). Note that ヴ did not have a JIS-encoded Hiragana form (ゔ) until JIS X 0213, meaning that many Shift JIS flavours (including the Windows and HTML5 version) can only represent it as a katakana, although Unicode supports both.
Digraphs
Syllables beginning with palatalized consonants are spelled with one of the seven consonantal kana from the i row followed by small ya, yu or yo. These digraphs are called yōon.
There are no digraphs for the semivowel y and w columns.
The digraphs are usually transcribed with three letters, leaving out the i: CyV. For example, きゃ is transcribed as kya.
si+y* and ti+y* are often transcribed sh* and ch* instead of sy* and ty*. For example, しゃ is transcribed as sha.
In earlier Japanese, digraphs could also be formed with w-kana. Although obsolete in modern Japanese, the digraphs くゎ (/kʷa/) and くゐ/くうぃ(/kʷi/), are preserved in certain Okinawan orthographies. In addition, the kana え can be used in Okinawan to form the digraph くぇ, which represents the /kʷe/ sound.
Note that the き゚ゃ, き゚ゅ and remaining entries in the rightmost column, though they exist, are not used in standard Japanese orthography.
jya, jyu, and jyo are often transcribed into English as ja, ju, and jo instead, respectively, according to contemporary pronunciation.
Modern usage
The difference in usage between hiragana and katakana is stylistic. Usually, hiragana is the default syllabary, and katakana is used in certain special cases.
Hiragana is used to write native Japanese words with no kanji representation (or whose kanji is thought obscure or difficult), as well as grammatical elements such as particles and inflections (okurigana).
Today katakana is most commonly used to write words of foreign origin that do not have kanji representations, as well as foreign personal and place names. Katakana is also used to represent onomatopoeia and interjections, emphasis, technical and scientific terms, transcriptions of the Sino-Japanese readings of kanji, and some corporate branding.
Kana can be written in small form above or next to lesser-known kanji in order to show pronunciation; this is called furigana. Furigana is used most widely in children's or learners' books. Literature for young children who do not yet know kanji may dispense with it altogether and instead use hiragana combined with spaces.
History
The first kana was a system called man'yōgana, a set of kanji used solely for their phonetic values, much as Chinese uses characters for their phonetic values in foreign loanwords (especially proper nouns) today. Man'yōshū, a poetry anthology assembled in 759, is written in this early script. Hiragana developed as a distinct script from cursive man'yōgana, whereas katakana developed from abbreviated parts of regular script man'yōgana as a glossing system to add readings or explanations to Buddhist sutras.
Kana is traditionally said to have been invented by the Buddhist priest Kūkai in the ninth century. Kūkai certainly brought the Siddhaṃ script of India home on his return from China in 806; his interest in the sacred aspects of speech and writing led him to the conclusion that Japanese would be better represented by a phonetic alphabet than by the kanji which had been used up to that point. The modern arrangement of kana reflects that of Siddhaṃ, but the traditional iroha arrangement follows a poem which uses each kana once.
The present set of kana was codified in 1900, and rules for their usage as per the gendai kanazukai spelling reforms of 1946.
Collation
Kana are the basis for collation in Japanese. They are taken in the order given by the gojūon (あ い う え お ... わ を ん), though iroha (い ろ は に ほ へ と ... せ す (ん)) ordering is used for enumeration in some circumstances. Dictionaries differ in the sequence order for long/short vowel distinction, small tsu and diacritics. As Japanese does not use word spaces (except as a tool for children), there can be no word-by-word collation; all collation is kana-by-kana.
In Unicode
The hiragana range in Unicode is U+3040 ... U+309F, and the katakana range is U+30A0 ... U+30FF. The obsolete and rare characters (wi and we) also have their proper code points.
Characters U+3095 and U+3096 are hiragana small ka and small ke, respectively. U+30F5 and U+30F6 are their katakana equivalents. Characters U+3099 and U+309A are combining dakuten and handakuten, which correspond to the spacing characters U+309B and U+309C. U+309D is the hiragana iteration mark, used to repeat a previous hiragana. U+309E is the voiced hiragana iteration mark, which stands in for the previous hiragana but with the consonant voiced (k becomes g, h becomes b, etc.). U+30FD and U+30FE are the katakana iteration marks. U+309F is a ligature of yori (より) sometimes used in vertical writing. U+30FF is a ligature of koto (コト), also found in vertical writing.
Additionally, there are halfwidth equivalents to the standard fullwidth katakana. These are encoded within the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block (U+FF00–U+FFEF), starting at U+FF65 and ending at U+FF9F (characters U+FF61–U+FF64 are halfwidth punctuation marks):
There is also a small "Katakana Phonetic Extensions" range (U+31F0 ... U+31FF), which includes some additional small kana characters for writing the Ainu language. Further small kana characters are present in the "Small Kana Extension" block.
Unicode also includes "Katakana letter archaic E" (U+1B000), as well as 255 archaic Hiragana, in the Kana Supplement block. It also includes a further 31 archaic Hiragana in the Kana Extended-A block.
The Kana Extended-B block was added in September, 2021 with the release of version 14.0:
See also
Furigana
Okurigana
Yotsugana
Gojūon
Hentaigana
Historical kana orthography
Man'yōgana
Romanization of Japanese
Transliteration and Transcription (linguistics)
References
External links
Hiragana & katakana chart and writing practice sheet
Origin of Hiragana
Origin of Katakana
Kana web translator - Transliterate Kana to Rōmaji
Kana Copybook (PDF)
Heian period
Japanese writing system
Japanese writing system terms
Nara period
de:Japanische Schrift#Kana | [
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17206 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KMS | KMS | KMS may refer to:
Organizations
National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark, or Kort & Matrikelstyrelsen
Keenie Meenie Services, private military contractor
Places and structures
Kumasi Airport, IATA code KMS, a national airport in Ghana
Medical
Kabuki makeup syndrome
Technology
Kernel mode-setting, of computer display
KMS driver, Linux kernel device driver
KMS (hypertext), the Knowledge Management System hypertext system
Key Management Service, a Microsoft technology
Key management system in cryptography
Kwangmyŏngsŏng program of North Korean satellites, prefix like KMS-4
Other
KMS state in quantum thermodynamics
A ship prefix sometimes attributed to vessels of the Kriegsmarine.
See also | [
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0.13141812384128... |
17209 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights%20of%20the%20Lambda%20Calculus | Knights of the Lambda Calculus | The Knights of the Lambda Calculus is a semi-fictional organization of expert Lisp and Scheme hackers. The name refers to the lambda calculus, a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which Lisp is intimately connected, and references the Knights Templar.
There is no actual organization that goes by the name Knights of the Lambda Calculus; it mostly only exists as a hacker culture in-joke. The concept most likely originated at MIT. For example, in the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures, Gerald Jay Sussman presents the audience with the button, saying they are now members of this special group. However, according to the Jargon File, a "well-known LISPer" has been known to give out buttons with Knights insignia on them, and some people have claimed to have membership in the Knights.
In popular culture
A group that evolved from or is similar to them, called The Knights of Eastern Calculus, make a major appearance in the anime series Serial Experiments Lain. References to MIT professors and other American computer scientists are prominent in Episode 11 of the series. At one point in the anime, Lain is seen with code displayed on her handheld device that appears to be Lisp.
References
Lambda calculus
Lambda Calculus
In-jokes | [
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17210 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowbot | Knowbot | A knowbot is a kind of bot that collects information by automatically gathering certain specified information from web sites.
KNOWBOT is the acronym for Knowledge-Based Object Technology. This term, used as early as 1988 and known to have been implemented by December 1989 at the latest describes computer-based objects developed for collecting and storing specific information, in order to use that information to accomplish a specific task, and to enable sharing that information with other objects or processes. An early use of knowbots was to provide a computerized assistant to users to complete redundant detailed tasks without a need to train the user in computer technology.
See also
Knowbot Information Service
Web crawler, a program that visits Web sites and gathers information according to some generalized criteria (opposed to user-specified criteria) and subsequently indexes it
References
Internet bots
Computer-related introductions in 1988 | [
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17211 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth | Knuth | Knuth is a name of Nordic origin. Knuth may refer to:
As a surname:
Daniel Knuth, American politician, environmentalist, and educator
Donald Knuth, American computer scientist; whence:
The Art of Computer Programming, often referred to by the author's name
Knuth's Algorithm X
21656 Knuth, Asteroid
Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm
Fisher–Yates shuffle, also known as the Knuth Shuffle, an algorithm for randomly permuting sets
Knuth Prize, a prize for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science
Knuth reward check
Knuth's up-arrow notation, a method of notation of very large integers
Eigil Knuth, Danish explorer and archaeologist
Frederik Marcus Knuth, Danish taxonomist
Jeff Knuth, Queensland politician
Kate Knuth, American politician
Paul Knuth, German botanist
Reinhard Gustav Paul Knuth, German botanist
Shane Knuth, Queensland politician
Shay Knuth, Playboy'''s Playmate of the Month for September 1969Jason Knuth'', the subject of the dedication of Silver Session for Jason Knuth, a 1998 EP by Sonic Youth
See also
Knut (disambiguation). | [
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17212 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOMPILER | KOMPILER | In computing, the KOMPILER was one of the first language compilation and runtime systems for International Business Machines' IBM 701, the fastest commercial U.S. computer available in 1955.
Information on KOMPILER is listed on page 16 of Volume 2, Number 5 (May 1959) of the Communications of the ACM. Known versions are KOMPILER 2 for IBM 701 and KOMPILER 3 for the IBM 704. KOMPILER was eventually replaced by a Fortran compiler on the IBM 704.
See also
PACT (compiler)
References
External links
HOPL: Kompiler.
Programming languages | [
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17213 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KornShell | KornShell | KornShell (ksh) is a Unix shell which was developed by David Korn at Bell Labs in the early 1980s and announced at USENIX on July 14, 1983. The initial development was based on Bourne shell source code. Other early contributors were Bell Labs developers Mike Veach and Pat Sullivan, who wrote the Emacs and vi-style line editing modes' code, respectively. KornShell is backward-compatible with the Bourne shell and includes many features of the C shell, inspired by the requests of Bell Labs users.
KornShell, i.e. ksh2020, a "major release for several reasons" (such as removal of EBCDIC support, dropped support for binary plugins written for ksh93u+ and removal of some broken math functions), was released by AT&T, but is not maintained or supported (by AT&T; wasn't even on release date).
Features
KornShell complies with POSIX.2, Shell and Utilities, Command Interpreter (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992.) Major differences between KornShell and the traditional Bourne shell include:
job control, command aliasing, and command history designed after the corresponding C shell features; job control was added to the Bourne Shell in 1989
a choice of three command line editing styles based on vi, Emacs, and Gosling Emacs
associative arrays and built-in floating-point arithmetic operations (only available in the version of KornShell)
dynamic search for functions
mathematical functions
process substitution and process redirection
C-language-like expressions
enhanced expression-oriented and loops
dynamic extensibility of (dynamically loaded) built-in commands (since )
reference variables
hierarchically nested variables
variables can have member functions associated with them
object-oriented-programming (since )
variables can be objects with member (sub-)variables and member methods
object methods are called with the object variable name followed (after a dot character) by the method name
special object methods are called on: object initialization or assignment, object abandonment ()
composition and aggregation is available, as well as a form of inheritance
History
KornShell was originally proprietary software. In 2000 the source code was released under a license particular to AT&T, but since the ksh93q release in early 2005 it has been licensed under the Eclipse Public License. KornShell is available as part of the AT&T Software Technology (AST) Open Source Software Collection. As KornShell was initially only available through a proprietary license from AT&T, a number of free and open source alternatives were created. These include , , , and .
The functionality of the original KornShell, , was used as a basis for the standard POSIX.2, Shell and Utilities, Command Interpreter (IEEE Std 1003.2-1992.)
Some vendors still ship their own versions of the older variant, sometimes with extensions. is maintained on GitHub.
As "Desktop KornShell" (), is distributed as part of the Common Desktop Environment. This version also provides shell-level mappings for Motif widgets. It was intended as a competitor to Tcl/Tk.
The original KornShell, , became the default shell on AIX in version 4, with ksh93 being available separately.
UnixWare 7 includes both and . The default Korn shell is , which is supplied as , and the older version is available as . UnixWare also includes when CDE is installed.
The ksh93 distribution underwent a less stable fate after the authors left AT&T around 2012 at stable version ksh93u+. The primary authors continued working on a ksh93v- beta branch until around 2014. That work was eventually taken up primarily by Red Hat in 2017 (due to customer requests) and resulted in the eventual initial release of ksh2020 in the Fall of 2019. That initial release (although fixing several prior stability issues) introduced some minor breakage and compatibility issues. In March 2020, AT&T decided to roll back the community changes, stash them in a branch, and restart from ksh93u+, as the changes were too broad and too ksh-focused for the company to absorb into a project in maintenance mode. Bugfix development continues on the ksh93u+m branch, based on the last stable AT&T release (ksh93u+ 2012-08-01).
Primary contributions to the main software branch
For the purposes of the lists below, the main software branch of KSH is defined as the original program, dating from July of 1983, up and through the release of KSH2020 in late 2019.
Continuing development of follow-on versions (branches) of KSH have split into different groups starting in 2020 and are not elaborated on below.
Primary individual contributors
The following are listed in a roughly ascending chronological order of their contributions:
David G. Korn (AT&T Bell Laboratories, AT&T Laboratories, and Google; and creator)
Glenn S. Fowler (AT&T Bell Laboratories, AT&T Laboratories)
Kiem-Phong Vo (AT&T Bell Laboratories, AT&T Laboratories)
Adam Edgar (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Michael T. Veach (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Patrick D. Sullivan (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Matthijs N. Melchior (AT&T Network Systems International)
Karsten-Fleischer (Omnium Software Engineering)
Boyer-Moore
Siteshwar Vashisht (Red Hat)
Kurtis Raider
Integration consultant
Roland Mainz
Primary corporate contributors
The following are listed in a roughly ascending chronological order of their contributions:
AT&T Bell Laboratories
AT&T Network Systems International
AT&T Laboratories (now AT&T Labs)
Omnium Software Engineering
Oracle Corporation
Google
Red Hat
Donated corporate resources
Besides the primary major contributing corporations (listed above), some companies have contributed free resources to the development of KSH. These are listed below (alphabetically ordered):
Coverity
GitHub
Travis CI
Variants
There are several forks and clones of KornShell:
– a fork of included as part of CDE.
– a fork of that provides access to the Tk widget toolkit.
– a port of OpenBSD's variant of KornShell, intended to be maximally portable across operating systems. It was used as the default shell in DeLi Linux 7.2.
– a Linux port of OpenBSD's variant of KornShell, with minimal changes.
– a free implementation of the KornShell language, forked from OpenBSD . It was originally developed for MirOS BSD and is licensed under permissive (though not public domain) terms; specifically, the MirOS Licence. In addition to its usage on BSD, this variant has replaced on Debian, and is the default shell on Android.
– an AmigaOS variant that provides several Amiga-specific features, such as ARexx interoperability. In this tradition MorphOS uses in its SDK.
MKS Inc.'s MKS Korn shell – a proprietary implementation of the KornShell language from Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) up to version 2.0; according to David Korn, the MKS Korn shell was not fully compatible with KornShell in 1998. In SFU version 3.0 Microsoft replaced the MKS Korn shell with a new POSIX.2-compliant shell as part of Interix.
KornShell is included in UWIN, a Unix compatibility package by David Korn.
See also
Comparison of computer shells
List of Unix commands
test (Unix)
References
Further reading
David G. Korn, Charles J. Northrup and Jeffery Korn The New KornShell—ksh93, Linux Journal, Issue 27, July 1996
External links
MirBSD Korn Shell (mksh)
Cross-platform software
Free software programmed in C
Scripting languages
Software that uses Meson
Unix shells | [
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0.3440882861... |
17214 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilt | Kilt | A kilt ( ; Irish: féileadh) is a type of knee-length men’s dress skirt non-bifurcated with pleats at the back, originating in the traditional dress of Gaelic men and boys in the Scottish Highlands. It is first recorded in the 16th century as the great kilt, a full-length garment whose upper half could be worn as a cloak. The small kilt or modern kilt emerged in the 18th century, and is essentially the bottom half of the great kilt. Since the 19th century, it has become associated with the wider culture of Scotland, and more broadly with Gaelic or Celtic heritage. It is most often made of woollen cloth in a tartan pattern.
Although the kilt is most often worn on formal occasions and at Highland games and other sports events, it has also been adapted as an item of informal male clothing, returning to its roots as an everyday garment. Particularly in North America, kilts are now made for casual wear in a variety of materials. Alternative fastenings may be used and pockets inserted to avoid the need for a sporran. Kilts have also been adopted as female wear for some sports.
History
The kilt first appeared as the great kilt, the or belted plaid, during the 16th century, and is Gaelic in origin. The or great kilt was a full-length garment whose upper half could be worn as a cloak draped over the shoulder, or brought up over the head. A version of the (philibeg), or small kilt (also known as the walking kilt), similar to the modern kilt was invented by an English Quaker from Lancashire named Thomas Rawlinson some time in the 1720s. He felt that the belted plaid was "cumbrous and unwieldy", and his solution was to separate the skirt and convert it into a distinct garment with pleats already sewn, which he himself began wearing. His associate, Iain MacDonnell, chief of the MacDonnells of Inverness, also began wearing it, and when clansmen employed in logging, charcoal manufacture and iron smelting saw their chief wearing the new apparel, they soon followed suit. From there its use spread "in the shortest space" amongst the Highlanders, and even amongst some of the Northern Lowlanders. It has been suggested there is evidence that the philibeg with unsewn pleats was worn from the 1690s.
Variants
The name "kilt" is applied to a range of garments:
The traditional garment, either in its historical form, or in the modern adaptation now usual in Scotland (see History of the kilt), usually in a tartan pattern
The kilts worn by Irish pipe bands are based on the traditional Scottish garment but now in a single (solid) colour
Variants of the Scottish kilt adopted in other Celtic nations, such as the Welsh cilt and the Cornish cilt
According to the Dictionary of the Scots Language and Oxford English Dictionary, the noun derives from a verb to kilt, originally meaning "to gird up; to tuck up (the skirts) round the body", which is apparently of Scandinavian origin.
Scotland
Organisations that sanction and grade the competitions in Highland dancing and piping all have rules governing acceptable attire for the competitors. These rules specify that kilts are to be worn (except that in the national dances, the female competitors will be wearing the Aboyne dress).
Design and construction
The Scottish kilt displays uniqueness of design, construction, and convention which differentiate it from other garments fitting the general description. It is a tailored garment that is wrapped around the wearer's body at the natural waist (between the lowest rib and the hip) starting from one side (usually the wearer's left), around the front and back and across the front again to the opposite side. The fastenings consist of straps and buckles on both ends, the strap on the inside end usually passing through a slit in the waistband to be buckled on the outside; alternatively it may remain inside the waistband and be buckled inside.
A kilt covers the body from the waist down to the centre of the knees. The overlapping layers in front are called "aprons" and are flat; the single layer of fabric around the sides and back is pleated. A kilt pin is fastened to the front apron on the free corner (but is not passed through the layer below, as its function is to add weight). Underwear may or may not be worn, as the wearer prefers, although tradition has it that a "true Scotsman" should wear nothing under his kilt. The Scottish Tartans Authority, however, warns that in some circumstances the practice could be "childish and unhygienic" and flying "in the face of decency".
In the World War I, the regiment would be inspected by a senior officer who would have a mirror to look under kilts. Anyone found wearing underpants would be sent back to take them off.
In 2015, the Scottish barmen of the Hootananny pub in Inverness abandoned kilts because some drunk female customers were lifting them. Ian Howie, the pub’s assistant manager, said, "You get large groups of drinking women circling around when you are collecting glasses and asking whether you are true Scotsman – and they find out for themselves. Mainly hen nights". The traditional Scottish garment was initially chosen to give the venue a more authentic feel. Now Tartan shorts are worn instead.
Fabrics
The typical kilt as seen at modern Highland games events is made of twill woven worsted wool. The twill weave used for kilts is a "2–2 type", meaning that each weft thread passes over and under two warp threads at a time. The result is a distinctive diagonal-weave pattern in the fabric which is called the twill line. This kind of twill, when woven according to a given sett or written colour pattern (see below) is called tartan. In contrast kilts worn by Irish pipers are made from solid-colour cloth, with saffron or green being the most widely used colours.
Kilting fabric weights are given in ounces per yard and run from the very-heavy, regimental worsted of approximately down to a light worsted of about . The most common weights for kilts are and . The heavier weights are more appropriate for cooler weather, while the lighter weights would tend to be selected for warmer weather or for active use, such as Highland dancing. Some patterns are available in only a few weights.
A modern kilt for a typical adult uses about 6–8 yards of single-width (about 26–30 inches) or about 3–4 yards of double-width (about 54–60 inches) tartan fabric. Double-width fabric is woven so that the pattern exactly matches on the selvage. Kilts are usually made without a hem because a hem would make the garment too bulky and cause it to hang incorrectly. The exact amount of fabric needed depends upon several factors including the size of the sett, the number of pleats put into the garment, and the size of the person. For a full kilt, 8 yards of fabric would be used regardless of size and the number of pleats and depth of pleat would be adjusted according to their size. For a very large waist, it may be necessary to use 9 yards of cloth.
Setts
One of the most-distinctive features of the authentic Scots kilt is the tartan pattern, the sett, it exhibits. The association of particular patterns with individual clans and families can be traced back perhaps one or two centuries. It was only in the 19th-century Victorian era that the system of named tartans known today began to be systematically recorded and formalised, mostly by weaving companies for mercantile purposes. Up until this point, Highland tartans held regional associations rather than being identified with any particular clan.
Today there are also tartans for districts, counties, societies and corporations. There are also setts for states and provinces; schools and universities; sporting activities; individuals; and commemorative and simple generic patterns that anybody can wear (see History of the kilt for the process by which these associations came about).
Setts are always arranged horizontally and vertically, never diagonally (except when adapted for women's skirts). They are specified by their thread counts, the sequence of colours and their units of width. As an example, the Wallace tartan has a thread count given as "K/4 R32 K32 Y/4" (K is black, R is red, and Y is yellow). This means that 4 units of black thread will be succeeded by 32 units of red, etc., in both the warp and the weft. Typically, the units are the actual number of threads, but as long as the proportions are maintained, the resulting pattern will be the same. This thread count also includes a pivot point indicated by the slash between the colour and thread number. The weaver is supposed to reverse the weaving sequence at the pivot point to create a mirror image of the pattern. This is called a symmetrical tartan. Some tartans, like Buchanan, are asymmetrical, which means they do not have a pivot point. The weaver weaves the sequence all the way through and then starts at the beginning again for the next sett.
Setts are further characterised by their size, the number of inches (or centimetres) in one full repeat. The size of a given sett depends on not only the number of threads in the repeat but also the weight of the fabric. This is because the heavier the fabric, the thicker the threads will be, and thus the same number of threads of a heavier-weight fabric will occupy more space. The colours given in the thread count are specified as in heraldry, although tartan patterns are not heraldic. The exact shade which is used is a matter of artistic freedom and will vary from one fabric mill to another as well as in dye lot to another within the same mill.
Tartans are commercially woven in four standard colour variations that describe the overall tone. "Ancient" or "Old" colours may be characterised by a slightly faded look intended to resemble the vegetable dyes that were once used, although in some cases "Old" simply identifies a tartan that was in use before the current one. Ancient greens and blues are lighter while reds appear orange. "Modern" colours are bright and show off modern aniline dyeing methods. The colours are bright red, dark hunter green, and usually navy blue. "Weathered" or "Reproduction" colours simulate the look of older cloth weathered by the elements. Greens turn to light brown, blues become grey, and reds are a deeper wine colour. The last colour variation is "Muted" which tends toward earth tones. The greens are olive, blues are slate blue, and red is an even deeper wine colour. This means that of the approximately 3500 registered tartans available in the Scottish Tartans Authority database as of 2004 there are four possible colour variations for each, resulting in around 14,000 recognised tartan choices.
Setts were registered until 2008, with the International Tartan Index (ITI) of the charitable organisation Scottish Tartans Authority (STA), which maintained a collection of fabric samples characterised by name and thread count, for free, which had its register, combined with others to form the Scottish Register of Tartans (SRT) of the statutory body the National Archives of Scotland (NAS), if the tartan meets SRT's criteria, for GB£70 as of 2010. Although many tartans are added every year, most of the registered patterns available today were created in the 19th century onward by commercial weavers who worked with a large variety of colours. The rise of Highland romanticism and the growing Anglicisation of Scottish culture by the Victorians at the time led to registering tartans with clan names. Before that, most of these patterns were more connected to geographical regions than to any clan. There is therefore nothing symbolic about the colours, and nothing about the patterns is a reflection of the status of the wearer.
Measurements
Although ready-to-wear kilts can be obtained in standard sizes, a custom kilt is tailored to the individual proportions of the wearer. At least three measurements, the waist, hips, and length of the kilt, are usually required. Sometimes the rise (distance above the waist) or the fell (distance from waistline to the widest part of the hips) is also required.
A properly made kilt, when buckled on the tightest holes of the straps, is not so loose that the wearer can easily twist the kilt around their body, nor so tight that it causes "scalloping" of the fabric where it is buckled. Additionally, the length of the kilt when buckled at the waist reaches a point no lower than halfway across the kneecap and no higher than about an inch above it.
Pleating and stitching
A kilt can be pleated with either box or knife pleats. A knife pleat is a simple fold, while the box pleat is bulkier, consisting of two knife pleats back-to-back. Knife pleats are the most common in modern civilian kilts. Regimental traditions vary. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders use box pleats, while the Black Watch make their kilts of the same tartan with knife pleats. These traditions were also passed on to affiliated regiments in the Commonwealth, and were retained in successor battalions to these regiments in the amalgamated Royal Regiment of Scotland.
Pleats can be arranged relative to the pattern in two ways. In pleating to the stripe, one of the vertical stripes in the tartan is selected and the fabric is then folded so that this stripe runs down the center of each pleat. The result is that along the pleated section of the kilt (the back and sides) the pattern appears different from the unpleated front, often emphasising the horizontal bands rather than creating a balance between horizontal and vertical. This is often called military pleating because it is the style adopted by many military regiments. It is also widely used by pipe bands.
In pleating to the sett, the fabric is folded so that the pattern of the sett is maintained and is repeated all around the kilt. This is done by taking up one full sett in each pleat, or two full setts if they are small. This causes the pleated sections to have the same pattern as the unpleated front.
Any pleat is characterised by depth and width. The portion of the pleat that protrudes under the overlying pleat is the size or width. The pleat width is selected based on the size of the sett and the amount of fabric to be used in constructing the kilt, and will generally vary from about 1/2" to about 3/4".
The depth is the part of the pleat which is folded under the overlying pleat. It depends solely on the size of the tartan sett even when pleating to the stripe, since the sett determines the spacing of the stripes.
The number of pleats used in making kilts depends upon how much material is to be used in constructing the garment and upon the size of the sett.
The pleats across the fell are tapered slightly since the wearer's waist is usually narrower than the hips and the pleats are usually stitched down either by machine or by hand.
In Highland dancing, it is easy to see the effect of the stitching on the action of a kilt. The kilt hugs the dancer's body from the waist down to the hipline and, from there, in response to the dancer's movements, it breaks sharply out. The way the kilt moves in response to the dance steps is an important part of the dance. If the pleats were not stitched down in this portion of the kilt, the action, or movement, would be quite different.
Accessories
The Scottish kilt is usually worn with kilt hose (woollen socks), turned down at the knee, often with garters and flashes, and a (Gaelic for "purse": a type of pouch), which hangs around the waist from a chain or leather strap. This may be plain or embossed leather, or decorated with sealskin, fur, or polished metal plating.
Other common accessories, depending on the formality of the context, include:
A belt (usually with embossed buckle)
A jacket (of various traditional designs)
A kilt pin
A (Gaelic: "black knife": a small sheathed knife worn in the top of the hose)
Ghillie brogues
Occasionally worn with a ghillie shirt, although this is more casual and, being a relatively modern invention, shouldn't be confused with actual historic garments.
Styles of kilt wear
Today most Scottish people regard kilts as formal dress or national dress. Although there are still a few people who wear a kilt daily, it is generally owned or hired to be worn at weddings or other formal occasions and may be worn by anyone regardless of nationality or descent. For semi-formal wear, kilts are usually worn with a Prince Charlie or an Argyll jacket. Irish formal dress is distinguished from Highland Dress by the Brian Boru jacket, a modified Prince Charlie jacket with a shawl collar, chain closure and round buttons. Formal is white tie and requires a Regulation Doublet or higher.
Kilts are also used for parades by groups such as the Boys' Brigade and Scouts, and in many places kilts are seen in force at Highland games and pipe band championships as well as being worn at Scottish country dances and ceilidhs.
Certain regiments/units of the British Army and armies of other Commonwealth nations (including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa) with a Scottish lineage or heritage still continue to wear kilts as part of dress or duty uniform, though they have not been used in combat since 1940 Uniforms in which kilts are worn include Ceremonial Dress, Service Dress, and Barracks Dress. Kilts are considered appropriate for ceremonial parades, office duties, less formal parades, walking out, mess dinners, and classroom instruction or band practice. Ceremonial kilts have also been developed for the US Marine Corps, and the pipe and drum bands of the US Military Academy, US Naval Academy and Norwich University – The Military College of Vermont.
It is not uncommon to see kilts worn at Irish pubs in the United States, and it is becoming somewhat less rare to see them in the workplace. Casual use of kilts dressed down with lace-up boots or moccasins, and with T-shirts or golf shirts, is becoming increasingly familiar at Highland Games. The kilt is associated with a sense of Scottish national pride and will often be seen being worn, along with a football top, when members of the Tartan Army are watching a football or rugby match. The small sgian-dubh knife is sometimes replaced by a wooden or plastic alternative or omitted altogether for security concerns: for example, it typically is not allowed to be worn or carried onto a commercial aircraft.
Ireland
Though the origins of the Irish kilt continue to be a subject of debate, current evidence suggests that kilts originated in the Scottish Highlands and Isles and were worn by Irish nationalists from at least 1850s onwards and then cemented from the early 1900s as a symbol of Gaelic identity.
A garment that has often been mistaken for kilts in early depictions is the Irish , a long tunic traditionally made from solid colour cloth, with black, saffron and green. Solid coloured kilts were first adopted for use by Irish nationalists and thereafter by Irish regiments serving in the British Army, but they could often be seen in late 19th and early 20th century photos in Ireland especially at political and musical gatherings, as the kilt was re-adopted as a symbol of Gaelic nationalism in Ireland during this period. Tartan was rarer in Irish kilts as it was more expensive to manufacture and only the wealthier members of Ireland could afford to have tartan kilts such as the Gaelic Chieftains and high ranking soldiers, for the most part it was usually only sashes, trews and shawls were made in tartan.
Within the world of Irish dancing, boys' kilts have been largely abandoned, especially since the worldwide popularity of Riverdance and the revival and interest in Irish dancing generally.
The Irish still wear kilts but they are largely restricted to formal events and weddings. Irish marching bands often dress in kilts as well.
Other Celtic nations
Although not a traditional component of national dress outside Scotland or Ireland, kilts have become recently popular in the other Celtic nations as a sign of Celtic identity. Kilts and tartans can therefore also be seen in Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, Brittany and Galicia. Although not considered a Celtic region, Northumbrian kilts in border tartan have also been adopted.
There are currently sixteen Breton tartans officially recorded in the Scottish tartan registries. The Breton tartans are: Brittany National (Breton National), Brittany Walking, Lead it Of, and a further nine county tartans (Kerne, Leon, Tregor, Gwened, Dol, St. Malo, Rennes, Nantes, St. Brieuc). Others have been recently created for smaller areas in Brittany (Ushent, Bro Vigoudenn and Menez Du "Black Mountain").
There are three Galician tartans recorded in the Scottish registries: Galicia, "Gallaecia – Galician National", and Bombeiros Voluntarios De Galicia. There is historical evidence of the use of tartan and kilt in Galicia up to the 18th century.
Kilts are also traditionally worn by some people in Austria, especially in Carinthia and Upper Austria, due to their celtic heritage. It is also mentionable that the oldest european tartan was found in Hallstatt, Austria, dating to sometime between 1200 and 400BC.
Contemporary designs
Kilts and other male skirts in general were relaunched as a trend during the 1980s. Stephen Sprouse introduced a black denim mini-skirt over black denim jeans in 1983. Then in 1984, Jean Paul Gaultier made waves in the fashion industry when he reintroduced mini skirts and kilts for men.
Contemporary kilts (also known as modern kilts and, especially in the United States of America, utility kilts) have appeared in the clothing marketplace in Scotland, the US, and Canada in a range of fabrics, including leather, denim, corduroy, and cotton. They may be designed for formal or casual dress, for use in sports or outdoor recreation, or as white or blue collar workwear. Some are closely modelled on traditional Scottish kilts, but others are similar only in being knee-length skirt-like garments for men. They may have box pleats, symmetrical knife pleats and be fastened by studs or velcro instead of buckles. Many are designed to be worn without a sporran, and may have pockets or tool belts attached.
In Canada, kilts are widely common as part of female dress at schools with a uniform policy. As well, due to the rich Scottish heritage of the country, they may frequently be seen at weddings and formal events. In Nova Scotia, they may even be worn as common daily attire.
In 2008, a USPS letter carrier, Dean Peterson, made a formal proposal that the kilt be approved as an acceptable postal uniform—for reasons of comfort. The proposal was defeated at the convention of the 220,000-member National Association of Letter Carriers in 2008 by a large margin.
5.11 Tactical produced a Tactical Duty Kilt as a result of the corporate April Fools' joke. The contemporary hybrid kilts are made up of tartan-woven fabric material.
Female athletes, especially lacrosse players, often wear kilts during games. They will typically wear compression shorts or spandex underneath. Kilts are popular among many levels of lacrosse, from youth leagues to college leagues, although some teams are replacing kilts with the more streamlined athletic skirt.
Men's kilts are often seen in popular contemporary media. For example, in the Syfy series Tin Man, side characters are shown wearing kilts as peasant working clothes. Trends in everyday fashion, especially in the Gothic subculture, have led to a popularisation of the kilt as an alternative to more conventional menswear. Some of these are made of PVC or cotton-polyester blends.
See also
Men's skirts
Shendyt
Argyle (pattern)
Belted plaid
Check (pattern)
Fly plaid
Full plaid
Highland dress
Trews
Dhoti
Lungi
Fustanella
Wrap (clothing)
References
Bibliography
.
Further reading
Teall, Gordon; and Smith, Jr., Philip D. (1992). District Tartans. Shepheard-Walwyn (London, United Kingdom). .
.
Thompson, J. Charles (1979). So You're Going to Wear the Kilt. Heraldic Art Press (Arlington, Virginia). .
Kinloch Anderson, Deirdre (2013). Kinloch Anderson, A Scottish Tradition. Neil Wilson Publishing (Castle Douglas, United Kingdom)
External links
The Scottish Tartans Authority
Acts Against the Highland Dress
Clans of the Scottish Highlands Fashion Plates from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries, featuring a variety of kilts
Medieval European costume
Dancewear
Folk costumes
Scottish clothing
Woolen clothing
Skirts | [
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17216 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge%20Query%20and%20Manipulation%20Language | Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language | The Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language, or KQML, is a language
and protocol for communication among software agents and knowledge-based systems. It was
developed in the early 1990s as part of the DARPA knowledge Sharing Effort, which was aimed at developing techniques for building large-scale knowledge bases which are
shareable and reusable. While originally conceived of as an interface to knowledge based systems, it was soon repurposed as an Agent communication language.
Work on KQML was led by Tim Finin of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Jay Weber of EITech and involved contributions from many researchers.
The KQML message format and protocol can be used to interact with an intelligent system, either by an application program, or by another intelligent system. KQML's "performatives" are operations that agents perform on each other's knowledge and goal stores. Higher-level interactions such as contract nets and negotiation are built using these. KQML's "communication facilitators" coordinate the interactions of other agents to support knowledge sharing.
Experimental prototype systems support concurrent engineering, intelligent design, intelligent planning, and scheduling.
KQML is superseded by FIPA-ACL.
References
Knowledge representation languages
Multi-agent systems | [
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17217 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KR | KR | KR is the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and WMO country code for South Korea.
KR or Kr may also refer to:
Sports
KR (basketball club), associated with Knattspyrnufélag Reykjavíkur
Knattspyrnufélag Reykjavíkur, an Icelandic football club
Kickoff returner, in American and Canadian football
Transportation
Comores Aviation International (IATA airline designator KR)
Kenya Railways
Konkan Railway, India
Korea Rail Network Authority
Krasnodar International Airport (IATA airport code KR), serving the southern Russian city of Krasnodar
Province of Crotone, Italy, vehicle registration
Other
Kr., German for kreis, a district akin to County
.kr, country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of South Korea
KR (ANSI), an ANSI X3.64 escape sequence
K. R. Market, Bangalore, India
Kamen Rider, a tokusatsu multimedia franchise created by Shotaro Ishinomori.
Kanuri language (ISO 639 alpha-2)
Kayser-Roth, clothing manufacturer in North Carolina
Kedaulatan Rakyat, a newspaper in Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Kiribati (FIPS 10-4 country code), a sovereign state in Micronesia
Knowledge representation and reasoning, in artificial intelligence
Kola Real, a Peruvian brand of soft drinks
Kroger, an American grocery chain, NYSE symbol
Krone, or Krona, several currencies
Krypton, a chemical element with symbol Kr
Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia (1858–1915), poet known by his pen name "KR"
Order of the Knights of Rizal, the sole order of knighthood in the Philippines | [
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0.22787831723... |
17220 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara%20Jane%20Olson | Sara Jane Olson | Sara Jane Olson (born Kathleen Ann Soliah on January 16, 1947) was a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in the 1970s. She grew up in Palmdale, California, the daughter of Norwegian-American parents, Elsie Soliah (née Engstrøm) and Palmdale High School English teacher and coach Martin Soliah.
She went into hiding in 1976 after having been indicted in a bombing case. She lived much of her life in Minnesota under the alias Sara Jane Olson, which is now her legal name. Arrested in 1999, she pleaded guilty in 2001 to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder, and in 2003 to second-degree murder, both stemming from her SLA activities in the 1970s. She received a sentence of 14 years in prison.
She was mistakenly released for five days in March 2008, due to an error made in calculating her parole, before being rearrested. She was released on parole on March 17, 2009.
Symbionese Liberation Army
Kathleen Soliah was born in Fargo, North Dakota, while her family were living in Barnesville, Minnesota. When she was eight, her conservative Lutheran family relocated to Southern California. After graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Soliah moved to Berkeley, California, with her boyfriend, James Kilgore. There, she met Angela Atwood at an acting audition where they both won lead roles. They became inseparable during the play's run. Atwood tried to sponsor Soliah into the SLA. Soliah, Kilgore, and Soliah’s brother Steve and sister Josephine followed the SLA closely without joining.
When Atwood and other core members of the SLA were killed in 1974 during a standoff with police near Watts, Los Angeles, following their murder of Marcus Foster, Oakland school superintendent, the Soliahs organized memorial rallies, including a rally in Berkeley's Willard Park (called Ho Chi Minh park by activists) where Soliah spoke in support of her friend Atwood, while being covertly filmed by the FBI. At that rally, Soliah said that her fellow SLA members had been:
She asserted that Atwood "was a truly revolutionary woman ... among the first white women to fight so righteously for their beliefs and to die for what they believed in".
While a fugitive, founding SLA member Emily Harris visited Soliah who was working at a bookstore. Soliah later recalled, "I was glad she was alive. I expected them to be killed at any time." She felt sorry for the group and agreed to help the remaining group hide from the police and FBI. She assisted them by procuring supplies for their San Francisco hideout and birth certificates of dead infants that could be used for identification purposes.
Crocker National Bank robbery and Myrna Opsahl murder
On April 21, 1975, SLA members robbed the Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California, in the process killing 42-year-old Myrna Opsahl, a mother of four depositing money for her church. Patty Hearst, who acted as getaway driver during the crime, provided the information that led the police to implicate the SLA in the robbery and murder; she also stated that Soliah was one of the actual robbers. According to Hearst, Soliah kicked a pregnant teller in the abdomen, leading to a miscarriage.
Several rounds of 9 mm ammunition spilled on the floor and found in Opsahl's body during the robbery bore manufacturing marks that matched that of ammunition loaded in a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol found by police in Soliah's bedroom dresser drawer at the SLA safehouse on Precita Avenue in San Francisco. In 2002, new forensics technology allowed police to link these shells definitively to those found at Crocker Bank prior to charging the former members of SLA, including Soliah, with the crime. Prosecutor Michael Latin said that Soliah was tied to the crime through fingerprints, a palm print, and handwriting evidence. The palm print was found on a garage door from a garage in which the SLA kept a getaway car.
Los Angeles Police Department bombs
On August 21, 1975, a bomb that came close to detonating was discovered where a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car had been parked in front of an International House of Pancakes restaurant earlier in the day. After the bomb was discovered, all Los Angeles police were ordered to search under their cars, and another bomb was found in front of a police department about a mile away. Soliah was accused of planting the bombs in an attempt to avenge the SLA members who had died a year earlier in the standoff with LA police.
The pipe bombs were rigged to detonate as the patrol cars drove away. One police officer present that day described the first bomb as one of "the most dangerous pipe bombs he had ever seen" and went on to say:
At Soliah's 2002 sentencing hearing on the bombing, police officer John Hall, who had been in the car on top of the bomb described a little girl who stood feet away with her family:
Soliah, along with five other SLA members, was indicted in 1976 for setting the police bombs, but vanished before the trial could commence. When Soliah was eventually brought to trial years later, the evidence against her was not considered by prosecutors to be a "slam dunk", although enough to convince a jury of her guilt. Two witnesses who had originally testified in her grand jury indictment had died by the time she was found and brought to trial: a plumber who had sold materials used in the bomb had picked Soliah out of a lineup as one of the buyers, and a bomb expert had stated the explosive could have been built in Soliah's apartment. Police could not identify any fingerprints on the devices other than those of the officers who had disarmed them; however, Soliah's fingerprint, handwriting and signature were identified on a letter sent to order a fuse that could only be used for bomb-making purposes, and components matching those used in the police car bombs were found in a locked closet at the Precita Avenue house where Soliah lived with the other members of the SLA.
Underground life, capture, and prosecution
In February 1976, a grand jury indicted Soliah in the bombing case. Soliah went underground and became a fugitive for 23 years.
She moved to Minnesota, having assumed the alias Sara Jane Olson; the surname chosen being one of the most common names in Minnesota due to the state's large Scandinavian-American population. In 1980 she married the physician Gerald Frederick "Fred" Peterson, with whom she had three daughters. Olson and Peterson spent time in Zimbabwe, where Peterson worked for a British Medical missionary group, before settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where Olson resumed her acting career. She was active in Saint Paul on community issues. Her husband described the family as interested in progressive social causes.
On March 3, 1999, and again on May 15, 1999, Soliah was profiled on the America's Most Wanted television program. After a tip generated by the show, she was arrested on June 16, 1999. Soliah was then charged with conspiracy to commit murder, possession of explosives, explosion, and attempt to ignite an explosive with intent to murder.
Shortly after her arrest, Soliah legally changed her name to her alias, Sara Jane Olson. She also published a cookbook titled Serving Time: America's Most Wanted Recipes.
On October 31, 2001, she accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing explosives with intent to murder. As part of a plea bargain, the other charges were dropped.
Plea controversy
Immediately after entering the plea, however, Olson told reporters that she was innocent and that she had decided to take a plea bargain due to the climate after the September 11 attacks, in which she felt an accused bomber could not receive a fair trial from a jury. "It became clear to me that the incident would have a remarkable effect on the outcome of this trial ... the effect was probably going to be negative," she said. "That's really what governed this decision, not the truth or honesty, but what was probably in my best interests and the interests of my family."
Angered by Olson's announcement that she had lied in court, Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler ordered another hearing on November 6, at which he asked her several times if she was indeed guilty of the charges. Olson replied "I want to make it clear, Your Honor, that I did not make that bomb. I did not possess that bomb. I did not plant that bomb. But under the concept of aiding and abetting, I plead guilty."
On November 13, Olson filed a motion requesting to withdraw her guilty plea and acknowledged that she did not misunderstand the judge when he read the charges against her. Rather, she said:
Sentencing in explosives charges
On December 3, 2001, Fidler offered to let Olson testify under oath about her role in the case. She refused. He then wondered "I took those pleas twice ... were you lying to me then or are you lying to me now?"—and denied her request to withdraw her plea. Observers expected her to serve only three to five years, but on January 18, 2002, she was sentenced to two consecutive 10-years-to-life terms. Fidler warned that according to California law, the Board of Prison Terms could later change the sentence to a lesser term. Olson's lawyers asserted that due to discrepancies between 1970s laws and current California laws, their client would most likely serve only five years, which could turn into two years for good behavior. The Board of Prison Terms did later change the sentence.
At her sentencing hearing, Olson's teenage daughter Leila, her pastor, and her husband spoke in her defense, while Olson's mother claimed on the stand that Olson had never been a part of the SLA and spoke against prosecutors and police she asserted had harassed the family.
Sentencing in Opsahl murder
On January 16, 2002, first-degree murder charges for the killing of Myrna Opsahl were filed against Olson and four other SLA members: Emily Harris, Bill Harris, Michael Bortin (Olson's brother-in law who had married her sister Josephine), and James Kilgore, who remained a fugitive. Judge Fidler arraigned Olson on the murder charges immediately following her sentencing hearing on January 18. Olson pleaded not guilty to that charge at the time. On November 7, along with the other three defendants, she pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second degree murder. She was sentenced on February 14, 2003, for the maximum term allowed under her plea bargain, which was a six-year term concurrent to the 14-year sentence she was already serving.
Incarceration and release
The state Board of Prison Terms had scrapped her original sentence in October 2002 in exchange for a longer 14-year sentence, saying Olson's crimes had the potential for great violence and targeted multiple victims. In July 2004, a judge said there was "no analysis" of how the state Board of Prison Terms had decided 14 years was appropriate, and threw it out. Her sentence was instead converted to five years, four months.
However, an appeals court panel restored her full 14-year sentence as of April 12, 2007. It ruled that a lower court did not follow procedure when they allowed Olson to appeal.
Olson served her time at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla. Her custody status was "Close A", which is reserved for inmates requiring the most supervision.
This status limited her privileges and required that she be counted seven times a day. It also prevented her from being able to seek a relocation to a facility closer to her home. David Nickerson, Olson's attorney, stated that this status reflected the Department of Corrections' view that she was a potential flight risk.
Olson's husband and three daughters continued to support her during her imprisonment and took turns visiting her frequently in Chowchilla. In an interview with Marie Claire (coincidentally published by Hearst Corporation), Olson's 23-year-old daughter Emily Peterson dismissed her mother's radical past with the SLA, saying "She lived in Berkeley. It was kind of normal. I always tell people she wasn't a terrorist. She was an urban guerrilla." Kathleen Soliah/Sara Olson never publicly expressed remorse or regret for her actions.
Release from prison and rearrest
Olson was released on parole from the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla on March 17, 2008. For five days, she stayed at her mother's home in Palmdale, and spent some time hiking with her husband.
On March 21, 2008, she was rearrested when it was decided that she had been mistakenly released a year early from prison due to a miscalculation by the parole board. Her attorney claimed that the action was a political move. Olson was taken back into custody by the California Department of Corrections and placed in the California Institution for Women in Corona for an additional year.
Release and parole
After serving a total of seven years, about half of her sentence, Olson was released from prison on March 17, 2009, to serve her parole in Minnesota. Police unions in both Minnesota and California protested the arrangement, stating that they believe her parole should be served in California, where her crimes were committed.
In a letter to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty also protested Olson being allowed to return to Minnesota.
Daughter competes in American Idol
Olson's 28-year-old daughter, Sophia Shorai, was a contestant in the 2011 season of the talent show American Idol.
References
Further reading
External links
Chronology of the SLA from CourtTV News (only goes up to 2002)
Profile of Sara Jane Olson
Full Court TV coverage of the Kathleen Soliah bombing case
1947 births
American bank robbers
American people convicted of murder
American people of Norwegian descent
Living people
People from Clay County, Minnesota
People from Palmdale, California
University of California, Santa Barbara alumni
Prisoners and detainees of California
Symbionese Liberation Army
People from Fargo, North Dakota
Terrorism in the United States | [
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17224 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent%20Recursive%20Calculator | Kent Recursive Calculator | KRC (Kent Recursive Calculator) is a lazy functional language developed by David Turner from November 1979 to October 1981 based on SASL, with pattern matching, guards and ZF expressions (now more usually called list comprehensions).
Two implementations of KRC were written: David Turner's original one in BCPL running on EMAS, and Simon J. Croft's later one in C under Unix, and KRC was the main language used for teaching functional programming at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK) from 1982 to 1985.
The direct successor to KRC is Miranda, which includes a polymorphic type discipline based on that of Milner's ML.
References
Further reading
Functional Programming and its Applications, David A. Turner, Cambridge U Press 1982.
Functional languages
History of computing in the United Kingdom
University of Kent | [
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17226 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax | Kremvax | Kremvax was originally a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, named like the then large number of Usenet VAXen with names of the form foovax. Kremvax was announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema of CWI (in Amsterdam) as an April Fool's prank—"because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time".
Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and kgbvax. The actual origin of the email was mcvax, one of the first European sites on the internet.
Six years later Usenet was joined by demos.su, the first genuine site based in Moscow. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it were not just another prank. Vadim Antonov, the senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from there until mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, and referred to it frequently in his own postings. Antonov later arranged to have the domain's gateway site named kremvax.demos.su, turning fiction into truth and, according to one account, "demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends cultural barriers".
The mid-1980s Usenet users were not aware of the official X.25 computer connections between USSR and other countries, which had existed since 1980, primarily via VNIIPAS and Academset to Soviet bloc countries and Austrian hosts at IIASA and IAEA. In 1983, the San Francisco Moscow Teleport (SFMT) venture was created to maintain USSR-American digital connections via VNIIPAS with its own Usenet analogues later known as Sovamnet ("Soviet-American net").
In 1992, the company Sun Microsystems, a commercial rival to VAX, gifted an own-made server to pioneer Soviet commercial network RELCOM. The company demanded that the server was named KremlSun, an allusion to then-legendary Kremvax, and made a root DNS server for the .su domain. The conditions were met, and the server became one of the initial devices when forming the Moscow Internet Exchange, since then the largest Russian Internet exchange point.
See also
RELCOM
References
External links
Original message archived on Google Groups
Author's Account
20th century in Moscow
Science and technology in Russia
Usenet
April Fools' Day
Internet in Russia
1980s hoaxes
Internet hoaxes
Computer humor | [
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17227 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KRL%20%28programming%20language%29 | KRL (programming language) | KRL is a knowledge representation language, developed by Daniel G. Bobrow and Terry Winograd while at Xerox PARC and Stanford University, respectively. It is a frame-based language.
KRL was an attempt to produce a language which was nice to read and write for the engineers who had to write programs in it, processed like human memory, so you could have realistic AI programs, had an underlying semantics which was firmly grounded like logic languages, all in one, all in one language. And I think it - again, in hindsight - it just bogged down under the weight of trying to satisfy all those things at once.
Further reading
"An Overview of KRL, a Knowledge Representation Language", D.G. Bobrow and T. Winograd, Cognitive Sci 1:1 (1977).
Daniel G. Bobrow, Terry Winograd, An Overview of KRL, A Knowledge Representation Language, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Memo AIM 293, 1976.
References
Knowledge representation languages
Programming languages created in 1976 | [
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17230 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSH | KSH | KSH or ksh may refer to:
Kenyan shilling, the currency of Kenya
KornShell, a Unix shell developed by David Korn in the early 1980s
Kölsch language (ISO 639-3 language code), a Ripuarian dialect spoken in Germany
, the Hungarian Central Statistical Office
Shahid Ashrafi Esfahani Airport (IATA airport code), in Kermanshah, Iran
Kerrville State Hospital, a mental hospital in Kerrville, Texas
Potassium hydrosulfide, chemical formula KSH | [
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-0.22008179128170013,
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0.609898090362548... |
17231 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSL | KSL | KSL may refer to:
Companies and organizations
KSL (radio), KSL-AM and KSL-FM, stations in Utah, US
KSL-TV, Utah, US
KSL.com, a Utah-based news website
Key Sounds Label, a Japanese record label
Knowledge Systems Laboratory, AI lab at Stanford
Korea StarCraft League, a tournament
Locations and transportation
Kate Sharpley Library, a library of anarchist publications
Kearsley railway station, England, station code
KSL City, a shopping mall, Johor, Malaysia
Other
Kenyan Sign Language
Korean Sign Language
Kia Super League, English cricket league (2016-2019)
KSL cells, early form of hematopoietic stem cells | [
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0.306833803653717... |
17232 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge%20Systems%20Laboratory | Knowledge Systems Laboratory | Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL) was an artificial intelligence research laboratory within the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University until 2007, located in the Gates Computer Science Building, Stanford. Work focused on knowledge representation for shareable engineering knowledge bases and systems, computational environments for modelling physical devices, architectures for adaptive intelligent systems, and expert systems for science and engineering.
KSL had projects with Stanford Medical Informatics (SMI), the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), the Stanford Formal Reasoning Group (SFRG), the Stanford Logic Group, and the Stanford Center for Design Research (CDR).
Past members
This is a partial list (in alphabetical order) of past members:
Edward Feigenbaum
Richard Fikes
Diana E. Forsythe
Tom Gruber
William Clancey
Alon Y. Halevy
Deborah L. McGuinness
Paulo Pinheiro
Derek H. Sleeman
Barbara Hayes-Roth
Bruce G. Buchanan
Ruth Duran Huard
Lee Brownston
References
Archived Publications: "The Edward A. Feigenbaum Papers: Work in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at Stanford University". Stanford University Libraries. Retrieved 22 July 2018.
Stanford University | [
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17233 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSR | KSR | KSR may refer to:
Kam Sheung Road station, Hong Kong; MTR station code
Kendall Square Research, former supercomputer company, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US
Keyboard Send Receive, a type of teleprinter made by Teletype Corporation
KSR v. Teleflex, a US patent lawsuit
Katahdin Scout Reservation, a BSA camp in Maine, US
KSR1 (kinase suppressor of Ras 1), an enzyme and gene
King Shaka Regiment, an infantry regiment of the South African Army | [
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17234 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTH | KTH | KTH may refer to:
Keat Hong LRT station, Singapore, LRT station abbreviation
Kent House railway station, London, National Rail station code
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, a university in Sweden
KTH Krynica, a Polish ice hockey team
Khyber Teaching Hospital, a university hospital in Pakistan
.kth, the extension of KDE theme files | [
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0... |
17240 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John-F.-Kennedy-Platz | John-F.-Kennedy-Platz | John-F.-Kennedy-Platz (John F. Kennedy Square), formerly Rudolph-Wilde-Platz, in the Schöneberg section of Berlin is the square in front of the former city hall of West Berlin (Rathaus Schöneberg). It was here, on June 26, 1963, that US President John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech to the Berliners, in which he stated: "Ich bin ein Berliner". The square was renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz on 25 November 1963, three days after Kennedy's assassination, and a large plaque dedicated to Kennedy, mounted on wall next to the entrance to the city hall, was unveiled one year after Kennedy's speech.
See also
List of memorials to John F. Kennedy
References
External links
Text, Audio, Video of Kennedy's Berlin Speech
Further reading
Andreas Daum, Kennedy in Berlin. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2008,
Squares in Berlin
Memorials to John F. Kennedy | [
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17241 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto%20Common%20Lisp | Kyoto Common Lisp | Kyoto Common Lisp (KCL) is an implementation of Common Lisp by Taichi Yuasa and Masami Hagiya, written in C to run under Unix-like operating systems. KCL is compiled to ANSI C. It conforms to Common Lisp as described in the 1984 first edition of Guy Steele's book Common Lisp the Language and is available under a licence agreement.
KCL is notable in that it was implemented from scratch, outside of the standard committee, solely on the basis of the specification. It was one of the first Common Lisp implementations ever, and exposed a number of holes and mistakes in the specification that had gone unnoticed.
Derived software
Austin Kyoto Common Lisp (AKCL) is a collection of ports, bug fixes, and performance improvements to KCL made by William Schelter. AKCL has been ported to a range of Unix workstations.
GNU Common Lisp (GCL) was derived from AKCL.
Embeddable Common-Lisp (ECL) was derived from KCL.
ManKai Common Lisp (MKCL) was derived from ECL.
Commercial versions of Kyoto Common Lisp were Ibuki Common Lisp and Delphi Common Lisp.
References
Common Lisp implementations
Common Lisp (programming language) software | [
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17245 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl%20Gustav%20Ahlefeldt | Karl Gustav Ahlefeldt | Karl Gustav Henry Folmer Ahlefeldt (13 March 1910 – 25 March 1985) was a Danish film actor. He appeared in the Carl Theodor Dreyer masterpiece Gertrud (1965).
Filmography
References
External links
1910 births
1985 deaths
Danish male film actors
Male actors from Copenhagen
20th-century Danish male actors | [
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17246 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kateretes | Kateretes | Kateretes is a genus of short-winged flower beetles in the family Kateretidae. There are about six described species in Kateretes.
Species
These six species belong to the genus Kateretes:
Kateretes dalmatinus (Sturm, 1844) g
Kateretes flavicans (Fairmaire, 1860) g
Kateretes mixtus Kirejtshuk, 1989 g
Kateretes pusillus (Thunberg, 1794) g b
Kateretes rufilabris (Latreille, 1807) g
Kateretes scissus (Parsons, 1943) i c g
Data sources: i = ITIS, c = Catalogue of Life, g = GBIF, b = Bugguide.net
References
Nitidulidae | [
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17248 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keflav%C3%ADk | Keflavík | Keflavík (pronounced , meaning Driftwood Bay) is a town in the Reykjanes region in southwest Iceland. It is included in the municipality of Reykjanesbær whose population as of 2016 is 15,129.
In 1995, Keflavik merged with nearby Njarðvík and Hafnir to form the municipality of Reykjanesbær.
History
Founded in the 16th century, Keflavík developed on account of its fishing and fish processing industry, founded by Scottish entrepreneurs and engineers. Later its growth continued from flight operations at the Keflavík International Airport which was built by the United States military during the 1940s. The airport used to hold a significant NATO military base and was a vital pre-jet refueling stop for trans-Atlantic commercial air traffic. It now serves as Iceland's main international hub.
During World War II the military airfield served as a refueling and transit depot. During the Cold War, Naval Air Station Keflavik played an important role in monitoring marine and submarine traffic from the Norwegian and Greenland seas into the Atlantic Ocean. Forces from the United States Air Force were added to provide radar monitoring, fighter intercept, in-flight refueling, and aerial/marine rescue. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the base's role was cast into doubt. The base officially closed on 30 September 2006, when the United States withdrew the remaining 30 military personnel.
In Iceland, Keflavík was renowned as a rich source of musicians during the 1960s and 70s, and is therefore also known as bítlabærinn or "The Beatle Town".
Geography
The local geography is dominated by fields of basalt rubble, interspersed with a few hardy plants and mosses. On a clear day, one can see Snæfellsjökull across the bay, some 115 km away.
Climate
The climate of Keflavík is subarctic (Dfc) with cool summers and moderately cold winters. There is no truly dry month but June is the month that gets the least amount of precipitation. Winter high temperatures average above the freezing mark, and summer high temperatures are cool to mild. The warmest month on average is July with an average high of and the coldest is January with an average high of .
Sport
The town is represented in sports by Íþrótta- og ungmennafélag Keflavíkur.
In popular culture
The former NATO military base Naval Air Station Keflavik is used as a setting for an important story line in Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising. Clancy speculated about the base, the geography, local flora, and the station equipment.
See also
Cold War
Iceland Defense Force, headquartered in Keflavík until 2006
Uppspretta
References
External links
Satellite picture by Google Maps
Populated places in Southern Peninsula (Iceland)
Reykjanes
Populated places established in the 16th century
Military of Iceland
Populated coastal places in Iceland | [
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17249 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James%20Parry | James Parry | James Parry (born July 13, 1967), commonly known by his nickname and username Kibo , is a Usenetter known for his sense of humor, various surrealist net pranks, an absurdly long signature, and a machine-assisted knack for "kibozing": joining any thread in which "kibo" was mentioned. His exploits have earned him a multitude of enthusiasts, who celebrate him as the head deity of the parody religion "Kibology", centered on the humor newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.
Background
James Parry grew up and lived in Scotia, New York. He showed early computing skills, such as being able to open up and reprogram ROM video game cartridges such as those for the Atari 2600, but was more interested in graphics and artistic pursuits. In this vein, he was initially a computer engineering major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, but moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1990 and attended Emerson College, where he studied videography and graphic design. At that time, he also worked as a typeface designer and for the world.std.com internet service provider. He developed several fonts in use today. One of his better-known works is the typography for Philip K. Dick's novel Gather Yourselves Together.
Growing fame
In the early 1990s, as public awareness grew of the Internet and Usenet, Parry received publicity, including a cover story in Wired magazine and mentions in Playboy and The Times. He became known on Usenet for grepping all occurrences of the term "Kibo"—whether intended to refer to Kibo himself or not—and replying, often in a fanciful manner. A typical exchange:
Mary Rose Campbell wrote:
>At CMU, we also have something called Gray Matter in the center of Skibo
>(our student union substitute). It's a bunch of shapes, walls, holes,
>and steps covered with the same dark gray carpet that's on the floor.
>It looks like a giant cat toy.
Actually, it's a life-size model of S. Kibo himself, my great great
grand-uncle. This was before he evolved past the 'giant metazoic
amoeba' stage a few aeons ago. Now he's a trilobite.
– K.
This practice became known as kibozing. In 2006, Parry estimated that he had posted "an average of 20 articles a week to alt.religion.kibology during the past 15 years, probably about 500 words of original content per article, that's... seven point eight words. Equivalent to about 100 books."
He is perhaps best known on Usenet for his famous (or infamous) "Happynet Proclamation" (1992), circulated to many newsgroups, some absurdly unrelated, which satirized the endless flamewars on the network, with Parry posing as a godlike being issuing an edict full of in-jokes and humor targets that claimed to unify all news into one glorious totality, "happynet". In the article, Kibo claimed that:
********* HAPPYNET: THE NET THAT'S HAPPIER THAN YOU! *********
UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE ALL-WISE LEADER KIBO,
THE NEW NETWORK SHALL BE ORGANIZED THUSLY:
Three hierarchies encompassing ALL HUMAN DISCOURSE.
=> nonbozo.*
=> bozo.*
=> megabozo.*
Existing groups will be moved into the new organization scheme, resulting
in nonbozo.news.announce.newusers, bozo.rec.pets, megabozo.talk.bizarre,
nonbozo.comp.virus, bozo.alt.sex, megabozo.alt.fan.lemurs, bozo.postmodern,
etc., as determined by scientific measurements of the bozosity of the
groups, measured by Leader Kibo's Council On Scientific Bozosity and the
faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY), world leaders in
bozosity assessment.
It is estimated that the breakdown will be thus:
1.0000% nonbozo.*
90.0000% bozo.*
9.0000% megabozo.* (Computations courtesy of Bell Labs)
Bozo.* will, of course, be subdivided logically: bozo.nerd.*, bozo.tv.*,
bozo.inane.*, bozo.boring.*, bozo.sex.*, bozo.argue.*.
Kibology and alt.religion.kibology
Kibology is a parody religion created by Parry, the central figure. Practitioners of Kibology are called 'Kibologists' or (sometimes more disdainfully) 'Kibozos'. Parry began Kibology about 1989. In its early Usenet days it was centered in the newsgroups talk.bizarre and alt.slack, until the creation of alt.religion.kibology in late 1991. The religious satire of Kibology shares tenets of other parody religions, including similar concepts to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Invisible Pink Unicorn. The alt.religion.kibology newsgroup remained active through the 1990s, with gradually less emphasis on the joke religion and more satirizing popular culture and internet culture. Other popular regular contributors kept the group active even during "Kibo"'s periodic absences from Usenet. In 2003, the group spawned a band, Interröbang Cartel, which by 2011 had written and recorded more than 80 songs.
Hallmarks
The term "bozo" and related jokes like the physics particle the "bozon" were Parry hallmarks. Revisions of the Manifesto were published in 1994 and 1998. HappyWeb was introduced in 1999.
In 1992, at age 25 (ten years younger than the constitutional minimum age for election), he launched a spoof campaign for President of the United States.
References
External links
Kibo's website
The alt.religion.kibology newsgroup (via Google Groups)
– signature
Ted Faber Ted Faber's archive of early Kibology postings.
Usenet people
1967 births
Living people
Emerson College alumni
American Internet celebrities
American typographers and type designers
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni
Religious parodies and satires
1980s in Internet culture
1990s in Internet culture
2000s in Internet culture
Internet_memes_introduced_in_the_1990s | [
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17250 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiritimati | Kiritimati | Kiritimati (also known as Christmas Island) is a Pacific Ocean atoll in the northern Line Islands. It is part of the Republic of Kiribati. The name is derived from the English word "Christmas" written in Gilbertese according to its phonology, in which the combination ti is pronounced s, giving .
The island has the greatest land area of any atoll in the world, about ; its lagoon is roughly the same size. The atoll is about in perimeter, while the lagoon shoreline extends for over . Kiritimati comprises over 70% of the total land area of Kiribati, a country encompassing 33 Pacific atolls and islands.
It lies north of the equator, south of Honolulu, and from San Francisco. Kiritimati is in the world's farthest forward time zone, UTC+14, and is therefore one of the first inhabited places on Earth to experience New Year's Day. (see also Caroline Atoll, Kiribati). Although it lies east of the 180th meridian, the Republic of Kiribati realigned the International Date Line in 1995, placing Kiritimati to the west of the dateline.
Nuclear tests were conducted on and around Kiritimati by the United Kingdom in the late 1950s, and by the United States in 1962. During these tests, the island was not evacuated, exposing the i-Kiribati residents and the British, New Zealand, and Fijian servicemen to nuclear radiation.
The entire island is a Wildlife Sanctuary; access to five particularly sensitive areas is restricted.
History
Kiritimati was inhabited by Polynesian traders and settlers, who would have found the island a useful replenishing station on the long voyages from the Society Islands or Marquesas Islands to Hawaii. This trade route was apparently used with some regularity by about AD 1000. From 1200 onwards Polynesian long-distance voyages became less frequent, and had there been human settlement on Kiritimati, it would have been abandoned in the early-mid second millennium AD. Two possible village sites and some stone structures of these early visitors have been located. Today, most inhabitants are I-Kiribati, and Gilbertese is the only language of any significance. English remains an official language.
The atoll was then discovered by Europeans with the Spanish expedition of in 1537, that charted it as Acea. This discovery was referred by a contemporary, the Portuguese António Galvão, governor of Ternate, in his book Tratado dos Descubrimientos of 1563. During his third voyage, Captain James Cook visited the island on Christmas Eve (24 December) 1777 and the island was put on a map in 1781 as île des Tortues (Turtles Island) by in Augsburg. Whaling vessels visited the island from at least 1822. and it was claimed by the United States under the Guano Islands Act of 1856, though little actual mining of guano took place.
Permanent settlement started in 1882, mainly by workers in coconut plantations and fishermen. In 1902, the British Government granted a 99 year lease on the island to Levers Pacific Plantations. The company planted 72,863 coconut palms on the island and introduced silver-lipped pearl oysters into the lagoon. The settlement didn't endure: Extreme drought killed 75% of the coconut palms, and the island was abandoned from 1905–1912.
Many of the toponyms in the island date to Father , a French priest who leased the island from 1917–1939, and planted some 500,000 coconut trees there. He lived in his Paris house (now only small ruins) located at Benson Point, across the Burgle Channel from Londres at Bridges Point (today London) where he established the port. He gave the name of Poland to a village where Stanisław (Stanislaus) Pełczyński, his Polish plantation manager then lived.
Joe English, Rougier's plantation manager from 1915–1919, named Joe's Hill (some 12 metres / 40 feet high). When cholera broke out in Papeete, English and two teenagers were left alone on the island for a year and a half (1917–1919) since transport had stopped due to the First World War. English was later rescued by British admiral John Jellicoe. English, thinking that the rescue ship was German and the war was still in effect, pulled his revolver on the admiral Jellicoe, causing a short standoff until some explanation defused the situation.
Kiritimati was occupied by the Allies in World War II with the U.S. in control of the island garrison. The atoll was important to hold, since Japanese occupation would allow interdiction of the Hawaii-to-Australia supply route. For the first few months there were next to no recreational facilities on the island, and the men amused themselves by shooting sharks in the lagoon. The island's first airstrip was constructed at this time to supply the Air Force weather station and communications center. The airstrip also provided rest and refuelling facilities for planes travelling between Hawaii and the South Pacific. The 1947 census listed only 47 inhabitants on the island. The U.S. Guano Islands Act claim was formally ceded by the Treaty of Tarawa between the U.S. and Kiribati. The treaty was signed in 1979 and ratified in 1983.
Spain's sovereignty rights
During the dispute over the Caroline islands between Germany and Spain in 1885 which was arbitrated by Pope Leo XIII, the sovereignty of Spain over the Caroline and Palau islands as part of the Spanish East Indies was analysed by a commission of cardinals and confirmed by an agreement signed on 17 December 1885. Its Article 2 specifies the limits of Spanish sovereignty in South Micronesia, being formed by the Equator and 11°N Latitude and by 133° and 164° Longitude. In 1899, Spain sold the Marianas, Carolines, and Palau to Germany after its defeat in 1898 in the Spanish–American War. However Emilio Pastor Santos, a researcher of the Spanish National Research Council, claimed in 1948 that there was historical basis to argue that Kiritimati ("Acea" on the Spanish maps) and some other islands had never been considered part of the Carolines, supported by the charts and maps of the time. Despite having sought acknowledgement of the issue regarding interpretation of the treaty, no Spanish government has made any attempt to assert sovereignty over Kiritimati, and the case remains a historical curiosity.
Nuclear bomb tests
During the Cold War Kiritimati was used for nuclear weapons testing by the United Kingdom and the USA. The United Kingdom conducted its first hydrogen bomb test series, Grapple 1-3, at Malden Island from 15 May to 19 June 1957 and used Kiritimati as the operation's main base. On 8 November 1957, the first H-bomb was dropped over the southeastern tip of Kiritimati in the Grapple X test. Subsequent tests in 1958 (Grapple Y and Z) also took place above or near Kiritimati.
The United States conducted 22 successful nuclear detonations of the island as part of Operation Dominic in 1962. Some toponyms (like Banana and Main Camp) come from the nuclear testing period, during which at times over 4,000 servicemen were present. By 1969, military interest in Kiritimati had ended and the facilities were mostly dismantled. However, some communications, transport, and logistics facilities were converted for civilian use, which Kiritimati uses serve as the administrative center for the Line Islands.
The United Kingdom detonated some of nuclear payload near and directly above Kiritimati in 1957–1958, while the total yield of weapons tested by the United States in the vicinity of the island between 25 April and 11 July 1962 was . During the British Grapple X test, yield was stronger than expected, resulting in the blast demolishing buildings and infrastructure. Islanders were usually not evacuated during the nuclear weapons testing, and data on the environmental and public health impact of these tests remains contested.
Present status
The island's population has strongly increased in recent years, from about 2,000 in 1989 to about 5,000 in the early 2000s. Kiritimati has three representatives in the Maneaba ni Maungatabu. Today there are five villages on the island, four populated and one abandoned:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! No. !! Village !! Population
|-
! 1
| Tabwakea
|style="text-align:right;"| 3,001
|-
! 2
| London
|style="text-align:right;"| 1,899
|-
! 3
| Banana
|style="text-align:right;"| 1,209
|-
! 4
| Poland
|style="text-align:right;"| 351
|-
! 5
| Paris
|style="text-align:right;"| 0
|- style="text-align:right;"
!colspan="2;"| Kiritimati
!style="text-align:right;"| 6,456
|}
The main villages of Kiritimati are Banana, Tabwakea, and London, which are located along the main road on the northern tip of the island, and Poland, which is across the main lagoon to the South. London is the main village and port facility. Banana is near Cassidy International Airport (IATA code CXI) but may be relocated closer to London to prevent groundwater contamination. The abandoned village of Paris is no longer listed in census reports.
The ministry of the Line and Phoenix islands is located in London. There are also two new high schools on the road between Tabwakea and Banana: One Catholic, and one Protestant. The University of Hawaii has a climatological research facility on Kiritimati. A Catholic church dedicated under the auspices of Saint Stanislaus and a primary school is located in Poland. The Kiribati Institute of Technology (KIT), based on Tarawa, opened a campus on Kiritimati in June 2019.
Commerce
Most of the atoll's food supplies have to be imported. Potable water can be in short supply, especially around November in La Niña years. A large and modern jetty, handling some cargo, was built by the Japanese at London. Marine fish provide a large portion of the island's nutrition, although overfishing has caused a drastic decrease in the populations of large, predatory fish over the last several years.
Exports of the atoll are mainly copra (dried coconut pulp); the state-owned coconut plantation covers about . In addition aquarium fish and seaweed are exported. A 1970s project to commercially breed Artemia salina brine shrimp in the salt ponds was abandoned in 1978. In recent years there have been attempts to explore the viability of live crayfish and chilled fish exports and salt production.
Transport
Cassidy International Airport is located just north of Banana and North East Point. It has a paved runway with a length of and was for some time the only airport in Kiribati to serve the Americas, via an Air Pacific (now Fiji Airways) flight to Honolulu, Hawaii. American Te Mauri Travel offers weekly charter flights from Honolulu.
Air Pacific ran flights to Kiritimati until 2008, when they stopped over concerns about the condition of the runway. Services resumed in 2010. A monthly air freight service is flown using a chartered from Honolulu operated by Asia Pacific Airlines.
Aeon Field is an abandoned airport, constructed before the British nuclear tests. It is located on the southeastern peninsula.
Tourism
There is a small amount of tourism, mainly associated with anglers interested in lagoon fishing (for bonefish in particular) or offshore fishing. Week-long ecotourism packages during which some of the normally closed areas can be visited are also available.
In recent years, surfers have discovered that there are good waves during the Northern Hemisphere's winter season and there are interests developing to service these recreational tourists. There is some tourism-related infrastructure, such as a small hotel, rental facilities, and food services.
Prospective launch sites
In the early 1950s, Wernher von Braun proposed using this island as a launch site for manned spacecraft, based on its proximity to the equator, and the generally empty ocean down-range (east).
There is a Japanese JAXA satellite tracking station. The abandoned Aeon Field had at one time been proposed for reuse by the Japanese for their now-canceled HOPE-X space shuttle project.
Kiritimati is also located fairly close to the Sea Launch satellite launching spot at 0° N 154° W, about 370 kilometres (200 nmi) to the east in international waters.
Geography
Kiritimati's roughly lagoon opens to the sea in the northwest; Burgle Channel (the entrance to the lagoon) is divided into the northern Cook Island Passage and the southern South Passage. The southeastern part of the lagoon is partially dried out today; essentially, progressing SE from Burgle Channel, the main lagoon gradually turns into a network of subsidiary lagoons, tidal flats, partially hypersaline brine ponds and salt pans, which as a whole has about the same area again as the main lagoon. Thus, the land and lagoon areas can only be given approximately, as no firm boundary exists between the main island body and the salt flats. Vaskess Bay is a large bay which extends along the southwest coast of Kiritimati Island.
In addition to the main island, there are several smaller ones. Cook Island is part of the atoll proper but unconnected to the Kiritimati mainland. It is a sand/coral island of , divides Burgle Channel into the northern and the southern entrance, and has a large seabird colony. Islets (motus) in the lagoon include Motu Tabu () with its Pisonia forest and the shrub-covered Motu Upua (also called Motu Upou or Motu Upoa, ) at the northern side, and Ngaontetaake () at the eastern side.
Joe's Hill (originally La colline de Joe) on the north coast of the south-eastern peninsula, southeast of Artemia Corners, is the highest point on the atoll, at about ASL. On the northwestern peninsula for example, the land rises only to some 7 m (20 ft), which is still considerable for an atoll.
Climate
Despite its proximity to the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), Kiritimati is located in an equatorial dry zone and rainfall is rather low except during El Niño years; on average per year, in some years it can be as little as and much of the flats and ponds can dry up such as in late 1978. On the other hand, in some exceptionally wet years abundant downpours in March–April may result in a total annual precipitation of over . Kiritimati is thus affected by regular, severe droughts. They are exacerbated by its geological structure; climatically "dry" Pacific islands are more typically located in the "desert belt" at about 30°N or S latitude. Kiritimati is a raised atoll, and although it does occasionally receive plenty of precipitation, little is retained given the porous carbonate rock, the thin soil, and the absence of dense vegetation cover on much of the island, while evaporation is constantly high. Consequently, Kiritimati is one of the rather few places close to the Equator which have an effectively arid climate.
The temperature is constantly between 24 °C and 30 °C (75 °F and 86 °F) with more diurnal temperature variation than seasonal variation. Easterly trade winds predominate.
Demography
At the first census done in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony in 1931, there were only 38 inhabitants on the island, most of them workers of the Company. After WWII in 1947 there were 52 inhabitants. After the nuclear tests, in 1963, this had increased to 477, reducing to 367 by 1967 but increasing again to 674 in 1973, 1,265 in 1978, 1,737 in the 1985 census, 2,537 in 1990, 3,225 in 1995, 3,431 in 2000, 5,115 in 2005, 5,586 in 2010 and 6,456 in 2015. This was the fastest population growth in Kiribati.
Ecology
The flora and the fauna consist of taxa adapted to drought. Terrestrial fauna is scant; there are no truly native land mammals and only one native land bird – Kiribati's endemic reed-warbler, the bokikokiko (Acrocephalus aequinoctialis). The 1957 attempt to introduce the endangered Rimitara lorikeet (Vini kuhlii) has largely failed; a few birds seem to linger on, but the lack of abundant coconut palm forest, on which this tiny parrot depends, makes Kiritimati a suboptimal habitat for this species.
Flora
The natural vegetation on Kiritimati consists mostly of low shrubland and grassland. What little woodland exists is mainly open coconut palm (Cocos nucifera) plantation. There are three small woods of catchbird trees (Pisonia grandis), at Southeast Point, Northwest Point, and on Motu Tabu. The latter was planted there in recent times. About 50 introduced plant species are found on Kiritimati; as most are plentiful around settlements, former military sites and roads, it seems that these only became established in the 20th century.
Beach naupaka (Scaevola taccada) is the most common shrub on Kiritimati; beach naupaka scrub dominates the vegetation on much of the island, either as pure stands or interspersed with tree heliotrope (Heliotropium foertherianum) and bay cedar (Suriana maritima). The latter species is dominant on the drier parts of the lagoon flats where it grows up to tall. Tree heliotrope is most commonly found a short distance from the sea- or lagoon-shore. In some places near the seashore, a low vegetation dominated by Polynesian heliotrope (Heliotropium anomalum), yellow purslane (Portulaca lutea) and common purslane (P. oleracea) is found. In the south and on the sandier parts, Sida fallax, also growing up to 2 m tall, is abundant. On the southeastern peninsula, S. fallax grows more stunted, and Polynesian heliotrope, yellow and common purslane as well as the spiderling Boerhavia repens, the parasitic vine Cassytha filiformis, and Pacific Island thintail (Lepturus repens) supplement it. The last species dominates in the coastal grasslands. The wetter parts of the lagoon shore are often covered by abundant growth of shoreline purslane (Sesuvium portulacastrum).
Perhaps the most destructive of the recently introduced plants is sweetscent (Pluchea odorata), a camphorweed, which is considered an invasive weed as it overgrows and displaces herbs and grasses. The introduced creeper Tribulus cistoides, despite having also spread conspicuously, is considered to be more beneficial than harmful to the ecosystem, as it provides good nesting sites for some seabirds.
Birds
See also "Extinction" below.
More than 35 bird species have been recorded from Kiritimati. As noted above, only the bokikokiko (Acrocephalus aequinoctialis), perhaps a few Rimitara lorikeets (Vini kuhlii) – if any remain at all – and the occasional eastern reef egret (Egretta sacra) make up the entire landbird fauna. About 1,000 adult bokikokikos are to be found at any date, but mainly in mixed grass/shrubland away from the settlements.
On the other hand, seabirds are plentiful on Kiritimati, and make up the bulk of the breeding bird population. There are 18 species of seabirds breeding on the island, and Kiritimati is one of the most important breeding grounds anywhere in the world for several of these:
Phaethontiformes
Eastern red-tailed tropicbird (Phaethon rubricauda melanorhynchus) – important breeding colony; 8,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline, fewer than 3,000 in 1984
Charadriiformes
Micronesian black noddy (Anous minutus marcusi) – 20,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Little white tern (Gygis microrhyncha) – 8,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Central Pacific sooty tern (Onychoprion fuscatus oahuensis) – largest breeding colony in the world; around 7,000,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Spectacled tern (Onychoprion lunatus) – important breeding colony; 6,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Central blue-grey noddy (Procelsterna cerulea cerulea) – important breeding colony, possibly the largest worldwide of this subspecies; 4,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Procellariiformes
Polynesian storm petrel (Nesofregetta fuliginosa) – important breeding colony; 1,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Phoenix petrel (Pterodroma alba) – largest breeding colony in the world; 24,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Christmas shearwater (Puffinus nativitatis) – largest subpopulation worldwide on Motu Upua; 12,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Wedge-tailed shearwater (Puffinus pacificus) – among the very largest breeding colonies in the world; about 1,000,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Pelecaniformes
Indopacific lesser frigatebird (Fregata ariel ariel) – important breeding colony; 9,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Central Pacific great frigatebird (Fregata minor palmerstoni) – important breeding colony; 12,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline, 6,500 afterwards
Austropacific masked booby (Sula dactylatra personata) – important breeding colony; 3,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Indopacific red-footed booby (Sula sula rubripes) – 12,000 birds before the 1982–1983 decline
Kiritimati's lagoon and the saltflats are a prime location for migratory birds to stop over or even stay all winter. The most commonly seen migrants are ruddy turnstone (Arenaria interpres), Pacific golden plover (Pluvialis fulva), bristle-thighed curlew (Numenius tahitiensis), and wandering tattler (Tringa incana); other seabirds, waders, and even dabbling ducks can be encountered every now and then. Around 7 October (±5 days), some 20 million sooty shearwaters pass through here en route from the North Pacific feeding grounds to breeding sites around New Zealand.
Other fauna
The only mammals native to the region are the common Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans) and the goats. The rat seems to have been introduced by seafarers many centuries before Cook arrived in 1777 (he mentioned them already being present); goats have been extinct since 14 January 2004. Black rats (Rattus rattus) were present at some time, perhaps introduced by 19th century sailors or during the nuclear tests. They were not able to gain a foothold between predation by cats and competitive exclusion by Polynesian rats, and no black rat population is found on Kiritimati today.
Up to 2,000 feral cats can in some years be found on the island; the population became established in the 19th century. Their depredations seriously harm the birdlife. Since the late 19th century, they have driven about 60% of the seabird species from the mainland completely, and during particular dry spells they will cross the mudflats and feast upon the birds on the motus. Spectacled tern chicks seem to be a favourite food of the local cat population. There are some measures being taken to ensure the cat population does not grow. That lowering the cat population by some amount would much benefit Christmas and its inhabitants is generally accepted, but the situation is too complex to simply go and eradicate them outright (which is theoretically possible; see Marion Island) – see below for details. A limited population of feral pigs exists. They were once plentiful and wreaked havoc especially on the Onychoprion and noddies. Pig hunting by locals has been encouraged, and was highly successful at limiting the pig population to a sustainable level, while providing a source of cheap protein for the islanders.
There are some "supertramp" lizards which have reached the island by their own means. Commonly seen are the mourning gecko (Lepidodactylus lugubris) and the skink Cryptoblepharus boutonii; the four-clawed gecko (Gehyra mutilata) is seen less often.
There are some crustaceans of note to be found on Kiritimati and in the waters immediately adjacent. The amphibious coconut crab (Birgus latro) is not as common as on Teraina. Ghost crabs (genus Ocypode), Cardisoma carnifex and Geograpsus grayi land crabs, the strawberry land hermit crab (Coenobita perlatus) are also notable. Introduced brine shrimp Artemia salina populate the island's saline ponds.
Ecology of the reef
Overfishing and pollution have impacted on the ocean surrounding the island. In the ocean surrounding uninhabited islands of the Northern Line Islands, Sharks comprised 74% of the top predator biomass (329 g/m2) at Kingman Reef and 57% at Palmyra Atoll (97 g/m2), whereas low shark numbers have been observed at Tabuaeran and Kiritimati.
Green turtles (Chelonia mydas) regularly nest in small numbers on Kiritimati. The lagoon is famous among sea anglers worldwide for its bonefish (Albula glossodonta), and has been stocked with Oreochromis tilapia to decrease overfishing of marine species. Though the tilapias thrive in brackish water of the flats, they will not last long should they escape into the surrounding ocean.
Giant Trevally (Caranx ignobilis) are found in large numbers both inside and outside of the lagoon and along the surrounding reefs. Very large specimens of Giant Trevally can be found around these surrounding reefs and they are sought after by many fishermen in addition to Bonefish.
Conservation and extinction
In December 1960, the British colonial authority gazetted Kiritimati as a bird sanctuary under the "Gilbert and Ellice Island Colony Wild Birds Protection Ordinance" of 1938. Access to Cook Island, Motu Tabu, and Motu Upua was restricted. Kiritimati was declared a Wildlife Sanctuary in May 1975, in accordance with the Wildlife Conservation Ordinance of the then self-governing colony. Ngaontetaake and the sooty tern breeding grounds at North West Point also became restricted-access zones. Two years later, active conservation measures got underway.
To a limited extent, permits to enter the restricted areas for purposes like research or small-scale ecotourism are given. Kiribati's Wildlife Conservation Unit participates in the Kiritimati Development Committee and the Local Land Planning Board, and there exists an integrated program of wildlife conservation and education. New Zealand is a major sponsor of conservation efforts on Kiritimati.
Former egg gathering
Egg collecting for food on a massive scale was frequent in the past but is now outlawed. It is to be noted that the sooty terns for example could sustain occasional collection of effectively all of a season's eggs (over 10 million), if given sufficient time to recover and if cats are absent. In theory, even egg collecting on a scale that significantly decreases costly food imports could be possible, but not until the cat and rat populations have been brought under control. Poaching remains a concern; with the population rising and spreading out on Kiritimati, formerly remote bird colonies have become more accessible; the red-tailed tropicbirds and the Sula especially are strongly affected by hunting and disturbance. Tropicbirds are mainly poached for their feathers, which are used in local arts and handicraft; it would certainly be possible to obtain them from living birds as was routinely done at the height of the Polynesian civilisation.
Feral cats
It may seem that the former numbers of seabirds may only ever be approached again by the wholesale eradication of the feral cats. While this has been since shown to be feasible, it is not clear whether even a severe curtailing of the cat population would be desirable: Though it previously was assumed that the small Polynesian rat is of little, if any, harm to seabirds, even house mice have been shown to eat seabird nestlings. Most nesting birds, in particularly Procellariiformes, are now accepted to be jeopardised by Rattus exulans. Kiritimati's cats meanwhile, are very fond of young seabirds; it even seems that their behaviour shifts accordingly, with cats being generally less territorial, and congregating in numbers at active bird colonies; they generally eschew hunting rats when seabird chicks are in plenty.
Possession of an unneutered female cat on Kiritimati is illegal, and owners need to prevent their domestic cats from running wild (such animals are usually quickly killed in traps set for this purpose). Nighttime cat hunting has made little effect on the cat population. As noted above, vigorous protection of active nesting grounds from cats by traps and poison, supplemented by shooting, while otherwise leaving them alone to hunt rats may well be the optimal solution.
Radiation hazards
There is no reliable data on the environmental and public health impact of the nuclear tests conducted on the island in the late 1950s. A 1975 study claimed that there was negligible radiation hazard; certainly, fallout was successfully minimised. More recently however, a Massey University study of New Zealand found chromosomal translocations to be increased about threefold on average in veterans who participated in the tests; most of the relevant data remains classified to date.
1982–1983 El Niño
The 1982–1983 "mega-El Niño" devastated seabird populations on Kiritimati. In some species, mortality rose to 90% and breeding success dropped to zero during that time.
In general, El Niño conditions will cause seabird populations to drop, taking several years to recover at the present density of predators. Global warming impact on Kiritimati is thus unpredictable. El Niño events seem to become shorter but more frequent in a warmer climate.
Climate change
Much of the island's infrastructure and habitation, with the notable exception of the airport area, is located to the leeward and thus somewhat protected from storms.
A rising sea level does not appear to be particularly problematic; the increasing flooding of the subsidiary lagoons would provide easily observed forewarning, and might even benefit seabird populations by making the motus less accessible to predators. In fact, geological data suggests that Kiritimati has withstood prehistoric sea level changes well.
The biggest hazard caused by a changing climate would seem to be more prolonged and/or severe droughts, which could even precipitate the island's abandonment (as happened in 1905). However, it is not clear how weather patterns would change, and it may be that precipitation increases.
Extinction
The type specimen of the Tuamotu sandpiper (Prosobonia cancellata) was collected on Christmas Island in 1778, probably on 1 or 2 January, during Captain Cook's visit. The expedition's naturalist William Anderson observed the bird, and it was painted by William Ellis (linked below). The single specimen was in Joseph Banks's collection at the end of the 18th century, but later was lost or destroyed. There is some taxonomic dispute regarding the Kiritimati population.
As all Prosobonia seem(ed) to be resident birds, unwilling to undertake long-distance migrations, an appropriate treatment would be to consider the extinct population the nominate subspecies, as Prosobonia cancellata cancellata or Kiritimati sandpiper, distinct from the surviving Tuamotu Islands population more than 2,000 km (1,200 mi) to the southeast.
It may have been, but probably was not, limited to Kiritimati; while no remains have been found, little fieldwork has been conducted, and judging from the Tuamotu sandpiper's habits, almost all Line Islands would have offered suitable habitat.
The Kiritimati population of P. cancellata disappeared in the earlier part of the 19th century or so, almost certainly due to predation by introduced mammals. While Prosobonia generally manage to hold their own against Polynesian rats, they are highly vulnerable to the black rat and feral cats. Given the uncertainties surrounding the introduction date and maximum population of the former, the cats seem to be the main culprits in the Kiritimati sandpiper's extinction.
Given that the island was apparently settled to some extent in prehistoric times, it may have already lost bird species then. The geological data indicates that Kiritimati is very old and was never completely underwater in the Holocene at least; thus it might have once harboured highly distinct wetland birds.
The limited overall habitat diversity on Kiritimati nonetheless limits the range of such hypothetical taxa, as does biogeography due to its remote location. At least one, possibly several Gallirallus and / or Porzana rails make the most likely candidates, given their former presence in the region, and that conditions on Kiritimati would seem well suited. Perhaps a Todiramphus kingfisher was also present; such a bird would probably have belonged to the sacred kingfisher (T. sanctus) group, as that species today occurs as a vagrant in Micronesia, and related forms are resident in southeastern Polynesia. These birds would have fallen victim to the Polynesian rat. In the case of the rails (which would have almost certainly been flightless) hunting by occasionally resident Polynesians, in addition to predation by the imported rats, likely contributed to their extinction.
Education
There is a government high school, Melaengi Tabai Secondary School, which is located on Tabuaeran (though the government of Kiribati wished to re-open its campus on Kiritimati instead) in addition to a Catholic senior high, St. Francis High School.
See also
List of Guano Island claims
Lists of islands
Bay of Wrecks
Ministry of Line and Phoenix Islands Development
Footnotes
References
Further reading
External links
Atolls of Kiribati
Gilbert and Ellice Islands
American nuclear test sites
British nuclear test sites
Pacific islands claimed under the Guano Islands Act
Former disputed islands | [
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17253 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla%20Khan | Kubla Khan | Kubla Khan () is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Shangdu, the summer capital of the Yuan dynasty founded by the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by "a person from Porlock". The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He left it unpublished and kept it for private readings for his friends until 1816 when, at the prompting of Lord Byron, it was published.
The poem is vastly different in style from other poems written by Coleridge. The first stanza of the poem describes Khan's pleasure dome built alongside a sacred river fed by a powerful fountain. The second stanza of the poem is the narrator's response to the power and effects of an Abyssinian maid's song, which enraptures him but leaves him unable to act on her inspiration unless he could hear her once again. Together, they form a comparison of creative power that does not work with nature and creative power that is harmonious with nature. The third and final stanza shifts to a first-person perspective of the speaker detailing his sighting of a woman playing a dulcimer, and if he could revive her song, he could fill the pleasure dome with music. He concludes by describing a hypothetical audience's reaction to the song in the language of religious ecstasy.
Some of Coleridge's contemporaries denounced the poem and questioned his story of its origin. It was not until years later that critics began to openly admire the poem. Most modern critics now view Kubla Khan as one of Coleridge's three great poems, along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. The poem is considered one of the most famous examples of Romanticism in English poetry, and is one of the most frequently anthologized poems in the English language. The manuscript is a permanent exhibit at the British Library in London.
Poem
The poem is divided into three irregular stanzas, which move loosely between different times and places.
The first stanza begins with a fanciful description of the origin of Kublai Khan's capital Xanadu (lines 1–2). It is described as being near the river Alph, which passes through caves before reaching a dark sea (lines 3–5). Ten miles of land were surrounded with fortified walls (lines 6–7), encompassing lush gardens and forests (lines 8–11).
The second stanza describes a mysterious canyon (lines 12–16). A geyser erupted from the canyon (lines 17–19), throwing rubble into the air (lines 20–23) and forming the source of the sacred river Alph (line 24). The river wandered through the woods, then reached the caves and dark sea described in the first stanza (lines 25–28). Kubla Khan, present for the eruption, heard a prophecy of war (lines 29–30). An indented section presents an image of the pleasure-dome reflected on the water, surrounded by the sound of the geyser above ground and the river underground (lines 31–34). A final un-indented couplet describes the dome again (lines 35–36).
The third stanza shifts to the first-person perspective of the poem's speaker. He once saw a woman in a vision playing a dulcimer (lines 37–41). If he could revive her song within himself, he says, he would revive the pleasure dome itself with music (lines 42–47). Those who heard would also see themselves there, and cry out a warning (lines 48–49). Their warning concerns an alarming male figure (line 50). The stanza ends with instructions and a warning, to carry out a ritual because he has consumed the food of Paradise (lines 51–54).
Composition and publication
Date of composition
Kubla Khan was likely written in October 1797, though the precise date and circumstances of the first composition of Kubla Khan are slightly ambiguous, due to limited direct evidence. Coleridge usually dated his poems, but did not date Kubla Khan, and did not mention the poem directly in letters to his friends.
Coleridge's descriptions of the poem's composition attribute it to 1797. In a manuscript in Coleridge's handwriting (known as the Crewe manuscript), a note by Coleridge says that it was composed "in the fall of the year, 1797." In the preface to the first published edition of the poem, in 1816, Coleridge says that it was composed during an extended stay he had made in Somerset during "the summer of the year 1797." On 14 October 1797, Coleridge wrote a letter to John Thelwall which, although it does not directly mention Kubla Khan, expresses many of the same feelings as in the poem, suggesting that these themes were on his mind. All of these details have led to the consensus of an October 1797 composition date.
A May 1798 composition date is sometimes proposed because the first written record of the poem is in Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, October 1798. October 1799 has also been suggested because by then Coleridge would have been able to read Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer, a work which drew on the same sources as Kubla Khan. At both time periods, Coleridge was again in the area of Ash Farm, near Culbone Church, where Coleridge consistently described composing the poem. However, the October 1797 composition date is more widely accepted.
Composition in a dream
In September 1797, Coleridge lived in Nether Stowey in the southwest of England and spent much of his time walking through the nearby Quantock Hills with his fellow poet William Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister Dorothy (his route today is memorialised as the "Coleridge Way"). Some time between 9 and 14 October 1797, when Coleridge says he had completed the tragedy Osorio, he left Stowey for Lynton. On his return journey, he became sick and rested at Ash Farm, located near Culbone Church and one of the few places to seek shelter on his route. There, he had a dream which inspired the poem.
Coleridge described the circumstances of his dream and the poem in two places: on a manuscript copy written some time before 1816, and in the preface to the printed version of the poem published in 1816. The manuscript states: "This fragment with a good deal more, not recoverable, composed, in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium taken to check a dysentry, at a Farm House between Porlock & Linton, a quarter of a mile from Culbone Church." The printed preface describes his location as "a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire," and embellishes the events into a narrative which has sometimes been seen as part of the poem itself.
According to the extended preface narrative, Coleridge was reading Purchas his Pilgrimes by Samuel Purchas, and fell asleep after reading about Kublai Khan. Then, he says, he "continued for about three hours in a profound sleep... during which time he had the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines ... On Awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved." The passage continues with a famous account of an interruption: "At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock... and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purpose of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away." The Person from Porlock later became a term to describe interrupted genius. When John Livingston Lowes taught the poem, he told his students "If there is any man in the history of literature who should be hanged, drawn, and quartered, it is the man on business from Porlock."
There are some problems with Coleridge's account, especially the claim to have a copy of Purchas with him. It was a rare book, unlikely to be at a "lonely farmhouse", nor would an individual carry it on a journey; the folio was heavy and almost 1,000 pages in size. It is possible that the words of Purchas were merely remembered by Coleridge and that the depiction of immediately reading the work before falling asleep was to suggest that the subject came to him accidentally. Critics have also noted that unlike the manuscript, which says he had taken two grains of opium, the printed version of this story says only that "In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed." The image of himself that Coleridge provides is of a dreamer who reads works of lore and not as an opium addict. Instead, the effects of the opium, as described, are intended to suggest that he was not used to its effects.
According to some critics, the second stanza of the poem, forming a conclusion, was composed at a later date and was possibly disconnected from the original dream.
Publication
After its composition, Coleridge periodically read the poem to friends, as to the Wordsworths in 1798, but did not seek to publish it. The poem was set aside until 1815 when Coleridge compiled manuscripts of his poems for a collection titled Sibylline Leaves. It did not feature in that volume, but Coleridge did read the poem to Lord Byron on 10 April 1816.
Byron persuaded Coleridge to publish the poem, and on 12 April 1816, a contract was drawn up with the publisher John Murray for £80. The Preface of Kubla Khan explained that it was printed "at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and as far as the author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits." Coleridge's wife discouraged the publication, and Charles Lamb, a poet and friend of Coleridge, expressed mixed feelings, worrying that the printed version of the poem couldn't capture the power of the recited version.
Kubla Khan was published with Christabel and "The Pains of Sleep" on 25 May 1816. Coleridge included "A Fragment" as a subtitle Kubla Khan to defend against criticism of the poem's incomplete nature. The original published version of the work was separated into 2 stanzas, with the first ending at line 30. The poem was printed four times in Coleridge's life, with the final printing in his Poetical Works of 1834. In the final work, Coleridge added the expanded subtitle "Or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment". Printed with Kubla Khan was a preface that claimed a dream provided Coleridge the lines. In some later anthologies of Coleridge's poetry, the preface is dropped along with the subtitle denoting its fragmentary and dream nature. Sometimes, the preface is included in modern editions but lacks both the first and final paragraphs.
Sources
Purchas and Marco Polo
The book Coleridge was reading before he fell asleep was Purchas, his Pilgrimes, or Relations of the World and Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from the Creation to the Present, by the English clergyman and geographer Samuel Purchas, published in 1613. The book contained a brief description of Xanadu, the summer capital of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. Coleridge's preface says that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall."
Coleridge names the wrong book by Purchas (Purchas wrote three books, his Pilgrimage, his Pilgrim, and his Pilgrimes; the last was his collection of travel stories), and misquotes the line. The text about Xanadu in Purchas, His Pilgrimes, which Coleridge admitted he did not remember exactly, was: In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteen miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.
This quotation was based upon the writings of the Venetian explorer Marco Polo who is widely believed to have visited Xanadu in about 1275. Marco Polo also described a large portable palace made of gilded and lacquered cane or bamboo which could be taken apart quickly and moved from place to place. This was the "sumptuous house of pleasure" mentioned by Purchas, which Coleridge transformed into a "stately pleasure dome".
In terms of spelling, Coleridge's printed version differs from Purchas's spelling, which refers to the Tartar ruler as "Cublai Can", and from the spelling used by Milton, "Cathaian Can". His original manuscript spells the name "Cubla Khan" and the place "Xannadu".
Mount Abora
In the Crewe manuscript (the earlier unpublished version of the poem), the Abyssinian maid is singing of Mount Amara, rather than Abora. Mount Amara is a real mountain, today called Amba Geshen, located in the Amhara Region of modern Ethiopia, formerly known as the Abyssinian Empire. It was a natural fortress, and was the site of the royal treasury and the royal prison. The sons of the Emperors of Abyssinia, except for the heir, were held prisoner there, to prevent them from staging a coup against their father, until the Emperor's death.
Mount Amara was visited between 1515 and 1521 by Portuguese priest, explorer and diplomat Francisco Alvares (1465–1541), who was on a mission to meet the Christian king of Ethiopia. His description of Mount Amara was published in 1540, and appears in Purchas, his Pilgrimes, the book Coleridge was reading before he wrote "Kubla Khan". Mount Amara also appears in Milton's Paradise Lost, where it is "by some suppos'd / True Paradise under the Ethiop line," where Abyssinian kings keep their children guarded.
Mount Amara is in the same region as Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile river. Ethiopian tradition says that the Blue Nile is the River Gihon of the Bible, one of the four rivers that flow out of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, which says that Gihon flows through the Kingdom of Kush, the Biblical name for Ethiopia and Sudan. In fact the Blue Nile is very far from the other three rivers mentioned in Genesis 2:10–14, but this belief led to the connection in 18th and 19th century English literature between Mount Amara and Paradise.
Abyssinian maid
The Abyssinian maid is similar to the way Coleridge describes Lewti in another poem he wrote around the same time, Lewti. The connection between Lewti and the Abyssinian maid makes it possible that the maid was intended as a disguised version of Mary Evans, who appears as a love interest since Coleridge's 1794 poem The Sigh. Evans, in these poems, appears as an object of sexual desire and a source of inspiration. She is also similar to the later subject of many of Coleridge's poems, Asra, based on Sara Hutchinson.
Literary precedents for the Abyssinian maid include a description in Heliodorus's work Aethiopian History, with its description of "a young Lady, sitting upon a Rock, of so rare and perfect a Beauty, as one would have taken her for a Goddess, and though her present misery opprest her with extreamest grief, yet in the greatness of her afflection, they might easily perceive the greatness of her Courage: A Laurel crown'd her Head, and a Quiver in a Scarf hanged at her back". Her description in the poem is also related to Isis of Apuleius's Metamorphoses, and to John Keats's Indian woman in Endymion who is revealed to be the moon goddess.
Other sources
Charles Lamb provided Coleridge on 15 April 1797 with a copy of his "A Vision of Repentance", a poem that discussed a dream containing imagery similar to those in "Kubla Khan". The poem could have provided Coleridge with the idea of a dream poem that discusses fountains, sacredness, and even a woman singing a sorrowful song.
There are additional strong literary connections to other works, including John Milton's Paradise Lost, Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Chatterton's African Eclogues, William Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Short Residence in Sweden, Plato's Phaedrus and Ion, Maurice's The History of Hindostan, and Heliodorus's Aethiopian History. The poem also contains allusions to the Book of Revelation in its description of New Jerusalem and to the paradise of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The sources used for "Kubla Khan" are also used in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Opium itself has also been seen as a "source" for many of the poem's features, such as its disorganized action. These features are similar to writing by other contemporary opium eaters and writers, such as Thomas de Quincey and Charles Pierre Baudelaire.
Coleridge may also have been influenced by the surrounding of Culbone Combe and its hills, gulleys, and other features including the "mystical" and "sacred" locations in the region. Other geographic influences include the river, which has been tied to Alpheus in Greece and is similar to the Nile. The caves have been compared to those in Kashmir.
Style
Fragmentation
According to Coleridge's account, the poem is an incomplete fragment. Originally, he says, his dream included between 200 and 300 lines, but he was only able to compose the first 30 before he was interrupted. The second stanza is not necessarily part of the original dream and refers to the dream in the past tense. Kubla Khan is also related to the genre of fragmentary poetry, with internal images reinforcing the idea of fragmentation that is found within the form of the poem. The poem's self-proclaimed fragmentary nature combined with Coleridge's warning about the poem in the preface turns "Kubla Khan" into an "anti-poem", a work that lacks structure, order, and leaves the reader confused instead of enlightened. However, the poem has little relation to the other fragmentary poems Coleridge wrote.
The first lines of the poem follow iambic tetrameter with the initial stanza relying on heavy stresses. The lines of the second stanza incorporate lighter stresses to increase the speed of the meter to separate them from the hammer-like rhythm of the previous lines. There also is a strong break following line 36 in the poem that provides for a second stanza, and there is a transition in narration from a third person narration about Kubla Khan into the poet discussing his role as a poet. Without the Preface, the two stanzas form two different poems that have some relationship to each other but lack unity. This is not to say they would be two different poems, since the technique of having separate parts that respond to another is used in the genre of the odal hymn, as in the poetry of other Romantic poets including John Keats or Percy Bysshe Shelley. However, the odal hymn as used by others has a stronger unity among its parts, and Coleridge believed in writing poetry that was unified organically. It is possible that Coleridge was displeased by the lack of unity in the poem and added a note about the structure to the Preface to explain his thoughts.
Sound
The poem's language is highly stylised with a strong emphasis on sound devices that change between the poem's original two stanzas. The poem relies on many sound-based techniques, including cognate variation and chiasmus. In particular, the poem emphasises the use of the "æ" sound and similar modifications to the standard "a" sound to make the poem sound Asian. Its rhyme scheme found in the first seven lines is repeated in the first seven lines of the second stanza. There is a heavy use of assonance and alliteration, especially in the first line: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan". The stressed sounds, "Xan", "du", "Ku", "Khan", contain assonance in their use of the sounds a-u-u-a, have two rhyming syllables with "Xan" and "Khan", and employ alliteration with the name "Kubla Khan" and the reuse of "d" sounds in "Xanadu" and "did". To pull the line together, the "i" sound of "In" is repeated in "did". Later lines do not contain the same amount of symmetry but do rely on assonance and rhymes throughout. Though the lines are interconnected, the rhyme scheme and line lengths are irregular.
Major themes
Poetic imagination
One theory says that "Kubla Khan" is about poetry and the two sections discuss two types of poems. The power of the imagination is an important component to this theme. The poem celebrates creativity and how the poet is able to experience a connection to the universe through inspiration. As a poet, Coleridge places himself in an uncertain position as either master over his creative powers or a slave to it. The dome city represents the imagination and the second stanza represents the relationship between a poet and the rest of society. The poet is separated from the rest of humanity after he is exposed to the power to create and is able to witness visions of truth. This separation causes a combative relationship between the poet and the audience as the poet seeks to control his listener through a mesmerising technique. The poem's emphasis on imagination as subject of a poem, on the contrasts within the paradisal setting, and its discussion of the role of poet as either being blessed or cursed by imagination, has influenced many works, including Alfred Tennyson's "Palace of Art" and William Butler Yeats's Byzantium based poems. There is also a strong connection between the idea of retreating into the imagination found within Keats's Lamia and in Tennyson's "Palace of Art". The Preface, when added to the poem, connects the idea of the paradise as the imagination with the land of Porlock, and that the imagination, though infinite, would be interrupted by a "person on business". The Preface then allows for Coleridge to leave the poem as a fragment, which represents the inability for the imagination to provide complete images or truly reflect reality. The poem would not be about the act of creation but a fragmentary view revealing how the act works: how the poet crafts language and how it relates to himself.
Through use of the imagination, the poem is able to discuss issues surrounding tyranny, war, and contrasts that exist within paradise. Part of the war motif could be a metaphor for the poet in a competitive struggle with the reader to push his own vision and ideas upon his audience. As a component to the idea of imagination in the poem is the creative process by describing a world that is of the imagination and another that is of understanding. The poet, in Coleridge's system, is able to move from the world of understanding, where men normally are, and enter into the world of the imagination through poetry. When the narrator describes the "ancestral voices prophesying war", the idea is part of the world of understanding, or the real world. As a whole, the poem is connected to Coleridge's belief in a secondary Imagination that can lead a poet into a world of imagination, and the poem is both a description of that world and a description of how the poet enters the world. The imagination, as it appears in many of Coleridge's and Wordsworth's works, including "Kubla Khan", is discussed through the metaphor of water, and the use of the river in "Kubla Khan" is connected to the use of the stream in Wordsworth's The Prelude. The water imagery is also related to the divine and nature, and the poet is able to tap into nature in a way Kubla Khan cannot to harness its power.
The nature of paradise
Although the land is one of man-made "pleasure", there is a natural, "sacred" river that runs past it. The lines describing the river have a markedly different rhythm from the rest of the passage. The land is constructed as a garden, but like Eden after Man's fall, Xanadu is isolated by walls. The finite properties of the constructed walls of Xanadu are contrasted with the infinite properties of the natural caves through which the river runs. The poem expands on the gothic hints of the first stanza as the narrator explores the dark chasm in the midst of Xanadu's gardens, and describes the surrounding area as both "savage" and "holy". Yarlott interprets this chasm as symbolic of the poet struggling with decadence that ignores nature. It may also represent the dark side of the soul, the dehumanising effect of power and dominion. Fountains are often symbolic of the inception of life, and in this case may represent forceful creativity. Since this fountain ends in death, it may also simply represent the life span of a human, from violent birth to a sinking end. Yarlott argues that the war represents the penalty for seeking pleasure, or simply the confrontation of the present by the past. Though the exterior of Xanadu is presented in images of darkness, and in context of the dead sea, we are reminded of the "miracle" and "pleasure" of Kubla Khan's creation. The vision of the sites, including the dome, the cavern, and the fountain, are similar to an apocalyptic vision. Together, the natural and man-made structures form a miracle of nature as they represent the mixing of opposites together, the essence of creativity. In the third stanza, the narrator turns prophetic, referring to a vision of an unidentified "Abyssinian maid" who sings of "Mount Abora". Harold Bloom suggests that this passage reveals the narrator's desire to rival Khan's ability to create with his own. The woman may also refer to Mnemosyne, the Greek personification of memory and mother of the muses, referring directly to Coleridge's claimed struggle to compose this poem from memory of a dream. The subsequent passage refers to unnamed witnesses who may also hear this, and thereby share in the narrator's vision of a replicated, ethereal, Xanadu. Harold Bloom suggests that the power of the poetic imagination, stronger than nature or art, fills the narrator and grants him the ability to share this vision with others through his poetry. The narrator would thereby be elevated to an awesome, almost mythical status, as one who has experienced an Edenic paradise available only to those who have similarly mastered these creative powers.
In the tradition from which Coleridge drew, the Tatars ruled by Kubla Khan were depicted as uncivilized worshippers of the sun, connected to either the Cain or Ham line of outcasts. In the tradition Coleridge relies on, the Tatar worship the sun because it reminds them of paradise, and they build gardens because they want to recreate paradise. The Tatars are connected to the Judaeo Christian ideas of Original Sin and Eden: Kubla Khan is of the line of Cain and fallen, but he wants to overcome that state and rediscover paradise by creating an enclosed garden. Kubla Khan is of the line of Cain and fallen, but he wants to overcome that state and rediscover paradise by creating an enclosed garden. The account of Cublai Can in Purchas's work connects the idea of paradise with luxury and sensual pleasure. The place was described in negative terms and seen as an inferior representation of paradise, and Coleridge's ethical system did not connect pleasure with joy or the divine. However, Coleridge describes Khan in a peaceful light and as a man of genius. He seeks to show his might but does so by building his own version of paradise. The description and the tradition provide a contrast between the daemonic and genius within the poem, and Khan is a ruler who is unable to recreate Eden.
The dome, as described in The History of Hindostan, was related to nature worship as it reflects the shape of the universe. Coleridge believed in a connection between nature and the divine but believed that the only dome that should serve as the top of a temple was the sky. He thought that a dome was an attempt to hide from the ideal and escape into a private creation, and Kubla Khan's dome is a flaw that keeps him from truly connecting to nature. Purchas's work does not mention a dome but a "house of pleasure". The use of dome instead of house or palace could represent the most artificial of constructs and reinforce the idea that the builder was separated from nature. However, Coleridge did believe that a dome could be positive if it was connected to religion, but the Khan's dome was one of immoral pleasure and a purposeless life dominated by sensuality and pleasure.
Critical response
The reception of Kubla Khan has changed substantially over time. Initial reactions to the poem were lukewarm, despite praise from notable figures like Lord Byron and Walter Scott. The work went through multiple editions, but the poem, as with his others published in 1816 and 1817, had poor sales. Initial reviewers saw some aesthetic appeal in the poem, but considered it unremarkable overall. As critics began to consider Coleridge's body of work as whole, however, Kubla Khan was increasingly singled out for praise. Positive evaluation of the poem in the 19th and early 20th centuries treated it as a purely aesthetic object, to be appreciated for its evocative sensory experience. Later criticism continued to appreciate the poem, but no longer considered it as transcending concrete meaning, instead interpreting it as a complex statement on poetry itself and the nature of individual genius.
During Coleridge's lifetime
Literary reviews at the time of the collection's first publication generally dismissed it. At the time of the poem's publication, a new generation of critical magazines, including Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Edinburgh Review, and Quarterly Review, had been established, with critics who were more provocative than those of the previous generation. These critics were hostile to Coleridge due to a difference of political views, and due to a puff piece written by Byron about the Christabel publication. The first of the negative reviews was written by William Hazlitt, literary critic and Romantic writer, who criticized the fragmentary nature of the work. Hazlitt said that the poem "comes to no conclusion" and that "from an excess of capacity, [Coleridge] does little or nothing" with his material. The only positive quality which Hazlitt notes is a certain aesthetic appeal: he says "we could repeat these lines to ourselves not the less often for not knowing the meaning of them," revealing that "Mr Coleridge can write better nonsense verse than any man in English." As other reviews continued to be published in 1816, they, too, were lukewarm at best. The poem received limited praise for "some playful thoughts and fanciful imagery," and was said to "have much of the Oriental richness and harmony" but was generally considered unremarkable.
These early reviews generally accepted Coleridge's story of composing the poem in a dream, but dismissed its relevance, and observed that many others have had similar experiences. More than one review suggested that the dream had not merited publication. One reviewer questioned whether Coleridge had really dreamed his composition, suggesting that instead he likely wrote it rapidly upon waking.
More positive appraisals of the poem began to emerge when Coleridge's contemporaries evaluated his body of work overall. In October 1821, Leigh Hunt singled out Kubla Khan as one of Coleridge's best works, praising the poem's evocative, dreamlike beauty. An 1830 review of Coleridge's Poetical Works similarly praised for its "melodious versification," describing it as "perfect music." An 1834 review, published shortly after Coleridge's death, also praised Kubla Khan's musicality. These three later assessments of Kubla Khan responded more positively to Coleridge's description of composing the poem in a dream, as an additional facet of the poetry.
Victorian period
Victorian critics praised the poem and some examined aspects of the poem's background. John Sheppard, in his analysis of dreams titled On Dreams (1847), lamented Coleridge's drug use as getting in the way of his poetry but argued: "It is probable, since he writes of having taken an 'anodyne,' that the 'vision in a dream' arose under some excitement of that same narcotic; but this does not destroy, even as to his particular case, the evidence for a wonderfully inventive action of the mind in sleep; for, whatever were the exciting cause, the fact remains the same". T. Hall Caine, in 1883 survey of the original critical response to Christabel and "Kubla Khan", praised the poem and declared: "It must surely be allowed that the adverse criticism on 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' which is here quoted is outside all tolerant treatment, whether of raillery or of banter. It is difficult to attribute such false verdict to pure and absolute ignorance. Even when we make all due allowance for the prejudices of critics whose only possible enthusiasm went out to 'the pointed and fine propriety of Poe,' we can hardly believe that the exquisite art which is among the most valued on our possessions could encounter so much garrulous abuse without the criminal intervention of personal malignancy." In a review of H. D. Traill's analysis of Coleridge in the "English Men of Letters", an anonymous reviewer wrote in 1885 Westminster Review: "Of 'Kubla Khan,' Mr. Traill writes: 'As to the wild dream-poem 'Kubla Khan,' it is hardly more than a psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the completeness of its metrical form.' Lovers of poetry think otherwise, and listen to these wonderful lines as the voice of Poesy itself."
Critics at the end of the 19th century favoured the poem and placed it as one of Coleridge's best works. When discussing Christabel, Rime of the Ancient Mariner and "Kubla Khan", an anonymous reviewer in the October 1893 The Church Quarterly Review claimed, "In these poems Coleridge achieves a mastery of language and rhythm which is nowhere else conspicuously evident in him." In 1895, Andrew Lang reviewed the Letters of Coleridge in addition to Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", Christabel and Rime of the Ancient Mariner, saying: "all these poems are 'miraculous;' all seem to have been 'given' by the dreaming 'subconscious self' of Coleridge. The earliest pieces hold no promise of these marvels. They come from what is oldest in Coleridge's nature, his uninvited and irrepressible intuition, magical and rare, vivid beyond common sight of common things, sweet beyond sound of things heard." G E Woodberry, in 1897, said that Christabel, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and "Kubla Khan" "are the marvelous creations of his genius. In these it will be said there is both a world of nature new created, and a dramatic method and interest. It is enough for the purpose of the analysis if it be granted that nowhere else in Coleridge's work, except in these and less noticeably in a few other instances, do these high characteristics occur." In speaking of the three poems, he claimed they "have besides that wealth of beauty in detail, of fine diction, of liquid melody, of sentiment, thought, and image, which belong only to poetry of the highest order, and which are too obvious to require any comment. 'Kubla Khan' is a poem of the same kind, in which the mystical effect is given almost wholly by landscape."
1920s–30s
The 1920s contained analysis of the poem that emphasised the poem's power. In Road to Xanadu (1927), a book length study of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and "Kubla Khan", John Livingston Lowes claimed that the poems were "two of the most remarkable poems in English". When turning to the background of the works, he argued, "Coleridge as Coleridge, be it said at once, is a secondary moment to our purpose; it is the significant process, not the man, which constitutes our theme. But the amazing modus operandi of his genius, in the fresh light which I hope I have to offer, becomes the very abstract and brief chronicle of the procedure of the creative faculty itself." After breaking down the various aspects of the poem, Lowes stated, "with a picture of unimpaired and thrilling vividness, the fragment ends. And with it ends, for all save Coleridge, the dream. 'The earth hath bubbles as the water has, and this is of them.' For 'Kubla Khan' is as near enchantment, I suppose, as we are like to come in this dull world. And over it is cast the glamour, enhanced beyond all reckoning in the dream, of the remote in time and space – that visionary presence of a vague and gorgeous and mysterious Past which brooded, as Coleridge read, above the inscrutable Nile, and domed pavilions in Cashmere, and the vanished stateliness of Xanadu." He continued by describing the power of the poem: "For none of the things which we have seen – dome, river, chasm, fountain, caves of ice, or floating hair – nor any combination of them holds the secret key to that sense of an incommunicable witchery which pervades the poem. That is something more impalpable by far, into which entered who can tell what traceless, shadowy recollections...The poem is steeped in the wonder of all Coleridge's enchanted voyagings." Lowes then concluded about the two works: "Not even in the magical four and fifty lines of 'Kubla Khan' is sheer visualizing energy so intensely exercised as in 'The Ancient Mariner.' But every crystal-clear picture there, is an integral part of a preconceived and consciously elaborated whole...In 'Kubla Khan' the linked and interweaving images irresponsibly and gloriously stream, like the pulsing, fluctuating banners of the North. And their pageant is as aimless as it is magnificent...There is, then...one glory of 'Kubla Khan' and another glory of 'The Ancient Mariner,' as one star differeth from another star in glory." George Watson, in 1966, claimed that Lowes's analysis of the poems "will stand as a permanent monument to historical criticism." Also in 1966, Kenneth Burke, declared, "Count me among those who would view this poem both as a marvel, and as 'in principle' finished."
T. S. Eliot attacked the reputation of "Kubla Khan" and sparked a dispute within literary criticism with his analysis of the poem in his essay "Origin and Uses of Poetry" from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933): "The way in which poetry is written is not, so far as our knowledge of these obscure matters as yet extends, any clue to its value...The faith in mystical inspiration is responsible for the exaggerated repute of "Kubla Khan". The imagery of that fragment, certainly, whatever its origins in Coleridge's reading, sank to the depths of Coleridge's feeling, was saturated, transformed there...and brought up into daylight again." He goes on to explain, "But it is not used: the poem has not been written. A single verse is not poetry unless it is a one-verse poem; and even the finest line draws its life from its context. Organization is necessary as well as 'inspiration'. The re-creation of word and image which happens fitfully in the poetry of such a poet as Coleridge happens almost incessantly with Shakespeare." Geoffrey Yarlott, in 1967, responds to Eliot to claim, "Certainly, the enigmatic personages who appear in the poem...and the vaguely incantatory proper names...appear to adumbrate rather than crystalize the poet's intention. Yet, though generally speaking intentions in poetry are nothing save as 'realized', we are unable to ignore the poem, despite Mr Eliot's strictures on its 'exaggerated repute'." He continued, "We may question without end what it means, but few of us question if the poem is worth the trouble, or whether the meaning is worth the having. While the feeling persists that there is something there which is profoundly important, the challenge to elucidate it proves irresistible." However, Lilian Furst, in 1969, countered Yarlott to argue that, "T. S. Eliot's objection to the exaggerated repute of the surrealist "Kubla Khan" is not unjustified. Moreover, the customary criticism of Coleridge as a cerebral poet would seem to be borne out by those poems such as This Lime-tree Bower my Prison or The Pains of Sleep, which tend more towards a direct statement than an imaginative presentation of personal dilemma."
1940s–60s
During the 1940s and 1950s, critics focused on the technique of the poem and how it relates to the meaning. In 1941, G. W. Knight claimed that "Kubla Khan" "needs no defence. It has a barbaric and oriental magnificence that asserts itself with a happy power and authenticity too often absent from visionary poems set within the Christian tradition." Humphrey House, in 1953, praised the poem and said of beginning of the poem: "The whole passage is full of life because the verse has both the needed energy and the needed control. The combination of energy and control in the rhythm and sound is so great" and that Coleridge's words "convey so fully the sense of inexhaustible energy, now falling now rising, but persisting through its own pulse". Also in 1953, Elisabeth Schneider dedicated her book to analysing the various aspects of the poem, including the various sound techniques. When discussing the quality of the poem, she wrote, "I sometimes think we overwork Coleridge's idea of 'the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.' I have to come back to it here, however, for the particular flavor of "Kubla Khan", with its air of mystery, is describable in part through that convenient phrase. Yet, the 'reconciliation' does not quite occur either. It is in fact avoided. What we have instead is the very spirit of 'oscillation' itself." Continuing, she claimed, "The poem is the soul of ambivalence, oscillation's very self; and that is probably its deepest meaning. In creating this effect, form and matter are intricately woven. The irregular and inexact rhymes and varied lengths of the lines play some part. More important is the musical effect in which a smooth, rather swift forward movement is emphasized by the relation of grammatical structure to line and rhyme, yet is impeded and thrown back upon itself even from the beginning". She then concluded: "Here in these interwoven oscillations dwells the magic, the 'dream,' and the air of mysterious meaning of "Kubla Khan". I question whether this effect was all deliberately out by Coleridge, though it might have been. It is possibly half-inherent in his subject...What remains is the spirit of 'oscillation,' perfectly poeticized, and possibly ironically commemorative of the author." Following in 1959, John Beer described the complex nature of the poem: "'Kubla Khan' the poem is not a meaningless reverie, but a poem so packed with meaning as to render detailed elucidation extremely difficult." In responding to House, Beer claimed, "That there is an image of energy in the fountain may be accepted: but I cannot agree that it is creative energy of the highest type."
Critics of the 1960s focused on the reputation of the poem and how it compared to Coleridge's other poems. In 1966, Virginia Radley considered Wordsworth and his sister as an important influence to Coleridge writing a great poem: "Almost daily social intercourse with this remarkable brother and sister seemed to provide the catalyst to greatness, for it is during this period that Coleridge conceived his greatest poems, 'Christabel,' 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' and 'Kubla Khan,' poems so distinctive and so different from his others that many generations of readers know Coleridge solely through them." She latter added that "Of all the poems Coleridge wrote, three are beyond compare. These three, 'The Ancient Mariner,' 'Christabel,' and 'Kubla Khan,' produced an aura which defies definition, but which might be properly be called one of 'natural magic.'" What sets apart the poem from the others is its "verbal enactment of the creative process" which makes it "unique even among the three poems of high imagination." To Radley, "the poem is skilfully wrought, as are all the poems of high imagination. The opposites within it are diverse and effectively so. In tone, the poem juxtaposes quiet with noise...Action presents its contrasts also...These seemingly antithetical images combine to demonstrate the proximity of the known and the unknown worlds, the two worlds of Understanding and Imagination." In concluding about the poem, she argued, "In truth, there are other 'Fears in Solitude' than that written by Coleridge and there are other 'Frosts at Midnight'; but there are no other 'Ancient Mariners' or 'Kubla Khans,' nor are there likely to be. In evaluating Coleridge's poetry, it can readily be seen and accepted that for the poems of high imagination his reputation is eternally made."
In the same year as Radley, George Watson argued that "The case of 'Kubla Khan' is perhaps the strangest of all – a poem that stands high even in English poetry as a work of ordered perfection is offered by the poet himself, nearly twenty years after its composition, as a fragment. Anyone can accept that a writer's head should be full of projects he will never fulfil, and most writers are cautious enough not to set them down; Coleridge, rashly, did set them down, so that his very fertility has survived as evidence of infertility." He later argued that the poem "is probably the most original poem about poetry in English, and the first hint outside his notebooks and letters that a major critic lies hidden in the twenty-five-year-old Coleridge." In conclusion about the poem, Watson stated, "The triumph of 'Kubla Khan,' perhaps, lies in its evasions: it hints so delicately at critical truths while demonstrating them so boldly. The contrasts between the two halves of the poem...So bold, indeed, that Coleridge for once was able to dispense with any language out of the past. It was his own poem, a manifesto. To read it now, with the hindsight of another age, is to feel premonitions of the critical achievement to come...But the poem is in advance, not just of these, but in all probability of any critical statement that survives. It may be that it stands close to the moment of discovery itself." After responding to Eliot's claims about "Kubla Khan", Yarlott, in 1967, argued that "few of us question if the poem is worth the trouble" before explaining that "The ambiguities inherent in the poem pose a special problem of critical approach. If we restrict ourselves to what is 'given', appealing to the poem as a 'whole', we shall fail probably to resolves its various cruxes. Hence, there is a temptation to look for 'external' influences ... The trouble with all these approaches is that they tend finally to lead away from the poem itself." When describing specifics, he argued, "The rhythmical development of the stanza, too, though technically brilliant, evokes admiration rather than delight. The unusually heavy stresses and abrupt masculine rhymes impose a slow and sonorous weightiness upon the movement of the iambic octosyllabics which is quite in contrast, say, to the light fast metre of the final stanza where speed of movement matches buoyancy of tone." Following in 1968, Walter Jackson Bate called the poem "haunting" and said that it was "so unlike anything else in English".
1970s–present
Criticism during the 1970s and 1980s emphasised the importance of the Preface while praising the work. Norman Fruman, in 1971, argued: "To discuss 'Kubla Khan' as one might any other great poem would be an exercise in futility. For a century and a half its status has been unique, a masterpiece sui generis, embodying interpretive problems wholly its own...It would not be excessive to say that no small part of the extraordinary fame of 'Kubla Khan' inheres in its alleged marvellous conception. Its Preface is world-famous and has been used in many studies of the creative process as a signal instance in which a poem has come to us directly from the unconscious."
In 1981, Kathleen Wheeler contrasts the Crewe Manuscript note with the Preface: "Contrasting this relatively factual, literal, and dry account of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the poem with the actual published preface, one illustrates what the latter is not: it is not a literal, dry, factual account of this sort, but a highly literary piece of composition, providing the verse with a certain mystique." In 1985, David Jasper praised the poem as "one of his greatest meditations on the nature of poetry and poetic creation" and argued "it is through irony, also, as it unsettles and undercuts, that the fragment becomes a Romantic literary form of such importance, nowhere more so than in 'Kubla Khan'." When talking about the Preface, Jasper claimed that it "profoundly influenced the way in which the poem has been understood". Responding in part to Wheeler in 1986, Charles Rzepka analysed the relationship between the poet and the audience of the poem while describing "Kubla Khan" as one of "Coleridge's three great poems of the supernatural". He continued by discussing the preface: "despite its obvious undependability as a guide to the actual process of the poem's composition, the preface can still, in Wheeler's words, lead us 'to ponder why Coleridge chose to write a preface...' What the preface describes, of course, is not the actual process by which the poem came into being, but an analogue of poetic creation as logos, a divine 'decree' or fiat which transforms the Word into the world."
During the 1990s, critics continued to praise the poem with many critics placing emphasis on what the Preface adds to the poem. David Perkins, in 1990, argued that "Coleridge's introductory note to "Kubla Khan" weaves together two myths with potent imaginative appeal. The myth of the lost poem tells how an inspired work was mysteriously given to the poet and dispelled irrecoverably." Also in 1990, Thomas McFarland stated, "Judging by the number and variety of critical effort to interpret their meaning, there may be no more palpably symbolic poems in all of English literature than "Kubla Khan" and The Ancient Mariner." In 1996, Rosemary Ashton claimed that the poem was "one of the most famous poems in the language" and claimed the Preface as "the most famous, but probably not the most accurate, preface in literary history." Richard Holmes, in 1998, declared the importance of the poem's Preface while describing the reception of the 1816 volume of poems: "However, no contemporary critic saw the larger possible significance of Coleridge's Preface to 'Kubla Khan', though it eventually became one of the most celebrated, and disputed, accounts of poetic composition ever written. Like the letter from the fictional 'friend' in the Biographia, it brilliantly suggests how a compressed fragment came to represent a much larger (and even more mysterious) act of creation."
In 2002, J. C. C. Mays pointed out that "Coleridge's claim to be a great poet lies in the continued pursuit of the consequences of 'The Ancient Mariner,' 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan' on several levels." Adam Sisman, in 2006, questioned the nature of the poem itself: "No one even knows whether it is complete; Coleridge describes it as a 'fragment,' but there is a case for doubting this. Maybe it is not a poem at all. Hazlitt called it 'a musical composition'...Though literary detectives have uncovered some of its sources, its remains difficult to say what the poem is about." In describing the merits of the poem and its fragmentary state, he claimed, "The poem stands for itself: beautiful, sensuous and enigmatic." During the same year, Jack Stillinger claimed that "Coleridge wrote only a few poems of the first rank – perhaps no more than a dozen, all told – and he seems to have taken a very casual attitude toward them...he kept 'Kubla Khan' in manuscript for nearly twenty years before offering it to the public 'rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits'". Harold Bloom, in 2010, argued that Coleridge wrote two kinds of poems and that "The daemonic group, necessarily more famous, is the triad of The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and 'Kubla Khan.'" He goes on to explain the "daemonic": "Opium was the avenging daemon or alastor of Coleridge's life, his dark or fallen angel, his experiential acquaintance with Milton's Satan. Opium was for him what wandering and moral tale-telling became for the Mariner – the personal shape of repetition compulsion. The lust for paradise in 'Kubla Khan,' Geraldine's lust for Christabel – these are manifestations of Coleridge's revisionary daemonization of Milton, these are Coleridge's countersublime. Poetic genius, the genial spirit itself, Coleridge must see as daemonic when it is his own rather than when it is Milton's."
Musical settings
Excerpts from the poem have been put to music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Granville Bantock, Humphrey Searle, and Paul Turok; and Charles Tomlinson Griffes composed an orchestral tone poem in 1912 (revised 1916).
Canadian rock band Rush refers to the poem directly in the 1977 song Xanadu, in which the narrator searches for a place called "Xanadu" that he believes will grant him immortality.
British band Frankie Goes to Hollywood alludes to the poem in the song Welcome to the Pleasuredome from its eponymous 1984 debut album, however altering the quoted wording to "In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a pleasuredome erect".
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Anonymous. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge". The Church Quarterly Review. Vol 37 (October 1893 – January 1894). London: Spottiswoode, 1894
Anonymous. Westminster Review. Vol 67 (January, April). Philadelphia: Leonard Scott, 1885.
Ashton, Rosemary. The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
Barth, J. Robert. Romanticism and Transcendence. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Bate, Walter Jackson. Coleridge. New York: Macmillan, 1968.
Beer, John. Coleridge the Visionary. New York: Collier, 1962.
Bloom, Harold. "Introduction" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2010.
Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Burke, Kenneth. "'Kubla Khan': Proto-Surrealist Poem" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Caine, T. Hall. Cobwebs of Criticism. London: Elliot Stock, 1883.
Doughty, Oswald. Perturbed Spirit. London: Associated University Presses, 1981.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
Fruman, Norman. Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel. New York: George Braziller, 1971.
Fulford, Tim. "Slavery and Superstition in the Poems" in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Ed. Lucy Newlyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Furst, Lilian. Romanticism in Perspective. New York: St Martin's Press, 1969.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804. New York: Pantheon, 1989.
Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834. New York: Pantheon, 1998.
House, Humphry. Coleridge. London: R. Hart-Davis, 1953.
Jackson, J R de J. Coleridge: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970.
Kastner, Joseph. A World of Naturalists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1977.
Knight, G. W. "Coleridge's Divine Comedy" in English Romantic Poets. Ed. M. H. Abrams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Lang, Andrew. "The Letters of Coleridge". Littell's Living Age. Vol. 206 (July, August, September). Boston: Littell and Co., 1895.
Lowes, John. The Road to Xanadu. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927.
Mays, J. C. C. (editor). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works I Vol I.I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Mays, J. C. C. "The Later Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Ed. Lucy Newlyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
McFarland, Thomas. "Involute and Symbol" in Coleridge, Keats, and the Imagination. Ed. J. Robert Barth and John Mahoney. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990.
Peart, Neil. "Xanadu". "A Farewell To Kings": Rush, 1977.
Perkins, David. "The Imaginative Vision of 'Kubla Khan': On Coleridge's Introductory Note" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2010.
Radley, Virginia. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. New York: Twayne, 1966.
Rauber, D. F. "The Fragment as Romantic Form", Modern Language Quarterly. Vol 30 (1969).
Rzepka, Charles. The Self As Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Schneider, Elisabeth. "Kubla Khan" in Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Sheppard, John. On Dreams. London: Jackson and Walford, 1847.
Sisman, Adam. The Friendship. New York: Viking, 2006.
Stillinger, Jack. "Pictorialism and Matter-of Factness in Coleridge's Poems of Somerset" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2010.
Watson, George. Coleridge the Poet. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966.
Wheeler, Kathleen. The Creative Mind in Coleridge's Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Woodberry, G. E. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge" in Library of the World's Best Literature. Vol VII. New York: R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill, 1897.
Yarlott, Geoffrey. Coleridge and the Abyssinian Maid. London: Methuen & Co, 1967.
External links
Full text of the poem
Explicated for an undergraduate class
Kubla Khan Analysis, another explication of the poem by JM Schroeder
1816 poems
Poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Unfinished poems
Cultural depictions of Kublai Khan
Cultural depictions of Marco Polo | [
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17254 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashubian%20language | Kashubian language | Kashubian or Cassubian (Kashubian: , ) is a West Slavic lect belonging to the Lechitic subgroup along with Polish and Silesian. Although often classified as a language in its own right, it is sometimes viewed as a dialect of Pomeranian or as a dialect of Polish.
In Poland, it has been an officially recognized ethnic-minority language since 2005. Approximately 108,000 people use mainly Kashubian at home. It is the only remnant of the Pomeranian language. It is close to standard Polish with influence from Low German and the extinct Polabian (West Slavic) and Old Prussian (West Baltic) languages.
The Kashubian language exists in two different forms: vernacular dialects used in rural areas, and literary variants used in education.
Origin
Kashubian is assumed to have evolved from the language spoken by some tribes of Pomeranians called Kashubians, in the region of Pomerania, on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea between the Vistula and Oder rivers. The Pomeranians were said to have arrived before the Poles, and certain tribes managed to maintain their language and traditions despite German and Polish settlements. It first began to evolve separately in the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century as the Polish-Pomeranian linguistic area began to divide based around important linguistic developments centred in the western (Kashubian) part of the area.
In the 19th century, Florian Ceynowa became Kashubian's first known activist. He undertook tremendous efforts to awaken Kashubian self-identity through the establishment of Kashubian language, customs, and traditions. He felt strongly that Poles were born brothers and that Kashubia was a separate nation.
The Young Kashubian movement followed in 1912, led by author and doctor Aleksander Majkowski, who wrote for the paper "Zrzësz Kaszëbskô" as part of the "Zrzëszincë" group. The group contributed significantly to the development of the Kashubian literary language.
The earliest printed documents in Polish with Kashubian elements date from the end of the 16th century. The modern orthography was first proposed in 1879.
Related languages
Many scholars and linguists debate whether Kashubian should be recognized as a Polish dialect or separate language. From the diachronic view it is a distinct Lechitic West Slavic language, but from the synchronic point of view it is a Polish dialect. Kashubian is closely related to Slovincian, while both of them are dialects of Pomeranian. Many linguists, in Poland and elsewhere, consider it a divergent dialect of Polish. Dialectal diversity is so great within Kashubian that a speaker of southern dialects has considerable difficulty in understanding a speaker of northern dialects. The spelling and the grammar of Polish words written in Kashubian, which is most of its vocabulary, is highly unusual, making it difficult for native Polish speakers to comprehend written text in Kashubian.
Like Polish, Kashubian includes about 5% loanwords from German (such as "art"). Unlike Polish, these are mostly from Low German and only occasionally from High German. Other sources of loanwords include the Baltic languages.
Speakers
Poland
The number of speakers of Kashubian varies widely from source to source, ranging from as low as 4,500 to the upper 366,000. In the 2011 census, over 108,000 people in Poland declared that they mainly use Kashubian at home, of these only 10 percent consider Kashubian to be their mother tongue, with the rest considering themselves to be native speakers of both Kashubian and Polish. The number of people who can speak at least some Kashubian is higher, around 366,000. All Kashubian speakers are also fluent in Polish. A number of schools in Poland use Kashubian as a teaching language. It is an official alternative language for local administration purposes in Gmina Sierakowice, Gmina Linia, Gmina Parchowo, Gmina Luzino and Gmina Żukowo in the Pomeranian Voivodeship. Most respondents say that Kashubian is used in informal speech among family members and friends. This is most likely because Polish is the official language and spoken in formal settings.
Americas
During the Kashubian diaspora of 1855–1900, 115,700 Kashubians emigrated to North America, with around 15,000 emigrating to Brazil. Among the Polish community of Renfrew County, Ontario, Kashubian is widely spoken to this day, despite the use of more formal Polish by parish priests. In Winona, Minnesota, which Ramułt termed the "Kashubian Capital of America", Kashubian was regarded as "poor Polish," as opposed to the "good Polish" of the parish priests and teaching sisters. Consequently, Kashubian failed to survive Polonization and died out shortly after the mid-20th century.
Literature
Important for Kashubian literature was Xążeczka dlo Kaszebov by Florian Ceynowa (1817–1881). Hieronim Derdowski (1852–1902 in Winona, Minnesota) was another significant author who wrote in Kashubian, as was Aleksander Majkowski (1876–1938) from Kościerzyna, who wrote the Kashubian national epic The Life and Adventures of Remus. Jan Trepczyk was a poet who wrote in Kashubian, as was Stanisław Pestka. Kashubian literature has been translated into Czech, Polish, English, German, Belarusian, Slovene and Finnish. Aleksander Majkowski and Alojzy Nagel belong to the most commonly translated Kashubian authors of the 20th century. A considerable body of Christian literature has been translated into Kashubian, including the New Testament, much of it by Adam Ryszard Sikora (OFM). Franciszek Grucza graduated from a Catholic seminary in Pelplin. He was the first priest to introduce Catholic liturgy in Kashubian.
Works
The earliest recorded artifacts of Kashubian date back to the 15th century and include a book of spiritual psalms that were used to introduce Kashubian to the Lutheran church:
1586 Duchowne piesnie (Spiritual songs) D. Marcina Luthera y ynßich naboznich męzow. Zniemieckiego w Slawięsky ięzik wilozone Przes Szymana Krofea... w Gdainsku: przes Jacuba Rhode, Tetzner 1896: translated from pastorks. S. Krofeja, Słowińca (?) rodem z Dąbia.
The next few texts are also religious catechisms but this time from the Catholic Church, because the majority of Kashubians were Roman Catholic and these texts helped them become more unified in faith:
1643 Mały Catechism (Little Catechism) D. Marciná Lutherá Niemiecko-Wándalski ábo Slowięski to jestá z Niemieckiego języká w Słowięski wystáwiony na jáwnosc wydan..., w Gdaińsku przes Jerzego Rhetá, Gdansk 1643. Pastor smołdziński ks. Mostnik, rodem ze Slupska.
Perykopy smołdzinskie (Smoldzinski Pericope), published by Friedhelm Hinze, Berlin (East), 1967
Śpiewnik starokaszubski (Old Kashubian songbook), published by Friedhelm Hinze, Berlin (East), 1967
Education
Throughout the communist period in Poland (1948-1989), Kashubian greatly suffered in education and social status. Kashubian was represented as folklore and prevented from being taught in schools. Following the collapse of communism, attitudes on the status of Kashubian have been gradually changing. It has been included in the program of school education in Kashubia although not as a language of teaching or as a required subject for every child, but as a foreign language taught 3 hours per week at parents' explicit request. Since 1991, it is estimated that there have been around 17,000 students in over 400 schools who have learned Kashubian. Kashubian has some limited usage on public radio and had on public television. Since 2005, Kashubian has enjoyed legal protection in Poland as an official regional language. It is the only language in Poland with that status, which was granted by the Act of 6 January 2005 on National and Ethnic Minorities and on the Regional Language of the Polish Parliament. The act provides for its use in official contexts in ten communes in which speakers are at least 20% of the population. The recognition means that heavily populated Kashubian localities have been able to have road signs and other amenities with Polish and Kashubian translations on them.
Dialects
Friedrich Lorentz wrote in the early 20th century that there were three main Kashubian dialects. These include the
Northern Kashubian dialect
Middle Kashubian dialect
Southern Kashubian dialect
Other researches would argue that each tiny region of the Kaszuby has its own dialect, as in Dialects and Slang of Poland:
Bylacki dialect
Slowinski dialect
Kabatkow dialect
Zaborski dialect
Tucholski and Krajniacki dialect (although both dialects would be considered a transitional form of the Wielkopolski dialect and are included as official Wielkopolskie dialects)
Features
A "standard" Kashubian language does not exist despite several attempts to create one; rather a diverse range of dialects takes its place. The vocabulary is heavily influenced by German and Polish and uses the Latin alphabet.
There are several similarities between Kashubian and Polish. For some linguists they consider this a sign that Kashubian is a dialect of Polish but others believe that this is just a sign that the two originate from the same location. They are nevertheless related to a certain degree and their proximity has made Kashubian influenced by Polish and its various dialects.
Exemplary differences between Kashubian and Polish:
a consonant-softening outcome of Proto-Slavic soft syllabic r in northern Kashubian dialects: ex: Northern Kashubian: , ; Polish: ,
the disappearance of a movable in the nominative case: ex: , ; ,
vowel takes the place of former long , continuants of the old long a distinct from the old short a are present in most dialects of Polish but absent from the standard language
transition of to just like the Masurian dialect: ex: ;
Phonology and morphology
Kashubian makes use of simplex and complex phonemes with secondary place articulation , , , and . They follow the Clements and Hume (1995) constriction model, where sounds are represented in terms of constriction. They are then organized according to particular features like anterior, implying the activation of features dominating it. Due to this model, the phonemes above are treated differently from the phonemes , , , and . The vocalic place node would be placed under the C-place node and V-place nodes interpolated to preserve well-forwardness.
Vowels
The exact phonetic realization of the close-mid vowels depends on the dialect.
Apart from these, there are also nasal vowels . Their exact phonetic realization depends on the dialect.
Consonants
Kashubian has simple consonants with a secondary articulation along with complex ones with secondary articulation.
are palato-alveolar.
are alveolo-palatal; the last four appear only in some dialects.
The fricative trill is now used only by some northern and northeastern speakers; other speakers realize it as flat postalveolar .
The labialized velar central approximant is realized as a velarized denti-alveolar lateral approximant by older speakers of southeastern dialects.
Kashubian alphabet
The following digraphs and trigraphs are used:
Samples
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Kashubian:
Wszëtczi lëdze rodzą sã wòlny ë równy w swòji czëstnoce ë swòjich prawach. Mają òni dostóne rozëm ë sëmienié ë nôlégô jima pòstãpòwac wobec drëdzich w dëchù bracënotë.
(All people are born free and equal in their dignity and rights. They are given reason and conscience and they shall create their relationships to one another according to the spirit of brotherhood.)
The Lord's Prayer in Kashubian:
Òjcze nasz, jaczi jes w niebie, niech sã swiãcy Twòje miono, niech przińdze Twòje królestwò, niech mdze Twòja wòlô jakno w niebie tak téż na zemi. Chleba najégò pòwszednégò dôj nóm dzysô i òdpùscë nóm naje winë, jak i më òdpùszcziwómë naszim winowajcóm. A nie dopùscë na nas pòkùszeniô, ale nas zbawi òde złégò. Amen.
Gallery
See also
Ł–l merger
Bilingual communes in Poland
Gdańsk Pomerania
Kashubia
Kashubian alphabet
Kashubian-Pomeranian Association
Kashubian studies
Masurian dialect
Old Prussian language
Pomerelia
Pomeranian language
Notes
References
Comrie, Bernard; Corbett, Greville. G. (2002). The Slavonic Languages. London: Routledge.
Blank, Joshua C. Creating Kashubia: History, Memory and Identity in Canada's First Polish Community. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016.
Gyula Décsy, Die linguistische Struktur Europas, Vergangenheit — Gegenwart — Zukunft, Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1973
Friedhelm Hinze, Wörterbuch und Lautlehre der deutschen Lehnwörter im Pomoranischen (Kaschubischen), Berlin 1965
Język kaszubski. Poradnik encyklopedyczny. ed. J. Treder, Rev. 2. corrected and expanded UG, Oficyna Czec, Gdańsk, 2006
J. Borzyszkowski, J. Mordawski, J. Treder: Historia, geografia, język i piśmiennictwo Kaszubów; J. Bòrzëszkòwsczi, J. Mòrdawsczi, J. Tréder: Historia, geògrafia, jãzëk i pismienizna Kaszëbów, Wëdowizna M. Rôżok przë wespółrobòce z Institutã Kaszëbsczim, Gduńsk 1999, p. 128
Aleksander Labuda, Słowôrz kaszëbsko-polsczi. Słownik polsko-kaszubski, Gdańsk 1982
Friedrich Lorentz, Geschichte der Pomoranischen (Kaschubischen) Sprache, Berlin and Leipzig, 1925
Nestor, N. & Hickey, T. (2009). Out of the Communist frying pan and into the EU fire? Exploring the case of Kashubian .
Nomachi Motoki, On the recipient passive in the Kashubian Language: Annex to Milka Ivić's syntactic inventory for Slavonic dialectology
Stefan Ramułt, Słownik języka pomorskiego, czyli kaszubskiego, Kraków, 1893 i.e. "Dictionary of the Pomeranian (Seacoast) or Kashubian language" (Kraków, 1893)
Stefan Ramułt, Słownik języka pomorskiego czyli kaszubskiego. Scalił i znormalizował Jerzy Treder, Gdańsk, 2003
C. F. i F. N. Voegelin, Classification and Index of the World's Languages. Elsevier, New York 1977
Further reading
Grabowska, A., & Ladykowski, P. The Change of the Cashubian Identity before Entering the EU.
Blank, Joshua C. Creating Kashubia: History, Memory and Identity in Canada's First Polish Community. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016.
Toops, G. H. (2007). [Review of Das Kaschubische: Sprachtod oder Revitalisierung? Empirische Studien zur ethnolinguistischen Vitalität einer Sprachminderheit in Polen. Slavistische Beiträge, 452].Canadian Slavonic Papers, 49(1/2), 160–162.
Kurczewski, J. (2007). Self-Identification Structure in Opole Silesia and the Kashubia: A Comparative Analysis. Polish Sociological Review, (157), 87–104.
Perkowski, J. L. (1966). The Kashubs: Origins and Emigration to the U. S.. Polish American Studies,23(1), 1–7.
Gregory MacDonald. (1939). The Kashubs on the Baltic. The Slavonic and East European Review,19(53/54), 265–275.
Stone, G. (1972). The Language of Cassubian Literature and the Question of a Literary Standard. The Slavonic and East European Review, 50(121), 521–529.
Ager, S. (1998-2016). Kashubian (kaszëbsczi jãzëk). Retrieved February 12, 2016, from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/kashubian.htm
W. (2016). Krótka historia języka kaszubskiego (Short History of the Kashubian Language). Retrieved February 12, 2016, from http://www.kaszubi.pl/o/reda/artykulmenu?id=395
Dawid Szulest (2012). Kashubian Identity. Kashubs in Canada and Kashubia/Kaszebe Retrieved from http://kaszebsko.com/uploads/KASHUBIAN%20IDENTITY.pdf
Topolinska, Z. (1974). A Historical Phonology of the Kashubian Dialects of Polish. General Information on the Kashubians and Kashubian Dialects. Retrieved from Google Books.
Stanulewicz, D. (n.d.). The Use of the Kashubian Language from the Perspective of Young People Aged 16–19: Settings and Participants. 191–203. Retrieved February 12, 2016, from www.wilkuer.de/forschung/191-204_stanulewicz_final_js_wk_js.rtf.
External links
LC
The World Atlas of Language Structures - WALS
BnF
Omniglot
COE 2011
Kashubian language
UNESCO
Following the trail of manor houses and castles of the Northern Kashubian Region
Kashubian resources; include phrasebooks
dictionary
Endangered languages
Kaszëbskô Mowa: Freeing the Kashubian Language
Languages of Poland
Endangered Slavic languages | [
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17256 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim%20Milford | Kim Milford | Richard Kim Milford (February 7, 1951 – June 16, 1988), known professionally as Kim Milford, was an American actor, singer-songwriter, and composer. He was known for his stage acting in musicals such as The Rocky Horror Show and Jesus Christ Superstar.
Early years
Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, Milford grew up in Winnetka, Illinois. His older sister, Penelope, also became an actress. Milford attended New Trier High School.
Career
Acting
Milford first appeared at the stock theatre in Chicago at age 10. In 1971, he appeared at The Kennedy Center in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Age 17, he was in the original stage version of Hair on Broadway, playing Woof and Claude. In 1976, he was awarded the Faith and Freedom Award by the Religious Heritage of America for his portrayal of the Prodigal Son in Round Trip. Milford later performed in the first concert tour of Jesus Christ Superstar playing Jesus and Judas. He also appeared in the original American production of The Rocky Horror Show as Rocky with the Los Angeles Roxy Cast and in the Broadway production. He reprised his role in the 1980 North American Tour production. He also appeared in the plays Henry Sweet Henry (1967), Your Own Thing, Rockabye Hamlet (1975–76), More Than You Deserve, Sunset, and All Bets Off.
In addition to stage work, Milford appeared in the 1975 television movies Song of the Succubus and Rock-a-Die-Baby (also known as Night of the Full Moon) in which he performed music with his band Moon. During the 1970s and 1980s, he had guest roles on The Mod Squad and Mannix and The Highwayman, and starred in the 1978 feature films Laserblast and Corvette Summer. He also had a recurring role as Tommy on the soap opera The Secret Storm.
Music
Milford briefly became vocalist for Beck, Bogert & Appice, billed as The Jeff Beck Group, for six performances between July 24 to August 8, 1972. He was also the front man for his own band Moon who were co-writers on songs such as "Lovin' Lady", "Jo Anna" and "She's Puttin' Me Through Changes". According to an interview in Viva, Milford recorded an album Chain Your Lovers to the Bedposts and a single "Help Is on the Way, Rozea" released in 1974. He recorded the single "Muddy River Water" for (Decca Records), the Sunset soundtrack and appeared on the Roxy cast album of Rocky Horror Show.
Milford composed the music for Salome, based on the Oscar Wilde play and starred in it at Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1979. He wrote and performed "My Love Is a Rebel" on the soundtrack of Limbo, starring Barry Bostwick. His song "Justice" appeared on the Ciao! Manhattan soundtrack.
Death
On June 16, 1988, Milford died of heart failure following open heart surgery several weeks earlier. He was 37 years old.
Discography
Albums
Chain Your Lovers to the Bedposts
Rocky Horror Show
Rocky Horror Show Original Los Angeles Cast (1974)
Rocky Horror Picture Show 15th Anniversary (1990)
Rocky Horror Collection Original Soundtrack (1997)
Rocky Horror Collection Original Soundtrack (2005)
Singles
"Help is on the Way, Rozea"
"Muddy River Water"
Filmography
Notes
External links
1951 births
1988 deaths
New Trier High School alumni
People from Glen Ridge, New Jersey
People from Winnetka, Illinois
Male actors from New Jersey
Male actors from Illinois
Singer-songwriters from Illinois
20th-century American singers
20th-century American male actors
American male child actors
American male dancers
American male film actors
American male musical theatre actors
American male singer-songwriters
American male television actors
American musical theatre composers
American rock guitarists
American male guitarists
American rock singers
American rock songwriters
20th-century American guitarists
Singer-songwriters from New Jersey
Guitarists from Illinois
Guitarists from New Jersey
20th-century American dancers
20th-century American male singers | [
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17257 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken%20Kesey | Ken Kesey | Ken Elton Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduating from the University of Oregon in 1957. He began writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1960 following the completion of a graduate fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University; the novel was an immediate commercial and critical success when published two years later. During this period, Kesey participated in government studies involving hallucinogenic drugs (including mescaline and LSD) to supplement his income.
Following the publication of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he moved to nearby La Honda, California and began hosting happenings with former colleagues from Stanford, miscellaneous bohemian and literary figures (most notably Neal Cassady) and other friends collectively known as the Merry Pranksters; these parties, known as Acid Tests, integrated the consumption of LSD with multimedia performances. He mentored the Grateful Dead (the de facto "house band" of the Acid Tests) throughout their incipience and continued to exert a profound influence upon the group throughout their long career.
His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion—an epic account of the vicissitudes of an Oregon logging family that aspired to the modernist grandeur of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga—was a commercial success that polarized critics and readers upon its release in 1964, although Kesey regarded the novel as his magnum opus.
In 1965, following an arrest for marijuana possession and subsequently faked suicide, Kesey was imprisoned for five months. Shortly thereafter, he returned home to the Willamette Valley and settled in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, where he maintained a secluded, family-oriented lifestyle for the rest of his life. In addition to teaching at the University of Oregon—an experience that culminated in Caverns (1989), a collaborative novel written by Kesey and his graduate workshop students under the pseudonym of "O.U. Levon"—he continued to regularly contribute fiction and reportage to such publications as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Oui, Running, and The Whole Earth Catalog; various iterations of these pieces were collected in Kesey's Garage Sale (1973) and Demon Box (1986).
Between 1974 and 1980, Kesey published six issues of Spit in the Ocean, a literary magazine that featured excerpts from an unfinished novel (Seven Prayers by Grandma Whittier, an account of Kesey's grandmother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease) and contributions from intellectuals including Margo St. James, Kate Millett, Stewart Brand, Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti, Paul Krassner and William S. Burroughs. After a third novel (Sailor Song) was released to lukewarm reviews in 1992, he reunited with the Merry Pranksters and began publishing works on the Internet until ill health (including a stroke) curtailed his activities. Kesey was also a part of the Church of the SubGenius.
Biography
Early life
Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Geneva (née Smith) and Frederick A. Kesey. In 1946, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon. Kesey was a champion wrestler in high school and college in the weight division. He almost qualified to be on the Olympic team, but a serious shoulder injury stopped his wrestling career. He graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Grey as his role models (later naming a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism and hypnotism.
While attending the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication in neighboring Eugene in 1956, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Oregon State College student Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had met in seventh grade. According to Kesey, "Without Faye, I would have been swept overboard by notoriety and weird, dope-fueled ideas and flower-child girls with beamy eyes and bulbous breasts." Married until his death at the age of 66, they had three children: Jed, Zane and Shannon. Additionally, with the approval of Faye Kesey, Ken fathered a daughter, Sunshine Kesey, with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams. Born in 1966, Sunshine was raised by Adams and her stepfather, Jerry Garcia.
Kesey had a football scholarship for his first year, but switched to the University of Oregon wrestling team as a better fit for his build. After posting a .885 winning percentage in the 1956–57 season, he received the Fred Low Scholarship for outstanding Northwest wrestler. In 1957, Kesey was second in his weight class at the Pacific Coast intercollegiate competition. He remains ranked in the top 10 of Oregon Wrestling's all time winning percentage.
A member of Beta Theta Pi throughout his studies, Kesey graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.A. in speech and communication in 1957. Increasingly disengaged by the playwriting and screenwriting courses that comprised much of his major, he began to take literature classes in the second half of his collegiate career with James B. Hall, a cosmopolitan alumnus of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who had previously taught at Cornell University and later served as provost of College V at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Hall took on Kesey as his protege and cultivated his interest in literary fiction, introducing Kesey (whose reading interests were hitherto confined to science fiction) to the works of Ernest Hemingway and other paragons of literary modernism. After the last of several brief summer sojourns as a struggling actor in Los Angeles, he published his first short story ("First Sunday of September") in the Northwest Review and successfully applied to the highly selective Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship for the 1958–59 academic year.
Unbeknownst to Kesey, who applied at Hall's request, the maverick literary critic Leslie Fiedler (then based at the University of Montana) successfully importuned the regional fellowship committee to select the "rough-hewn" Kesey alongside more traditional fellows from Reed College and other elite institutions. Because he lacked the prerequisites to work toward a traditional master's degree in English as a communications major, Kesey elected to enroll in the non-degree program at Stanford University's Creative Writing Center that fall. While studying and working in the Stanford milieu over the next five years, most of them spent as a resident of Perry Lane (a historically bohemian enclave adjacent to the university golf course), he developed intimate lifelong friendships with fellow writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman and Robert Stone.
During his initial fellowship year, Kesey frequently clashed with Center director Wallace Stegner, who regarded the young writer as "a sort of highly talented illiterate" and rejected Kesey's application for a departmental Stegner Fellowship before permitting his attendance as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Reinforcing these perceptions, Stegner's deputy Richard Scowcroft later recalled that "neither Wally nor I thought he had a particularly important talent." According to Stone, Stegner "saw Kesey... as a threat to civilization and intellectualism and sobriety" and continued to reject Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the 1959–60 and 1960–61 terms.
Nevertheless, Kesey received the prestigious $2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for his first novel in progress (the oft-rejected Zoo) and audited the graduate writing seminar—a courtesy nominally accorded to former Stegner Fellows, although Kesey only secured his place by falsely claiming to Scowcroft that his colleague (on sabbatical through 1960) "had said that he could attend classes for free"—through the 1960–61 term. The course was initially taught that year by Viking Press editorial consultant and Lost Generation eminence grise Malcolm Cowley, who was "always glad to see" Kesey and fellow auditor Tillie Olsen. Cowley was succeeded the following quarter by the Irish short-story specialist Frank O'Connor; frequent spats between O'Connor and Kesey ultimately precipitated his departure from the class. While under the tutelage of Cowley, he began to draft and workshop a manuscript that evolved into One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Reflecting upon this period in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder, Kesey recalled, "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie."
Experimentation with psychedelic drugs
At the invitation of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student Vic Lovell, Kesey volunteered to take part in what turned out to be a CIA-financed study under the aegis of Project MKULTRA, a highly secret military program, at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital where he worked as a night aide. The project studied the effects of psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT, and DMT on people. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in the years of private drug-use that followed.
Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at the Veterans' Administration hospital, inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The success of this book, as well as the demolition of the Perry Lane cabins in August 1963, allowed him to move to a log house at 7940 La Honda Road in La Honda, California, a rustic hamlet in the Santa Cruz Mountains fifteen miles to the west of the Stanford University campus. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests," involving music (including the Stanford-educated Anonymous Artists of America and Kesey's favorite band, the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobe lights, LSD, and other psychedelic effects. These parties were described in some of Allen Ginsberg's poems and served as the basis for Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an early exemplar of the nonfiction novel. Other firsthand accounts of the Acid Tests appear in Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and the 1967 Hells Angels memoir Freewheelin Frank:, Secretary of the Angels (Frank Reynolds; ghostwritten by Michael McClure).
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
While still enrolled at the University of Oregon in 1957, Kesey wrote End of Autumn; according to Rick Dogson, the novel "focused on the exploitation of college athletes by telling the tale of a football lineman who was having second thoughts about the game". Although Kesey came to regard the unpublished work as juvenilia, an excerpt served as his Stanford Creative Writing Center application sample.
During his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship year, Kesey wrote Zoo, a novel about the beatniks living in the North Beach community of San Francisco, but it was never published.
The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on the night shift with Gordon Lish at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs he had volunteered to experiment with. Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. Published under the guidance of Cowley in 1962, the novel was an immediate success; in 1963, it was adapted into a successful stage play by Dale Wasserman, and in 1975, Miloš Forman directed a screen adaptation, which won the "Big Five" Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Director (Forman) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman).
Kesey originally was involved in creating the film, but left two weeks into production. He claimed never to have seen the movie because of a dispute over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the film rights. Kesey loathed that, unlike the book, the film was not narrated by the Chief Bromden character, and he disagreed with Jack Nicholson's being cast as Randle McMurphy (he wanted Gene Hackman). Despite this, Faye Kesey has stated that her husband was generally supportive of the film and pleased that it was made.
Merry Pranksters
When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964, required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, and others in a group of friends they called the Merry Pranksters took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed Furthur. This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's unproduced screenplay, The Furthur Inquiry) was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life, and to experience roadway America while high on LSD. In an interview after arriving in New York, Kesey is quoted as saying, "The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied. But we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be different without being a threat." A huge amount of footage was filmed on 16 mm cameras during the trip, which remained largely unseen until the release of Alex Gibney and Alison Elwood's film Magic Trip in 2011.
After the bus trip, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around the San Francisco Bay Area from 1965 to 1966. Many of the Pranksters lived at Kesey's residence in La Honda. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who then turned them on to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion inspired a 1970 film starring and directed by Paul Newman; it was nominated for two Academy Awards, and in 1972 was the first film shown by the new television network HBO, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Kesey was arrested in La Honda, California, for possession of marijuana in 1965. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with an elaborate suicide note, written by the Pranksters. Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car. He returned to the United States eight months later. On January 17, 1966, Kesey was sentenced to six months to be served at the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, California. Two nights later, he was arrested again, this time with Carolyn Adams, while smoking marijuana on the rooftop of Stewart Brand's Telegraph Hill home in San Francisco. On his release, he moved back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, where he spent the rest of his life. He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during that time.
Death of son
On January 23, 1984, Kesey's 20-year-old son Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, suffered severe head injuries on the way to Pullman, Washington, when the team's loaned van crashed after sliding off an icy highway. Two days later at Deaconess Hospital in Spokane, he was declared brain dead and his parents gave permission for his organs to be donated.
Jed's death deeply affected Kesey, who later called Jed a victim of policies that had starved the team of funding. He wrote to Senator Mark Hatfield:
At a Grateful Dead concert soon after the death of promoter Bill Graham, Kesey delivered a eulogy, mentioning that Graham had donated $1,000 toward a memorial to Jed atop Mount Pisgah, near the Kesey home in Pleasant Hill. In 1988, Kesey donated $33,395 towards the purchase of a proper bus for the school's wrestling team.
Final years
Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992. In 1994, he toured with members of the Merry Pranksters, performing a musical play he wrote about the millennium called Twister: A Ritual Reality. Many old and new friends and family showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour, which took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot all along the West Coast, including a sold-out two-night run at The Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg into performing with them.
Kesey mainly kept to his home life in Pleasant Hill, preferring to make artistic contributions on the Internet or holding ritualistic revivals in the spirit of the Acid Test. In the official Grateful Dead DVD release The Closing of Winterland (2003) documenting the monumental New Year's 1978/1979 concert at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco, Kesey is featured in a between-set interview.
On August 14, 1997, Kesey and his Pranksters attended a Phish concert in Darien Lake, New York. Kesey and the Pranksters appeared onstage with the band and performed a dance-trance-jam session involving several characters from The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein.
In June 2001, Kesey was invited and accepted as the keynote speaker at the annual commencement of The Evergreen State College. His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
Death
In 1997, health problems began to weaken Kesey, starting with a stroke that year. On October 25, 2001, Kesey had surgery at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene on his liver to remove a tumor; he did not recover and died of complications several weeks later on November 10 at age 66.
Legacy
The film Gerry (2002) is dedicated to Ken Kesey.
Kesey Square is located in downtown Eugene, Oregon.
Works
This is a selected list of Kesey's better-known works.
A collection of essays
A collection of essays and short stories
"O.U. Levon" spelled backwards produces "novel U.O" This book was jointly written by a creative writing class taught by Kesey at the University of Oregon (U.O.).
A play / photographic record
A children's book
A novel
A Western genre novel
A play
An expansion of the 1967 journals that Kesey kept while incarcerated
See also
Summer of Love
Wavy Gravy
Footnotes
Further reading
Ronald Gregg Billingsley, The Artistry of Ken Kesey. PhD dissertation. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon, 1971.
Dedria Bryfonski, Mental illness in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2010.
Rick Dodgson, It's All Kind of Magic: The Young Ken Kesey. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.
Robert Faggen, "Ken Kesey, The Art of Fiction No. 136," The Paris Review, Spring 1994.
Barry H. Leeds, Ken Kesey. New York: F. Ungar Publishing Co., 1981.
Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: the Inside History of the Grateful Dead. Broadway Books, 2002.
Tim Owen, "Remembering Ken Kesey," Cosmik Debris Magazine, November 10, 2001.
M. Gilbert Porter, The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey's Fiction. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1982.
Elaine B Safer, The contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988.
Peter Swirski, "You're Not in Canada until You Can Hear the Loons Crying; or, Voting, People's Power and Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," in Swirski, American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Stephen L. Tanner, Ken Kesey. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1983.
External links
Bruce Carnes, Ken Kesey, Western Writers Series Digital Editions at Boise State University
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters
Article on Ken Kesey lecture at Virginia Commonwealth University, Feb. 20, 1990
Ken Kesey Documentary produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting
Chip Brown, "Ken Kesey Kisses No Ass" Esquire Magazine; September 1992
Ken Kesey On Misconceptions Of Counterculture, NPR's Fresh Air; August 12, 2011
Ken Kesey papers at the University of Oregon
1935 births
2001 deaths
20th-century American essayists
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American short story writers
Activists from California
American male essayists
American male novelists
American male short story writers
American psychological fiction writers
American SubGenii
Beat Generation writers
Counterculture festivals activists
Deaths from cancer in Oregon
Deaths from liver cancer
Drug policy reform activists
Novelists from Oregon
Oregon Ducks wrestlers
People from La Junta, Colorado
People from Pleasant Hill, Oregon
People from Springfield, Oregon
People who faked their own death
Postmodern writers
Pranksters
Psychedelic drug advocates
University of Oregon alumni
Wrestlers from Oregon
Writers from California
20th-century American male writers | [
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17260 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandahar | Kandahar | Kandahar (; Kandahār, , Qandahār) is a city in Afghanistan, located in the south of the country on the Arghandab River, at an elevation of . It is Afghanistan's second largest city after Kabul, with a population of about 614,118. It is the capital of Kandahar Province as well as the de facto capital of the Taliban, formally known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It also happens to be the centre of the larger cultural region called Loy Kandahar. In 1709, Mirwais Hotak made the region an independent kingdom and turned Kandahar into the capital of the Hotak dynasty. In 1747, Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Durrani dynasty, made Kandahar the capital of the Afghan Empire.
Kandahar is one of the most culturally significant cities of the Pashtuns and has been their traditional seat of power for more than 300 years. It is a major trading centre for sheep, wool, cotton, silk, felt, food grains, fresh and dried fruit, and tobacco. The region produces fine fruits, especially pomegranates and grapes, and the city has plants for canning, drying, and packing fruit, and is a major source of marijuana and hashish.
The region around Kandahar is one of the oldest known human settlements. A major fortified city existed at the site of Kandahar, probably as early as 1000–750 BC, and it became an important outpost of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire in the 6th century BC. Alexander the Great had laid-out the foundation of what is now Old Kandahar in the 4th century BC and gave it the Ancient Greek name Ἀλεξάνδρεια Ἀραχωσίας ().
Many empires have long fought over the city due to its strategic location along the trade routes of southern, central and western Asia.
Name
The city was founded by Alexander the Great in 330 BC who named it Alexandria in Arachosia, which was the recorded name for this city until the Islamic conquest. It is suggested that the name "Kandahar" evolved from "Iskandar" pronounced as "Scandar" , in the local dialect version of the name Alexander. The change of the name from "Scandar" to Candar is mentioned by the 15th-century Portuguese historian João de Barros in his most famous work, Décadas da Ásia.
A folk etymology offered is that the word "kand" or "qand" in Persian and Pashto (the local languages) is the origin of the word "candy". The name "Candahar" or "Kandahar" in this form probably translates to candy area. This probably has to do with the location being fertile and historically known for producing fine grapes, pomegranates, apricots, melons and other sweet fruits.
Ernst Herzfeld claimed Kandahar perpetuated the name of the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares, who re-founded the city under the name Gundopharron. An alternative etymology derives the name of the city from Gandhara, the name of an ancient Hindu-Buddhist kingdom located between the Kunar River and Indus River, centred on the Peshawar Valley.
History
Prehistory
Excavations of prehistoric sites by archaeologists such as Louis Dupree and others suggest that the region around Kandahar is one of the oldest human settlements known so far.
British excavations in the 1970s discovered that Kandahar existed as a large fortified city during the early 1st millennium BC; while this earliest period at Kandahar has not been precisely dated via radiocarbon, ceramic comparisons with the latest period at the major Bronze Age city of Mundigak have suggested an approximate time-frame of 1000 to 750 BC. This fortified city became an important outpost of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th to 4th centuries BC, and formed part of the province of Arachosia.
Alexandria
The now "Old Kandahar" was founded in 330 BC by Alexander the Great, near the site of the ancient city of Mundigak (established around 3000 BC). Mundigak served as the provincial capital of Arachosia and was ruled by the Medes followed by the Achaemenids until the arrival of the Greeks from Macedonia. The main inhabitants of Arachosia were the Pakhtas, an ancient Indo-Iranian tribe, who may be among the ancestors of today's Pashtuns. Kandahar was named Alexandria, a name given to cities that Alexander founded during his conquests.
Kandahar has been a frequent target for conquest because of its strategic location in Asia, controlling the main trade route linking the Indian subcontinent with the Middle East and Central Asia. The territory became part of the Seleucid Empire after the death of Alexander. It is mentioned by Strabo that a treaty of friendship was established eventually between the Greeks and the Mauryas (Indians). The city eventually became part of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (250 BC – 125 BC), and continued that way for two hundred years under the later Indo-Greek Kingdom (180 BC – 10 AD).
While the Diadochi were warring amongst themselves, the Mauryas were developing in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. The founder of the empire, Chandragupta Maurya, confronted a Macedonian invasion force led by Seleucus I in 305 BC and following a brief conflict, an agreement was reached as Seleucus ceded Gandhara and Arachosia and areas south of Bagram to the Mauryas. During the 120 years of the Mauryas in southern Afghanistan, Buddhism was introduced and eventually become a major religion alongside Zoroastrianism and local pagan beliefs.
Inscriptions made by Emperor Ashoka, a fragment of Edict 13 in Greek, as well as a full Edict, written in both Greek and Aramaic has been discovered in Kandahar. It is said to be written in excellent Classical Greek, using sophisticated philosophical terms. In this Edict, Ashoka the great uses the word Eusebeia ("Piety") as the Greek translation for the ubiquitous "Dharma" of his other Edicts written in Prakrit.
Islamic period
In the 7th century AD, Arab armies conquered the region with the new religion of Islam but were unable to succeed in fully converting the population. The leader of the expedition that conquered the city was Abbad ibn Ziyad, who governed Sijistan between 673 and 681. In AD 870, Yaqub ibn Layth Saffari, a local ruler of the Saffarid dynasty, conquered Kandahar and the rest of the nearby regions in the name of Islam.
It is believed that the Zunbil dynasty were probably the rulers of the Kandahar region from the 7th century until the late 9th century AD. Kandahar was taken by Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni in the 11th century followed by the Ghurids of Ghor.
Kandahar appears to have been renamed Teginābād in the 10th-12th centuries, but the origin of the new name is unclear. During this period, nearby Panjway served as the administrative center for the area. However, Kandahar was of much more strategic importance, to the extent that Minhaj-i-Siraj attributes the downfall of the Ghaznavids to the loss of Kandahar. The city's name was changed back to Kandahar by the 13th century, after Ala ad-Din Husayn Jahansuz sacked Lashkari Bazar, near Bost. Again, the reason for the name change is not clear.
Kandahar was besieged by a Mongol army in 1221, although Jalal ad-Din Mingburnu defeated them. In 1251, upon accession to the Mongol throne, Möngke Khan granted Kandahar, along with other lands in Afghanistan, to Shams ad-Din Mohammad Kart of the Kart dynasty. However, the city is mentioned as being under Chagatai control in 1260–61; Kandahar didn't come under Kart control until 1281. Later, in 1318, a Chagatai prince raised an army from Kandahar against the Ilkhanid governor of Sistan. Kandahar was described by Ibn Battuta in 1333 as a large and prosperous town three nights journey from Ghazni.
Timur the Great, founder of the Timurid Empire, captured Kandahar in 1383. He appointed his grandson Pir Muhammad as governor of Kandahar in 1390. Following his death in 1405, the city was ruled by other Timurid governors. Kandahar was entrusted to the Arghuns in the late 15th century, who eventually achieved independence from the Timurids. Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, is believed to have visited the town (c. 1521 AD) during his important journey between Hindustan and Mecca in Arabia.
Tamerlane's descendant, Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, annexed Kandahar in 1508. In 1554, Babur's son, Humayun, handed it over to the Safavid Shah Tahmasp in return of 12,000 soldiers he received from the Shah to reconquer India. In 1595, Humayun's son Akbar the Great reconquered the city by diplomacy. Akbar died in 1605 and when this news reached the Persian court, Shah Abbas ordered his army to besiege the city which continued until early 1606 and finally failed due to the reinforcements sent by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir that forced the Safavid retreat. In the Mughal–Safavid War, Kandahar was once again lost to the Safavids. In 1698, Mughals under Samandar Khan of Kalat State captured Kandahar again. Kandahar was regarded as important to the Mughal Empire because it was one of the gateways to India, and Mughal control over Kandahar helped to prevent foreign intrusions.
The memory of the wars fought over Kandahar at this time is preserved in the epic poem Qandahār-nāma ("The Campaign Against Qandahār"), a major work of Saib Tabrizi which is a classic of Persian literature.
Modern
Mirwais Hotak, chief of the Ghilji tribe, revolted in 1709 by killing Gurgin Khan, an ethnic Georgian subject and governor of the Shia Safavid Persians. After establishing the Hotak dynasty in Kandahar, Mirwais and his army successfully defeated subsequent expeditions by Kay Khusraw and Rustam Khán. Mirwais resisted attempts by the Persian government who were seeking to convert the Afghans from Sunni to the Shia sect of Islam. He died of a natural death in November 1715 and was succeeded by his brother Abdul Aziz, but after being suspected of giving Kandahar's sovereignty back to the Persians he was killed by his nephew Mahmud Hotak.
In 1722, Mahmud led an army of Afghans to the Safavid capital Isfahan and proclaimed himself King of Persia. The Hotak dynasty was eventually removed from power by a new Persian ruler, Nader Shah. In 1738, Nader Shah invaded Afghanistan and destroyed the now Old Kandahar, which was held by Hussain Hotak and his Ghilji tribes. In the meantime, Nader Shah freed Ahmad Khan (later Ahmad Shah Durrani) and his brother Zulfikar who were held prisoners by the Hotak ruler. Before leaving southern Afghanistan for Delhi in India, Nader Shah laid out the foundation for a new town to be built next to the destroyed ancient city, naming it "Naderabad". His rule ended in June 1747 after being murdered by his Persian guards.
Ahmad Shah Durrani, chief of the Durrani tribe, gained control of Kandahar and made it the capital of his new Afghan Empire in October 1747. Initially, Ahmad Shah had trouble finding land on which to build his city. His own tribe had no extensive lands and others who had, such as the Alikozai and Barakzai, refused to give up their lands. Only the Popalzai finally offered him his pick of their lands. The foundations for the city were laid in June, 1761. Once begun, the city was built with grand proportions. It was laid out in the form of a regular rectangle with a circumference of three miles; walls 30 feet thick at the bottom and 15 feet at the top, rose 27 feet high to enclose it. Outside, the walls were ringed by a moat 24 feet wide. Six mammoth gateways pierced these walls: the Eid Gah Gate on the north, the Shikarpur Gate on the south; the Herat and Top Khana Gates on the west; and, the Bar Durrani and Kabul Gates on the east. At its peak, Ahmad Shah's empire included present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Khorasan and Kohistan provinces of Iran, along with Punjab in India. In October 1772, Ahmad Shah retired and died from a natural cause. A new city was laid out by Ahmad Shah and is dominated by his mausoleum, which is adjacent to the Mosque of the Cloak in the centre of the city. By 1776, his eldest son Timur Shah had transferred Afghanistan's main capital, due to several conflicts with various Pashtun tribes, from Kandahar to Kabul, where the Durrani legacy continued.
From 1818 to 1855, Kandahar was ruled by half-brothers of Dost Mohammad Khan as an independent principality. In September 1826, Syed Ahmad Shaheed's followers arrived to Kandahar in search of volunteers to help them wage jihad against the Sikh invaders to what is now Pakistan. Led by Ranjit Singh, the Sikhs had captured several of Afghanistan's territories in the east, including what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Kashmir. More than 400 local Kandahar warriors assembled themselves for the jihad. Sayed Din Mohammad Kandharai was appointed as their leader.
British-led Indian forces from neighbouring British India invaded the city in 1839, during the First Anglo-Afghan War, but withdrew in 1842. In November 1855 Dost Mohammad Khan conquered Kandahar. The British and Indian forces returned in 1878 during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. They emerged from the city in July 1880 to confront the forces of Ayub Khan, but were defeated at the Battle of Maiwand. They were again forced to withdraw a few years later, despite winning the Battle of Kandahar.
Kandahar remained peaceful for the next 100 years, except during 1929 when loyalists of Habibullah Kalakani (Bache Saqqaw) placed the fortified city on lock-down and began torturing its population. Nobody was allowed to enter or leave from within the city's tall defensive walls, and as a result of this many people suffered after running out of food supplies. This lasted until October 1929 when Nadir Khan and his Afghan army came to eliminate Kalakani, known as the Tajik bandit from the village of Kalakan in northern Kabul Province.
During Zahir Shah's rule, the city slowly began expanding by adding modern style streets and housing schemes. In the 1960s, during the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, Kandahar International Airport was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers next to the city. The U.S. also completed several other major projects in Kandahar and in other parts of southern Afghanistan. In the meantime, Soviet engineers were busy building major infrastructures in other parts of the country, such as Bagram Airfield and Kabul International Airport.
During the 1980s, Soviet–Afghan War, Kandahar city (and the province as a whole) witnessed heavy fighting as it became a centre of resistance as the mujahideen forces waged a strong guerrilla warfare against the Soviet-backed government, who tightly held on control of the city. Government and Soviet troops surrounded the city and subjected it to heavy air bombardment in which many civilians lost lives. In January 1982 indiscriminate shelling and bombing by the Soviets killed hundreds. 300 civilians were killed during Soviet bombings in July 1984. It was under siege again in April 1986. Kandahar International Airport was used by the Soviet Army during their ten-year troop placement in the country. The city also became a battle ground for the US and Pakistani-backed against the pro-Communist government of Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal and the collapse of Najibullah's government in 1992, Kandahar fell to local mujahideen commander, Gul Agha Sherzai. However Sherzai lacked authority against other local commanders which led to lawlessness in the city, and fighting in 1993.
In August 1994, the Taliban, under Mohammed Omar Mujahid, captured Kandahar from commander Mullah Naqib almost without a fight, and turned the city to its capital. The Taliban introduced a strict form of the Sharia law, banning formal education for boys and girls, including watching TV, films, music, and playing sports. In December 1999, a hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814 plane by Pakistani militants loyal to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen landed at Kandahar International Airport and kept the passengers hostage as part of a demand to release three Pakistani militants from prison in India.
21st century
In October 2001, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, the United States Navy began hitting targets inside the city by precision-guided cruise missiles that were fired from the Persian Gulf. These targets were the airport and buildings that were occupied by the Taliban, including Arab families who had arrived several years earlier and were residing in the area. About a month later, the Taliban began surrendering in mass numbers to a private militia that had been formed by Gul Agha Sherzai and Hamid Karzai. Kandahar once again fell into the hands of Sherzai, who had control over the area before the rise of the Taliban. He was transferred in 2003 and replaced by Yousef Pashtun until Asadullah Khalid took the post in 2005. The current Governor of the province is Toryalai Wesa. He was appointed by President Hamid Karzai in December 2008 after Rahmatullah Raufi's four-month rule.
As of 2002, Kandahar International Airport is used by members of the United States armed forces and NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). NATO began training the newly formed Afghan National Police and are now given the security responsibility of the city. The military of Afghanistan, backed by NATO forces, has gradually expanded its authority and presence throughout most of the country. The 205th Corps of the Afghan National Army is based at Kandahar and provides military assistance to the south of the country. The Canadian Forces maintain their military command headquarters at Kandahar, heading the Regional Command South of the NATO led International Security Assistance Force in Kandahar Province. The Taliban also have supporters inside the city reporting on events.
NATO forces expanded the Afghan police force for the prevention of a Taliban comeback in Kandahar, the militants' "spiritual birthplace" and a strategic key to ward off the Taliban insurgency, as a part of a larger effort that also aimed to deliver services such as electricity and clean drinking water that the Taliban could not provide – encouraging support for the government in a city that was once the Taliban's headquarters. The most significant battle between NATO troops and the Taliban lasted throughout the summer of 2006, culminating in Operation Medusa. The Taliban failed to defeat the Western troops in open warfare, which marked a turn in their tactics towards IED emplacement. In June 2008, it was reported that over 1,000 inmates had escaped from Sarposa prison. In Spring 2010, the province and the city of Kandahar became a target of American operations following Operation Moshtarak in the neighbouring Helmand Province. In March 2010, U.S. and NATO commanders released details of plans for the biggest offensive of the war against the Taliban insurgency.
In May 2010, Kandahar International Airport became subject of a combined rocket and ground attack by insurgents, following similar attacks on Kabul and Bagram in the preceding weeks. Although this attack did not lead to many casualties on the side of NATO forces, it did show that the militants are still capable of launching multiple, coordinated operations in Afghanistan. In June 2010, a shura was held by Afghan President Hamid Karzai with tribal and religious leaders of the Kandahar region. The meeting highlighted the need for support of NATO-led forces in order to stabilize parts of the province.
By 2011, Kandahar became known as the assassination city of Afghanistan after witnessing many targeted killings. In July Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai, was shot by his long time head of security. Soon after the Quetta Shura of the Taliban claimed responsibility. The next day an Islamic cleric (mulla) of the famous Red Mosque in the Shahr-e Naw area of the city and a number of other people were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber who had hidden explosives inside his turban. On 27 July 2011, the mayor of the city, Ghulam Haider Hamidi, was assassinated by another Taliban militant who had hidden explosives in his turban. Two deputy mayors had been killed in 2010, while many tribal elders and Islamic clerics have also been assassinated in the last several years.
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy network is often blamed as the masterminds behind the Taliban-led insurgency. The Afghan government alleges that the ISI is using the insurgents in the name of Islamic jihad to counter the growing influence of its rival India in Afghanistan and the Afghan claim regarding the disputed Durand Line border. The overwhelming majority of the victims in the attacks are ordinary Afghan civilians. On 6 June 2012, at least 21 civilians were killed and 50 others injured when two Taliban suicide bombers on motorcycles blew themselves up in a market area near Kandahar International Airport.
On 4 May 2020, a policewoman was assassinated in the centre of Kandahar, making her the fifth policewoman to be killed during the previous two months in Kandahar. No group claimed responsibility for the killing of the policewomen.
On 12 August 2021, the Taliban captured Kandahar. After days of brutal clashes with ANA soldiers retreating from the city, the Taliban were finally able to capture the city. It became the twelfth provincial capital to be seized by Taliban as part of the wider 2021 Taliban offensive.
On 15 October 2021, four suicide bombers killed dozens at a Shia mosque in the city.
Geography
The Arghandab River runs along the west of Kandahar. The city has 15 districts and a total land area of 27,337 hectares. The total number of dwellings in Kandahar is 61,902.
Land use
Kandahar is the regional hub in southern Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan. Non-built up land use accounts for 59% of the total land area. Within the built-up area, vacant plots occupy a slightly higher percentage of land (36%) than residential land (34%). There is a significant commercial cluster along the road to Pakistan in District 5. India, Iran and Pakistan have consulates here for trade, military and political links.
Climate
Kandahar has a hot desert climate (Köppen BWh), characterised by little precipitation and high variation between summer and winter temperatures. Summers start in mid-May, last until late-September, and are extremely dry. Temperatures peak in July with a 24-hour daily average of around . They are followed by dry autumns from early October to late November, with days still averaging in the 20s °C (above 68 °F) into November, though nights are sharply cooler. Winter begins in December and sees most of its precipitation in the form of rain. Temperatures average in January, although lows can drop well below freezing. They end in early-March and are followed by a pleasant spring till late-April with temperatures generally in the upper 10s °C to lower 30s °C (65–88 °F) range. Sunny weather dominates year-round, especially in summer, when rainfall is extremely rare. The annual mean temperature is .
Transport
Kandahar International Airport serves as southern Afghanistan's main airport for domestic and international flights. It is also used as a major military base as well as shipping and receiving of supplies for the NATO armies. The entire area in and around the airport is heavily guarded but a section is designated for civilian passengers. Most international flights are to the UAE, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
Pakistan plans to build a railroad track from the Pakistani town of Chaman to Kandahar which will connect Afghan Railways with Pakistan Railways. The feasibility study was completed in 2006 but no construction work had begun.
Kandahar is connected to Quetta Pakistan via Chaman and Kabul by the Kabul-Kandahar Highway and to Herat by the Kandahar-Herat Highway. There is a bus station located at the start of the Kabul-Kandahar Highway, where a number of privately owned older-model Mercedes-Benz coach buses are available to take passengers to most major cities of the country. Kandahar is also connected by road to Quetta in neighbouring Pakistan. Due to the ongoing war, the route to Kabul has become increasingly dangerous as insurgent attacks on convoys and destruction of bridges make it an unreliable link between the two cities.
Commuters in the city of Kandahar use the public bus system (Milli Bus), and taxicabs and rickshaws are common. Private vehicle use is increasing, partially due to road and highway improvements. Large dealerships are importing cars from Dubai, UAE.
Education
Before the 1978 coup in Kabul, majority of the city's population were enrolled in schools. Nearly all of the elite class of the city fled to neighboring Pakistan during the early 1980s, and from there they began immigrating to North America, Europe, Australia and other parts of the world.
The two oldest known schools are Ahmad Shah Baba High School and Zarghona Ana High School. There are a number of new schools that opened in the last decade, with more being built in the future as the city's population grows with the large returning Afghans from neighboring countries. Afghan Turk High Schools is one of the top private schools in the city.
The main university is the Kandahar University. A number of private higher education institutions have also opened in the last decade such as Benawa Institute of Higher Education, Mirwais Neeka Institute of Higher Education, Malalay Institute of Higher Education and Saba Institute of Higher Education.
Communications
Telecommunication services in the city are provided by Afghan Wireless, Roshan, Etisalat, MTN Group and Afghan Telecom. In November 2006, the Afghan Ministry of Communications signed a $64.5 million agreement with ZTE for the establishment of a countrywide fibre optical cable network. This was intended to improve telephone, internet, television and radio broadcast services not just in Kandahar but throughout the country.
Places of interest
The tomb of Ahmad Shah Durrani is located in the city centre, which also houses Durrani's brass helmet and other personal items. In front of Durrani's mausoleum is the Shrine of the Cloak, containing one of the most valued relics in the Islamic world, which was given by the Emir of Bokhara (Murad Beg) to Ahmad Shah Durrani. The Sacred Cloak is kept locked away, taken out only at times of great crisis. Mullah Omar took it out in November 1996 and displayed it to a crowd of ulema of religious scholars to have himself declared Amir al-Mu'minin (Commander of the Faithful). Prior to that it was taken out when the city was struck by a cholera epidemic in the 1930s.
The village of Sher Surkh is located southeast of the city, in the suburbs of the old city of Nadirabad. Kandahar Museum is located at the western end of the third block of buildings lining the main road east of Eidgah Durwaza (gate). It has many paintings by the now famous Ghiyassuddin, painted while he was a young teacher in Kandahar. He is acknowledged among Afghanistan's leading artists.
Just to the north of the city, off its northeast corner at the end of buria (matting) bazaar, there is a shrine dedicated to a saint who lived in Kandahar more than 300 years ago. The grave of Hazratji Baba, long to signify his greatness, but otherwise covered solely by rock chips, is undecorated save for tall pennants at its head. A monument to Islamic martyrs stands in the centre of Kandahar's main square, called Da Shahidanu Chawk, which was built in the 1940s.
The Chilzina is a rock-cut chamber above the plain at the end of the rugged chain of mountains forming the western defence of Kandahar's Old City. This is here that Ashoka's Kandahar Bilingual Rock Inscription was found. Forty steps, about, lead to the chamber, which is guarded by two chained lions, defaced, and inscribed with an account of Mughal conquest. The rugged cliffs from which the Chilzina was hewn form the natural western bastion of the Old City of Kandahar, which was destroyed in 1738 by Nadir Shah Afshar of Persia.
A short distance from Chilzina, going west on the main highway, a bright blue dome appears on the right. This is the mausoleum of Mirwais Hotak, the Ghiljai chieftain who declared Kandahar's independence from the Persians in 1709. The shrine of Baba Wali Kandhari (Baba Sahib), its terraces shaded by pomegranate groves beside the Arghandab River, is also very popular for picnics and afternoon outings. He was a Muslim pir who had a strange encounter with Guru Nanak at Hasan Abdal in what is now Attock District of Pakistan. The shrine of Baba Wali is important to Muslims and Sikhs. Close to Baba Wali's shrine is a military base established by the United States armed forces in about 2007.
Development and modernization
Decades of war left Kandahar and the rest of the country destroyed and depopulated, but in recent years billions of dollars began pouring in for construction purposes and millions of expats have returned to Afghanistan. New residential areas have been established around the city, and a number of modern-style buildings have been constructed.
Some residents of the city have access to clean drinking water and electricity, and the government is working to extend these services to every home. The city relies on electricity from the Kajaki hydroelectricity plant in neighbouring Helmand, which is being upgraded or expanded. About north of the city is the Dahla Dam, the second largest dam in Afghanistan.
The Aino Mina is a new housing project for up to two million people on the northern edge of the city. Originally called the Kandahar Valley and started by Mahmud Karzai, it was announced that the project would build up to 20,000 single-family homes and associated infrastructure such as roads, water and sewer systems, and community buildings, including schools.
It recently won 2 awards, the Residential Project and Sustainable Project of the Year at the Middle East Architect Awards. Many of the high-ranking government employees and civil servants as well as wealthy businessmen live in this area, which is a more secured community in Kandahar. Work on the next $100 million scheme was initiated in 2011.
Also, construction of Hamidi Township in the Morchi Kotal area of the city began in August 2011. It is named after Ghulam Haider Hamidi, the mayor of Kandahar who was assassinated by militants in late July 2011. Situated along the Kandahar-Uruzgan Highway in the northeast of the city, the new township will have 2,000 residential and commercial plots. Including new roads, schools, commercial markets, clinics, canals and other facilities.
About east of Kandahar, a huge industrial park is under construction with modern facilities. The park will have professional management for the daily maintenance of public roads, internal streets, common areas, parking areas, 24 hours perimeter security, access control for vehicles and persons.
Airports
Kandahar International Airport
Neighborhoods
Aino Meyna (under development since 2003)
Hamidi Meyna (under development since 2011)
Share Naw (meaning New City)
Dand
Karz
Mirwais Meyna
Daman
Sarpuza
Malajat
Old Kandahar (Zorr Shar)
Arghandab Valley
Cultural sites and parks
Kandahar Park
Baba Saab
Kokaran Park
Baghi Pul Park
Chilzina View (Moghul Emperor Babur's inscription site)
Kandahar Museum
Mosques and shrines
Friday Mosque of Kandahar
Shrine of the Cloak
Mosque of the Hair of the Prophet
Mosque at Kandahar University (Eidgah Jaami Jumat)
Mausoleums
Mausoleum of Ahmad Shah Durrani
Mausoleum of Mirwais Hotak
Mausoleum of Baba Wali
Shopping
Al-Jadeed indoor shopping center
Herat Bazaar
Kabul Bazaar
Shah Bazaar
Shkar Pur Bazaar
Piaroz Super store
Kandahr Super Store
Samimi Super Store
Hospitals
Afghan National Army Regional Hospital
Mirwais Hospital
Sial Curative Hospital
Bilal Hospital
Momand Hospital
Sydal Hospital
Banks
AIB Bank
Kabul Bank
Azizi Bank
Sports
Professional sports teams from Kandahar
Stadium
Kandahar International Cricket Stadium (under construction)
Kandahar Stadium used for football
Ahmad Shahi Stadium, 20,000-capacity, used for football
Demography and culture
The population of Kandahar numbers approximately 651,484 . The Pashtuns make up the overwhelming majority population of the city and province but exact figures are not available. In a 2003 estimate by the National Geographic, Pashtuns were put at ca. 70%, Tajiks 20%, Baloch 2%, and Uzbeks 2%.
Pashto serves as the main language in the city and the region. Persian is also understood by a fair number of the city dwellers, especially those serving in the government and the educated Afghans. Both are the official languages of Afghanistan. A 2006 compendium of provincial data prepared by the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development and United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) states:
In another report, by BBC news Farsi, there are roughly 50,000-100,000 Tajik or Persian speakers in the city of Kandahar. The "Council for Tajiks of the south" head office is also based in Kandahar city.
The Pashtun culture is dominant in this region.
Notable people
Nur Jahan – Empress of the Mughal Empire
Mirwais Hotak – founder of the Hotak dynasty
Abdul Aziz Hotak – ruler of the Hotak dynasty
Mahmud Hotak – ruler of the Hotak dynasty and Shah of Persia
Ashraf Hotak – Shah of Persia
Hussain Hotak – ruler of the Hotak dynasty
Ahmad Shah Durrani – founding father of Afghanistan, buried in the city
Dost Mohammad Khan – Emir of Afghanistan and son of Payandah Khan
Sher Ali Khan – Emir of Afghanistan and son of Dost Mohammad Khan
Abdur Rahman Khan – Emir of Afghanistan and son of Dost Mohammad Khan
Ghulam Muhammad Tarzi – leader of Tarzi family who played an important part in Afghan history during the late 19th century onward
Abdul Rehman Khan, father of Bollywood actor Kader Khan
Mohammad Ibraheem Khwakhuzhi
Maryam Durani an Afghan activist and women's advocate
Ubaidullah Jan – Pashto music king of southern Afghanistan
Naghma – Afghan singer
Nashenas – Afghan musician
Abdul Hai Habibi – scholar, former professor at Kabul University and author of many books
The Karzais – the family of Afghan President Hamid Karzai
Gul Agha Sherzai – served as the governor of Kandahar Province followed by as governors of Nangarhar Province
Said Tayeb Jawad – former Afghanistan Ambassador to the United States
Yousef Pashtun – Afghan politician
Khan Mohammad Mujahid – Alokozai tribe leader
See also
Kandahar Province
Old Kandahar
Arachosia
Alexandria Arachosia
Yazidis of Kandahar
Operation Dreamseed
Footnotes
References
Hill, John E. 2004. The Peoples of the West from the Weilue 魏略 by Yu Huan 魚豢: A Third Century Chinese Account Composed between 239 and 265 CE. Draft annotated English translation.
Hill, John E. (2009) Through the Jade Gate to Rome: A Study of the Silk Routes during the Later Han dynasty, 1st to 2nd centuries CE. BookSurge, Charleston, South Carolina. .
Frye, Richard N. (1963). The Heritage of Persia. World Publishing company, Cleveland, Ohio. Mentor Book edition, 1966.
Toynbee, Arnold J. (1961). Between Oxus and Jumna. London. Oxford University Press.
Willem Vogelsang (1985). "Early historical Arachosia in South-east Afghanistan; Meeting-place between East and West." Iranica antiqua, 20 (1985), pp. 55–99.
Wood, Michael (1997). In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great: A Journey from Greece to Asia. University of California Press.
Further reading
Published in the 19th century
Boulger, Demetrius Charles. Ought We to Hold Candahar?. London: William H. Allen and Company (1879).
Published in the 20th century
Published in the 21st century
External links
Map of Kandahar, from Afghanistan Information Management Services
Populated places established in the 4th century BC
330s BC establishments
Populated places in Kandahar Province
Cities founded by Alexander the Great
Populated places along the Silk Road
Cities in Central Asia
Cities in Afghanistan
Provincial capitals in Afghanistan | [
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17262 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar%20Schwenckfeld | Caspar Schwenckfeld | Caspar (or Kaspar) Schwen(c)kfeld von Ossig () (1489 or 1490 – 10 December 1561) was a German theologian, writer, physician, naturalist, and preacher who became a Protestant Reformer and spiritualist. He was one of the earliest promoters of the Protestant Reformation in Silesia.
Schwenckfeld came to Reformation principles through Thomas Müntzer and Andreas Karlstadt. However, he developed his own principles and fell out with Martin Luther over the eucharistic controversy (1524). He had his own views on the sacraments - the Heavenly Flesh doctrine - developed in close association with his humanist colleague, Valentin Crautwald (1465–1545). His followers became a new sect (see Schwenckfelders), which was outlawed in Germany, but his ideas influenced Anabaptism, Pietism on mainland Europe, and Puritanism in England.
Many of his followers were persecuted in Europe and thus forced to either convert or flee. Because of this, there are Schwenkfelder Church congregations in countries such as the United States (which was then the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain).
Life
Early life
Schwenckfeld was born in Ossig near Liegnitz, Silesia now Osiek, near Legnica, Poland, to noble parents in 1489. From 1505 to 1507 he was a student in Cologne, and in 1507 enrolled at the University of Frankfurt on the Oder. Between 1511 and 1523, Schwenckfeld served the Duchy of Liegnitz as an adviser to Duke Charles I (1511–1515), Duke George I (1515–1518), and Duke Frederick II (1518–1523).
From Catholic to Magisterial Reformer to Radical Reformer
In 1518 or 1519, Schwenckfeld experienced an awakening that he called a "visitation of God". Luther's writings had a deep influence on Schwenckfeld, and he embraced the "Lutheran" Reformation and became a student of the Scriptures. In 1521, Schwenckfeld began to preach the gospel, and in 1522 won Duke Friedrich II over to Protestantism. He organized a Brotherhood of his converts for the purpose of study and prayer in 1523. In 1525, he rejected Luther's idea of Real Presence and came to a spiritual interpretation of the Lord's Supper, which was subsequently rejected by Luther. Schwenckfeld began to teach that the true believer ate the spiritual body of Christ. He pushed for reformation wherever he went, but also criticized reformers that he thought went to extremes. He emphasized that for one to be a true Christian, one must not change only outwardly but inwardly. Because of the communion and other controversies, Schwenckfeld broke with Luther and followed what some describe as a "middle way". Because of his break from Luther and the Magisterial Reformation, scholars typically categorize Schwenckfeld as a member of the Radical Reformation. He voluntarily exiled himself from Silesia in 1529 in order to relieve pressure on and embarrassment of his duke. He lived in Strassburg from 1529–1534 and then in Swabia.
Teachings
Some of the teachings of Schwenckfeld included opposition to war, secret societies, and oath-taking, that the government had no right to command one's conscience, that regeneration is by grace through inner work of the Spirit, that believers feed on Christ spiritually, and that believers must give evidence of regeneration. He rejected infant baptism, outward church forms, and "denominations". His views on the Eucharist prompted Luther to publish several sermons on the subject in his 1526 The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics.
Publications
In 1540 Martin Luther expelled Caspar Schwenckfeld from Silesia. In 1541, Schwenckfeld published the Great Confession on the Glory of Christ. Many considered the writing to be heretical. He taught that Christ had two natures, divine and human, but that he became progressively more divine. He also published a number of works about interpreting the Scriptures during the 1550s, often responding to the rebuttals of the Lutheran Reformer Matthias Flacius Illyricus.
Schwenckfeld's Theriotropheum Silesiae is considered the world's oldest published local faunal list containing a list of the animals of Silesia including 150 bird species.
Death
In 1561, Schwenckfeld became sick with dysentery, and gradually grew weaker until he died in Ulm on the morning of December 10, 1561. Because of his enemies, the fact of his death and the place of his burial were kept secret.
Schwenkfelder Church
Schwenckfeld did not organize a separate church during his lifetime, but followers seemed to gather around his writings and sermons. In 1700 there were about 1,500 of them in Lower Silesia. Many fled Silesia under persecution of the Austrian emperor, and some found refuge on the lands of Count Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf and his Herrnhuter Brüdergemeinde. These followers became known as Schwenkfelders. A group arrived in Philadelphia in 1731, followed by five more migrations up to 1737. In 1782, the Society of Schwenkfelders was formed, and in 1909 the Schwenkfelder Church was organized.
The Schwenkfelder Church has remained small, and currently there are five churches with about 3,000 members in southeastern Pennsylvania. All of these bodies are within a fifty-mile radius of Philadelphia.
Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center
The Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center is a small museum, library and archives in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. It is the only institution dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of the Schwenkfelder story, including Caspar Schwenckfeld, the Radical Reformation, religious toleration, the Schwenkfelders in Europe and America, and the Schwenkfelder Church. The Schwenkfelder Library & Heritage Center has exhibits and programs throughout the year.
Notes
References
Peter C. Erb: Schwenckfeld in his Reformation Setting. Valley Forge, Pa: Judson Press, 1978.
Edited by Chester David Hartranft et alii: Corpus Schwenkfeldianorum . Vols. 1-19. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1907–1961.
Paul L. Maier: Caspar Schwenckfeld on the Person and Work of Christ. A Study of Schwenckfeldian Theology at Its Core. Assen, The Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum Ltd, 1959.
R. Emmet McLaughlin: Caspar Schwenckfeld, reluctant radical : his life to 1540. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1986
Rufus M. Jones: Spiritual reformers in the 16th and 17th centuries. London: Macmillan, 1914.
Douglas H. Shantz: Crautwald and Erasmus. A Study in Humanism and Radical Reform in Sixteenth Century Silesia. Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1992.
External links
The Life & Thought of Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig
Caspar von Schwenckfeld in Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online
15th-century births
1561 deaths
16th-century German Protestant theologians
16th-century German male writers
Deaths from dysentery
German male non-fiction writers
German Protestant Reformers
German spiritualists
Infectious disease deaths in Germany
People from Lubin County
Silesian-German people
Silesian nobility
European University Viadrina alumni | [
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17264 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitt%20Peak%20National%20Observatory | Kitt Peak National Observatory | The Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) is a United States astronomical observatory located on Kitt Peak of the Quinlan Mountains in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert on the Tohono O'odham Nation, west-southwest of Tucson, Arizona. With more than twenty optical and two radio telescopes, it is one of the largest gatherings of astronomical instruments in the northern hemisphere.
Kitt Peak National Observatory was founded in 1958. It was home to what was the largest solar telescope in the world, and many large astronomical telescopes of the late 20th century in the United States.
The observatory was administered by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) from the early 1980s until 2019, after which it was overseen by NOIRLab.
General information
Kitt Peak was selected by its first director, Aden B. Meinel, in 1958 as the site for a national observatory under contract with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and was administered by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. The land was leased from the Tohono O'odham under a perpetual agreement. The second director (1960 to 1971) was Nicholas U. Mayall. In 1982, NOAO was formed to consolidate the management of three optical observatories — Kitt Peak; the National Solar Observatory facilities at Kitt Peak and Sacramento Peak, New Mexico; and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The observatory sites are under lease from the Tohono O'odham Nation at the amount of a quarter dollar per acre yearly, which was overwhelmingly approved by the Council in the 1950s. In 2005, the Tohono O'odham Nation brought suit against the National Science Foundation to stop further construction of gamma ray detectors in the Gardens of the Sacred Tohono O'odham Spirit I'itoi, which are just below the summit.
The largest optical instruments at KPNO are the Mayall 4 meter telescope and the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope; there are also several two- and one-meter class telescopes. The McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope is currently the largest solar telescope in the world and the largest unobstructed reflector (it doesn't have a secondary mirror in the path of incoming light). The ARO 12m Radio Telescope is also at the location.
Kitt Peak is famous for hosting the first telescope (an old 91 cm reflector) used to search for near-Earth asteroids, and calculating the probability of an impact with planet Earth.
Kitt Peak hosts an array of programs for the public to take part in, including:
Daytime tours, speaking about the history of the observatory as well as touring a major research telescope.
The Nightly Observing Program (NOP), which allows visitors to arrive in the late afternoon, watch the sunset, and use binoculars and telescopes to view the cosmos.
Additionally, there is the Overnight Telescope Observing Program (OTOP). This program allows for a one-on-one, full night of observing using any of the visitor center's telescopes. Guests may choose to do DSLR imaging, CCD imaging, or simply take in the sights with their eye to the telescope.
Kitt Peak's Southeastern Association for Research and Astronomy (SARA) Telescope was featured in the WIPB-PBS documentary, "Seeing Stars in Indiana". The project followed SARA astronomers from Ball State University to the observatory and featured time-lapse images from various points around Kitt Peak.
A major project in the 2010s at Kitt Peak is the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument for the Mayall.
History
The Kitt Peak National Observatory of the United States was dedicated on March 16, 1960. At the dedication a 36-inch telescope and various facilities were ready. Construction was underway for the then planned 84 inch telescope. (i.e. the KPNO 2.1 meter)
The 84 inch (2.1 m) had its first light in September 1964.
Over the decades the mountaintop hosted many telescopes, and achieved a variety of discoveries. Some examples of astronomical research KPNO contributed to include the study of dark matter, cosmic distances, high-redshift galaxies, and the Boötes void. In addition, the observatory has engaged in variety of public outreach and education programs.
In 2018, KPNO established plans for its Windows on the Universe Center for Astronomy Outreach.
Discoveries
In 1976 the Mayall Telescope was used to discover methane ice on Pluto.
The 90 cm Spacewatch telescope was used to discover the Kuiper belt body, 20000 Varuna in the year 2000. This was discovered by an astronomer noticing the slow moving object in a blink comparison.
Photos
Climate
Due to its high elevation, the observatory experiences a subtropical highland climate (Cfb) with a much cooler and wetter climate throughout the year than most of the Sonoran desert.
See also
List of astronomical observatories
List of radio telescopes
List of telescope types
Richard Green (astronomer)
References
Further reading
Discover Magazine article about Kitt Peak, May 2005
Kitt Peak docent training book, 2008
External links
Kitt Peak National Observatory – official site
Kitt Peak National Observatory Visitor Center – visiting and tour information
Kitt Peak Webcam
Kitt Peak Clear Sky Chart Forecasts of observing conditions
NOAA general forecast for KPNO
NOAA detailed forecast for KPNO
Observing At Kitt Peak – General Overview for Observers and Staff
Astronomical observatories in Arizona
Buildings and structures in Pima County, Arizona
Minor-planet discovering observatories
Museums in Pima County, Arizona
National Science Foundation
Science museums in Arizona
Sonoran Desert
Tohono O'odham Nation
University of Arizona
Tourist attractions in Pima County, Arizona
NOIRLab | [
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17268 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz%20Stockhausen | Karlheinz Stockhausen | Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance (aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.
He was educated at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and the University of Cologne, later studying with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. One of the leading figures of the Darmstadt School, his compositions and theories were and remain widely influential, not only on composers of art music, but also on jazz and popular music. His works, composed over a period of nearly sixty years, eschew traditional forms. In addition to electronic music—both with and without live performers—they range from miniatures for musical boxes through works for solo instruments, songs, chamber music, choral and orchestral music, to a cycle of seven full-length operas. His theoretical and other writings comprise ten large volumes. He received numerous prizes and distinctions for his compositions, recordings, and for the scores produced by his publishing company.
His notable compositions include the series of nineteen Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces), Kontra-Punkte for ten instruments, the electronic/musique-concrète Gesang der Jünglinge, Gruppen for three orchestras, the percussion solo Zyklus, Kontakte, the cantata Momente, the live-electronic Mikrophonie I, Hymnen, Stimmung for six vocalists, Aus den sieben Tagen, Mantra for two pianos and electronics, Tierkreis, Inori for soloists and orchestra, and the gigantic opera cycle Licht.
He died of sudden heart failure at the age of 79, on 5 December 2007 at his home in Kürten, Germany.
Biography
Childhood
Stockhausen was born in Burg Mödrath, the "castle" of the village of Mödrath. The village, located near Kerpen in the Cologne region, was displaced in 1956 to make way for lignite strip mining, but the castle itself still stands. Despite its name, the building is more a manor house than a castle. Built in 1830 by a local businessman named Arend, it was called by locals Burg Mödrath. From 1925 to 1932 it was the maternity home of the Bergheim district, and after the war it served for a time as a shelter for war refugees. In 1950, the owners, the Düsseldorf chapter of the Knights of Malta, turned it into an orphanage, but it was subsequently returned to private ownership and became a private residence again. In 2017, an anonymous patron purchased the house and opened it in April 2017 as an exhibition space for modern art, with the first floor to be used as the permanent home of the museum of the WDR Electronic Music Studio, where Stockhausen had worked from 1953 until shortly before WDR closed the studio in 2000.
His father, Simon Stockhausen, was a schoolteacher, and his mother Gertrud (née Stupp) was the daughter of a prosperous family of farmers in Neurath in the Cologne Bight. A daughter, Katherina, was born the year after Karlheinz, and a second son, Hermann-Josef ("Hermännchen") followed in 1932. Gertrud played the piano and accompanied her own singing but, after three pregnancies in as many years, experienced a mental breakdown and was institutionalized in December 1932, followed a few months later by the death of her younger son, Hermann.
From the age of seven, Stockhausen lived in Altenberg, where he received his first piano lessons from the Protestant organist of the Altenberger Dom, Franz-Josef Kloth. In 1938 his father remarried. His new wife, Luzia, had been the family's housekeeper. The couple had two daughters. Because his relationship with his new stepmother was less than happy, in January 1942 Karlheinz became a boarder at the teachers' training college in Xanten, where he continued his piano training and also studied oboe and violin. In 1941 he learned that his mother had died, ostensibly from leukemia, although everyone at the same hospital had supposedly died of the same disease. It was generally understood that she had been a victim of the Nazi policy of killing "useless eaters". The official letter to the family falsely claimed she had died 16 June 1941, but recent research by Lisa Quernes, a student at the Landesmusikgymnasium in Montabaur, has determined that she was gassed along with 89 other people at the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre in Hesse-Nassau on 27 May 1941. Stockhausen dramatized his mother's death in hospital by lethal injection, in Act 1 scene 2 ("Mondeva") of the opera Donnerstag aus Licht.
In late 1944, Stockhausen was conscripted to serve as a stretcher bearer in Bedburg. In February 1945, he met his father for the last time in Altenberg. Simon, who was on leave from the front, told his son, "I'm not coming back. Look after things." By the end of the war, his father was regarded as missing in action, and may have been killed in Hungary. A comrade later reported to Karlheinz that he saw his father wounded in action. Fifty-five years after the fact, a journalist writing for the Guardian stated that Simon Stockhausen was killed in Hungary in 1945.
Education
From 1947 to 1951, Stockhausen studied music pedagogy and piano at the Hochschule für Musik Köln (Cologne Conservatory of Music) and musicology, philosophy, and German studies at the University of Cologne. He had training in harmony and counterpoint, the latter with Hermann Schroeder, but he did not develop a real interest in composition until 1950. He was admitted at the end of that year to the class of Swiss composer Frank Martin, who had just begun a seven-year tenure in Cologne. At the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1951, Stockhausen met Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts, who had just completed studies with Olivier Messiaen (analysis) and Darius Milhaud (composition) in Paris, and Stockhausen resolved to do likewise. He arrived in Paris on 8 January 1952 and began attending Messiaen's courses in aesthetics and analysis, as well as Milhaud's composition classes. He continued with Messiaen for a year, but he was disappointed with Milhaud and abandoned his lessons after a few weeks. In March 1953, he left Paris to take up a position as assistant to Herbert Eimert at the newly established Electronic Music Studio of Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) (from 1 January 1955, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, or WDR) in Cologne. In 1963, he succeeded Eimert as director of the studio. From 1954 to 1956, he studied phonetics, acoustics, and information theory with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. Together with Eimert, Stockhausen edited the journal Die Reihe from 1955 to 1962.
Career and adult life
Family and home
On 29 December 1951, in Hamburg, Stockhausen married Doris Andreae. Together they had four children: Suja (b. 1953), Christel (b. 1956), Markus (b. 1957), and Majella (b. 1961). They were divorced in 1965. On 3 April 1967, in San Francisco, he married Mary Bauermeister, with whom he had two children: Julika (b. 22 January 1966) and Simon (b. 1967). They were divorced in 1972.
Four of Stockhausen's children became professional musicians (Kurtz 1992, 202), and he composed some of his works specifically for them. A large number of pieces for the trumpet—from Sirius (1975–77) to the trumpet version of In Freundschaft (1997)—were composed for and premièred by his son Markus. Markus, at the age of 4 years, had performed the part of The Child in the Cologne première of Originale, alternating performances with his sister Christel. Klavierstück XII and Klavierstück XIII (and their versions as scenes from the operas Donnerstag aus Licht and Samstag aus Licht) were written for his daughter Majella, and were first performed by her at the ages of 16 and 20, respectively. The saxophone duet in the second act of Donnerstag aus Licht, and a number of synthesizer parts in the Licht operas, including Klavierstück XV ("Synthi-Fou") from Dienstag, were composed for his son Simon, who also assisted his father in the production of the electronic music from Freitag aus Licht. His daughter Christel is a flautist who performed and gave a course on interpretation of Tierkreis in 1977, later published as an article.
In 1961, Stockhausen acquired a parcel of land in the vicinity of Kürten, a village east of Cologne, near Bergisch Gladbach in the Bergisches Land. He had a house built there, which was designed to his specifications by the architect Erich Schneider-Wessling, and he resided there from its completion in the autumn of 1965.
Teaching
After lecturing at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt (first in 1953), Stockhausen gave lectures and concerts in Europe, North America, and Asia. He was guest professor of composition at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and at the University of California, Davis in 1966–67. He founded and directed the Cologne Courses for New Music from 1963 to 1968, and was appointed Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik Köln in 1971, where he taught until 1977. In 1998, he founded the Stockhausen Courses, which are held annually in Kürten.
Publishing activities
From the mid-1950s onward, Stockhausen designed (and in some cases arranged to have printed) his own musical scores for his publisher, Universal Edition, which often involved unconventional devices. The score for his piece Refrain, for instance, includes a rotatable (refrain) on a transparent plastic strip. Early in the 1970s, he ended his agreement with Universal Edition and began publishing his own scores under the Stockhausen-Verlag imprint. This arrangement allowed him to extend his notational innovations (for example, dynamics in Weltparlament [the first scene of Mittwoch aus Licht] are coded in colour) and resulted in eight German Music Publishers Society Awards between 1992 (Luzifers Tanz) and 2005 (Hoch-Zeiten, from Sonntag aus Licht). The Momente score, published just before Stockhausen's death in 2007, won this prize for the ninth time.
In the early 1990s, Stockhausen reacquired the licenses to most of the recordings of his music he had made to that point, and started his own record company to make this music permanently available on Compact Disc.
Death
Stockhausen died of sudden heart failure on the morning of 5 December 2007 in Kürten, North Rhine-Westphalia. The night before, he had finished a recently commissioned work for performance by the Mozart Orchestra of Bologna. He was 79 years old.
Compositions
Stockhausen wrote 370 individual works. He often departs radically from musical tradition and his work is influenced by Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varèse, and Anton Webern, as well as by film and by painters such as Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.
1950s
Stockhausen began to compose in earnest only during his third year at the conservatory. His early student compositions remained out of the public eye until, in 1971, he published Chöre für Doris, Drei Lieder for alto voice and chamber orchestra, Choral for a cappella choir (all three from 1950), and a Sonatine for violin and piano (1951).
In August 1951, just after his first Darmstadt visit, Stockhausen began working with a form of athematic serial composition that rejected the twelve-tone technique of Schoenberg. He characterized many of these earliest compositions (together with the music of other, like-minded composers of the period) as punktuelle Musik, "punctual" or "pointist" music, commonly mistranslated as "pointillist", though one critic concluded after analysing several of these early works that Stockhausen "never really composed punctually". Compositions from this phase include Kreuzspiel (1951), the Klavierstücke I–IV (1952—the fourth of this first set of four Klavierstücke, titled Klavierstück IV, is specifically cited by Stockhausen as an example of "punctual music", and the first (unpublished) versions of Punkte and Kontra-Punkte (1952). However, several works from these same years show Stockhausen formulating his "first really ground-breaking contribution to the theory and, above all, practice of composition", that of "group composition", found in Stockhausen's works as early as 1952 and continuing throughout his compositional career. This principle was first publicly described by Stockhausen in a radio talk from December 1955, titled "Gruppenkomposition: Klavierstück I".
In December 1952, he composed a Konkrete Etüde, realized in Pierre Schaeffer's Paris musique concrète studio. In March 1953, he moved to the NWDR studio in Cologne and turned to electronic music with two Electronic Studies (1953 and 1954), and then introducing spatial placements of sound sources with his mixed concrète and electronic work Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56). Experiences gained from the Studies made plain that it was an unacceptable oversimplification to regard timbres as stable entities. Reinforced by his studies with Meyer-Eppler, beginning in 1955, Stockhausen formulated new "statistical" criteria for composition, focussing attention on the aleatoric, directional tendencies of sound movement, "the change from one state to another, with or without returning motion, as opposed to a fixed state". Stockhausen later wrote, describing this period in his compositional work, "The first revolution occurred from 1952/53 as musique concrète, electronic tape music, and space music, entailing composition with transformers, generators, modulators, magnetophones, etc; the integration of all concrete and abstract (synthetic) sound possibilities (also all noises), and the controlled projection of sound in space". His position as "the leading German composer of his generation" was established with Gesang der Jünglinge and three concurrently composed pieces in different media: Zeitmaße for five woodwinds, Gruppen for three orchestras, and Klavierstück XI. The principles underlying the latter three compositions are presented in Stockhausen's best-known theoretical article, "... wie die Zeit vergeht ..." ("... How Time Passes ..."), first published in 1957 in vol. 3 of Die Reihe.
His work with electronic music and its utter fixity led him to explore modes of instrumental and vocal music in which performers' individual capabilities and the circumstances of a particular performance (e.g., hall acoustics) may determine certain aspects of a composition. He called this "variable form". In other cases, a work may be presented from a number of different perspectives. In Zyklus (1959), for example, he began using graphic notation for instrumental music. The score is written so that the performance can start on any page, and it may be read upside down, or from right to left, as the performer chooses. Still other works permit different routes through the constituent parts. Stockhausen called both of these possibilities "polyvalent form", which may be either open form (essentially incomplete, pointing beyond its frame), as with Klavierstück XI (1956), or "closed form" (complete and self-contained) as with Momente (1962–64/69).
In many of his works, elements are played off against one another, simultaneously and successively: in Kontra-Punkte ("Against Points", 1952–53), which, in its revised form became his official "opus 1", a process leading from an initial "point" texture of isolated notes toward a florid, ornamental ending is opposed by a tendency from diversity (six timbres, dynamics, and durations) toward uniformity (timbre of solo piano, a nearly constant soft dynamic, and fairly even durations). In Gruppen (1955–57), fanfares and passages of varying speed (superimposed durations based on the harmonic series) are occasionally flung between three full orchestras, giving the impression of movement in space.
In his Kontakte for electronic sounds (optionally with piano and percussion) (1958–60), he achieved for the first time an isomorphism of the four parameters of pitch, duration, dynamics, and timbre.
1960s
In 1960, Stockhausen returned to the composition of vocal music (for the first time since Gesang der Jünglinge) with Carré for four orchestras and four choirs. Two years later, he began an expansive cantata titled Momente (1962–64/69), for solo soprano, four choir groups and thirteen instrumentalists. In 1963, Stockhausen created Plus-Minus, "2 × 7 pages for realisation" containing basic note materials and a complex system of transformations to which those materials are to be subjected in order to produce an unlimited number of different compositions. Through the rest of the 1960s, he continued to explore such possibilities of "process composition" in works for live performance, such as Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen, and Spiral (both 1968), culminating in the verbally described "intuitive music" compositions of Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Für kommende Zeiten (1968–70). Some of his later works, such as Ylem (1972) and the first three parts of Herbstmusik (1974), also fall under this rubric. Several of these process compositions were featured in the all-day programmes presented at Expo 70, for which Stockhausen composed two more similar pieces, Pole for two players, and Expo for three. In other compositions, such as Stop for orchestra (1965), Adieu for wind quintet (1966), and the Dr. K Sextett, which was written in 1968–69 in honour of Alfred Kalmus of Universal Edition, he presented his performers with more restricted improvisational possibilities.
He pioneered live electronics in Mixtur (1964/67/2003) for orchestra and electronics, Mikrophonie I (1964) for tam-tam, two microphones, two filters with potentiometers (6 players), Mikrophonie II (1965) for choir, Hammond organ, and four ring modulators, and Solo for a melody instrument with feedback (1966). Improvisation also plays a part in all of these works, but especially in Solo. He also composed two electronic works for tape, Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1966–67). The latter also exists in a version with partially improvising soloists, and the third of its four "regions" in a version with orchestra. At this time, Stockhausen also began to incorporate pre-existent music from world traditions into his compositions. Telemusik was the first overt example of this trend.
In 1968, Stockhausen composed the vocal sextet Stimmung, for the Collegium Vocale Köln, an hour-long work based entirely on the overtones of a low B-flat. In the following year, he created Fresco for four orchestral groups, a Wandelmusik ("foyer music") composition. This was intended to be played for about five hours in the foyers and grounds of the Beethovenhalle auditorium complex in Bonn, before, after, and during a group of (in part simultaneous) concerts of his music in the auditoriums of the facility. The overall project was given the title Musik für die Beethovenhalle. This had precedents in two collective-composition seminar projects that Stockhausen gave at Darmstadt in 1967 and 1968: Ensemble and Musik für ein Haus, and would have successors in the "park music" composition for five spatially separated groups, Sternklang ("Star Sounds") of 1971, the orchestral work Trans, composed in the same year and the thirteen simultaneous "musical scenes for soloists and duets" titled Alphabet für Liège (1972).
Space music and Expo '70
Since the mid-1950s, Stockhausen had been developing concepts of spatialization in his works, not only in electronic music, such as the 5-channel Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) and Telemusik (1966), and 4-channel Kontakte (1958–60) and Hymnen (1966–67). Instrumental/vocal works like Gruppen for three orchestras (1955–57) and Carré for four orchestras and four choirs (1959–60) also exhibit this trait. In lectures such as "Music in Space" from 1958, he called for new kinds of concert halls to be built, "suited to the requirements of spatial music". His idea was In 1968, the West German government invited Stockhausen to collaborate on the German Pavilion at the 1970 World Fair in Osaka and to create a joint multimedia project for it with artist Otto Piene. Other collaborators on the project included the pavilion's architect, Fritz Bornemann, Fritz Winckel, director of the Electronic Music Studio at the Technical University of Berlin, and engineer Max Mengeringhausen. The pavilion theme was "gardens of music", in keeping with which Bornemann intended "planting" the exhibition halls beneath a broad lawn, with a connected auditorium "sprouting" above ground. Initially, Bornemann conceived this auditorium in the form of an amphitheatre, with a central orchestra podium and surrounding audience space. In the summer of 1968, Stockhausen met with Bornemann and persuaded him to change this conception to a spherical space with the audience in the centre, surrounded by loudspeaker groups in seven rings at different "latitudes" around the interior walls of the sphere.
Although Stockhausen and Piene's planned multimedia project, titled Hinab-Hinauf, was developed in detail, the World Fair committee rejected their concept as too extravagant and instead asked Stockhausen to present daily five-hour programs of his music. Stockhausen's works were performed for 5½ hours every day over a period of 183 days to a total audience of about a million listeners. According to Stockhausen's biographer, Michael Kurtz, "Many visitors felt the spherical auditorium to be an oasis of calm amidst the general hubbub, and after a while it became one of the main attractions of Expo 1970".
1970s
Beginning with Mantra for two pianos and electronics (1970), Stockhausen turned to formula composition, a technique which involves the projection and multiplication of a single, double, or triple melodic-line formula. Sometimes, as in Mantra and the large orchestral composition with mime soloists, Inori, the simple formula is stated at the outset as an introduction. He continued to use this technique (e.g., in the two related solo-clarinet pieces, Harlekin [Harlequin] and Der kleine Harlekin [The Little Harlequin] of 1975, and the orchestral Jubiläum [Jubilee] of 1977) through the completion of the opera-cycle Licht in 2003. Some works from the 1970s did not employ formula technique—e.g., the vocal duet "Am Himmel wandre ich" (In the Sky I am Walking, one of the 13 components of the multimedia Alphabet für Liège, 1972, which Stockhausen developed in conversation with the British biophysicist and lecturer on mystical aspects of sound vibration Jill Purce), "Laub und Regen" (Leaves and Rain, from the theatre piece Herbstmusik (1974), the unaccompanied-clarinet composition Amour, and the choral opera Atmen gibt das Leben (Breathing Gives Life, 1974/77)—but nevertheless share its simpler, melodically oriented style. Two such pieces, Tierkreis ("Zodiac", 1974–75) and In Freundschaft (In Friendship, 1977, a solo piece with versions for virtually every orchestral instrument), have become Stockhausen's most widely performed and recorded compositions.
This dramatic simplification of style provided a model for a new generation of German composers, loosely associated under the label neue Einfachheit or New Simplicity. The best-known of these composers is Wolfgang Rihm, who studied with Stockhausen in 1972–73. His orchestral composition Sub-Kontur (1974–75) quotes the formula of Stockhausen's Inori (1973–74), and he has also acknowledged the influence of Momente on this work.
Other large works by Stockhausen from this decade include the orchestral Trans (1971) and two music-theatre compositions utilizing the Tierkreis melodies: Musik im Bauch ("Music in the Belly") for six percussionists (1975), and the science-fiction "opera" Sirius (1975–77) for eight-channel electronic music with soprano, bass, trumpet, and bass clarinet, which has four different versions for the four seasons, each lasting over an hour and a half.
1977–2003
Between 1977 and 2003, Stockhausen composed seven operas in a cycle titled Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche ("Light: The Seven Days of the Week"). The Licht cycle deals with the traits associated in various historical traditions with each weekday (Monday = birth and fertility, Tuesday = conflict and war, Wednesday = reconciliation and cooperation, Thursday = traveling and learning, etc.) and with the relationships between three archetypal characters: Michael, Lucifer, and Eve. Each of these characters dominates one of the operas (Donnerstag [Thursday], Samstag [Saturday], and Montag [Monday], respectively), the three possible pairings are foregrounded in three others, and the equal combination of all three is featured in Mittwoch (Wednesday).
Stockhausen's conception of opera was based significantly on ceremony and ritual, with influence from the Japanese Noh theatre, as well as Judeo-Christian and Vedic traditions. In 1968, at the time of the composition of Aus den sieben Tagen, Stockhausen had read a biography by Satprem about the Bengali guru Sri Aurobindo, and subsequently he also read many of the published writings by Aurobindo himself. The title of Licht owes something to Aurobindo's theory of "Agni" (the Hindu and Vedic fire deity), developed from two basic premises of nuclear physics; Stockhausen's definition of a formula and, especially, his conception of the Licht superformula, also owes a great deal to Sri Aurobindo's category of the "supramental". Similarly, his approach to voice and text sometimes departed from traditional usage: Characters were as likely to be portrayed by instrumentalists or dancers as by singers, and a few parts of Licht (e.g., Luzifers Traum from Samstag, Welt-Parlament from Mittwoch, Lichter-Wasser and Hoch-Zeiten from Sonntag) use written or improvised texts in simulated or invented languages.
The seven operas were not composed in "weekday order" but rather starting (apart from Jahreslauf in 1977, which became the first act of Dienstag) with the "solo" operas and working toward the more complex ones: Donnerstag (1978–80), Samstag (1981–83), Montag (1984–88), Dienstag (1977/1987–91), Freitag (1991–94), Mittwoch (1995–97), and finally Sonntag (1998–2003).
Stockhausen had dreams of flying throughout his life, and these dreams are reflected in the Helikopter-Streichquartett (the third scene of Mittwoch aus Licht), completed in 1993. In it, the four members of a string quartet perform in four helicopters flying independent flight paths over the countryside near the concert hall. The sounds they play are mixed together with the sounds of the helicopters and played through speakers to the audience in the hall. Videos of the performers are also transmitted back to the concert hall. The performers are synchronized with the aid of a click track, transmitted to them and heard over headphones.
The first performance of the piece took place in Amsterdam on 26 June 1995, as part of the Holland Festival. Despite its extremely unusual nature, the piece has been given several performances, including one on 22 August 2003 as part of the Salzburg Festival to open the Hangar-7 venue, and the German première on 17 June 2007 in Braunschweig as part of the Stadt der Wissenschaft 2007 Festival. The work has also been recorded by the Arditti Quartet.
In 1999 he was invited by Walter Fink to be the ninth composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival.
In 1999, BBC producer Rodney Wilson asked Stockhausen to collaborate with Stephen and Timothy Quay on a film for the fourth series of Sound on Film International. Although Stockhausen's music had been used for films previously (most notably, parts of Hymnen in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout in 1971), this was the first time he had been asked to provide music specially for the purpose. He adapted 21 minutes of material taken from his electronic music for Freitag aus Licht, calling the result Zwei Paare (Two Couples), and the Brothers Quay created their animated film, which they titled In Absentia, based only on their reactions to the music and the simple suggestion that a window might be an idea to use. When, at a preview screening, Stockhausen saw the film, which shows a madwoman writing letters from a bleak asylum cell, he was moved to tears. The Brothers Quay were astonished to learn that his mother had been "imprisoned by the Nazis in an asylum, where she later died. ... This was a very moving moment for us as well, especially because we had made the film without knowing any of this".
2003–2007
After completing Licht, Stockhausen embarked on a new cycle of compositions based on the hours of the day, Klang ("Sound"). Twenty-one of these pieces were completed before Stockhausen's death. The first four works from this cycle are First Hour: Himmelfahrt (Ascension), for organ or synthesizer, soprano and tenor (2004–2005); Second Hour: Freude (Joy) for two harps (2005); Third Hour: Natürliche Dauern (Natural Durations) for piano (2005–2006); and Fourth Hour: Himmels-Tür (Heaven's Door) for a percussionist and a little girl (2005). The Fifth Hour, Harmonien (Harmonies), is a solo in three versions for flute, bass clarinet, and trumpet (2006). The Sixth through Twelfth hours are chamber-music works based on the material from the Fifth Hour. The Thirteenth Hour, Cosmic Pulses, is an electronic work made by superimposing 24 layers of sound, each having its own spatial motion, among eight loudspeakers placed around the concert hall. Hours 14 through 21 are solo pieces for bass voice, baritone voice, basset-horn, horn, tenor voice, soprano voice, soprano saxophone, and flute, respectively, each with electronic accompaniment of a different set of three layers from Cosmic Pulses. The twenty-one completed pieces were first performed together as a cycle at the Festival MusikTriennale Köln on 8–9 May 2010, in 176 individual concerts.
Theories
In the 1950s and early 1960s, Stockhausen published a series of articles that established his importance in the area of music theory. Although these include analyses of music by Mozart, Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky, Goeyvaerts, Boulez, Nono, Johannes Fritsch, Michael von Biel, and, especially, Webern, the items on compositional theory directly related to his own work are regarded as the most important generally. "Indeed, the Texte come closer than anything else currently available to providing a general compositional theory for the postwar period". His most celebrated article is "... wie die Zeit vergeht ..." ("... How Time Passes ..."), first published in the third volume of Die Reihe (1957). In it, he expounds a number of temporal conceptions underlying his instrumental compositions Zeitmaße, Gruppen, and Klavierstück XI. In particular, this article develops (1) a scale of twelve tempos analogous to the chromatic pitch scale, (2) a technique of building progressively smaller, integral subdivisions over a basic (fundamental) duration, analogous to the overtone series, (3) musical application of the concept of the partial field (time fields and field sizes) in both successive and simultaneous proportions, (4) methods of projecting large-scale form from a series of proportions, (5) the concept of "statistical" composition, (6) the concept of "action duration" and the associated "variable form", and (7) the notion of the "directionless temporal field" and with it, "polyvalent form".
Other important articles from this period include "Elektronische und Instrumentale Musik" ("Electronic and Instrumental Music", 1958), "Musik im Raum" ("Music in Space", 1958), "Musik und Graphik" ("Music and Graphics", 1959), "Momentform" (1960), "Die Einheit der musikalischen Zeit" ("The Unity of Musical Time", 1961), and "Erfindung und Entdeckung" ("Invention and Discovery", 1961), the last summing up the ideas developed up to 1961. Taken together, these temporal theories suggested that the entire compositional structure could be conceived as "timbre": since "the different experienced components such as colour, harmony and melody, meter and rhythm, dynamics, and form correspond to the different segmental ranges of this unified time", the total musical result at any given compositional level is simply the "spectrum" of a more basic duration—i.e., its "timbre", perceived as the overall effect of the overtone structure of that duration, now taken to include not only the "rhythmic" subdivisions of the duration but also their relative "dynamic" strength, "envelope", etc.
...
Compositionally considered, this produced a change of focus from the individual tone to a whole complex of tones related to one another by virtue of their relation to a "fundamental"—a change that was probably the most important compositional development of the latter part of the 1950s, not only for Stockhausen's music but for "advanced" music in general. Some of these ideas, considered from a purely theoretical point of view (divorced from their context as explanations of particular compositions) drew significant critical fire. For this reason, Stockhausen ceased publishing such articles for a number of years, as he felt that "many useless polemics" about these texts had arisen, and he preferred to concentrate his attention on composing.
Through the 1960s, although he taught and lectured publicly, Stockhausen published little of an analytical or theoretical nature. Only in 1970 did he again begin publishing theoretical articles, with "Kriterien", the abstract for his six seminar lectures for the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. The seminars themselves, covering seven topics ("Micro- and Macro-Continuum", "Collage and Metacollage", "Expansion of the Scale of Tempos", "Feedback", "Spectral Harmony—Formant Modulation", "Expansion of Dynamics—A Principle of Mikrophonie I", and "Space Music—Spatial Forming and Notation") were published only posthumously.
His collected writings were published in Texte zur Musik, including his compositional theories and analyses on music as a general phenomenon.
Reception
Musical influence
Stockhausen has been described as "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music". His two early Electronic Studies (especially the second) had a powerful influence on the subsequent development of electronic music in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the work of the Italian Franco Evangelisti and the Poles Andrzej Dobrowolski and Włodzimierz Kotoński. The influence of his Kontra-Punkte, Zeitmasse and Gruppen may be seen in the work of many composers, including Igor Stravinsky's Threni (1957–58) and Movements for piano and orchestra (1958–59) and other works up to the Variations: Aldous Huxley in Memoriam (1963–64), whose rhythms "are likely to have been inspired, at least in part, by certain passages from Stockhausen's Gruppen". Though music of Stockhausen's generation may seem an unlikely influence, Stravinsky said in a 1957 conversation: I have all around me the spectacle of composers who, after their generation has had its decade of influence and fashion, seal themselves off from further development and from the next generation (as I say this, exceptions come to mind, Krenek, for instance). Of course, it requires greater effort to learn from one's juniors, and their manners are not invariably good. But when you are seventy-five and your generation has overlapped with four younger ones, it behooves you not to decide in advance "how far composers can go", but to try to discover whatever new thing it is makes the new generation new.
Amongst British composers, Sir Harrison Birtwistle readily acknowledges the influence of Stockhausen's Zeitmaße (especially on his two wind quintets, Refrains and Choruses and Five Distances) and Gruppen on his work more generally. Brian Ferneyhough says that, although the "technical and speculative innovations" of Klavierstücke I–IV, Kreuzspiel and Kontra-Punkte escaped him on first encounter, they nevertheless produced a "sharp emotion, the result of a beneficial shock engendered by their boldness" and provided "an important source of motivation (rather than of imitation) for my own investigations". While still in school, he became fascinated upon hearing the British première of Gruppen, and listened many times to the recording of this performance, while trying to penetrate its secrets—how it always seemed to be about to explode, but managed nevertheless to escape unscathed in its core—but scarcely managed to grasp it. Retrospectively, it is clear that from this confusion was born my interest for the formal questions which remain until today. Although it eventually evolved in a direction of its own, Ferneyhough's 1967 wind sextet, Prometheus, began as a wind quintet with cor anglais, stemming directly from an encounter with Stockhausen's Zeitmaße. With respect to Stockhausen's later work, he said, I have never subscribed (whatever the inevitable personal distance) to the thesis according to which the many transformations of vocabulary characterizing Stockhausen's development are the obvious sign of his inability to carry out the early vision of strict order that he had in his youth. On the contrary, it seems to me that the constant reconsideration of his premises has led to the maintenance of a remarkably tough thread of historical consciousness which will become clearer with time. ... I doubt that there has been a single composer of the intervening generation who, even if for a short time, did not see the world of music differently thanks to the work of Stockhausen. In a short essay describing Stockhausen's influence on his own work, Richard Barrett concludes that "Stockhausen remains the composer whose next work I look forward most to hearing, apart from myself of course" and names as works that have had particular impact on his musical thinking Mantra, Gruppen, Carré, Klavierstück X, Inori, and Jubiläum.
French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez once declared, "Stockhausen is the greatest living composer, and the only one whom I recognize as my peer". Boulez also acknowledged the influence of performing Stockhausen's Zeitmaße on his subsequent development as a conductor. Another French composer, Jean-Claude Éloy, regards Stockhausen as the most important composer of the second half of the 20th century, and cites virtually "all his catalog of works" as "a powerful discoveration , and a true revelation".
Dutch composer Louis Andriessen acknowledged the influence of Stockhausen's Momente in his pivotal work Contra tempus of 1968. German composer Wolfgang Rihm, who studied with Stockhausen, was influenced by Momente, Hymnen, and Inori.
At the Cologne ISCM Festival in 1960, the Danish composer Per Nørgård heard Stockhausen's Kontakte as well as pieces by Kagel, Boulez, and Berio. He was profoundly affected by what he heard and his music suddenly changed into "a far more discontinuous and disjunct style, involving elements of strict organization in all parameters, some degree of aleatoricism and controlled improvisation, together with an interest in collage from other musics".
Jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock, Yusef Lateef, and Anthony Braxton cite Stockhausen as an influence.
Stockhausen was influential within pop and rock music as well. Frank Zappa acknowledges Stockhausen in the liner notes of Freak Out!, his 1966 debut with The Mothers of Invention. On the back of The Who's second LP released in the US, "Happy Jack", their primary composer and guitarist Pete Townshend, is said to have "an interest in Stockhausen". Rick Wright and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd also acknowledge Stockhausen as an influence. San Francisco psychedelic groups Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead are said to have done the same; Stockhausen said that the Grateful Dead were "well orientated toward new music". Founding members of Cologne-based experimental band Can, Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, both studied with Stockhausen at the Cologne Courses for New Music. German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk also say they studied with Stockhausen, and Icelandic vocalist Björk has acknowledged Stockhausen's influence.
Wider cultural renown
Stockhausen, along with John Cage, is one of the few avant-garde composers to have succeeded in penetrating the popular consciousness. The Beatles included his face on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. This reflects his influence on the band's own avant-garde experiments as well as the general fame and notoriety he had achieved by that time (1967). In particular, "A Day in the Life" (1967) and "Revolution 9" (1968) were influenced by Stockhausen's electronic music. Stockhausen's name, and the perceived strangeness and supposed unlistenability of his music, was even a punchline in cartoons, as documented on a page on the official Stockhausen web site (Stockhausen Cartoons). Perhaps the most caustic remark about Stockhausen was attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham. Asked "Have you heard any Stockhausen?", he is alleged to have replied, "No, but I believe I have trodden in some".
Stockhausen's fame is also reflected in works of literature. For example, he is mentioned in Philip K. Dick's 1974 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and in Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49. The Pynchon novel features "The Scope", a bar with "a strict electronic music policy". Protagonist Oedipa Maas asks "a hip graybeard" about a "sudden chorus of whoops and yibbles" coming out of "a kind of jukebox." He replies, "That's by Stockhausen... the early crowd tends to dig your Radio Cologne sound. Later on we really swing".
The French writer Michel Butor acknowledges that Stockhausen's music "taught me a lot", mentioning in particular the electronic works Gesang der Jünglinge and Hymnen.
Later in his life, Stockhausen was portrayed by at least one journalist, John O'Mahony of the Guardian newspaper, as an eccentric, for example being alleged to live an effectively polygamous lifestyle with two women, to whom O'Mahony referred as his "wives", while at the same time stating he was not married to either of them. In the same article, O'Mahony claims Stockhausen said he was born on a planet orbiting the star Sirius. In the German newspaper Die Zeit, Stockhausen stated that he was educated at Sirius (see Controversy below).
Criticism
Robin Maconie finds that, "Compared to the work of his contemporaries, Stockhausen's music has a depth and rational integrity that is quite outstanding... His researches, initially guided by Meyer-Eppler, have a coherence unlike any other composer then or since". Maconie also compares Stockhausen to Beethoven: "If a genius is someone whose ideas survive all attempts at explanation, then by that definition Stockhausen is the nearest thing to Beethoven this century has produced. Reason? His music lasts", and "As Stravinsky said, one never thinks of Beethoven as a superb orchestrator because the quality of invention transcends mere craftsmanship. It is the same with Stockhausen: the intensity of imagination gives rise to musical impressions of an elemental and seemingly unfathomable beauty, arising from necessity rather than conscious design".
Christopher Ballantine, comparing the categories of experimental and avant-garde music, concludes that Perhaps more than any other contemporary composer, Stockhausen exists at the point where the dialectic between experimental and avant-garde music becomes manifest; it is in him, more obviously than anywhere else, that these diverse approaches converge. This alone would seem to suggest his remarkable significance.
Igor Stravinsky expressed great, but not uncritical, enthusiasm for Stockhausen's music in the conversation books with Robert Craft, and for years organised private listening sessions with friends in his home where he played tapes of Stockhausen's latest works. In an interview published in March 1968, however, he says of an unidentified person, I have been listening all week to the piano music of a composer now greatly esteemed for his ability to stay an hour or so ahead of his time, but I find the alternation of note-clumps and silences of which it consists more monotonous than the foursquares of the dullest eighteenth-century music. The following October, a report in Sovetskaia Muzyka translated this sentence (and a few others from the same article) into Russian, substituting for the conjunction "but" the phrase "Ia imeiu v vidu Karlkheintsa Shtokkhauzena" ("I am referring to Karlheinz Stockhausen"). When this translation was quoted in Druskin's Stravinsky biography, the field was widened to all of Stockhausen's compositions and Druskin adds for good measure, "indeed, works he calls unnecessary, useless and uninteresting", again quoting from the same Sovetskaia Muzyka article, even though it had made plain that the characterization was of American "university composers".
Early in 1995, BBC Radio 3 sent Stockhausen a package of recordings from contemporary artists Aphex Twin, Richie Hawtin (Plastikman), Scanner and Daniel Pemberton, and asked him for his opinion on the music. In August of that year, Radio 3 reporter Dick Witts interviewed Stockhausen about these pieces for a broadcast in October, subsequently published in the November issue of the British publication The Wire asking what advice he would give these young musicians. Stockhausen made suggestions to each of the musicians, who were then invited to respond. All but Plastikman obliged.
Controversy
Throughout his career, Stockhausen excited controversy. One reason for this is that his music displays high expectations about "shaping and transforming the world, about the truth of life and of reality, about the creative departure into a future determined by spirit", so that Stockhausen's work "like no other in the history of new music, has a polarizing effect, arouses passion, and provokes drastic opposition, even hatred". Another reason was acknowledged by Stockhausen himself in a reply to a question during an interview on the Bavarian Radio on 4 September 1960, reprinted as a foreword to his first collection of writings:
After the student revolts in 1968, musical life in Germany became highly politicized, and Stockhausen found himself a target for criticism, especially from the leftist camp who wanted music "in the service of the class struggle". Cornelius Cardew and Konrad Boehmer denounced their former teacher as a "servant of capitalism". In a climate where music mattered less than political ideology, some critics held that Stockhausen was too élitist, while others complained he was too mystical.
Scandal at the Fresco premiere
As reported in the German magazine Der Spiegel, the première (and only performance to date) on 15 November 1969 of Stockhausen's work Fresco for four orchestral groups (playing in four different locations) was the scene of a scandal. The rehearsals were already marked by objections from the orchestral musicians questioning such directions as "glissandos no faster than one octave per minute" and others phoning the artists union to clarify whether they really had to perform the Stockhausen work as part of the orchestra. In the backstage warm-up room at the premiere a hand-lettered sign could be seen saying: "We're playing, otherwise we would be fired". During the première the parts on some music stands suddenly were replaced by placards reading things like "Stockhausen-Zoo. Please don't feed", that someone had planted. Some musicians, fed up with the monkeyshines, left after an hour, though the performance was planned for four to five hours. Stockhausen fans protested, while Stockhausen foes were needling the musicians asking: "How can you possibly participate in such crap?" ("Wie könnt ihr bloß so eine Scheiße machen!"). At one point someone managed to switch off the stand lights, leaving the musicians in the dark. After 260 minutes the performance ended with no-one participating any longer.
Sirius star system
In an obituary in the German newspaper Die Zeit, Karlheinz Stockhausen was quoted as having said: "I was educated at Sirius and want to return to there, although I am still living in Kürten near Cologne." On hearing about this, conductor Michael Gielen stated: "When he said he knew what was happening at Sirius, I turned away from him in horror. I haven't listened to a note since." He called Stockhausen's statements "hubris" and "nonsense", while at the same time defending his own belief in astrology: "Why should these large celestial bodies exist if they do not stand for something? I cannot imagine that there is anything senseless in the universe. There is much we do not understand".
11 September attacks
In a press conference in Hamburg on 16 September 2001, Stockhausen was asked by a journalist whether the characters in Licht were for him "merely some figures out of a common cultural history" or rather "material appearances". Stockhausen replied, "I pray daily to Michael, but not to Lucifer. I have renounced him. But he is very much present, like in New York recently". The same journalist then asked how the events of 11 September had affected him, and how he viewed reports of the attack in connection with the harmony of humanity represented in Hymnen. He answered:Well, what happened there is, of course—now all of you must adjust your brains—the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practise ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. [Hesitantly.] And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn't do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers. [...] It is a crime, you know of course, because the people did not agree to it. They did not come to the "concert". That is obvious. And nobody had told them: "You could be killed in the process."
As a result of the reaction to the press report of Stockhausen's comments, a four-day festival of his work in Hamburg was cancelled. In addition, his pianist daughter announced to the press that she would no longer appear under the name "Stockhausen". In a subsequent message, he stated that the press had published "false, defamatory reports" about his comments, and said:
At the press conference in Hamburg, I was asked if Michael, Eve and Lucifer were historical figures of the past and I answered that they exist now, for example Lucifer in New York. In my work, I have defined Lucifer as the cosmic spirit of rebellion, of anarchy. He uses his high degree of intelligence to destroy creation. He does not know love. After further questions about the events in America, I said that such a plan appeared to be Lucifer's greatest work of art. Of course I used the designation "work of art" to mean the work of destruction personified in Lucifer. In the context of my other comments this was unequivocal.
Honours
Amongst the numerous honours and distinctions that were bestowed upon Stockhausen are:
1964 German gramophone critics award;
1966 and 1972 SIMC award for orchestral works (Italy);
1968 Grand Art Prize for Music of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia; Grand Prix du Disque (France); Member of the Free Academy of the Arts, Hamburg;
1968, 1969, and 1971 Edison Prize (Netherlands);
1970 Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music;
1973 Member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin;
1974 Federal Cross of Merit, 1st class (Germany);
1977 Member of the Philharmonic Academy of Rome;
1979 Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters;
1980 Member of the ;
1981 Prize of the Italian music critics for Donnerstag aus Licht;
1982 German gramophone prize (German Phonograph Academy);
1983 Diapason d'or (France) for Donnerstag aus Licht;
1985 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France);
1986 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize;
1987 Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, London;
1988 Honorary Citizen of the Kuerten community;
1989 Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences;
1990 Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria;
1991 Honorary Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy of Music; Accademico Onorario of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Caecilia, Rome; Honorary Patron of Sound Projects Weimar;
1992 IMC-UNESCO Picasso Medal; Distinguished Service Medal of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia; German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Luzifers Tanz (3rd scene of Saturday from Light);
1993 Patron of the European Flute Festival; Diapason d'or for Klavierstücke I–XI and Mikrophonie I and II;
1994 German Music Publishers Society Award for the score Jahreslauf (Act 1 of Tuesday from Light);
1995 Honorary Member of the German Society for Electro-Acoustic Music; Bach Award of the city of Hamburg;
1996 Honorary doctorate (Dr. phil. h. c.) of the Free University of Berlin; Composer of the European Cultural Capital Copenhagen; Edison Prize (Netherlands) for Mantra; Member of the Free Academy of the Arts Leipzig; Honorary Member of the Leipzig Opera; Cologne Culture Prize;
1997 German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Weltparlament (first scene of Wednesday from Light); Honorary member of the music ensemble LIM (Laboratorio de Interpretación Musical), Madrid;
1999 Entry in the Golden Book of the city of Cologne;
2000 German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Evas Erstgeburt (act 1 of Monday from Light);
2000–2001 The film In Absentia made by the Quay Brothers (England) to concrete and electronic music by Karlheinz Stockhausen won the Golden Dove (first prize) at the International Festival for Animated Film in Leipzig. More awards: Special Jury Mention, Montreal, FCMM 2000; Special Jury Award, Tampere 2000; Special Mention, Golden Prague Awards 2001; Honorary Diploma Award, Cracow 2001; Best Animated Short Film, 50th Melbourne International Film Festival 2001; Grand Prix, Turku Finland 2001;
2001 German Music Publishers Society Award for the score Helicopter String Quartet (third scene of Wednesday from Light); Polar Music Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of the Arts;
2002 Honorary Patron of the Sonic Arts Network, England;
2003 German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Michaelion (4th scene of Wednesday from Light);
2004 Associated member of the Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres & des Beaux-arts (Belgium); Honorary doctorate (Dr. phil. h. c.) of the Queen's University in Belfast; German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Stop and Start for 6 instrumental groups;
2005 German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Hoch-Zeiten for choir (fifth scene of Sunday from Light);
2006 Honorary member of the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna;
2008 On 22 August, Stockhausen's birthday, the Rathausplatz in his home town of Kürten was renamed Karlheinz-Stockhausen-Platz in his honour;
2008 On 10 October, the Studio for Electronic Music of the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in the Netherlands changed its name to Karlheinz Stockhausen Studio;
2009 German Music Publishers Society Award for the score of Momente for solo soprano, four choral groups, and 13 instrumentalists;
2010 The municipality of Kürten adopts the designation "Stockhausengemeinde" (Stockhausen municipality) in honour of the late composer.
Notable students
References
Sources
Davies, Hugh. 1968. "Working with Stockhausen." The Composer no. 27:8–11.
via Newspapers.com
Further reading
Adamenko, Victoria. 2007. Neo-mythologism in Music: From Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb. Interplay Series 5. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press. .
Anon. 2008. "Karlheinz Stockhausen—a Romantic Discovering the Universe" [radio transcript]. In Talking to Kinky and Karlheinz—170 musicians get vocal on The Music Show, edited by Anni Heino, 283–291. Sydney: ABC Books. .
Assis, Gustavo Oliveira Alfaix. 2011. Em busca do som: A música de Karlheinz Stockhausen nos anos 1950. São Paulo: Editora UNESP. .
Barrett, Richard. 2012. "Stockhausen Today and Tomorrow". Revised version of a paper presented at the Festival of Light, University of Birmingham/Birmingham Conservatoire/mac Birmingham (20 August). Richardbarrettmusic.com (Accessed 11 September 2012).
Bauer, Christian. 2008. Sacrificium intellectus: Das Opfer des Verstandes in der Kunst von Karlheinz Stockhausen, Botho Strauß und Anselm Kiefer. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. .
Bauermeister, Mary. 2011. Ich hänge im Triolengitter: Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen. Munich: Edition Elke Heidenreich bei C. Bertelsmann. .
Beaucage, Réjean. 2005. "Contact avec / Contact with Stockhausen", English translation by Jane Brierley. La Scena Musicale 11, no. 3 (November): 18–25.
Beer, Roland de. 2008. "Magistraal klinkend in memoriam". De Volkskrant (21 June).
Betsill, Daniel Joseph. 2007. The Construction of Stockhausen's Heaven's Door.
Blumröder, Christoph von. 1993. Die Grundlegung der Musik Karlheinz Stockhausens. Supplement to the Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 32, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Blumröder, Christoph von. 2017. Die elektroakustische Musik: Eine kompositorische Revolution und ihre Folgen. Signale aus Köln: Beiträge zur Musik der Zeit 22. Vienna; Verlag Der Apfel. .
Bos, Christian. 2007. "Synthesizer sind etwas Sinnliches", Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (28 November; accessed 5 April 2017).
Bridoux-Michel, Séverine. 2006. "Architecture et musique: croisements de pensées après 1950 (la collaboration de l'architecte et du musicien, de la conception à l'oeuvre)". PhD diss., l'Université Charles de Gaulle–Lille.
Brümmer, Ludger. 2008. "Stockhausen on Electronics, 2004". Computer Music Journal 32, no. 4:10–16.
Cardew, Cornelius. 1974. Stockhausen Serves Imperialism. London: Latimer New Directions. Reprinted in Cornelius Cardew (1936–1981) – A Reader, edited by E Prévost. Harlow: Copula, 2006.
Chaplygina, Marina. 1993. Карлхайнц Штокхаузен: когда-нибудь речь станет пением ["Karlheinz Stockhausen: Some Day Speech Will Become Singing" (interview)]. Музыкальная жизнь [Musical Life], nos. 15–16:24–26.
Côté, Michel F. 2009. "Considérations en provenance de Sirius". Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines 19, no. 2:57–62.
Covell, Grant Chu. 2000. "Stockhausen Is Invisible". La Folia 3/1 (November).
Covell, Grant Chu. 2007. "Ferneyhough & Stockhausen: Grubby and Gruppen". La Folia (April).
Custodis, Michael. 2004. Die soziale Isolation der neuen Musik: Zum Kölner Musikleben nach 1945. Supplement to the Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 54, edited by Albrecht Riethmüller, with Reinhold Brinkmann, Ludwig Finscher, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Wolfgang Osthoff, and Wolfram Steinbeck. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. .
Dirmeikis, Paul. 1999. Le Souffle du temps: Quodlibet pour Karlheinz Stockhausen. [La Seyne-sur-Mer]: Éditions Telo Martius.
Dousson, Lambert. 2020. « La plus grande œuvre d’art pour le cosmos tout entier ». Stockhausen et le 11 septembre (Essai sur la musique et la violence), Paris, éditions MF, coll. « Répercussions », 2020, 240 p.
Essl, Karlheinz. 1989. "Aspekte des Seriellen bei Karlheinz Stockhausen". First appeared in Lothar Knessl (Ed.) WIEN MODERN '89: 90–97. Vienna.
Feß, Eike. 2004. "Die Wirkung der Informationstheorie auf das Werk Karlheinz Stockhausens". In Kompositorische Stationen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Debussy, Webern, Messiaen, Boulez, Cage, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Höller, Bayle. Signale aus Köln. Beiträge zur Musik der Zeit 7, edited by Christoph von Blumröder, 116–128. Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2004. .
Föllmer, Golo. [n.d.] "Karlheinz Stockhausen: "Spherical Concert Hall"" (Osaka World Expo, 1970). Medien Kunst Net / Media Art Net.
Fox, Edward. 1993. "Licht Fantastic". The Age, Melbourne (9 October): 173. via Newspapers.com
Frisius, Rudolf. 1996. Karlheinz Stockhausen I: Einführung in das Gesamtwerk; Gespräche mit Karlheinz Stockhausen. Mainz: Schott Musik International. .
Frisius, Rudolf. 2008. Karlheinz Stockhausen II: Die Werke 1950–1977; Gespräch mit Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Es geht aufwärts". Mainz, London, Berlin, Madrid, New York, Paris, Prague, Tokyo, Toronto: Schott Musik International. .
Frisius, Rudolf. 2013. Karlheinz Stockhausen III: Die Werkzyklen 1977–2007. Mainz, London, Berlin, Madrid, New York, Paris, Prague, Tokyo, Toronto: Schott Music. .
Fritsch, Johannes, with Richard Toop. 2008. "Versuch, eine Grenze zu überschreiten ... Johannes Fritsch im Gespräch über die Aufführungspraxis von Werken Karlheinz Stockhausens". MusikTexte: Zeitschrift für neue Musik, no. 116 (February): 31–40.
Hattenstone, Simon. 2001. "Listen without Prejudice". The Guardian, London (6 October): 62. via Newspapers.com
Gather, John Philipp. 2003. "The Origins of Synthetic Timbre Serialism and the Parisian Confluence, 1949–52". PhD diss. Buffalo: State University of New York, Buffalo.
Gilmore, Bob. 2009. "Claude Vivier and Karlheinz Stockhausen: Moments from a Double Portrait". Circuit: musiques contemporaines 19, no. 2:35–49.
Grant, M[orag] J[osephine], and Imke Misch (eds.). 2016. The Musical Legacy of Karlheinz Stockhausen: Looking Back and Forward. Hofheim: Wolke Verlag. .
Grohmann, Katerina. 2010. Karlheinz Stockhausen: Oper MITTWOCH aus LICHT. Kölner Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 12, edited by Christoph von Blumröder, Wolfram Steinbeck. Kassel: Bosse Verlag. .
Gutkin, David. 2012. "Drastic or Plastic? Threads from Karlheinz Stockhausen's 'Musik und Graphik', 1959". Perspectives of New Music 50, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter–Summer): 255–305.
Habib, André. 15 January 2002. "Through a Glass Darkly: Interview with the Quay Brothers". Senses of Cinema (February) (archive from 18 May 2011; accessed 18 March 2016). French translation previously published in the Montreal-based online journal Hors Champ.
Hänggi, Christian. 2011. Stockhausen at Ground Zero. Fillip. .
Hartwell, Robin. 2012. "Threats and Promises: Lucifer, Hell, and Stockhausen's Sunday from Light". Perspectives of New Music 50, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter–Summer): 393–424.
Heikinheimo, Seppo. 1972. The Electronic Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen: Studies on the Esthetical and Formal Problems of Its First Phase, translated by Brad Absetz. Acta Musicologica Fennica 6 (). Helsinki: Suomen Musiikkitieteellinen Seura / Musikvetenskapliga Sällskapet i Finland. (Doctoral thesis, Helsinki University.)
Henkel, Georg. 2012. Kosmisches Lachen: Synthi-Fou und der närrische Humor in Karlheinz Stockhausens Opernzyklus Licht. Hamburg: Tredition GmbH. .
Harvey, Jonathan. 1975a. The Music of Stockhausen: An Introduction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. .
Heyworth, Peter. 1971. "Composer-Prophet". The Observer, London (25 April): 9. via Newspapers.com
Heyworth, Peter. 1985. "Alchemist of the avant-garde" and "Thursday's child goes far". The Observer, London (22 September): 9, 23. via Newspapers.com
Holbein, Ulrich. 2008. "Karlheinz Stockhausen: Elektroniker, Neutöner, Klang-Avantgardist, Lichtgestalt, Mythenverdünner". In his Narratorium: 255 Lebensbilder, 916–920. Zürich: Ammann Verlag. .
Hollings, Ken. May 1999. " Lost in the Stars: Karlheinz Stockhausen in Conversation with Ken Hollings, Kürten, Germany, 12 March 1999". The Wire, no. 184.
Hopp, Winrich. 1998. Kurzwellen von Karlheinz Stockhausen: Konzeption und musikalische Poiesis. Kölner Schriften zur neuen Musik 6. With CD recording. Mainz and New York: Schott. .
Howland, Patricia L. 2010. "Formal Processes in Post-Tonal Music: A Study of Selected Works by Babbitt, Stockhausen, and Carter". PhD diss. New York: City University of New York.
Schonberg, Harlold C.. 1971. "Stockhausen Does the Twist". The Baltimore Sun (7 March): 96. via Newspapers.com
Ingram, James, and Paul Roberts. 2008. "Über das Unsichtbarsein: Ein E-mail Interview mit James Ingram zu seiner Tätigkeit als Stockhausens Notenkopist", translated by Gisela Gronemeyer. MusikTexte, no. 117 (May): 43–52. Expanded English text, as "On Being Invisible" (April 2009). James Ingram: Act Two website. Accessed 27 July 2010.
Jones, Stephen. 2004. "Philippa Cullen: Dancing the Music". Leonardo Music Journal 14 (Composers Inside Electronics: Music After David Tudor): 64–73.
. 2005. "Eötvös und Stockhausen". In Identitäten: Der Komponist und Dirigent Peter Eötvös: Symposion, 19. September 2004, Alte Oper Frankfurt am Main, edited by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, 48–56. Edition Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Mainz: Schott Musik International. .
Kelsall, John. 1975. "Compositional Techniques in the Music of Stockhausen (1951–1970)". PhD diss. Glasgow: University of Glasgow.
Kirchmeyer, Helmut. 2009. "Stockhausens Elektronische Messe nebst einem Vorspann unveröffentlichter Briefe aus seiner Pariser Zeit an Herbert Eimert". Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 66, no. 3:234–359.
Kohl, Jerome. 2008. Programme notes in the programme booklet for the Klang Festival, (1–9 November), Southbank Centre, London: 12–13, 16–17, 20–21, 24–25.
Kohl, Jerome. 2009a. "Klang/Som: Die 24 Stunden des Tages/As 24 horas do dia". Temporada Gulbenkian de Música 2009–2010 (October): 13–14.
Kohl, Jerome. 2009b. "Hoffnung/Esperança, para violino, viola e violoncelo (2007): 9ª hora de Klang, as 24 horas do dia". Temporada Gulbenkian de Música 2009–2010 (October): 18.
Kohl, Jerome. 2009c. "Schönheit/Beleza, para clarinete baixo, flauta e trompete (2006): 6ª hora de Klang, as 24 horas do dia". Temporada Gulbenkian de Música 2009–2010 (October): 22.
Kohl, Jerome. 2010. "A Child of the Radio Age". In Cut & Splice: Transmission, edited by Daniela Cascella and Lucia Farinati, 135–139. London: Sound and Music. .
Kohl, Jerome. 2012a. "A Gedenkschrift for Karlheinz Stockhausen: Guest Editor's Introduction". Perspectives of New Music 50, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter–Summer): 306–312.
Kohl, Jerome. 2012b. "Harmonies and the Path from Beauty to Awakening: Hours 5 to 12 of Stockhausen's Klang". Perspectives of New Music 50, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter–Summer): 476–523.
Krause, Peter. 2008. "Elektro-Esoterik: Uraufführung von Stockhausen-Klang". Die Welt (8 August).
Maconie, Robin. 2016. Other Planets: The Complete Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen 1950–2007, updated edition. Lanham, Maryland, and London: Rowman & Littlefield. .
Mießgang, Thomas, and Robert Baumanns. 1997. "Schlagsahne, Irrengesang, Kirmesgeister: Karlheinz Stockhausen testet Krautrock". Die Zeit, 1997, no. 17 (18 April).
Miller, Paul. 2009. "Stockhausen and the Serial Shaping of Space". PhD diss. Rochester: Eastman School of Music.
Miller, Paul. 2012. "An Adventure into Outer Space: Stockhausen's Lichter—Wasser and the Analysis of Spatialized Music". Perspectives of New Music 50, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter–Summer): 342–392.
Misch, Imke, and Markus Bandur (eds.). 2001. Karlheinz Stockhausen bei den Internationalen Ferienkursen für Neue Musik in Darmstadt 1951–1996: Dokumente und Briefe. Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag. .
Mischke, Joachim. 8 August 2008. "SHMF: Neue Musik, visionär, von heute und wie von gestern". Hamburger Abendblatt.
Morreau, Annette. 6 March 2001. "Where Herzog Met Portishead: Only Connect, Barbican, London". The Independent.
Mowitz, Michael. 2010. Die Form der Klänge. Stockhausens ›Konzeption einer einheitlichen musikalischen Zeit‹ am Beispiel der Komposition "Kontakte". Osnabrück: epOs-Music. .
Normandeau, Robert. 2009. "Influence de Stockhausen chez les compositeurs électroacoustiques québécois: Sondage courriel et entrevues". Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines 19, no. 2:51–55.
Parsons, Ian Lawrence. 2019. "The Phenomenology of Light: an Interpretation of Stockhausen's Opera Cycle Drawing on Heidegger's Fourfold and Lacanian Psychoanalysis". PhD diss. Melbourne: Monash University.
Rea, John. 2009. "On Stockhausen's Kontakte (1959–60) for Tape, Piano and Percussion: A Lecture/Analysis by John Rea Given at the University of Toronto, March 1968". Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines 19, no. 2:77–86.
Rigoni, Michel. 1998. Stockhausen: ... un vaisseau lancé vers le ciel, second edition, revised, corrected, and enlarged. Lillebonne: Millénaire III Editions. .
Rigoni, Michel. 2001. Le rêve de Lucifer de Karlheinz Stockhausen. La trace des silences. [Paris]: M. de Maule. .
Roads, Curtis. 2001. Microsound. Cambridge: MIT Press. .
Romney, Jonathan. 3 March 2001. "The Barbican's Musical Jellyfish: Sound on Film Live". The Guardian.
Rudi, Jøran (editor), Asbjørn Blokkum Flø, and Asbjørn Schaathun. 2008. Karlheinz Stockhausen – A Pioneer in Utopia. Oslo: Notam. .
Sandner, Wolfgang, and Péter Eötvös. 2005. "Klangbildeaufnahmen wie von einem Fotografen". In Identitäten: Der Komponist und Dirigent Péter Eötvös: Symposion, 19. September 2004, Alte Oper Frankfurt am Main, edited by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, 59–67. Edition Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Mainz: Schott Musik International. .
Shimizu, Minoru. 1999. "Stockhausen und Japan, Licht und Schatten". In Internationales Stockhausen-Symposion 1998: Musikwissenschaftliches Institut der Universität zu Köln, 11. bis 14. November 1998. Tagungsbericht, edited by Imke Misch and Christoph von Blumröder, 87–94. Signale aus Köln: Beiträge zur Musik der Zeit 4. Saarbrücken: PFAU-Verlag. .
Sigel, Paul. 2000. "Der deutsche Beitrag auf der Expo70 in Osaka." Arch plus no. 149–150 (April): 116–133. Reprinted online Thema 5, no. 1 (July 2000).
Smalley, John. 2000."Gesang der Jünglinge: History and Analysis". Programme note for concert series, Masterpieces of 20th-Century Electronic Music: A Multimedia Perspective. The Columbia University Computer Music Center, presented by Lincoln Center (July) .
Stenzl, Jürg. 1991. "York Höller's 'The Master and Margarita': A German Opera." Translated by Sue Rose. Tempo New Series, no. 179 (December): 8–15.
Stephens, Suzanne, and Kathinka Pasveer (eds.). 2008. Gedenkschrift für Stockhausen. Kürten: Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik. .
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1998. "Bildung ist große Arbeit: Karlheinz Stockhausen im Gespräch mit Studierenden des Musikwissenschaftlichen Instituts der Universität zu Köln am 5. Februar 1997." In Stockhausen 70: Das Programmbuch Köln 1998. Signale aus Köln: Musik der Zeit 1, edited by Imke Misch and Christoph von Blumröder, 1–36. Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 2007b. "Harmonien/Harmonies for Bass Clarinet (2006)". In 2007 Stockhausen-Kurse Kürten: Programm zu den Interpretations- und Kompositionskursen und Konzerten der Musik von / Programme for the Interpretation and Composition Courses and Concerts of the Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, 7. Juli bis 15. Juli 2007 in Kürten / from th to 15th 2007 in Kuerten, notes for the German première on 11 July 2007, pp. 33–34. Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag.
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Stockhausen, Karlheinz, and Maryvonne Kendergi. 2009. "La mesure du temps: un entretien inédit avec Stockhausen (1958)". Circuit: Musiques Contemporaines 19, no. 2:63–76.
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Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. 1960. Memories and Commentaries. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
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Tommasini, Anthony. 30 September 2001. "The Devil Made Him Do It". The New York Times.
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Toop, Richard. 2008. "Kulturelle Dissidenten: Die Stockhausen-Klasse der Jahre 1973 und 1974". MusikTexte: Zeitschrift für neue Musik, no. 116 (February): 46–49.
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Truelove, Stephen. 1984. "Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI: An Analysis of Its Composition via a Matrix System of Serial Polyphony and the Translation of Rhythm into Pitch." DMA diss. Norman: University of Oklahoma.
Truelove, Stephen. 1998. "The Translation of Rhythm into Pitch in Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI." Perspectives of New Music 36, no. 1 (Winter): 189–220.}}
Ulrich, Thomas. 2006. Neue Musik aus religiösem Geist: theologisches Denken im Werk von Karlheinz Stockhausen und John Cage. Saarbrücken: Pfau. .
Ulrich, Thomas. 2012a. "Lucifer and Morality in Stockhausen's Opera Cycle Licht", translated by Jerome Kohl. Perspectives of New Music 50, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter–Summer): 313–341.
Ulrich, Thomas. 2012b. Stockhausen: A Theological Interpretation, translated by Jayne Obst. Kürten: Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik. .
Ulrich, Thomas. 2017. Stockhausens Zyklus LICHT: Ein Opernführer. Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. .
Vermeil, Jean. 1996. Conversations with Boulez: Thoughts on Conducting, translated by Camille Nash, with a selection of programs conducted by Boulez and a discography by Paul Griffiths. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press.
Viel, Massimiliano. 1990. "Formeltechnik, ponte tra intuito e memoria. Incontro con K.Stockhausen". Sonus 2, no 1: 51–68.
Voermans, Erik. 2008. "Besluit van een machtig oeuvre". Het Parool (20 June).
Wager, Gregg. 1998. Symbolism as a Compositional Method in the Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen. College Park, Maryland: Gtrgg Wager. English translation of "Symbolik als kompositorische Methode in den Werken von Karlheinz Stockhausen". PhD diss. Berlin: Free University Berlin, 1996.
Wolfson, Richard. 5 March 2001. "Hit and mismatch" The Telegraph, London.
Welsh, Tom. 2019. "Ballad for a Child: The Discovery of an Unknown Song by Karlheinz Stockhausen Provides a Humanising Footnote to His Barnstorming 1958 Lecture Tour of the US". The Wire, no. 425 (July): 20–21.
Obituaries
Anon. 2007. "Karlheinz Stockhausen: Influential and Controversial German Composer Who Pursued His Uncompromising Avant-Garde Vision through Six Decades". The Times (10 December) (archive from 14 August 2011, accessed 20 May 2020).
Nonnenmann, Rainer. 2007. "In Kürten zu Hause—und im Universum". Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (7 December) (in German).
Swed, Mark 2007. "Karlheinz Stockhausen, Avant-Garde Composer; at 79". The Boston Globe (8 December): 67. via Newspapers.com
Documentary films
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Helicopter String Quartet, documentary, The Netherlands, 1995, 78 min., producer: , director: Frank Scheffer, production: Allegri Film, streaming and DVD: Medici.tv. trailer
, documentary, Germany, 2009, 56 min., producer and director: Norbert Busè and co-director , production: , broadcast: Arte, ZDF.
External links
Stockhausen – full CD editions
The Stockhausen Society (International) – main site
Stockhausen catalogues of works (Stockhausen Stiftung)
Stockhausen sound files, Stockhausen films, Stockhausen British lectures at UbuWeb
Stockhausen excerpts from sound archives works, musiquecontemporaine.fr
1928 births
2007 deaths
People from Kerpen
20th-century classical composers
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German male classical composers
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Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winners
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17269 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken%20MacLeod | Ken MacLeod | Kenneth Macrae MacLeod (born 2 August 1954) is a Scottish science fiction writer. He has won Prometheus Award and the BSFA award, nominated for Arthur C. Clarke Award
Biography
MacLeod was born in Stornoway, Scotland on 2 August 1954. He graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics. He was a Trotskyist activist in the 1970s and early 1980s and is married and has two children. He lived in South Queensferry near Edinburgh before moving to Gourock, on the Firth of Clyde, in June 2017.
MacLeod is opposed to Scottish independence.
Writing
He is part of a group of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Neal Asher, Stephen Baxter, Iain M. Banks, Paul J. McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross, Richard Morgan, and Liz Williams.
His science fiction novels often explore socialist, communist, and anarchist political ideas, especially Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism (or extreme economic libertarianism).
Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution, and post-human cyborg-resurrection. MacLeod's general outlook can be best described as techno-utopian socialist, though unlike a majority of techno-utopians, he has expressed great scepticism over the possibility and especially over the desirability of strong AI.
He is known for his constant in-joking and punning on the intersection between socialist ideologies and computer programming, as well as other fields. For example, his chapter titles such as "Trusted Third Parties" or "Revolutionary Platform" usually have double (or multiple) meanings. A future programmers union is called "Information Workers of the World Wide Web", or the Webblies, a reference to the Industrial Workers of the World, who are nicknamed the Wobblies. The Webblies idea formed a central part of the novel For the Win by Cory Doctorow and MacLeod is acknowledged as coining the term. Doctorow and Charles Stross also used one of MacLeod's references to the singularity as "the rapture for nerds" as the title for their collaborative novel Rapture of the Nerds (although MacLeod denies coining the phrase). There are also many references to, or puns on, zoology and palaeontology. For example, in The Stone Canal the title of the book, and many places described in it, are named after anatomical features of marine invertebrates such as starfish.
Books about MacLeod
The Science Fiction Foundation have published an analysis of MacLeod's work titled The True Knowledge Of Ken MacLeod (2003; ), edited by Andrew M. Butler and Farah Mendlesohn. As well as critical essays it contains material by MacLeod himself, including his introduction to the German edition of Banks' Consider Phlebas.
Bibliography
Series
Fall Revolution series
The Star Fraction (1995; US paperback ) – Prometheus Award winner, 1996; Clarke Award nominee, 1996
The Stone Canal (1996; US paperback ) – Prometheus Award winner, 1998; BSFA nominee, 1996
The Cassini Division (1998; US paperback ) – BSFA nominee, 1998; Clarke, and Nebula Awards nominee, 1999
The Sky Road (1999; US paperback ) BSFA Award winner, 1999; Hugo Award nominee, 2001 – represents an 'alternate future' to the second two books, as its events diverge sharply due to a choice made differently by one of the protagonists in the middle of The Stone Canal<ref>"The Falling Rate of Profit, Red Hordes and Green Slime: What the Fall Revolution Books Are About" – Nova Express, Volume 6, Spring/Summer 2001, pp 19–21</ref>
This series is also available in two volumes:
Fractions: The First Half of the Fall Revolution (2009; US paperback )
Divisions: The Second Half of the Fall Revolution (2009; US paperback )
Engines of Light Trilogy
Cosmonaut Keep (2000; US paperback ) – Clarke Award nominee, 2001; Hugo Award nominee, 2002 Begins the series with a first contact story in a speculative mid-21st century where a resurgently socialist USSR (incorporating the European Union) is once again in opposition with the capitalist United States, then diverges into a story told on the other side of the galaxy of Earth-descended colonists trying to establish trade and relations within an interstellar empire of several species who travel from world to world at the speed of light.
Dark Light (2001; US paperback ) – Campbell Award nominee, 2002
Engine City (2002; US paperback )
The Corporation Wars
Dissidence (2016)
Insurgence (2016)
Emergence (2017)
Lightspeed
Beyond the Hallowed Sky (2021)
Other work
Newton's Wake: A Space Opera (2004; US paperback edition ) – BSFA nominee, 2004; Campbell Award nominee, 2005
Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact (2005; UK hardback edition ) Prometheus Award winner 2006; Hugo, Locus SF, Campbell and Clarke Awards nominee, 2006; BSFA nominee, 2005
"The Highway Men" (2006; UK edition )
The Execution Channel (2007; UK hardback edition ) – BSFA Award nominee, 2007; Campbell, and Clarke Awards nominee, 2008
The Night Sessions (2008; UK hardback edition ) – Winner Best Novel 2008 BSFA
The Restoration Game (2010). According to the author, "In The Restoration Game I revisited the fall of the Soviet Union, with a narrator who is at first a piece in a game played by others, and works her way up to becoming to some extent a player, but – as we see when we pull back at the end – is still part of a larger game."
Intrusion (2012): "an Orwellian surveillance society installs sensors on pregnant women to prevent smoking or drinking; and these women also have to take a eugenic 'fix' to eliminate genetic anomalies.
Descent (2014): "My genre model for Descent was bloke-lit – that's basically first-person, self-serving, rueful confessional by a youngish man looking back on youthful stupidities... ... Descent is about flying saucers, hidden races, and Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, all set in a tale of Scottish middle class family life in and after the Great Depression of the 21st Century. Almost mainstream fiction, really."
Short fiction
The Web: Cydonia (1998; UK paperback edition ) Part of the young adult fiction series The Web. Collected in Giant Lizards from Another Star.
The Human Front (2002) (Winner of Short-form Sidewise Award for Alternate History 2002) collected in Giant Lizards from Another Star
Who's Afraid of Wolf 359? (The New Space Opera, 2007) – nominated for Hugo Award for Best Short Story
"Ms Found on a Hard Drive" (Glorifying Terrorism, 2007)
Earth Hour
The Light Company (1998)
The Highway Men (2006)
"'The Entire Immense Superstructure': An Installation" (Reach for Infinity, 2014)
Collections
Poems & Polemics (2001; Rune Press: Minneapolis, MN) Chapbook of non-fiction and poetry.
Giant Lizards From Another Star (2006; US trade hardcover ) Collected fiction and nonfiction.
References
External links
Ken MacLeod's Weblog
Ken MacLeod's page at Macmillan.com
The Human Genre Project, a collection of works on genetic themes, collated and maintained by MacLeod
Free MacLeod stories online at Free Speculative Fiction Online
Interviews
Interview with Ken Macleod at SFFWorld.com
SF Zone interview with MacLeod
Interview on the SciFiDimensions Podcast
Science Saturday: Galactic Princesses Edition Bloggingheads dialog with Annalee Newitz
The story behind Descent - Online Essay by Ken MacLeod
1954 births
Alumni of the University of Glasgow
Left-libertarians
Living people
British alternative history writers
People from Stornoway
Science fiction fans
Scottish bloggers
Scottish science fiction writers
Scottish socialists
Sidewise Award winners
Scottish Trotskyists
Scottish libertarians
British transhumanists
Scottish male novelists | [
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17270 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanem%E2%80%93Bornu%20Empire | Kanem–Bornu Empire | The Kanem–Bornu Empire existed in areas which are now part of Niger, Cameroon, Chad and Nigeria. It was known to the Arabian geographers as the Kanem Empire from the 8th century AD onward and lasted as the independent kingdom of Bornu (the Bornu Empire) until 1900.
The Kanem Empire (c. 700–1380) was located in the present countries of Chad, Nigeria and Libya. At its height, it encompassed an area covering not only most of Chad but also parts of southern Libya (Fezzan) and eastern Niger, northeastern Nigeria and northern Cameroon. The Bornu Empire (1380s–1893) was a state in what is now northeastern Nigeria, in time becoming even larger than Kanem, incorporating areas that are today parts of Chad, Niger, Sudan, and Cameroon.
The early history of the empire is mainly known from the Royal Chronicle, or Girgam, discovered in 1851 by the German traveller Heinrich Barth. Remnant successor regimes of the empire, in form of the Borno Emirate and Dikwa Emirate, were established around 1900 and still exist today as traditional states within Nigeria.
History
Theories on the origin of Kanem
Kanem was located at the southern end of the trans-Saharan trade route between Tripoli and the region of Lake Chad. Besides its urban elite, it also included a confederation of nomadic peoples who spoke languages of the Teda–Daza (Toubou) group.
In the 8th century, Wahb ibn Munabbih used Zaghawa to describe the Teda-Tubu group, in the earliest use of the ethnic name. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi also mentions the Zaghawa in the 9th century, as did Ibn al-Nadim in his Kitāb al-Fihrist in the 10th-century. Kanem comes from anem, meaning south in the Teda and Kanuri languages, and hence a geographic term. During the first millennium, as the Sahara underwent desiccation, people speaking the Kanembu language migrated to Kanem in the south. This group contributed to the formation of the Kanuri people. Kanuri traditions state the Zaghawa dynasty led a group of nomads called the Magumi.
This desiccation of the Sahara resulted in two settlements, those speaking Teda-Daza northeast of Lake Chad, and those speaking Chadic west of the lake in Bornu and Hausa-land.
Founding by local Kanembu (Dugua) c. 700 AD
The origins of Kanem are unclear. The first historical sources tend to show that the kingdom of Kanem began forming around 700 AD under the nomadic Tebu-speaking Kanembu. The Kanembu were supposedly forced southwest towards the fertile lands around Lake Chad by political pressure and desiccation in their former range. The area already possessed independent, walled city-states belonging to the Sao culture. Under the leadership of the Duguwa dynasty, the Kanembu would eventually dominate the Sao, but not before adopting many of their customs. War between the two continued up to the late 16th century.
Diffusionist theories
One scholar, Dierk Lange, has proposed another theory based on a diffusionist ideology. This theory was much criticised by the scientific community, as it seriously lacks of direct and clear evidences. Lange connects the creation of Kanem–Bornu with exodus from the collapsed Assyrian Empire c. 600 BC to the northeast of Lake Chad.
He also proposes that the lost state of Agisymba (mentioned by Ptolemy in the middle of the 2nd century AD) was the antecedent of the Kanem Empire.
Duguwa or Dougouwa dynasty (700–1086)
Kanem was connected via a trans-Saharan trade route with Tripoli via Bilma in the Kawar. Slaves were imported from the south along this route.
Kanuri tradition states Sayf b. Dhi Yazan established dynastic rule over the nomadic Magumi around the 9th or 10th century, through divine kingship. For the next millennium, the Mais ruled the Kanuri, which included the Ngalaga, Kangu, Kayi, Kuburi, Kaguwa, Tomagra and Tubu.
Kanem is mentioned as one of three great empires in Bilad el-Sudan, by Al Yaqubi in 872. He describes the kingdom of "the Zaghāwa who live in a place called Kānim", which included several vassal kingdoms, and "Their dwellings are huts made of reeds and they have no towns." Living as nomads, their cavalry gave them military superiority. In the 10th century, al-Muhallabi mentions two towns in the kingdom, one of which was Mānān. Their king was considered divine, believing he could "bring life and death, sickness and health". Wealth was measured in livestock, sheep, cattle, camels and horses. From Al-Bakri in the 11th century onwards, the kingdom is referred to as Kanem. In the 12th century Muhammad al-Idrisi described Mānān as "a small town without industry of any sort and little commerce". Ibn Sa'id al-Maghribi describes Mānān as the capital of the Kanem kings in the 13th century and Kanem as a powerful Muslim kingdom.
Sayfawa or Sefououwa dynasty (1085–1846)
The Kanuri-speaking Muslim Saifawas gained control of Kanem from the Zaghawa nomads in the 9th century. This included control of the Zaghawa trade links in the central Sahara with Bilma and other salt mines. Yet, the principal trade commodity was slaves. Tribes to the south of Lake Chad were raided as kafirun, and then transported to Zawila in the Fezzan, where the slaves were traded for horses and weapons. The annual number of slaves traded increased from 1,000 in the 7th century to 5,000 in the 15th. Mai Hummay began his reign in 1075, and formed alliances with the Kay, Tubu, Dabir and Magumi. Mai Humai was the first Muslim king of Kanem, and was converted by his Muslim tutor Muhammad b. Mānī. This dynasty replaced the earlier Zaghawa dynasty. They remained nomadic until the 11th century, when they fixed their capital at Nijmi.
According to Richmond Palmer, it was customary to have "the Mai sitting in a curtained cage called fanadir, dagil, or tatatuna...a large cage for a wild animal, with vertical wooden bars."
Humai's successor, Dunama (1098–1151), performed the Hajj three times, before drowning at Aidab. His wealth included 100,000 horsemen and 120,000 soldiers.
Mai Dunama Dabbalemi
Kanem's expansion peaked during the long and energetic reign of Mai Dunama Dabbalemi (1210–1259). Dabbalemi initiated diplomatic exchanges with sultans in North Africa, sending a giraffe to the Hafsid monarch, and arranged for the establishment of a madrasa of al-Rashíq in Cairo to facilitate pilgrimages to Mecca. During his reign, he declared jihad against the surrounding tribes and initiated an extended period of conquest with his cavalry of 41,000. He fought the Bulala for 7 years, 7 months, and 7 days. After dominating the Fezzan, he established a governor at Traghan, delegated military command amongst his sons. As the Sefawa extended control beyond Kanuri tribal lands, fiefs were granted to military commanders, as cima, or 'master of the frontier'. Civil discord was said to follow his opening of the sacred Mune.
Shift of the Sayfuwa court from Kanem to Bornu
By the end of the 14th century, internal struggles and external attacks had torn Kanem apart. War with the Sao brought the death of four Mai: Selemma, Kure Ghana es-Saghir, Kure Kura al-Kabir, and Muhammad I, all sons of 'Abdullāh b. Kadai. Then, war with the Bulala resulted in the death of four Mai in succession between 1377 and 1387: Daud Nigalemi, Uthmān b. Dawūd, Uthmān b. Idris, and Abu Bakr Liyatu. Finally, around 1387 the Bulala forced Mai Umar b. Idris to abandon Njimi and move the Kanembu people to Bornu on the western edge of Lake Chad.
But even in Bornu, the Sayfawa dynasty's troubles persisted. During the first three-quarters of the 15th century, for example, fifteen Mais occupied the throne. Then, around 1460 Ali Gazi (1473–1507) defeated his rivals and began the consolidation of Bornu. He built a fortified capital at Ngazargamu, to the west of Lake Chad (in present-day Nigeria), the first permanent home a Sayfawa mai had enjoyed in a century. So successful was the Sayfawa rejuvenation that by the early 16th century Mai Idris Katakarmabe (1507–1529) was able to defeat the Bulala and retake Njimi, the former capital. The empire's leaders, however, remained at Ngazargamu because its lands were more productive agriculturally and better suited to the raising of cattle. Ali Gaji was the first ruler of the empire to assume the title of Caliph.
Mai Idris Alooma
Bornu peaked during the reign of Mai Idris Alooma (c. 1564–1596), reaching the limits of its greatest territorial expansion, gaining control over Hausaland, and the people of Ahir and Tuareg. Peace was made with Bulala, when a demarcation of boundaries was agreed upon with a non-aggression pact. Military innovations included the use of mounted Turkish musketeers, slave musketeers, mailed cavalrymen, and footmen. This army was organized into an advance guard and a rear reserve, transported via camel or large boats and fed by free and slave women cooks. Military tactics were honed by drill and organization, supplemented with a scorched earth policy. Ribāts were built on frontiers, and trade routes to the north were secure, allowing relations to be established with the Pasha of Tripoli and the Turkish empire. Between 1574 and 1583, the Borno sultan had diplomatic relations with the Ottoman sultan Murad III, as well as with the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, in the context of political tensions in the Sahara. The Borno sultan allied with the Moroccan sultan against the Ottoman imperialism in the Sahara. Ibn Furtu called Alooma Amir al-Mu'minin, after he implemented Sharia, and relied upon large fiefholders to ensure justice.
The Lake Chad to Tripoli route became an active highway in the 17th century, with horses traded for slaves. An intense diplomatic activity has been reported between Borno and the Pachalik of Tripoli at that time. About two million slaves traveled this route to be traded in Tripoli, the largest slave market in the Mediterranean. As Martin Meredith states, "Wells along the way were surrounded by the skeletons of thousands of slaves, mostly young women and girls, making a last desperate effort to reach water before dying of exhaustion once there."
Successors
Most of the successors of Idris Alooma are only known from the meagre information provided by the Diwan. Some of them are noted for having undertaken the pilgrimage to Mecca, others for their piety. In the eighteenth century, Bornu was affected by several long-lasting famines. The Sultanate of Agadez was independently operating the Bilma salt mines by 1750, having been a tributary since 1532.
The administrative reforms and military brilliance of Aluma sustained the empire until the mid-17th century when its power began to fade. By the late 18th century, Bornu rule extended only westward, into the land of the Hausa of modern Nigeria. The empire was still ruled by the Mai who was advised by his councilors (kokenawa) in the state council or nokena. The members of his Nokena council included his sons and daughters and other royalty (the Maina) and non-royalty (the Kokenawa, "new men"). The Kokenawa included free men and slave eunuchs known as kachela. The latter "had come to play a very important part in Bornu politics, as eunuchs did in many Muslim courts".
During the 17th century and 18th century, Bornu became a centre for Islamic learning. Borno sultans developed a political legitimacy based on their religious charisma, in the context of the rise of Sufism in Sahel. Islam and the Kanuri language was widely adopted, while slave raiding propelled the economy.
Fulani Jihad
Around this time, Fulani people invading from the west were able to make major inroads into Bornu during the Fulani War. By the early 19th century, Kanem–Bornu was clearly an empire in decline, and in 1808 Fulani warriors conquered Ngazargamu. Usman dan Fodio led the Fulani thrust and proclaimed a jihad (holy war) on the irreligious Muslims of the area. His campaign eventually affected Kanem–Bornu and inspired a trend toward Islamic orthodoxy.
Muhammad al-Kanemi
Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi contested the Fulani advance. Kanem was a Muslim scholar and non-Sayfawa warlord who had put together an alliance of Shuwa Arabs, Kanembu, and other seminomadic peoples. He eventually built in 1814 a capital at Kukawa (in present-day Nigeria). Sayfawa mais remained titular monarchs until 1846. In that year, the last mai, in league with the Ouaddai Empire, precipitated a civil war, resulting in the death of Mai Ibrahim, the last mai. It was at that point that Kanemi's son, Umar, became Shehu, thus ending one of the longest dynastic reigns in international history. By then, Hausaland in the west, was lost to the Sokoto Caliphate, while the east and north were lost to the Wadai Empire.
Shehu of Borno
Although the dynasty ended, the kingdom of Kanem–Bornu survived. Umar eschewed the title mai for the simpler designation shehu (from the Arabic shaykh), could not match his father's vitality, and gradually allowed the kingdom to be ruled by advisers (wazirs). Bornu began a further decline as a result of administrative disorganization, regional particularism, and attacks by the militant Waddai Empire to the east. The decline continued under Umar's sons. In 1893, Rabih az-Zubayr led an invading army from eastern Sudan and conquered Bornu. Following his expulsion shortly thereafter, the state was absorbed by the new Northern Nigeria Protectorate, in the sphere of the British Empire, and eventually became part of the independent state of Nigeria. From the arrival of the British, a remnant of the old kingdom was (and still is) allowed to continue to exist in subjection to the various Governments of the country as the Borno Emirate.
Rabih's invasion meant the death of Shehu Ashimi, Shehu Kyari and Shehu Sanda Wuduroma between 1893 and 1894. The British recognized Rabih as the 'Sultan of Borno', until the French killed Rabih on 22 April 1900 during the Battle of Kousséri. The French then occupied Dikwa, Rabih's capital, in April 1902, after the British had occupied Borno in March. Yet, based on their 1893 treaty, most of Borno remained under British control, while the Germans occupied eastern Borno, including Dikwa, as 'Deutsch-Bornu'. The French did name Abubakar, the Shehu of Dikwa Emirate, until the British convinced him to be the Shehu of the Borno Emirate. The French then named his brother, Sanda, Shehu of Dikwa. Shehu Garbai formed a new capital, Yerwa, on 9 January 1907. After World War I, Deutsch-Bornu became the British Northern Cameroons. Upon Sheha Abubakar's death in 1922, Sanda Kura became Shehu of Borno. Then upon his death in 1937, his cousin, Shehu of Dikwa Sanda Kyarimi, became Shehu of Borno. As Vincent Hiribarren points out, "By becoming Shehu of the whole of Borno, Sanda Kyarimi reunited under his personal rule a territory which had been divided since 1902. For 35 years two Shehus had co-existed." In 1961, the Northern Cameroons voted to join Nigeria, effectively joining the frontiers of the kingdom of Bornu.
See also
Chronology of the Sayfawa (Kanem-Bornu)
Kingdom of Baguirmi
List of Sunni Muslim dynasties
References
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
The Story of Africa: Kanem-Borno — BBC World Service
Timeline of rulers
Former empires in Africa
Muslim empires
Countries in medieval Africa
Sahelian kingdoms
States and territories established in the 700s
States and territories disestablished in 1893
8th-century establishments in Africa
1893 disestablishments in Africa
History of Cameroon
History of Chad
History of Northern Nigeria
History of Fezzan
History of Niger
Medieval Libya
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17272 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin%20Chernenko | Konstantin Chernenko | Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko (24 September 1911 – 10 March 1985) was a Soviet politician and the fifth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He briefly led the Soviet Union from 13 February 1984 until his death on 10 March 1985.
Born to a poor family from Siberia, Chernenko joined the Komsomol (the Communist Party's youth league) in 1929 and became a full member of the party in 1931. After holding a series of propaganda posts, in 1948 he became the head of the propaganda department in Moldavia, serving under Leonid Brezhnev. After Brezhnev took over as First Secretary of the CPSU in 1964, Chernenko rose to head the General Department of the Central Committee, responsible for setting the agenda for the Politburo and drafting Central Committee decrees. In 1971 Chernenko became a full member of the Central Committee, and in 1978 he was made a full member of the Politburo.
After the deaths of Brezhnev and his successor Yuri Andropov, Chernenko was elected General Secretary in February 1984 and made Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in April 1984. Due to his rapidly failing health, he was often unable to fulfill his official duties. He died in March 1985 after leading the country for only 13 months, and was succeeded as General Secretary by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Early life and political career
Origins
Chernenko was born to a poor family in the Siberian village of Bolshaya Tes (now in Novosyolovsky District, Krasnoyarsk Krai) on 24 September 1911. His father, Ustin Demidovich (of Ukrainian origin), worked in copper mines and gold mines while his mother took care of the farm work.
Chernenko joined the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) in 1929. By 1931, he became a full member of the ruling Communist Party. From 1930 to 1933, he served in the Soviet frontier guards on the Soviet–Chinese border. After completing his military service, he returned to Krasnoyarsk as a propagandist. In 1933 he worked in the Propaganda Department of the Novosyolovsky District Party Committee. A few years later he was promoted to head of the same department in Uyarsk Raykom.
Chernenko steadily rose through the Party ranks, becoming the Director of the Krasnoyarsk House of Party Enlightenment before being named Deputy Head of the Agitprop Department of Krasnoyarsk's Territorial Committee in 1939. In the early 1940s, he began a close relationship with Fyodor Kulakov and was named Secretary of the Territorial Party Committee for Propaganda. By 1945, he acquired a diploma from a party training school in Moscow then later finished a correspondence course for schoolteachers in 1953.
Rise to the Soviet leadership
The turning point in Chernenko's career was his assignment in 1948 to head the Communist Party's propaganda department in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. There, he met and won the confidence of Leonid Brezhnev, the first secretary of the Moldavian branch of the Communist Party from 1950 to 1952 and future leader of the Soviet Union. Chernenko followed Brezhnev in 1956 to fill a similar propaganda post in the CPSU Central Committee in Moscow. In 1960, after Brezhnev was named chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (titular head of state of the Soviet Union), Chernenko became his chief of staff.
In 1964, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was deposed, and succeeded by Brezhnev. During Brezhnev's tenure as Party leader, Chernenko's career continued successfully. He was nominated in 1965 as head of the General Department of the Central Committee, and given the mandate to set the Politburo agenda and prepare drafts of numerous Central Committee decrees and resolutions. He also monitored telephone wiretaps and covert listening devices in various offices of the top Party members. Another of his jobs was to sign hundreds of Party documents daily, a job he did for the next 20 years. Even after he became General Secretary of the Party, he continued to sign papers referring to the General Department (when he could no longer physically sign documents, a facsimile was used instead).
In 1971, Chernenko was promoted to full membership in the Central Committee: overseeing Party work over the Letter Bureau, dealing with correspondence. In 1976, he was elected secretary of the Letter Bureau. He became Candidate in 1977, and in 1978 a full member of the Politburo, second to the General Secretary in the Party hierarchy.
During Brezhnev's final years, Chernenko became fully immersed in ideological Party work: heading Soviet delegations abroad, accompanying Brezhnev to important meetings and conferences, and working as a member of the commission that revised the Soviet Constitution in 1977. In 1979, he took part in the Vienna arms limitation talks.
After Brezhnev's death in November 1982, there was speculation that the position of General Secretary would fall to Chernenko, but he was unable to rally enough support for his candidacy within the Party. Ultimately, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who had been more mindful of Brezhnev's failing health, succeeded to the position.
Leader of the Soviet Union
Yuri Andropov died in February 1984, after just 15 months in office. Chernenko was then elected to replace Andropov even though the latter stated he wanted Gorbachev to succeed him. Additionally, Chernenko was terminally ill himself.
Nonetheless, Yegor Ligachev writes in his memoirs that Chernenko was elected general secretary without a hitch. At the Central Committee plenary session on 13 February 1984, four days after Andropov's death, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Nikolai Tikhonov, nominated Chernenko as the next general secretary, and the Committee duly voted him in. In an episode that reportedly occurred following a Politburo meeting the day after Andropov's death, Arkady Volsky, a longtime aide to Andropov and other Soviet leaders, recalled Andrei Gromyko (or Dmitriy Ustinov in later accounts) putting his arm around Tikhonov and saying: "It's okay, Kostya is an agreeable guy (pokladisty muzhik), one can do business with him...."
At the time of his ascent to the country's top post, Chernenko was primarily viewed as a transitional leader who could give the Politburo's "Old Guard" time to choose an acceptable candidate from the next generation of Soviet leadership. In the interim, he was forced to govern the country as part of a triumvirate alongside Defense Minister Dmitriy Ustinov and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Despite widespread knowledge about Chernenko's failing health, the Politburo failed to authorize Gorbachev, the party's second-in-command, to chair meetings in his absence. This became a growing problem as Chernenko's illness led him to miss meetings with increasing frequency. As Nikolai Ryzhkov describes it in his memoirs, "every Thursday morning he (Mikhail Gorbachev) would sit in his office like a little orphan – I would often be present at this sad procedure – nervously awaiting a telephone call from the sick Chernenko: Would he come to the Politburo himself or would he ask Gorbachev to stand in for him this time again?"
At Andropov's funeral, Chernenko could barely read the eulogy. Those present strained to catch the meaning of what he was trying to say in his eulogy. He spoke rapidly, swallowed his words, kept coughing and stopped repeatedly to wipe his lips and forehead. He ascended Lenin's Mausoleum by way of a newly installed escalator and descended with the help of two bodyguards.
Chernenko represented a return to the policies of the late Brezhnev era. Nevertheless, he supported a greater role for the labour unions, and reform in education and propaganda. The one major personnel change Chernenko made was the dismissal of the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, who had advocated less spending on consumer goods in favour of greater expenditures on weapons research and development. Ogarkov was subsequently replaced by Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev.
In foreign policy, he negotiated a trade pact with China. Despite calls for renewed détente, Chernenko did little to prevent the escalation of the Cold War with the United States. For example, in 1984, the Soviet Union prevented a visit to West Germany by East German leader Erich Honecker. However, in late autumn of 1984, the U.S. and the Soviet Union did agree to resume arms control talks in early 1985. In November 1984 Chernenko met with Britain's Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock.
In 1980, the United States had boycotted the Summer Olympics held in Moscow in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The following 1984 Summer Olympics were due to be held in Los Angeles, California. On 8 May 1984, under Chernenko's leadership, the USSR announced its intention not to participate, citing security concerns and "chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria being whipped up in the United States". The boycott was joined by 14 Eastern Bloc countries and allies, including Cuba (but not Romania). The action was widely seen as revenge for the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games. The boycotting countries organised their own "Friendship Games" in the summer of 1984.
Health problems, death and legacy
Chernenko started smoking at the age of nine, and he was always known to be a heavy smoker as an adult. Long before his election as general secretary, he had developed emphysema and right-sided heart failure. In 1983 he had been absent from his duties for three months due to bronchitis, pleurisy and pneumonia. Historian John Lewis Gaddis describes him as "an enfeebled geriatric so zombie-like as to be beyond assessing intelligence reports, alarming or not" when he succeeded Andropov in 1984.
In early 1984, Chernenko was hospitalised for over a month but kept working by sending the Politburo notes and letters. During the summer, his doctors sent him to Kislovodsk for the mineral spas, but on the day of his arrival at the resort Chernenko's health deteriorated, and he contracted pneumonia. Chernenko did not return to the Kremlin until later in 1984. He awarded Orders to cosmonauts and writers in his office, but was unable to walk through the corridors of his office and was driven in a wheelchair.
By the end of 1984, Chernenko could hardly leave the Central Clinical Hospital, a heavily guarded facility in west Moscow, and the Politburo was affixing a facsimile of his signature to all letters, as Chernenko had done with Andropov's when he was dying. Chernenko's illness was first acknowledged publicly on 22 February 1985 during a televised election rally in Kuibyshev Borough of northeast Moscow, where the General Secretary stood as candidate for the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR, when Politburo member Viktor Grishin revealed that the General Secretary was absent in accordance with doctors' advice. Two days later, in a televised scene that shocked the nation, Grishin dragged the terminally ill Chernenko from his hospital bed to a ballot box to vote. On 28 February 1985, Chernenko appeared once more on television to receive parliamentary credentials and read out a brief statement on his electoral victory: "the election campaign is over and now it is time to carry out the tasks set for us by the voters and the Communists who have spoken out".
Emphysema and the associated lung and heart damage worsened significantly for Chernenko in the last three weeks of February 1985. According to the Chief Kremlin doctor, Yevgeny I. Chazov, Chernenko had also developed both chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver. On 10 March at 15:00, Chernenko fell into a coma and died later that evening at 19:20. He was 73 years old. An autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a combination of chronic emphysema, an enlarged and damaged heart, congestive heart failure and liver cirrhosis.
Chernenko became the third Soviet leader to die in less than three years. Upon being informed in the middle of the night of his death, U.S. President Ronald Reagan is reported to have remarked, "How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?"
Chernenko was honored with a state funeral and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. He is the last person to have been interred there.
The impact of Chernenko—or the lack thereof—was evident in the way in which his death was reported in the Soviet press. Soviet newspapers carried stories about Chernenko's death and Gorbachev's selection on the same day. The papers had the same format: page 1 reported the party Central Committee session on 11 March that elected Gorbachev and printed the new leader's biography and a large photograph of him; page 2 announced the demise of Chernenko and printed his obituary.
After the death of a Soviet leader it was customary for his successors to open his safe. When Gorbachev had Chernenko's safe opened, it was found to contain a small folder of personal papers and several large bundles of money; a large amount of money was also found in his desk. It is not known where he had obtained the money or what he intended to use it for.
Honors and awards
Chernenko was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, 1976, in 1981 and in 1984 he was awarded Hero of Socialist Labour: on the latter occasion, Minister of Defence Ustinov underlined his rule as an "outstanding political figure, a loyal and unwavering continuer of the cause of the great Lenin"; in 1981 he was awarded with the Bulgarian Order of Georgi Dimitrov and in 1982 he received the Lenin Prize for his "Human Rights in Soviet Society".
Hero of Socialist Labour, three times (1976, 1981, 1984)
Order of Lenin, four times (1971, 1976, 1981, 1984)
Order of the Red Banner of Labour, three times (1949, 1957, 1965)
Medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" (1945)
Jubilee Medal "In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" (1969)
Jubilee Medal "Thirty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" (1975)
Jubilee Medal "60 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR" (1978)
Lenin Prize (1982)
USSR State Prize (1982)
Order of Karl Marx (East Germany)
Order of Georgi Dimitrov (Bulgaria)
Order of Klement Gottwald (Czechoslovakia)
Order of Sukhbaatar (Mongolia)
Order of the National Flag, 1st class (North Korea)
Personal life
Chernenko had a son from his first marriage, Albert, who became a noted Soviet legal theorist. With his second wife, Anna Dmitrevna Lyubimova (1913–2010), who married him in 1944, he also had two daughters, Yelena (who worked at the Institute of Party History) and Vera (who worked at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. in the United States), and a son, Vladimir, who was a Goskino editorialist. In 2015, archival documents were published, according to which Konstantin Chernenko had many more wives, and many more children with them; this circumstance, perhaps, was the reason for the slowing of Chernenko's career growth in the 1940s.
He had a gosdacha (state-owned vacation house) named Sosnovka-3 in Troitse-Lykovo by the Moskva River with a private beach, while Sosnovka-1 was used by Mikhail Suslov.
Notes
References
Sources
Ostrovsky Alexander. Кто поставил Горбачёва? (2010). ("Who brought Gorbachev to power?") — М.: "Алгоритм-Эксмо". ("Проект "Распад СССР: Тайные пружины власти" — М. "Алгоритм", 2016. Переиздание книги "Кто поставил Горбачёва?") ("Project" Collapse of the USSR: Secret Springs of Power ". Reissue of the book "Who brought Gorbachev to power?" — М.: "Алгоритм", 2016.)
Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1998), The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. pp 383–431.
Zemtsov, Ilya. Chernenko: The Last Bolshevik: The Soviet Union on the Eve of Perestroika (1989), 308p. covers 1970 to 1985.
External links
Human Rights in Soviet Society by Chernenko.
Soviet Democracy: Principles and Practice by Chernenko.
1911 births
1985 deaths
Burials at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis
Deaths from cirrhosis
Deaths from emphysema
Heads of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Heads of state of the Soviet Union
Heroes of Socialist Labour
Lenin Prize winners
Members of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union
People from Novosyolovsky District
People from Yeniseysk Governorate
People of the Cold War
People of the Soviet–Afghan War
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union members
Presidents of the Organising Committees for the Olympic Games
Recipients of the Order of Georgi Dimitrov
Recipients of the Order of Karl Marx
Recipients of the Order of Lenin
Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour
Recipients of the USSR State Prize
Russian people of Ukrainian descent
Soviet atheists
Soviet border guards
Soviet politicians | [
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17273 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komondor | Komondor | The Komondor (), also known as the Hungarian sheepdog, is a large, white-coloured Hungarian breed of livestock guardian dog with a long, corded coat.
Sometimes referred to as 'mop dogs', the Komondor is a long-established dog breed commonly employed to guard livestock and other property. The Komondor was brought to Europe by the Cumans and the oldest known mention of it is in a Hungarian codex from 1544. The Komondor breed has been declared one of Hungary’s national treasures, to be preserved and protected from modification.
Etymology and history
Komondors were brought to Hungary by Cumans, the Turkic speaking, nomadic people who settled in Hungary during the 12th and 13th century. The name Komondor derives from *Koman-dor, meaning "Cuman dog". The breed descends from Tibetan dogs and came from Asia with the Cumans, whose homeland might have been near the Yellow River. In the late 10th century, Mongols began to expand their territories at the expense of the Cumans, forcing them to move westwards. Fleeing from the Mongols, they reached the borders of Hungary in the 12th century. Cumans were granted asylum and settled in Hungary in 1239 under Köten Khan. Komondor remains have been found in Cuman gravesites.
The name "quman-dur" means "belonging to the Cumans" or "the dog of the Cumans", thus distinguishing it from a similar Hungarian sheepdog breed which later merged with the Komondor. The name Komondor is found for the first time written in 1544 in the History of King Astiagis by Kákonyi Péter, in Early Modern Hungarian. Later, in 1673, Amos Comenius mentions the Komondor in one of his works.
Today, the Komondor is a fairly common breed in Hungary, its country of origin. Many Komondors were killed during World War II and local stories say that this was because when the Germans (and then the Russians) invaded, they had to kill the dog before they could capture a farm or house that it guarded.
The Komondor is related to the South Russian Ovcharka, the Puli and, by extension, the Pumi, the Mudi, the Polish Lowland Sheepdog, the Schapendoes, the Bearded collie, and the Old English sheepdog. In 1947, the Komondor was used to acquire fresh blood in the rare South Russian Ovcharka. In the 1970s, another Komondor cross was made. It is also believed to be related to the Briard, the Catalonian Sheepdog, the Cão da Serra de Aires, the Pyrenean Shepherd and the Bergamasco shepherd, but the Bergamasco has flocks unlike the Komondor.
The two Hungarian breeds of livestock guardian dogs have evolved independently. This is because the Komondor was developed by a group of people who called it the Kuman-dor, the dog of the Cumans, and the Kuvasz was bred by a different people - the Magyars. For much of Hungary's early history, these two peoples lived in separate areas in Hungary, spoke different languages and so did not mix. As a result, their dogs have little, if any at all, admixture.
Description
The Komondor is a large breed of dogmany are over tallone of the larger breeds of dog. The body is covered with a heavy, matted, corded coat. They have robust bodies, strongly muscled with long legs and a short back. The tail is carried with a slight curl. The body when seen sideways, forms a prone rectangle. The length of body is slightly longer than the height at the withers, approximately 104% of the height at withers. The Komondor has a broad head with the muzzle slightly shorter than half of the length of the head with an even and complete scissor bite. Nose and lips are always black.
The minimum height of female Komondors is at the withers, with an average height of . The minimum height of male Komondors is with an average height of . No upper height limit is given. Komondor females on average weigh between and Komondor males weigh on average between .
Appearance
The Komondor's coat is a long, thick, and strikingly corded white coat, about 20 – 27 cm long (the heaviest amount of fur in the canine world), which resembles dreadlocks or a mop. The puppy coat is soft and fluffy. However, the coat is wavy and tends to curl as the puppy matures. A fully mature coat is formed naturally from the soft undercoat and the coarser outer coat combining to form tassels or cords and will take about two years to form. Some help is needed in separating the cords so the dog does not turn into one large matted mess. The length of the cords increases with time as the coat grows. Moulting is minimal with this breed, contrary to what one might think (once cords are fully formed). The only substantial shedding occurs as a puppy before the dreadlocks fully form. The Komondor is born with only a white coat, unlike the similar-looking Puli, which can be white, black, or sometimes grayish. However, a working Komondor's coat may be discolored by the elements and may appear off-white if not washed regularly. Traditionally, the coat protects the Komondor from possible wolves' bites as the bites would not penetrate the thick coat. The coat of the Komondor takes about two and a half days to dry after a bath.
Temperament
The Komondor is built for livestock guarding. Its temperament is like that of most livestock guarding dogs; it is calm and steady when things are normal, but, in case of trouble, the dog will fearlessly defend its charges. It was bred to think and act independently and make decisions on its own.
The Komondor is affectionate with its family, and gentle with the children and friends of the family. Although wary of strangers, they can accept them when it is clear that no harm is imminent, being instinctively very protective of its family, home, and possessions. The Komondor is very good with other family pets, often very protective over them, but is intolerant to trespassing animals and is not a good dog for an apartment. The dog is vigilant and will rest in the daytime, keeping an eye on its surroundings, but at night is constantly moving, patrolling the place, moving up and down around its whole territory. The dogs will usually knock down intruders and keep them down until its owner arrives. Hungarian Komondor breeders used to say that an intruder may be allowed to enter the property guarded by a Komondor, but he will not be allowed to leave or escape.
Uses
The breed has a natural guardian instinct and an inherent ability to guard livestock. An athletic dog, the Komondor is fast and powerful and will leap at a predator to drive it off or knock it down. It can be used successfully to guard sheep against wolves or bears. It is a big, strong dog breed, armored with a thick coat. The coat provides protection against wild animals, weather and vegetation. The coat looks similar to that of a sheep so it can easily blend into a flock and camouflage itself giving it an advantage when predators such as wolves attack. The Komondor is one breed of livestock guardian dog which has seen a vast increase in use as a guardian of sheep and goats in the United States to protect against predators such as coyotes, cougars, bears, and other predators.
Training
Due to the Komondor's size, power, speed and temperament, a lack of obedience training can result in danger to others. Komondors generally take well to training if started early (ideally between 4–8 months). A Komondor can become obstinate when bored, so it is imperative that training sessions be upbeat and happy. Praise is a must, as are consistent and humane corrections. Once a Komondor gets away with unfriendly or hostile behavior, it will always think such behavior is appropriate. Therefore, consistent corrections even with a young puppy are necessary to ensure a well-adjusted adult. Socialization is also extremely important. The Komondor should be exposed to new situations, people and other dogs while still a puppy. Because it is a natural guard dog, a Komondor that is not properly socialized may react in an excessively aggressive manner when confronted with a new situation or person.
Given the proper environment and care, a Komondor is a responsible, loving dog. It is devoted and calm without being sluggish. As in any breed, there is quite a range of personalities, so your needs should be outlined clearly to your breeder. An experienced breeder can try to identify that personality which would be happiest as an independent livestock dog, or that which wants more to please and would make a good obedience dog or family pet. Adolescence can be marked by changes in a Komondor's temperament, eating habits, trainability, and general attitude.
Breed-specific legislation requires some breeds to be muzzled in public places. Romania is the only country that requires Komondors to be muzzled.
In popular culture
Odelay is the fifth studio album by American musician Beck, released on 18 June 1996 by DGC Records. The album's cover features a Komondor jumping over a hurdle, taken by canine photographer Joan Ludwig (1914–2004) for the July 1977 issue of the American Kennel Club's Gazette.
See also
Hungarian dog breeds
Dogs portal
List of dog breeds
References
External links
http://akomondor.hu/komondor-fajtamentes/
Dog breeds originating in Hungary
FCI breeds
Hungarian words and phrases
Livestock guardian dogs | [
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17274 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeshond | Keeshond | The Keeshond ( , plur. Keeshonden) is a medium-sized dog with a plush, two-layer coat of silver and black fur with a ruff and a curled tail. It originated in Holland, and its closest relatives are the German spitzes such as the Großspitz (Large Spitz), Mittelspitz (Medium Spitz), Kleinspitz (Miniature Spitz), Zwergspitz (Dwarf-Spitz) or Pomeranian.
The Keeshond was previously known as the Dutch Barge Dog, as it was frequently seen on barges traveling the canals and rivers of the Netherlands. The Keeshond was the symbol of the Patriot faction in the Netherlands during political unrest in the years immediately preceding the French Revolution.
In the late 19th century, the breed was developed in England from imports obtained in both the Netherlands and Germany. In 1930, the Keeshond was first registered with the American Kennel Club.
Description
Appearance
A member of the spitz group of dogs, the Keeshond in American Kennel Club (AKC) standard is to tall and ± in the Fédération Cynologique Internationale (FCI) standard and weighs to . Sturdily built, they have a typical spitz appearance. Neither coarse nor refined, they have a wedge-shaped head, medium-length muzzle with a definite stop, small pointed ears, and an expressive face. The tail is tightly curled and, in profile, should be carried such that it is indistinguishable from the compact body of the dog.
Coat
Like most spitz-type dogs, the Keeshond has a dense double coat, with a thick ruff around the neck. Typically, the males of this breed will have a thicker, more pronounced ruff than the females. The body should be abundantly covered with long, straight, harsh hair standing well out from a thick, downy undercoat. The hair on the legs should be smooth and short, except for a feathering on the front legs and "trousers" on the hind legs. The hair on the tail should be profuse, forming a rich plume. The head, including muzzle, skull, and ears, should be covered with smooth, soft, short hair—velvety in texture on the ears. The coat must not part down the back.
Coat care requires line brushing on a fairly regular basis. The Keeshond typically 'blows' its undercoat once a year for males, twice a year for females. During this time, the loss of coat is excessive and their guard hairs will lie flat to their back. It usually takes two weeks for the 'blow' to complete, in order for new undercoat to begin growing back in. A Keeshond should never be shaved, as their undercoat provides a natural barrier against heat and cold. Keeping their coat in good condition will allow efficient insulation in both hot and cold weather.
Color
The color should be a mixture of grey and black and some white as well. The undercoat should be very pale grey or cream (not tawny). The hair of the outer coat is black tipped, the length of the black tips producing the characteristic shading of color. The color may vary from light to dark, but any pronounced deviation from the grey color is not permissible. The plume of the tail should be very light grey when curled on back and the tip of the tail should be black. Legs and feet should be cream. Ears should be very dark—almost black.
Shoulder line markings (light grey) should be well defined. The color of the ruff and "trousers" is generally lighter than that of the body. "Spectacles" and shadings, as later described, are characteristic of the breed and must be present to some degree. There should be no pronounced white markings.
According to the American Kennel Club breed standard, the legs and feet are to be cream; feet that are totally black or white are severe faults. Black markings more than halfway down the foreleg, except for pencilling, are faulted.
The other important marking is the "spectacles", a delicate dark line running from the outer corner of each eye toward the lower corner of each ear, which, coupled with markings forming short eyebrows, is necessary for the distinct expressive look of the breed. All markings should be clear, not muddled or broken. Absence of the spectacles is considered a serious fault. The eyes should be dark brown, almond-shaped with black eye rims.
Ears should be small, dark, triangular, and erect.
Temperament
Keeshonden tend to be very playful, with quick reflexes and strong jumping ability. They are thoughtful, eager to please and very quick learners, which means they are also quick to learn things their humans did not intend to teach them. However, Keeshonden make excellent agility and obedience dogs. In fact, so amenable to proper training is this bright, sturdy dog that they have been successfully trained to serve as guide dogs for the blind; only their lack of size has prevented them from being more widely used in this role.
They love children and are excellent family dogs, preferring to be close to their humans whenever possible. They generally get along with other dogs as well and will enjoy a good chase around the yard. Keeshonden are very intuitive and empathetic and are often used as comfort dogs. Most notably, at least one Keeshond, Tikva, was at Ground Zero following the September 11 attacks to help comfort the rescue workers. The breed has a tendency to become especially clingy towards their owners, more so than most other breeds. If their owner is out, or in another room behind a closed door, they may sit, waiting for their owner to reappear, even if there are other people nearby. Many have been referred to as their "owner's shadow", or "velcro dogs".
They are known by their loud, distinctive bark. Throughout the centuries, the Keeshond has been very popular as a watch dog on barges on canals in the Netherlands and middle Europe. This trait is evident to this day, and they are alert dogs that warn their owners of any new visitors. Although loud and alert, Keeshonden are not aggressive towards visitors. They generally welcome visitors affectionately once their family has accepted them. Unfortunately, barking may become a problem if not properly handled. Keeshonden that are kept in a yard, and not allowed to be with their humans, are unhappy and often become nuisance barkers.
Training
The Keeshond is very bright in work and obedience. The Keeshond ranks 18th in Stanley Coren's The Intelligence of Dogs, being of excellent working/obedience intelligence. This intelligence makes a Keeshond a good choice for the dog owner who is willing to help a dog learn the right lessons, but also entails added responsibility.
While affectionate, Keeshonden are not easy for the inexperienced trainer. Consistency and fairness are needed; and, while most dogs need a structured environment, it is especially necessary with a Keeshond. Like most of the independent-minded spitz breeds, Keeshonden respond poorly to heavy-handed or forceful training methods.
Many behavioral problems with Keeshonden stem from these intelligent dogs inventing their own activities (often destructive ones, like digging and chewing) out of boredom. They need daily contact with their owners and much activity to remain happy. Keeshonden do not live happily alone in a kennel or backyard.
Keeshonden can also be timid dogs. It is important to train them to respect, but not fear, their owners and family. Keeshonden want to please, so harsh punishment is not necessary when the dog does not obey as quickly as desired. They like to spend time with their owners and love attention.
Health
Keeshonden are generally a very healthy breed. Though congenital health issues are not common, the conditions which have been known to sometimes occur in Keeshonden are hip dysplasia, luxating patellas (trick knee), epilepsy, Cushing's disease, diabetes, primary hyperparathyroidism, and hypothyroidism. Von Willebrand's disease has been known in Keeshonden but is very rare. An accurate test for the gene causing primary hyperparathyroidism (or PHPT) has recently been developed at Cornell University. As with any breed, it is important when buying a puppy to make sure that both parents have been tested and certified free from inherited problems. Test results may be obtained from the breeder, and directly from the Orthopaedic Foundation For Animals site.
Keeshonds in a UK Kennel Club survey had a median lifespan of 12 years 2 months. 1 in 4 died of old age, at an average of 14–15 years.
Grooming
Because of their double coat, Keeshonden need regular brushing; an hour a week will keep the dog comfortable and handsome. The Keeshond's coat sheds dirt when dry, and the breed is not prone to doggy odor, so frequent bathing is unnecessary and undesirable. The coat acts as insulation and protects the dog from sunburn and insects, so shaving is not desirable, however some owners find it beneficial to clip their dogs' coats in hotter weather. The coat also loses its distinct color as the black tipping on the hairs will be shorn off. If frequent brushing is too much effort, it is better to choose another breed rather than clip the Keeshond short.
History
The Keeshond was named after the 18th-century Dutch Patriot, Cornelis (Kees) de Gyselaer (spelled 'Gijzelaar' in Modern Dutch), leader of the rebellion against the House of Orange. The dog became the rebels' symbol; and, when the House of Orange returned to power, this breed almost disappeared. The word 'keeshond' is a compound word: 'Kees' is a nickname for Cornelius (de Gyselaer), and 'hond' is the Dutch word for dog. In the Netherlands, "keeshond" is the term for German Spitzes that encompass them all from the toy or dwarf (Pomeranian) to the Wolfspitz (Keeshond). The sole difference among the German Spitzes is their coloring and size guidelines. There are debates over the origin of the breed; many English references point to the Keeshond as we know it originating in the Netherlands. On the other hand, according to the FCI, the breed is cited as being part of the German Spitz family, originating in Germany along with the Pomeranian (toy or dwarf German Spitz) and American Eskimo dog (small or standard German Spitz).
The first standard for "Wolfspitz" was posted at the Dog Show of 1880 in Berlin. The Club for German Spitzes was founded in 1899. The German standard was revised in 1901 to specify the characteristic color that we know today, "silver grey tipped with black". In the late 19th century the "Overweight Pomeranian", a white German Spitz and most likely a Standard German Spitz, was shown in the British Kennel Club. The "Overweight Pomeranian" was no longer recognized by the British Kennel Club in 1915. In the 1920s, Baroness van Hardenbroeck took an interest in the breed and began to build it up again. The Nederlandse Keeshond Club was formed in 1924. The Dutch Barge Dog Club of England was formed in 1925 by Mrs. Wingfield-Digby and accepted into the British Kennel Club in 1926, when the breed and the club were renamed to Keeshond.
Carl Hinderer is credited with bringing his Schloss Adelsburg Kennel, which he founded in 1922 in Germany, with him to America in 1923. His German Champion Wolfspitz followed him two by two in 1926. At that time, less than ten years after World War I, Germany was not regarded fondly in England and America; and the Wolfspitz/Keeshond was not recognized by the AKC. Consequently, Hinderer had to register each puppy born in the U.S. with his club in Germany. Despite this, he joined the Maryland KC and attended local shows.
Hinderer regularly wrote to the AKC, including the New York headquarters, to promote the Wolfspitz. While going through New York on his way to Germany in 1930, Hinderer visited the AKC offices and presented "Wachter", his Germany champion, to AKC President, Dr. DeMond, who promptly agreed to start the recognition process, with some caveats including changing the name to Keeshond, and asked Hinderer to bring back all the relevant data from Germany. Hinderer also translated the German standard to English for the AKC. The Keeshond was accepted for AKC registration in 1930.
Despite intense lobbying the FCI would not accept the Keeshond as a separate breed since it viewed the Wolfspitz and Keeshond as identical. In 1997, the German Spitz Club updated its standard so that the typically smaller Keeshond preferred in America and other English-speaking countries could be included. This greatly expanded the gene pool and unified the standard internationally for the first time. Now bred for many generations as a companion dog, the Keeshond easily becomes a loving family member.
As a result of the breed's history and friendly disposition, Keeshonden are sometimes referred to as "The Smiling Dutchman".
See also
List of dog breeds
References
External links
Keeshond World Online Magazine and Pedigree Database
Dog breeds originating in Germany
Dog breeds originating in the Netherlands
FCI breeds
Spitz breeds | [
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17275 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krag%E2%80%93J%C3%B8rgensen | Krag–Jørgensen | The Krag–Jørgensen is a repeating bolt-action rifle designed by the Norwegians Ole Herman Johannes Krag and Erik Jørgensen in the late 19th century. It was adopted as a standard arm by Norway, Denmark, and the United States. About 300 were delivered to Boer forces of the South African Republic.
A distinctive feature of the Krag–Jørgensen action is its magazine. While many other rifles of its era use an integral box magazine loaded by a charger or stripper clip, the magazine of the Krag–Jørgensen is integral with the receiver (the part of the rifle that houses the operating parts), featuring an opening on the right hand side with a hinged cover. Instead of a charger, single cartridges are inserted through the side opening, and are pushed up, around, and into the action by a spring follower. Later, similar to a charger, a claw type clip would be made for the Krag that allowed the magazine to be loaded all at once, also known as the Krag "speedloader magazine".
The design presents both advantages and disadvantages compared with a top-loading "box" magazine. Normal loading was one cartridge at a time, and this could be done more easily with a Krag than a rifle with a "box" magazine. In fact, several cartridges can be dumped into the opened magazine of a Krag at once with no need for careful placement, and when shutting the magazine-door the cartridges are forced to line up correctly inside the magazine. The design was also easy to "top off", and unlike most top-loading magazines, the Krag–Jørgensen's magazine could be topped up without opening the rifle's bolt. The Krag–Jørgensen is a popular rifle among collectors, and is valued by shooters for its smooth action.
Early development
The 1880s were an interesting period in the development of modern firearms. During this decade smokeless powder came into general use, and the calibre of various service rifles diminished. Several nations adopted small calibre repeating bolt-action rifles during this decade.
Even though Norway had adopted the repeating Jarmann rifle in 1884, it was soon clear that it was at best an interim weapon. Ole Krag, captain in the Norwegian Army and director of Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk (the government weapons factory), therefore continued the development of small arms, as he had since at least 1866. Not satisfied with the tubular magazine of the Jarmann rifle and his earlier Krag–Petersson rifle (adopted by the Royal Norwegian Navy in 1876), he enlisted the help of master gunsmith Erik Jørgensen. Together they developed the capsule magazine. The principal feature of the capsule magazine was that instead of being a straight box protruding below the stock of the rifle, it wrapped around the bolt action. Early models contained ten rounds and were fitted to modified versions of the Jarmann—though they could be adapted to any bolt-action rifle.
In 1886, Denmark was on the verge of adopting a new rifle for its armed forces. One of the early prototypes of the new rifle was sent to Denmark. The feedback given by the Danes was vital in the further development of the weapon. The test performed in Denmark revealed the need to lighten the rifle, as well as the possible benefits of a completely new action. Krag and Jørgensen therefore decided to convert the magazine into what they referred to as a half-capsule, containing only five rounds of ammunition instead of the previous ten. They also, over the next several months, combined what they considered the best ideas from other gunsmiths with a number of their own ideas to design a distinct bolt action for their rifle. The long extractor, situated on top of the bolt, was inspired by the Jarmann mechanism, while the use of curved surfaces for cocking and ejecting the spent round was probably inspired by the designs from Mauser. For a time after the weapon was adopted by Denmark they experimented with dual frontal locking lugs, but decided against it on grounds of cost and weight. The ammunition of the day did not need dual frontal locking lugs, and the bolt already had three lugs—one in front, one just in front of the bolt handle, and the bolt handle itself—which were considered more than strong enough.
The rifle had a feature known as a magazine cut-off. This is a switch on the left rear of the receiver. When flipped up (on the Norwegian Krag-J rifles and carbines), the cut-off does not allow cartridges in the internal magazine to be fed into the chamber by the advancing bolt. This was intended to be used for firing single rounds when soldiers were comfortably firing at distant targets, so the magazine could be quickly turned on in case of an incoming charge or issue to charge the enemy. This instantly gives five rounds to the shooter for quick firing. The M1903 Springfield that replaced the Krags had a magazine cutoff, as did the SMLE (Lee–Enfield) until 1915.
Danish Krag–Jørgensen rifles
After strenuous tests, Denmark adopted the Krag–Jørgensen rifle on July 3, 1889. The Danish rifle differed in several key areas from the weapons later adopted by the United States and Norway, particularly in its use of a forward (as opposed to downward) hinged magazine door, the use of rimmed ammunition, and the use of an outer steel liner for the barrel.
The Danish Krag–Jørgensen was chambered for the 8×58R cartridge (0.31 in / 7.87 mm), and was at least in the early years used as a single shooter with the magazine in reserve. It stayed in service right up to the German invasion of Denmark on April 9, 1940. Danish Krags were given the German identification code Scharfschützen-Gewehr 312(d).
Subtypes of the Danish Krag–Jørgensen
While information on the various subtypes of the Krag–Jørgensen used in Denmark has proven difficult to find, at least the following subtypes were manufactured:
Rifle M/89 (Gevær M/89), stocked almost to the muzzle, no hand guard, straight bolt handle and an outer steel liner for the barrel. This weapon is typical of the period in having a long barrel and stock without pistol grip. Was originally issued without a safety catch; instead, a half-cock notch on the cocking piece/firing pin assembly served this purpose. In 1910, this weapon was modified by the addition of a manual safety, which was placed on the right side of the receiver just behind the closed bolt handle.
Cavalry carbine M/89 (Rytterkarabin M/89) and engineer carbine M/89 (Ingeniørkarabin M/89), wooden hand guard, shorter than the other carbines. The two designs differed only in placement of the barrel bands and the cavalry carbine's lack of a bayonet lug. The cavalry carbine M/89-23 (Rytterkarabin M/89-23) design added a bayonet lug.
Artillery carbine M/89-24 (Artillerikarabin M/89) and infantry carbine M/89-24 (Fodfolkskarabin M/89-24), differed only in placement of the sling-swivel, and look like short versions of the rifle M/89.
Sniper rifle M/89-28 (Finskydningsgevær M/89-28), an alteration of the rifle M/89 with a heavier barrel and a wooden hand guard, micrometer rear sight and hooded front sight.
American Krag–Jørgensen rifles
Like many other armed forces, the United States Military was searching for a new rifle in the early 1890s. A competition was held in 1892, comparing 53 rifle designs including Lee, Krag, Mannlicher, Mauser, and Schmidt–Rubin. The trials were held at Governors Island, New York, and the finalists were all foreign manufacturers—the Krag, the Lee, and the Mauser. The contract was awarded to the Krag design in August 1892, with initial production deferred as the result of protests from domestic inventors and arms manufacturers. Two rifle designers, Russell and Livermore, even sued the US government over the initial selection of the Krag, forcing a review of the testing results in April and May 1893. In spite of this, an improved form of the Krag–Jørgensen was again selected, and was awarded the contract. The primary reason for the selection of the Krag appears to have been its magazine design, which could be topped off as needed without raising and retracting the bolt (thus putting the rifle temporarily out of action). Ordnance officials also believed the Krag's magazine cutoff and lower reloading speed to be an advantage, one which conserved ammunition on the battlefield. This magazine design would later resurface as a distinct disadvantage once U.S. soldiers encountered Spanish troops armed with the charger-loaded 1893 7mm Spanish Mauser in the Spanish–American War.
Around 500,000 "Krags" in .30 Army (.30-40) calibre were produced at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts from 1894 to 1904. The Krag–Jørgensen rifle in .30 Army found use in the Boxer Rebellion, the Spanish–American War and the Philippine–American War. A few carbines were used by United States cavalry units fighting Apaches in New Mexico Territory and preventing poaching in Yellowstone National Park. Two-thousand rifles were taken to France by the United States Army 10th–19th engineers (railway) during World War I; but there is no evidence of use by front-line combat units during that conflict.
The US 'Krags' were chambered for the rimmed "cartridge, caliber 30, U.S. Army", round, also known as the .30 U.S., .30 Army, or .30 Government, and, more popularly, by its civilian name, the .30-40 Krag. The .30 Army was the first smokeless powder round adopted by the U.S. military, but its civilian name retained the "caliber-charge" designation of earlier black powder cartridges. Thus the .30-40 Krag employs a round-nose 220-grain (14 g) cupro-nickel jacketed .30 caliber (7.62 mm) bullet propelled by 40 grains (3 g) of smokeless powder to a muzzle velocity of approximately 2000 feet (600 m) per second. As with the .30-30 Winchester, it is the use of black powder nomenclature that leads to the incorrect assumption that the .30-40 Krag was once a black powder cartridge.
In U.S. service, the Krag eventually proved uncompetitive with Mauser-derived designs, most notably in combat operations in Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish–American War. It served as the U.S. military's primary rifle for only 12 years, when it was replaced by the M1903 Springfield rifle in 1906 and many units did not receive it until 1908 and later.
Subtypes of the Krag–Jørgensen used in the United States
There were at least nine different models of the American Krag–Jørgensen:
M1892 rifle, is in overall length weighing 9.3 pounds with a 30-inch (760 mm) barrel and a magazine cut off that operates in the up position. It can be identified by the cleaning rod under the barrel. Because it took two years to retool for production, Model 1892 Krags have receivers dated "1894." Most of the M1892 rifles were arsenal reconditioned to the Model 1896 configuration.
M1892 carbine, presumably a prototype, as just two are known today. Looks like the M1892 rifle, but with a 22-inch barrel, including the long stock, and one-piece cleaning rod.
M1896 rifle, where the magazine cut-off operates in down position and a three-piece cleaning rod is stored in a butt trap. An improved rear sight and tighter production tolerances gave better accuracy. Stock altered slightly (made thicker). This model figures prominently in the first part of Andrew Krivak's novel, The Sojourn.
M1896 cadet rifle, which was fitted with cleaning rod like M1892 rifle. Only about 400 were made before it was discontinued. The cadet rifle did not have sling swivels, and the lower band was retained by a band spring.
M1896 carbine, with the same modifications as the M1896 rifle.
M1898 rifle, generally much like M1896, but with a wide range of minor changes, including reconfiguring the bolt handle recess to simplify receiver manufacture, reversing the operation of the magazine cut-off lever, and (beginning in 1901) providing windage adjustment on the rear sight.
M1898 carbine, same minor modifications as the M1898 Rifle. Only 5000 made, originally had the same short stock (rear sight touches band) as the Model 1896 carbine; most were restocked as Model 1899s.
M1899 carbine, generally the same as the M1898 carbine, but with a slightly longer forearm and hand guard, and without the swivel ring. Most of the M1898 carbines were arsenal reconditioned to the Model 1899 configuration and fitted with windage-adjustable rear sights.
M1899 constabulary carbine, built for use in the Philippines. Basically a M1899 carbine fitted with a full-length stock and a bayonet lug, and the muzzle stepped down to accept bayonet.
A few prototype Model 1898 sniper rifles were assembled with Cataract telescopic sights for limited testing. In 1901, 100 Model 1898 rifles, and 100 Model 1899 carbines were fitted with a Parkhurst clip loading attachment to test use of Mauser-type stripper clips. In 1902, 100 rifles were made with barrels in an effort to develop one model acceptable to both infantry and cavalry. The so-called NRA carbines were rifles cut down to carbine length for sale to members of the National Rifle Association beginning in 1926 as a means of keeping skilled armoury workmen employed at Benicia Arsenal.
In the Caribbean and Latin America
In the early 20th century, the United States also distributed the Krag to some Caribbean countries in which US forces intervened. These included Haiti, where they equipped the Gendarmerie d'Haïti (newly founded in 1915) with surplus Krags. A 1919 letter to the Marine Commandant from the First Provisional Brigade in Port-au-Prince noted: "...[A]bout 2,000 bandits infest the hills... I don't believe that in all Haiti there are more than 400 to 500 rifles, if that many. They are very short of ammunition.. They use our ammunition and the Krag by tying a piece of goatskin on string around the base of the cartridge."
The 1916-1924 American occupation of the Dominican Republic resulted in a small flow of Krags to that country. The Guardia Nacional Dominicana issued the received Krag rifles, though the rifles broke down quickly when issued to unfamiliar Dominican troops, and spare parts were hard to obtain. The discovery of Krag bullets in victims' bodies in the 1937 Parsley Massacre was taken by US observers as evidence of the government's involvement in the killings. At the start of World War II, the Dominican government had 1,860 Krags on-hand, supplementing their over 2,000 Spanish Mausers.
In Nicaragua, to support the government of Adolfo Díaz, the American government provided Krags to the newly formed Guardia Nacional in 1925. In 1961, Cuban militias were still fielding some Krag-Jørgensons during the Bay of Pigs invasion.
In Africa
In 1919, the United States provided discounted arms sales to the Liberians, giving them a number of Springfield Krag rifles, in addition to Peabody and Mauser rifles.
Norwegian Krag–Jørgensen rifles
The Swedish-Norwegian Rifle Commission started its work in 1891. One of their first tasks was to find the best possible calibre for the new weapon. After extensive ballistic tests where different calibres were tested (8 mm, 7.5 mm, 7 mm, 6.5 mm etc.), the optimal caliber was determined to be 6.5 mm (0.256 in). Following this decision, a joint Norwegian-Swedish commission was established in December 1893. This commission worked through a series of meetings to decide on the different measurements for the cartridge case. A rimless cartridge case of 55 mm length was approved, and each possible measurement (diameter at base, diameter at neck, angle of case, angle of shoulder etc.) was decided upon. The corresponding dimensions of the cartridge chamber to be used in a future service rifle was also determined. The cartridge became what is later known as 6.5×55mm. The round of ammunition is also known as 6.5×55 Krag, 6.5×55 Scan(dinavia), 6.5×55 Mauser, 6.5×55 Swedish, and 6.5×55 Nor(wegian), but they all referred to the same cartridge.
Some historians have assumed that there was a difference in cartridge blueprint measurements between Swedish and Norwegian 6.5×55mm ammunition, but this may be unintentional. Due to different interpretations of the blueprint standard, i.e. the standards of manufacturing using maximum chamber in the Krag vs. minimum chamber in the Swedish Mauser, a small percentage of the ammunition produced in Norway proved to be slightly oversize when chambered in the Swedish Mauser action, i.e. requiring a push on the bolt handle to chamber in the Swedish arm. A rumour arose not long after the 6.5×55mm cartridge was adopted that one could use Swedish ammunition in Norwegian rifles, but not Norwegian ammunition in Swedish rifles. Some even alleged that this incompatibility was deliberate, to give Norway the tactical advantage of using captured ammunition in a war, while denying the same advantage to the Swedes. However, after the rumour first surfaced in 1900, the issue was examined by the Swedish military. They declared the difference to be insignificant, and that both the Swedish and Norwegian ammunition was within the specified parameters laid down. Despite this finding, the Swedish weapon-historian Josef Alm repeated the rumour in a book in the 1930s, leading many to believe that there was a significant difference between the ammunition manufactured in Norway and Sweden. It is worth noting that Sweden would later adopt a 6.5×55mm rifle with a much stronger Mauser bolt action, the m/94 carbine in 1894 and the m/96 rifle in 1896, both of which were proof-tested with loads generating significantly more pressure than those used to proof the Norwegian Krag action.
Once the question of ammunition was settled, the Norwegians started looking at a modern arm to fire their newly designed cartridge. The processing was modelled on the US Army Ordnance selection process and considered, among other things, sharp-shooting at different ranges, shooting with defective or dirty ammunition, rapidity of shooting, conservation of ammunition, corrosion resistance, and ease of assembly and disassembly. After the test, three rifles were shortlisted:
Mannlicher 1892
Mauser 1892
Krag–Jørgensen 1892
About fifty Krag–Jørgensen rifles were produced in 1893 and issued to soldiers for field testing. The reports were good, and a few modifications were later incorporated into the design. Despite the fact that both the Mannlicher and Mauser submissions were significantly faster to reload than the Krag, the latter, having been designed in Norway, was selected. As in the United States, rapidity of fire was deemed to be of lesser importance in an era when current military philosophy still emphasized precise aimed fire and conservation of ammunition. Instead, the magazine was looked upon as a reserve, to be used only when authorized by a commanding officer. The Krag–Jørgensen was formally adopted as the new rifle for the Norwegian Army on April 21, 1894.
A total of more than 215,000 Krag–Jørgensen rifles and carbines were built at the Kongsberg Arms Factory in Norway. 33,500 additional M/1894 rifles were produced at Steyr (Österreichische Waffenfabrik Gesellschaft) in 1896–1897 under contracts for the Norwegian Army (29,000 rifles) and the Civilian Marksmanship Organisation (4,500 rifles). The various subtypes of Krag–Jørgensen replaced all rifles and carbines previously used by the Norwegian armed forces, notably the Jarmann M1884, the Krag–Petersson and the last of the remaining Remington M1867 and modified kammerladers rimfire rifles and carbines.
Norwegian-style Krag rifles in Boer service
A number of 1896 and 1897 Steyr-manufactured Krag rifles resembling the M1894 Norwegian and chambered in 6.5×55, but lacking some Norwegian inspection markings and having serial numbers outside the sequences of those produced for Norway, were in Boer hands during the second Boer War of 1899–1902—most have serial numbers below 900. Markings show these rifles were manufactured by Steyr concurrently with a large order of M1894 rifles made for Norway. Some parts of rejected Norwegian rifles may have been used in these weapons—many small parts have serial numbers that do not match receiver numbers, these mismatched small parts sometimes have numbers in ranges of rifles made for Norway, yet appear original to the rifle. Photographs of high-ranking Boer officers holding M1894-like rifles exist. Cartridge casings in 6.5×55 have been found on the Magersfontein battlefield and may have been fired by such M1894-like rifles. Some sources state that about 100 1896-date and at least about 200 1897-date rifles reached the Boers. Some rifles meeting this description exist in South African museums with Boer-war documentation, and in England documented as captured bring-backs. A few rifles having Norwegian inspector stamps and serial numbers in the civilian marksmanship organization serial number range are also known to be in South African museums and may have been used by Boer forces—it is suspected that these may have arrived in South Africa with a small Scandinavian volunteer force that fought for the Boers. A small number of Steyr 1897 M1894-like 6.5×55 rifles with 3-digit serial numbers outside the Norwegian contract ranges and in the same range as these Boer Krags, and lacking Norwegian inspection stamps like the low-numbered 1897 rifles in South African museums, are known to exist in the US—it is not known if these have Boer connections or were initially delivered elsewhere.
Subtypes of the Krag–Jørgensen used in Norway
The Krag–Jørgensen was produced in Norway for a very long time, and in a number of different variations. The major military models are the following:
The M1894 rifle,Hanevik, Karl Egil (1998). Norske Militærgeværer etter 1867, chapter 8 (civilian M1894)Hanevik, Karl Egil (1998). Norske Militærgeværer etter 1867, chapter 13 (M1894 w/ telescopic sights) "long Krag", was the most common Krag in Norway. A total of about 122,817 were produced for the Norwegian Army at Kongsberg until 1922 when production ended. An additional 29,000 were bought from Steyr weapons factory in Austria 1896–1897. In 1910, after some initial tests, 1,000 of the M1894s (serials 89602 to 90601) were fitted with telescopic sights on a specially constructed bracket. Issued five to each company, they were meant to be used against enemy officers and other high-value targets. Since the model was considered to be less than satisfactory, further production was stopped. 3396 M/1894 rifles were produced in a special serial range for the Norwegian Navy. For the civilian market in Norway (competition shooters and hunters), about 33,600 M/1894 rifles in a special serial range were made from 1895 to 1940. An additional 4500 M/1894 rifles were procured from Steyr in a special series for the civilian marksmanship organization in 1897 (serials 3001–7500). All in all, the M/1894 is by far the most common model of the Norwegian Krag models.
The M1895 cavalry carbine and M1897 mountain artillery and engineer carbine differed only in how the sling swivel was fitted to the stock, and were issued in one series. A total of 9,309 were made between 1898 and 1906.
The M1904 engineer carbine and M1907 field artillery carbine differed from the earlier carbines mainly by being stocked to the muzzle. The difference between the two models was only in the attachment of the sling, and again they were issued as one series. A total of 2,750 M/1904 and 750 M/1907 were produced between 1906 and 1908.
The M1906 Guttekarabin (boy's carbine) was a simplified M1895 carbine, with a shortened stock and no hand guard. They were issued to schools in Norway, and used to train boys aged 14 to 17 to shoot. Special "school ammunition" was developed to allow shooting in restricted areas. A total of 3,321 were made, of which some 315 were later modified to fire .22 Long Rifle ammunition. Shooting was on the syllabus for Norwegian teens until World War II.
The M1912 carbine / M1912/16 carbine / M1912/18 carbine, "short rifle", was made after it became clear that the long barreled M1894 left something to be desired. The M1912 was adopted after experiments with shorter, thicker barrels and different projectiles. It differed from the earlier models by being stocked all the way to the muzzle; the bracket for the bayonet was moved from the barrel to under the stock. The M1912 carbine also featured an improved (strengthened) action which differed from the M/94 action on several points. It was soon clear that the nose band was too weak, which led to the /16 and /18 modifications of the basic design. A total of 30,118 were produced in the military serial number range between 1913 and 1926. It was also decided that any further production would be of this model. About 1592 M1912 were produced in a special serial number range for sale to civilians.
The M1923 sniper rifle was the first attempt to produce a sniper rifle, but it was not solid enough for use in the field. A total of 630 were built between 1923 and 1926, about half of which were sold to civilian sharpshooters. Most were later converted to M1930 or hunting rifles.
The M1925 sniper rifle was an improved version of the M1923 built for the civilian market. A total of 1,900 were made from 1925 to the German invasion on April 9, 1940. A further 250 were built for the Germans during the war, and the last 124 were put together in 1950.
The M1930 sniper rifle was another improvement of the M1923 and M1925, featuring a heavier barrel, a different stock, sights, and a fine tuned trigger. It was a successful weapon, but no more than 466 were built between 1930 and 1939. In 1950 and 51, an additional 404 M/30 rifles were produced, then with laminated stocks, improved rear (diopter) sights and M/12 actions as the basis. The pre-war M/30 rifles used the M/94 action as the basis.
In addition, most models were produced for the civilian market as well. After World War II a limited number of Krag–Jørgensens were made in purely civilian models.
Bayonets for Norwegian Krag–Jørgensen
The Swedish-Norwegian Rifle Commission only briefly looked into bayonets, focusing on selecting the best possible rifle. However, their report mentions that they have experimented with knife shaped bayonets and spike bayonets, both in loose forms and in folding forms. Very few of the experimental bayonets are known today.
The bayonet that was finally approved, probably alongside the rifle itself, was a knife bayonet. Later on, longer bayonets were approved as well, and renewed experiments with spike bayonets took place during the development of the M/1912.
Bayonet M/1894 was a knife bayonet, with a blade length of 21.5 cm, a blade width of 1.9 cm and a total length of 33.5 cm. The scabbard was made of steel, hanging from a leather strap, and was 22.7 cm long. A total of 101750 was manufactured by Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk, Husqvarna and Steyr.
Bayonet M/1912 was constructed during the development of the "short rifle" that became the M1912 carbine. It was significantly longer than the M/1894, to maintain the "reach" of the soldier. The total length of the bayonet was 48.5 cm, of which 38.5 cm was blade. The very long blade proved to be too weak for actual use (it had "double fullers" on each side of the blade), and the Bayonet M/1913 was adopted instead. Most likely less than 50 M/1912 bayonets were produced.
Bayonet M/1913 was stronger, but heavier (only one "fuller" on each side), than the M/1912 but was of identical size. However, it soon became clear that the short rifles were too weak in the stock to be used with the very long bayonets, which led to the development of the strengthened M1912/16 and M1912/18 carbines. Production of the M/1913 bayonet was ended in favour of the M/1916 after about 3000 M/1913 bayonets had been manufactured by Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk. The M/1913 bayonets were issued with a leather scabbard.
Bayonet M/1916 was meant to be used on both the short carbines and the long rifles. Of almost identical size to the previous M/1913, it was stronger and had a sharpened edge along both sides of the blade's point. The scabbards to the M/1916 were initially made of leather (for M/1912 carbine serials 12159–12178, 13179-16678 og 21479–21678), but were later changed to steel (for M/1912 carbine serials 21679–30118 and M/1894 rifle serials 121000–152000).
Bayonet M/1894/1943 was a variation of the bayonet M/1894 manufactured during the war for delivery to Nazi Germany. Only 3,300 were manufactured, all of them lower quality than the bayonets delivered before the German invasion.
A number of special bayonets and oddities were experimented with during the time the Krag–Jørgensen was a Norwegian service rifle, two of which are mentioned here.
The officers bayonet was an attempt to replace the traditional side arm for officers in dress uniform with a high quality, decorated M/1916. The prototype was made in 1928, with two different scabbards (one in black lacquered steel, the other in brown leather), polished blade and the coat of arms inlaid in the handle. The bayonet was never issued, and the prototype is lost.
The bayonet lengthener' was a special scabbard for the M/1894 with a bayonet mount added. By mounting the bayonet to the scabard, and the scabbard to the rifle, a total length of 47 cm was achieved. It is speculated that the reason was to achieve the same reach as with the M/1916 without having to scrap the huge quantities of M/1894 in storage. The lengthener was never issued.
Production for Nazi Germany during World War II
During the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany, the German forces demanded that Kongsberg Våpenfabrikk build weapons for the German armed forces. They placed large orders for the Krag–Jørgensen, the Colt M1914 (license-produced Colt M1911), and 40 mm anti-aircraft guns. However, production was kept down by sabotage and slow work by the employees. Out of the total of 13,450 rifles ordered by the Germans, only between 3,350 and 3,800 were actually delivered. Early deliveries was identical to the M1894, but with German proof marks and substandard workmanship compared to M1894 produced earlier. During the war the model was altered to be externally more like the German Kar98K. This was achieved by shortening the barrel by 15 cm (6 inches) down to 61.3 cm (24 inches) and shortening the stock by 18 cm (7 inches), and adding a front sight hood similar to that of the Kar98K. These shortened Krag–Jørgensen's were known in Norway as the Stomperud-Krag. A number of the Krag–Jørgensens manufactured for the Germans have been described as "bastards", created from mismatched parts left over from previous production.
Experiments with using the German standard issue 7.92×57mm ammunition, a cartridge as powerful as the .30-06 and the modern 7.62 mm NATO, also took place.
While information on the Wehrmacht's use of the Krag–Jørgensen is hard to find, it is assumed that it was issued primarily to second line units since the Wehrmacht attempted to only issue firearms in standard calibres to front line troops. It was also issued to the Hird—the armed part of Nasjonal Samling (NS) ("National Unity"), the national-socialist party of Vidkun Quisling's puppet government. It is further likely that the experiments with 7.92 mm ammunition means that the Germans considered a wider use of the Krag–Jørgensen.
Post-war production
A few Krag–Jørgensen rifles were put together after 1945, for sale to civilian hunters and sharpshooters, among them 1600 of the so-called Stomperud Krag. While there were at no point any plans for re-equipping the Norwegian Army with the Krag–Jørgensen, attempts were made to adapt it to firing more modern, high-powered ammunition like the .30-06 and 7.62mm NATO rounds. While this was found to be possible, it required a new barrel (or relined barrels) and modification to the bolt and receiver. The resulting cost of the conversion was about the same as that of a new gun of a more modern design.Hanevik, Karl Egil (1998). Norske Militærgeværer etter 1867, chapter 20 The last Krag–Jørgensen rifles in production were the M/1948 Elgrifle (moose rifle), of which 500 were made in 1948–49 and the M/1951 Elgrifle (moose rifle), of which 1000 were made in 1950–51.
As a civilian target rifle
Before the Sauer 200 STR was approved as the new standard Scandinavian target rifle, rebarreled and re-stocked Krag–Jørgensen rifles were the standard Norwegian target rifle together with the Kongsberg-Mauser M59 and M67. The Krag was preferred for shooting on covered ranges and in fair weather, and dominated on the speed-shooting exercises due to its smooth action, and very fast loading with a spring speedloader, however it was known to change its point of impact under wet conditions due to the single front locking lug. Thus, many shooters had both a Krag and a "Mauser" for varying conditions.
Special Krag–Jørgensen rifles / carbines and oddities
The Krag–Jørgensen was manufactured for almost 60 years in Norway. During this time several special models and prototypes were designed and manufactured. Some of these special weapons were meant as an aid in production or to meet a specific demand, but there were also various attempts to increase the firepower of the weapon.
Model rifles
The so-called "model rifles" were used both when the various sub types were approved and as a guide for manufacturing. Basically, the model rifle or model carbine was a specially manufactured weapon that showed how the approved weapon should be. They were numbered and stored separately. Several model rifles and carbines were manufactured for things like a change in surface treatment or other seemingly minor things. There were especially many model rifles made for the M1894, since several were sent to Steyr in Austria to work as controls and models.
Harpoon rifles
A small number of Krag–Jørgensen rifles were converted into harpoon guns, in the same fashion as Jarmann M1884s were converted to Jarmann harpoon rifles. It was realized that converting the Jarmann was more cost efficient than converting the Krag–Jørgensen, so further conversions was halted. It is not known how many were converted in this way.
Modified for belt feed
In the factory museum at Kongsberg Weapon Factory, there is preserved an interesting prototype of a M1894 modified for belt feed. Although no documentation has been uncovered, it's clear that the rifle has been modified at an early stage in the manufacturing process to use the same feed belts that were used on the Hotchkiss heavy machine gun in use in the Norwegian Army at the time.
The backward and forward movement of the bolt operates a mechanism that moves the belt through the receiver, presenting fresh rounds for the weapon. While this may have been advantageous while fighting from fixed fortifications, it cannot have been very practical for the user of the rifle to carry a long feed belt with him in the field. Even so, it is an interesting and early attempt to increase the firepower of the Krag–Jørgensen.
Lieutenant Tobiensen's "speed loader"
In 1923 Lieutenant Tobiesen, working at Kongsberg Weapon Factory, designed what he called a speed loader for repeating rifles. It can be seen as a new attempt to increase the firepower of the Krag–Jørgensen, just as the attempt to convert it to belt feed. The design consisted of a modified cover that let the user of the rifle attach a magazine from the Madsen light machine gun. The cover had a selector switch, allowing the user to select if he wanted to use the Krag–Jørgensen's internal magazine with its 5 rounds of ammunition, or if he wanted to use the external magazine with 25 rounds.
The design was considered promising enough that eight prototypes were manufactured and tested. However, in testing it was revealed that the heavy magazine mounted on the side of the weapon not only made the rifle more cumbersome to carry and use, but also made it twist sideways. It was decided that the "speed loader" was not a practical design for military use and no further manufacture took place.
In 1926, a group of seal hunters approached Kongsberg Weapon Factory and asked to purchase a number of speedloaders for use when hunting seals from small boats. They were turned down due to the high cost of manufacturing a limited number of the devices.
Modified to self loaders
At the same time that the Hotchkiss heavy machine gun was introduced to the Norwegian Army, some people started considering modifying the Krag–Jørgensen to semi-automatic fire. Doing so would have multiplied the firepower of the infantry, allowing more weight of fire to be brought at a target. Most of the designs put forward were not very well thought out and few of the designers knew enough about firearms to be able to calculate the pressures and dimensions necessary. However, two designs were investigated further, and eventually one prototype was built.
Sunngaard's automatic rifle
In 1915 Sergeant Sunngaard proposed a design for making the Krag–Jørgensen into a selfloading rifle. The design was considered over a period of time before it was declared to be 'quite without value', primarily because the requisite pressure would not be attainable without major redesign of the rifle. For this reason, no prototype was made.
Self-loading device SNABB 38
In 1938 a Swedish design called the SNABB was considered. This was a modification that could be made to virtually any bolt-action rifle allowing it to be converted into a self-loading weapon, therefore presenting a chance to cut costs as compared to manufacturing new weapons. The device used gas pressure to operate the bolt handle with the help of a runner. The modification was deemed by some to be unnecessarily complicated. A separate pistolgrip was needed, and the receiver needed major modifications.
A prototype was manufactured in the autumn of 1938 and tested for several months. While moderately successful, the modification would cost about three times as much as originally thought, and the project was dropped due to lack of funds.
Ammunition
The various Krag–Jørgensens were manufactured for a wide variety of ammunition. Apart from various civilian calibres, the rifle was manufactured for the following service ammunition:
Danish 8×58mmR, a 7.87 mm (0.31 in) rimmed round. Early rounds had a 15.3 grams (236 grains) long round nosed bullet, and was loaded so that it produced a muzzle velocity of about 580 m/s (roughly 1900 ft/s), while later rounds had a 12.8 grams (198 grains) spitzer bullet and gave a muzzle velocity of 823 m/s (2740 ft/s).
US 30–40, a 7.62 mm (0.30 in) rimmed round loaded with 40 grains (3 grams) of smokeless powder. It gave a chamber pressure of 40000 lbf/in² (276 MPa), which resulted in a muzzle velocity of 609.6 m/s (2000 ft/s) in the rifles, and 597.4 m/s (1960 ft/s) from the shorter barrel of the carbines.
6.5×55mm, a 6.5 mm (0.256 in) rimless round. Most variations are loaded for a chamber pressure of 350 MPa (roughly 51000 lbf/in²). Early rounds, with a 10.1 grams (156 grains) long round nosed bullet (B-projectile) had a muzzle velocity of around 700 m/s (roughly 2300 ft/s), while later rounds with a 9 grams (139 grains) spitzer bullet (D-projectile) offered a muzzle velocity up to 870 m/s (2854 ft/s).
Contrary to some rumors, the Krag–Jørgensen action can be modified to fire modern, high-power cartridges. During World War II, and also in the early 1950s, several were produced in 7.92×57mm, which can hardly be considered a low-power cartridge. A number of Krag–Jørgensens have also been converted to .30-06 and 7.62×51mm NATO for target shooting and hunting. However, it must be stressed that these were all late-production Norwegian Krag–Jørgensen rifles, made in an era when metallurgy was vastly more advanced than when the American Krag–Jørgensen rifles were made. The American Krag–Jørgensen also has only a single locking lug, whereas the Norwegian and Danish versions effectively had two lugs.
Nonetheless, older rifles may benefit from milder loads. Modern European 6.5×55mm rounds are sometimes loaded to a CIP maximum of 55000 PSI, but 6.5×55mm rounds marked "safe for the Krag" are loaded to a milder 40600 PSI. SAAMI specifications call for maximum average pressure of 46000 PSI, sufficient for with a 160 grain bullet.
Comparison of service rifles
What follows is a comparison between the Danish, American and Norwegian service weapons.
Comparison with contemporary rifles
At the time of adoption in Denmark, the United States and Norway, the Krag–Jørgensen was seen as the best available rifle. Here it is compared with rifles of later decades. In the U.S. trials, the Krag competed against the Mauser Model 92 (as well as many other designs), not the improved Model 98. The Japanese Type 38 was adopted starting 1905, nearly two decades after the first Krag design.
Users
: Produced by the Springfield Armory as the Springfield Model Krag
See also
Antique guns
Krag–Jørgensen pistol
List of individual weapons of the U.S. Armed Forces
Other Norwegian rifles:
Kongsberg Skarpskyttergevær M59—The Norwegian sniper rifle
Kongsberg Skarpskyttergevær M67—The 1967 redesign of the M59
Våpensmia NM149—the rifle that replaced the M59F1 as a Norwegian sniper rifle
Contemporary rifles
M1895 Navy Lee—another rifle in US service at the time.
Mosin–Nagant—the Russian service rifle from 1891.
Notes
References
Andersen, Bjørn (1998). Krag-Jorgensen Rifles and the Danish & Norwegian Military Retrieved Jan. 26 2005.
ANSI-SAAMI Z.299.4 (1992). SAAMI Retrieved Dec 20, 2010.
B. M. Berkovitch The South African Military History Society, Military History Journal – Vol 3 No 6, THE KRAG-JORGENSEN RIFLE OF THE ANGLO-BOER WAR (with an incomplete list of Boer Krag serial numbers)
Cruffler.com (2001). The Norwegian M1894 Krag-Jorgensen Rifle''. Retrieved Jan. 26 2005.
The Krag Rifle (Rate of fire)
External links
An exploded view of the Krag–Jørgensen mechanism
An in depth article on the M1894 "Long Krag"
Krag-Jørgensen Model 1896 (video)
Model 1898 Krag 30–40 (video)
Bolt-action rifles of Norway
Early rifles
Norwegian inventions
Rifles of the United States
Rotary magazine firearms
World War II infantry weapons
World War II military equipment of Denmark
World War II military equipment of Norway
6.5×55mm rifles | [
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17276 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa | Krakatoa | Krakatoa (), also transcribed Krakatau (; ), is a caldera in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Indonesian province of Lampung. The caldera is part of a volcanic island group (Krakatoa Archipelago) comprising four islands. Two, Lang and Verlaten, are remnants of a previous volcanic edifice destroyed in eruptions long before the famous 1883 eruption; another, Rakata, is the remnant of a much larger island destroyed in the 1883 eruption.
In 1927, a fourth island, Anak Krakatau, or "Child of Krakatoa", emerged from the caldera formed in 1883. There has been new eruptive activity since the late 20th century, with a large collapse causing a deadly tsunami in December 2018.
Historical significance
The most notable eruptions of Krakatoa culminated in a series of massive explosions over 26–27 August 1883, which were among the most violent volcanic events in recorded history.
With an estimated Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 6, the eruption was equivalent to —about 13,000 times the nuclear yield of the Little Boy bomb (13 to 16 kt) that devastated Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II, and four times the yield of Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated at 50 Mt.
The 1883 eruption ejected approximately of rock. The cataclysmic explosion was heard away in Alice Springs, Australia, and on the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, to the west.
According to the official records of the Dutch East Indies colony, 165 villages and towns were destroyed near Krakatoa, and 132 were seriously damaged. At least 36,417 people died, and many more thousands were injured, mostly from the tsunamis that followed the explosion. The eruption destroyed two-thirds of the island of Krakatoa.
Eruptions in the area since 1927 have built a new island at the same location, named Anak Krakatau (which is Indonesian for "Child of Krakatoa"). Periodic eruptions have continued since, with recent eruptions in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, and a major collapse in 2018. In late 2011, this island had a radius of roughly , and a highest point of about above sea level, growing each year.
In 2017, the height of Anak Krakatau was reported as over above sea level; following a collapse in December 2018, the height was reduced to 110 meters (361 ft).
Etymology
Although there are earlier descriptions of an island in the Sunda Strait with a "pointed mountain," the earliest mention of Krakatoa by name in the western world was on a 1611 map by Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, who labelled the island "Pulo Carcata" (pulo is the Sundanese word for "island"). About two dozen variants have been found, including Crackatouw, Cracatoa, and Krakatao (in an older Portuguese-based spelling). The first known appearance of the spelling Krakatau was by Wouter Schouten, who passed by "the high tree-covered island of Krakatau" in October 1658.
The origin of the Indonesian name Krakatau is uncertain.
The Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program cites the Indonesian name, Krakatau, as the correct name, but says that Krakatoa is often employed.
Geographical setting
Indonesia has over 130 active volcanoes, the most of any nation. They make up the axis of the Indonesian island arc system produced by northeastward subduction of the Indo-Australian Plate. A majority of these volcanoes lie along Indonesia's two largest islands, Java and Sumatra. These two islands are separated by the Sunda Strait located at a bend in the axis of the island arc. Krakatau is directly above the subduction zone of the Eurasian Plate and the Indo-Australian Plate where the plate boundaries make a sharp change of direction, possibly resulting in an unusually weak crust in the region.
Pre-1883 history
At some point in prehistory, an earlier caldera-forming eruption had occurred, leaving as remnants Verlaten (or Sertung); Lang (also known as Rakata Kecil, or Panjang); Poolsche Hoed ("Polish Hat"); and the base of Rakata. Later, at least two more cones (Perboewatan and Danan) formed and eventually joined with Rakata, forming the main island of Krakatoa. At the time of the 1883 eruption, the Krakatoa group comprised Lang, Verlaten, and Krakatoa itself, an island long by wide. There were also the tree-covered islet near Lang (Poolsche Hoed) and several small rocky islets or banks between Krakatoa and Verlaten.
There were three volcanic cones on Krakatoa island: Rakata, () to the south; Danan, () near the center; and Perboewatan, () to the north.
AD 416 event
The Javanese Book of Kings (Pustaka Raja) records that in the year 338 Saka (416 AD):
There is no geological evidence of a Krakatoa eruption of this size around that time; it may describe the loss of land which previously joined Java to Sumatra across what is now the narrow east end of the Sunda Strait; or it may be a mistaken date, referring to a later eruption in 535 AD, for which there is some corroborating historical evidence.
AD 535 event
David Keys, Ken Wohletz, and others have postulated that a violent volcanic eruption, possibly of Krakatoa, in 535 was responsible for the global climate changes of 535–536. Keys explores what he believes to be the radical and far-ranging global effects of such a putative 6th-century eruption in his book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World. This eruption was believed to have been even more violent than Krakatoa's 1883 eruption, and also the one that created Krakatoa's original caldera, which resulted in the creation of Verlaten Island and Lang Island. However, there are other explanations for the climate change, including an eruption of Ilopango in El Salvador, in Central America.
Middle Ages
Thornton mentions that Krakatoa was known as "The Fire Mountain" during Java's Sailendra dynasty, with records of seven eruptive events between the 9th and 16th centuries. These have been tentatively dated as having occurred in 850, 950, 1050, 1150, 1320, and 1530.
1680
In February 1681, Johann Wilhelm Vogel, a Dutch mining engineer at Salida, Sumatra (near Padang), on his way to Batavia (now Jakarta) passed through the Sunda Strait. In his diary he wrote:
Vogel spent several months in Batavia, returning to Sumatra in November 1681. On the same ship were several other Dutch travellers, including Elias Hesse, a writer. Hesse's journal reports:
The eruption was also reported by a Bengali sea captain, who wrote of the event later, but had not recorded it at the time in the ship's log. Neither Vogel nor Hesse mention Krakatoa in any real detail in their other passages, and no other travellers at the time mention an eruption or evidence of one. (In November 1681, a pepper crop was being offered for sale by inhabitants.)
Simon Winchester maintains, in his 2003 book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, that the 1680 eruption was depicted in an eighteenth-century etching by Dutch cartographer Jan van Schley called Het Brandende Eiland, "The Burning Island," writing that "it was a depiction, without a doubt, of the otherwise little-chronicled eruption that supposedly took place in 1680."
In 1880, Verbeek investigated a fresh unweathered lava flow at the northern coast of Perboewatan, which could not have been more than two centuries old.
Visit by HMS Discovery
In February 1780, the crews of and , on the way home after Captain James Cook's death in Hawaii, stopped for a few days on Krakatoa. They found a freshwater and a hot spring on the island. They described the natives who then lived on the island as "friendly" and made several sketches (In his journal, John Ledyard calls the island "Cocoterra").
Visit by USS Peacock
Edmund Roberts calls the island Crokatoa in his journal. A paraphrased account follows: On 8 September 1832, US sloop-of-war Peacock anchored off the north end, also visiting Lang Island, in search of inhabitants, fresh water, and yams. It was found difficult to land anywhere, due to a heavy surf and to the coral having extended itself to a considerable distance from the shore. Hot springs boiling furiously up, through many fathoms of water, were found on the eastern side of Krakatoa, from the shore. Roberts, Captain Geisinger, and marine lieutenant Fowler visited Forsaken island, having mistaken the singing of locusts for the sound of running water. The boat glided over crystal clear water, over an extensive and highly beautiful submarine garden. Corals of every shape and hue were there, some resembling sunflowers and mushrooms, others cabbages from in diameter, while a third type bore a striking likeness to the rose. The hillsides were typical of tropical climate; large flocks of parrots, monkeys in great variety, wild-mango and orange groves—a superb scene of plants and flowers of every description, glowing in vivid tints of purple, red, blue, brown, and green—but not water or provisions.
Dutch activity
In 1620, the Dutch set up a naval station on the islands and somewhat later a shipyard was built. Sometime in the late 17th century, an attempt was made to establish a pepper plantation on Krakatoa, but the islands were generally ignored by the Dutch East India Company. In 1809, a penal colony was established at an unspecified location, which was in operation for about a decade. By the 1880s, the islands were without permanent inhabitants; the nearest settlement was the nearby island of Sebesi (about away) with a population of 3,000.
Several surveys and mariners' charts were made, and the islands were little explored or studied. An 1854 map of the islands was used in an English chart, which shows some difference from a Dutch chart made in 1874. In July 1880, Rogier Verbeek made an official survey of the islands, but was allowed to spend only a few hours there. He was able to collect samples from several places, and his investigation later proved important in judging the geological impact of the 1883 eruption.
1883 eruption
While seismic activity around the volcano was intense in the years preceding the cataclysmic 1883 eruption, a series of lesser eruptions began on 20 May 1883. The volcano released huge plumes of steam and ash lasting until late August.
On 27 August, a series of four huge explosions almost destroyed the island. The explosions were so violent that they were heard away in Perth, Western Australia, and the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, away. The pressure wave from the third and most violent explosion was recorded on barographs around the world. Several barographs recorded the wave seven times over the course of five days: four times with the wave travelling away from the volcano to its antipodal point, and three times travelling back to the volcano; the wave rounded the globe three and a half times. Ash was propelled to a height of . The sound of the eruption was so loud it was reported that if anyone was within , they would have gone deaf.
The combined effects of pyroclastic flows, volcanic ashes, and tsunamis had disastrous results in the region and worldwide. The death toll recorded by the Dutch authorities was 36,417, although some sources put the estimate at more than 120,000. There are numerous documented reports of groups of human skeletons floating across the Indian Ocean on rafts of volcanic pumice and washing up on the east coast of Africa up to a year after the eruption. Summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere fell by an average of in the year following the eruption.
Aftermath
Anak Krakatau
Verbeek, in his report on the eruption, predicted that any new activity would manifest itself in the region which had been between Perboewatan and Danan. This prediction came true on 29 December 1927, when a submarine lava dome in the area of Perboewatan showed evidence of eruptions (an earlier event in the same area had been reported in June 1927). A new island volcano rose above the waterline a few days later. The eruptions were initially of pumice and ash, and that island and the two islands that followed were quickly eroded away by the sea. Eventually, a fourth island, named Anak Krakatau (meaning "child of Krakatoa" in Indonesian), broke water in August 1930 and produced lava flows more quickly than the waves could erode them.
Biological research
The islands have become a major case study of island biogeography and founder populations in an ecosystem being built from the ground up in an environment virtually cleaned.
The islands had been little studied or biologically surveyed before the 1883 catastrophe—only two pre-1883 biological collections are known: one of plant specimens and the other part of a shell collection. From descriptions and drawings made by , the flora appears to have been representative of a typical Javan tropical climax forest. The pre-1883 fauna is virtually unknown but was probably typical of the smaller islands in the area.
Botanical studies
From a biological perspective, the Krakatau problem refers to the question of whether the islands were completely sterilized by the 1883 eruption or whether some indigenous life survived. When the first researchers reached the islands in May 1884, the only living thing they found was a spider in a crevice on the south side of Rakata. Life quickly recolonized the islands, however; Verbeek's visit in October 1884 found grass shoots already growing. The eastern side of the island has been extensively vegetated by trees and shrubs, presumably brought there as seeds washed up by ocean currents or carried in birds' droppings (or brought by natives and scientific investigators). It is, however, in a somewhat fragile position, and the vegetated area has been badly damaged by recent eruptions.
Handl's occupancy
In 1914, plans were to set aside Rakata as a nature preserve. In 1916, Johann Handl, a German "pumice collector", obtained a permit to mine pumice, against "strong community objections", apparently to get away from World War I. His lease of (basically the eastern half of the island) was to be for 30 years. Handl took up residence on the south coast of Rakata, where he built a house and planted a garden along with "four European families and about 30 coolies". Handl found un-burned wood below the 1883 ash deposits while digging, and fresh water was found below . He and his entourage stayed there for four years, but left due to "violation of the terms of the lease." It is his party that is believed to have inadvertently introduced the black rat to the island, which quickly proliferated.
Conservation
Krakatoa was declared as a nature reserve in 1921, corresponding to IUCN management category Ia (strict nature reserve). Along with several other nature reserves, it was proposed as a national park in 1980. In 1991, "Ujung Kulon National Park and Krakatau Nature Reserve" was inscribed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site, matching Natural criteria (vii) and (x). Ujung Kulon National Park was officially established in 1992, including Krakatoa.
In popular culture
A large part of the 1947 children's novel The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois takes place on Krakatoa, where several families have established a wealthy and fanciful colony based on fictional diamond mines on the island.
Krakatoa has been featured as a subject and a part of the story in various television and film dramas. In the 1953 film Fair Wind to Java, an American sea captain and a pirate leader race one another to recover a fortune in diamonds hidden on Krakatoa, which begins its final eruption as they search the island for the treasure. The island was a prominent part of the plot of '"Crack of Doom," episode six of the Irwin Allen television series The Time Tunnel in 1966. It was also featured as the main part of the story line in the 1969 film, Krakatoa, East of Java (retitled Volcano in a re-release in the 1970s; the title contains a rather large geographical error, as Krakatoa is west of Java), which depicts an effort to salvage a priceless cargo of pearls located perilously close to the erupting volcano. An Indonesian martial arts action film, Krakatau (1977), starring Dicky Zulkarnaen and Advent Bangun, also set the story on the mountain. In more recent years, it has been the subject of a 2006 television drama, Krakatoa: Volcano of Destruction and again in 2008 as Krakatoa.
In Klaus Teuber's board game Seafarers of Catan, the "Krakatoa Variant" is a scenario involving an island composed of three volcano tiles.
In 1973, the American progressive rock band Styx released a spoken-word track called "Krakatoa" on its album The Serpent Is Rising. Written by then-guitarist John Curulewski along with Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, the song tells the story of Krakatoa's eruption and the subsequent return of life to the island.
The British heavy metal band Saxon also released a song about the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, called "Krakatoa", on the 2010 re-release of its 1985 album Innocence Is No Excuse.
See also
Krakatoa documentary and historical materials
List of volcanic eruptions by death toll
List of volcanoes in Indonesia
References
Citations
Bibliography
See Krakatoa documentary and historical materials
External links
1883 Eruption of Krakatau from the United States Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory
Krakatau, Indonesia (1883) – information from San Diego State University about the 1883 eruption
– "Naked Science"
Active volcanoes of Indonesia
Mountains of Indonesia
Subduction volcanoes
Submarine calderas
Islands of the Sunda Strait
Uninhabited islands of Indonesia
VEI-6 volcanoes
Calderas of Indonesia
1883 natural disasters
19th-century volcanic events | [
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17278 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremlin%20%28fortification%29 | Kremlin (fortification) | A kremlin (, ) is a major fortified central complex found in historic Russian cities. This word is often used to refer to the most famous one, the Moscow Kremlin, or metonymically to the government that is based there. Other such fortresses are called detinets, such as the Novgorod Detinets.
Etymology
The Russian word is of uncertain origin. Different versions include the word originating from the Turkic languages, the Greek language or from Baltic languages. The word may share the same root as kremen''' (, , "flint").
History
Kremlins in Rus'
The Slavs began to build fortresses to protect their lands from enemies in the ninth century. It is known that the Scandinavians called the Slavic lands the land of fortresses - "Gardariki". Arabic geographer Al-Bakri wrote: "And that is how the Slavs build a large part of their fortresses: they head for meadows, rich in water and reeds, and there mark a round or rectangular place, depending on the shape they want to make a fortress, and they dig around the moat, and the dugout earth is dumped in a rampart, reinforcing it with planks and piles, like beaten earth, until the wall reaches the desired height. Then they measure the door at whichever side they want, and approach by a wooden bridge". In ancient times, a wooden fence was built on the crest of a rampart, a palisade or zapolot (the wall made of logs, vertically one above the other, and connected with horizontally laid timbers). The way of defending the settlement was primitive; later wooden fortress walls became more preferable.
In the VIII century, the earliest known stone and wooden fortress - Lubšanská fortress near Staraya Ladoga was built. The ancient stone and wooden kremlins include a fortress on Truvorov settlement near Izborsk (IX century) and the first Stara Ladoga Kremlin (the end of IX century, later rebuilt). Single stone towers, gates and bends of walls appeared in other cities (Vladimir, Kyiv, Novgorod, Pereyaslavl): the Golden Gate of Kievan citadel and the gate of the Vladimir Kremlin bearing the same name survived.
A special type of wooden and stone Kremlins appeared under the influence of architectural traditions of Poland and Hungary. They were characterised by the juxtaposition of wooden walls and towers with vezha - high stone towers standing inside the fortress, which were used as watchtowers. Constructions, called Volyn towers, were erected, for example, in the citadels of Kholmsk, Kamenets and Gorodeni.
During the Mongol-Tatar invasion, many Russian wooden and stone-wooden fortresses were taken and destroyed by the Mongols. The long-lasting Mongol-Tatar yoke slowed down the development of Russian fortification architecture for a century and a half, as internecine wars stopped and the need to build fortresses disappeared.
The tradition of fortress construction was preserved in Novgorod and Pskov lands which were not damaged by the Mongol invasion. Here are built not only kremlins (Izborsk, Porkhov) but - for the first time in Russia - fortresses, which were not many cities in the full sense of the word, as defensive structures (Koporie, Oreshek, Yam, Korela, Ostrov, Kobyla). The strongest of the Russian fortresses was the Pskov Kremlin, which had no equal in Russia in the number of sustained sieges.
Kremlins of the Russian state
The term Kremlin (in the variant Kremnik) is first encountered in chronicles of 1317 in accounts of the construction of the Tver Kremlin, where a wooden city-fortress was erected, which was clayed and whitewashed.
Wooden fortresses were erected everywhere in the Russian state - from the Far East lands to the Swedish borders. They were numerous in the South, where they served as a link of fortified fortification zones cutting off the way to the central regions from Crimean Tatars. Aesthetically wooden fortresses were not inferior to stone ones - and we can regret that the towers of wooden kremlins have not survived to this day. Wooden fortresses were built quickly: in 1638 in Mtsensk fortress walls of Bolshoi Ostrog and Pletny Gorod with a total length of about 3 kilometres with 13 towers and almost one hundred meters long bridge over the River Zusha were erected in 20 days. The town of Sviyazhsk was built similarly during the Kazan campaign in the spring of 1551: fortress walls about 2.5 kilometres long, many churches and houses were erected in a month.
Later on, many Kremlins were rebuilt and strengthened. Thus, the Moscow Kremlin under Ivan the Third was reconstructed of bricks.
In the XVI-XVII centuries, about 30 stone fortresses were built in the Russian State. New Kremlins have regular geometric forms in plan (Zaraisky and Tula Kremlins). The Tula Kremlin is unique because it was built in a valley (which was possible because of undeveloped siege artillery of nomad Tatars).
Construction of the Kremlin lasted until the turn of the XVII-XVIII centuries. The last Kremlin structure was built of stone in 1699-1717 in the town of Tobolsk (the easternmost Kremlin in Russia).
In Russia
World Heritage Sites
Moscow Kremlin
Novgorod Kremlin
Solovetsky Monastery
Suzdal Kremlin
Kazan Kremlin
Intact
Astrakhan Kremlin
Kolomna Kremlin
Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin
Pskov Kremlin
Rostov Kremlin (a bishop's residence, not formally considered a kremlin)
Smolensk Kremlin
Tobolsk Kremlin (the sole stone kremlin in Siberia)
Tula Kremlin
Zaraysk Kremlin
Ivangorod Fortress (not formally considered a kremlin)
Oreshek Fortress (not formally considered a kremlin)
Staraya Ladoga
Alexandrov Kremlin (a czar residence, not formally considered a kremlin)
Korela Fortress (not formally considered a kremlin)
Izborsk Kremlin
In ruins
Gdov Kremlin
Porkhov Kremlin
Serpukhov Kremlin
Velikie Luki Kremlin
Torzhok Kremlin
Mozhaysk Kremlin
Fortress of Koporye (not formally considered a kremlin)
Vyazma Kremlin (one tower)
Syzran Kremlin (one tower, 1683)
Ufa
Existing and unwalled
Vladimir Kremlin (Tower Golden Gate and bank)
Dmitrov
Ryazan
Vologda (a bishop residence, not formally considered a kremlin)
Yaroslavl (two towers)
Pereslavl-Zalessky
Khlynov (Vyatka)
Volokolamsk
Traces remain
Borovsk
Opochka
Zvenigorod
Starodub
Tver – a wooden fortress was burned down in a fire in 1763
Sknyatino – underwater since flooding during the 1930s.
Yam fortress (not formally considered a kremlin)
Fortress of Radonezh
Ryazan
(60 km from modern Ryazan)
Ostrov (14th-15th centuries)
Belgorod (bank of fortress)
Vereya
Kaluga
Kostroma
Pustozyorsk
Uglich
Staritsa
Sviyazhsk
Cheboksary
Yuryev-Polsky
Aleksin
Opochka
Oryol
Mtsensk
Raskiel
Modern imitations
Izmaylovo Kremlin
Yoshkar Ola
Outside Russia
After the disintegrations of the Kievan Rus, the Russian Empire and the USSR, some fortresses considered Kremlin-type, remained beyond the borders of modern Russia. Some are listed below:
Belz, Ukraine (only traces)
Kyiv, Ukraine (reconstructed tower of the Golden Gate)
Putyvl, Ukraine
Novhorod-Siverskyi, Ukraine
Chernihiv, Ukraine (only traces)
Kamyanyets, Belarus (shafts and Belaya Vezha tower)
Belgorod Kievsky, Ukraine (now village Belgorodka)
The same structure in Novgorodshina, Ukraine and other Old Russian territories is also called dytynets ( , from dytyna – child). The term has been in use since the 11th century. The term kremlin first appeared in 14th century in various Russian territories, where it replaced dytynets''.
Many Russian monasteries have been built in a fortress-like style similar to that of a kremlin. For a partial list, see Monasteries in Russia.
See also
Citadel
References
Further reading
Воронин Н. Н. Владимир, Боголюбово, Суздаль, Юрьев-Польской. М.: Искусство, 1967.
Кирьянов И. А. Старинные крепости Нижегородского Поволжья. Горький: Горьк. книжн. изд., 1961.
Косточкин В. В. Русское оборонное зодчество конца XIII — начала XVI веков. М.: Издательство Академии наук, 1962.
Крадин Н. П. Русское деревянное оборонное зодчество". М.: Искусство, 1988.
Раппопорт П. А. Древние русские крепости. М.: Наука, 1965.
Раппопорт П. А. Зодчество Древней Руси. Л.: Наука, 1986.
Раппопорт П. А. Строительное производство Древней Руси (X—XIII вв.). СПб: Наука, СПб, 1994.
Сурмина И. О. Самые знаменитые крепости России. М.: Вече, 2002.
Тихомиров М. Н. Древнерусские города. М.: Гос. изд. полит. лит-ры, 1956.
Яковлев В. В. Эволюция долговременной фортификации. М.: Воениздат, 1931.
External links
Russian Fortification Architecture
Twelve Russian Kremlins
Fortifications in Russia | [
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17282 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev%20wave | Kondratiev wave | In economics, Kondratiev waves (also called supercycles, great surges, long waves, K-waves or the long economic cycle) are hypothesized cycle-like phenomena in the modern world economy. The phenomenon is closely connected with the technology life cycle.
It is stated that the period of a wave ranges from forty to sixty years, the cycles consist of alternating intervals of high sectoral growth and intervals of relatively slow growth.
Long wave theory is not accepted by most academic economists. Among economists who accept it, there is a lack of agreement about both the cause of the waves and the start and end years of particular waves. Among critics of the theory, the consensus is that it involves recognizing patterns that may not exist (apophenia).
History of concept
The Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev (also written Kondratieff or Kondratyev) was the first to bring these observations to international attention in his book The Major Economic Cycles (1925) alongside other works written in the same decade. In 1939, Joseph Schumpeter suggested naming the cycles "Kondratieff waves" in his honor. The underlying idea is closely linked to organic composition of capital.
Two Dutch economists, Jacob van Gelderen and Salomon de Wolff, had previously argued for the existence of 50- to 60-year cycles in 1913 and 1924, respectively.
Since the inception of the theory, various studies have expanded the range of possible cycles, finding longer or shorter cycles in the data. The Marxist scholar Ernest Mandel revived interest in long-wave theory with his 1964 essay predicting the end of the long boom after five years and in his Alfred Marshall lectures in 1979. However, in Mandel's theory long waves are the result of the normal business cycle and noneconomic factors, such as wars.
In 1996, George Modelski and William R. Thompson published a book documenting K-Waves dating back to 930 AD in China. Separately, Michael Snyder wrote: "economic cycle theories have enabled some analysts to correctly predict the timing of recessions, stock market peaks and stock market crashes over the past couple of decades".
The historian Eric Hobsbawm also wrote of the theory: "That good predictions have proved possible on the basis of Kondratiev Long Waves—this is not very common in economics—has convinced many historians and even some economists that there is something in them, even if we don't know what".
US economist Anwar Shaikh analyses the movement of the general price level - prices expressed in gold - in the US and the UK since 1890 and identifies three long cycles with troughs ca. in 1895, 1939 and 1982. With this model 2018 was another trough between the third and a possible future fourth cycle.
Characteristics of the cycle
Kondratiev identified three phases in the cycle, namely expansion, stagnation and recession. More common today is the division into four periods with a turning point (collapse) between expansion and stagnation.
Writing in the 1920s, Kondratiev proposed to apply the theory to the 19th century:
1790–1849, with a turning point in 1815.
1850–1896, with a turning point in 1873.
Kondratiev supposed that in 1896 a new cycle had started.
The long cycle supposedly affects all sectors of an economy. Kondratiev focused on prices and interest rates, seeing the ascendant phase as characterized by an increase in prices and low interest rates while the other phase consists of a decrease in prices and high interest rates. Subsequent analysis concentrated on output.
Explanations of the cycle
Cause and effect
Kondratiev waves present both causes and effects of common events that have recurred in capitalistic economies throughout history. Although Kondratiev himself made little differentiation between cause and effect, understanding the cause and effect of Kondratiev waves is a useful discussion and academic tool.
The causes documented by Kondratiev waves primarily include inequity, opportunity and social freedoms. Often, much more discussion is made of the notable effects of these causes as well. Effects are both good and bad and include, to name just a few, technological advance, birthrates, populism and revolution—and revolution's contributing causes which can include racism, religious and political intolerance, failed freedoms and opportunity, incarceration rates, terrorism, etc.
When inequity is low and opportunity is easily available, peaceful, moral decisions are preferred and Aristotle's "Good Life" is possible (Americans call the good life "the American Dream"). Opportunity created the simple inspiration and genius of the Mayflower Compact, for example. Post-World War II and the post-California gold rush 1850s exemplify times of great opportunity and low inequity, and both resulted in unprecedented technological and industrial advances. On the other hand, 1893's global economic panics were not met with sufficient wealth-distributing government policies internationally, and a dozen major revolutions resulted, which some argue were significant causes of World War I. Few would argue against the assertion that World War II began in response to the economic strictures of World War I's Treaty of Versailles and the failure to create government policy that supported economic opportunity during the Great Depression.
Technological innovation theory
According to the innovation theory, these waves arise from the bunching of basic innovations that launch technological revolutions that in turn create leading industrial or commercial sectors. Kondratiev's ideas were taken up by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s. The theory hypothesized the existence of very long-run macroeconomic and price cycles, originally estimated to last 50–54 years.
In recent decades there has been considerable progress in historical economics and the history of technology, and numerous investigations of the relationship between technological innovation and economic cycles. Some of the works involving long cycle research and technology include Mensch (1979), Tylecote (1991), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) (Marchetti, Ayres), Freeman and Louçã (2001), Andrey Korotayev and Carlota Perez.
Perez (2002) places the phases on a logistic or S curve, with the following labels: the beginning of a technological era as irruption, the ascent as frenzy, the rapid build out as synergy and the completion as maturity.
Demographic theory
Because people have fairly typical spending patterns through their life cycle, such as spending on schooling, marriage, first car purchase, first home purchase, upgrade home purchase, maximum earnings period, maximum retirement savings and retirement, demographic anomalies such as baby booms and busts exert a rather predictable influence on the economy over a long time period. The Easterlin hypothesis deals with the post-war baby-boom. Harry Dent has written extensively on demographics and economic cycles. Tylecote (1991) devoted a chapter to demographics and the long cycle.
Land speculation
Georgists such as Mason Gaffney, Fred Foldvary and Fred Harrison argue that land speculation is the driving force behind the boom and bust cycle. Land is a finite resource which is necessary for all production and they claim that because exclusive usage rights are traded around, this creates speculative bubbles which can be exacerbated by overzealous borrowing and lending. As early as 1997, a number of Georgists predicted that the next crash would come in 2008.
Debt deflation
Debt deflation is a theory of economic cycles which holds that recessions and depressions are due to the overall level of debt shrinking (deflating). Hence, the credit cycle is the cause of the economic cycle.
The theory was developed by Irving Fisher following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Debt deflation was largely ignored in favor of the ideas of John Maynard Keynes in Keynesian economics, but it has enjoyed a resurgence of interest since the 1980s, both in mainstream economics and in the heterodox school of post-Keynesian economics and has subsequently been developed by such post-Keynesian economists as Hyman Minsky and Steve Keen.
Modern modifications of Kondratiev theory
Inequity appears to be the most obvious driver of Kondratiev waves, and yet some researches have presented a technological and credit cycle explanation as well.
There are several modern timing versions of the cycle although most are based on either of two causes: one on technology and the other on the credit cycle.
Additionally, there are several versions of the technological cycles and they are best interpreted using diffusion curves of leading industries. For example, railways only started in the 1830s, with steady growth for the next 45 years. It was after Bessemer steel was introduced that railroads had their highest growth rates. However, this period is usually labeled the age of steel. Measured by value added, the leading industry in the U.S. from 1880 to 1920 was machinery, followed by iron and steel.
Any influence of technology during the cycle that began in the Industrial Revolution pertains mainly to England. The U.S. was a commodity producer and was more influenced by agricultural commodity prices. There was a commodity price cycle based on increasing consumption causing tight supplies and rising prices. That allowed new land to the west to be purchased and after four or five years to be cleared and be in production, driving down prices and causing a depression as in 1819 and 1839. By the 1850s, the U.S. was becoming industrialized.
The technological cycles can be labeled as follows:
Industrial Revolution (1771)
Age of Steam and Railways (1829)
Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering (1875)
Age of Oil, Electricity, the Automobile and Mass Production (1908)
Age of Information and Telecommunications (1971)
Some argue that this logic can be extended. The custom of classifying periods of human development by its dominating general purpose technology has surely been borrowed from historians, starting with the Stone Age. Including those, authors distinguish three different long-term metaparadigms, each with different long waves. The first focused on the transformation of material, including stone, bronze, and iron. The second, often referred to as industrial revolutions, was dedicated to the transformation of energy, including water, steam, electric, and combustion power. Finally, the most recent metaparadigm aims at transforming information. It started out with the proliferation of communication and stored data and has now entered the age of algorithms, which aims at creating automated processes to convert the existing information into actionable knowledge.
Several papers on the relationship between technology and the economy were written by researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). A concise version of Kondratiev cycles can be found in the work of Robert Ayres (1989) in which he gives a historical overview of the relationships of the most significant technologies. Cesare Marchetti published on Kondretiev waves and on the diffusion of innovations. Arnulf Grübler's book (1990) gives a detailed account of the diffusion of infrastructures including canals, railroads, highways and airlines, with findings that the principal infrastructures have midpoints spaced in time corresponding to 55-year K wavelengths, with railroads and highways taking almost a century to complete. Grübler devotes a chapter to the long economic wave. In 1996, Giancarlo Pallavicini published the ratio between the long Kondratiev wave and information technology and communication.
Korotayev et al. recently employed spectral analysis and claimed that it confirmed the presence of Kondratiev waves in the world GDP dynamics at an acceptable level of statistical significance. Korotayev et al. also detected shorter business cycles, dating the Kuznets to about 17 years and calling it the third harmonic of the Kondratiev, meaning that there are three Kuznets cycles per Kondratiev.
Leo A. Nefiodow shows that the fifth Kondratieff ended with the global economic crisis of 2000–2003 while the new, sixth Kondratieff started simultaneously. According to Leo A. Nefiodow, the carrier of this new long cycle will be health in a holistic sense—including its physical, psychological, mental, social, ecological and spiritual aspects; the basic innovations of the sixth Kondratieff are "psychosocial health" and "biotechnology".
More recently, the physicist and systems scientist Tessaleno Devezas advanced a causal model for the long wave phenomenon based on a generation-learning model and a nonlinear dynamic behaviour of information systems. In both works, a complete theory is presented containing not only the explanation for the existence of K-Waves, but also and for the first time an explanation for the timing of a K-Wave (≈60 years = two generations).
A specific modification of the theory of Kondratieff cycles was developed by Daniel Šmihula. Šmihula identified six long-waves within modern society and the capitalist economy, each of which was initiated by a specific technological revolution:
Wave of the Financial-agricultural revolution (1600–1780)
Wave of the Industrial revolution (1780–1880)
Wave of the Technical revolution (1880–1940)
Wave of the Scientific-technical revolution (1940–1985)
Wave of the Information and telecommunications revolution (1985–2015)
Hypothetical wave of the post-informational technological revolution (Internet of things/renewable energy transition?) (2015–2035?)
Unlike Kondratieff and Schumpeter, Šmihula believed that each new cycle is shorter than its predecessor. His main stress is put on technological progress and new technologies as decisive factors of any long-time economic development. Each of these waves has its innovation phase which is described as a technological revolution and an application phase in which the number of revolutionary innovations falls and attention focuses on exploiting and extending existing innovations. As soon as an innovation or a series of innovations becomes available, it becomes more efficient to invest in its adoption, extension and use than in creating new innovations. Each wave of technological innovations can be characterized by the area in which the most revolutionary changes took place ("leading sectors").
Every wave of innovations lasts approximately until the profits from the new innovation or sector fall to the level of other, older, more traditional sectors. It is a situation when the new technology, which originally increased a capacity to utilize new sources from nature, reached its limits and it is not possible to overcome this limit without an application of another new technology.
For the end of an application phase of any wave there are typical an economic crisis and economic stagnation. The financial crisis of 2007–2008 is a result of the coming end of the "wave of the Information and telecommunications technological revolution". Some authors have started to predict what the sixth wave might be, such as James Bradfield Moody and Bianca Nogrady who forecast that it will be driven by resource efficiency and clean technology. On the other hand, Šmihula himself considers the waves of technological innovations during the modern age (after 1600 AD) only as a part of a much longer "chain" of technological revolutions going back to the pre-modern era. It means he believes that we can find long economic cycles (analogical to Kondratiev cycles in modern economy) dependent on technological revolutions even in the Middle Ages and the Ancient era.
Criticism of long cycles
Long wave theory is not accepted by many academic economists. However, it is important for innovation-based, development and evolutionary economics. Yet, among economists who accept it, there has been no formal universal agreement about the standards that should be used universally to place start and the end years for each wave. Agreement of start and end years can be +1 to 3 years for each 40- to 65-year cycle.
Health economist and biostatistician Andreas J. W. Goldschmidt searched for patterns and proposed that there is a phase shift and overlap of the so-called Kondratiev cycles of IT and health (shown in the figure). He argued that historical growth phases in combination with key technologies does not necessarily imply the existence of regular cycles in general. Goldschmidt is of the opinion that different fundamental innovations and their economic stimuli do not exclude each other as they mostly vary in length and their benefit is not applicable to all participants in a market.
Joseph Schumpeter, a professor at Harvard University, was among the key advocates of the existence of Kondratiev wave.
See also
Business cycles
Clustering illusion
Grand supercycle (Ralph Nelson Elliott's wave theory)
Joshua S. Goldstein
Kuznets swing
Market trends
Martin A. Armstrong
Second Industrial Revolution
Smihula waves
Spending wave
Technological revolution
References
Further reading
Grinin, L., Korotayev, A. and Tausch A. (2016) Economic Cycles, Crises, and the Global Periphery. Springer International Publishing, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, London, ; https://www.springer.com/de/book/9783319412603
With contributions by Samir Amin, Christopher Chase Dunn, Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein.
Weekly Column from 11.09.2007 predicting a major turning-point between 2007 and 2009 and the start of a Great Depression.
This book provides the history of the many ups and downs of the economies.
Kondratieff Waves almanac
Nefiodow, Leo A. (2014). Health: The Economic Growth Engine of the 21st Century, HealthManagement.org Vol 14 Issue 4/2014
Béla Sipos: „Empirical research of long-term cycles”. STATISZTIKAI SZEMLE [Statistical Survey] 75: 1. ksz. pp. 119–128., Bp., 1997.
Béla Sipos „Analysis of long-term tendencies in the world economy and Hungary”. STATISZTIKAI SZEMLE [Statistical Survey] 80: Klnsz pp. 86–102. 2002.
External links
"Kondratieff waves" on faculty.Washington.edu (The Evolutionary World Politics Homepage).
"Kondratieff theory explained" on Kondratyev.com (Kondratyev Theory Letters).
The Kondratieff Cycle: Real or Fabricated? by Murray Rothbard
Business cycle theories
1925 in economics | [
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17284 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koo%20Stark | Koo Stark | Kathleen Norris Stark (born April 26, 1956), better known as Koo Stark, is an American photographer and actress, known for her relationship with Prince Andrew. She is a patron of the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust, museum of the Victorian pioneer photographer.
Early life and education
Stark was born in New York. Her parents were Wilbur Stark, a writer and producer, and Kathi Norris, a writer and television presenter in New York City. She is the youngest of three children, the others being Pamela and Brad. At the time of her birth, the family was living in Manhattan. Her grandfather, Edwin Earl Norris, was a cabinetmaker and musician, playing the French horn and the viola in the Newark Symphony Orchestra. Her mother's family were Presbyterians.<ref>Andrew Devore Boyd, Joseph Boyd, Sr. (died 1799) of Prince George's County, Maryland, and his family through six generations' (2010), p. 34: '221. Lena A. Loyd'</ref> After a divorce in the 1960s, her mother remarried.
Koo Stark attended the Hewitt School in New York and the Glendower Preparatory School in Kensington, London. After training at a stage school, she began her acting career.Wilbur Stark, TV Producer, 81 , dated August 14, 1995, at nytimes.com, accessed 12 November 2017
Career
Acting
Her first film role was in the comedy All I Want Is You... and You... and You... (1974), produced by her father. In 1975 she appeared in Las adolescentes (The Adolescents), opposite Anthony Andrews, and starred in an episode of Shades of Greene.
Also that year she had an uncredited role as a bridesmaid in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Her best-remembered performance is the lead role in the semi-erotic film Emily (1976), directed by Henry Herbert, 17th Earl of Pembroke. Uncertain whether to accept the part, Stark did so on the advice of Graham Greene, with whom she had worked the year before. Of working with her in Emily, actor Victor Spinetti later wrote "I found Koo Stark to be an enchanting girl and terribly bright and interesting".
She also appeared in Cruel Passion (1977), a film based on the novel Justine. Around the same time, she played the part of Camie Marstrap in Star Wars (1977); the scenes in which she appeared were cut from the film before its original release, but can be seen in Star Wars: Behind the Magic (1998).
Stark also began to work as a fashion model, particularly for Norman Parkinson. In February 1981, she was at the National Theatre as an understudy in the Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?She appeared in the comedy Eat the Rich (1987), and then featured in "Timeslides", an episode of the sci-fi show Red Dwarf (1989), playing Lady Sabrina Mulholland-Jjones, the fiancée of a more successful Dave Lister.
In September 1987, she returned to the stage, taking the part of Vera Claythorne in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None at the Duke of York's Theatre. The London Theatre Record posed the question "Why has a girl so obviously three-dimensional chosen a part so obviously two-dimensional?" She played Miss Scarlett in the 1991 series of Cluedo, succeeding Toyah Willcox and befriending Rula Lenska.
Photography
Stark has worked as a photographer since the 1980s, and may have been the first person to turn the tables on the pursuing paparazzi by taking photos of them. Prince Andrew has told how in 1983 a photographic printer, Gene Nocon, invited Stark to take photographs of people taking photos of her, for his exhibition, Personal Points of View, planned for October. She persuaded Nocon to include Andrew's work as well. Her early photographs led to a book deal, for which she took lessons from Norman Parkinson. She travelled to Tobago, where he lived, and he became her mentor. Her book Contrasts (1985) included about a hundred of her photographs. She went on to study the work of leading photographers, including Angus McBean, whom she met and photographed, developing her interests in photography to include reportage, portraits, landscapes, still life, and other work.
The book Contrasts was launched at Hamiltons Gallery, London, in September 1985, at an exhibition of the same name. In 1994, the Gallery Bar at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane hosted an exhibition called 'The Stark Image', forty photographs by Stark, including several previously unpublished. In 1998, her work was featured at the Como Lario in Holbein Place, Belgravia. In July 2001 she had an exhibition called 'Stark Images" at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, duplicated from June to July 2001 at Dimbola Lodge on the Isle of Wight. A solo exhibition of portraits was at the Winter Gardens, Ventnor, from September to October 2010, and another at Dimbola Lodge from February to April, 2011.
On 22 April 1987, a charity auction at Christie's, St James's, for the Campaign to Protect Rural England, featured signed work by David Bailey, Patrick Lichfield, Don McCullin, Terence Donovan, Fay Godwin, Heather Angel, Clive Arrowsmith, Linda McCartney, Koo Stark, and fifteen others,BBC Wildlife, Volumes 4-5 (1986), p. 201 Views by Stark, including some of Kirby Muxloe Castle, were in G. H. Davies's England's Glory (1987), a CPRE book launched at the same time.
Pictures by Stark have appeared in Country Life and other magazines. Several of her portraits are in the National Portrait Gallery, and work is also in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, both in London.
A Leica user, Stark has said her camera transcends mere function and is a personal friend. A solo exhibition hosted by the Leica gallery in Mayfair in May 2017 was entitled Kintsugi, a Japanese word for a way of renovating things that have been broken. Stark explained the title: "Kintsugi is a way of learning to see individual beauty, and to appreciate the value of experience and honesty. It is the antithesis of digital, airbrushed, Photoshop-homogenised ‘beauty’." In August the exhibition was repeated in Manchester, to mark the opening of a new Leica store there.
Personal life
Stark met Prince Andrew in February 1981, and they were close for some two years, before and after his active service in the Falklands War.Alastair Burnet, The ITN book of the royal wedding (Michael O'Mara Books, 1986), p. 38: "The actress Miss Koo Stark was a regular girlfriend of Prince Andrew for several years." Tina Brown has claimed that this was Andrew's only serious love affair. In October 1982 they took a holiday together on the island of Mustique. According to Lady Colin Campbell, Andrew was in love, and the Queen was "much taken with the elegant, intelligent, and discreet Koo". However, in 1983, after 18 months of dating, they split up under pressure from the Queen. In 1988, Stark brought a successful libel action against The Mail on Sunday over an untrue story headed 'Koo dated Andy after she wed'. In 1989, The Spectator reported that she had received £300,000 from one newspaper "for years of inaccurate persecution" and was also collecting money from others. In 1997, Prince Andrew became the godfather of Stark's daughter, and in 2015, when the Prince was accused by Virginia Roberts over the Jeffrey Epstein connection, Stark came to his defence, stating that he was a good man and she could help to rebut the claims.
Stark married Tim Jefferies, manager of a photographic gallery, in August 1984, at St Saviour's, Hampstead, with the minister, Christopher Neil-Smith, commenting that "It was such a quiet affair you wouldn't have known it was happening." They stayed together for a year, later divorcing.
About 1993, Stark was hit by a taxi in Old Compton Street, losing two teeth and also suffering a deep wound to her forehead, after a collision with her camera. This accident left her temporarily disfigured, but the wound eventually closed leaving a small scar just under the hair-line. She has been a practising Buddhist since meeting the Dalai Lama.
She was later engaged to Warren Walker, an American banker, but he cancelled their wedding before the birth of their daughter, Tatiana, in May 1997.
In 2002, Stark was diagnosed with breast cancer and endured a double mastectomy and chemotherapy, causing her to lose her hair for a time.
In another libel action in 2007, Stark won an apology and substantial damages from Zoo Weekly magazine, which had described her as a porn star. She commented "I am relieved that my name has been cleared of this false, highly damaging and serious allegation which has been proved to be completely untrue." In 2011, The Daily Telegraph called her an early Kate Middleton prototype and suggested that if she had not appeared in the film Emily early in her career she might have gone on to become the Duchess of York.
Stark continues to live in London and is a member of the Chelsea Arts Club. She is a Patron of the Julia Margaret Cameron Trust, at Dimbola Lodge on the Isle of Wight, home of the Victorian pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.
Films and television
Film
Television
Publications
Stark, Koo Contrasts'' (The Book Service Ltd, 1985)
Photographic exhibitions
'Contrasts', Hamiltons Gallery, Carlos Place, London, September 1985
'The Stark Image', Gallery Bar at Grosvenor House Hotel, London, 1994
'Stark Images', Dimbola Lodge, Isle of Wight, June to July 2001
'Stark Images', Fruitmarket Gallery, Market Street, Edinburgh, July 2001
'Portraits by Koo Stark', Winter Gardens, Ventnor, Isle of Wight, September to October 2010
'Koo Stark: Contrasts', Dimbola Lodge, Isle of Wight, February to April, 2011
'Kintsugi', Leica gallery, Bruton Place, Mayfair, May 2017
'Kintsugi', Leica store, Police Street, Manchester, August 2017
'Kintsugi Portraits', San Lorenzo, Beauchamp Place, London SW3, November 2017
References
External links
Koo Stark Pictures and Images at gettyimages.co.uk
Koo Stark exhibition at Dimbola Lodge, Isle of Wight, Feb 2011, by Birgit Cunningham
1956 births
Living people
Actresses from New York City
American Buddhists
American emigrants to England
American female models
American film actresses
American women photographers
Hewitt School alumni
Fine art photographers
American portrait photographers | [
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17289 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kliment%20Voroshilov | Kliment Voroshilov | Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (, , Klyment Okhrimovyč Vorošylov), popularly known as Klim Voroshilov (, Klim Vorošilov; 4 February 1881 – 2 December 1969), was a prominent Soviet military officer and politician during the Stalin era. He was one of the original five Marshals of the Soviet Union, the highest military rank of the Soviet Union, and served as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Soviet head of state, from 1953 to 1960.
Born to a Russian worker's family in modern Ukraine, Voroshilov took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an early member of the Bolsheviks. He served with distinction at the Battle of Tsaritsyn, during which he became a close friend of Stalin. Voroshilov was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1921, and in 1925 Stalin appointed him People's Commissar for Military and Navy Affairs (later People's Commissars for Defence). In 1926, he became a full member of the Politburo. In 1935, Voroshilov was named a Marshal of the Soviet Union. He played a central role during the Great Purge, denounced many of his own colleagues and subordinates, and personally signed over a hundred execution lists.
At the outbreak of World War II, Voroshilov was held responsible for Soviet failures in Finland during the Winter War and was replaced as Defense Commissar by Semyon Timoshenko. Following the German invasion in June 1941, he was recalled and appointed to the State Defense Committee. Voroshilov failed to stop the German encirclement of Leningrad and was again relieved from his command in September 1941.
After the war, Voroshilov oversaw the establishment of a socialist regime in Hungary. Following Stalin's death in 1953, Voroshilov was appointed Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. His fortunes declined during the rise of Nikita Khrushchev and the Supreme Soviet removed him from power in 1960. Voroshilov died in 1969 at the age of 88.
Early life
Voroshilov was born in the settlement of Verkhnyeye, Bakhmut uyezd, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire (now part of Lysychansk city in Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine), into a railway worker's family of Russian ethnicity. According to the Soviet Major General Petro Grigorenko, Voroshilov himself alluded to the heritage of his birth-country and to the previous family name of Voroshilo. During his school years, Voroshilov became a close friend and almost a member of the family of Semyon Ryzhkov, who later became the second secretary of the First Duma.
Russian Revolution
Voroshilov joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1905. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Voroshilov became a member of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars and Commissar for Internal Affairs along with Vasiliy Averin. He was well known for aiding Joseph Stalin in the Revolutionary Military Council, having become closely associated with Stalin during the Red Army's 1918 defense of Tsaritsyn, and one of the Cavalry Army clique.
Voroshilov was active as a commander of the Southern Front during the Russian Civil War and the Polish–Soviet War while with the 1st Cavalry Army. As Political Commissar serving co-equally with Stalin, Voroshilov was responsible for the morale of the 1st Cavalry Army, which was composed chiefly of peasants from southern Russia.
Voroshilov headed the Petrograd Police during 1917 and 1918.
Interwar period
Voroshilov served as a member of the Central Committee from his election in 1921 until 1961. In 1925, after the death of Mikhail Frunze, Voroshilov was appointed People's Commissar for Military and Navy Affairs and Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the USSR, a post he held until 1934. His main accomplishment in this period was to move key Soviet war industries east of the Urals, so that the Soviet Union could strategically retreat, while keeping its manufacturing capability intact. Frunze's political position adhered to that of the Troika (Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Stalin), but Stalin preferred to have a close, personal ally in charge (as opposed to Frunze, a "Zinovievite"). Frunze was urged by a group of Stalin's hand-picked doctors to have surgery to treat an old stomach ulcer, despite previous doctors' recommendations to avoid surgery and Frunze's own unwillingness. He died on the operating table of a massive overdose of chloroform, an anaesthetic. Voroshilov became a full member of the newly formed Politburo in 1926, remaining a member until 1960.
Voroshilov was appointed People's Commissar (Minister) for Defence in 1934 and a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1935. He played a central role in Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s, denouncing many of his own military colleagues and subordinates when asked to do so by Stalin. He wrote personal letters to exiled former Soviet officers and diplomats such as commissar Mikhail Ostrovsky, asking them to return voluntarily to the Soviet Union and falsely reassuring them that they would not face retribution from authorities. Voroshilov personally signed 185 documented execution lists, fourth among the Soviet leadership after Molotov, Stalin and Kaganovich. Voroshilov did not personally share the paranoia towards upper-class elements of the officer corps. He openly declared that the saboteurs in the Red Army were few in number and tried to save the lives of officers like Lukin, who would serve with distinction during the Second World War, and Sokolov-Strakhov, and he was sometimes successful. He had no problem denouncing officers he disliked such as Tukhachevsky.
Despite taking part in the purging of many "mechanisers" (supporters of wide usage of tanks rather than cavalry) from the Red Army, Voroshilov became convinced that reliance on cavalry should be decreased while more modern arms should receive higher priority. Marshal Budyonny tried to recruit him to his cause of protecting the status of cavalry in the Red Army but Voroshilov openly declared his intention to do the opposite. He praised the army's combined arms warfare capabilities as well as the high quality and ability to take initiative of the officers during the 1936 summer manoeuvers. However he also pointed out issues in the Red Army as a whole in his full report. Among the issues he pointed out were insufficient communication, ineffective staffs, insufficient cooperation between arms, and the rudimentary nature of the command structure in tank units and other modern arms.
When the Great Purge ended, some reforms were undertaken by the high command to reconcile Red Army doctrine (for example deep operations doctrine) with the real state of the Red Army. The politically appointed commanders of the post-purge Red Army saw that the army, especially after the purge, was not suitable to carry out deep operations style warfare. Commanders such as Voroshilov and Kulik were among the instigators of these reforms which positively impacted the Red Army. These commanders themselves turned out not to be able to carry out such operations in practice. Voroshilov and Kulik turned out to be unable to put these reforms into practice. One of these reforms was a reorganization of Red Army field units which accidentally moved Red Army organization to a far less advanced state than it had been in 1936. This reorganization was conceived by Kulik but put into practice by Voroshilov.
When territorial units were abolished Voroshilov noted that among the reasons for disbanding them was inability to train conscripts in the use of modern technology. He had openly proclaimed that the system was inadequate in an era in which imperialist powers (such as Germany) were expanding the capabilities of their armies. The territorial units had been very unpopular, not only with Voroshilov, but with the Red Army leadership a whole. They were hopelessly ineffective: territorial conscript Alexey Grigorovich Maslov noted that he never fired a shot during his training, while it was noted that these units only underwent real training in the one month a year when experienced veterans returned.
World War II
Voroshilov commanded Soviet troops during the Winter War from November 1939 to January 1940 but, due to poor Soviet planning and Voroshilov's incompetence as a general, the Red Army suffered about 320,000 casualties compared to 70,000 Finnish casualties. When the leadership gathered at Stalin's dacha at Kuntsevo, Stalin shouted at Voroshilov for the losses; Voroshilov replied in kind, blaming the failure on Stalin for eliminating the Red Army's best generals in his purges. Voroshilov followed this retort by smashing a platter of roast suckling pig on the table. Nikita Khrushchev said it was the only time he ever witnessed such an outburst. Voroshilov was nonetheless made the scapegoat for the initial failures in Finland. He was later replaced as Defense Commissar by Semyon Timoshenko. Voroshilov was then made Deputy Premier responsible for cultural matters.
Voroshilov initially argued that thousands of Polish army officers captured in September 1939 should be released, but he later signed the order for their execution in the Katyn massacre of 1940.
Between 1941 and 1944, Voroshilov was a member of the State Defense Committee.
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Voroshilov became commander of the short-lived Northwestern Direction (July to August 1941), controlling several fronts. In September 1941 he commanded the Leningrad Front. Working alongside military commander Andrei Zhdanov as German advances threatened to cut off Leningrad, he displayed considerable personal bravery in defiance of heavy shelling at Ivanovskoye; at one point he rallied retreating troops and personally led a counter-attack against German tanks armed only with a pistol. However, the style of counterattack he launched had long since been abandoned by strategists and drew mostly contempt from his military colleagues; he failed to prevent the Germans from surrounding Leningrad and he was dismissed from his post and replaced by Georgy Zhukov on 8 September 1941. Stalin had a political need for popular wartime leaders, however, and Voroshilov remained as an important figurehead.
Post war
Hungary
Between 1945 and 1947, Voroshilov supervised the establishment of the socialist republic in postwar Hungary. He attributed the poor showing of the Hungarian Communist Party in the October 1945 Budapest municipal elections to the number of minorities in leadership positions, arguing that it was "detrimental to the party that its leaders are not of Hungarian origin".
1952–1953 Soviet leadership
In 1952, Voroshilov was appointed a member of the Presidium of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Stalin's death on 5 March 1953 prompted major changes in the Soviet leadership. On 15 March 1953, Voroshilov was approved as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (i.e., the head of state) with Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Communist Party and Georgy Malenkov as Premier of the Soviet Union. Voroshilov, Malenkov, and Khrushchev brought about the 26 June 1953 arrest of Lavrenty Beria after Stalin's death.
One of Voroshilov's responsibilities as chairman of the Presidium was to oversee the appeal review of Soviet death row inmates. Analysis by Jeffrey S. Hardy and Yana Skorobogatov describe his role thus:
"Chairman Voroshilov presided over the meetings and clearly had the most influential voice, but split votes were not uncommon and Voroshilov was sometimes outvoted... Throughout his tenure as Presidium chair, he behaved like someone who believed that one should follow established procedure and not act too quickly in matters of life and death."
Hardy and Skorobogatov indicate that Voroshilov frequently exerted his influence on the committee toward leniency, especially in the case of those who expressed repentance in their appeal documents and those convicted of crimes of passion or under the influence of alcohol; he judged those convicted of political crimes or acts with financial motives more harshly. During his tenure, many individuals sentenced to death had their punishments commuted to prison terms of varying lengths. The authors of study observe that his successor, Brezhnev, took a noticeably harder line in appeals cases.
However, the contrast between Voroshilov's relatively magnanimous attitude toward pardon cases in the 1950s with his well-documented participation in the deadly purges of the 1930s (as described above) was noted even at the time by Khrushchev, who asked him, "So when were you acting according to your conscience, then or now?"
Fall from grace
After Khrushchev removed most of the Stalinists like Molotov and Malenkov from the party, Voroshilov's career began to fade. On 7 May 1960, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union granted Voroshilov's request for retirement and elected Leonid Brezhnev chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council (the head of state). The Central Committee also relieved him of duties as a member of the Party Presidium (as the Politburo had been called since 1952) on 16 July 1960. In October 1961, his political defeat was complete at the 22nd party congress when he was excluded from election to the Central Committee.Following Khrushchev's fall from power, Soviet leader Brezhnev brought Voroshilov out of retirement into a figurehead political post. Voroshilov was again re-elected to the Central Committee in 1966. Voroshilov was awarded a second medal of Hero of the Soviet Union 1968.
Death
During a winter night in 1969, the 88 year old Voroshilov started to feel unwell. His family proposed to call an ambulance immediately, but he adamantly refused. In the morning he put on his military uniform, and after calling a car, he went to the hospital himself, fully decorated. Voroshilov died on 2 December and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, in one of the twelve individual tombs located between the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin wall.
Personal life
Voroshilov was married to Ekaterina Voroshilova, born Golda Gorbman, a Ukrainian Jew from Mardarovka. She changed her name when she converted to Orthodox Christianity in order to be allowed to marry Voroshilov. They met while both exiled in Arkhangelsk, where Ekaterina was sent in 1906. While both serving on the Tsaritsyn Front in 1918, where Ekaterina was helping orphans, they adopted a four-year-old orphan boy who they named Petya. They also adopted the children of Mikhail Frunze following his death in 1925. During Stalin's rule, they lived in the Kremlin at the Horse Guards.
His personality as it was described by Molotov in 1974: "Voroshilov was nice, but only in certain times. He always stood for the political line of the party, because he was from a working class, a common man, very good orator. He was clean, yes. And he was personally devoted to Stalin. But his devotion was not very strong. However in this period he advocated Stalin very actively, supported him in everything, though not entirely sure in everything. It also affected their relationship. This is a very complex issue. This must be taken into account to understand why Stalin treated him critically and not invited him at all our conversations. At least at private ones. But he came by himself. Stalin frowned. Under Khrushchev, Voroshilov behaved badly."
Honours and awards
Soviet Union
The Kliment Voroshilov (KV) series of tanks, used in World War II, was named after him. Two towns were also named after him: Voroshilovgrad in Ukraine (now changed back to the historical Luhansk) and Voroshilov in the Soviet Far East (now renamed Ussuriysk after the Ussuri river), as well as the General Staff Academy in Moscow. Stavropol was called Voroshilovsk from 1935 to 1943.
Hero of the Soviet Union, two times (No. 10840 - 3 February 1956 (in conjunction with his 75th birthday), No. 47 - 22 February 1968 (in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the Armed Forces of the USSR))
Hero of Socialist Labour (No. 10268 - 7 May 1960)
Order of Lenin, eight times (No. 880 – 23 February 1935, No. 3582 – 22 February 1938, No. 14851 – 3 February 1941, No. 26411 – 21 February 1945, No. 128065 – 3 February 1951, No. 313410 – 3 February 1956, No. 331807 – 3 February 1961, No. 340967 – 22 February 1968)
Order of the Red Banner, six times (No. 47 – 26 June 1919, No. 629 - 2 April 1921, No. 27 - 3–2 December 1925, No. 5 - 4–22 February 1930, No. 1 - 5–3 November 1944, No. 1–24 June 1948)
Order of Suvorov, 1st class (No. 125 – 22 February 1944)
Order of the Red Banner of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (17 February 1930)
Order of the Red Banner of the Tajik SSR (No. 148 – 14 January 1933)
Order of the Red Banner ZSFSR (25 February 1933)
Jubilee Medal "XX Years of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army" (22 February 1938)
Medal "For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" (1945)
Medal "For the Defence of Leningrad"
Medal "For the Defence of Moscow"
Medal "For the Defence of the Caucasus"
Medal "In Commemoration of the 800th Anniversary of Moscow" (21 September 1947)
Jubilee Medal "30 Years of the Soviet Army and Navy" (22 February 1948)
Jubilee Medal "40 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR" (17 February 1958)
Jubilee Medal "50 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR"
Jubilee Medal "Twenty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" (1965)
Honorary Revolutionary Weapon (1920, 1968)
Foreign awards
Mongolian P.R.
Hero of the Mongolian People's Republic (29 May 1957)
Order of Sukhbaatar, twice
Order of the Red Banner
Order of the Polar Star
Finland
Grand Cross of the Order of the White Rose of Finland
Turkey
Honorary citizen of Izmir, November 1933; in Izmir a street was also named after him. In 1951, it was renamed "Plevne Bulvarı".
See also
Bibliography of the Russian Revolution and Civil War
Bibliography of Stalinism and the Soviet Union
Bibliography of the Post Stalinist Soviet Union
Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization
Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941
Voroshilov Sharpshooter
"Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin," a famous Soviet painting
References
External links
Collection of Soviet songs about Klim Voroshilov
1881 births
1969 deaths
People from Lysychansk
People from Yekaterinoslav Governorate
Russians in Ukraine
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party members
Old Bolsheviks
Russian Constituent Assembly members
Anti-revisionists
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union members
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Soviet Union) members
Heads of state of the Soviet Union
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First convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
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Fourth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Fifth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Sixth convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Seventh convocation members of the Soviet of the Union
Marshals of the Soviet Union
People of the Russian Civil War
Russian people of World War II
Soviet people of World War II
Great Purge perpetrators
Commissioners of the Leningrad Police
Heroes of the Soviet Union
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Recipients of the Order of Lenin
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Burials at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis
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20th-century Ukrainian politicians
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Third convocation members of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Fourth convocation members of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
Soviet interior ministers of Ukraine
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union members | [
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17291 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristi%20Yamaguchi | Kristi Yamaguchi | Kristine Tsuya Yamaguchi (born July 12, 1971) is an American former figure skater. In ladies' singles, Yamaguchi is the 1992 Olympic champion, a two-time World champion (1991 and 1992), and the 1992 U.S. champion. In 1992, she became the first Asian American woman to win a gold medal in a Winter Olympic competition. As a pairs skater with Rudy Galindo, she is the 1988 World Junior champion and a two-time national champion (1989 and 1990). In December 2005, she was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. In 2008, Yamaguchi became the celebrity champion in the sixth season of Dancing with the Stars.
Early life
Yamaguchi was born on July 12, 1971, in Hayward, California, to Jim Yamaguchi, a dentist, and Carole (née Doi), a medical secretary. Yamaguchi is Sansei (a third-generation descendant of Japanese emigrants). Her paternal grandparents and maternal great-grandparents emigrated to the United States from Japan, originating from Wakayama Prefecture and Saga Prefecture. Yamaguchi's grandparents were sent to an internment camp during World War II, where her mother was born. Her maternal grandfather, George A. Doi, was in the U.S. Army and fought in Germany and France during World War II during the time his family was interned at the Heart Mountain and Amache camps. Research done in 2010 by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for the PBS series Faces of America showed that Yamaguchi's heritage can be traced back to Wakayama and Saga prefectures in Japan and that her paternal grandfather, Tatsuichi Yamaguchi, emigrated to Hawaii in 1899.
Yamaguchi and her siblings, Brett and Lori, grew up in Fremont, California. In order to accommodate her training schedule, Yamaguchi was home-schooled for her first two years of high school, but attended Mission San Jose High School for her junior and senior years, where she graduated.
Skating career
Yamaguchi began skating and taking ballet lessons, as a child, as physical therapy for her club feet.
Pairs career
With Rudy Galindo she won the junior title at the U.S. championships in 1986. Two years later, Yamaguchi won the singles and, with Galindo, the pairs titles at the 1988 World Junior Championships; Galindo had won the 1987 World Junior Championship in singles. In 1989 Yamaguchi and Galindo won the senior pairs title at the U.S. Championships. They won the title again in 1990.
As a pairs team, Yamaguchi and Galindo were unusual in that they were both accomplished singles skaters, which allowed them to consistently perform difficult elements like side by side triple flip jumps, which are still more difficult than side by side jumps performed by current top international pairs teams. They also jumped and spun in opposite directions, Yamaguchi counter-clockwise, and Galindo clockwise, which gave them an unusual look on the ice. In 1990, Yamaguchi decided to focus solely on singles. Galindo went on to have a successful singles career as well, winning the 1996 U.S. championships and the 1996 World bronze medal.
Singles career
Yamaguchi won her first major international gold medal in figure skating at the 1990 Goodwill Games.
In 1991, Yamaguchi moved to Edmonton, Alberta, to train with coach Christy Ness. There, she took psychology courses at the University of Alberta. The same year Yamaguchi placed second to Tonya Harding at the U.S. championships, her third consecutive silver medal at Nationals. The following month in Munich, Germany, Yamaguchi won the 1991 World Championships. That year, the American ladies team, consisting of Yamaguchi, Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, became the only national ladies team to have its members sweep the Worlds podium until the 2021 World Figure Skating Championships, when Anna Shcherbakova, Elizaveta Tuktamysheva and Alexandra Trusova swept the podium representing FSR. In 1992, Yamaguchi won her first U.S. title and gained a spot to the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. Joining her on the U.S. team were again Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. While competitors Harding and Japan’s Midori Ito were consistently landing the difficult triple Axel jump in competition, Yamaguchi instead focused on her artistry and her triple-triple combinations in hopes of becoming a more well-rounded skater. Both Harding and Ito fell on their triple Axels at the Olympics (though Ito successfully landed the jump later on in her long program after missing the first time), allowing Yamaguchi to win the gold, despite errors in her free program, including putting a hand to the ice on a triple loop and a double salchow instead of a planned triple. She later explained her mindset during the long program: “You just do your best and forget the rest." Yamaguchi went on to successfully defend her World title that same year.
Professional career
Yamaguchi turned professional after the 1991–92 competitive season. She toured for many years with Stars on Ice and also participated in the pro competition circuit.
Yamaguchi made a fitness video with the California Raisins in 1993 called "Hip to be Fit: The California Raisins and Kristi Yamaguchi". She has appeared as herself on Everybody Loves Raymond and in D2: The Mighty Ducks, Frosted Pink, and the Disney Channel original movie Go Figure. Yamaguchi has also performed in numerous television skating specials, including the Disney special Aladdin on Ice, in which she played Princess Jasmine.
In 2006 Yamaguchi was the host of WE tv series Skating's Next Star, created and produced by Major League Figure Skating. Yamaguchi was a local commentator on figure skating for San Jose TV station KNTV (NBC 11) during the 2006 Winter Olympics.
On May 20, 2008, Yamaguchi became the champion of the sixth season of ABC's reality program Dancing with the Stars, in which she was paired with Mark Ballas, defeating finalist couple Jason Taylor and Edyta Śliwińska. Yamaguchi made a special appearance in the finale of the sixteenth season where she danced alongside Dorothy Hamill.
In 2010, Yamaguchi worked as a daily NBC Olympics skating broadcast analyst on NBC's Universal Sports Network. During the 2010 Winter Olympics, Kristi was also a special correspondent for the Today Show.
In early 2012, Yamaguchi created a woman's active wear line focused on function, comfort, and style to empower women to look good and feel good. The lifestyle brand is called "Tsu.ya by Kristi Yamaguchi". Tsu.ya donates a portion of its proceeds to support early childhood literacy through Yamaguchi's "Always Dream Foundation".
In November 2017, Yamaguchi returned to Dancing With the Stars' 25th season in Week eight, to participate in a trio Jazz with Lindsey Stirling and her professional partner Mark Ballas.
Books
Yamaguchi is the author of Always Dream, Pure Gold, and Figure Skating for Dummies. In 2011, she published an award-winning children's book, Dream Big, Little Pig, which was #2 on the New York Times bestseller list, and received the Gelett Burgess Children's Book Award; a portion of the proceeds went to the "Always Dream Foundation" to support early childhood literacy programs. A sequel, It's a Big World Little Pig, was scheduled to be published March 6, 2012.
Awards
Yamaguchi received the Inspiration Award at the 2008 Asian Excellence Awards. Two days after her Dancing with the Stars champion crowning, she received the 2008 Sonja Henie Award from the Professional Skaters Association. Among her other awards are the Thurman Munson Award, Women's Sports Foundation Flo Hyman Award,the Heisman Humanitarian Award, and the Great Sports Legends Award. She is also a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee Olympic Hall of Fame, World Skating Hall of Fame, and the US Figure Skating Hall of Fame.
Philanthropic work
In 1996, Yamaguchi established the Always Dream Foundation for children. The goal of the foundation is to provide funding for after school programs, computers, back-to-school clothes for underprivileged children, and summer camps for kids with disabilities. Commenting in 2009, she explained her inspiration for the project: "I was inspired by the Make-A-Wish foundation to make a positive difference in children’s lives. We’ve been helping out various children’s organizations, which is rewarding. Our latest project is a playground designed so that kids of all abilities can play side by side. That’s our focus now."
Currently her Always Dream Foundation is focused on early childhood literacy with a statement of "Empowering Children to reach their dreams through education and inspiration." ADF has partnered with "Raising a Reader" to launch a reading program in schools throughout California and eventually nationwide. The foundation is also providing a language arts program "Footsteps to Brilliance" to kindergarten and first grade. Both programs integrate innovative technology into the classrooms.
Personal life
On July 8, 2000, she married Bret Hedican, a professional hockey player she met at the 1992 Winter Olympics when he played for Team USA. After their wedding, Yamaguchi and Hedican resided in Raleigh, North Carolina where Hedican played for the Carolina Hurricanes NHL team and won his only Stanley Cup in 2006. He played for one year with the Anaheim Ducks and they now live in Alamo in northern California with their two daughters, Keara Kiyomi (born 2003) and Emma Yoshiko (born 2005). In 2011, she authored a children's book, Dream Big, Little Pig!, with illustrator Tim Bowers. She has a summer home on Gull Lake in northern Minnesota.
Competitive highlights
Singles
Professional
Pairs
(with Rudy Galindo)
Filmography
Selected books
Yamaguchi, Kristi. Figure Skating for Dummies, Foster City, CA : IDG Books, 1997.
Yamaguchi, Kristi. Pure Gold, Harcourt School, 1997.
Yamaguchi, Kristi. Always Dream, Dallas : Taylor Pub. Co., 1998.
Yamaguchi, Kristi. Dream Big Little Pig, New York, NY : Scholastic Inc, 2011.
Notes
References
Nomura, Gail M. (1998). "Japanese American Women," in The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History (Mankiller, Barbara Smith, ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ;
Further reading
Schwindt, Troy, "Yamaguchi Honored in Thursday Night's U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame Ceremony", US Figure Skating Association, December 8, 2005
External links
AlwaysDream.org: Yamaguchi's Always Dream Foundation
olympic.org Athlete Profile – Yamaguchi
1971 births
American children's writers
American female pair skaters
American female single skaters
American sportspeople of Japanese descent
Dancing with the Stars (American TV series) winners
Figure skaters at the 1992 Winter Olympics
Goodwill Games medalists in figure skating
Living people
Medalists at the 1992 Winter Olympics
Olympic figure skaters of the United States
Olympic gold medalists for the United States in figure skating
Participants in American reality television series
People from Alamo, California
Sportspeople from Hayward, California
Figure skaters from San Jose, California
University of Alberta alumni
World Figure Skating Championships medalists
World Junior Figure Skating Championships medalists
Writers from San Jose, California
Competitors at the 1990 Goodwill Games
American people of Asian descent
American people of Japanese descent
21st-century American women | [
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17292 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzysztof%20Penderecki | Krzysztof Penderecki | Krzysztof Eugeniusz Penderecki (; 23 November 1933 – 29 March 2020) was an internationally renowned Polish composer and conductor. His best known works include Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, Symphony No. 3, his St Luke Passion, Polish Requiem, Anaklasis and Utrenja. Penderecki's oeuvre includes four operas, eight symphonies and other orchestral pieces, a variety of instrumental concertos, choral settings of mainly religious texts, as well as chamber and instrumental works.
Born in Dębica, Penderecki studied music at Jagiellonian University and the Academy of Music in Kraków. After graduating from the Academy, he became a teacher there and began his career as a composer in 1959 during the Warsaw Autumn festival. His Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra and the choral work St. Luke Passion have received popular acclaim. His first opera, The Devils of Loudun, was not immediately successful. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Penderecki's composition style changed, with his first violin concerto focusing on the semitone and the tritone. His choral work Polish Requiem was written in the 1980s and expanded in 1993 and 2005.
Penderecki won many prestigious awards, including the Prix Italia in 1967 and 1968; the Wihuri Sibelius Prize of 1983; four Grammy Awards in 1987, 1998 (twice), and 2017; the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1987; and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1992. In 2012, Sean Michaels of The Guardian called him 'arguably Poland's greatest living composer'.
Career
1933–1958: Early years
Penderecki was born on 23 November 1933 in Dębica, the son of Zofia and Tadeusz Penderecki, a lawyer. Penderecki's grandfather, Robert Berger, was a highly talented painter and director of the local bank at the time of Penderecki's birth; Robert's father Johann, a German Protestant, moved to Dębica from Breslau (now Wrocław) in the mid-19th century. Out of love for his wife, he subsequently converted to Catholicism. Penderecki's grandmother Stefania was an Armenian from Stanislau in Austria-Hungary (present-day Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine). Penderecki used to go to the Armenian Church in Kraków with her. He was the youngest of three siblings; his sister, Barbara, was married to a mining engineer, and his older brother, Janusz, was studying law and medicine at the time of his birth. Tadeusz was a violinist and also played piano.
In 1939, the Second World War broke out, and Penderecki's family moved out of their apartment as the Ministry of Food was to operate there. After the war, Penderecki began attending grammar school in 1946. He began studying the violin under Stanisław Darłak, Dębica's military bandmaster who organized an orchestra for the local music society after the war. Upon graduating from grammar school, Penderecki moved to Kraków in 1951, where he attended Jagiellonian University. He studied violin with Stanisław Tawroszewicz and music theory with Franciszek Skołyszewski. In 1954, Penderecki entered the Academy of Music in Kraków and, having finished his studies on violin after his first year, focused entirely on composition. Penderecki's main teacher there was Artur Malawski, a composer known for his choral and orchestral works, as well as chamber music and songs. After Malawski's death in 1957, Penderecki took further lessons with Stanisław Wiechowicz, a composer primarily known for his choral works. At the time, the 1956 overthrow of Stalinism in Poland lifted strict cultural censorship and opened the door to a wave of creativity.
1958–1962: First compositions
On graduating from the Academy of Music in Kraków in 1958, Penderecki took up a teaching post at the Academy. His early works show the influence of Anton Webern and Pierre Boulez (Penderecki was also influenced by Igor Stravinsky). Penderecki's international recognition began in 1959 at the Warsaw Autumn with the premieres of the works Strophen, Psalms of David, and Emanations, but the piece that truly brought him to international attention was Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (see threnody and atomic bombing of Hiroshima), written in 1960 for 52 string instruments. In it, he makes use of extended instrumental techniques (for example, playing behind the bridge, bowing on the tailpiece). There are many novel textures in the work, which makes extensive use of tone clusters. He originally titled the work 8' 37", but decided to dedicate it to the victims of Hiroshima.
Fluorescences followed a year later; it increases the orchestral density with more wind and brass, and an enormous percussion section of 32 instruments for six players, including a Mexican güiro, typewriters, gongs and other unusual instruments. The piece was composed for the Donaueschingen Festival of contemporary music of 1962, and its performance was regarded as provocative and controversial. Even the score appeared revolutionary; the form of graphic notation that Penderecki had developed rejected the familiar look of notes on a staff, instead representing music as morphing sounds. His intentions at this stage were quite Cagean: 'All I'm interested in is liberating sound beyond all tradition'.
Another noteworthy piece of this period is the Canon for 52 strings and 2 tapes. This is in a similar style to other pieces in the late 1950s in its use of sound masses, dramatically juxtaposed with traditional means although the use of standard techniques or idioms is often disguised or distorted. Indeed, the Canon brings to mind the choral tradition and indeed the composer has the players sing, albeit with the performance indication of bocca chiusa (with closed mouth) at various points; nevertheless, Penderecki uses the 52 'voices' of the string orchestra to play in massed glissandi and harmonics at times – this is then recorded by one of the tapes for playback later on in the piece. It was performed at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1962 and caused a riot although curiously the rioters were young music students and not older concertgoers.
At the same time, he started composing music for theater and film. The first theater performance with Penderecki's music was Złoty kluczyk (Golden Little Key) by Yekaterina Borysowa directed by Władysław Jarema (premiered on 12 May 1957 in Krakow at the "Groteska" Puppet Theater). In 1959, at the Cartoon Film Studio in Bielsko-Biała, he composed the music for the first animated film, Bulandra i diabeł (Coal Miner Bulandra and Devil), directed by Jerzy Zitzman and Lechosław Marszałek. In 1959 he wrote the score for Jan Łomnicki's first short fiction film Nie ma końca wielkiej wojny (There is no End to the Great War, WFDiF Warszawa). In the following years, he created over twenty original musical settings for dramatic and over 40 puppet performances, and composed original music for at least eleven documentary and feature films as well as for twenty-five animated films for adults and children.
The St. Luke Passion
The large-scale St. Luke Passion (1963–66) brought Penderecki further popular acclaim, not least because it was devoutly religious, yet written in an avant-garde musical language, and composed within Communist Eastern Europe. Western audiences saw it as a snub to the Soviet authorities. Various different musical styles can be seen in the piece. The experimental textures, such as were employed in the Threnody, are balanced by the work's Baroque form and the occasional use of more traditional harmonic and melodic writing. Penderecki makes use of serialism in this piece, and one of the tone rows he uses includes the BACH motif, which acts as a bridge between the conventional and more experimental elements. The Stabat Mater section toward the end of the piece concludes on a simple chord of D major, and this gesture is repeated at the very end of the work, which finishes on a triumphant E major chord. These are the only tonal harmonies in the work, and both come as a surprise to the listener; Penderecki's use of tonal triads such as these remains a controversial aspect of the work.
Penderecki continued to write sacred music. In the early 1970s he wrote a Dies irae, a Magnificat, and Canticum Canticorum Salomonis (Song of Songs) for chorus and orchestra.
De Natura Sonoris and other pieces in the 1960s and early 1970s
Penderecki's preoccupation with sound culminated in De Natura Sonoris I (1966), which frequently calls upon the orchestra to use non-standard playing techniques to produce original sounds and colours. A sequel, De Natura Sonoris II, was composed in 1971: with its more limited orchestra, it incorporates more elements of post-Romanticism than its predecessor. This foreshadowed Penderecki's renunciation of the avant-garde in the mid-1970s, although both pieces feature dramatic glissandos, dense clusters, use of harmonics, and unusual instruments (the musical saw features in the second piece).
In 1968 Penderecki received the State Prize 1st class. During the jubilee of the People's Republic of Poland he received the Commander's Cross (1974) and Knight's Cross of Order of Polonia Restituta (1964).
Towards the end of the decade, Penderecki received a commission to write for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. The result was Kosmogonia, a piece of twenty minutes for 3 soloists (soprano, tenor, bass), mixed choir and orchestra. The Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered the piece on 24 October 1970 with Zubin Mehta as conductor and Robert Nagy as tenor. The piece uses texts from ancient writers Sophocles and Ovid in addition to contemporary statements from Soviet and American astronauts to musically explore the idea of the cosmos.
1970s–2020: Later years
In the mid-1970s, while he was a professor at the Yale School of Music, Penderecki's style began to change. The Violin Concerto No. 1 largely leaves behind the dense tone clusters with which he had been associated, and instead focuses on two melodic intervals: the semitone and the tritone. This direction continued with the Symphony No. 2 (1980), which is harmonically and melodically quite straightforward; the symphony is sometimes referred to as the "Christmas Symphony" due to the opening phrase of the Christmas carol Silent Night appearing three times during the work.
Penderecki explained this shift by stating that he had come to feel that the experimentation of the avant-garde had gone too far from the expressive, non-formal qualities of Western music: 'The avant-garde gave one an illusion of universalism. The musical world of Stockhausen, Nono, Boulez and Cage was for us, the young – hemmed in by the aesthetics of socialist realism, then the official canon in our country – a liberation...I was quick to realise however, that this novelty, this experimentation, and formal speculation, is more destructive than constructive; I realised the Utopian quality of its Promethean tone'. Penderecki concluded that he was 'saved from the avant-garde snare of formalism by a return to tradition'. Penderecki wrote relatively little chamber music. However, compositions for smaller ensembles range in date from the start of his career to the end, reflecting the changes his style of writing has undergone.
In 1975 the Lyric Opera of Chicago asked him to write a work to commemorate the US Bicentennial in 1976; this became the opera Paradise Lost. Delays to the project however meant it did not see its premiere until 1978. The music continued to illustrate Penderecki's move away from avant-garde techniques: it is tonal music and the composer explained: 'This is not music by the angry young man I used to be'.
In 1980, Penderecki was commissioned by Solidarity to compose a piece to accompany the unveiling of a statue at the Gdańsk shipyards to commemorate those killed in anti-government riots there in 1970. Penderecki responded with Lacrimosa, which he later expanded into one of the best-known works of his later period, the Polish Requiem (1980–84, 1993, 2005). Later, he tended towards more traditionally conceived tonal constructs, as heard in works such as the Cello Concerto No. 2 and the Credo, which received the Grammy Award for best choral performance for the world-premiere recording made by the Oregon Bach Festival, which commissioned the piece. The same year, Penderecki was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Spain, one of the highest honours given in Spain to individuals, entities, organizations or others from around the world who make notable achievements in the sciences, arts, humanities, or public affairs. Invited by Walter Fink, he was the eleventh composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2001. He conducted the Credo on the occasion of the 70th birthday of Helmuth Rilling, 29 May 2003. Penderecki received an honorary doctorate from the Seoul National University, Korea, in 2005 and the University of Münster, Germany, in 2006. His notable students include Chester Biscardi and Walter Mays. In celebration of his 75th birthday, he conducted three of his works at the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2008, among them Ciaccona from the Polish Requiem.
In 2010, he worked on an opera based on Phèdre by Racine for 2014, which was never realized, and expressed his wish to write a 9th symphony. In 2014, he was engaged in the creation of a choral work to coincide with the Armenian genocide centennial. In 2018, he conducted Credo in Kyiv at the 29th Kyiv Music Fest, marking the centenary of Polish independence.
Personal life
Penderecki had three children, first a daughter Beata with pianist Barbara Penderecka (née Graca; married 1954, then divorced). He then had a son Łukasz (b. 1966) and daughter Dominika (b. 1971) with his second wife, Elżbieta Penderecka (née Solecka), whom he married on 19 December 1965. He lived in the Kraków suburb of Wola Justowska. He was also a keen gardener and established a 15-hectare arboretum near his manor house in Lusławice.
Penderecki died after a long illness in his home in Kraków, Poland, on 29 March 2020.
Legacy
In 1979, a bronze bust by artist Marian Konieczny honouring Penderecki was unveiled in The Gallery of Composers' Portraits at the Pomeranian Philharmonic in Bydgoszcz. His monument is located on the Celebrity Alley at the Scout Square (Skwer Harcerski) in Kielce.
Led Zeppelin guitarist and founding member Jimmy Page was an admirer of the composer’s groundbreaking work Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima during his teenage years. This would be reflected later by Page’s use of the violin bow on his guitar.
Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is noted for his admiration of the Polish composer's work. He visited Penderecki in 2012 and wrote a work, 48 Responses to Polymorphia, for strings which was conducted by Penderecki himself in various performances throughout Europe.
Works
Penderecki's compositions include operas, symphonies, choral works, as well as chamber and instrumental music.
Film and television scores
Krzysztof Penderecki composed between 1959 and 1968 original music for at least eleven documentary and feature films as well as for twenty-five animated films for adults and children.
Some of Penderecki's music has been adapted for film soundtracks. The Exorcist (1973) features his String Quartet and Kanon For Orchestra and Tape; fragments of the Cello Concerto and The Devils of Loudun. Writing about The Exorcist, the film critic for The New Republic wrote that 'even the music is faultless, most of it by Krzysztof Penderecki, who at last is where he belongs'. Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) features six pieces of Penderecki's music: Utrenja II: Ewangelia, Utrenja II: Kanon Paschy, The Awakening of Jacob, De Natura Sonoris No. 1, De Natura Sonoris No. 2 and Polymorphia. David Lynch has used Penderecki's music in the soundtracks of the films Wild at Heart (1990), Inland Empire (2006), and the TV series Twin Peaks (2017). In the film Fearless (1993) by Peter Weir, the piece Polymorphia was once again used for an intense plane crash scene, seen from the point of view of the passenger played by Jeff Bridges. Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima was also used during one of the final sequences in the film Children of Men (2006). Penderecki composed music for Andrzej Wajda's 2007 Academy Award nominated film Katyń, while Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010) featured his Symphony No. 3 and Fluorescences.
Some of Penderecki's oeuvre inspired Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead to release an album, which thereafter appeared in his score for There Will Be Blood, a 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson film.
Honors and awards
1959: 2nd Competition for Young Polish Composers in Warsaw organised by the Composers' Union – Penderecki was awarded the top three prizes for the works he anonymously submitted: Stanzas, Emanations, and Psalms of David;
1961: Prize of the UNESCO International Tribune of Composers in Paris for Threnody;
1966: Grand Art Prize of North Rhine-Westphalia for St. Luke Passion;
1967: Prix Italia for the St. Luke Passion; Sibelius Gold Medal;
1968: Prix Italia for the Dies Irae in memory of the victims of Auschwitz; Grammy Trustees Award for significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording;
1972: City of Kraków Award;
1977: Herder Prize (Germany/Austria)
1978: Prix Arthur Honegger for Magnificat (France)
1983: Wihuri Sibelius Prize (Finland); Polish National Award
1985: Premio Lorenzo Magnifico (Italy)
1987: Wolf Prize in Arts (Israel); Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition
1990: Grand Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; Chevalier de Saint Georges;
1992: University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for Adagio – 4 Symphony; Austrian Medal for Science and Art;
1993: Distinguished Citizen Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University, Bloomington, Prize of the International Music Council / UNESCO for Music; Cultural Merit of the Principality of Monaco
1995: Member of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (Dublin); honorary citizen of Strasbourg; Primetime Emmy Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; Pro Baltica Prize
1996: Primetime Emmy Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
1998: Grammy for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance; Composition Prize for the Promotion of the European economy, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Munich; Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas (Lithuania)
1999: Music Prize of the City of Duisburg (Germany); Honorary Board of the Vilnius Festival '99
2000: Cannes Classical Award as "Living Composer of the Year"; honorary member of the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna; Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic;
2001: Prince of Asturias Award for Art (Spain); Grammy for Best Choral Performance for Credo; Honorary Professor of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts
2002: State Prize of North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany), Romano Guardini Prize
2003: Grand Gold Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria; Preis der Europäischen Kirchenmusik (Germany), Freedom of Dębica, Eduardo M. Torner Medal of the Conservatorio de Musica del Principado Asturias in Oviedo, Spain; honorary director of the Choir of the Prince of Asturias Foundation, Honorary President of the Apayo a la Creación Musical, Judaica Foundation Medal;
2004: Praemium Imperiale – Music (Japan)
2005: Order of the White Eagle (Poland); Gold Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis
2006: Order of the Three Stars (Latvia)
2008: Polish Academy Award for Best Film Score for Katyn, Commander of the Order of the Three Stars (Latvia), Order of Bernardo O'Higgins (Chile), Golden Medal of the Minister of Culture (Armenia), Commander of the Order of the Lion of Finland; Thorunium Medal
2009: Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg; Merit of Armenia
2011: Viadrina Prize for contributions to Polish-German cooperation (Viadrina European University, Frankfurt); Grand Cross of the Order pro Merito Melitensi (Malta)
2012: Paszport Polityki Award
2014: Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, 1st Class (Estonia)
2015: Per Artem ad Deum Medal
2017: Grammy for Best Choral Performance; New Culture of New Europe Award at the Krynica Economic Forum.
Penderecki was an honorary doctor and honorary professor of several universities: Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., University of Glasgow, Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Fryderyk Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw, Seoul National University, Universities of Rochester, Bordeaux, Leuven, Belgrade, Madrid, Poznan and St. Olaf College (Northfield, Minnesota), Duquesne University, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, University of Pittsburgh (PA), University of St. Petersburg, Beijing Conservatory, Yale University and Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster (Westphalia) (2006 Faculty of Arts).
He was an honorary member of the following academies and music companies: Royal Academy of Music (London), Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome), Royal Swedish Academy of Music (Stockholm), Academy of Arts (London), Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires), the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, Academy of Arts in Berlin, Académie Internationale de Philosophie et de l’Art in Bern, and the Académie Nationale des Sciences, Belles-lettres et Arts in Bordeaux. In 2009, he became an honorary citizen of the city of Bydgoszcz.
See also
List of Polish composers
Music of Poland
Lusławice
References
Sources
Further reading
continued on page 74
continued on page G7
External links
"Penderecki's violin revolution in Poland" (Drowned In Sound, 2012)
Krzysztof Penderecki interview by Bruce Duffie (March 2000)
Interview with Krzysztof Penderecki by Galina Zhukova (2011), Журнал reMusik, Saint-Petersburg Contemporary Music Center.
"Krzysztof Penderecki: Turning history into avant-garde". Video interview by Louisiana Channel, Denmark, 2013.
Krzysztof Penderecki, Culture.pl
Krzysztof Penderecki's biography on Cdmc website
Not Just 'The Shining': 13 Soundtracks Featuring Krzysztof Penderecki on Culture.pl
Musical Trace Pendereckis' film & theatre music (Polish only)
Penderecki's Garden, digital garden from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute launched on 29 March 2021 for the anniversary of his death.
1933 births
2020 deaths
People from Dębica
20th-century classical composers
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Microtonal composers
Polish classical composers
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Polish people of Armenian descent
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Members of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts
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Honorary Members of the Royal Academy of Music
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Folkwang University of the Arts faculty
20th-century male musicians
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Recipients of the State Award Badge (Poland)
Recipients of the Order of the White Eagle (Poland) | [
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17293 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krugerrand | Krugerrand | The Krugerrand (; ) is a South African coin, first minted on 3 July 1967 to help market South African gold and produced by Rand Refinery and the South African Mint. The name is a compound of Paul Kruger, the former President of the South African Republic (depicted on the obverse), and rand, the South African unit of currency. On the reverse side of the Krugerrand is a pronking springbok, South Africa's national animal.
By 1980 the Krugerrand accounted for more than 90% of the global gold coin market and was the number one choice for investors buying gold. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, Krugerrands fell out of favor as some western countries forbade import of the Krugerrand because of its association with the apartheid government of South Africa.
Although gold Krugerrand coins have no face value, they are considered legal tender in South Africa by the South African Reserve Bank Act (SARBA) of 1989.
In 2017, the Rand Refinery began minting silver versions, which have the same overall design as the gold coin.
History
The Krugerrand was introduced in 1967 as a vehicle for private ownership of gold. It was minted in a copper-gold alloy more durable than pure gold. By 1980 the Krugerrand accounted for 90% of the global gold coin market. That year, South Africa introduced three smaller coins containing of gold.
Economic sanctions against South Africa for its policy of apartheid made the Krugerrand an illegal import in many Western countries during the 1970s and 1980s. The United States which had historically been the largest market for the coin, banned imports in 1985; the previous year, over US$600 million of Krugerrands had been marketed in that country. Most sanctions ended in 1991, after the South African government took steps toward ending its apartheid policy.
Over 50 million ounces of gold Krugerrand coins have been sold since production started in 1967.
Variations and imitations
During the bull market in gold of the 1970s, the gold Krugerrand quickly became the primary choice for gold investors worldwide. Between 1974 and 1985, it is estimated that 22 million gold Krugerrand coins were imported into the United States alone. This huge success of the Krugerrand encouraged other gold-producing countries to mint and issue gold bullion coins of their own, including the Canadian Gold Maple Leaf in 1979, the Australian Nugget in 1987, the Chinese Gold Panda in 1982, the American Gold Eagle in 1986, and the British Britannia coin in 1987.
Properties
The coin is so named because the obverse, designed by Otto Schultz, bears the face of Boer statesman Paul Kruger, four-term president of the old South African Republic. The reverse depicts a springbok, the national animal of South Africa. The image was designed by Coert Steynberg, and was previously used on the reverse of the earlier South African five shillings (1947-51 and 1953-59) and 50 Cents (1961-64) coin. The name "South Africa" and the gold content are inscribed in both Afrikaans and English (as can be seen on the pictures of the coin).
The word "Krugerrand" is a registered trademark owned by Rand Refinery Limited, of Germiston.
Proof Krugerrands
The South African Mint Company produces limited edition proof Krugerrands intended to be collectors' items rather than bullion investments. These coins are priced above bullion value, although non-proof Krugerrands also have a premium above gold bullion value. They can be distinguished from the bullion Krugerrands by the number of serrations on the edge of the coin. Proof coins have 220 edge serrations, while bullion coins have 160.
50th Anniversary Krugerrands
2017 marked the 50th year of issuance (1967–2017) and to commemorate the anniversary, the South African Mint produced "Premium Uncirculated" versions in gold (.916 or 22 carat) and for the first time also in platinum (.999 fine) and silver (.999 fine). The issue limit for these commemorative platinum, gold and silver coins was 2,017 for platinum, 5,000 for gold and 1,000,000 for silver. The commemorative issues are distinguished by a '50' privy seal mark above the springbok design on the reverse for the platinum and silver issues and to the right of the springbok design on the gold issues. In addition to the "Premium Uncirculated" issue, 15,000 silver "Proof" krugerrands were also issued as well as "Proof" krugerrands in gold and platinum.
Export control
The South African Reserve Bank restricts the exportation of Krugerrands by a South African resident to a non-resident to a maximum of R30,000 (about US$2,100 or €1,870 as of June 2018). Visitors to South Africa can export up to 15 coins by declaring the items to the South African Revenue Service.
Charitable donations
In the 21st century, Krugerrands have received media attention in the United States after anonymous donors have left the valuable coin in the Salvation Army's annual "Christmas Kettle" donation jars in various cities around the country.
See also
Bullion
Bullion coin
Economy of South Africa
Gold as an investment
Inflation hedge
Silver as an investment
References
External links
Krugerrand Value.
Krugerrand
Rand Refinery
The South African Mint Company
Collection of Krugerrand photos
Gold Ounce (1 oz) Krugerrand, Coin Type from South Africa
Bullion coins of South Africa
Gold bullion coins
Silver bullion coins | [
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17294 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara%C4%91or%C4%91evi%C4%87%20dynasty | Karađorđević dynasty | The Karađorđević (, Karađorđevići / Карађорђевићи, ) dynasty is a Serb family, founded by Karađorđe Petrović (1768-1817), the veliki vožd ("grand leader") of Serbia during the First Serbian Uprising of 1804-1813. In the course of the 19th century the relatively short-lived dynasty was supported by the Russian Empire and was opposed to the Austria-Hungary-supported Obrenović dynasty. After Karađorđe's assassination in 1817, Miloš Obrenović founded the House of Obrenović. The two houses subsequently vied for the throne for several generations. Following the assassination of the Obrenović King Alexander I of Serbia in 1903, the Serbian Parliament chose Karađorđe's grandson, Peter I Karađorđević, then living in exile, to occupy the throne of the Kingdom of Serbia. He was duly crowned as King Peter I, and shortly before the end of World War I in 1918, representatives of the three peoples proclaimed a Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with Peter I as sovereign. In 1929 the kingdom was renamed Yugoslavia, under Alexander I, the son of Peter I. In November 1945 the family lost their throne when the League of Communists of Yugoslavia seized power during the reign of Peter II.
Name
In English, it is typically spelled Karadjordjevic or anglicized as Karageorgevitch (e.g. as with Prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch), and in previous times was also rendered as Kara-Georgevich.
Ancestry
According to some researchers, Karađorđe's paternal ancestors most likely migrated from the Highlands (in what is today Montenegro) to Šumadija during the Second Great Serb Migration in 1737–39 under the leadership of Patriarch Šakabenta, as a result of the Austro-Turkish War (in which Serbs took part). Serbian historiography accepted the theory that Karađorđe's ancestors came from Vasojevići.
Some conjecture has arisen about where the family ended up after arriving in Šumadija. According to Radoš Ljušić, Karađorđe's ancestors most likely hailed from Vasojevići, but he has said there is no certain historical information on Karađorđe's ancestors or where they came from, folklore being the only real source. Most likely, Karađorđe's ancestors hailed from Vasojevići. Grigorije Božović (1880–1945) claimed that the family were Srbljaci (natives) in Vasojevići territory. Contributing to Srbljak theory is the fact that the family celebrated St Clement as their Slava until 1890, while the patron saint of Vasojevići, i.e. Vaso's descendants is Archangel Michael. King Peter I was allowed to change his Slava to St Andrew the First-called by Belgrade Metropolitan Mihailo in 1890, following the death of his wife, Princess Zorka, thus honoring the date by Julian calendar when Serbian rebels liberated Belgrade during the First Serbian Uprising.
Furthermore, King Peter chose Voivode of Vasojevići Miljan Vukov Vešović to be his bridesman during his wedding to princess Zorka in 1883. Upon being asked by his future father-in-law prince Nicholas why he chose Miljan amongst various Voivodes of Montenegro, he replied that he chose him because of heroism and relation describing him as Vojvode of my own blood and kin. His son, Alexander, who was born in Cetinje was nicknamed Montenegrin The Vasojevići tribe claim descent from Stefan Konstantin of the Nemanjić dynasty. The Vasojevići were proud of Karađorđe, and saw him as their kinsman. Montenegrin politician and Vasojević Gavro Vuković, supported this theory. Accordingly, Alexander Karađorđević (1806-1885) was given the title "Voivode of Vasojevići" by Petar II in 1840. Other theories include: Montenegrin historian Miomir Dašić claimed that Karađorđe's family originated from the Gurešići from Podgorica in Montenegro. Folklorist Dragutin Vuković believed that Tripko Knežević–Guriš was Karađorđe's great-grandfather; Vukićević, writing in 1907, said that in the surroundings of Podgorica, there is a local claim that Karađorđe's ancestors initially came from Vranj.
The family claimed descent from the Vasojevići tribe (in Montenegro) and had emigrated in the late 1730s or early 1740s. The family lived in Mačitevo (in Suva Reka), from where grandfather Jovan moved to Viševac, while Jovan's brother Radak moved to Mramorac.
Monarchs
Current claims to the throne
The Karađorđevićs are active in Serbian society in various ways. There is a view that constitutional parliamentary monarchy would be the ultimate solution for stability, unity and continuity. In addition, they support Serbia as a democratic country with a future in the European Union.
The last crown prince of Yugoslavia, Alexander, has lived in Belgrade in the Dedinje Royal Palace since 2001. As the only son of the last king, Peter II, who never abdicated, and the last official heir of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia he claims to be the rightful heir to the Serbian throne in the event of restoration. Prior to the fall of Slobodan Milošević, he personally united the parliamentary opposition in several major congresses. In the palace, he regularly receives religious leaders and strives, as opportunity permits, to demonstrate his commitment to human rights and to democracy.
The Karađorđevićs are much engaged in humanitarian work. Crown Princess Katherine has a humanitarian foundation while Crown Prince Alexander heads the Foundation for Culture and Education, whose activities include student scholarships, summer camps for children, etc. The Karađorđevićs are also prominent in national sports activities.
Serbia and Yugoslavia
The Karađorđević family initially was a Serbian Royal House, then the Royal House of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and then the Royal House of Yugoslavia. When they last reigned they were called the Royal House of Yugoslavia.
Crown Prince Alexander was born in London but on property temporarily recognised by the United Kingdom's government as subject to the sovereignty of the Yugoslav crown, on which occasion it was publicly declared that the Crown Prince had been born on the native soil of the land he was expected to eventually rule.
Heraldry
Family tree
The list below includes male members of the Karađorđević dynasty. Bold denotes the head of the House. Number in parentheses indicates the order of line of Succession to the throne, as of December 2021. The order of line of Succession is not official.
Karađorđe (1768–1817), Jelena Jovanović
Alexis (1801–1830)
George (1827–1884), Sarka Anastasijević
Prince Alexis (1859–1920)
Prince Bojidar (1862–1908)
Alexander, Prince of Serbia (1806–1885), Persida Nenadović
Peter I of Serbia (1844–1921), Princess Zorka of Montenegro
George, Crown Prince of Serbia (1887–1972), Radmila Radonjić
Alexander I of Yugoslavia (1888–1934), Princess Maria of Romania
Peter II of Yugoslavia (1923–1970), Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark
(1) Crown Prince Alexander (b. 1945), Princess Maria da Gloria of Orléans-Braganza, Katherine Clairy Batis
(2) Hereditary Prince Peter (b. 1980)
(3) Prince Philip (b. 1982), Danica Marinković
(4) Prince Stefan (b. 2018)
(5) Prince Alexander (b. 1982)
Prince Tomislav (1928–2000), Princess Margarita of Baden, Linda Mary Bonney
(6) Prince Nicholas (b. 1958)
(7) Prince George (b. 1984)
(8) Prince Michael (b. 1985)
Prince Andrew (1929–1990), Princess Christina of Hesse, Princess Kira of Leiningen, Eva Maria Andjelkovich
Prince Christopher (1960–1994)
(9) Prince Karl Vladimir (b. 1964)
Prince Kirill (2001–2001)
(10) Prince Dimitri (b. 1965)
Prince Arsen (1859–1938), Princess Aurora Pavlovna Demidova
Prince Regent Paul (1893–1976), Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark
Prince Alexander (1924–2016), Princess Maria Pia of Savoy, Princess Barbara of Liechtenstein
Prince Dimitri (b. 1958)
Prince Michael (b. 1958)
Prince Sergius (b. 1963)
Prince Dušan (b. 1977)
Prince Nicholas (1928–1954)
References
External links
Official site of the Serbian Royal Family
Crown Prince Alexander's Foundation for Culture and Education
Princess Katherine's Humanitarian Foundation
Serbian royal families
Modern history of Serbia | [
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17296 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl%20B%C3%B6ttiger | Karl Böttiger | Karl August Böttiger (8 June 1760 – 17 November 1835) was a German archaeologist and classicist, and a prominent member of the literary and artistic circles in Weimar and Jena.
Biography
Böttiger was born in Reichenbach, in the kingdom of Saxony, and educated at Schulpforta and Leipzig. Under the influence of Johann Gottfried Herder, he was for 13 years headmaster at the gymnasium and consistorial councillor in Weimar, from 1790 to 1804. For the remaining 31 years of his life, he resided at Dresden as director of the Museum of Antiquities, and was active as a journalist and public lecturer. As a schoolmaster, he had published a considerable number of pedagogic and philological programs. In 1810, Böttiger with Swiss painter Heinrich Meyer released a monograph on the painting in the Vatican known as the "Aldobrandini marriage". His archaeological works, mainly produced at Dresden, fall into three groups:
The first of these is private antiquities, best represented by his Sabina, or morning scenes in the dressing room of a wealthy Roman lady (; 1803, 2 vols.; 2nd ed., 1806), which was translated into French and served as a model for Wilhelm Adolf Becker's Gallus and Charicles. The second, the Greek theatre, which Böttiger had been interested in since his time as a drama critic in Weimar; his unfavorable review of August Wilhelm Schlegel's Ion was withdrawn at the request of Goethe. It was mainly as a schoolmaster in Weimar that he wrote his papers on the distribution of the parts, on the masks and dresses, and on the machinery of the ancient stage, as well as a dissertation on the masks of the Furies in 1801. Thirdly, he worked in the domain of ancient art and mythology; his work in this area was popular but, according to some 20th-century critics, superficial.
His accomplishments in Dresden led him to be noticed by the court of the Kingdom of Saxony, and he was the Aulic councilor of the kings of Saxony. Böttiger supplied the descriptive letter-press to the 1797 German edition of Tischbein's reproductions from William Hamilton's second collection of Greek vases, and thus introduced the study of Greek vase-painting into Germany. He published lectures on the history of ancient sculpture in 1806, and painting in 1811, and edited the three volumes of an archaeological periodical called Amalthea from 1820 to 1825, which included contributions from the most eminent classical archaeologists of the day.
In 1832 Böttiger was elected a member of the French Institute. He died in Dresden. His pupil, who edited many of Böttiger's works after his death, was the German classicist Karl Julius Sillig. There are two medals that were commissioned for him. One on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1830 and the other after he died.
His son, Karl Wilhelm Böttiger (15 August 1790 – 26 November 1862; not to be confused with the Swedish writer Carl Wilhelm Böttiger), was a historian and biographer of his father. He wrote Karl August Böttiger. Eine biographische Skizze, a biographical sketch (Leipzig, 1837). From his father's papers, he edited the posthumous work Litterarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen (Literary circumstances and contemporaries, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1838). Karl Wilhelm Böttiger contributed the history of Saxony to Heeren and Ukert's Europäische Staatengeschichte, and his Allgemeine Geschichte für Schule und Haus (Universal history for school and home) and Deutsche Geschichte für Schule und Haus (German history for school and home) passed through many editions. From 1821 until his death he was professor of history in Erlangen.
Works
Griechische Vasengemälde (1797–1800)
Ideen zur Archäologie der Malerei, i. (1811)
Kunstmythologie (1811)
Vorlesungen und Aufsätze zur Alterthumskunde (1817)
Amalthea (1821–1825)
Ideen zur Kunstmythologie (1826–1836)
Opuscula et Carmine Latino (1837)
Kleine Schriften, includes a complete 56-page list of his works (1837–1838)
Notes
References
1760 births
1835 deaths
Archaeologists from Dresden
18th-century German people
Members of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
People from Reichenbach im Vogtland | [
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17297 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl%20Ferdinand%20Braun | Karl Ferdinand Braun | Karl Ferdinand Braun (; 6 June 1850 – 20 April 1918) was a German electrical engineer, inventor, physicist and Nobel laureate in physics. Braun contributed significantly to the development of radio and television technology: he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi "for their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".
Biography
Braun was born in Fulda, Germany, and educated at the University of Marburg and received a PhD from the University of Berlin in 1872. In 1874, he discovered that a point-contact semiconductor rectifies alternating current. He became director of the Physical Institute and professor of physics at the University of Strassburg in 1895.
In 1897, he built the first cathode-ray tube (CRT) and cathode ray tube oscilloscope. The CRT became the cornerstone in developing fully electronic television. It is still sometimes called the "Braun tube" in German-speaking countries (Braunsche Röhre) and other countries such as Korea (브라운관: Buraun-kwan) and Japan (ブラウン管: Buraun-kan).
During the development of radio, he also worked on wireless telegraphy. In 1897, Braun joined the line of wireless pioneers. His major contributions were the introduction of a closed tuned circuit in the generating part of the transmitter, its separation from the radiating part (the antenna) by means of inductive coupling, and later on the usage of crystals for receiving purposes. Around 1898, he invented a crystal detector . Wireless telegraphy claimed Dr. Braun's full attention in 1898, and for many years after that he applied himself almost exclusively to the task of solving its problems. Dr. Braun had written extensively on wireless subjects and was well known through his many contributions to the Electrician and other scientific journals. In 1899, he would apply for the patent Wireless electro transmission of signals over surfaces. Also in 1899, he is said to have applied for a patent on Electro telegraphy by means of condensers and induction coils .
Pioneers working on wireless devices eventually came to a limit of distance they could cover. Connecting the antenna directly to the spark gap produced only a heavily damped pulse train. There were only a few cycles before oscillations ceased. Braun's circuit afforded a much longer sustained oscillation because the energy encountered less losses swinging between coil and Leyden Jars. And by means of inductive antenna coupling the radiator was better matched to the generator. The resultant stronger and less bandwidth consuming signals bridged a much longer distance.
Braun invented the phased array antenna in 1905. He described in his Nobel Prize lecture how he carefully arranged three antennas to transmit a directional signal. This invention led to the development of radar, smart antennas, and MIMO.
Braun's British patent on tuning was used by Marconi in many of his tuning patents. Guglielmo Marconi used Braun's patents (among others). Marconi would later admit to Braun himself that he had "borrowed" portions of Braun's work . In 1909, Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Marconi for "contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy." The prize awarded to Braun in 1909 depicts this design. Braun experimented at first at the University of Strasbourg. Not before long he bridged a distance of 42 km to the city of Mutzig. In spring 1899, Braun, accompanied by his colleagues Cantor and Zenneck, went to Cuxhaven to continue their experiments at the North Sea. On 24 September 1900 radio telegraphy signals were exchanged regularly with the island of Heligoland over a distance of 62 km. Light vessels in the river Elbe and a coast station at Cuxhaven commenced a regular radio telegraph service.
Braun went to the United States at the beginning of World War I (before the U.S. had entered the war) to be a witness for the defense in a lawsuit regarding a
patent claim by the Marconi Corporation against the wireless station at Sayville, New York. After the US entered the war, Braun was detained, but could move freely within Brooklyn, New York. Braun died in his house in Brooklyn, before the war ended in 1918.
SID Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize
In 1987 the Society for Information Display created the Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize, awarded for an outstanding technical achievement in display technology.
Patents
See also
History of radio
Invention of radio
Edouard Branly
References
Footnotes
General
K.F. Braun: "On the current conduction in metal sulphides (title translated from German into English)", Ann. Phys. Chem., 153 (1874), 556. (In German) An English translation can be found in "Semiconductor Devices: Pioneering Papers", edited by S.M. Sze, World Scientific, Singapore, 1991, pp. 377–380.
Keller, Peter A.: The cathode-ray tube: technology, history, and applications. New York: Palisades Press, 1991. .
Keller, Peter A.: "The 100th Anniversary of the Cathode-Ray Tube," Information Display, Vol. 13, No. 10, 1997, pp. 28–32.
F. Kurylo: "Ferdinand Braun Leben und Wirken des Erfinders der Braunschen Röhre Nobelpreis 1909", München: Moos Verlag, 1965. (In German)
External links
including the Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1909 Electrical Oscillations and Wireless Telegraphy
Naughton, Russell, "Karl Ferdinand Braun, Dr : 1850 – 1918".
"Karl Ferdinand Braun ". Biographies of Famous Electrochemists and Physicists Contributed to Understanding of Electricity.
"Karl Ferdinand Braun, 1850–1918". (German) (English translation)
The Ferdinand-Braun-Institut fuer Hoechstfrequenztechnik Berlin, Germany
Alfred Thomas Story A Story of Wireless Telegraphy. D. Appleton and company 1904
1850 births
1918 deaths
20th-century German physicists
People from the Electorate of Hesse
Experimental physicists
19th-century German inventors
German Nobel laureates
19th-century German physicists
Television pioneers
Humboldt University of Berlin alumni
Nobel laureates in Physics
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology faculty
University of Marburg alumni
University of Marburg faculty
University of Strasbourg faculty
University of Tübingen faculty
University of Würzburg faculty
People from Fulda
20th-century German inventors | [
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17299 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khunjerab%20Pass | Khunjerab Pass | Khunjerab Pass (; ; ) is a -high mountain pass in the Karakoram Mountains, in a strategic position on the northern border of Pakistan (Gilgit–Baltistan's Hunza and Nagar Districts) and on the southwest border of China (Xinjiang).
Mutsjliga Pass is a -high mountain pass at
near Khunjerab Pass.
Etymology
Its name is derived from two words of the local Wakhi language: "khun" means blood and "jerab" means a creek coming from a spring or waterfall.
Notability
The Khunjerab Pass is the highest-paved international border crossing in the world and the highest point on the Karakoram Highway. The roadway across the pass was completed in 1982, and has superseded the unpaved Mintaka and Kilik Passes as the primary passage across the Karakoram Range. The choice of Khunjerab Pass for Karakoram Highway was decided in 1966: China citing the fact that Mintaka would be more susceptible to air strikes recommended the steeper Khunjerab Pass instead.
On the Pakistani-administered side, the pass is from the National Park station and checkpoint in Dih, from the customs and immigration post in Sost, from Gilgit, and from Islamabad.
On the Chinese side, the pass is the southwest terminus of China National Highway 314 (G314) and is from Tashkurgan, from Kashgar and some from Urumqi. The Chinese port of entry is located along the road from the pass in Tashkurgan County.
The long, relatively flat pass is often snow-covered during the winter season and as a consequence is generally closed for heavy vehicles from November 30 to May 1 and for all vehicles from December 30 to April 1.
The reconstructed Karakoram Highway passes through Khunjerab Pass.
Since June 1, 2006, there has been a daily bus service across the boundary from Gilgit to Kashgar, Xinjiang.
This is one of the international borders where left-hand traffic (Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan) changes to right-hand traffic (China) and vice versa.
Highest ATM in the world
The Pakistani side features the highest ATM in the world, administered by the National Bank of Pakistan and 1LINK.
Railway
In 2007, consultants were hired to evaluate the construction of a railway through this pass to connect China with transport in Pakistani-administered Gilgit-Baltistan. A feasibility study started in November 2009 for a line connecting Havelian away in Pakistan and Kashgar in Xinjiang. However, no progress has been made thereafter and this project is also not part of the current CPEC plan.
Gallery
See also
China–Pakistan border
Mustagh Pass
Sost
Khunjerab National Park
Karakoram Highway
Gilgit–Baltistan
Nathu La
Abra del Acay
References
Citations
Sources
Curzon, George Nathaniel. 1896. The Pamirs and the Source of the Oxus. Royal Geographical Society, London. Reprint: Elibron Classics Series, Adamant Media Corporation. 2005. (pbk); (hbk).
King, John 1989. Karakoram Highway : the high road to China. Hawthorn, Victoria, Lonely Planet Publications.
Episode 13/30 of the NHK television series The Silk Road, a series originally shown in Japan in the early 1980s.
External links
Extreme points of Earth
Mountain passes of Gilgit-Baltistan
Mountain passes of Xinjiang
China–Pakistan border crossings
Mountain passes of the Karakoram
Sites along the Silk Road
Mountain passes of Pakistan
Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County | [
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17300 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir%20Malevich | Kazimir Malevich | Kazimir Severinovich Malevich ( – 15 May 1935) was a Ukrainian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing had a profound influence on the development of non-objective art (or abstract art) in the 20th century. Born in Kyiv to an ethnic Polish family, his concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Malevich is considered to be part of the Ukrainian avant-garde (together with Alexander Archipenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster, and David Burliuk) that was shaped by Ukrainian-born artists who worked first in Ukraine and later over a geographical span between Europe and America.
Early on, Malevich worked in a variety of styles, quickly assimilating the movements of Impressionism, Symbolism and Fauvism, and after visiting Paris in 1912, Cubism. Gradually simplifying his style, he developed an approach with key works consisting of pure geometric forms and their relationships to one another, set against minimal grounds. His Black Square (1915), a black square on white, represented the most radically abstract painting known to have been created so far and drew "an uncrossable line (…) between old art and new art"; Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), a barely differentiated off-white square superimposed on an off-white ground, would take his ideal of pure abstraction to its logical conclusion. In addition to his paintings, Malevich laid down his theories in writing, such as "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism" (1915) and The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (1926).
Malevich's trajectory in many ways mirrored the tumult of the decades surrounding the October Revolution (O.S.) in 1917. In its immediate aftermath, vanguard movements such as Suprematism and Vladimir Tatlin's Constructivism were encouraged by Trotskyite factions in the government. Malevich held several prominent teaching positions and received a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow in 1919. His recognition spread to the West with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927. From 1928 to 1930, he taught at the Kyiv Art Institute, with Alexander Bogomazov, Victor Palmov, Vladimir Tatlin and published his articles in a Kharkiv magazine, Nova Generatsia (New Generation). But the start of repression in Ukraine against the intelligentsia forced Malevich return to modern-day Saint Petersburg. From the beginning of the 1930s, modern art was falling out of favor with the new government of Joseph Stalin. Malevich soon lost his teaching position, artworks and manuscripts were confiscated, and he was banned from making art. In 1930, he was imprisoned for two months due to suspicions raised by his trip to Poland and Germany. Forced to abandon abstraction, he painted in a representational style in the years before his death from cancer in 1935, at the age of 56.
Nonetheless, his art and his writing influenced contemporaries such as El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova and Alexander Rodchenko, as well as generations of later abstract artists, such as Ad Reinhardt and the Minimalists. He was celebrated posthumously in major exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (1936), the Guggenheim Museum (1973) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1989), which has a large collection of his work. In the 1990s, the ownership claims of museums to many Malevich works began to be disputed by his heirs.
Early life
Kazimir Malevich was born Kazimierz Malewicz to a Polish family, who settled near Kyiv in Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire during the partitions of Poland. His parents, Ludwika and Seweryn Malewicz, were Roman Catholic like most ethnic Poles, though his father attended Orthodox services as well. They both had fled from the former eastern territories of the Commonwealth (present-day Kopyl Region of Belarus) to Kyiv in the aftermath of the failed Polish January Uprising of 1863 against the tsarist army.
His native language was Polish, but he also spoke Russian, as well as Ukrainian due to his childhood surroundings. Malevich would later write a series of articles in Ukrainian about art.
Kazimir's father managed a sugar factory. Kazimir was the first of fourteen children, only nine of whom survived into adulthood. His family moved often and he spent most of his childhood in the villages of modern-day Ukraine, amidst sugar-beet plantations, far from centers of culture. Until age twelve, he knew nothing of professional artists, although art had surrounded him in childhood. He delighted in peasant embroidery, and in decorated walls and stoves. He was able to paint in the peasant style. He studied drawing in Kyiv from 1895 to 1896.
Artistic career
From 1896 to 1904, Kazimir Malevich lived in Kursk. In 1904, after the death of his father, he moved to Moscow. He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1904 to 1910 and in the studio of Fedor Rerberg in Moscow. In 1911, he participated in the second exhibition of the group, Soyuz Molodyozhi (Union of Youth) in St. Petersburg, together with Vladimir Tatlin and, in 1912, the group held its third exhibition, which included works by Aleksandra Ekster, Tatlin, and others. In the same year, he participated in an exhibition by the collective, Donkey's Tail in Moscow. By that time, his works were influenced by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, Russian avant-garde painters, who were particularly interested in Russian folk art called lubok. Malevich described himself as painting in a "Cubo-Futurist" style in 1912. In March 1913, a major exhibition of Aristarkh Lentulov's paintings opened in Moscow. The effect of this exhibition was comparable with that of Paul Cézanne in Paris in 1907, as all the main Russian avant-garde artists of the time (including Malevich) immediately absorbed the cubist principles and began using them in their works. Already in the same year, the Cubo-Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun, with Malevich's stage-set, became a great success. In 1914, Malevich exhibited his works in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster, and Vadim Meller, among others. Malevich also co-illustrated, with Pavel Filonov, Selected Poems with Postscript, 1907–1914 by Velimir Khlebnikov and another work by Khlebnikov in 1914 titled Roar! Gauntlets, 1908–1914, with Vladimir Burliuk. Later in that same year, he created a series of lithographs in support of Russia's entry into WWI. These prints, accompanied by captions by Vladimir Mayakovsky and published by the Moscow-based publication house Segodniashnii Lubok (Contemporary Lubok), on the one hand show the influence of traditional folk art, but on the other are characterised by solid blocks of pure colours juxtaposed in compositionally evocative ways that anticipate his Suprematist work.
In 1911, Brocard & Co. produced an eau de cologne called Severny. Malevich conceived the advertisement and design of the perfume bottle with craquelure of an iceberg and a polar bear on the top, which lasted through the mid-1920s.
Suprematism
In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto, From Cubism to Suprematism. In 1915–1916, he worked with other Suprematist artists in a peasant/artisan co-operative in Skoptsi and Verbovka village. In 1916–1917, he participated in exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds group in Moscow together with Nathan Altman, David Burliuk, Aleksandra Ekster and others. Famous examples of his Suprematist works include Black Square (1915) and White On White (1918).
Malevich exhibited his first Black Square, now at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) in 1915. A black square placed against the sun appeared for the first time in the 1913 scenic designs for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. The second Black Square was painted around 1923. Some believe that the third Black Square (also at the Tretyakov Gallery) was painted in 1929 for Malevich's solo exhibition, because of the poor condition of the 1915 square. One more Black Square, the smallest and probably the last, may have been intended as a diptych together with the Red Square (though of smaller size) for the exhibition Artists of the RSFSR: 15 Years, held in Leningrad (1932). The two squares, Black and Red, were the centerpiece of the show. This last square, despite the author's note 1913 on the reverse, is believed to have been created in the late twenties or early thirties, for there are no earlier mentions of it.
Malevich's student Anna Leporskaya observed that Malevich "neither knew nor understood what the black square contained. He thought it so important an event in his creation that for a whole week he was unable to eat, drink or sleep."
In 1918, Malevich decorated a play, Mystery-Bouffe, by Vladimir Mayakovskiy produced by Vsevolod Meyerhold. He was interested in aerial photography and aviation, which led him to abstractions inspired by or derived from aerial landscapes.
Some Ukrainian authors argue that Malevich's Suprematism is rooted in the traditional Ukrainian culture.
Post-revolution
After the October Revolution (1917), Malevich became a member of the Collegium on the Arts of Narkompros, the Commission for the Protection of Monuments and the Museums Commission (all from 1918–1919). He taught at the Vitebsk Practical Art School in Belarus (1919–1922) alongside Marc Chagall, the Leningrad Academy of Arts (1922–1927), the Kyiv Art Institute (1928–1930), and the House of the Arts in Leningrad (1930). He wrote the book The World as Non-Objectivity, which was published in Munich in 1926 and translated into English in 1959. In it, he outlines his Suprematist theories.
In 1923, Malevich was appointed director of Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture, which was forced to close in 1926 after a Communist party newspaper called it "a government-supported monastery" rife with "counterrevolutionary sermonizing and artistic debauchery." The Soviet state was by then heavily promoting an idealized, propagandistic style of art called Socialist Realism—a style Malevich had spent his entire career repudiating. Nevertheless, he swam with the current, and was quietly tolerated by the Communists.
International recognition and banning
In 1927, Malevich traveled to Warsaw where he was given a hero's welcome. There, he met with artists and former students Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro, whose own movement, Unism, was highly influenced by Malevich. He held his first foreign exhibit in the Hotel Polonia Palace. From there, the painter ventured on to Berlin and Munich for a retrospective which finally brought him international recognition. He arranged to leave most of the paintings behind when he returned to the Soviet Union. Malevich's assumption that a shifting in the attitudes of the Soviet authorities toward the modernist art movement would take place after the death of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky's fall from power was proven correct in a couple of years, when the government of Joseph Stalin turned against forms of abstraction, considering them a type of "bourgeois" art, that could not express social realities. As a consequence, many of his works were confiscated and he was banned from creating and exhibiting similar art.
In autumn 1930, he was arrested and interrogated by the KGB in Leningrad, accused of Polish espionage, and threatened with execution. He was released from imprisonment In early December.
Critics derided Malevich's art as a negation of everything good and pure: love of life and love of nature. The Westernizer artist and art historian Alexandre Benois was one such critic. Malevich responded that art can advance and develop for art's sake alone, saying that "art does not need us, and it never did".
Death
When Malevich died of cancer at the age of fifty-seven, in Leningrad on 15 May 1935, his friends and disciples buried his ashes in a grave marked with a black square. They didn't fulfill his stated wish to have the grave topped with an "architekton"—one of his skyscraper-like maquettes of abstract forms, equipped with a telescope through which visitors were to gaze at Jupiter.
On his deathbed, Malevich had been exhibited with the Black Square above him, and mourners at his funeral rally were permitted to wave a banner bearing a black square. Malevich had asked to be buried under an oak tree on the outskirts of Nemchinovka, a place to which he felt a special bond. His ashes were sent to Nemchinovka, and buried in a field near his dacha. Nikolai Suetin, a friend of Malevich's and a fellow artist, designed a white cube with a black square to mark the burial site. The memorial was destroyed during World War II. The city of Leningrad bestowed a pension on Malevich's mother and daughter.
In Nazi Germany his works were banned as "Degenerate Art".
In 2013, an apartment block was built on the place of the tomb and burial site of Kazimir Malevich. Another nearby monument to Malevich, put up in 1988, is now also situated on the grounds of a gated community.
Painting technique
According to an observation by radiologist and art historian Milda Victurina, one of the features of Kazimir Malevich's painting technique was the layering of paints one on another to get a special kind of colour spots. For example, Malevich used two layers of colour for the red spot - the lower black and the upper red. The light ray going through these colour layers is perceived by the viewer not as red, but with a touch of darkness. This technique of superimposing the two colours allowed experts to identify fakes of Malevich's work, which generally lacked it.
Polish ethnicity
Malevich's family was one of the millions of Poles who lived within the Russian Empire following the Partitions of Poland. Kazimir Malevich was born near Kyiv on lands that had previously been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth of parents who were ethnic Poles.
Both Polish and Russian were native languages of Malevich, who would sign his artwork in the Polish form of his name as Kazimierz Malewicz. In a visa application to travel to France, Malewicz claimed Polish as his nationality. French art historian Andrei Nakov, who re-established Malevich's birth year as 1879 (and not 1878), has argued for restoration of the Polish spelling of Malevich's name.
In 1985, Polish performance artist Zbigniew Warpechowski performed "Citizenship for a Pure Feeling of Kazimierz Malewicz" as an homage to the great artist and critique of Polish authorities that refused to grant Polish citizenship to Kazimir Malevich. In 2013, Malevich's family in New York City and fans founded the not-for-profit The Rectangular Circle of Friends of Kazimierz Malewicz, whose dedicated goal is to promote awareness of Kazimir's Polish ethnicity.
Russian art historian Irina Vakar gained access to the artist's criminal case and found that in some documents Malevich specified his nationality as Ukrainian.
Posthumous exhibitions
Alfred H. Barr Jr. included several paintings in the groundbreaking exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936. In 1939, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened in New York, whose founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim—an early and passionate collector of the Russian avant-garde—was inspired by the same aesthetic ideals and spiritual quest that exemplified Malevich's art.
The first U.S. retrospective of Malevich's work in 1973 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum provoked a flood of interest and further intensified his impact on postwar American and European artists. However, most of Malevich's work and the story of the Russian avant-garde remained under lock and key until Glasnost. In 1989, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam held the West's first large-scale Malevich retrospective, including the paintings they owned and works from the collection of Russian art critic Nikolai Khardzhiev.
Collections
Malevich's works are held in several major art museums, including the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and in New York, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam owns 24 Malevich paintings, more than any other museum outside of Russia. Another major collection of Malevich works is held by the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki.
Art market
Black Square, the fourth version of his magnum opus painted in the 1920s, was discovered in 1993 in Samara and purchased by Inkombank for US$250,000. In April 2002, the painting was auctioned for an equivalent of US$1 million. The purchase was financed by the Russian philanthropist Vladimir Potanin, who donated funds to the Russian Ministry of Culture, and ultimately, to the State Hermitage Museum collection. According to the Hermitage website, this was the largest private contribution to state art museums since the October Revolution.
In 2008, the Stedelijk Museum restituted five works to the heirs of Malevich's family from a group that had been left in Berlin by Malevich, and acquired by the gallery in 1958, in exchange for undisputed title to the remaining pictures.
On 3 November 2008, one of these works entitled Suprematist Composition from 1916, set the world record for any Russian work of art and any work sold at auction for that year, selling at Sotheby's in New York City for just over US$60 million (surpassing his previous record of US$17 million set in 2000).
In May 2018, the same painting Suprematist Composition 1916 sold at Christie's New York for over US$85 million (including fees), a record auction price for a Russian work of art.
In popular culture
Malevich's life inspires many references featuring events and the paintings as players. The smuggling of Malevich paintings out of Russia is a key to the plot line of writer Martin Cruz Smith's thriller Red Square. Noah Charney's novel, The Art Thief tells the story of two stolen Malevich White on White paintings, and discusses the implications of Malevich's radical Suprematist compositions on the art world. British artist Keith Coventry has used Malevich's paintings to make comments on modernism, in particular his Estate Paintings. Malevich's work also is featured prominently in the Lars von Trier film, Melancholia. At the Closing Ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Malevich visual themes were featured (via projections) in a section on 20th century Russian modern art.
Selected works
1912 – Morning in the Country after Snowstorm
1912 – The Woodcutter
1912–13 – Reaper on Red Background
1914 – The Aviator
1914 – An Englishman in Moscow
1914 – Soldier of the First Division
1915 – Black Square
1915 – Red Square †
1915 – Black Square and Red Square ††
1915 – Suprematist Composition
1915 – Suprematism (1915)
1915 – Suprematist Painting: Aeroplane Flying
1915 – Suprematism: Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions
1915–16 – Suprematist Painting (Ludwigshafen)
1916 – Suprematist Painting (1916)
1916 – Supremus No. 56
1916–17 – Suprematism (1916–17)
1917 – Suprematist Painting (1917)
1918 – White on White
1919–1926 – Untitled (Suprematist Composition)
1928–1932 – Complex Presentiment: Half-Figure in a Yellow Shirt
1932–1934 – Running Man
† Also known as Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions.
†† Also known as Black Square and Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension.
Gallery
See also
List of Russian artists
Sergei Senkin
Oberiu
UNOVIS
Footnotes
Citations
References
Crone, Rainer, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, and David Moos. Kazimir Malevich: The Climax of Disclosure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Dreikausen, Margret, Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art (Associated University Presses: Cranbury, NJ; London, England; Mississauga, Ontario: 1985).
Drutt, Matthew; Malevich, Kazimir, Kazimir Malevich: suprematism, Guggenheim Museum, 2003,
Honour, H. and Fleming, J. (2009) A World History of Art. 7th edn. London: Laurence King Publishing.
Malevich, Kasimir, The Non-objective World, Chicago: P. Theobald, 1959.
Malevich and his Influence, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2008.
Milner, John; Malevich, Kazimir, Kazimir Malevich and the art of geometry, Yale University Press, 1996.
Nakov, Andrei, Kasimir Malevich, Catalogue raisonné, Paris, Adam Biro, 2002
Nakov, Andrei, vol. IV of Kasimir Malevich, le peintre absolu, Paris, Thalia Édition, 2007
Néret, Gilles, Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism 1878-1935, Taschen, 2003.
Petrova, Yevgenia, Kazimir Malevich in the State Russian Museum. Palace Editions, 2002. . (English Edition)
Shatskikh, Aleksandra S, and Marian Schwartz, Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, 2012.
Shishanov, V.A. Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art: a History of Creation and a Collection. 1918–1941. - Minsk: Medisont, 2007. - 144 p.Mylivepage.ru
Tedman, Gary. Soviet Avant Garde Aesthetics, chapter from Aesthetics & Alienation. pp 203–229. 2012. Zero Books.
Tolstaya, Tatyana, The Square, The New Yorker, 12 June 2015
Das weiße Rechteck. Schriften zum Film, herausgegeben von Oksana Bulgakowa. PotemkinPress, Berlin 1997,
The White Rectangle. Writings on Film. (In English and the Russian original manuscript). Edited by Oksana Bulgakowa. PotemkinPress, Berlin / Francisco 2000,
External links
Malevich works, MoMA
Kazimir Malevich, Guggenheim Collection Online
Kasimir Malevich Works Online, Artcyclopedia
Floirat, Anetta. 2016, The Scythian element of the Russian primitivism, in music and visual arts. Based on the work Goncharova, Malevich, Roerich, Stravinsky and Prokofiev
Peter Brooke, Deux Peintres Philosophes - Albert Gleizes et Kasimir Malévitch and Quelques Réflexions sur la Littérature Actuelle du Cubisme, both Ampuis (Association des Amis d’Albert Gleizes) 1995
History of Malevich-designed Perfume bottle of the eau de cologne “Severny”
1879 births
1935 deaths
Abstract painters
Artists from Kyiv
Ukrainian people of Polish descent
19th-century Russian painters
20th-century Russian painters
Futurist painters
People of the Russian Empire of Polish descent
Painters of the Russian Empire
Russian male painters
Modern painters
Polish painters
Polish male painters
Russian avant-garde
Soviet painters
Suprematism (art movement)
Ukrainian avant-garde
Ukrainian painters
Ukrainian male painters
Deaths from prostate cancer
Deaths from cancer in Russia | [
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17302 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiki%20Kaifu | Toshiki Kaifu | was a Japanese politician who served as the 77th Prime Minister of Japan from 1989 to 1991.
Early life and education
Kaifu was born in Nagoya City on 2 January 1931. He was educated at Chuo University and Waseda University.
Career
A member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Kaifu ran successfully for the 1960 Japanese general election and took office as the youngest member of the National Diet. He served for sixteen terms, totaling 49 years.
Kaifu was education minister before rising to lead the party after the resignations of Takeshita Noboru and Sōsuke Uno. Facing Yoshiro Hayashi and Shintaro Ishihara, Kaifu was elected on the platform of clean leadership. He became the 76th Prime Minister of Japan in August 1989.
On 10 August 1991, Kaifu became the first leader of a major country to make an official visit to China and break China's diplomatic isolation after the Tiananmen Square Incident of 4 June 1989. Kaifu ended Japan's participation in economic sanctions against China and offered $949.9 million in loans and an additional $1.5 million in emergency aid following flood damage in southern China in June and July. In 1991 he sent the Maritime Self-Defense Force to the Persian Gulf in the wake of the Gulf War.
Throughout his two Cabinets, Kaifu's faction was too small to push through the reforms he sought, and the continuing repercussions of the Sagawa Express scandal caused problems. He resigned in November 1991 and was replaced by Kiichi Miyazawa.
In 1994, he left the LDP to become head of the newly-founded New Frontier Party. He supported Ichirō Ozawa's party until he returned to LDP in 2003. He was defeated in the election of 2009 by DPJ candidate Mitsunori Okamoto, which witnessed the end of almost uninterrupted LDP dominance since 1955. At the time of his defeat, he was the longest-serving member of the lower house of the Diet, and he was also the first former prime minister to be defeated at a re-election since 1963.
Death
Kaifu was the last surviving former Japanese prime minister who had served in the 1980s. He died from pneumonia on 9 January 2022 at a Tokyo hospital, at the age of 91. The announcement of his death to the media was delayed until 14 January.
References
External links
KAIFU, Toshiki International Who's Who. Retrieved 3 September 2006.
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1931 births
2022 deaths
20th-century Japanese politicians
20th-century prime ministers of Japan
21st-century Japanese politicians
Chuo University alumni
Waseda University alumni
Prime Ministers of Japan
Ministers of Finance of Japan
People from Nagoya
New Frontier Party (Japan) politicians
Liberal Democratic Party (Japan) politicians
Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun
Politicians from Aichi Prefecture | [
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17303 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kakinomoto%20no%20Hitomaro | Kakinomoto no Hitomaro | Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (柿本 人麻呂 or 柿本 人麿; – ) was a Japanese waka poet and aristocrat of the late Asuka period. He was the most prominent of the poets included in the Man'yōshū, the oldest waka anthology, but apart from what can be gleaned from hints in the Man'yōshū, the details of his life are largely uncertain. He was born to the Kakinomoto clan, based in Yamato Province, probably in the 650s, and likely died in Iwami Province around 709.
He served as court poet to Empress Jitō, creating many works praising the imperial family, and is best remembered for his elegies for various imperial princes. He also composed well-regarded travel poems.
He is ranked as one of the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals. Ōtomo no Yakamochi, the presumed compiler of the Man'yōshū, and Ki no Tsurayuki, the principal compiler of the Kokin Wakashū, praised Hitomaro as Sanshi no Mon (山柿の門) and Uta no Hijiri (歌の聖) respectively. From the Heian period on, he was often called Hito-maru (人丸). He has come to be revered as a god of poetry and scholarship, and is considered one of the four greatest poets in Japanese history, along with Fujiwara no Teika, Sōgi and Bashō.
Life
Sources
The sole early source for the life of the poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro is the Man'yōshū. His name does not appear in any of the official court documents, perhaps on account of his low rank.
Ancestry
Hitomaro was born into the Kakinomoto clan, an offshoot of the ancient . Centred in the northeastern part of the Nara Basin, the Wani clan had furnished many imperial consorts in the fourth through sixth centuries, and extended their influence from Yamato Province to Yamashiro, Ōmi, Tanba and Harima provinces. Many of their clan traditions (including genealogies, songs, and tales) are preserved in the Nihon Shoki and, especially, the Kojiki. The Kakinomoto clan were headquartered in either Shinjō, Nara or, perhaps more likely, the Ichinomoto area of Tenri, Nara. The main Wani clan were also based in this area, so the Kakinomoto clan may have had a particularly close relationship with their parent clan. According to the Shinsen Shōjiroku, the clan's name derives from the persimmon (kaki) tree that grew on their land during the reign of Emperor Bidatsu.
The Kakinomoto clan had their hereditary title promoted from Omi to Ason in the eleventh month (see Japanese calendar) of 684. According to the Nihon Shoki, Kakinomoto no Saru, the probable head of the clan, had been among ten people appointed , equivalent to Junior Fifth Rank, in the twelfth month of 681. These facts lead Watase to conjecture that the Kakinomoto clan may have had some literary success in the court of Emperor Tenmu. According to the Shoku Nihongi, Saru died in 708, having attained the Junior Fourth Rank, Lower Grade.
There are several theories regarding the relationship of this Kakinomoto no Saru to the poet Hitomaro, including the former being the latter's father, brother, uncle, or them being the same person. The theory that they were the same person has been advanced by Takeshi Umehara, but has little supporting evidence. While the other theories cannot be confirmed, it is certain that they were members of the same clan (probably close relatives), and were active at the same time. It is likely that their mutual activity at court had a significant effect on each other.
Birth and early life
The year in which he was born is not known, nor can much be said with certainty about any aspects of his life beyond his poetic activities. Watase tentatively takes Hitomaro as being 21 years old (by Japanese reckoning) between 673 and 675, which would put his birth between 653 and 655.
Emperor Tenmu's reign
The earliest dated work attributed to him in the Man'yōshū is his Tanabata poem (Man'yōshū 2033) composed in the ninth year of Emperor Tenmu's reign (680). The content of this poem reveals an awareness of the mythology that, according to the preface to the Kojiki (completed in 712) had begun to be compiled during Tenmu's reign. Watase also observes that Hitomaro's having composed a Tanabata poem means that he was probably attending Tanabata gatherings during this period. A significant number of poems in the Kakinomoto no Ason Hitomaro Kashū were apparently recorded by Hitomaro before 690, and are characteristic of court poetry, leading to the conclusion that he was active at court from the early part of Emperor Tenmu's reign. From this point he was active in recording and composing love poems at court.
Watase speculates that Hitomaro came to court in the service of the in response to an imperial edict in 673.
Based on Hitomaro's poetic activities during Empress Jitō's reign, there are a few possibilities for where Hitomaro was serving at Tenmu's court. Watase presents three principal theories: first under the empress-consort Princess Uno-no-sarara (who later became Empress Jitō); second under Crown Prince Kusakabe; third in the palace of Prince Osakabe.
Reigns of Empress Jitō and Emperor Monmu
Hitomaro acted as a court poet during the reigns of Empress Jitō and Emperor Monmu. In the fourth month of 689, Prince Kusakabe died, and Hitomaro composed an elegy commemorating the prince. He also composed an elegy for Princess Asuka, who died in the fourth month of 700, and a poem commemorating an imperial visit to Kii Province.
His poetic composition flourished during the period in which Empress Jitō was active (both during her reign and after her retirement). He composed poetry for numerous members of the imperial family, including the empress, Prince Kusakabe, Prince Karu, Prince Takechi, Prince Osakabe, Prince Naga, Prince Yuge, Prince Toneri, , Princess Hatsusebe and Princess Asuka. He apparently composed poetry in Yamato Province (his home), Yamashiro Province and Ōmi Province in the north, Kii Province in the south, Shikoku, Kyūshū and the Seto Inland Sea in the west, as well as Iwami Province in the northwest.
Susumu Nakanishi remarks that the fact that he did not apparently compose elegies for emperors themselves, and that most of his poems centre around princes and princesses, indicates that he was probably a writer affiliated with the literary circles that formed around these junior members of the imperial family.
Later life and death
The ordering of poems, and their headnotes, in volume 2 of the Man'yōshū, implies that Hitomaro died shortly before the moving of the capital to Nara in 710. He would have been in Iwami Province, at the Sixth Rank or lower.
The date, site and manner of his death are a matter of scholarly debate, due to some contradictory details that are gleaned from poems attributed to Hitomaro and his wife . Taking Watase's rough dates, he would have been in his mid-fifties in 709, when Watase speculates he died. Mokichi Saitō postulated that Hitomaro died in an epidemic that swept Iwami and Izumo provinces in 707. Hitomaro's final poem gives the strong impression that he met his death in the mountains.
Saitō was convinced he had located the site of the Kamoyama of the above poem and erected a monument there, but two poems by Yosami that immediately follow the above in the Man'yōshū suggest otherwise, as they mention "shells" (貝 kai) and a "Stone River" (石川 Ishikawa), neither of which seem likely in the context of Saitō's Kamoyama.
The above-quoted translation is based on Saitō's interpretation of kai as referring to a "ravine" (峡). Other scholars take the presence of "shells" as meaning Hitomaro died near the mouth of a river where it meets the sea. (This interpretation would give the translation "Alas! he lies buried, men say, / With the shells of the Stone River.")
There is no river named "Ishikawa" near the present Kamoyama; Saitō explained this as "Ishikawa" perhaps being an archaic name for upper part of another river.
An unknown member of the Tajihi clan wrote a response to Yosami in the persona of Hitomaro, very clearly connecting Hitomaro's death to the sea.
Works
Hitomaro was a court poet during the reigns of Empress Jitō and Emperor Monmu, with most of his dateable poems coming from the last decade or so of the seventh century. He apparently left a private collection, the so-called Kakinomoto no Ason Hitomaro Kashū, which does not survive as an independent work but was cited extensively by the compilers of the Man'yōshū.
18 chōka and 67 tanka (of which 36 are envoys to his long poems) are directly attributed to him in the Man'yōshū. All are located in the first four books of the collection. Of these, six chōka and 29 tanka are classified as zōka (miscellaneous poems), three chōka and 13 tanka as sōmon (mutual exchanges of love poetry), and nine chōka and 25 tanka as banka (elegies). Of note is the fact that he contributed chōka to all three categories, and that he composed so many banka.
Broken down by topic, the above poems include:
three chōka and five tanka about reigning emperors, such as hymns praising Empress Jitō's visits to Yoshino and , and poems lamenting the fallen Ōmi capital;
seven chōka and 17 tanka about imperial princes and princesses such as his elegies for Prince Kusakabe, Prince Takechi, Princess Asuka and and his songs of praise for Prince Karu, Prince Osakabe, Prince Naga and Prince Niitabe;
seven chōka and 28 tanka about court women, including the three tanka he composed on the court women accompanying Empress Jitō on her visit to Ise while he stayed in the capital, one chōka and eight tanka mourning Kibitsu no Uneme, Hijikata no Otome and Izumo no Otome, and a number of romantic exchanges with his wife and other lovers;
one chōka and three tanka commemorating the bodies of dead people Hitomaro encountered;
14 tanka composed on travel topics that do not fit into any of the above categories (all of which also include travel poems).
From the above it can be said that Hitomaro's poetry was primarily about affairs of the court, but that he also showed a marked preference for poems on travel.
In addition to the 85 poems directly attributed to Hitomaro by the Man'yōshū, two chōka and three tanka in books 3 and 9 are said to be traditionally attributed to Hitomaro. Additionally, there is one Hitomaro tanka in book 15 said to have been recited in 736 by an envoy sent to Silla. Including these "traditional" Hitomaro poems, that gives 20 chōka and 71 tanka. It is quite possible that a significant number of these poems were incorrectly attributed to Hitomaro by tradition. In addition to Hitomaro's own compositions, there are also many poems said to have been recorded by him in his personal collection, the Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro Kashū (柿本朝臣人麿歌集). The Hitomaro Kashū included 333 tanka, 35 sedōka, and two chōka. This adds up to a total figure of close to 500 poems directly associated with Hitomaro.
Characteristic style
Hitomaro is known for his solemn and mournful elegies of members of the imperial family, whom he described in his courtly poems as "gods" and "children of the sun". He incorporated elements of the national mythology seen in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki and historical narrative in his poetry. While he is known for his poems praising the imperial family, his poetry is also filled with human sensitivity and a new, fresh "folkiness".
His lament for the Ōmi capital is noted for its vivid, sentimental descriptions of the ruins, while his elegy for Prince Takechi powerfully evokes the Jinshin War. His Yoshino and poems praise splendidly the natural scenery and the divinity of the Japanese islands, and his Iwami exchange vividly describes the powerful emotions of being separated from the woman he loved. His romantic poems convey honest emotions, and his travel poems exquisitely describe the mood of the courtiers on these trips. He shed tears for the deaths of even random commoners on country paths and court women whose names he did not even know.
Watase credits him with the creation of an ancient lyricism that expressed both human sentiment and sincere emotions across both his poems of praise and mourning.
Reception
There is evidence that Hitomaro exerted direct influence on the poetry composed during his own time. For example, poems 171 through 193 of Book 1 of the Man'yōshū bear similarities to his work. It is generally accepted that the court poets of the following generation (the so-called "third period" of Man'yō poetry), including Yamabe no Akahito, were influenced by Hitomaro's courtly poems. Ōtomo no Yakamochi, a poet of the "fourth period" who probably had a hand in the final compilation of the collection, held Hitomaro in high regard, praising him as Sanshi no Mon (山柿の門). As discussed above, the death of Hitomaro appears to have already taken on some legendary characteristics.
In his Japanese preface to the tenth-century Kokin Wakashū, Ki no Tsurayuki referred to Hitomaro as Uta no Hijiri ("Saint of Poetry"). In the Heian period the practice of Hitomaru-eigu (人丸影供) also gained currency, showing that Hitomaro had already begun to be apotheosized. Hitomaro's divinity status continued to grow in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. The Edo period scholars Keichū and Kamo no Mabuchi tended to reject the various legends about Hitomaro.
In Akashi, Hyōgo Prefecture there is a Kakinomoto Shrine dedicated to him, commemorating an early Heian belief that Hitomaro's spirit came to rest in Akashi, an area the historical Hitomaro probably visited multiple times.
Hitomaro is today ranked, along with Fujiwara no Teika, Sōgi and Bashō, as one of the four greatest poets in Japanese history.
Notes
References
Works cited
External links
Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (New Directions, 1955, ) contains several of Hitomaro's waka, as well as notable translations of 3 naga uta ("In the sea of ivy clothed Iwami", "The Bay of Tsyunu", and "When she was still alive")
Japanese male poets
Man'yō poets
650s births
700s deaths
7th-century Japanese poets
Hyakunin Isshu poets
Deified Japanese people | [
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17304 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl%20Ernst%20von%20Baer | Karl Ernst von Baer | Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer Edler von Huthorn ( – ) was a Baltic German scientist and explorer. Baer was a naturalist, biologist, geologist, meteorologist, geographer, and is considered a, or the, founding father of embryology. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a co-founder of the Russian Geographical Society, and the first president of the Russian Entomological Society, making him one of the most distinguished Baltic German scientists.
Life
Karl Ernst von Baer was born into the Baltic German noble Baer family (et) in the Piep Manor (et), Jerwen County, Governorate of Estonia (in present-day Lääne-Viru County, Estonia), as a knight by birthright. His patrilineal ancestors were of Westphalian origin and originated in Osnabrück. He spent his early childhood at Lasila manor, Estonia. He was educated at the Knight and Cathedral School in Reval (Tallinn) and the Imperial University of Dorpat (Tartu). In 1812, during his tenure at the university, he was sent to Riga to aid the city after Napoleon's armies had laid siege to it. As he attempted to help the sick and wounded, he realized that his education at Dorpat had been inadequate, and upon his graduation, he notified his father that he would need to go abroad to "finish" his education. In his autobiography, his discontent with his education at Dorpat inspired him to write a lengthy appraisal of education in general, a summary that dominated the content of the book. After leaving Tartu, he continued his education in Berlin, Vienna, and Würzburg, where Ignaz Döllinger introduced him to the new field of embryology.
In 1817, he became a professor at Königsberg University and full professor of zoology in 1821, and of anatomy in 1826. In 1829, he taught briefly in St Petersburg, but returned to Königsberg (Kaliningrad). In 1834, Baer moved back to St Petersburg and joined the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, first in zoology (1834–46) and then in comparative anatomy and physiology (1846–62). His interests while there were anatomy, ichthyology, ethnography, anthropology, and geography. While embryology had kept his attention in Königsberg, then in Russia von Baer engaged in a great deal of field research, including the exploration of the island Novaya Zemlya. The last years of his life (1867–76) were spent in Dorpat, where he became a major critic of Charles Darwin.
Contributions
Embryology
von Baer studied the embryonic development of animals, discovering the blastula stage of development and the notochord. Together with Heinz Christian Pander and based on the work by Caspar Friedrich Wolff, he described the germ layer theory of development (ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm) as a principle in a variety of species, laying the foundation for comparative embryology in the book Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere (1828). In 1826, Baer discovered the mammalian ovum. The human ovum was first described by Edgar Allen in 1928. In 1827, he completed research Ovi Mammalium et Hominis genesi for St Petersburg's Academy of Science (published at Leipzig). In 1827 von Baer became the first person to observe human ova. Only in 1876 did Oscar Hertwig prove that fertilization is due to fusion of an egg and sperm cell.
von Baer formulated what became known as Baer's laws of embryology:
General characteristics of the group to which an embryo belongs develop before special characteristics.
General structural relations are likewise formed before the most specific appear.
The form of any given embryo does not converge upon other definite forms, but separates itself from them.
The embryo of a higher animal form never resembles the adult of another animal form, such as one less evolved, but only its embryo.
Permafrost research
Baer was a genius scientist covering not only the topics of embryology and ethnology, he also was especially interested in the geography of the northern parts of Russia, and explored Novaya Zemlya in 1837. In these arctic environments, he was studying periglacial features, permafrost occurrences, and collecting biological specimens. Other travels led him to subarctic regions of the North Cape and Lapland, but also to the Caspian Sea. He was one of the founders of the Russian Geographical Society.
Thanks to Baer's research expeditions, the scientific investigation of permafrost began in Russia. Baer recorded the importance of permafrost research even before 1837 when observing in detail the geothermal gradient from a 116.7 m deep shaft in Yakutsk. At the end of the 1830s, he recommended sending expeditions to explore permafrost in Siberia and suggested Alexander von Middendorff as leader. Baer's expedition instructions written for Middendorff comprised over 200 pages. Baer summarized his knowledge in 1842/43 in a print-ready typescript. The German title is „Materialien zur Kenntniss des unvergänglichen Boden-Eises in Sibirien“ (=materials for the knowledge of the perennial ground ice in Siberia). This world's first permafrost textbook was conceived as a complete work for printing. But it remained lost for more than 150 years. However, from 1838 onwards, Baer published a larger number of small publications on permafrost. Numerous of Baer's papers on permafrost were already published as early as 1837 and 1838. Well known was his paper "On the Ground Ice or Frozen Soil of Siberia", published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London (1838, pp. 210–213) and reprinted 1839 in the American Journal of Sciences and Arts by S. Silliman. There are many other publications and small notes on permafrost by Baer, as shown in the Karl Ernst von Baer museum in Tartu (Estonia), now part of the Estonian University of Life Sciences.
There are quite a number of studies in Russian about the origin of permafrost research. Russian authors usually relate with it the name Alexander von Middendorff (1815–1894), as he did much scientific work during the years 1842–1845 concerning permafrost on Taimyr Peninsula and in East-Siberia. However, Russian scientists during the 1940s also realized, that it was K. E. Baer who initiated this expedition and that the origin of scientific permafrost research must be fixed with Baer's thorough earlier scientific work. They even believed, that the scepticism about the permafrost findings and publications of Middendorff would not have risen, if Baer's original "materials for the study of the perennial ground-ice" would have been published in 1842 as intended. This was realized also by the Russian Academy of Sciences that honoured Baer with the publication of a tentative Russian translation done already in 1842 by Sumgin. These facts were completely forgotten until after the Second World War.
In North America, permafrost research started after the Second World War with the creation of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), a division of the US army. It was realized that the understanding of frozen ground and permafrost are essential factors in strategic northern areas during the Cold War. In the Soviet Union, the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk had similar aims. The first post-World War major contact between groups of senior Russian and American frozen ground researchers took place in November 1963 in Yakutsk.However, Baer's permafrost textbook remained still undiscovered.
Thus in 2001 the discovery and annotated publication of the typescript from 1843 in the library archives of the University of Giessen was a scientific sensation. The full text of Baer's work is available online (234 pages). The editor Lorenz King added to the facsimile reprint a preface in English, two colour permafrost maps of Eurasia and some figures of permafrost features. Baer's text is introduced with detailed comments and references on additional 66 pages written by the Estonian historian Erki Tammiksaar.
The work is fascinating to read, because both Baer's observations on permafrost distribution and his periglacial morphological descriptions are largely still correct today. He distinguished between "continental" and "insular" permafrost, saw the temporary existence of permafrost and postulated the formation and further development of permafrost as a result of the complex physio-geographical, geological and floristic site conditions. With his permafrost classification Baer laid the foundation for the modern permafrost terminology of the International Permafrost Association. With his compilation and analysis of all available data on ground ice and permafrost, Karl Ernst von Baer must be given the attribute "founder of scientific permafrost research".
Evolution
From his studies of comparative embryology, Baer had believed in the transmutation of species but rejected later in his career the theory of natural selection proposed by Charles Darwin. He produced an early phylogenetic tree revealing the ontogeny and phylogeny of vertebrate embryos.
In the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species published in 1869, Charles Darwin added a Historical Sketch giving due credit to naturalists who had preceded him in publishing the opinion that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life have descended by true generation from pre-existing forms. According to Darwin:
"Von Baer, towards whom all zoologists feel so profound a respect, expressed about the year 1859... his conviction, chiefly grounded on the laws of geographical distribution, that forms now perfectly distinct have descended from a single parent-form." He was a pioneer in studying biological time – the perception of time in different organisms.
Baer believed in a teleological force in nature which directed evolution (orthogenesis).
Other topics
The term Baer's law is also applied to the unconfirmed proposition that in the Northern Hemisphere, erosion occurs mostly on the right banks of rivers, and in the Southern Hemisphere on the left banks. In its more thorough formulation, which Baer never formulated himself, the erosion of rivers depends on the direction of flow, as well. For example, in the Northern Hemisphere, a section of river flowing in a north–south direction, according to the theory, erodes on its right bank due to the coriolis effect, while in an east–west section there is no preference. However, this was repudiated by Albert Einstein's tea leaf paradox.
Awards and distinctions
In 1849, he was elected a foreign honorary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1850. He was the president of the Estonian Naturalists' Society in 1869–1876, and was a co-founder and first president of the Russian Entomological Society. In 1875, he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Legacy
A statue honouring him can be found on Toome Hill in Tartu, as well as at Lasila manor, Estonia, and at the Zoological Museum in St Petersburg, Russia. In Tartu, there is also located Baer House which also functions as Baer Museum.
Before the Estonian conversion to the euro, the 2-kroon bank note bore his portrait. Baer Island in the Kara Sea was named after Karl Ernst von Baer for his important contributions to the research of arctic meteorology between 1830 and 1840. A duck, Baer's pochard, was also named after him.
Works
Karl Ernst von Baer, Gregor von Helmersen. Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Russischen Reiches und der angränzenden Länder Asiens, 2 vols. Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1839. Google Books.
Karl Ernst von Baer, Welche Auffassung der lebenden Natur ist die richtige? Berlin, 1862
References
Further reading
Wood C, Trounson A. Clinical in Vitro Fertilization. Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1984, Page 6.
Baer, K E v. "Über ein allgemeines Gesetz in der Gestaltung der Flußbetten", Kaspische Studien, 1860, VIII, S. 1–6.
External links
Bibliography and links at Max Planck Institute
Overview of Piibe (Piep) manor (with photo of memorial stone)
Short biography
Glossary of Permafrost and Related Ground-Ice Terms (IPA)
International Conferences on Permafrost
Estonian banknotes
Ajaloolane: Karl Ernst von Baer oli Venemaa luure asutaja (in Estonian)
1792 births
1876 deaths
People from Väike-Maarja Parish
People from Kreis Jerwen
Baltic-German people
Estonian explorers
German explorers
Explorers of the Russian Empire
Biologists of the Russian Empire
German embryologists
Orthogenesis
Proto-evolutionary biologists
Recipients of the Copley Medal
Novaya Zemlya
Explorers of the Arctic
19th-century Estonian people
Estonian nobility
German knights
University of Tartu alumni
University of Königsberg faculty
Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Founding members of the Russian Geographical Society
Full members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
Honorary members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
German military personnel of the Napoleonic Wars
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Burials at Raadi cemetery | [
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17306 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky%20and%20Virginia%20Resolutions | Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions | The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were political statements drafted in 1798 and 1799 in which the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures took the position that the federal Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional. The resolutions argued that the states had the right and the duty to declare unconstitutional those acts of Congress that the Constitution did not authorize. In doing so, they argued for states' rights and strict construction of the Constitution. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 were written secretly by Vice President Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively.
The principles stated in the resolutions became known as the "Principles of '98". Adherents argued that the states could judge the constitutionality of central government laws and decrees. The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 argued that each individual state has the power to declare that federal laws are unconstitutional and void. The Kentucky Resolution of 1799 added that when the states determine that a law is unconstitutional, nullification by the states is the proper remedy. The Virginia Resolutions of 1798 refer to "interposition" to express the idea that the states have a right to "interpose" to prevent harm caused by unconstitutional laws. The Virginia Resolutions contemplated joint action by the states.
The Resolutions had been controversial since their passage, eliciting disapproval from ten state legislatures. Ron Chernow assessed the theoretical damage of the resolutions as "deep and lasting ... a recipe for disunion". George Washington was so appalled by them that he told Patrick Henry that if "systematically and pertinaciously pursued", they would "dissolve the union or produce coercion". Their influence reverberated right up to the Civil War and beyond. In the years leading up to the Nullification Crisis, the resolutions divided Jeffersonian democrats, with states' rights proponents such as John C. Calhoun supporting the Principles of '98 and President Andrew Jackson opposing them. Years later, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 led anti-slavery activists to quote the Resolutions to support their calls on Northern states to nullify what they considered unconstitutional enforcement of the law.
Provisions of the Resolutions
The resolutions opposed the federal Alien and Sedition Acts, which extended the powers of the federal government. They argued that the Constitution was a "compact" or agreement among the states. Therefore, the federal government had no right to exercise powers not specifically delegated to it. If the federal government assumed such powers, its acts could be declared unconstitutional by the states. So, states could decide the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress. Kentucky's Resolution 1 stated:
That the several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by compact, under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each state to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party; that this government, created by this compact, was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.
A key provision of the Kentucky Resolutions was Resolution 2, which denied Congress more than a few penal powers by arguing that Congress had no authority to punish crimes other than those specifically named in the Constitution. The Alien and Sedition Acts were asserted to be unconstitutional, and therefore void, because they dealt with crimes not mentioned in the Constitution:
That the Constitution of the United States, having delegated to Congress a power to punish treason, counterfeiting the securities and current coin of the United States, piracies, and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations, and no other crimes, whatsoever; and it being true as a general principle, and one of the amendments to the Constitution having also declared, that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," therefore the act of Congress, passed on the 14th day of July, 1798, and intitled "An Act in addition to the act intitled An Act for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States," as also the act passed by them on the—day of June, 1798, intitled "An Act to punish frauds committed on the bank of the United States," (and all their other acts which assume to create, define, or punish crimes, other than those so enumerated in the Constitution,) are altogether void, and of no force whatsoever.
The Virginia Resolution of 1798 also relied on the compact theory and asserted that the states have the right to determine whether actions of the federal government exceed constitutional limits. The Virginia Resolution introduced the idea that the states may "interpose" when the federal government acts unconstitutionally, in their opinion:
That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact, as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that, in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states, who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties, appertaining to them.
History of the Resolutions
There were two sets of Kentucky Resolutions. The Kentucky state legislature passed the first resolution on November 16, 1798 and the second on December 3, 1799. Jefferson wrote the 1798 Resolutions. The author of the 1799 Resolutions is not known with certainty. Both resolutions were stewarded by John Breckinridge who was falsely believed to have been their author.
James Madison wrote the Virginia Resolution. The Virginia state legislature passed it on December 24, 1798.
The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 stated that acts of the national government beyond the scope of its constitutional powers are "unauthoritative, void, and of no force". While Jefferson's draft of the 1798 Resolutions had claimed that each state has a right of "nullification" of unconstitutional laws, that language did not appear in the final form of those Resolutions. Rather than purporting to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts, the 1798 Resolutions called on the other states to join Kentucky "in declaring these acts void and of no force" and "in requesting their repeal at the next session of Congress".
The Kentucky Resolutions of 1799 were written to respond to the states who had rejected the 1798 Resolutions. The 1799 Resolutions used the term "nullification", which had been deleted from Jefferson's draft of the 1798 Resolutions, resolving: "That the several states who formed [the Constitution], being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and, That a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under color of that instrument, is the rightful remedy." The 1799 Resolutions did not assert that Kentucky would unilaterally refuse to enforce the Alien and Sedition Acts. Rather, the 1799 Resolutions declared that Kentucky "will bow to the laws of the Union" but would continue "to oppose in a constitutional manner" the Alien and Sedition Acts. The 1799 Resolutions concluded by stating that Kentucky was entering its "solemn protest" against those Acts.
The Virginia Resolution did not refer to "nullification", but instead used the idea of "interposition" by the states. The Resolution stated that when the national government acts beyond the scope of the Constitution, the states "have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties, appertaining to them". The Virginia Resolution did not indicate what form this "interposition" might take or what effect it would have. The Virginia Resolutions appealed to the other states for agreement and cooperation.
Numerous scholars (including Koch and Ammon) have noted that Madison had the words "void, and of no force or effect" excised from the Virginia Resolutions before adoption. Madison later explained that he did this because an individual state does not have the right to declare a federal law null and void. Rather, Madison explained that "interposition" involved a collective action of the states, not a refusal by an individual state to enforce federal law, and that the deletion of the words "void, and of no force or effect" was intended to make clear that no individual state could nullify federal law.
The Kentucky Resolutions of 1799, while claiming the right of nullification, did not assert that individual states could exercise that right. Rather, nullification was described as an action to be taken by "the several states" who formed the Constitution. The Kentucky Resolutions thus ended up proposing joint action, as did the Virginia Resolution.
The Resolutions joined the foundational beliefs of Jefferson's party and were used as party documents in the 1800 election. As they had been shepherded to passage in the Virginia House of Delegates by John Taylor of Caroline, they became part of the heritage of the "Old Republicans". Taylor rejoiced in what the House of Delegates had made of Madison's draft: it had read the claim that the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional as meaning that they had "no force or effect" in Virginia—that is, that they were void. Future Virginia Governor and U.S. Secretary of War James Barbour concluded that "unconstitutional" included "void, and of no force or effect", and that Madison's textual change did not affect the meaning. Madison himself strongly denied this reading of the Resolution.
The long-term importance of the Resolutions lies not in their attack on the Alien and Sedition Acts, but rather in their strong statements of states' rights theory, which led to the rather different concepts of nullification and interposition.
Responses of other states
The resolutions were submitted to the other states for approval, but with no success. Seven states formally responded to Kentucky and Virginia by rejecting the Resolutions and three other states passed resolutions expressing disapproval, with the other four states taking no action. No other state affirmed the resolutions. At least six states responded to the Resolutions by taking the position that the constitutionality of acts of Congress is a question for the federal courts, not the state legislatures. For example, Vermont's resolution stated: "It belongs not to state legislatures to decide on the constitutionality of laws made by the general government; this power being exclusively vested in the judiciary courts of the Union." In New Hampshire, newspapers treated them as military threats and replied with foreshadowings of civil war. "We think it highly probable that Virginia and Kentucky will be sadly disappointed in their infernal plan of exciting insurrections and tumults," proclaimed one. The state legislature's unanimous reply was blunt:
Alexander Hamilton, then building up the army, suggested sending it into Virginia, on some "obvious pretext". Measures would be taken, Hamilton hinted to an ally in Congress, "to act upon the laws and put Virginia to the Test of resistance". At the Virginia General Assembly, delegate John Mathews was said to have objected to the passing of the resolutions by "tearing them into pieces and trampling them underfoot."
The Report of 1800
In January 1800, the Virginia General Assembly passed the Report of 1800, a document written by Madison to respond to criticism of the Virginia Resolution by other states. The Report of 1800 reviewed and affirmed each part of the Virginia Resolution, affirming that the states have the right to declare that a federal action is unconstitutional. The Report went on to assert that a declaration of unconstitutionality by a state would be an expression of opinion, without legal effect. The purpose of such a declaration, said Madison, was to mobilize public opinion and to elicit cooperation from other states. Madison indicated that the power to make binding constitutional determinations remained in the federal courts:
Madison then argued that a state, after declaring a federal law unconstitutional, could take action by communicating with other states, attempting to enlist their support, petitioning Congress to repeal the law in question, introducing amendments to the Constitution in Congress, or calling a constitutional convention.
However, in the same document Madison explicitly argued that the states retain the ultimate power to decide about the constitutionality of the federal laws, in "extreme cases" such as the Alien and Sedition Act. The Supreme Court can decide in the last resort only in those cases which pertain to the acts of other branches of the federal government, but cannot takeover the ultimate decision-making power from the states which are the "sovereign parties" in the Constitutional compact. According to Madison states could override not only the Congressional acts, but also the decisions of the Supreme Court:
The resolution supposes that dangerous powers, not delegated, may not only be usurped and executed by the other departments, but that the judicial department, also, may exercise or sanction dangerous powers beyond the grant of the Constitution; and, consequently, that the ultimate right of the parties to the Constitution, to judge whether the compact has been dangerously violated, must extend to violations by one delegated authority as well as by another—by the judiciary as well as by the executive, or the legislature.
However true, therefore, it may be, that the judicial department is, in all questions submitted to it by the forms of the Constitution, to decide in the last resort, this resort must necessarily be deemed the last in relation to the authorities of the other departments of the government; not in relation to the rights of the parties to the constitutional compact, from which the judicial, as well as the other departments, hold their delegated trusts. On any other hypothesis, the delegation of judicial power would annul the authority delegating it; and the concurrence of this department with the others in usurped powers, might subvert forever, and beyond the possible reach of any rightful remedy, the very Constitution which all were instituted to preserve.
Madison later strongly denied that individual states have the right to nullify federal law.
Influence of the Resolutions
Although the New England states rejected the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798–99, several years later, the state governments of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island threatened to ignore the Embargo Act of 1807 based on the authority of states to stand up to laws deemed by those states to be unconstitutional. Rhode Island justified its position on the embargo act based on the explicit language of interposition. However, none of these states actually passed a resolution nullifying the Embargo Act. Instead, they challenged it in court, appealed to Congress for its repeal, and proposed several constitutional amendments.
Several years later, Massachusetts and Connecticut asserted their right to test constitutionality when instructed to send their militias to defend the coast during the War of 1812. Connecticut and Massachusetts questioned another embargo passed in 1813. Both states objected, including this statement from the Massachusetts legislature, or General Court:
Massachusetts and Connecticut, along with representatives of some other New England states, held a convention in 1814 that issued a statement asserting the right of interposition. But the statement did not attempt to nullify federal law. Rather, it made an appeal to Congress to provide for the defense of New England and proposed several constitutional amendments.
The Nullification Crisis
During the "nullification crisis" of 1828–1833, South Carolina passed an Ordinance of Nullification purporting to nullify two federal tariff laws. South Carolina asserted that the Tariff of 1828 and the Tariff of 1832 were beyond the authority of the Constitution, and therefore were "null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this State, its officers or citizens". Andrew Jackson issued a proclamation against the doctrine of nullification, stating: "I consider ... the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed." He also denied the right to secede: "The Constitution ... forms a government not a league. ... To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States is not a nation."
James Madison also opposed South Carolina's position on nullification. Madison argued that he had never intended his Virginia Resolution to suggest that each individual state had the power to nullify an act of Congress. Madison wrote: "But it follows, from no view of the subject, that a nullification of a law of the U. S. can as is now contended, belong rightfully to a single State, as one of the parties to the Constitution; the State not ceasing to avow its adherence to the Constitution. A plainer contradiction in terms, or a more fatal inlet to anarchy, cannot be imagined." Madison explained that when the Virginia Legislature passed the Virginia Resolution, the "interposition" it contemplated was "a concurring and cooperating interposition of the States, not that of a single State. ... [T]he Legislature expressly disclaimed the idea that a declaration of a State, that a law of the U. S. was unconstitutional, had the effect of annulling the law." Madison went on to argue that the purpose of the Virginia Resolution had been to elicit cooperation by the other states in seeking change through means provided in the Constitution, such as amendment.
The compact theory
The Supreme Court rejected the compact theory in several nineteenth century cases, undermining the basis for the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. In cases such as Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, McCulloch v. Maryland, and Texas v. White, the Court asserted that the Constitution was established directly by the people, rather than being a compact among the states. Abraham Lincoln also rejected the compact theory saying the Constitution was a binding contract among the states and no contract can be changed unilaterally by one party.
School desegregation
In 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that segregated schools violate the Constitution. Many people in southern states strongly opposed the Brown decision. James J. Kilpatrick, an editor of the Richmond News Leader, wrote a series of editorials urging "massive resistance" to integration of the schools. Kilpatrick, relying on the Virginia Resolution, revived the idea of interposition by the states as a constitutional basis for resisting federal government action. A number of southern states, including Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia, and Florida, subsequently passed interposition and nullification laws in an effort to prevent integration of their schools.
In the case of Cooper v. Aaron, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Arkansas' effort to use nullification and interposition. The Supreme Court held that under the Supremacy Clause, federal law was controlling and the states did not have the power to evade the application of federal law. The Court specifically rejected the contention that Arkansas' legislature and governor had the power to nullify the Brown decision.
In a similar case arising from Louisiana's interposition act, Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board, the Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a federal district court that rejected interposition. The district court stated: "The conclusion is clear that interposition is not a constitutional doctrine. If taken seriously, it is illegal defiance of constitutional authority. Otherwise, 'it amounted to no more than a protest, an escape valve through which the legislators blew off steam to relieve their tensions.' ... However solemn or spirited, interposition resolutions have no legal efficacy."
Importance of the Resolutions
Merrill Peterson, Jefferson's otherwise very favorable biographer, emphasizes the negative long-term impact of the Resolutions, calling them "dangerous" and a product of "hysteria":
Jefferson's biographer Dumas Malone argued that the Kentucky resolution might have gotten Jefferson impeached for treason, had his actions become known at the time. In writing the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson warned that, "unless arrested at the threshold", the Alien and Sedition Acts would "necessarily drive these states into revolution and blood." Historian Ron Chernow says of this "he wasn't calling for peaceful protests or civil disobedience: he was calling for outright rebellion, if needed, against the federal government of which he was vice president." Jefferson "thus set forth a radical doctrine of states' rights that effectively undermined the constitution." Chernow argues that neither Jefferson nor Madison sensed that they had sponsored measures as inimical as the Alien and Sedition Acts themselves. Historian Garry Wills argued "Their nullification effort, if others had picked it up, would have been a greater threat to freedom than the misguided [alien and sedition] laws, which were soon rendered feckless by ridicule and electoral pressure". The theoretical damage of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions was "deep and lasting, and was a recipe for disunion". George Washington was so appalled by them that he told Patrick Henry that if "systematically and pertinaciously pursued", they would "dissolve the union or produce coercion". The influence of Jefferson's doctrine of states' rights reverberated right up to the Civil War and beyond. Future president James Garfield, at the close of the Civil War, said that Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution "contained the germ of nullification and secession, and we are today reaping the fruits".
References
Further reading
Bird, Wendell. "Reassessing Responses to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions: New Evidence from the Tennessee and Georgia Resolutions and from Other States," Journal of the Early Republic 35#4 (Winter 2015)
Gutzman, Kevin, "'O, What a Tangled Web We Weave ... ': James Madison and the Compound Republic", Continuity 22 (1998), 19–29.
Gutzman, Kevin, "A Troublesome Legacy: James Madison and the 'Principles of '98,'" Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995), 569–89.
Gutzman, Kevin., "The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions Reconsidered: 'An Appeal to the _Real Laws_ of Our Country,'" Journal of Southern History 66 (2000), 473–96.
External links
Text of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798
Text of Virginia Resolutions of 1798
Answers from Delaware, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York (also to Kentucky), Connecticut, New Hampshire (also to Kentucky), and Vermont.
Text of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799
James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions
The Address of the Minority in the Virginia Legislature to the People of that State, Containing a Vindication of the Constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Laws (1799)
1798 in American law
Federalism in the United States
United States resolutions | [
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17307 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone%20Cops | Keystone Cops | The Keystone Cops (often spelled "Keystone Kops") are fictional, humorously incompetent policemen featured in silent film slapstick comedies produced by Mack Sennett for his Keystone Film Company between 1912 and 1917.
History
The idea for the Keystone Cops came from Hank Mann, and they were named for the Keystone studio, the film production company founded in 1912 by Sennett. Their first film was Hoffmeyer's Legacy (1912), with Mann playing the part of police chief Tehiezel, but their popularity stemmed from the 1913 short The Bangville Police starring Mabel Normand, which had Ford Sterling in the role of chief.
As early as 1914, Sennett shifted the Keystone Cops from starring roles to background ensemble in support of comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. The Keystone Cops served as supporting players for Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, and Chaplin in the first full-length Sennett comedy feature Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914); Mabel's New Hero (1913) with Normand and Arbuckle; Making a Living (1914) with Chaplin in his first pre-Tramp screen appearance; In the Clutches of the Gang (1914) with Normand, Arbuckle, and Al St. John; and Wished on Mabel (1915) with Arbuckle and Normand, among others. Comic actors Chester Conklin, Jimmy Finlayson, and Ford Sterling were also Keystone Cops, as was director Del Lord.
The original Keystone Cops were George Jeske, Bobby Dunn, Mack Riley, Charles Avery, Slim Summerville, Edgar Kennedy, and Hank Mann. In 2010, the lost short A Thief Catcher was discovered at an antique sale in Michigan. It was filmed in 1914 and stars Ford Sterling, Mack Swain, Edgar Kennedy, and Al St. John and includes a previously unknown appearance of Charlie Chaplin as a Keystone Kop.
Revivals
Mack Sennett continued to use the Keystone Cops intermittently through the 1920s, but their popularity had waned by the time that sound films arrived. In 1935, director Ralph Staub staged a revival of the Sennett gang for his Warner Brothers short subject Keystone Hotel, featuring a re-creation of the Kops clutching at their hats, leaping in the air in surprise, running energetically in any direction, and taking extreme pratfalls. The Staub version of the Keystone Cops became a template for later re-creations. 20th Century Fox's 1939 film Hollywood Cavalcade had Buster Keaton in a Keystone chase scene. Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955) included a lengthy chase scene, showcasing a group of stuntmen dressed as Sennett's squad. (Two original Keystone Cops in this film were Heinie Conklin as an elderly studio guard and Hank Mann as a prop man. Sennett also starred in a cameo appearance as himself).
Richard Lester's A Hard Day' s Night (1964) has a scene where the reminiscent Keystone cops chase the Beatles around the streets.
In Sydney, Australia, in the 1960s, Rod Hull, Desmond Tester and Penny Spence featured in a local homage series of TV comedy shorts, Caper Cops. "It’s a direct steal of the American Keystone Kops [sic], but this is Sydney, Australia, in the late 1960s and who cares..." said creator/star Hull.
Mel Brooks directed a car chase scene in the Keystone Cops' style in his comedy film Silent Movie (1976).
Canceled cartoon shorts
In the late 1960s, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts pitched to created a series of animated cartoon short films based on the Keystone Cops, before being scrapped permanently following the closure of Warner’s original animation studio in 1969.
In popular culture
The name has since been used to criticize any group for its mistakes and lack of coordination, particularly if either trait was exhibited after a great deal of energy and activity. For example, in criticizing the Department of Homeland Security's response to Hurricane Katrina, Senator Joseph Lieberman claimed that emergency workers under DHS chief Michael Chertoff "ran around like Keystone Kops, uncertain about what they were supposed to do or uncertain how to do it."
In sport, the term has come into common usage by television commentators, particularly in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The rugby commentator Liam Toland uses the term to describe a team's incompetent performance on the pitch. The phrase "Keystone cops defending" has become a catchphrase for describing a situation in an English football match where a defensive error or a series of defensive errors leads to a goal. The term was also used in American Football commentary to describe the play of the New York Jets against the New England Patriots in the 2012 Butt Fumble game, with sportscaster Cris Collinsworth declaring "This is the Keystone Cops", after the Jets gave up 21 points in 51 seconds.
According to Dave Filoni, supervising director of the animated television series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the look of the police droid is based on the appearance of the Keystone Kops.
The 1983 video game Keystone Kapers, released for the Atari 2600, 5200, MSX and Colecovision, by Activision, featured Keystone Kop Officer Kelly.
The open-source 1987 video game NetHack features Keystone Kops as a type of enemy, appearing whenever a player steals from an in-game shop.
See also
Monty Banks
Glen Cavender
Funny Business (TV series)
References
Further reading
Basinger, Jeanine, (1999), chapter on Keystone Kops (also covers Mabel Normand) in Silent Stars, .
Davis, Lon & Debra compiled and edited by, (2020), Chase! A Tribute to the Keystone Cops, BearManor Media, Orlando, .
External links
Feature films
Hoffmeyer's Legacy (1912)
The Bangville Police (1913) with Mabel Normand
The Gangsters (1913) with Roscoe Arbuckle, Ford Sterling, and Al St. John
Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life (1913) with Mabel Normand
Mabel's New Hero (1913) with Mabel Normand and Roscoe Arbuckle
Making a Living (1914) (Available to watch/download from the Internet Archive) with Charles Chaplin
Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) (Available to watch/download from the Internet Archive) with Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, and Charles Chaplin
In the Clutches of the Gang (1914) with Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Al St. John
The Noise of Bombs (1914) with Edgar Kennedy as police chief
Love, Loot and Crash (1915) (Available to watch/download from the Internet Archive) with Charley Chase
Wished on Mabel (1915) with Roscoe Arbuckle and Mabel Normand
Love, Speed and Thrills (1915) (Available to watch/download from the Internet Archive) with Mack Swain, Minta Durfee, and Chester Conklin
Film series
Fictional police officers in films
Police comedies
Film characters introduced in 1912
Slapstick comedy
Slapstick films
Silent films
American films
American black-and-white films
Films directed by Mack Sennett
1910s police films
Comedy franchises | [
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17310 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koenigsegg | Koenigsegg | Koenigsegg Automotive AB () is a Swedish manufacturer of high-performance sports cars, based in Ängelholm, Skåne County, Sweden.
Company
The company was founded in 1994 in Sweden by Christian von Koenigsegg, with the intention of producing a "world-class" sports car. Many years of development and testing led to the CC8S, the company's first street-legal production car which was introduced in 2002.
In 2006, Koenigsegg began production of the CCX, which uses an engine created in-house especially for the car. The goal was to develop a car homologated for use worldwide, particularly the United States whose strict regulations did not allow the import of earlier Koenigsegg models.
In March 2009, the CCXR was listed by Forbes as one of "the world's most beautiful cars".
In December 2010, the Agera won the BBC Top Gear Hypercar of the Year Award.
Apart from developing, manufacturing and selling the Koenigsegg line of sports cars, Koenigsegg is also involved in "green technology" development programmes beginning with the CCXR ("Flower Power") flex-fuel sports car and continuing through the present with the Jesko. Koenigsegg is also active in development programs of plug-in electric cars' systems and next-generation reciprocating engine technologies. Koenigsegg has also developed a camless piston engine which found its first application in the Gemera, which was introduced in 2020.
Koenigsegg develops and produces most of the main systems, subsystems and components needed for their cars in-house instead of relying on subcontractors.
In January 2019, Koenigsegg sold a 20% stake in the company to Swedish electric car manufacturer (Egstrand & Lundgren), National Electric Vehicle Sweden (NEVS), for .
History
Prototypes and production
The initial design of the CC was penned down by Christian von Koenigsegg. Industrial designer David Crafoord realised the sketches as a 1:5 scale model. This model was later scaled up in order to create the base plug for the initial Koenigsegg prototype that was finished in 1996. During the next years, the prototype went through extensive testing and several new prototypes were built. The prototypes initially used an Audi V8 engine but after the engine supply contract fell through, the next candidate was the Flat-12 race engine developed by Motori Moderni for the Scuderia Coloni Formula one team, in which this engine was raced under the Subaru badge in the 1990 season. These Subaru 1235 engines were purchased and modified for use in the CC; this deal failed when the founder of Motori Moderni died, sending the company into bankruptcy. Eventually Koenigsegg developed its own engine based on the Ford Modular architecture which was used in its early sports cars. Later on, Koenigsegg developed their own engines from scratch, including control systems and transmissions, which is very unusual for a small size sports car producer.
Factory history
Christian von Koenigsegg got the idea to build his own car after watching the Norwegian stop-motion animated movie Pinchcliffe Grand Prix in his youth. He took his first steps in the world of business in his early 20s running a trading company called Alpraaz in Stockholm, Sweden. Alpraaz exported food from Europe to the developing world. The success of this venture gave von Koenigsegg the necessary financial standing to launch his chosen career as a car manufacturer.
Initially, Koenigsegg Automotive was based in Olofström. In 1997, the company needed larger production facilities and moved to a farm, just outside Ängelholm. On 22 February 2003, one of the production facilities caught fire and was badly damaged. Koenigsegg then acquired an abandoned air field to use as his new factory building and in late 2003, one of the two large fighter-jet hangars and an office building were converted into a car factory. Since then, the company is located near the still-active Ängelholm airport, clients can arrive by private jet nearby. Koenigsegg controls and uses the former military runway for shakedown runs of production cars and high-speed testing.
The Koenigsegg badge was designed in 1994 by Jacob Låftman, based on the heraldic coat of arms of the Koenigsegg family. The shield has been the family's coat of arms since the 12th century when a family member was knighted by the Germany-based Holy Roman Empire.
Ghost Badge
After moving into the abandoned airfield, which once housed the Swedish air force's "Johan Röd" squadron, Koenigsegg adopted the "ghost symbol" that the squadron had on their planes, which were Saab AJS37 Viggens aircraft (the squad also used the English phrase "The show must go on" on their aircraft as well) as a tribute to the squadron. The badge is seen on models built in the factory that was converted from their hangar.
Attempted purchase of Saab
On 12 June 2009, the media reported that Koenigsegg Group, consisting of Koenigsegg Automotive AB, Christian von Koenigsegg, Bård Eker and a group of investors led by Mark Bishop had signed a letter of intent with Saab to take over the brand from General Motors. General Motors confirmed on June 16 that they had chosen Koenigsegg Group as the buyer of Saab Automobile. The deal, set to close 30 September 2009, included in financing from the European Investment Bank, guaranteed by the Swedish government. By comparison, in 2008 Koenigsegg with its staff of 45 produced 18 cars at an average price of ; Saab employed 3,400 workers and made more than 93,000 cars.
General Motors announced on 18 August that the deal had been signed, although certain financing details remained to be completed. On 9 September 2009, Koenigsegg announced that BAIC was going to join as a minority stakeholder in Koenigsegg.
In November 2009, Koenigsegg decided not to finalise the purchase of Saab and therefore, left the negotiations. The timing uncertainty of finalisation of the take over was the reason Koenigsegg stated for leaving the deal.
Models
A Koenigsegg CC prototype was first publicised in 1996, while the full carbon fibre production prototype having white paintwork was finally unveiled at the 2000 Paris Motor Show. The first customer took delivery of a red CC8S in 2002 at the Geneva Auto Show and four more cars were built that year. Koenigsegg was established in Asia later that year with a premiere at the Seoul Auto Show. In 2004, the new CCR, which was basically a high performance variant of the CC8S, was unveiled at the Geneva Auto Show; only 14 were produced.
In 2006, Koenigsegg introduced the CCX, a new model, that was developed in order to meet worldwide regulations for road use. This meant the car had to go through extensive development in order to meet the latest and most stringent safety and emission standards that the world's authorities demanded; Koenigsegg had to, for example, develop their own engines and other related technologies. Furthermore, Koenigsegg is the only low-volume sports car manufacturer to pass the new European pedestrian impact tests. Just after Koenigsegg passed this test, the requirement was deemed too complicated for compliance by low-volume manufacturers, so it is now unnecessary to meet these regulations if the production volume of a given model is less than 10,000 cars annually.
In 2007, Koenigsegg premiered the CCXR, a biofuel/flex-fuel version of the CCX. The car features a modified engine, fuel system, and engine management system that enables the car to run on normal gasoline or ethanol, and in any mixture between these two fuels. Ethanol has a higher octane rating compared to regular fuel and has an internal cooling effect on the combustion chamber, which allows for increased performance.
In 2009, Koenigsegg released information about a special edition car called the Trevita, of which three were planned to be made but only two were finished due to technical problems. The Trevita, which translates into English as "three whites", has a body made entirely of Koenigsegg's proprietary material consisting of diamond-coated carbon fibre. The Trevita is based on the CCXR, and therefore has a power output of when running on biofuel.
In 2010 Koenigsegg released information at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show about a new model called the Agera, which translates into English as "take action/act". The Agera features a Koenigsegg developed 5.0-litre V8 engine coupled with variable turbo geometry turbochargers having a power output of , mated to a newly developed 7-speed dual clutch transmission. The Agera's design follows a clear lineage from the previous Koenigsegg sports cars, but adds many special new features, such as a wider front track, new styling and aerodynamic features, and a new interior; including a new lighting technique called "Ghost Light" by the manufacturer which consists of microscopic holes to hide the interior lighting until it is turned on, which then shines through what appears to be solid aluminium. Production of the Agera ended in July 2018 after being in production for eight years when two of the three final edition cars were presented to their customers.
At the 2015 Geneva Motor Show, Koenigsegg presented a new model named the Regera, which translates into English as to "reign" or "rule". The Regera uses the Koenigsegg Direct Drive (KDD) transmission. Below , motive power is by two electric motors on the rear wheels and the internal combustion engine (ICE) is disconnected. Above , the ICE is connected by a fixed ratio transmission with no gearbox, torque vectoring by the previously mentioned electric motors and boosted by a third electric motor attached to the driveshaft.
Koenigsegg initially based its engine on a V8 engine block from Ford Racing. These engines powered the initial run of the CC monikered cars. The block for the V8 in the CCX (Competition Coupe Ten, to celebrate ten years of the company) was cast for Koenigsegg by Grainger & Worrall of the UK who also cast the block for the Agera's 5.0-litre engine
In late 2018, Koenigsegg showed potential customers in Australia the replacement of the Agera via VR. Teaser sketches were released by the company at the same time. Initially, the model was rumoured to be called "Ragnarok" but the public unveil of the car at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show revealed the name to be Jesko, after the founder's father Jesko Von Koenigsegg.
The Jesko uses a development of the 5.0-litre V8 engine used in the Agera which has a power output of on normal gasoline and has a power output of and of torque at 5,100 rpm on E85 biofuel. The engine is mated to a 9-speed multi-clutch transmission having seven clutches called the "Light Speed Transmission" (LST) by the manufacturer. The focus of this transmission is to have faster shift times. The car will come in either a high-downforce, track-oriented or a low-drag, high speed Absolut variant.
On 3 March 2020, the Gemera was unveiled on an online broadcast. It is scheduled to be released to the public in 2022. There will be a limited production of 300 units. This will be Koenigsegg's first four-seater vehicle. The vehicle is powered by a small engine called the Koenigsegg TFG (Tiny Friendly Giant). The car also features full-length Koenigsegg Automated Twisted Synchrohelix Actuation Doors (KATSAD).
List of models
Koenigsegg CC (1994) 1 prototype
Koenigsegg CC8S (2002–2003) 6 units (2 right hand drive) – 0–100 km/h (0–62 mph) under 3.5 sec. Top speed 390 km/h (243 mph) (claimed)
Koenigsegg CCR (2004–2006) 14 units – 0–100 km/h (0-62 mph) 3.2 sec. Top speed (claimed); (tested)
Koenigsegg CCX (2006–2010) 29 units – 0–100 km/h (0-62 mph) 3.2 sec. Top speed (claimed)
Koenigsegg CCGT (2007) Only 1 unit developed for the sole purpose of competing in the FIA GT1
Koenigsegg CCXR (2007–2009) 9 units – 0–100 km/h (0-62 mph) 3.1 sec. Top speed (claimed)
Koenigsegg CCX Edition (2008) 2 units – 0–100 km/h (0-62 mph) 3.0 sec. Top speed (claimed)
Koenigsegg CCXR Edition (2008) 4 units – 0–100 km/h (0-62 mph) 2.9 sec. Top speed (claimed)
Koenigsegg CCXR Special Edition (2008–2009) 2 units – 0–100 km/h (0-62 mph) 2.9 sec. Top speed (claimed)
Koenigsegg Trevita (2008–2009) 2 units – 0–100 km/h (0-62 mph) 2.9 sec. Top speed (claimed)
Koenigsegg Quant (2009) Solar Concept
Koenigsegg Agera (2011) 7 units(2 became Agera R later on) – 0–100 km/h (0-62 mph) 3.0 sec. Top speed 420 km/h (261 mph) (claimed)
Koenigsegg Agera R (2011–2014) 18 units(2 were converted from normal Agera)– 0–100 km/h (62 mph) 2.8 sec, 0–200 km/h (124 mph) 7.8 sec. Top speed 420 km/h (261 mph) (claimed)
Koenigsegg Agera S (2013–2014) 5 units – 0–100 km/h (62 mph) 2.9 sec, 0–200 km/h (124 mph) 7.9 sec. Top speed 420 km/h (261 mph) (claimed)
Koenigsegg One:1 (2014–2015) 6 units + 1 prototype – 0–400 km/h (248 mph) 20 sec. Top speed 440 km/h (274 mph) (claimed)
Koenigsegg Agera RS (2015–2018) 25 units, 3 Agera RSR for Japanese market included. Top speed (tested)
Koenigsegg Agera Final (2016–2018) 3 units
Koenigsegg Regera (2016–present) 80 units planned – 0–100 km/h (0–62 mph) 2.8 sec. Top speed 410 km/h (255 mph) (claimed)
Koenigsegg Jesko (2020–) 125 units planned (Buyers have the option to choose between the track-oriented Jesko or the Jesko Absolut). Top speed is yet to be revealed.
Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut (2020–) Top speed (claimed)
Koenigsegg Gemera (2022–) 0–100 km/h (62 mph) 1.9 sec, $1.9 Million. 300 units planned.
Records
On 28 February 2005, at 12:08 pm local time, in Nardò, Italy, the CCR broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest production car in the world, having attained on the Nardò Ring (a circular track of circumference), breaking the record previously held by the McLaren F1.
It held the record until September 2005 when the Bugatti Veyron broke the record again by attaining a speed of , proven both by Car and Driver and Top Gear. Both of the records set by Bugatti and McLaren were set on Volkswagen's own test-track Ehra-Lessien, which features a straight.
In 2008 the German magazine sport auto conducted a test for production cars, with the CCX winning the event in a total time of . The CCX also accelerated from 0–200 km/h in 9.3 seconds.
In September 2011, the Agera R broke the Guinness World Record for 0–300 km/h with a time of 14.53 seconds and a 0-300-0 km/h time of 21.19 seconds. Koenigsegg improved this record with the One:1 on 8 June 2015. It attained 0–300 km/h in 11.92 seconds and 0-300-0 km/h in 17.95 seconds (a 3.24 sec improvement over the 2011 Koenigsegg Agera R record), it also attained 0–322 km/h (0–200 mph) in 14.328 seconds and 0-322-0 km/h in 20.71 seconds.
On 1 October 2017, an Agera RS set an unofficial record for with a time of 36.44 seconds. The record was set at the Vandel Airfield in Denmark and broke the record of 42 seconds set by the Bugatti Chiron a few weeks prior.
On 4 November 2017, an Agera RS set a new record for the world's fastest production car with an average speed of . The record breaking run was done on a closed section of Nevada State Route 160 in Pahrump, Nevada, United States. On the same day they also beat their own 0–400–0 km/h record they set a few weeks prior (33.29 seconds compared to the old record of 36.44 seconds). It was later confirmed via the instrumentation that the car topped out at 457.94 km/h (284.55 mph)
On 23 September 2019, Koenigsegg set a new 0-400-0 km/h world record when a Koenigsegg Regera completed the run in 31.49 seconds. This was 1.8 seconds faster than Koenigsegg’s previously unbeaten record, set by the Agera RS in 2017.
Awards
Top Gear - Award 2010 - The Agera becomes BBCs Top Gear Hypercar of the Year
Red Dot - Award for excellent Design
National Swedish Design Prize - Utmärkt Svensk Form
Entrepreneur of the Year Nomination - Företagarna Sweden
Powercar - Superexotic import of the year 2007 and 2008 - Germany
References
External links
Top Gear Award
Vehicle manufacturing companies established in 1994
Swedish brands
Car manufacturers of Sweden
Sports car manufacturers
Car brands
Koenigsegg vehicles
Luxury motor vehicle manufacturers
1994 establishments in Sweden | [
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17311 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaliningrad%20Oblast | Kaliningrad Oblast | Kaliningrad Oblast () is the westernmost federal subject of Russia. It is a semi-exclave, and is situated on the Baltic coast. The oblast's largest city and administrative centre is the city of Kaliningrad, formerly known as Königsberg. The oblast's port city of Baltiysk is Russia's only port on the Baltic Sea that remains ice-free in winter. The oblast had a population of roughly 1 million in the Russian Census of 2010.
The oblast is bordered by Poland to the south, Lithuania to the north and east, and the Baltic Sea to the west. It is impossible to travel overland between the oblast and the main contiguous portion of Russia without passing through at least two other countries. The territory was formerly the northern part of the Prussian province of East Prussia, the southern part of which is today part of the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship in Poland. With the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, the territory was annexed as part of the Russian SFSR by the Soviet Union. Following the post-war migration and flight and expulsion of Germans, the territory was populated with mostly Russians. According to the 2010 census, there were fewer than 10,000 Germans.
History of Kaliningrad
Middle Ages
Before and during the Middle Ages, the territory of what is now the Kaliningrad Oblast was inhabited by the Old Prussians (Sambians) in the western part and by Lithuanians in the eastern part. The tribes were divided by the rivers Pregolya and Łyna. The Teutonic Order conquered the region and established a monastic state. On the foundations of a destroyed Prussian settlement known as Tvanksta, the Order founded the city of Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad). Germans resettled the territory and assimilated the indigenous Old Prussians. The Lithuanian-inhabited areas became known as Lithuania Minor. The old Baltic languages became extinct around the 17th century, their speakers having been assimilated and Germanised.
Pre-Modern Period
In 1525, Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg secularized the Teutonic Order's Prussian branch and established himself as ruler of the Duchy of Prussia. The duchy was nominally a fief of the Polish crown. It later merged with the Margraviate of Brandenburg. Königsberg was the duchy's capital from 1525 until 1701. As Prussia's centre moved westward, the capital's position became too peripheral and Berlin became the new Prussian capital. During the Seven Years' War it was occupied by the Russian Empire. The region was reorganized into the Province of East Prussia within the Kingdom of Prussia in 1773. The territory of the Kaliningrad Oblast lies in the northern part of East Prussia.
Modern period
First Russian annexation (1758–62)
In the context of the Seven Year War, Russia allied with Austria and France against Prussia and the Kingdom of Great Britain. After crushing victories against Prussia, Russia occupied all of East Prussia and officially annexed it in 1758. The inhabitants, including Kant, swore an oath to Empress Elizabeth. But after her death, the new Russian Tsar, Peter III, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, decided to return it to Prussia in 1762 to establish an alliance with the latter as Peter III aimed at regaining his duchy, then occupied by Denmark.
Napoleonic occupation
After the defeats of Jena–Auerstedt, the Kingdom of Prussia was invaded and Berlin was occupied by the French. The Court of Prussia fled to Königsberg, asking Russian help. Russia interfered and this led to the bloody battle of Eylau and battle of Friedland in 1807. The French won and signed the Treaties of Tilsit.
Historical ethnic and religious structure
In 1817, East Prussia had 796,204 Protestants, 120,123 Roman Catholics, 2,389 Jews, and 864 Mennonites.
In 1824, shortly before its merger with West Prussia, the population of East Prussia was 1,080,000 people. According to Karl Andree, Germans were slightly more than half of the people, while 280,000 (~26%) were ethnically Polish and 200,000 (~19%) were ethnically Lithuanian. As of 1819 there were also 20,000 strong ethnic Curonian and Latvian minorities as well as 2,400 Jews, according to Georg Hassel. Similar numbers are given by August von Haxthausen in his 1839 book, with a breakdown by county. However, the majority of East Prussian Polish and Lithuanian inhabitants were Lutherans, not Roman Catholics like their ethnic kinsmen across the border in the Russian Empire. Only in Southern Warmia (German: Ermland) Catholic Poles – so called Warmiacy (not to be confused with predominantly Protestant Masurians) – comprised the majority of population, numbering 26,067 people (~81%) in county Allenstein (Polish: Olsztyn) in 1837. Another minority in 19th-century East Prussia, were ethnically Russian Old Believers, also known as Philipponnen – their main town was Eckersdorf (Wojnowo).
German culture and Germanization
East Prussia was an important centre of German culture. Many important figures, such as Immanuel Kant and E. T. A. Hoffmann, came from this region. Despite being heavily damaged during World War II and thereafter, the oblast's cities still contain examples of German architecture. The Jugendstil style showcases the rich German history and cultural importance of the area.
By the early 20th century, Lithuanians formed a majority only in rural parts of north-eastern East Prussia (Memelland and Prussian Lithuania). The same was true of the Latvian-speaking Kursenieki who had settled the coast of East Prussia between Gdańsk and Klaipėda. The rest of the area, except the Polish Masurians in Mazury (southern Prussia), was overwhelmingly German-speaking.
The Memel Territory (Klaipėda region), formerly part of north-eastern East Prussia as well as Prussian Lithuania, was annexed by Lithuania in 1923. In 1938, Nazi Germany radically renamed about a third of the place names of this area, replacing Old Prussian and Lithuanian names with newly invented German names.
World War I
In September 1914, after hostilities began between Germany, France and Russia, the Reich was about to seize Paris, the French urged Russia to attack East Prussia. Nicholas II launched a major attack, resulting in a Russian victory in the Battle of Gumbinnen. The Russian army arrived at Königsberg's outskirts but did not take it and settled at Insterburg. This Russian victory and East Prussia's occupation by Russia saved Paris by forcing the Germans to send many troops to their East provinces. Later Hindenburg and Lüdendorff pushed Russia back at the battle of Tannenberg, hence liberating East Prussia from Russian troops. Yet Russian troops remained in the easternmost part of the region till early 1915.
Takeover by the Soviet Union
On 29 August 1944, Soviet troops reached the border of East Prussia. By January 1945, they had taken all of East Prussia except for the area around Königsberg. Many inhabitants fled west at this time. During the war's last days, over two million people fled before the Red Army and were evacuated by sea. Under the Potsdam Agreement's terms, the city became part of the Soviet Union pending the final determination of territorial questions at a peace settlement. This final determination took place on 12 September 1990, with the signing of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany. The excerpt pertaining to the partition of East Prussia including the area surrounding Königsberg is as follows (note that Königsberg is spelt "Koenigsberg" in the original document):
VI. CITY OF KOENIGSBERG AND THE ADJACENT AREAThe Conference examined a proposal by the Soviet Government that pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement, the section of the western frontier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which is adjacent to the Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig to the east, north of Braunsberg – Goldep, to the meeting point of the frontiers of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia.
The Conference has agreed in principle to the proposal of the Soviet Government concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the city of Koenigsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above, subject to expert examination of the actual frontier.
The President of the United States and the British Prime Minister supported the proposal of the Conference at the forthcoming peace settlement.
Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 in memory of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Mikhail Kalinin. The remaining German population was forcibly expelled between 1947 and 1948. The annexed territory was populated with Soviet citizens, mostly ethnic Russians but to a lesser extent also Ukrainians and Belarusians.
The German language was replaced with the Russian language. In 1950, there were 1,165,000 inhabitants, which was only half the number of the pre-war population.
Soviet period
The city was rebuilt after WWII. The territory became strategically important as the Soviet Baltic Fleet's headquarters, as the port is ice-free in winter unlike Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad). Hence, the city was closed to foreign visitors.
The reconstruction of the Oblast, threatened by hunger in the immediate post-war years, was carried out through an ambitious and efficient policy of oceanic fishing with the creation of one of the main fishing harbours of the USSR in Kaliningrad city. Fishing not only fed the regional economy but also was a basis for social and scientific development, in particular oceanography. The region remained ocean-oriented until 1990.
In 1957, an agreement was signed and later came into force which delimited the border between Poland and the Soviet Union.
The region was added as a semi-exclave to the Russian SFSR; since 1946 it has been known as the Kaliningrad Oblast. According to some historians, Stalin created it as an oblast separate from the Lithuanian SSR because it further separated the Baltic states from the West. Others think that the reason was that the region was far too strategic for the USSR to leave it in the hands of another SSR other than the Russian one. The names of the cities, towns, rivers and other geographical features were changed to Russian names.
The area was administered by the planning committee of the Lithuanian SSR, although it had its own Communist Party committee. In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev offered the entire Kaliningrad Oblast to the Lithuanian SSR but Antanas Sniečkus refused to annex the territory because it would add at least a million ethnic Russians to Lithuania.
In 2010, the German magazine Der Spiegel published a report claiming that Kaliningrad had been offered to Germany in 1990 (against payment). Although, the offer was not seriously considered by the West German government which saw, at the time, the reunification with East Germany as a higher priority. However, this story was later denied by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Today
Kaliningrad's isolation was exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 when Lithuania became an independent country and even more when both Poland and Lithuania became members of NATO and subsequently the European Union in 2004. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Baltic states, Kaliningrad Oblast has been separated from the rest of Russia by other countries instead of by other Soviet republics. Neighboring nations imposed strict border controls when they joined the European Union. All military and civilian land links between the region and the rest of Russia have to pass through members of NATO and the EU. Russian proposals for visa-free travel between the EU and Kaliningrad have so far been rejected by the EU. Travel arrangements, based on the Facilitated Transit Document (FTD) and Facilitated Rail Transit Document (FRTD) have been made. On 12 January 1996, Kaliningrad Oblast, alongside Sverdlovsk, became the first oblasts of Russia to sign a power-sharing treaty with the federal government, granting it autonomy. However this agreement was abolished on 31 May 2002.
The territory's economic situation was badly affected by its geographic isolation and the significant reduction in the size of the Russian military garrison, which had previously been one of the major employers and helped the local economy.
After 1991, some ethnic Germans immigrated to the area, such as Volga Germans from other parts of Russia and Kazakhstan, especially after Germany raised the requirements for people from the former Soviet Union to be accepted as ethnic Germans and have a "right of return". These Germans are overwhelmingly Russian-speaking and as such were rejected for resettlement within Germany under Germany's new rules. A similar migration by Poles from the lands of the former Soviet Union to the Kaliningrad Oblast occurred at this time as well. The situation has begun to change, albeit slowly. Germany, Lithuania, and Poland have renewed contact with Kaliningrad Oblast, through town twinning and other projects. This has helped to promote interest in the history and culture of the East Prussian and Lietuvininkai communities.
In July 2005, the 750-year jubilee of the city was widely celebrated.
In July 2007, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov declared that if US-controlled missile defense systems were deployed in Poland, then nuclear weapons might be deployed in Kaliningrad. On 5 November 2008, Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev said that installing missiles in Kaliningrad was almost a certainty. These plans were suspended in January 2009, but implemented in October 2016. In 2011, a long range Voronezh radar was commissioned to monitor missile launches within about . It is situated in the settlement of Pionersky (formerly German Neukuhren) in Kaliningrad Oblast.
Geography
Kaliningrad is the only Russian Baltic Sea port that is ice-free all year round and hence plays an important role in maintenance of the Baltic Fleet. As a semi-exclave of Russia, it is surrounded by Poland (Pomeranian and Warmian-Masurian Voivodeships), Lithuania (Klaipėda, Marijampolė and Tauragė Counties) and the Baltic Sea. Its largest river is the Pregolya. It starts as a confluence of the Instruch and the Angrapa and drains into the Baltic Sea through the Vistula Lagoon. Its length under the name of Pregolya is 123 km (76 mi), 292 km (181 mi), including the Angrapa.
Notable geographical features include:
Curonian Lagoon (shared with Lithuania)
Vistula Lagoon (shared with Poland)
Major cities and towns:
† Pre-1946 (the German-language names were also used in English in this period)
Politics
The current governor (since 2017) of Kaliningrad Oblast is Anton Alikhanov. The latest elections to the region's legislative body, the 40-seat Kaliningrad Oblast Duma, were held in September 2016.
Administrative divisions
Demographics
Settlements
Population
At the 2010 census, the population of the oblast was 941,873; down from 955,281 recorded in the 2002 census. The 1989 census recorded 871,283 inhabitants. Kaliningrad Oblast was the fourth most densely populated federal subject in Russia, with 62.5 persons/km2 (162 persons/sq mi).
Ethnic groups
According to the 2010 census, the ethnic composition of the oblast was as follows:
772,534 Russians (86.4%)
32,771 Ukrainians (3.7%)
32,497 Belarusians (3.6%)
9,769 Lithuanians (1.1%)
9,226 Armenians (1%)
7,349 Germans (0.8%)
4,534 Tatars (0.5%)
3,282 Azeris (0.4%)
2,788 Poles (0.3%)
2,245 Uzbeks (0.3%)
16,857 others (1.9%)
48,021 people were registered from administrative databases and could not declare an ethnicity. It is estimated that the proportion of ethnicities in this group is the same as that of the declared group.
Total fertility rate
Religion
According to a 2012 survey 34% of the population of Kaliningrad Oblast declare themselves to be "spiritual but not religious", 30.9% adhere to the Russian Orthodox Church, 22% are atheist and 11.1% follow other religions or did not give an answer to the question, 1% are unaffiliated generic Christians and 1% adhere to the Catholic Church.
Until 1945, the region was overwhelmingly Lutheran, with a small number of Catholics and Jews. The state church of Prussia was dominant in the region. Although it was both Reformed and Lutheran since 1817, there was an overwhelming Lutheran majority and very few Reformed adherents in East Prussia.
Economy
In 2017, the nominal GDP of Kaliningrad Oblast was US$7 billion total and $7,000 per capita.
The oblast derives an economic advantage from its geographic position as an ice-free port and its proximity to the European Union. It also has the world's largest deposits of amber. The region has developed its tourism infrastructure and promotes attractions such as the Curonian Spit.
To address the oblast's high rate of unemployment, in 1996 the Russian authorities granted the oblast a special economic status with tax incentives that were intended to attract investors. The oblast's economy has since benefited substantially and in recent years experienced a boom. A US$45 million airport terminal has been opened and the European Commission provides funds for business projects under its special program for the region. Trade with the countries of the EU has increased. Economic output has increased.
According to official statistics, the Gross Regional Product in 2006 was 115 billion roubles. GRP per capita in 2007 was 155 669 roubles.
Industry
Car and truck assembly (GM, BMW, Kia, Yuejin by Avtotor), and production of auto parts, are major industries in Kaliningrad Oblast. There are shipbuilding facilities in Kaliningrad and Sovetsk. Food processing is a mature industry in the region with Miratorg operating a sizeable food processing factory. OKB Fakel, a world leader in the field of Hall thruster development, as well as a leading Russian developer and manufacturer of electric propulsion systems, is based in Neman. The company employs 960 people.
General Satellite (GS) is the biggest employer in Gusev city producing satellite receivers, cardboard packaging, nanomaterials etc.
Natural resources
Kaliningrad Oblast possesses more than 90 per cent of the world's amber deposits. Until recently raw amber was exported for processing to other countries, but in 2013 the Russian government banned the export of raw amber in order to boost the amber processing industry in Russia.
There are small oil reservoirs beneath the Baltic Sea not far from Kaliningrad's shore. Small-scale offshore exploration started in 2004. Poland, Lithuania, and some local NGOs, voiced concerns about possible environmental effects.
Fishing
Fishing is an important regional industry, with big fishing ports in Kaliningrad and Pionersky (formerly Neukuhren) and smaller ones in Svetly and Rybachy.
Power generation
Average yearly power consumption in the Kaliningrad Oblast was 3.5 terawatt-hours in 2004 with local power generation providing just 0.235 terawatt-hours. The balance of energy needs was imported from neighbouring countries. A new Kaliningrad power station was built in 2005, covering 50% of the oblast's energy needs. A second part to this station was built in 2010, making the oblast independent from electricity imports.
In 2008, planning began for the construction of two nuclear power reactors, with costs estimated at €5 billion (US$8 billion). The project was suspended in May 2013, and in 2014, it was abandoned after environmental concerns and lack of support.
See also
2011 Kaliningrad Oblast election
Baltic Republican Party
List of rural localities in Kaliningrad Oblast
Kaliningrad Special Region
Kaliningrad question
References
Sources
Roqueplo O: La Russie & son Miroir d'Extrême-Occident, Langues'O, HAL, 2018
Simon Grunau, Preußische Chronik. Hrsg. von M. Perlbach etc., Leipzig, 1875.
A. Bezzenberger, Geographie von Preußen, Gotha, 1959
External links
Official website of Kaliningrad Oblast
A. Liucija Arbusauskaité "The Soviet Policy Towards the "Kaliningrad Germans" 1945–1951" chapter in "Themenheft: Eingliederung und Ausgrenzung. Beiträge aus der Historischen Migrationsforschung. Hrsg.: Jochen Oltmer Osnabrück: IMIS, 1999.
Master's thesis by Sergey Naumkin on the possibility of Kaliningrad integrating with the EU as a special economic zone
Life in Kaliningrad Oblast
Spuren der Vergangenheit / Следы Пρошлого (Traces of the past) This site by W.A. Milowskij, a Kaliningrad resident, contains hundreds of interesting photos, often with text explanations, of architectural and infrastructural artifacts of the territory's long German past.
City and Reagen News
History of Prussia
Enclaves and exclaves
Russian-speaking countries and territories
Germany–Soviet Union relations
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