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17313 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth%20MacAlpin | Kenneth MacAlpin | Kenneth MacAlpin (, ; 810 – 13 February 858) or Kenneth I was King of Dál Riada (841–850), King of the Picts (843–858), and the King of Alba (843–858). He inherited the throne of Dál Riada from his father Alpín mac Echdach, founder of the Alpínid dynasty. Kenneth I conquered the kingdom of the Picts in 843–850 and began a campaign to seize all of Scotland and assimilate the Picts, for which he was posthumously nicknamed An Ferbasach ("The Conqueror"). Forteviot became the capital of his kingdom, and he also fought the Britons of the Kingdom of Strathclyde and the invading Vikings from Scandinavia. Kenneth also relocated relics including the Stone of Scone from an abandoned abbey on Iona to his new domain.
Kenneth I is traditionally considered the founder of Scotland, which was then known as Alba, although like his immediate successors, he bore the title of King of the Picts. One chronicle calls Kenneth the first Scottish lawgiver but there is no information about the laws he passed.
Origin
According to the genealogy of the Scottish kings, Kenneth's father was Alpín mac Echdach, the King of Dál Riada, which existed in what is now western Scotland. Alpín is considered to be the grandson of Áed Find, a descendant of Cenél nGabráin, who ruled in Dál Riada. The Synchronism of the Irish Kings lists Alpín among the kings of Scotland. Modern historians are sceptical about the reign of Alpín in Dál Riada and his relationship with Áed, and believe this misconception is the result of negligence on the part of the scribes in some texts. The genealogy of the kings of Scotland and Dál Riada dates back to an original manuscript that was written during the reign of Malcolm III in the mid-to-late 11th century. The Rawlinson B 502 manuscript provides the following ancestry for Kenneth:
There is very limited information about Alpín, the father of Kenneth. Some of Dál Riada's royal lists, which contain many scribal errors, say he ruled from 841 to 843. The Chronicle of Huntingdon, which was written in the late 13th century, states Alpín defeated the Picts at Galloway but the Picts then defeated him in a battle that took place in the same year, during which Alpín was killed. According to the chronicle, Alpín died on 20 July 834. This date is given in other sources but several researchers claim the date was probably copied from another source and the year of his death was obtained by recalculating the dates in the erroneous royal lists so they attribute Alpín's date of death to 840, or 841.
Alpín's mother is likely to have been a Pictish princess, the sister of Constantine I and Óengus II. According to the Pictish tradition, a female representative of the royal dynasty could inherit the crown. This origin gave Kenneth a legitimate claim to the Pictish throne.
Kenneth I had at least one brother, Donald I, who succeeded him as king.
Life and reign
Early years
Kenneth MacAlpin is believed to have been born around 810 on the island of Iona, which is part of modern-day Scotland. After his father's death, Kenneth succeeded him as the King of Dál Riada. His coronation took place in 840 or 841. One of the main sources on the life of Kenneth is the 10th-century Chronicle of the Kings of Alba and describes the reigns of Scottish kings from Kenneth I to Kenneth II ().
Conquest of Pictavia
According to the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba, Kenneth came to a region that was inhabited by the Picts, during the second year of his reign in Dál Riada. Having defeated the Picts, Kenneth ruled there for 16 years. According to the Annals of Ulster, compiled in the 15th century, he became the King of the Picts in 842 or 843, and died in 858. Although some sources state Kenneth ruled the Picts from 841 to 856, according to the Chronicle of Melrose, he became king in 843, a date that is generally accepted by most modern-day historians.
In the first half of the 9th century, the geopolitical situation in Dál Riada deteriorated. Almost the entire territory of the kingdom was mountainous, and was filled with uneasy terrain. Kenneth's realm lay between the powerful Kingdom of Strathclyde in the south and the Druim Alban mountain ridge in the east. It was difficult to pass through the provinces of Dál Riada, most of the land was infertile, and the kingdom had lost its western territories in the Hebrides to the Vikings, who had settled in the area and were raiding the borders of Dál Riada. These conditions may have forced Kenneth to attack the Picts.
After the death of Eóganan mac Óengusa in 839, Uurad, and then Bridei VI succeeded him as the King of the Picts. According to List One, Uurad's reign lasted three years, while Brude VI reigned for a year. According to List Two, Uurad reigned for two years, while Bridei VI's reign lasted a month. The reigns of Uurad's three sons were also present in List Two. Based on these accounts, the Pictish kingdom fell in 849 or 850. Many sources dating to the following periods state that the historical kingdom of the Picts and the Scots unified in 850. List Two states that the last Pictish King was killed in Forteviot or Scone. This is probably a reference to MacAlpin's treason, a medieval legend first recorded in the 12th century by Giraldus Cambrensis. According to the legend, a Pictish nobleman is invited by the Scots to a meeting or a feast in Scone and is treacherously killed there. At the same time, List One gives the year 843 as the date when Kenneth received the title of King of the Picts.
Sources do not detail Kenneth's conquest of Pictavia. No chronicle mentions either Kenneth's continuing his father's campaign against the Picts or his supposed claim to the Pictish crown. Modern-day historians suggest Kenneth was a descendant of Pictish kings through his mother or had ties with them through his wife. It is likely the death of Eóganan, and the heavy losses sustained on the Picts in a battle against the Viking invaders, had weakened the Picts' military might. It is also possible Kenneth's visit to Pictavia began as a rebellion against the Pictish dominion as the Pictish forces of Óengus had occupied Dál Riada and made it its vassal in 741. The Chronicle of Huntingdon gives the following interpretation of the events that took place after Eóganan's death:
It is likely Kenneth killed the Pictish leaders and destroyed their armies during his conquest of Pictavia, after which he devastated the whole country. The Annals of the Four Masters record a single battle during Kenneth's campaign, which according to Isabel Henderson, proves the Picts did not show any significant resistance to Kenneth's forces.
King of Alba
According to historical tradition, a new kingdom was formed after Kenneth annexed the kingdom of the Picts. This kingdom's Gaelic name was Alba, which was later replaced with Scotia and Scotland. The rulers of the kingdom initially held the title of King of Alba. Kenneth is listed in the royal lists dating to later periods as the first King of Scotland; modern historians, however, believe the final unification of the kingdom took place half a century later and that Kenneth's main political achievement should be considered the creation of a new dynasty. This dynasty sought to dominate all of Scotland, under which the Scots assimilated the Picts, resulting in their quick disappearance of the Picts' language and institutions.
After the conquest of Pictavia, the Scots from Dál Riada began to migrate en masse to the territories populated by the Picts. The list of Pictish kings concludes in 850 and the list of kings of Dál Riada also ends around the same time, meaning the title ceased to exist. Kenneth I and his administration moved to Pictavia; it is possible the Scots moved to the region before the war and that such settlements played a major role in the selection of Scone as the kingdom's capital. Kenneth moved relics from an abandoned abbey on Iona, where Viking raids made life untenable, to Dunkeld, which was the centre of the Church of Scotland, in 848 or 849, according to The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba. The coronation stone was also moved from the island to Scone, for which it is referred to as the Stone of Scone. According to archaeological excavations, Forteviot was probably originally a royal residence but the place is not mentioned in the chronicles after the death of Donald I. The mass migration of Scots to the east most likely led to the assimilation of the Picts. Although the Irish annals, which dates to the late 9th century, mentions the title King of the Picts, the Picts may not have remained independent. The Pictish civil system and clerical laws were completely replaced with the Scottish legal system, and it is likely similar changes occurred in other spheres of the Pictish society. The Picts did not revolt against this assimilation process.
The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba describes the events that occurred during Kenneth's reign without specifying their dates. He invaded Lothian in the Kingdom of Northumbria six times, and captured the towns of Melrose and Dunbar, and razed them. The Celtic Britons from the Kingdom of Strathclyde attacked Kenneth's kingdom and burnt Dunblane. Furthermore, Viking invaders raided Pictavia, ravaging the territories "from Clunie to Dunkeld".
Kenneth strengthened his power by arranging royal marriages with neighbouring states, marrying his daughters to the kings of Strathclyde and Ireland. According to the Chronicle of Melrose, Kenneth was one of the first Scottish lawgivers but his laws have not survived to the 21st century.
Death and succession
According to the Annals of Ulster, Kenneth died in 858. The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba states he died in February in Forteviot due to a tumour. Historians suggest this date might be 13 February. Kenneth was buried in Iona Abbey. Succession in the kingdom was carried out in the form of tanistry so Kenneth's successor was his brother Donald rather than his eldest son. After the death of Donald I, the sons of Kenneth, Causantín mac Cináeda and Áed mac Cináeda, inherited the crown. The Alpínid dynasty, which ruled Scotland until the beginning of the 11th century, was formed during this period.
Contemporaneous Irish annals give Kenneth and his immediate successors the title King of the Picts but do not call him the King of Fortriu, a title that was only given to four Pictish kings who reigned in the 7th to 9th centuries. It is possible the use of the title of King of the Picts was in reference to Kenneth and his immediate successors' claim to all of Pictavia, though there is very little evidence of the extent of their domain.
Family
The name of Kenneth's wife is unknown. There is a hypothesis she may have been a Pictish princess. Kenneth's children were:
Causantín mac Cináeda (), King of Alba
Áed of the White Flowers (), King of Alba
Unknown daughter. She married Rhun ab Arthgal (), the King of Strathclyde, and had a son, Eochaid (), who may have ruled as King of Strathclyde and/or King of the Picts
Máel Muire ingen Cináeda. She married Áed Findliath (), the High King of Ireland.
There is also a theory the wife of Amlaíb Conung (), the King of Dublin, was a daughter of Kenneth.
Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
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(digital version: )
810 births
858 deaths
9th-century births
9th-century Scottish monarchs
Pictish monarchs
Kings of Dál Riata
Burials at Iona Abbey
Founding monarchs
Kenneth I | [
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17314 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khandi%20Alexander | Khandi Alexander | Harriet Rene "Khandi" Alexander (born September 4, 1957) is an American dancer, choreographer, and actress. She began her career as a dancer in the 1980s and was a choreographer for Whitney Houston's world tours from 1988 to 1992.
During the 1990s, Alexander appeared in a number of films, include CB4 (1993), What's Love Got to Do with It (1993), Sugar Hill (1994), and There's Something About Mary (1998). She starred as Catherine Duke in the NBC sitcom NewsRadio from 1995 to 1998. She also had a major recurring role in the NBC medical drama ER (1995–2001) as Jackie Robbins, sister to Dr. Peter Benton. Alexander also received critical acclaim for her leading performance in the HBO miniseries The Corner in 2000.
From 2002 to 2009, Alexander starred as Dr. Alexx Woods in the CBS police procedural series CSI: Miami. From 2010 to 2013, she starred as LaDonna Batiste-Williams in the HBO drama Treme. Later in 2013, she joined the cast of the ABC drama Scandal as Maya Lewis, Olivia Pope's mother, for which she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination in 2015. Alexander also received a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination for playing Bessie Smith's sister Viola in the 2015 HBO film Bessie.
Early life
Khandi Alexander was born in Jacksonville, Florida, the daughter of Alverina Yavonna (Masters), an opera and jazz singer, and Henry Roland Alexander, who owned a construction company. She was raised in Queens, New York, and was educated at Queensborough Community College. She appeared on Broadway, starring in Chicago, Bob Fosse's Dancin', and Dreamgirls. She was a choreographer for Whitney Houston's world tour from 1988–1992, and also appeared as a dancer in Natalie Cole's video for "Pink Cadillac" in 1988.
Career
Alexander began her acting career in the late 1980s. She made her television debut on the 1985 sketch-comedy show FTV. Since the early 1990s, Alexander has concentrated on film and TV, playing supporting roles in several movies, including CB4, Joshua Tree, What's Love Got to Do with It, Poetic Justice, and Sugar Hill.
In 1995, Alexander was cast as Catherine Duke on the NBC comedy series NewsRadio. She stayed with the show until season 4, episode 7, "Catherine Moves On", then returned for a final appearance in the season 5 premiere episode, "Bill Moves On" to memorialize Phil Hartman. She played the recurring character of Jackie Robbins in the medical drama series ER. Alexander has made a number of guest appearances on other television shows, including Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, NYPD Blue, Third Watch, Cosby, Better off Ted, La Femme Nikita, and Body of Proof.
In 2000, Alexander won critical acclaim for her performance as Fran Boyd, a mother addicted to drugs in the Emmy Award-winning HBO miniseries The Corner. She later appeared in the films Emmett's Mark and Dark Blue, and starred opposite Rob Lowe in the Lifetime television movie Perfect Strangers. In 2002 through 2008, she portrayed the character of Alexx Woods, a medical examiner in the CBS police drama CSI: Miami. Alexander left CSI: Miami shortly before the end of the 2007–2008 season. Her final appearance aired on May 5, 2008. On February 2, 2009, she returned to the role of Alexx Woods for a guest appearance in the episode "Smoke Gets In Your CSI's". She returned again as Alexx Woods in guest appearances in the episodes "Out of Time" on September 21, 2009 and "Bad Seed" on October 19, 2009.
In fall 2008, Alexander was cast as a lead character in the HBO drama pilot Treme, that premiered on April 11, 2010. She played a bar owner in a neighborhood of New Orleans affected by Hurricane Katrina. She received critical acclaim for her performance in the show. Alexander starred in the award-winning HBO television series by David Simon from 2010 to 2013. The series ended after four seasons. She later was cast in Shonda Rhimes' drama series Scandal as Maya Lewis, Kerry Washington's character Olivia Pope's mother. In 2015, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her performance.
In 2014, Alexander was cast as older sister of Queen Latifah's title character in the HBO Film Bessie about iconic blues singer Bessie Smith. She was nominated for a Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Movie/Miniseries.
Filmography
Film
Television
Music videos
1993 – "Heaven Knows" by Luther Vandross
Awards and nominations
References
External links
1957 births
Living people
American television actresses
American film actresses
Actresses from New York City
American choreographers
American female dancers
Dancers from New York (state)
20th-century American actresses
21st-century American actresses
Queensborough Community College alumni
African-American actresses
African-American female dancers
African-American choreographers
20th-century African-American women
20th-century African-American people
21st-century African-American women
21st-century African-American people | [
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17317 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus%20Fuchs | Klaus Fuchs | Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons and, later, early models of the hydrogen bomb. After his conviction in 1950, he served nine years in prison in the United Kingdom, then migrated to East Germany where he resumed his career as a physicist and scientific leader.
The son of a Lutheran pastor, Fuchs attended the University of Leipzig, where his father was a professor of theology, and became involved in student politics, joining the student branch of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, the SPD's paramilitary organisation. He was expelled from the SPD in 1932, and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He went into hiding after the 1933 Reichstag fire, and fled to the United Kingdom, where he received his PhD from the University of Bristol under the supervision of Nevill Mott, and his DSc from the University of Edinburgh, where he worked as an assistant to Max Born.
After the Second World War broke out in Europe, he was interned in the Isle of Man, and later in Canada. After he returned to Britain in 1941, he became an assistant to Rudolf Peierls, working on "Tube Alloys"—the British atomic bomb project. He began passing information on the project to the Soviet Union through Ursula Kuczynski, codenamed "Sonya", a German communist and a major in Soviet military intelligence who had worked with Richard Sorge's spy ring in the Far East. In 1943, Fuchs and Peierls went to Columbia University, in New York City, to work on the Manhattan Project. In August 1944, Fuchs joined the Theoretical Physics Division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, working under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of implosion, necessary for the development of the plutonium bomb. After the war, he returned to the UK and worked at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell as head of the Theoretical Physics Division.
In January 1950, Fuchs confessed that he was a spy. A British court sentenced him to fourteen years' imprisonment and stripped him of his British citizenship. He was released in 1959, after serving nine years, and migrated to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where he was elected to the Academy of Sciences and became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) central committee. He was later appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, where he served until he retired in 1979.
Early life
Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was born in Rüsselsheim, Grand Duchy of Hesse, on 29 December 1911, the third of four children of a Lutheran pastor, Emil Fuchs, and his wife Else Wagner. His father served in the army during World War I but later became a pacifist and a socialist, joining the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1921. He eventually became a Quaker. Fuchs had an older brother Gerhard, an older sister Elisabeth, and a younger sister, Kristel. The family moved to Eisenach, where Fuchs attended the Gymnasium, and took his Abitur. At school, Fuchs and his siblings were taunted over his father's unpopular socialist political views, which they came to share. They became known as the "red foxes", Fuchs being the German word for fox. Fuchs was left-handed, but was forced to write with his right hand.
Fuchs entered the University of Leipzig in 1930, where his father was a professor of theology. He became involved in student politics, joining the student branch of the SPD, a party that his father had joined in 1912, and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, the party's paramilitary organisation. His father took up a new position as professor of religion at the Pedagogical Academy in Kiel, and in the autumn Fuchs transferred to the University of Kiel, which his brother Gerhard and sister Elisabeth also attended. Fuchs continued his studies in mathematics and physics at the university. In October 1931, his mother committed suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid. The family later discovered that his maternal grandmother had also taken her own life.
In the March 1932 German presidential election, the SPD supported Paul von Hindenburg for President, fearing that a split vote would hand the job to the Nazi Party (NSDAP) candidate, Adolf Hitler. However, when the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) ran its own candidate, Ernst Thälmann, Fuchs offered to speak for him, and was expelled from the SPD. That year Fuchs and all three of his siblings joined the KPD. Fuchs and his brother Gerhard were active speakers at public meetings, and occasionally attempted to disrupt NSDAP gatherings. At one such gathering, Fuchs was beaten up and thrown into the river.
When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Fuchs decided to leave Kiel, where the NSDAP was particularly strong and he was a well-known KPD member. He enrolled at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. On 28 February, he took an early train to Berlin for a KPD meeting there. On the train, he read about the Reichstag fire in a newspaper. Fuchs correctly assumed that opposition parties would be blamed for the fire, and quietly removed his hammer and sickle lapel pin. The KPD meeting in Berlin was held in secret. Fellow party members urged him to continue his studies in another country. He went into hiding for five months in the apartment of a fellow party member. In August 1933, he attended an anti-fascist conference in Paris chaired by Henri Barbusse, where he met an English couple, Ronald and Jessie Gunn, who invited Fuchs to stay with them in Clapton, Somerset. He was expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in October 1933.
Refugee in Britain
Fuchs arrived in England on 24 September 1933. Jessie Gunn was a member of the Wills family, the heirs to Imperial Tobacco and benefactors of the University of Bristol. She arranged for Fuchs to meet Nevill Mott, Bristol's professor of physics, and he agreed to take Fuchs on as a research assistant. Fuchs earned his Ph.D. in physics there in 1937. A paper on "A Quantum Mechanical Calculation of the Elastic Constants of Monovalent Metals" was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1936. By this time, Mott had a number of German refugees working for him, and lacked positions for them all. He did not think that Fuchs would make much of a teacher, so he arranged a research post for Fuchs, at the University of Edinburgh working under Max Born, who was himself a German refugee. Fuchs published papers with Born on "The Statistical Mechanics of Condensing Systems" and "On Fluctuations in Electromagnetic radiation" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. He also received a Doctorate in Science degree from Edinburgh. Fuchs proudly mailed copies back to his father in Germany.
In Germany, Emil had been dismissed from his academic post, and, disillusioned with the Lutheran Church's support of the NSDAP, had become a Quaker in 1933. He was arrested for speaking out against the government, but was held for only one month. Elisabeth married a fellow communist, Gustav Kittowski, with whom she had a child they named Klaus. Elisabeth and Kittowski were arrested in 1933, and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, but were freed at Christmas. Gerhard and his wife Karin were arrested in 1934, and spent the next two years in prison. Gerhard, Karin, Elisabeth and Kittowski established a car rental agency in Berlin, which they used to smuggle Jews and opponents of the government out of Germany.
After Emil was arrested in 1933, Kristel fled to Zurich, where she studied education and psychology at the University of Zurich. She returned to Berlin in 1934, where she too worked at the car rental agency. In 1936, Emil arranged with Quaker friends in the United States for Kristel to attend Swarthmore College there. She visited Fuchs in England en route to America, where she eventually married an American communist, Robert Heineman, and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She became a permanent resident in the United States in May 1938. In 1936, Kittowski and Elisabeth were arrested again, and the rental cars were impounded. Gerhard and Karin fled to Czechoslovakia. Elisabeth was released and went to live with Emil, while Kittowski, sentenced to six years, later escaped from prison and also made his way to Czechoslovakia. In August 1939, Elisabeth committed suicide by throwing herself from a train, leaving Emil to raise young Klaus.
Second World War
Fuchs applied to become a British subject in August 1939, but his application had not been processed before the Second World War broke out in Europe in September 1939. There was a classification system for enemy aliens, but Born provided Fuchs with a reference that said that he had been a member of the SPD from 1930 to 1932, and an anti-Nazi. There matters stood until June 1940, when the police arrived and took Fuchs into custody. He was first interned on the Isle of Man and then, in July, he was sent to an internment camp in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. During his internment in 1940, he continued to work and published four more papers with Born: The Mass Centre in Relativity, Reciprocity, Part II: Scalar Wave Functions, Reciprocity, Part III: Reciprocal Wave Functions and Reciprocity, Part IV: Spinor Wave Functions, and one by himself, On the Statistical Method in Nuclear Theory.
While interned in Quebec, he joined a communist discussion group led by Hans Kahle. Kahle was a KPD member who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. After fleeing to Britain with his family, Kahle had helped Jürgen Kuczynski organise the KPD in Britain. Kristel arranged for Israel Halperin, the brother-in-law of a friend of hers, Wendell H. Furry, to bring Fuchs some magazines. Max Born lobbied for his release. On Christmas Day 1940, Fuchs and Kahle were among the first group of internees to board a ship to return to Britain.
Fuchs returned to Edinburgh in January, and resumed working for Born. In May 1941, he was approached by Rudolf Peierls of the University of Birmingham to work on the "Tube Alloys" programme – the British atomic bomb research project. Despite wartime restrictions, he became a British subject on 7 August 1942 and signed an Official Secrets Act declaration form. As accommodation was scarce in wartime Birmingham, he stayed with Rudolf and Genia Peierls. Fuchs and Peierls did some important work together, which included a fundamental paper about isotope separation.
Soon after, Fuchs contacted Jürgen Kuczynski, who was now teaching at the London School of Economics. Kuczynski put him in contact with Simon Davidovitch Kremer (codename: "Alexander"; 1900-1991), the secretary to the military attaché at the Soviet Union's embassy, who worked for the GRU (Russian: Главное Разведывательное Управление), the Red Army's foreign military intelligence directorate. After three meetings, Fuchs was teamed up with a courier so he would not have to find excuses to travel to London. She was Ursula Kuczynski (codename: "Sonya"), the sister of Jürgen Kuczynski. She was a German communist, a major in Soviet Military Intelligence and an experienced agent who had worked with Richard Sorge's spy ring in the Far East.
In late 1943, Fuchs (codename: "Rest"; he became "Charles" in May 1944) transferred along with Peierls to Columbia University, in New York City, to work on gaseous diffusion as a means of uranium enrichment for the Manhattan Project. Although Fuchs was "an asset" of GRU in Britain, his "control" was transferred to the NKGB (Russian: Народный Kомиссариат Государственной Безопасности), the Soviet Union's civilian intelligence organisation, when he moved to New York. He spent Christmas 1943 with Kristel and her family in Cambridge. He was contacted by Harry Gold (codename: "Raymond"), an NKGB agent in early 1944.
From August 1944, Fuchs worked in the Theoretical Physics Division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, under Hans Bethe. His chief area of expertise was the problem of imploding the fissionable core of the plutonium bomb. At one point, Fuchs did calculation work that Edward Teller had refused to do because of lack of interest. He was the author of techniques (such as the still-used Fuchs-Nordheim method) for calculating the energy of a fissile assembly that goes highly prompt critical, and his report on blast waves is still considered a classic. Fuchs was one of the many Los Alamos scientists present at the Trinity test in July 1945. In April 1946 he attended a conference at Los Alamos that discussed the possibility of a thermonuclear weapon; one month later, he filed a patent with John von Neumann, describing a method to initiate fusion in a thermonuclear weapon with an implosion trigger. Bethe considered Fuchs "one of the most valuable men in my division" and "one of the best theoretical physicists we had."
Fuchs, who was known as "Karl" rather than "Klaus" at Los Alamos, dated grade school teachers Evelyn Kline and Jean Parker. He befriended Richard Feynman. Fuchs and Peierls were the only members of the British Mission to Los Alamos who owned cars, and Fuchs lent his Buick to Feynman so Feynman could visit his dying wife in hospital in Albuquerque.
Klaus Fuchs's main courier was Harry Gold. Allen Weinstein, the author of The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America (1999), has pointed out: "The NKVD had chosen Gold, an experienced group handler, as Fuchs' contact on the grounds that it was safer than having him meet directly with a Russian operative, but Semyon Semyonov was ultimately responsible for the Fuchs relationship."
Gold reported after his first meeting with Klaus Fuchs:
Post-war activities
At the request of Norris Bradbury, who had replaced Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in October 1945, Fuchs stayed on at the laboratory into 1946 to help with preparations for the Operation Crossroads weapons tests. The US Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) prohibited the transfer of information on nuclear research to any foreign country, including Britain, without explicit official authority, and Fuchs supplied highly classified U.S. information to nuclear scientists in Britain and to his Soviet contacts.
, British official files on Fuchs were still being withheld. As of 2020, the National Archives listed one dossier on Fuchs, KV 2/1263, including the "Prosecution file. With summary of early interrogations ... and details of the scientifical/technical information passed to the Russians". The date of release of this material was not stated. According to an October 2020 book review, author Nancy Thorndike Greenspan "appears to have had access to some of the Fuchs files that have been withheld at Kew, such as the AB/1 series, which has been closed for access for most human beings".
Fuchs was highly regarded as a scientist by the British, who wanted him to return to the United Kingdom to work on Britain's postwar nuclear weapons programme. He returned in August 1946 and became the head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. From late 1947 to May 1949 he gave Alexander Feklisov, his Soviet case officer, the principal theoretical outline for creating a hydrogen bomb and the initial drafts for its development as the work progressed in England and America. Meeting with Feklisov six times, he provided the results of the test at Eniwetok Atoll of uranium and plutonium bombs and the key data on production of uranium-235.
Also in 1947, Fuchs attended a conference of the Combined Policy Committee (CPC), which was created to facilitate exchange of atomic secrets at the highest levels of governments of the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Donald Maclean, another Soviet spy, was also in attendance as British co-secretary of CPC.
Detection and confession
By September 1949, information from the Venona project indicated to GCHQ that Fuchs was a spy, but the British intelligence services were wary of indicating the source of their information. The Soviets had broken off contact with him in February. Fuchs may have been subsequently tipped off by Kim Philby. In October 1949, Fuchs approached Henry Arnold, the head of security at Harwell, with the news that his father had been given a chair at the University of Leipzig in East Germany.
After a great deal of research for his 2019 biography, Trinity, Frank Close confirmed that while MI5 suspected Fuchs for over two years, "it was decrypters at GCHQ who supplied clear proof of his guilt ... not the crack American team that is normally given all the credit", according to a review of the book.
Under interrogation by MI5 officer William Skardon at an informal meeting in December 1949, Fuchs initially denied being a spy and was not detained. In January 1950, Fuchs arranged another interview with Skardon and voluntarily confessed that he was a spy. Three days later, he also directed a statement more technical in content to Michael Perrin, the deputy controller of atomic energy within the Ministry of Supply. Fuchs told interrogators that the NKGB had acquired an agent in Berkeley, California, who had informed the Soviet Union about electromagnetic separation research of uranium-235 in 1942 or earlier. Fuchs's statements to British and American intelligence agencies were used to implicate Harry Gold, a key witness in the trials of David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States.
Fuchs finally confessed on 27 January 1950, stating that "The last time when I handed over information [to Russian authorities] was in February or March 1949".
Fuchs later testified that he passed detailed information on the project to the Soviet Union through courier Harry Gold in 1945, and further information about Edward Teller's unworkable "Super" design for a hydrogen bomb in 1946 and 1947.
In her 2020 book, Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs, Nancy Thorndike Greenspan concluded that "Fuchs sought 'the betterment of mankind' [when sharing secrets with the Soviets] ... because "his goal became to balance world power and to prevent nuclear blackmail" according to a New York Times review by the conservative historian Ronald Radosh. Radosh wrote that "this was a post facto justification. The reason Fuchs spied was simply that he was a Communist and a true believer in Stalin and the Soviet Union".
Value of data to Soviet project
Hans Bethe once said that Klaus Fuchs was the only physicist he knew to have truly changed history. Because the head of the Soviet project, Lavrenti Beria, used foreign intelligence as a third-party check, rather than giving it directly to the scientists, as he did not trust the information by default, it is unknown whether Fuchs's fission information had a substantial effect. Considering that the pace of the Soviet program was set primarily by the amount of uranium that it could procure, it is difficult for scholars to judge accurately how much time was saved.
According to On a Field of Red, a history of the Comintern (Communist International) by Anthony Cave Brown and Charles B. MacDonald, Fuchs's greatest contribution to the Soviets may have been disclosing how uranium could be processed for use in a bomb. Fuchs gave Gold technical information in January 1945 that was acquired only after two years of experimentation at a cost of $400 million. Fuchs also disclosed the amount of uranium or plutonium the Americans planned to use in each atomic bomb.
Whether the information Fuchs passed relating to the hydrogen bomb would have been useful is still debated. Most scholars agree with Hans Bethe's 1952 assessment, which concluded that by the time Fuchs left the thermonuclear program in mid-1946, too little was known about the mechanism of the hydrogen bomb for his information to be useful to the Soviet Union. The successful Teller-Ulam design was not devised until 1951. Soviet physicists later noted that they could see as well as the Americans eventually would that the early designs by Fuchs and Edward Teller were useless.
Later archival work by the Soviet physicist German Goncharov suggested that Fuchs's early work did not help Soviet efforts towards the hydrogen bomb, but it was closer to the final correct solution than anyone recognised at the time. It also indeed spurred Soviet research into useful problems that eventually provided the correct answer. In any case, it seems clear that Fuchs could not have just given the Soviets the "secret" to the hydrogen bomb since he did not actually know it himself.
In his 2019 book, Trinity: The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History, Frank Close asserts that "it was primarily Fuchs who enabled the Soviets to catch up with Americans" in the race for the nuclear bomb. The author of the 2020 book Atomic Spy gives his efforts less value. Nancy Thorndike Greenspan suggests that the Soviets would have developed their bomb even without his help, "though probably not until 1951". On the other hand, the earlier development of the Soviet bomb may have had one significant benefit to the world, a balance of power; the author is convinced that this prevented the United States from using their bomb on North Korea.
Trial and imprisonment
It is likely that Fuchs's espionage led the U.S. to cancel a 1950 Anglo-American plan to give Britain American-made atomic bombs. He was prosecuted by Sir Hartley Shawcross and was convicted on 1 March 1950 of four counts of breaking the Official Secrets Act by "communicating information to a potential enemy." After a trial lasting less than 90 minutes that was based on his confession, Lord Goddard sentenced him to 14 years' imprisonment, the maximum for espionage, because the Soviet Union was classed as an ally at the time. In December 1950, he was stripped of his British citizenship. The head of the British H-bomb project, Sir William Penney, visited Fuchs in prison in 1952.
While imprisoned, he was friendly with the Irish Republican Army prisoner Seamus Murphy with whom he played chess and helped to escape. It was suggested by some that Fuchs had turned IRA leader Cathal Goulding into a Marxist, but Murphy denied it by saying, "Fuchs never tried to turn anyone – it was hard to get a word out of him!"
Fuchs was released on 23 June 1959 after he had served nine years and four months of his sentence (as was then required in England where long-term prisoners were entitled by law to one third off for good behaviour in prison) at Wakefield Prison and promptly emigrated to the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Career in East Germany
On arrival at Berlin Schönefeld Airport in the GDR, Fuchs was met by Grete (Margarete) Keilson, a friend from his years as a student communist. They were married on 9 September 1959.
In the GDR, Fuchs continued his scientific career and achieved considerable prominence as a leader of research. He became a member of the SED central committee in 1967, and in 1972 was elected to the Academy of Sciences where from 1974 to 1978 he was the head of the research area of physics, nuclear and materials science; he was then appointed deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research in Rossendorf, where he served until he retired in 1979. From 1984, Fuchs was head of the scientific councils for energetic basic research and for fundamentals of microelectronics. He received the Patriotic Order of Merit, the Order of Karl Marx and the National Prize of East Germany. A tutorial Fuchs gave to Qian Sanqiang and other Chinese physicists helped them to develop the first Chinese atomic bomb, the 596, which was tested five years later—according to Thomas Reed and Daniel Stillman, the authors of The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation (2009). Three historians of nuclear weapons history, Robert S. Norris, Jeremy Bernstein, and Peter D. Zimmerman, challenged this particular assertion as "unsubstantiated conjecture" and asserted that The Nuclear Express is "an ambitious but deeply flawed book".
Death
Fuchs died in Berlin on 28 January 1988. He was cremated and his ashes buried in the "Pergolenweg" of the Socialists' Memorial in Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.
In popular culture
A documentary film about Fuchs, Väter der tausend Sonnen (Fathers of a Thousand Suns), was released in 1990.
Notes
References
Further reading
(discusses the case of Fuchs, based on now available MI5 'Personal Files')
(discusses use of Fuchs's passed on information by Soviets, based on now-declassified files)
External links
1994 Audio Interview with Robert Lamphere by Richard Rhodes on interrogating Klaus Fuchs Voices of the Manhattan Project
Visit the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) for the full text of Alexander Vassiliev's Notebooks containing more information on Fuchs's involvement in espionage
FBI file on Klaus Fuchs
Klaus Fuchs's 1950 confession
PBS.org on Fuchs, with photo
German Goncharov on: What the Soviets Learned From Klaus Fuchs
Klaus Fuchs at Carey Sublette's NuclearWeaponArchive.org, which includes information about the specific information given by Fuchs to the Soviets from declassified KGB files
Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response (CIA publication), contains letter from agents in 1949 about Klaus Fuchs.
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Members of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin | [
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17318 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin%20Stanislavski | Konstantin Stanislavski | Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski ( Alekseyev; ; 7 August 1938) was a seminal Soviet and Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognized as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his 'system' of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.
Stanislavski (his stage name) performed and directed as an amateur until the age of 33, when he co-founded the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) company with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, following a legendary 18-hour discussion. Its influential tours of Europe (1906) and the US (1923–24) and its landmark productions of The Seagull (1898) and Hamlet (1911–12) established his reputation and opened new possibilities for the art of the theatre. By means of the MAT, Stanislavski was instrumental in promoting the new Russian drama of his day—principally the work of Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Bulgakov—to audiences in Moscow and around the world; he also staged acclaimed productions of a wide range of classical Russian and European plays.
He collaborated with the director and designer Edward Gordon Craig and was formative in the development of several other major practitioners, including Vsevolod Meyerhold (whom Stanislavski considered his "sole heir in the theatre"), Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Michael Chekhov. At the MAT's 30-year anniversary celebrations in 1928, a massive heart attack on-stage put an end to his acting career (though he waited until the curtain fell before seeking medical assistance). He continued to direct, teach, and write about acting until his death a few weeks before the publication of the first volume of his life's great work, the acting manual An Actor's Work (1938). He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of Lenin and was the first to be granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR.
Stanislavski wrote that "there is nothing more tedious than an actor's biography" and that "actors should be banned from talking about themselves". At the request of a US publisher, however, he reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, My Life in Art (first published in English in 1924 and in a revised, Russian-language edition in 1926), though its account of his artistic development is not always accurate. Three English-language biographies have been published: David Magarshack's Stanislavsky: A Life (1950) ; Jean Benedetti's Stanislavski: His Life and Art (1988, revised and expanded 1999). and Nikolai M Gorchakov's "Stanislavsky Directs" (1954).
This article draws substantially on these books. An out-of-print English translation of Elena Poliakova's Russian biography of Stanislavski has also been published (1982).
Overview of the 'system'
Stanislavski subjected his acting and direction to a rigorous process of artistic self-analysis and reflection. His 'system' of acting developed out of his persistent efforts to remove the blocks that he encountered in his performances, beginning with a major crisis in 1906. He produced his early work using an external, director-centred technique that strove for an organic unity of all its elements—in each production he planned the interpretation of every role, blocking, and the mise en scène in detail in advance. He also introduced into the production process a period of discussion and detailed analysis of the play by the cast. Despite the success that this approach brought, particularly with his Naturalistic stagings of the plays of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, Stanislavski remained dissatisfied.
Both his struggles with Chekhov's drama (out of which his notion of subtext emerged) and his experiments with Symbolism encouraged a greater attention to "inner action" and a more intensive investigation of the actor's process. He began to develop the more actor-centred techniques of "psychological realism" and his focus shifted from his productions to rehearsal process and pedagogy. He pioneered the use of theatre studios as a laboratory in which to innovate actor training and to experiment with new forms of theatre. Stanislavski organised his techniques into a coherent, systematic methodology, which built on three major strands of influence: (1) the director-centred, unified aesthetic and disciplined, ensemble approach of the Meiningen company; (2) the actor-centred realism of the Maly; and (3) the Naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement.
The 'system' cultivates what Stanislavski calls the "art of experiencing" (to which he contrasts the "art of representation"). It mobilises the actor's conscious thought and will to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly. In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment (a "task"). Stanislavski's earliest reference to his 'system' appears in 1909, the same year that he first incorporated it into his rehearsal process. The MAT adopted it as its official rehearsal method in 1911.
Later, Stanislavski further elaborated the 'system' with a more physically grounded rehearsal process that came to be known as the "Method of Physical Action". Minimising at-the-table discussions, he now encouraged an "active analysis", in which the sequence of dramatic situations are improvised. "The best analysis of a play", Stanislavski argued, "is to take action in the given circumstances."
Just as the First Studio, led by his assistant and close friend Leopold Sulerzhitsky, had provided the forum in which he developed his initial ideas for the 'system' during the 1910s, he hoped to secure his final legacy by opening another studio in 1935, in which the Method of Physical Action would be taught. The Opera-Dramatic Studio embodied the most complete implementation of the training exercises described in his manuals. Meanwhile, the transmission of his earlier work via the students of the First Studio was revolutionising acting in the West. With the arrival of Socialist realism in the USSR, the MAT and Stanislavski's 'system' were enthroned as exemplary models.
Family background and early influences
Stanislavski had a privileged youth, growing up in one of the richest families in Russia, the Alekseyevs. He was born Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev—he adopted the stage name "Stanislavski" in 1884 to keep his performance activities secret from his parents. Up until the communist revolution in 1917, Stanislavski often used his inherited wealth to fund his experiments in acting and directing. His family's discouragement meant that he appeared only as an amateur until he was thirty three.
As a child, Stanislavski was interested in the circus, the ballet, and puppetry. Later, his family's two private theatres provided a forum for his theatrical impulses. After his debut performance at one in 1877, he started what would become a lifelong series of notebooks filled with critical observations on his acting, aphorisms, and problems—it was from this habit of self-analysis and critique that Stanislavski's 'system' later emerged. Stanislavski chose not to attend university, preferring to work in the family business.
Increasingly interested in "experiencing the role", Stanislavski experimented with maintaining a characterization in real life. In 1884, he began vocal training under Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, with whom he also explored the coordination of body and voice. A year later, Stanislavski briefly studied at the Moscow Theatre School but, disappointed with its approach, he left after little more than two weeks. Instead, he devoted particular attention to the performances of the Maly Theatre, the home of Russian psychological realism (as developed in the 19th century by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Shchepkin).
Shchepkin's legacy included a disciplined, ensemble approach, extensive rehearsals, and the use of careful observation, self-knowledge, imagination, and emotion as the cornerstones of the craft. Stanislavski called the Maly his 'university'. One of Shchepkin's students, Glikeriya Fedotova, taught Stanislavski; she instilled in him the rejection of inspiration as the basis of the actor's art, stressed the importance of training and discipline, and encouraged the practice of responsive interaction with other actors that Stanislavski came to call "communication". As well as the artists of the Maly, performances given by foreign stars influenced Stanislavski. The effortless, emotive, and clear playing of the Italian Ernesto Rossi, who performed major Shakespearean tragic protagonists in Moscow in 1877, particularly impressed him. So too did Tommaso Salvini's 1882 performance of Othello.
Amateur work as an actor and director
By now well known as an amateur actor, at the age of twenty-five Stanslavski co-founded a Society of Art and Literature. Under its auspices, he performed in plays by Molière, Schiller, Pushkin, and Ostrovsky, as well as gaining his first experiences as a director. He became interested in the aesthetic theories of Vissarion Belinsky, from whom he took his conception of the role of the artist.
On , Stanislavski married Maria Lilina (the stage name of Maria Petrovna Perevostchikova). Their first child, Xenia, died of pneumonia in May 1890 less than two months after she was born. Their second daughter, Kira, was born on . In January 1893, Stanislavski's father died. Their son Igor was born on .
In February 1891, Stanislavski directed Leo Tolstoy's The Fruits of Enlightenment for the Society of Art and Literature, in what he later described as his first fully independent directorial work. But it was not until 1893 he first met the great realist novelist and playwright that became another important influence on him. Five years later the MAT would be his response to Tolstoy's demand for simplicity, directness, and accessibility in art.
Stanislavski's directorial methods at this time were closely modelled on the disciplined, autocratic approach of Ludwig Chronegk, the director of the Meiningen Ensemble. In My Life in Art (1924), Stanislavski described this approach as one in which the director is "forced to work without the help of the actor". From 1894 onward, Stanislavski began to assemble detailed prompt-books that included a directorial commentary on the entire play and from which not even the smallest detail was allowed to deviate.
Whereas the Ensemble's effects tended toward the grandiose, Stanislavski introduced lyrical elaborations through the mise-en-scène that dramatised more mundane and ordinary elements of life, in keeping with Belinsky's ideas about the "poetry of the real". By means of his rigid and detailed control of all theatrical elements, including the strict choreography of the actors' every gesture, in Stanislavski's words "the inner kernel of the play was revealed by itself". Analysing the Society's production of Othello (1896), Jean Benedetti observes that:
Stanislavski uses the theatre and its technical possibilities as an instrument of expression, a language, in its own right. The dramatic meaning is in the staging itself. [...] He went through the whole play in a completely different way, not relying on the text as such, with quotes from important speeches, not providing a 'literary' explanation, but speaking in terms of the play's dynamic, its action, the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists, the world in which they lived. His account flowed uninterruptedly from moment to moment.
Benedetti argues that Stanislavski's task at this stage was to unite the realistic tradition of the creative actor inherited from Shchepkin and Gogol with the director-centred, organically unified Naturalistic aesthetic of the Meiningen approach. That synthesis would emerge eventually, but only in the wake of Stanislavski's directorial struggles with Symbolist theatre and an artistic crisis in his work as an actor. "The task of our generation", Stanislavski wrote as he was about to found the Moscow Art Theatre and begin his professional life in the theatre, is "to liberate art from outmoded tradition, from tired cliché and to give greater freedom to imagination and creative ability."
Creation of the Moscow Art Theatre
Stanislavski's historic meeting with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko on led to the creation of what was called initially the "Moscow Public-Accessible Theatre", but which came to be known as the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). Their eighteen-hour-long discussion has acquired a legendary status in the history of theatre.
Nemirovich was a successful playwright, critic, theatre director, and acting teacher at the Philharmonic School who, like Stanislavski, was committed to the idea of a popular theatre. Their abilities complemented one another: Stanislavski brought his directorial talent for creating vivid stage images and selecting significant details; Nemirovich, his talent for dramatic and literary analysis, his professional expertise, and his ability to manage a theatre. Stanislavski later compared their discussions to the Treaty of Versailles, their scope was so wide-ranging; they agreed on the conventional practices they wished to abandon and, on the basis of the working method they found they had in common, defined the policy of their new theatre.
Stanislavski and Nemirovich planned a professional company with an ensemble ethos that discouraged individual vanity; they would create a realistic theatre of international renown, with popular prices for seats, whose organically unified aesthetic would bring together the techniques of the Meiningen Ensemble and those of André Antoine's Théâtre Libre (which Stanislavski had seen during trips to Paris). Nemirovich assumed that Stanislavski would fund the theatre as a privately owned business, but Stanislavski insisted on a limited, joint stock company. Viktor Simov, whom Stanislavski had met in 1896, was engaged as the company's principal designer.
In his opening speech on the first day of rehearsals, , Stanislavski stressed the "social character" of their collective undertaking. In an atmosphere more like a university than a theatre, as Stanislavski described it, the company was introduced to his working method of extensive reading and research and detailed rehearsals in which the action was defined at the table before being explored physically. Stanislavski's lifelong relationship with Vsevolod Meyerhold began during these rehearsals; by the end of June, Meyerhold was so impressed with Stanislavski's directorial skills that he declared him a genius.
Naturalism at the MAT
The lasting significance of Stanislavski's early work at the MAT lies in its development of a Naturalistic performance mode. In 1898, Stanislavski co-directed with Nemirovich the first of his productions of the work of Anton Chekhov. The MAT production of The Seagull was a crucial milestone for the fledgling company that has been described as "one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama." Despite its 80 hours of rehearsal—a considerable length by the standards of the conventional practice of the day—Stanislavski felt it was under-rehearsed. The production's success was due to the fidelity of its delicate representation of everyday life, its intimate, ensemble playing, and the resonance of its mood of despondent uncertainty with the psychological disposition of the Russian intelligentsia of the time.
Stanislavski went on to direct the successful premières of Chekhov's other major plays: Uncle Vanya in 1899 (in which he played Astrov), Three Sisters in 1901 (playing Vershinin), and The Cherry Orchard in 1904 (playing Gaev). Stanislavski's encounter with Chekhov's drama proved crucial to the creative development of both men. His ensemble approach and attention to the psychological realities of its characters revived Chekhov's interest in writing for the stage, while Chekhov's unwillingness to explain or expand on the text forced Stanislavski to dig beneath its surface in ways that were new in theatre.
In response to Stanislavski's encouragement, Maxim Gorky promised to launch his playwrighting career with the MAT. In 1902, Stanislavski directed the première productions of the first two of Gorky's plays, The Philistines and The Lower Depths. As part of the rehearsal preparations for the latter, Stanislavski took the company to visit Khitrov Market, where they talked to its down-and-outs and soaked up its atmosphere of destitution. Stanislavski based his characterisation of Satin on an ex-officer he met there, who had fallen into poverty through gambling. The Lower Depths was a triumph that matched the production of The Seagull four years earlier, though Stanislavski regarded his own performance as external and mechanical.
The productions of The Cherry Orchard and The Lower Depths remained in the MAT's repertoire for decades. Along with Chekhov and Gorky, the drama of Henrik Ibsen formed an important part of Stanislavski's work at this time—in its first two decades, the MAT staged more plays by Ibsen than any other playwright. In its first decade, Stanislavski directed Hedda Gabler (in which he played Løvborg), An Enemy of the People (playing Dr Stockmann, his favorite role), The Wild Duck, and Ghosts. "More's the pity I was not a Scandinavian and never saw how Ibsen was played in Scandinavia," Stanislavski wrote, because "those who have been there tell me that he is interpreted as simply, as true to life, as we play Chekhov". He also staged other important Naturalistic works, including Gerhart Hauptmann's Drayman Henschel, Lonely People, and Michael Kramer and Leo Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness.
Symbolism and the Theatre-Studio
In 1904, Stanislavski finally acted on a suggestion made by Chekhov two years earlier that he stage several one-act plays by Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Symbolist. Despite his enthusiasm, however, Stanislavski struggled to realise a theatrical approach to the static, lyrical dramas. When the triple bill consisting of The Blind, Intruder, and Interior opened on , the experiment was deemed a failure.
Meyerhold, prompted by Stanislavski's positive response to his new ideas about Symbolist theatre, proposed that they form a "theatre studio" (a term which he invented) that would function as "a laboratory for the experiments of more or less experienced actors." The Theatre-Studio aimed to develop Meyerhold's aesthetic ideas into new theatrical forms that would return the MAT to the forefront of the avant-garde and Stanislavski's socially conscious ideas for a network of "people's theatres" that would reform Russian theatrical culture as a whole. Central to Meyerhold's approach was the use of improvisation to develop the performances.
When the studio presented a work-in-progress, Stanislavski was encouraged; when performed in a fully equipped theatre in Moscow, however, it was regarded as a failure and the studio folded. Meyerhold drew an important lesson: "one must first educate a new actor and only then put new tasks before him", he wrote, adding that "Stanislavski, too, came to such a conclusion." Reflecting in 1908 on the Theatre-Studio's demise, Stanislavski wrote that "our theatre found its future among its ruins." Nemirovich disapproved of what he described as the malign influence of Meyerhold on Stanislavski's work at this time.
Stanislavski engaged two important new collaborators in 1905: Liubov Gurevich became his literary advisor and Leopold Sulerzhitsky became his personal assistant. Stanislavski revised his interpretation of the role of Trigorin (and Meyerhold reprised his role as Konstantin) when the MAT revived its production of Chekhov's The Seagull on .
This was the year of the abortive revolution in Russia. Stanislavski signed a protest against the violence of the secret police, Cossack troops, and the right-wing extremist paramilitary "Black Hundreds", which was submitted to the Duma on the . Rehearsals for the MAT's production of Alexander Griboyedov's classic verse comedy Woe from Wit were interrupted by gun-battles on the streets outside. Stanislavski and Nemirovich closed the theatre and embarked on the company's first tour outside of Russia.
European tour and artistic crisis
The MAT's first European tour began on in Berlin, where they played to an audience that included Max Reinhardt, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Eleonora Duse. "It's as though we were the revelation", Stanislavski wrote of the rapturous acclaim they received. The success of the tour provided financial security for the company, garnered an international reputation for their work, and made a significant impact on European theatre. The tour also provoked a major artistic crisis for Stanislavski that had a significant impact on his future direction. From his attempts to resolve this crisis, his 'system' would eventually emerge.
Sometime in March 1906—Jean Benedetti suggests that it was during An Enemy of the People—Stanislavski became aware that he was acting without a flow of inner impulses and feelings and that as a consequence his performance had become mechanical. He spent June and July in Finland on holiday, where he studied, wrote, and reflected. With his notebooks on his own experience from 1889 onwards, he attempted to analyze "the foundation stones of our art" and the actor's creative process in particular. He began to formulate a psychological approach to controlling the actor's process in a Manual on Dramatic Art.
Productions as research into working methods
Stanislavski's activities began to move in a very different direction: his productions became opportunities for research, he was more interested in the process of rehearsal than its product, and his attention shifted away from the MAT towards its satellite projects—the theatre studios—in which he would develop his 'system'. On his return to Moscow, he explored his new psychological approach in his production of Knut Hamsun's Symbolist play The Drama of Life. Nemirovich was particularly hostile to his new methods and their relationship continued to deteriorate in this period. In a statement made on , Stanislavski marked a significant shift in his directorial method and stressed the crucial contribution he now expected from a creative actor:
The committee is wrong if it thinks that the director's preparatory work in the study is necessary, as previously, when he alone decided the whole plan and all the details of the production, wrote the mise en scène and answered all the actors' questions for them. The director is no longer king, as before, when the actor possessed no clear individuality. [...] It is essential to understand this—rehearsals are divided into two stages: the first stage is one of experiment when the cast helps the director, the second is creating the performance when the director helps the cast.
Stanislavski's preparations for Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (which was to become his most famous production to-date) included improvisations and other exercises to stimulate the actors' imaginations; Nemirovich described one in which the cast imitated various animals. In rehearsals he sought ways to encourage his actors' will to create afresh in every performance. He focused on the search for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the characters are seeking to achieve at any given moment (what he would come to call their "task"). This use of the actor's conscious thought and will was designed to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly.
Noting the importance to great actors' performances of their ability to remain relaxed, he discovered that he could abolish physical tension by focusing his attention on the specific action that the play demanded; when his concentration wavered, his tension returned. "What fascinates me most", Stanislavski wrote in May 1908, "is the rhythm of feelings, the development of affective memory and the psycho-physiology of the creative process." His interest in the creative use of the actor's personal experiences was spurred by a chance conversation in Germany in July that led him to the work of French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot. His "affective memory" contributed to the technique that Stanislavski would come to call "emotion memory".
Together these elements formed a new vocabulary with which he explored a "return to realism" in a production of Gogol's The Government Inspector as soon as The Blue Bird had opened. At a theatre conference on , Stanislavski delivered a paper on his emerging 'system' that stressed the role of his techniques of the "magic if" (which encourages the actor to respond to the fictional circumstances of the play "as if" they were real) and emotion memory. He developed his ideas about three trends in the history of acting, which were to appear eventually in the opening chapters of An Actor's Work: "stock-in-trade" acting, the art of representation, and the art of experiencing (his own approach).
Stanislavski's production of A Month in the Country (1909) was a watershed in his artistic development. Breaking the MAT's tradition of open rehearsals, he prepared Turgenev's play in private. They began with a discussion of what he would come to call the "through-line" for the characters (their emotional development and the way they change over the course of the play). This production is the earliest recorded instance of his practice of analysing the action of the script into discrete "bits".
At this stage in the development of his approach, Stanislavski's technique was to identify the emotional state contained in the psychological experience of the character during each bit and, through the use of the actor's emotion memory, to forge a subjective connection to it. Only after two months of rehearsals were the actors permitted to physicalise the text. Stanislavski insisted that they should play the actions that their discussions around the table had identified. Having realised a particular emotional state in a physical action, he assumed at this point in his experiments, the actor's repetition of that action would evoke the desired emotion. As with his experiments in The Drama of Life, they also explored non-verbal communication, whereby scenes were rehearsed as "silent études" with actors interacting "only with their eyes". The production's success when it opened in December 1909 seemed to prove the validity of his new methodology.
Late in 1910, Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri, where they discussed actor training and Stanislavski's emerging "grammar". Inspired by a popular theatre performance in Naples that employed the techniques of the commedia dell'arte, Gorky suggested that they form a company, modeled on the medieval strolling players, in which a playwright and group of young actors would devise new plays together by means of improvisation. Stanislavski would develop this use of improvisation in his work with his First Studio.
Staging the classics
In his treatment of the classics, Stanislavski believed that it was legitimate for actors and directors to ignore the playwright's intentions for a play's staging. One of his most important—a collaboration with Edward Gordon Craig on a production of Hamlet—became a landmark of 20th-century theatrical modernism. Stanislavski hoped to prove that his recently developed 'system' for creating internally justified, realistic acting could meet the formal demands of a classic play. Craig envisioned a Symbolist monodrama in which every aspect of production would be subjugated to the protagonist: it would present a dream-like vision as seen through Hamlet's eyes.
Despite these contrasting approaches, the two practitioners did share some artistic assumptions; the 'system' had developed out of Stanislavski's experiments with Symbolist drama, which had shifted his attention from a Naturalistic external surface to the characters' subtextual, inner world. Both had stressed the importance of achieving a unity of all theatrical elements in their work. Their production attracted enthusiastic and unprecedented worldwide attention for the theatre, placing it "on the cultural map for Western Europe", and it has come to be regarded as a seminal event that revolutionised the staging of Shakespeare's plays. It became "one of the most famous and passionately discussed productions in the history of the modern stage."
Increasingly absorbed by his teaching, in 1913 Stanislavski held open rehearsals for his production of Molière's The Imaginary Invalid as a demonstration of the 'system'. As with his production of Hamlet and his next, Goldoni's The Mistress of the Inn, he was keen to assay his 'system' in the crucible of a classical text. He began to inflect his technique of dividing the action of the play into bits with an emphasis on improvisation; he would progress from analysis, through free improvisation, to the language of the text:
I divide the work into large bits clarifying the nature of each bit. Then, immediately, in my own words, I play each bit, observing all the curves. Then I go through the experiences of each bit ten times or so with its curves (not in a fixed way, not being consistent). Then I follow the successive bits in the book. And finally, I make the transition, imperceptibly, to the experiences as expressed in the actual words of the part.
Stanislavski's struggles with both the Molière and Goldoni comedies revealed the importance of an appropriate definition of what he calls a character's "super-task" (the core problem that unites and subordinates the character's moment-to-moment tasks). This impacted particularly on the actors' ability to serve the plays' genre, because an unsatisfactory definition produced tragic rather than comic performances.
Other European classics directed by Stanislavski include: Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and Othello, an unfinished production of Molière's Tartuffe, and Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro. Other classics of the Russian theatre directed by Stanislavki include: several plays by Ivan Turgenev, Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, Gogol's The Government Inspector, and plays by Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, and Pushkin.
Studios and the search for a 'system'
Following the success of his production of A Month in the Country, Stanislavski made repeated requests to the board of the MAT for proper facilities to pursue his pedagogical work with young actors. Gorky encouraged him not to found a drama school to teach inexperienced beginners, but rather—following the example of the Theatre-Studio of 1905—to create a studio for research and experiment that would train young professionals.
Stanislavski created the First Studio on . Its founding members included Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, Richard Boleslawski, and Maria Ouspenskaya, all of whom would exert a considerable influence on the subsequent history of theatre. Stanislavski selected Suler (as Gorky had nicknamed Sulerzhitsky) to lead the studio. In a focused, intense atmosphere, their work emphasised experimentation, improvisation, and self-discovery. Following Gorky's suggestions about devising new plays through improvisation, they searched for "the creative process common to authors, actors and directors".
Stanislavski created the Second Studio of the MAT in 1916, in response to a production of Zinaida Gippius' The Green Ring that a group of young actors had prepared independently. With a greater focus on pedagogical work than the First Studio, the Second Studio provided the environment in which Stanislavski developed the training techniques that would form the basis for his manual An Actor's Work (1938).
A significant influence on the development of the 'system' came from Stanislavski's experience teaching and directing at his Opera Studio, which was founded in 1918. He hoped that the successful application of his 'system' to opera, with its inescapable conventionality and artifice, would demonstrate the universality of his approach to performance and unite the work of Mikhail Shchepkin and Feodor Chaliapin. From this experience Stanislavski's notion of "tempo-rhythm" emerged. He invited Serge Wolkonsky to teach diction and Lev Pospekhin to teach expressive movement and dance and attended both of their classes as a student.
From the First World War to the October Revolution
Stanislavski spent the summer of 1914 in Marienbad where, as he had in 1906, he researched the history of theatre and theories of acting to clarify the discoveries that his practical experiments had produced. When the First World War broke out, Stanislavski was in Munich. "It seemed to me", he wrote of the atmosphere at the train station in an article detailing his experiences, "that death was hovering everywhere."
The train was stopped at Immenstadt, where German soldiers denounced him as a Russian spy. Held in a room at the station with a large crowd with "the faces of wild beasts" baying at its windows, Stanislavski believed he was to be executed. He remembered that he was carrying an official document that mentioned having played to Kaiser Wilhelm during their tour of 1906 that, when he showed it to the officers, produced a change of attitude towards his group. They were placed on a slow train to Kempten. Gurevich later related how during the journey Stanislavski surprised her when he whispered that:
[E]vents of recent days had given him a clear impression of the superficiality of all that was called human culture, bourgeois culture, that a completely different kind of life was needed, where all needs were reduced to the minimum, where there was work—real artistic work—on behalf of the people, for those who had not yet been consumed by this bourgeois culture.
In Kempten they were again ordered into one of the station's rooms, where Stanislavski overheard the German soldiers complain of a lack of ammunition; it was only this, he understood, that prevented their execution. The following morning they were placed on a train and eventually returned to Russia via Switzerland and France.
Turning to the classics of Russian theatre, the MAT revived Griboyedov's comedy Woe from Wit and planned to stage three of Pushkin's "little tragedies" in early 1915. Stanislavski continued to develop his 'system', explaining at an open rehearsal for Woe from Wit his concept of the state of "I am being". This term marks the stage in the rehearsal process when the distinction between actor and character blurs (producing the "actor/role"), subconscious behavior takes the lead, and the actor feels fully present in the dramatic moment. He stressed the importance to achieving this state of a focus on action ("What would I do if ...") rather than emotion ("How would I feel if ..."): "You must ask the kinds of questions that lead to dynamic action." Instead of forcing emotion, he explained, actors should notice what is happening, attend to their relationships with the other actors, and try to understand "through the senses" the fictional world that surrounds them.
When he prepared for his role in Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri, Stanislavski created a biography for Salieri in which he imagined the character's memories of each incident mentioned in the play, his relationships with the other people involved, and the circumstances that had impacted on Salieri's life. When he attempted to render all of this detail in performance, however, the subtext overwhelmed the text; overladen with heavy pauses, Pushkin's verse was fragmented to the point of incomprehensibility. His struggles with this role prompted him to attend more closely to the structure and dynamics of language in drama; to that end, he studied Serge Wolkonsky's The Expressive Word (1913).
The French theatre practitioner Jacques Copeau contacted Stanislavski in October 1916. As a result of his conversations with Edward Gordon Craig, Copeau had come to believe that his work at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier shared a common approach with Stanislavski's investigations at the MAT. On , Stanislavski's assistant and closest friend, Leopold Sulerzhitsky, died from chronic nephritis. Reflecting on their relationship in 1931, Stanislavski said that Suler had understood him completely and that no one, since, had replaced him.
Revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War years
Stanislavski welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 and its overthrow of the absolute monarchy as a "miraculous liberation of Russia". With the October Revolution later in the year, the MAT closed for a few weeks and the First Studio was occupied by revolutionaries. Stanislavski thought that the social upheavals presented an opportunity to realize his long-standing ambitions to establish a Russian popular theatre that would provide, as the title of an essay he prepared that year put it, "The Aesthetic Education of the Popular Masses".
Vladimir Lenin, who became a frequent visitor to the MAT after the revolution, praised Stanislavski as "a real artist" and indicated that, in his opinion, Stanislavski's approach was "the direction the theatre should take." The revolutions of that year brought about an abrupt change in Stanislavski's finances when his factories were nationalized, which left his wage from the MAT as his only source of income. On 29 August 1918 Stanislavski, along with several others from the MAT, was arrested by the Cheka, though he was released the following day.
During the years of the Civil War, Stanislavski concentrated on teaching his 'system', directing (both at the MAT and its studios), and bringing performances of the classics to new audiences (such as factory workers and the Red Army). Several articles on Stanislavski and his 'system' were published, but none were written by him. On 5 March 1921, Stanislavski was evicted from his large house on Carriage Row, where he had lived since 1903. Following the personal intervention of Lenin (prompted by Anatoly Lunacharsky), Stanislavski was re-housed at 6 Leontievski Lane, not far from the MAT. He was to live there until his death in 1938. On 29 May 1922, Stanislavski's favourite pupil, the director Yevgeny Vakhtangov, died of cancer.
MAT tours in Europe and the United States
In the wake of the temporary withdrawal of the state subsidy to the MAT that came with the New Economic Policy in 1921, Stanislavski and Nemirovich planned a tour to Europe and the US to augment the company's finances. The tour began in Berlin, where Stanislavski arrived on 18 September 1922, and proceeded to Prague, Zagreb, and Paris, where he was welcomed at the station by Jacques Hébertot, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, and Jacques Copeau. In Paris, he also met André Antoine, Louis Jouvet, Isadora Duncan, Firmin Gémier, and Harley Granville-Barker. He discussed with Copeau the possibility of establishing an international theatre studio and attended performances by Ermete Zacconi, whose control of his performance, economic expressivity, and ability both to "experience" and "represent" the role impressed him.
The company sailed to New York City and arrived on 4 January 1923. When reporters asked about their repertoire, Stanislavski explained that "America wants to see what Europe already knows." David Belasco, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Feodor Chaliapin attended the opening night performance. Thanks in part to a vigorous publicity campaign that the American producer, Morris Gest, orchestrated, the tour garnered substantial critical praise, although it was not a financial success.
As actors (among whom was the young Lee Strasberg) flocked to the performances to learn from the company, the tour made a substantial contribution to the development of American acting. Richard Boleslavsky presented a series of lectures on Stanislavski's 'system' (which were eventually published as Acting: The First Six Lessons in 1933). A performance of Three Sisters on 31 March 1923 concluded the season in New York, after which they travelled to Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.
At the request of a US publisher, Stanislavski reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, My Life in Art, since his proposals for an account of the 'system' or a history of the MAT and its approach had been rejected. He returned to Europe during the summer where he worked on the book and, in September, began rehearsals for a second tour. The company returned to New York on 7 November and went on to perform in Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, Newark, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit. On 20 March 1924, Stanislavski met President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. They were introduced by a translator, Elizabeth Hapgood, with whom he would later collaborate on An Actor Prepares. The company left the US on 17 May 1924.
Soviet productions
On his return to Moscow in August 1924, Stanislavski began with the help of Gurevich to make substantial revisions to his autobiography, in preparation for a definitive Russian-language edition, which was published in September 1926. He continued to act, reprising the role of Astrov in a new production of Uncle Vanya (his performance of which was described as "staggering"). With Nemirovich away touring with his Music Studio, Stanislavski led the MAT for two years, during which time the company thrived.
With a company fully versed in his 'system', Stanislavski's work on Mikhail Bulgakov's The Days of the Turbins focused on the tempo-rhythm of the production's dramatic structure and the through-lines of action for the individual characters and the play as a whole. "See everything in terms of action" he advised them. Aware of the disapproval of Bulgakov felt by the Repertory Committee (Glavrepertkom) of the People's Commissariat for Education, Stanislavski threatened to close the theatre if the play was banned. Despite substantial hostility from the press, the production was a box-office success.
In an attempt to render a classic play relevant to a contemporary Soviet audience, Stanislavski re-located the action in his fast and free-flowing production of Pierre Beaumarchais' 18th-century comedy The Marriage of Figaro to pre-Revolutionary France and emphasised the democratic point of view of Figaro and Susanna, in preference to that of the aristocratic Count Almaviva. His working methods contributed innovations to the 'system': the analysis of scenes in terms of concrete physical tasks and the use of the "line of the day" for each character.
In preference to the tightly controlled, Meiningen-inspired scoring of the mise en scène with which he had choreographed crowd scenes in his early years, he now worked in terms of broad physical tasks: actors responded truthfully to the circumstances of scenes with sequences of improvised adaptations that attempted to solve concrete, physical problems. For the "line of the day," an actor elaborates in detail the events that supposedly occur to the character 'off-stage', in order to form a continuum of experience (the "line" of the character's life that day) that helps to justify his or her behaviour 'on-stage'. This means that the actor develops a relationship to where (as a character) he has just come from and to where he intends to go when leaving the scene. The production was a great success, garnering ten curtain calls on opening night. Thanks to its cohesive unity and rhythmic qualities, it is recognised as one of Stanislavski's major achievements.
With a performance of extracts from its major productions—including the first act of Three Sisters in which Stanislavski played Vershinin—the MAT celebrated its 30-year jubilee on 29 October 1928. While performing Stanislavski suffered a massive heart-attack, although he continued until the curtain call, after which he collapsed. With that, his acting career came to an end.
A manual for actors
While on holiday in August 1926, Stanislavski began to develop what would become An Actor's Work, his manual for actors written in the form of a fictional student's diary. Ideally, Stanislavski felt, it would consist of two volumes: the first would detail the actor's inner experiencing and outer, physical embodiment; the second would address rehearsal processes. Since the Soviet publishers used a format that would have made the first volume unwieldy, however, in practice this became three volumes—inner experiencing, outer characterisation, and rehearsal—each of which would be published separately, as it became ready.
The danger that such an arrangement would obscure the mutual interdependence of these parts in the 'system' as a whole would be avoided, Stanislavski hoped, by means of an initial overview that would stress their integration in his psycho-physical approach; as it turned out, however, he never wrote the overview and many English-language readers came to confuse the first volume on psychological processes—published in a heavily abridged version in the US as An Actor Prepares (1936)—with the 'system' as a whole.
The two editors—Hapgood with the American edition and Gurevich with the Russian—made conflicting demands on Stanislavski. Gurevich became increasingly concerned that splitting An Actor's Work into two books would not only encourage misunderstandings of the unity and mutual implication of the psychological and physical aspects of the 'system', but would also give its Soviet critics grounds on which to attack it: "to accuse you of dualism, spiritualism, idealism, etc." Frustrated with Stanislavski's tendency to tinker with details in preference to addressing more important missing sections, in May 1932 she terminated her involvement. Hapgood echoed Gurevich's frustration.
In 1933, Stanislavski worked on the second half of An Actor's Work. By 1935, a version of the first volume was ready for publication in America, to which the publishers made significant abridgements. A significantly different and far more complete Russian edition, An Actor's Work on Himself, Part I, was not published until 1938, just after Stanislavski's death. The second part of An Actor's Work on Himself was published in the Soviet Union in 1948; an English-language variant, Building a Character, was published a year later. The third volume, An Actor's Work on a Role, was published in the Soviet Union in 1957; its nearest English-language equivalent, Creating a Role, was published in 1961. The differences between the Russian and English-language editions of volumes two and three were even greater than those of the first volume. In 2008, an English-language translation of the complete Russian edition of An Actor's Work was published, with one of An Actor's Work on a Role following in 2010.
Development of the Method of Physical Action
While recuperating in Nice at the end of 1929, Stanislavski began a production plan for Shakespeare's Othello. Hoping to use this as the basis for An Actor's Work on a Role, his plan offers the earliest exposition of the rehearsal process that became known as his Method of Physical Action. He first explored this approach practically in his work on Three Sisters and Carmen in 1934 and Molière in 1935.
In contrast to his earlier method of working on a play—which involved extensive readings and analysis around a table before any attempt to physicalise its action—Stanislavski now encouraged his actors to explore the action through its "active analysis". He felt that too much discussion in the early stages of rehearsal confused and inhibited the actors. Instead, focusing on the simplest physical actions, they improvised the sequence of dramatic situations given in the play. "The best analysis of a play", he argued, "is to take action in the given circumstances." If the actor justified and committed to the truth of the actions (which are easier to shape and control than emotional responses), Stanislavski reasoned, they would evoke truthful thoughts and feelings.
Stanislavski's attitude to the use of emotion memory in rehearsals (as distinct from its use in actor training) had shifted over the years. Ideally, he felt, an instinctive identification with a character's situation should arouse an emotional response. The use of emotion memory in lieu of that had demonstrated a propensity for encouraging self-indulgence or hysteria in the actor. Its direct approach to feeling, Stanislavski felt, more often produced a block than the desired expression. Instead, an indirect approach to the subconscious via a focus on actions (supported by a commitment to the given circumstances and imaginative "Magic Ifs") was a more reliable means of luring the appropriate emotional response.
This shift in approach corresponded both with an increased attention to the structure and dynamic of the play as a whole and with a greater prominence given to the distinction between the planning of a role and its performance. In performance the actor is aware of only one step at a time, Stanislavski reasoned, but this focus risks the loss of the overall dynamic of a role in the welter of moment-to-moment detail. Consequently, the actor must also adopt a different point of view in order to plan the role in relation to its dramatic structure; this might involve adjusting the performance by holding back at certain moments and playing full out at others. A sense of the whole thereby informs the playing of each episode. Borrowing a term from Henry Irving, Stanislavski called this the "perspective of the role".
Every afternoon for five weeks during the summer of 1934 in Paris, Stanislavski worked with the American actress Stella Adler, who had sought his assistance with the blocks she had confronted in her performances. Given the emphasis that emotion memory had received in New York City, Adler was surprised to find that Stanislavski rejected the technique except as a last resort. The news that this was Stanislavski's approach would have significant repercussions in the US; Lee Strasberg angrily rejected it and refused to modify his version of the 'system'.
Political fortunes under Stalin
Following his heart attack in 1928, for the last decade of his life Stanislavski conducted most of his work writing, directing rehearsals, and teaching in his home on Leontievski Lane. In line with Joseph Stalin's policy of "isolation and preservation" towards certain internationally famous cultural figures, Stanislavski lived in a state of internal exile in Moscow. This protected him from the worst excesses of Stalin's "Great Terror".
A number of articles critical of the terminology of Stanislavski's 'system' appeared in the run-up to a RAPP conference in early 1931, at which the attacks continued. The 'system' stood accused of philosophical idealism, of a-historicism, of disguising social and political problems under ethical and moral terms, and of "biological psychologism" (or "the suggestion of fixed qualities in nature"). In the wake of the first congress of the USSR Union of Writers (chaired by Maxim Gorky in August 1934), however, Socialist realism was established as the official party line in aesthetic matters. While the new policy would have disastrous consequences for the Soviet avant-garde, the MAT and Stanislavski's 'system' were enthroned as exemplary models.
Final work at the Opera-Dramatic Studio
Given the difficulties he had with completing his manual for actors, Stanislavski decided that he needed to found a new studio if he was to ensure his legacy. "Our school will produce not just individuals," he wrote, "but a whole company". In June 1935, he began to instruct a group of teachers in the training techniques of the 'system' and the rehearsal processes of the Method of Physical Action. Twenty students (out of 3,500 auditionees) were accepted for the dramatic section of the Opera-Dramatic Studio, where classes began on 15 November. Stanislavski arranged a curriculum of four years of study that focused exclusively on technique and method—two years of the work detailed later in An Actor's Work and two of that in An Actor's Work on a Role.
Once the students were acquainted with the training techniques of the first two years, Stanislavski selected Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet for their work on roles. He worked with the students in March and April 1937, focusing on their sequences of physical actions, on establishing their through-lines of action, and on rehearsing scenes anew in terms of the actors' tasks. By June 1938 the students were ready for their first public showing, at which they performed a selection of scenes to a small number of spectators. The Opera-Dramatic Studio embodied the most complete implementation of the training exercises that Stanislavski described in his manuals.
From late 1936 onwards, Stanislavski began to meet regularly with Vsevolod Meyerhold, with whom he discussed the possibility of developing a common theatrical language. In 1938, they made plans to work together on a production and discussed a synthesis of Stanislavski's Method of Physical Action and Meyerhold's biomechanical training. On 8 March, Meyerhold took over the rehearsals for Rigoletto, the staging of which he completed after Stanislavski's death. On his death-bed Stanislavski declared to Yuri Bakhrushin that Meyerhold was "my sole heir in the theatre—here or anywhere else". Stalin's police tortured and killed Meyerhold in February 1940.
Stanislavski died in his home at 3:45 pm on 7 August 1938, having probably suffered another heart-attack five days earlier. Thousands of people attended his funeral. Three weeks after his death his widow, Lilina, received an advanced copy of the Russian-language edition of the first volume of An Actor's Work—the "labour of his life", as she called it. Stanislavski was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, not far from the grave of Anton Chekhov.
See also
Stanislavski's system
Method acting
Lee Strasberg
Sanford Meisner
Ivana Chubbuck
Ion Cojar
Psycho-physical Awareness
References
Sources
Primary sources
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Stanislavski, Konstantin. 1961. Creating a Role. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. London: Mentor, 1968. .
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Stanislavski, Konstantin. 1968. Stanislavski's Legacy: A Collection of Comments on a Variety of Aspects of an Actor's Art and Life. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. Revised and expanded edition. London: Methuen, 1981. .
Stanislavski, Constantin, and Pavel Rumyantsev. 1975. Stanislavski on Opera. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. London: Routledge, 1998. .
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Ribot, Théodule-Armand. 2007. Diseases of Memory: An Essay in the Positive Psychology. London: Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprints. . Online edition available.
Roach, Joseph R. 1985. The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Theater:Theory/Text/Performance Ser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. .
Rudnitsky, Konstantin. 1981. Meyerhold the Director. Trans. George Petrov. Ed. Sydney Schultze. Revised translation of Rezhisser Meierkhol'd. Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1969. .
Rudnitsky, Konstantin. 1988. Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde. Trans. Roxane Permar. Ed. Lesley Milne. London: Thames and Hudson. Rpt. as Russian and Soviet Theater, 1905–1932. New York: Abrams. .
Schuler, Catherine A. 1996. Women in Russian Theatre: The Actress in the Silver Age. London and New York: Routledge. .
Taxidou, Olga. 1998. The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig. Contemporary Theatre Studies ser. volume 30. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. .
Toporkov, Vasily Osipovich. 2001. Stanislavski in Rehearsal: The Final Years. Trans. Jean Benedetti. London: Methuen. .
Whyman, Rose. 2008. The Stanislavsky System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. .
Worrall, Nick. 1996. The Moscow Art Theatre. Theatre Production Studies ser. London and NY: Routledge. .
External links
The Stanislavski Centre at the Rose Bruford College
Routledge Performance Archive: Stanislavski
1863 births
1938 deaths
19th-century Russian male actors
19th-century Russian people
19th-century theatre
20th-century Russian actors
20th-century Russian male actors
20th-century Russian people
20th-century theatre
Acting theorists
Male actors from Moscow
Male actors of the Russian Empire
Method actors
Moscow Art Theater
People from Moscow Governorate
People's Artists of the RSFSR
People's Artists of the USSR
Recipients of the Order of Lenin
Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour
Russian and Soviet theatre directors
Russian drama teachers
Russian male stage actors
Russian theatre directors
Soviet drama teachers
Soviet male stage actors
Soviet theatre directors
Theatre directors of the Russian Empire
Theatre practitioners
Burials at Novodevichy Cemetery | [
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17319 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%20cell | K cell | K cell may refer to:
k-cell (mathematics)
Intestinal cells which synthesize gastric inhibitory polypeptide
Natural killer cell
Koniocellular cell
Knudsen cell
The unit cube of dimension k
Kcell, a Kazakhstani mobile phone operator | [
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17320 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khartoum | Khartoum | Khartoum or Khartum ( ; ) is the capital of Sudan. With a population of 5,274,321, its metropolitan area is the largest in Sudan. It is located at the confluence of the White Nile, flowing north from Lake Victoria, and the Blue Nile, flowing west from Lake Tana in Ethiopia. The place where the two Niles meet is known as al-Mogran or al-Muqran (; English: "The Confluence"). From there, the Nile continues north towards Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.
Divided by these two parts of the Nile, Khartoum is a tripartite metropolis with an estimated population of over five million people, consisting of Khartoum proper, and linked by bridges to Khartoum North ( ) and Omdurman ( ) to the west.
Khartoum was founded in 1821 as part of Ottoman Egypt, north of the ancient city of Soba. While the United Kingdom exerted power over Egypt, it left administration of the Sudan to it until Mahdist forces took over Khartoum. The British attempted to evacuate Anglo-Egyptian garrisons from Sudan but the Siege of Khartoum in 1884 resulted in the capture of the city by Mahdist forces and a massacre of the defending Anglo-Egyptian garrison. In 1898 it was reoccupied by British forces, and was the seat of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan government until 1956.
That year the city was designated as the capital of an independent Sudan. In modern times, it has been a site of political unrest, as when three hostages were killed during the Attack on the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum in 1973. In the 21st century, the Justice and Equality Movement engaged in combat there in 2008 with Sudanese government forces as part of the War in Darfur. The Khartoum massacre occurred in 2019 during the Sudanese Revolution.
Khartoum is an economic and trade centre in Northern Africa, with rail lines from Port Sudan and El-Obeid. It is served by Khartoum International Airport, and Khartoum New International Airport is under construction. Several national and cultural institutions are in Khartoum and its metropolitan area, including the National Museum of Sudan, the Khalifa House Museum, the University of Khartoum, and the Sudan University of Science and Technology.
Etymology
The origin of the word Khartoum is uncertain. One theory argues that it is derived from Arabic (, "trunk" or "hose"), probably referring to the narrow strip of land extending between the Blue and White Niles. Dinka scholars argue that the name derives from the Dinka words (Dinka-Bor dialect) or khier-tuom (as is the pronunciation in various Dinka Dialects), translating to "place where rivers meet". This is supported by historical accounts which place the Dinka homeland in central Sudan (around present-day Khartoum) as recently as the 13th-17th centuries A.D. Captain J.A. Grant, who reached Khartoum in 1863 with Captain Speke's expedition, thought the name was most probably from the Arabic (, "safflower", i.e., Carthamus tinctorius), which was cultivated extensively in Egypt for its oil to be used as fuel. Some scholars speculate that the word derives from the Nubian word ("the abode of Atum"), the Nubian and Egyptian god of creation. Other Beja scholars suggest Khartoum is derived from the Beja word , "meeting". Sociologist Vincent J. Donovan notes that in the Nilotic Maa language of the Maasai people, means "we have acquired" and that the geographical location of Khartoum is where Maasai oral tradition claims that the ancestors of the Maasai first acquired cattle.
History
19th century
In 1821, Khartoum was established north of the ancient city of Soba, by Ismail Pasha, the third son of Egypt's ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, who had just incorporated Sudan into his realm. Originally, Khartoum served as an outpost for the Egyptian Army, but the settlement quickly grew into a regional centre of trade. It also became a focal point for the slave trade. Later, it became the administrative center and official capital of Sudan.
On 13 March 1884, troops loyal to the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad started a siege of Khartoum, against defenders led by British General Charles George Gordon. The siege ended in a massacre of the Anglo-Egyptian garrison when on 26 January 1885 the heavily damaged city fell to the Mahdists.
On 2 September 1898, Omdurman was the scene of the bloody Battle of Omdurman, during which British forces under Herbert Kitchener defeated the Mahdist forces defending the city.
20th century
The Arab League summit of 29 August 1967 was held in Khartoum as the fourth Arab League Summit.
In 1973, the city was the site of an anomalous hostage crisis in which members of Black September held 10 hostages at the Saudi Arabian embassy, five of them diplomats. The US ambassador, the US deputy ambassador, and the Belgian chargé d'affaires were murdered. The remaining hostages were released. A 1973 United States Department of State document, declassified in 2006, concluded: "The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat."
In 1977, the first oil pipeline between Khartoum and the Port of Sudan was completed.
The Organisation of African Unity summit of 18–22 July 1978 was held in Khartoum, during which Sudan was awarded the OAU presidency.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Khartoum was the destination of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing conflicts in neighboring nations such as Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda. Many Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees assimilated into society, while others settled in large slums on the city's outskirts. Since the mid-1980s, large numbers of refugees from South Sudan and Darfur, fleeing the violence of the Second Sudanese Civil War and Darfur conflict, have settled around Khartoum.
In 1991, Osama bin Laden purchased a house in the affluent al-Riyadh neighborhood of the city and another in Soba. He lived there until 1996, when he was banished from the country. Following the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, the United States accused bin Laden's al-Qaeda group and, on 20 August, launched cruise missile attacks on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum North. The factory's destruction created diplomatic tension between the U.S. and Sudan. The factory ruins are now a tourist attraction.
In November 1991, the government of President Omar al-Bashir sought to remove half the population from the city. The residents, deemed squatters, were mostly southern Sudanese whom the government feared could be potential rebel sympathizers. Around 425,000 people were placed in five "Peace Camps" in the desert an hour's drive from Khartoum. The camps were watched over by heavily armed security guards, many relief agencies were banned from assisting, and "the nearest food was at a market four miles away, a vast journey in the desert heat." Many residents were reduced to having only burlap sacks as housing. The intentional displacement was part of a large urban renewal plan backed by the housing minister, Sharaf Bannaga.
21st century
The sudden death of SPLA head and vice-president of Sudan, John Garang, at the end of July 2005, was followed by three days of violent riots in the capital. Order was finally restored after Southern Sudanese politicians and tribal leaders sent strong messages to the rioters. The situation could have been much more dire; even so, the death toll was at least 24, as youths from southern Sudan attacked northern Sudanese and clashed with security forces.
The African Union summit of 16–24 January 2006 was held in Khartoum; as was the Arab League summit of 28–29 March 2006, during which they awarded Sudan the Arab League presidency.
On 10 May 2008, the Darfur rebel group, Justice and Equality Movement, moved into the city, where they engaged in heavy fighting with Sudanese government forces. Their soldiers included minors, and their goal was to topple Omar al-Bashir's government, though the Sudanese government succeeded in beating back the assault.
On 23 October 2012, an explosion at the Yarmouk munitions factory killed two people and injured another person. The Sudanese government has claimed that the explosion was the result of an Israeli airstrike.
On 3 June 2019, Khartoum was the site of the Khartoum massacre, where over 100 dissidents were murdered (the government said 61 were killed), hundreds more injured and 70 women raped by Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in order to forcefully disperse the peaceful protests calling for civilian government.
On 1 July 2020, activists demanded that al-Zibar Basha street in Khartoum be renamed. Al-Zubayr Rahma Mansur was a slave trader and the al-Zibar Basha street leads to the military base where the 2019 Khartoum massacre took place.
On 26 October 2021, the city was locked down following a military coup that left at least 7 dead, triggering protests and calls for a general strike. Prime minister Abdalla Hamdok was arrested during the coup, and held along with other cabinet members in an unknown location.
Geography
Location
Khartoum is located in the middle of the populated areas in Sudan, at almost the northeast center of the country between 15 and 16 degrees latitude north, and between 31 and 32 degrees longitude east. Khartoum marks the convergence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile, where they join to form the bottom of the leaning-S shape of the main Nile (see map, upper right) as it zigzags through northern Sudan into Egypt at Lake Nasser.
Khartoum is relatively flat, at elevation , as the Nile flows northeast past Omdurman to Shendi, at elevation about away.
Climate
Khartoum features a hot desert climate (Köppen climate classification BWh) with a dry season occurring during winter, typical of the Saharo-Sahelian zone, which marks the progressive passage between the Sahara Desert's vast arid areas and the Sahel's vast semi-arid areas. The climate is extremely dry for most of the year, with about eight months when average rainfall is lower than . The very long dry season is itself divided into a warm, very dry season between November and February, as well as a very hot, dry season between March and May. During this part of the year, hot, dry continental trade winds from deserts, such as the harmattan, sweep over the region; the weather is stable and very dry.
The very irregular, very brief, rainy season lasts about 1 month as the maximum rainfall is recorded in August, with about . The rainy season is characterized by a seasonal reverse of wind regimes, when the Intertropical Convergence Zone goes northerly. Average annual rainfall is very low, with only of precipitation. Khartoum records on average six days with or more and 19 days with or more of rainfall. The highest temperatures occur during two periods in the year: the first at the late dry season, when average high temperatures consistently exceed from April to June, and the second at the early dry season, when average high temperatures exceed in September and October. Temperatures cool off somewhat during the night, with Khartoum's lowest average low temperature of the year, in January, just above . Khartoum is one of the hottest major cities on Earth, with annual mean temperatures hovering around . The city also has very warm winters. In no month does the average monthly high temperature fall below . This is something not seen in other major cities with hot desert climates, such as Riyadh, Baghdad and Phoenix.
Demographics
Almost 250,000 Syrians lived in Khartoum as of 2019, representing 5% of the total population of the city. Most are young men who have fled war in Syria. Sudan was the only country in the world to accept travelers carrying a Syrian passport who lacked a visa.
Economy
After the signing of the historic Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLA), the Government of Sudan began a massive development project. In 2007, the biggest projects in Khartoum were the Al-Mogran Development Project, two five-star hotels, a new airport, El Mek Nimr Bridge (finished in October 2007) and the Tuti Bridge that links Khartoum to Tuti Island.
In the 21st century, Khartoum developed based on Sudan's oil wealth (although the independence of South Sudan in 2011 affected the economy of Sudan negatively). The center of the city has tree-lined streets. Khartoum has the highest concentration of economic activity in the country. This has changed as major economic developments take place in other parts of the country, like oil exploration in the South, the Giad Industrial Complex in Al Jazirah state and White Nile Sugar Project in Central Sudan, and the Merowe Dam in the North.
Among the city's industries are printing, glass manufacturing, food processing, and textiles. Petroleum products are now produced in the far north of Khartoum state, providing fuel and jobs for the city. One of Sudan's largest refineries is located in northern Khartoum.
Retailing
The Souq Al Arabi is Khartoum's largest open air market. The "souq" is spread over several blocks in the center of Khartoum proper just south of the Great Mosque (Mesjid al-Kabir) and the minibus station. It is divided into separate sections, including one focused entirely on gold.
Al Qasr Street and Al Jamhoriyah Street are considered the most famous high streets in Khartoum State.
Afra Mall is located in the southern suburb of Arkeweet. The Afra Mall has a supermarket, retail outlets, coffee shops, a bowling alley, movie theaters, and a children's playground.
In 2011, Sudan opened the Hotel Section and part of the food court of the new, Corinthia Hotel Tower. The Mall/Shopping section is still under construction.
Education
Khartoum is the main location for most of Sudan's top educational bodies. There are four main levels of education:
Kindergarten and day-care. It begins in the age of 3–4, consists of 1-2 grades, (depending on the parents).
Elementary school. The first grade pupils enter at the age of 6–7. It consists of 8 grades, each year there is more academic efforts and main subjects added plus more school methods improvements. By the 8th grade a student is 13–14 years old ready to take the certificate exams and entering high school.
Upper second school and high school. At this level the school methods add some main academic subjects such as chemistry, biology, physics, and geography. There are three grades in this level. The students' ages are about 14–15 to 17–18.
Higher education. There are many universities in Khartoum, including the University of Khartoum and Sudan University of Science and Technology. Some foreigners attend universities there, as the reputation of the universities is very good and the living expenses are low compared to other countries.
Transportation
Khartoum is home to the largest airport in Sudan, Khartoum International Airport. It is the main hub for Sudan Airways, Sudan's main carrier. A new airport was planned for the southern outskirts of the city, but with Khartoum's rapid growth and consequent urban sprawl, the airport is still located in the heart of the city.
Khartoum's transportation is limited to the vehicular road system, with buses and personal vehicles comprising the main types of vehicles. As with many cities in the continent, parts of Khartoum are connected through privately owned buses.
Khartoum has a number of bridges across both tributaries of the Nile. The Mac Nimir Bridge, the Blue Nile Road & Railway Bridge, the Cooper Bridge (also known as the Armed Forces Bridge), and the Elmansheya Bridge span the Blue Nile, connecting Khartoum to Khartoum North. The Omdurman Bridge, the Victory Bridge, and the Al-Dabbasin Bridge span the White Nile, connecting Khartoum to Omdurman. The Tuti Bridge connects Tuti Island with Khartoum. Prior to the construction of the Tuti Bridge in 2008, residents of Tuti Island relied on water taxis to cross the Blue Nile into Khartoum.
Khartoum has rail lines from Wadi Halfa, Port Sudan on the Red Sea, and El Obeid. All are operated by Sudan Railways.
Architecture
The architecture of Khartoum reflects the city's history since the early 1820s and is marked by both native Sudanese, Turkish, British and modern buildings. In general, the architecture of Sudan reflects a wide diversity in its shapes, materials, and use.
Since independence, the people of Sudan have introduced new infrastructure and technology, which has led to new and innovative building concepts, ideas and construction techniques.
Culture
Museums
The largest museum in Sudan is the National Museum of Sudan. Founded in 1971, it contains works from different epochs of Sudanese history. Among the exhibits are two Egyptian temples of Buhen and Semna, originally built by Pharaoh Hatshepsut and Pharaoh Tuthmosis III, respectively, but relocated to Khartoum upon the flooding of Lake Nasser.
The Republican Palace Museum, opened in 2000, is located in the former Anglican All Saints' cathedral on Sharia al-Jama'a, next to the historical Presidential Palace.
The Ethnographic Museum is located on Sharia al-Jama'a, close to the Mac Nimir Bridge.
Botanical gardens
Khartoum is home to one of the oldest botanical garden in Africa, National Botanical Garden in the Mogran district of the city.
Clubs
Khartoum is home to several clubs including the Blue Nile Sailing Club, social clubs such as the German Club, the Greek Club, the Coptic Club, the Syrian Club and the International Club, as well as football clubs Al Khartoum SC and Al Ahli Khartoum.
Places of worship
The places of worship in Khartoum primarily consist of Muslim mosques. There are also Christian churches and temples: St. Matthew's Cathedral, Khartoum, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Khartoum (Catholic Church), Sudan Interior Church (Baptist World Alliance), and Presbyterian Church in Sudan (World Communion of Reformed Churches).
See also
Al Amarat (Khartoum)
References
Bibliography
External links
Kidnapped, tortured and thrown in jail: my 70 days in Sudan The Guardian, 2017
Capitals in Africa
Populated places on the Nile
Populated places in Khartoum (state)
Populated places established in 1821
State capitals in Sudan
1821 establishments in Sudan
Cities in Sudan | [
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17322 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Ketoglutaric%20acid | Α-Ketoglutaric acid | α-Ketoglutaric acid (2-oxoglutaric acid) is one of two ketone derivatives of glutaric acid. The term "ketoglutaric acid," when not further qualified, almost always refers to the alpha variant. β-Ketoglutaric acid varies only by the position of the ketone functional group, and is much less common.
Its carboxylate, α-ketoglutarate also called 2-oxoglutarate, is an important biological compound. It is the keto acid produced by deamination of glutamate, and is an intermediate in the Krebs cycle.
Functions
Alanine transaminase
The enzyme alanine transaminase converts α-ketoglutarate and L-alanine to L-glutamate and pyruvate, respectively, as a reversible process.
Krebs cycle
α-Ketoglutarate is a key intermediate in the Krebs cycle, coming after isocitrate and before succinyl CoA. Anaplerotic reactions can replenish the cycle at this juncture by synthesizing α-ketoglutarate from transamination of glutamate, or through action of glutamate dehydrogenase on glutamate.
Formation of amino acids
Glutamine is synthesized from glutamate by glutamine synthetase, which utilizes adenosine triphosphate to form glutamyl phosphate; this intermediate is attacked by ammonia as a nucleophile giving glutamine and inorganic phosphate. Proline, arginine, and lysine (in some organisms) are other amino acids synthesized as well. These three amino acids derive from glutamate with the addition of further steps or enzymes to facilitate reactions.
Nitrogen transporter
Another function is to combine with nitrogen released in cells, therefore preventing nitrogen overload.
α-Ketoglutarate is one of the most important nitrogen transporters in metabolic pathways. The amino groups of amino acids are attached to it (by transamination) and carried to the liver where the urea cycle takes place.
α-Ketoglutarate is transaminated, along with glutamine, to form the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate. Glutamate can then be decarboxylated (requiring vitamin B6) into the inhibitory neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid.
It is reported that high ammonia and/or high nitrogen levels may occur with high protein intake, excessive aluminum exposure, Reye's syndrome, cirrhosis, and urea cycle disorder.
It plays a role in detoxification of ammonia in brain.
Relationship to molecular oxygen
Acting as a co-substrate for α-ketoglutarate-dependent hydroxylase, it also plays important function in oxidation reactions involving molecular oxygen.
Molecular oxygen (O2) directly oxidizes many compounds to produce useful products in an organism, such as antibiotics, in reactions catalyzed by oxygenases. In many oxygenases, α-ketoglutarate helps the reaction by being oxidized with the main substrate. EGLN1, one of the α-ketoglutarate-dependent oxygenases, is an O2 sensor, informing the organism the oxygen level in its environment.
In combination with molecular oxygen, alpha-ketoglutarate is one of the requirements for the hydroxylation of proline to hydroxyproline in the production of type 1 collagen.
Antioxidant
α-Ketoglutarate, which is released by several cell types, decreases the levels of hydrogen peroxide, and the α-ketoglutarate was depleted and converted to succinate in cell culture media.
Longevity
Studies have linked α-ketoglutarate with increased lifespan in nematode worms
and increased healthspan/lifespan in mice.
Immune regulation
A study showed that in glutamine deprived conditions, α-ketoglutarate promotes naïve CD4+ T cell differentiation into TH1 whilst inhibiting their differentiation into anti-inflammatory Treg cells.
Enzyme cofactor
α-Ketoglutarate has been shown to be a cofactor for demethylases that contain the Jumonji C (JmjC) domain.
Production
α-Ketoglutarate can be produced by:
Oxidative decarboxylation of isocitrate by isocitrate dehydrogenase
Oxidative deamination of glutamate by glutamate dehydrogenase
From galacturonic acid by the organism Agrobacterium tumefaciens
Alpha-ketoglutarate can be used to produce:
Creatine-alpha ketoglutarate
Interactive pathway map
See also
2OG-dependent dioxygenases
References
Dicarboxylic acids
Alpha-keto acids
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17326 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian%20economics | Keynesian economics | Keynesian economics ( ; sometimes Keynesianism, named after British economist John Maynard Keynes) are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) strongly influences economic output and inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy. Instead, it is influenced by a host of factors – sometimes behaving erratically – affecting production, employment, and inflation.
Keynesian economists generally argue that aggregate demand is volatile and unstable and that, consequently, a market economy often experiences inefficient macroeconomic outcomes – a recession, when demand is low, and inflation, when demand is high. Further, they argue that these economic fluctuations can be mitigated by economic policy responses coordinated between government and central bank. In particular, fiscal policy actions (taken by the government) and monetary policy actions (taken by the central bank), can help stabilize economic output, inflation, and unemployment over the business cycle. Keynesian economists generally advocate a market economy – predominantly private sector, but with an active role for government intervention during recessions and depressions.
Keynesian economics developed during and after the Great Depression from the ideas presented by Keynes in his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Keynes' approach was a stark contrast to the aggregate supply-focused classical economics that preceded his book. Interpreting Keynes's work is a contentious topic, and several schools of economic thought claim his legacy.
Keynesian economics, as part of the neoclassical synthesis, served as the standard macroeconomic model in the developed nations during the later part of the Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war economic expansion (1945–1973). It lost some influence following the oil shock and resulting stagflation of the 1970s. Keynesian economics was later redeveloped as New Keynesian economics, becoming part of the contemporary new neoclassical synthesis, that forms one current-day theory on macroeconomics. The advent of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 sparked renewed interest in Keynesian thought.
Historical context
Pre-Keynesian macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is the study of the factors applying to an economy as a whole. Important macroeconomic variables include the overall price level, the interest rate, the level of employment, and income (or equivalently output) measured in real terms.
The classical tradition of partial equilibrium theory had been to split the economy into separate markets, each of whose equilibrium conditions could be stated as a single equation determining a single variable. The theoretical apparatus of supply and demand curves developed by Fleeming Jenkin and Alfred Marshall provided a unified mathematical basis for this approach, which the Lausanne School generalized to general equilibrium theory.
For macroeconomics, relevant partial theories included the Quantity theory of money determining the price level and the classical theory of the interest rate. In regards to employment, the condition referred to by Keynes as the "first postulate of classical economics" stated that the wage is equal to the marginal product, which is a direct application of the marginalist principles developed during the nineteenth century (see The General Theory). Keynes sought to supplant all three aspects of the classical theory.
Precursors of Keynesianism
Although Keynes's work was crystallized and given impetus by the advent of the Great Depression, it was part of a long-running debate within economics over the existence and nature of general gluts. A number of the policies Keynes advocated to address the Great Depression (notably government deficit spending at times of low private investment or consumption), and many of the theoretical ideas he proposed (effective demand, the multiplier, the paradox of thrift), had been advanced by authors in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (E.g. J. M. Robertson raised the paradox of thrift in 1892.) Keynes's unique contribution was to provide a general theory of these, which proved acceptable to the economic establishment.
An intellectual precursor of Keynesian economics was underconsumption theories associated with John Law, Thomas Malthus, the Birmingham School of Thomas Attwood, and the American economists William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings, who were influential in the 1920s and 1930s. Underconsumptionists were, like Keynes after them, concerned with failure of aggregate demand to attain potential output, calling this "underconsumption" (focusing on the demand side), rather than "overproduction" (which would focus on the supply side), and advocating economic interventionism. Keynes specifically discussed underconsumption (which he wrote "under-consumption") in the General Theory, in Chapter 22, Section IV and Chapter 23, Section VII.
Numerous concepts were developed earlier and independently of Keynes by the Stockholm school during the 1930s; these accomplishments were described in a 1937 article, published in response to the 1936 General Theory, sharing the Swedish discoveries.
Keynes's early writings
In 1923 Keynes published his first contribution to economic theory, A Tract on Monetary Reform, whose point of view is classical but incorporates ideas that later played a part in the General Theory. In particular, looking at the hyperinflation in European economies, he drew attention to the opportunity cost of holding money (identified with inflation rather than interest) and its influence on the velocity of circulation.
In 1930 he published A Treatise on Money, intended as a comprehensive treatment of its subject "which would confirm his stature as a serious academic scholar, rather than just as the author of stinging polemics", and marks a large step in the direction of his later views. In it, he attributes unemployment to wage stickiness and treats saving and investment as governed by independent decisions: the former varying positively with the interest rate, the latter negatively. The velocity of circulation is expressed as a function of the rate of interest. He interpreted his treatment of liquidity as implying a purely monetary theory of interest.
Keynes's younger colleagues of the Cambridge Circus and Ralph Hawtrey believed that his arguments implicitly assumed full employment, and this influenced the direction of his subsequent work. During 1933, he wrote essays on various economic topics "all of which are cast in terms of movement of output as a whole".
Development of The General Theory
At the time that Keynes's wrote the General Theory, it had been a tenet of mainstream economic thought that the economy would automatically revert to a state of general equilibrium: it had been assumed that, because the needs of consumers are always greater than the capacity of the producers to satisfy those needs, everything that is produced would eventually be consumed once the appropriate price was found for it. This perception is reflected in Say's law and in the writing of David Ricardo, which states that individuals produce so that they can either consume what they have manufactured or sell their output so that they can buy someone else's output. This argument rests upon the assumption that if a surplus of goods or services exists, they would naturally drop in price to the point where they would be consumed.
Given the backdrop of high and persistent unemployment during the Great Depression, Keynes argued that there was no guarantee that the goods that individuals produce would be met with adequate effective demand, and periods of high unemployment could be expected, especially when the economy was contracting in size. He saw the economy as unable to maintain itself at full employment automatically, and believed that it was necessary for the government to step in and put purchasing power into the hands of the working population through government spending. Thus, according to Keynesian theory, some individually rational microeconomic-level actions such as not investing savings in the goods and services produced by the economy, if taken collectively by a large proportion of individuals and firms, can lead to outcomes wherein the economy operates below its potential output and growth rate.
Prior to Keynes, a situation in which aggregate demand for goods and services did not meet supply was referred to by classical economists as a general glut, although there was disagreement among them as to whether a general glut was possible. Keynes argued that when a glut occurred, it was the over-reaction of producers and the laying off of workers that led to a fall in demand and perpetuated the problem. Keynesians therefore advocate an active stabilization policy to reduce the amplitude of the business cycle, which they rank among the most serious of economic problems. According to the theory, government spending can be used to increase aggregate demand, thus increasing economic activity, reducing unemployment and deflation.
Origins of the multiplier
The Liberal Party fought the 1929 General Election on a promise to "reduce levels of unemployment to normal within one year by utilising the stagnant labour force in vast schemes of national development". David Lloyd George launched his campaign in March with a policy document, We can cure unemployment, which tentatively claimed that, "Public works would lead to a second round of spending as the workers spent their wages." Two months later Keynes, then nearing completion of his Treatise on money, and Hubert Henderson collaborated on a political pamphlet seeking to "provide academically respectable economic arguments" for Lloyd George's policies. It was titled Can Lloyd George do it? and endorsed the claim that "greater trade activity would make for greater trade activity ... with a cumulative effect". This became the mechanism of the "ratio" published by Richard Kahn in his 1931 paper "The relation of home investment to unemployment", described by Alvin Hansen as "one of the great landmarks of economic analysis". The "ratio" was soon rechristened the "multiplier" at Keynes's suggestion.
The multiplier of Kahn's paper is based on a respending mechanism familiar nowadays from textbooks. Samuelson puts it as follows:
Let’s suppose that I hire unemployed resources to build a $1000 woodshed. My carpenters and lumber producers will get an extra $1000 of income... If they all have a marginal propensity to consume of 2/3, they will now spend $666.67 on new consumption goods. The producers of these goods will now have extra incomes... they in turn will spend $444.44 ... Thus an endless chain of secondary consumption respending is set in motion by my primary investment of $1000.
Samuelson's treatment closely follows Joan Robinson's account of 1937 and is the main channel by which the multiplier has influenced Keynesian theory. It differs significantly from Kahn's paper and even more from Keynes's book.
The designation of the initial spending as "investment" and the employment-creating respending as "consumption" echoes Kahn faithfully, though he gives no reason why initial consumption or subsequent investment respending shouldn't have exactly the same effects. Henry Hazlitt, who considered Keynes as much a culprit as Kahn and Samuelson, wrote that ...
... in connection with the multiplier (and indeed most of the time) what Keynes is referring to as "investment" really means any addition to spending for any purpose... The word "investment" is being used in a Pickwickian, or Keynesian, sense.
Kahn envisaged money as being passed from hand to hand, creating employment at each step, until it came to rest in a cul-de-sac (Hansen's term was "leakage"); the only culs-de-sac he acknowledged were imports and hoarding, although he also said that a rise in prices might dilute the multiplier effect. Jens Warming recognised that personal saving had to be considered, treating it as a "leakage" (p. 214) while recognising on p. 217 that it might in fact be invested.
The textbook multiplier gives the impression that making society richer is the easiest thing in the world: the government just needs to spend more. In Kahn's paper, it is harder. For him, the initial expenditure must not be a diversion of funds from other uses, but an increase in the total expenditure: something impossible – if understood in real terms – under the classical theory that the level of expenditure is limited by the economy's income/output. On page 174, Kahn rejects the claim that the effect of public works is at the expense of expenditure elsewhere, admitting that this might arise if the revenue is raised by taxation, but says that other available means have no such consequences. As an example, he suggests that the money may be raised by borrowing from banks, since ...
... it is always within the power of the banking system to advance to the Government the cost of the roads without in any way affecting the flow of investment along the normal channels.
This assumes that banks are free to create resources to answer any demand. But Kahn adds that ...
... no such hypothesis is really necessary. For it will be demonstrated later on that, pari passu with the building of roads, funds are released from various sources at precisely the rate that is required to pay the cost of the roads.
The demonstration relies on "Mr Meade's relation" (due to James Meade) asserting that the total amount of money that disappears into culs-de-sac is equal to the original outlay, which in Kahn's words "should bring relief and consolation to those who are worried about the monetary sources" (p. 189).
A respending multiplier had been proposed earlier by Hawtrey in a 1928 Treasury memorandum ("with imports as the only leakage"), but the idea was discarded in his own subsequent writings. Soon afterwards the Australian economist Lyndhurst Giblin published a multiplier analysis in a 1930 lecture (again with imports as the only leakage). The idea itself was much older. Some Dutch mercantilists had believed in an infinite multiplier for military expenditure (assuming no import "leakage"), since ...
... a war could support itself for an unlimited period if only money remained in the country ... For if money itself is "consumed", this simply means that it passes into someone else's possession, and this process may continue indefinitely. Multiplier doctrines had subsequently been expressed in more theoretical terms by the Dane Julius Wulff (1896), the Australian Alfred de Lissa (late 1890s), the German/American Nicholas Johannsen (same period), and the Dane Fr. Johannsen (1925/1927). Kahn himself said that the idea was given to him as a child by his father.
Public policy debates
As the 1929 election approached "Keynes was becoming a strong public advocate of capital development" as a public measure to alleviate unemployment. Winston Churchill, the Conservative Chancellor, took the opposite view:
It is the orthodox Treasury dogma, steadfastly held ... [that] very little additional employment and no permanent additional employment can, in fact, be created by State borrowing and State expenditure.
Keynes pounced on a flaw in the Treasury view. Cross-examining Sir Richard Hopkins, a Second Secretary in the Treasury, before the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry in 1930 he referred to the "first proposition" that "schemes of capital development are of no use for reducing unemployment" and asked whether "it would be a misunderstanding of the Treasury view to say that they hold to the first proposition". Hopkins responded that "The first proposition goes much too far. The first proposition would ascribe to us an absolute and rigid dogma, would it not?"
Later the same year, speaking in a newly created Committee of Economists, Keynes tried to use Kahn's emerging multiplier theory to argue for public works, "but Pigou's and Henderson's objections ensured that there was no sign of this in the final product". In 1933 he gave wider publicity to his support for Kahn's multiplier in a series of articles titled "The road to prosperity" in The Times newspaper.
A. C. Pigou was at the time the sole economics professor at Cambridge. He had a continuing interest in the subject of unemployment, having expressed the view in his popular Unemployment (1913) that it was caused by "maladjustment between wage-rates and demand" – a view Keynes may have shared prior to the years of the General Theory. Nor were his practical recommendations very different: "on many occasions in the thirties" Pigou "gave public support ... to State action designed to stimulate employment". Where the two men differed is in the link between theory and practice. Keynes was seeking to build theoretical foundations to support his recommendations for public works while Pigou showed no disposition to move away from classical doctrine. Referring to him and Dennis Robertson, Keynes asked rhetorically: "Why do they insist on maintaining theories from which their own practical conclusions cannot possibly follow?"
The General Theory
Keynes set forward the ideas that became the basis for Keynesian economics in his main work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). It was written during the Great Depression, when unemployment rose to 25% in the United States and as high as 33% in some countries. It is almost wholly theoretical, enlivened by occasional passages of satire and social commentary. The book had a profound impact on economic thought, and ever since it was published there has been debate over its meaning.
Keynes and classical economics
Keynes begins the General Theory with a summary of the classical theory of employment, which he encapsulates in his formulation of Say's Law as the dictum "Supply creates its own demand".
Under the classical theory, the wage rate is determined by the marginal productivity of labour, and as many people are employed as are willing to work at that rate. Unemployment may arise through friction or may be "voluntary," in the sense that it arises from a refusal to accept employment owing to "legislation or social practices ... or mere human obstinacy", but "...the classical postulates do not admit of the possibility of the third category," which Keynes defines as involuntary unemployment.
Keynes raises two objections to the classical theory's assumption that "wage bargains ... determine the real wage". The first lies in the fact that "labour stipulates (within limits) for a money-wage rather than a real wage". The second is that classical theory assumes that, "The real wages of labour depend on the wage bargains which labour makes with the entrepreneurs," whereas, "If money wages change, one would have expected the classical school to argue that prices would change in almost the same proportion, leaving the real wage and the level of unemployment practically the same as before." Keynes considers his second objection the more fundamental, but most commentators concentrate on his first one: it has been argued that the quantity theory of money protects the classical school from the conclusion Keynes expected from it.
Keynesian unemployment
Saving and investment
Saving is that part of income not devoted to consumption, and consumption is that part of expenditure not allocated to investment, i.e., to durable goods. Hence saving encompasses hoarding (the accumulation of income as cash) and the purchase of durable goods. The existence of net hoarding, or of a demand to hoard, is not admitted by the simplified liquidity preference model of the General Theory.
Once he rejects the classical theory that unemployment is due to excessive wages, Keynes proposes an alternative based on the relationship between saving and investment. In his view, unemployment arises whenever entrepreneurs' incentive to invest fails to keep pace with society's propensity to save (propensity is one of Keynes's synonyms for "demand"). The levels of saving and investment are necessarily equal, and income is therefore held down to a level where the desire to save is no greater than the incentive to invest.
The incentive to invest arises from the interplay between the physical circumstances of production and psychological anticipations of future profitability; but once these things are given the incentive is independent of income and depends solely on the rate of interest r. Keynes designates its value as a function of r as the "schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital".
The propensity to save behaves quite differently. Saving is simply that part of income not devoted to consumption, and:
... the prevailing psychological law seems to be that when aggregate income increases, consumption expenditure will also increase but to a somewhat lesser extent.
Keynes adds that "this psychological law was of the utmost importance in the development of my own thought".
Liquidity preference
Keynes viewed the money supply as one of the main determinants of the state of the real economy. The significance he attributed to it is one of the innovative features of his work, and was influential on the politically hostile monetarist school.
Money supply comes into play through the liquidity preference function, which is the demand function that corresponds to money supply. It specifies the amount of money people will seek to hold according to the state of the economy. In Keynes's first (and simplest) account – that of Chapter 13 – liquidity preference is determined solely by the interest rate r—which is seen as the earnings forgone by holding wealth in liquid form: hence liquidity preference can be written L(r ) and in equilibrium must equal the externally fixed money supply M̂.
Keynes’s economic model
Money supply, saving and investment combine to determine the level of income as illustrated in the diagram, where the top graph shows money supply (on the vertical axis) against interest rate. M̂ determines the ruling interest rate r̂ through the liquidity preference function. The rate of interest determines the level of investment Î through the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital, shown as a blue curve in the lower graph. The red curves in the same diagram show what the propensities to save are for different incomes Y ; and the income Ŷ corresponding to the equilibrium state of the economy must be the one for which the implied level of saving at the established interest rate is equal to Î.
In Keynes's more complicated liquidity preference theory (presented in Chapter 15) the demand for money depends on income as well as on the interest rate and the analysis becomes more complicated. Keynes never fully integrated his second liquidity preference doctrine with the rest of his theory, leaving that to John Hicks: see the IS-LM model below.
Wage rigidity
Keynes rejects the classical explanation of unemployment based on wage rigidity, but it is not clear what effect the wage rate has on unemployment in his system. He treats wages of all workers as proportional to a single rate set by collective bargaining, and chooses his units so that this rate never appears separately in his discussion. It is present implicitly in those quantities he expresses in wage units, while being absent from those he expresses in money terms. It is therefore difficult to see whether, and in what way, his results differ for a different wage rate, nor is it clear what he thought about the matter.
Remedies for unemployment
Monetary remedies
An increase in the money supply, according to Keynes's theory, leads to a drop in the interest rate and an increase in the amount of investment that can be undertaken profitably, bringing with it an increase in total income.
Fiscal remedies
Keynes' name is associated with fiscal, rather than monetary, measures but they receive only passing (and often satirical) reference in the General Theory. He mentions "increased public works" as an example of something that brings employment through the multiplier, but this is before he develops the relevant theory, and he does not follow up when he gets to the theory.
Later in the same chapter he tells us that:
Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for the precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.
But again, he doesn't get back to his implied recommendation to engage in public works, even if not fully justified from their direct benefits, when he constructs the theory. On the contrary he later advises us that ...
... our final task might be to select those variables which can be deliberately controlled or managed by central authority in the kind of system in which we actually live ...
and this appears to look forward to a future publication rather than to a subsequent chapter of the General Theory.
Keynesian models and concepts
Aggregate demand
Keynes' view of saving and investment was his most important departure from the classical outlook. It can be illustrated using the "Keynesian cross" devised by Paul Samuelson. The horizontal axis denotes total income and the purple curve shows C (Y ), the propensity to consume, whose complement S (Y ) is the propensity to save: the sum of these two functions is equal to total income, which is shown by the broken line at 45°.
The horizontal blue line I (r ) is the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital whose value is independent of Y. The schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital is dependent on the interest rate, specifically the interest rate cost of a new investment. If the interest rate charged by the financial sector to the productive sector is below the marginal efficiency of capital at that level of technology and capital intensity then investment is positive and grows the lower the interest rate is, given the diminishing return of capital. If the interest rate is above the marginal efficiency of capital then investment is equal to zero. Keynes interprets this as the demand for investment and denotes the sum of demands for consumption and investment as "aggregate demand", plotted as a separate curve. Aggregate demand must equal total income, so equilibrium income must be determined by the point where the aggregate demand curve crosses the 45° line. This is the same horizontal position as the intersection of I (r ) with S (Y ).
The equation I (r ) = S (Y ) had been accepted by the classics, who had viewed it as the condition of equilibrium between supply and demand for investment funds and as determining the interest rate (see the classical theory of interest). But insofar as they had had a concept of aggregate demand, they had seen the demand for investment as being given by S (Y ), since for them saving was simply the indirect purchase of capital goods, with the result that aggregate demand was equal to total income as an identity rather than as an equilibrium condition. Keynes takes note of this view in Chapter 2, where he finds it present in the early writings of Alfred Marshall but adds that "the doctrine is never stated to-day in this crude form".
The equation I (r ) = S (Y ) is accepted by Keynes for some or all of the following reasons:
As a consequence of the principle of effective demand, which asserts that aggregate demand must equal total income (Chapter 3).
As a consequence of the identity of saving with investment (Chapter 6) together with the equilibrium assumption that these quantities are equal to their demands.
In agreement with the substance of the classical theory of the investment funds market, whose conclusion he considers the classics to have misinterpreted through circular reasoning (Chapter 14).
The Keynesian multiplier
Keynes introduces his discussion of the multiplier in Chapter 10 with a reference to Kahn's earlier paper (see below). He designates Kahn's multiplier the "employment multiplier" in distinction to his own "investment multiplier" and says that the two are only "a little different". Kahn's multiplier has consequently been understood by much of the Keynesian literature as playing a major role in Keynes's own theory, an interpretation encouraged by the difficulty of understanding Keynes's presentation. Kahn's multiplier gives the title ("The multiplier model") to the account of Keynesian theory in Samuelson's Economics and is almost as prominent in Alvin Hansen's Guide to Keynes and in Joan Robinson's Introduction to the Theory of Employment.
Keynes states that there is ...
... a confusion between the logical theory of the multiplier, which holds good continuously, without time-lag ... and the consequence of an expansion in the capital goods industries which take gradual effect, subject to a time-lag, and only after an interval ...
and implies that he is adopting the former theory. And when the multiplier eventually emerges as a component of Keynes's theory (in Chapter 18) it turns out to be simply a measure of the change of one variable in response to a change in another. The schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital is identified as one of the independent variables of the economic system: "What [it] tells us, is ... the point to which the output of new investment will be pushed ..." The multiplier then gives "the ratio ... between an increment of investment and the corresponding increment of aggregate income".
G. L. S. Shackle regarded Keynes' move away from Kahn's multiplier as ...
... a retrograde step ... For when we look upon the Multiplier as an instantaneous functional relation ... we are merely using the word Multiplier to stand for an alternative way of looking at the marginal propensity to consume ...,
which G. M. Ambrosi cites as an instance of "a Keynesian commentator who would have liked Keynes to have written something less 'retrograde.
The value Keynes assigns to his multiplier is the reciprocal of the marginal propensity to save: k = 1 / S '(Y ). This is the same as the formula for Kahn's mutliplier in a closed economy assuming that all saving (including the purchase of durable goods), and not just hoarding, constitutes leakage. Keynes gave his formula almost the status of a definition (it is put forward in advance of any explanation). His multiplier is indeed the value of "the ratio ... between an increment of investment and the corresponding increment of aggregate income" as Keynes derived it from his Chapter 13 model of liquidity preference, which implies that income must bear the entire effect of a change in investment. But under his Chapter 15 model a change in the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital has an effect shared between the interest rate and income in proportions depending on the partial derivatives of the liquidity preference function. Keynes did not investigate the question of whether his formula for multiplier needed revision.
The liquidity trap
The liquidity trap is a phenomenon that may impede the effectiveness of monetary policies in reducing unemployment.
Economists generally think the rate of interest will not fall below a certain limit, often seen as zero or a slightly negative number. Keynes suggested that the limit might be appreciably greater than zero but did not attach much practical significance to it. The term "liquidity trap" was coined by Dennis Robertson in his comments on the General Theory, but it was John Hicks in "Mr. Keynes and the Classics" who recognised the significance of a slightly different concept.
If the economy is in a position such that the liquidity preference curve is almost vertical, as must happen as the lower limit on r is approached, then a change in the money supply M̂ makes almost no difference to the equilibrium rate of interest r̂ or, unless there is compensating steepness in the other curves, to the resulting income Ŷ. As Hicks put it, "Monetary means will not force down the rate of interest any further."
Paul Krugman has worked extensively on the liquidity trap, claiming that it was the problem confronting the Japanese economy around the turn of the millennium. In his later words:
Short-term interest rates were close to zero, long-term rates were at historical lows, yet private investment spending remained insufficient to bring the economy out of deflation. In that environment, monetary policy was just as ineffective as Keynes described. Attempts by the Bank of Japan to increase the money supply simply added to already ample bank reserves and public holdings of cash...
The IS–LM model
Hicks showed how to analyze Keynes' system when liquidity preference is a function of income as well as of the rate of interest. Keynes's admission of income as an influence on the demand for money is a step back in the direction of classical theory, and Hicks takes a further step in the same direction by generalizing the propensity to save to take both Y and r as arguments. Less classically he extends this generalization to the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital.
The IS-LM model uses two equations to express Keynes' model. The first, now written I (Y, r ) = S (Y,r ), expresses the principle of effective demand. We may construct a graph on (Y, r ) coordinates and draw a line connecting those points satisfying the equation: this is the IS curve. In the same way we can write the equation of equilibrium between liquidity preference and the money supply as L(Y ,r ) = M̂ and draw a second curve – the LM curve – connecting points that satisfy it. The equilibrium values Ŷ of total income and r̂ of interest rate are then given by the point of intersection of the two curves.
If we follow Keynes's initial account under which liquidity preference depends only on the interest rate r, then the LM curve is horizontal.
Joan Robinson commented that:
... modern teaching has been confused by J. R. Hicks' attempt to reduce the General Theory to a version of static equilibrium with the formula IS–LM. Hicks has now repented and changed his name from J. R. to John, but it will take a long time for the effects of his teaching to wear off.
Hicks subsequently relapsed.
Keynesian economic policies
Active fiscal policy
Keynes argued that the solution to the Great Depression was to stimulate the country ("incentive to invest") through some combination of two approaches:
A reduction in interest rates (monetary policy), and
Government investment in infrastructure (fiscal policy).
If the interest rate at which businesses and consumers can borrow decreases, investments that were previously uneconomic become profitable, and large consumer sales normally financed through debt (such as houses, automobiles, and, historically, even appliances like refrigerators) become more affordable. A principal function of central banks in countries that have them is to influence this interest rate through a variety of mechanisms collectively called monetary policy. This is how monetary policy that reduces interest rates is thought to stimulate economic activity, i.e., "grow the economy"—and why it is called expansionary monetary policy.
Expansionary fiscal policy consists of increasing net public spending, which the government can effect by a) taxing less, b) spending more, or c) both. Investment and consumption by government raises demand for businesses' products and for employment, reversing the effects of the aforementioned imbalance. If desired spending exceeds revenue, the government finances the difference by borrowing from capital markets by issuing government bonds. This is called deficit spending. Two points are important to note at this point. First, deficits are not required for expansionary fiscal policy, and second, it is only change in net spending that can stimulate or depress the economy. For example, if a government ran a deficit of 10% both last year and this year, this would represent neutral fiscal policy. In fact, if it ran a deficit of 10% last year and 5% this year, this would actually be contractionary. On the other hand, if the government ran a surplus of 10% of GDP last year and 5% this year, that would be expansionary fiscal policy, despite never running a deficit at all.
But – contrary to some critical characterizations of it – Keynesianism does not consist solely of deficit spending, since it recommends adjusting fiscal policies according to cyclical circumstances. An example of a counter-cyclical policy is raising taxes to cool the economy and to prevent inflation when there is abundant demand-side growth, and engaging in deficit spending on labour-intensive infrastructure projects to stimulate employment and stabilize wages during economic downturns.
Keynes's ideas influenced Franklin D. Roosevelt's view that insufficient buying-power caused the Depression. During his presidency, Roosevelt adopted some aspects of Keynesian economics, especially after 1937, when, in the depths of the Depression, the United States suffered from recession yet again following fiscal contraction. But to many the true success of Keynesian policy can be seen at the onset of World War II, which provided a kick to the world economy, removed uncertainty, and forced the rebuilding of destroyed capital. Keynesian ideas became almost official in social-democratic Europe after the war and in the U.S. in the 1960s.
The Keynesian advocacy of deficit spending contrasted with the classical and neoclassical economic analysis of fiscal policy. They admitted that fiscal stimulus could actuate production. But, to these schools, there was no reason to believe that this stimulation would outrun the side-effects that "crowd out" private investment: first, it would increase the demand for labour and raise wages, hurting profitability; Second, a government deficit increases the stock of government bonds, reducing their market price and encouraging high interest rates, making it more expensive for business to finance fixed investment. Thus, efforts to stimulate the economy would be self-defeating.
The Keynesian response is that such fiscal policy is appropriate only when unemployment is persistently high, above the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). In that case, crowding out is minimal. Further, private investment can be "crowded in": Fiscal stimulus raises the market for business output, raising cash flow and profitability, spurring business optimism. To Keynes, this accelerator effect meant that government and business could be complements rather than substitutes in this situation.
Second, as the stimulus occurs, gross domestic product rises—raising the amount of saving, helping to finance the increase in fixed investment. Finally, government outlays need not always be wasteful: government investment in public goods that is not provided by profit-seekers encourages the private sector's growth. That is, government spending on such things as basic research, public health, education, and infrastructure could help the long-term growth of potential output.
In Keynes's theory, there must be significant slack in the labour market before fiscal expansion is justified.
Keynesian economists believe that adding to profits and incomes during boom cycles through tax cuts, and removing income and profits from the economy through cuts in spending during downturns, tends to exacerbate the negative effects of the business cycle. This effect is especially pronounced when the government controls a large fraction of the economy, as increased tax revenue may aid investment in state enterprises in downturns, and decreased state revenue and investment harm those enterprises.
Views on trade imbalance
In the last few years of his life, John Maynard Keynes was much preoccupied with the question of balance in international trade. He was the leader of the British delegation to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in 1944 that established the Bretton Woods system of international currency management.
He was the principal author of a proposal – the so-called Keynes Plan – for an International Clearing Union. The two governing principles of the plan were that the problem of settling outstanding balances should be solved by 'creating' additional 'international money', and that debtor and creditor should be treated almost alike as disturbers of equilibrium. In the event, though, the plans were rejected, in part because "American opinion was naturally reluctant to accept the principle of equality of treatment so novel in debtor-creditor relationships".
The new system is not founded on free trade (liberalisation of foreign trade) but rather on regulating international trade to eliminate trade imbalances. Nations with a surplus would have a powerful incentive to get rid of it, which would automatically clear other nations' deficits. Keynes proposed a global bank that would issue its own currency—the bancor—which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange and would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country's trade deficit or trade surplus. Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union. He pointed out that surpluses lead to weak global aggregate demand – countries running surpluses exert a "negative externality" on trading partners, and posed far more than those in deficit, a threat to global prosperity. Keynes thought that surplus countries should be taxed to avoid trade imbalances.
In "National Self-Sufficiency" The Yale Review, Vol. 22, no. 4 (June 1933), he already highlighted the problems created by free trade.
His view, supported by many economists and commentators at the time, was that creditor nations may be just as responsible as debtor nations for disequilibrium in exchanges and that both should be under an obligation to bring trade back into a state of balance. Failure for them to do so could have serious consequences. In the words of Geoffrey Crowther, then editor of The Economist, "If the economic relationships between nations are not, by one means or another, brought fairly close to balance, then there is no set of financial arrangements that can rescue the world from the impoverishing results of chaos."
These ideas were informed by events prior to the Great Depression when – in the opinion of Keynes and others – international lending, primarily by the U.S., exceeded the capacity of sound investment and so got diverted into non-productive and speculative uses, which in turn invited default and a sudden stop to the process of lending.
Influenced by Keynes, economic texts in the immediate post-war period put a significant emphasis on balance in trade. For example, the second edition of the popular introductory textbook, An Outline of Money, devoted the last three of its ten chapters to questions of foreign exchange management and in particular the 'problem of balance'. However, in more recent years, since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, with the increasing influence of Monetarist schools of thought in the 1980s, and particularly in the face of large sustained trade imbalances, these concerns – and particularly concerns about the destabilising effects of large trade surpluses – have largely disappeared from mainstream economics discourse and Keynes' insights have slipped from view. They are receiving some attention again in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–08.
Views on free trade and protectionism
The turning point of the Great Depression
At the beginning of his career, Keynes was an economist close to Alfred Marshall, deeply convinced of the benefits of free trade. From the crisis of 1929 onwards, noting the commitment of the British authorities to defend the gold parity of the pound sterling and the rigidity of nominal wages, he gradually adhered to protectionist measures.
On 5 November 1929, when heard by the Macmillan Committee to bring the British economy out of the crisis, Keynes indicated that the introduction of tariffs on imports would help to rebalance the trade balance. The committee's report states in a section entitled "import control and export aid", that in an economy where there is not full employment, the introduction of tariffs can improve production and employment. Thus the reduction of the trade deficit favours the country's growth.
In January 1930, in the Economic Advisory Council, Keynes proposed the introduction of a system of protection to reduce imports. In the autumn of 1930, he proposed a uniform tariff of 10% on all imports and subsidies of the same rate for all exports. In the Treatise on Money, published in the autumn of 1930, he took up the idea of tariffs or other trade restrictions with the aim of reducing the volume of imports and rebalancing the balance of trade.
On 7 March 1931, in the New Statesman and Nation, he wrote an article entitled Proposal for a Tariff Revenue. He pointed out that the reduction of wages led to a reduction in national demand which constrained markets. Instead, he proposes the idea of an expansionary policy combined with a tariff system to neutralise the effects on the balance of trade. The application of customs tariffs seemed to him "unavoidable, whoever the Chancellor of the Exchequer might be".Thus, for Keynes, an economic recovery policy is only fully effective if the trade deficit is eliminated. He proposed a 15% tax on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and 5% on certain foodstuffs and raw materials, with others needed for exports exempted (wool, cotton).
In 1932, in an article entitled The Pro- and Anti-Tariffs, published in The Listener, he envisaged the protection of farmers and certain sectors such as the automobile and iron and steel industries, considering them indispensable to Britain.
The critique of the theory of comparative advantage
In the post-crisis situation of 1929, Keynes judged the assumptions of the free trade model unrealistic. He criticised, for example, the neoclassical assumption of wage adjustment.
As early as 1930, in a note to the Economic Advisory Council, he doubted the intensity of the gain from specialisation in the case of manufactured goods. While participating in the MacMillan Committee, he admitted that he no longer "believed in a very high degree of national specialisation" and refused to "abandon any industry which is unable, for the moment, to survive". He also criticised the static dimension of the theory of comparative advantage, which, in his view, by fixing comparative advantages definitively, led in practice to a waste of national resources.
In the Daily Mail of 13 March 1931, he called the assumption of perfect sectoral labour mobility "nonsense" since it states that a person made unemployed contributes to a reduction in the wage rate until he finds a job. But for Keynes, this change of job may involve costs (job search, training) and is not always possible. Generally speaking, for Keynes, the assumptions of full employment and automatic return to equilibrium discredit the theory of comparative advantage.
In July 1933, he published an article in the New Statesman and Nation entitled National Self-Sufficiency, in which he criticised the argument of the specialisation of economies, which is the basis of free trade. He thus proposed the search for a certain degree of self-sufficiency. Instead of the specialisation of economies advocated by the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, he prefers the maintenance of a diversity of activities for nations. In it he refutes the principle of peacemaking trade. His vision of trade became that of a system where foreign capitalists compete for new markets. He defends the idea of producing on national soil when possible and reasonable and expresses sympathy for the advocates of protectionism.
He notes in National Self-Sufficiency:
He also writes in National Self-Sufficiency:
Later, Keynes had a written correspondence with James Meade centred on the issue of import restrictions. Keynes and Meade discussed the best choice between quota and tariff. In March 1944 Keynes began a discussion with Marcus Fleming after the latter had written an article entitled Quotas versus depreciation. On this occasion, we see that he has definitely taken a protectionist stance after the Great Depression. He considered that quotas could be more effective than currency depreciation in dealing with external imbalances. Thus, for Keynes, currency depreciation was no longer sufficient, and protectionist measures became necessary to avoid trade deficits. To avoid the return of crises due to a self-regulating economic system, it seemed essential to him to regulate trade and stop free trade (deregulation of foreign trade).
He points out that countries that import more than they export weaken their economies. When the trade deficit increases, unemployment rises and GDP slows down. And surplus countries exert a "negative externality" on their trading partners. They get richer at the expense of others and destroy the output of their trading partners. John Maynard Keynes believed that the products of surplus countries should be taxed to avoid trade imbalances. Thus he no longer believes in the theory of comparative advantage (on which free trade is based) which states that the trade deficit does not matter, since trade is mutually beneficial.
This also explains his desire to replace the liberalisation of international trade (Free Trade) with a regulatory system aimed at eliminating trade imbalances in his proposals for the Bretton Woods Agreement.
Postwar Keynesianism
Keynes's ideas became widely accepted after World War II, and until the early 1970s, Keynesian economics provided the main inspiration for economic policy makers in Western industrialized countries. Governments prepared high quality economic statistics on an ongoing basis and tried to base their policies on the Keynesian theory that had become the norm. In the early era of social liberalism and social democracy, most western capitalist countries enjoyed low, stable unemployment and modest inflation, an era called the Golden Age of Capitalism.
In terms of policy, the twin tools of post-war Keynesian economics were fiscal policy and monetary policy. While these are credited to Keynes, others, such as economic historian David Colander, argue that they are, rather, due to the interpretation of Keynes by Abba Lerner in his theory of functional finance, and should instead be called "Lernerian" rather than "Keynesian".
Through the 1950s, moderate degrees of government demand leading industrial development, and use of fiscal and monetary counter-cyclical policies continued, and reached a peak in the "go go" 1960s, where it seemed to many Keynesians that prosperity was now permanent. In 1971, Republican US President Richard Nixon even proclaimed "I am now a Keynesian in economics."
Beginning in the late 1960s, a new classical macroeconomics movement arose, critical of Keynesian assumptions (see sticky prices), and seemed, especially in the 1970s, to explain certain phenomena better. It was characterized by explicit and rigorous adherence to microfoundations, as well as use of increasingly sophisticated mathematical modelling.
With the oil shock of 1973, and the economic problems of the 1970s, Keynesian economics began to fall out of favour. During this time, many economies experienced high and rising unemployment, coupled with high and rising inflation, contradicting the Phillips curve's prediction. This stagflation meant that the simultaneous application of expansionary (anti-recession) and contractionary (anti-inflation) policies appeared necessary. This dilemma led to the end of the Keynesian near-consensus of the 1960s, and the rise throughout the 1970s of ideas based upon more classical analysis, including monetarism, supply-side economics, and new classical economics.
However, by the late 1980s, certain failures of the new classical models, both theoretical (see Real business cycle theory) and empirical (see the "Volcker recession") hastened the emergence of New Keynesian economics, a school that sought to unite the most realistic aspects of Keynesian and neo-classical assumptions and place them on more rigorous theoretical foundation than ever before.
One line of thinking, utilized also as a critique of the notably high unemployment and potentially disappointing GNP growth rates associated with the new classical models by the mid-1980s, was to emphasize low unemployment and maximal economic growth at the cost of somewhat higher inflation (its consequences kept in check by indexing and other methods, and its overall rate kept lower and steadier by such potential policies as Martin Weitzman's share economy).
Schools
Multiple schools of economic thought that trace their legacy to Keynes currently exist, the notable ones being neo-Keynesian economics, New Keynesian economics, post-Keynesian economics, and the new neoclassical synthesis. Keynes's biographer Robert Skidelsky writes that the post-Keynesian school has remained closest to the spirit of Keynes's work in following his monetary theory and rejecting the neutrality of money. Today these ideas, regardless of provenance, are referred to in academia under the rubric of "Keynesian economics", due to Keynes's role in consolidating, elaborating, and popularizing them.
In the postwar era, Keynesian analysis was combined with neoclassical economics to produce what is generally termed the "neoclassical synthesis", yielding neo-Keynesian economics, which dominated mainstream macroeconomic thought. Though it was widely held that there was no strong automatic tendency to full employment, many believed that if government policy were used to ensure it, the economy would behave as neoclassical theory predicted. This post-war domination by neo-Keynesian economics was broken during the stagflation of the 1970s. There was a lack of consensus among macroeconomists in the 1980s, and during this period New Keynesian economics was developed, ultimately becoming- along with new classical macroeconomics- a part of the current consensus, known as the new neoclassical synthesis.
Post-Keynesian economists, on the other hand, reject the neoclassical synthesis and, in general, neoclassical economics applied to the macroeconomy. Post-Keynesian economics is a heterodox school that holds that both neo-Keynesian economics and New Keynesian economics are incorrect, and a misinterpretation of Keynes's ideas. The post-Keynesian school encompasses a variety of perspectives, but has been far less influential than the other more mainstream Keynesian schools.
Interpretations of Keynes have emphasized his stress on the international coordination of Keynesian policies, the need for international economic institutions, and the ways in which economic forces could lead to war or could promote peace.
Keynesianism and liberalism
In a 2014 paper, economist Alan Blinder argues that, "for not very good reasons," public opinion in the United States has associated Keynesianism with liberalism, and he states that such is incorrect. For example, both Presidents Ronald Reagan (1981–89) and George W. Bush (2001–09) supported policies that were, in fact, Keynesian, even though both men were conservative leaders. And tax cuts can provide highly helpful fiscal stimulus during a recession, just as much as infrastructure spending can. Blinder concludes, "If you are not teaching your students that 'Keynesianism' is neither conservative nor liberal, you should be."
Other schools of macroeconomic thought
The Keynesian schools of economics are situated alongside a number of other schools that have the same perspectives on what the economic issues are, but differ on what causes them and how best to resolve them. Today, most of these schools of thought have been subsumed into modern macroeconomic theory.
Stockholm School
The Stockholm school rose to prominence at about the same time that Keynes published his General Theory and shared a common concern in business cycles and unemployment. The second generation of Swedish economists also advocated government intervention through spending during economic downturns although opinions are divided over whether they conceived the essence of Keynes's theory before he did.
Monetarism
There was debate between monetarists and Keynesians in the 1960s over the role of government in stabilizing the economy. Both monetarists and Keynesians agree that issues such as business cycles, unemployment, and deflation are caused by inadequate demand. However, they had fundamentally different perspectives on the capacity of the economy to find its own equilibrium, and the degree of government intervention that would be appropriate. Keynesians emphasized the use of discretionary fiscal policy and monetary policy, while monetarists argued the primacy of monetary policy, and that it should be rules-based.
The debate was largely resolved in the 1980s. Since then, economists have largely agreed that central banks should bear the primary responsibility for stabilizing the economy, and that monetary policy should largely follow the Taylor rule – which many economists credit with the Great Moderation. The financial crisis of 2007–08, however, has convinced many economists and governments of the need for fiscal interventions and highlighted the difficulty in stimulating economies through monetary policy alone during a liquidity trap.
Marxian economics
Some Marxist economists criticized Keynesian economics. For example, in his 1946 appraisal Paul Sweezy—while admitting that there was much in the General Theory'''s analysis of effective demand that Marxists could draw on—described Keynes as a prisoner of his neoclassical upbringing. Sweezy argued that Keynes had never been able to view the capitalist system as a totality. He argued that Keynes regarded the class struggle carelessly, and overlooked the class role of the capitalist state, which he treated as a deus ex machina, and some other points.
While Michał Kalecki was generally enthusiastic about the Keynesian revolution, he predicted that it would not endure, in his article "Political Aspects of Full Employment". In the article Kalecki predicted that the full employment delivered by Keynesian policy would eventually lead to a more assertive working class and weakening of the social position of business leaders, causing the elite to use their political power to force the displacement of the Keynesian policy even though profits would be higher than under a laissez faire system: The erosion of social prestige and political power would be unacceptable to the elites despite higher profits.
Public choice
James M. Buchanan criticized Keynesian economics on the grounds that governments would in practice be unlikely to implement theoretically optimal policies. The implicit assumption underlying the Keynesian fiscal revolution, according to Buchanan, was that economic policy would be made by wise men, acting without regard to political pressures or opportunities, and guided by disinterested economic technocrats. He argued that this was an unrealistic assumption about political, bureaucratic and electoral behaviour. Buchanan blamed Keynesian economics for what he considered a decline in America's fiscal discipline. Buchanan argued that deficit spending would evolve into a permanent disconnect between spending and revenue, precisely because it brings short-term gains, so, ending up institutionalizing irresponsibility in the federal government, the largest and most central institution in our society.
Martin Feldstein argues that the legacy of Keynesian economics–the misdiagnosis of unemployment, the fear of saving, and the unjustified government intervention–affected the fundamental ideas of policy makers.
Milton Friedman thought that Keynes's political bequest was harmful for two reasons. First, he thought whatever the economic analysis, benevolent dictatorship is likely sooner or later to lead to a totalitarian society. Second, he thought Keynes's economic theories appealed to a group far broader than economists primarily because of their link to his political approach.
Alex Tabarrok argues that Keynesian politics–as distinct from Keynesian policies–has failed pretty much whenever it's been tried, at least in liberal democracies.
In response to this argument, John Quiggin, wrote about these theories' implication for a liberal democratic order. He thought that if it is generally accepted that democratic politics is nothing more than a battleground for competing interest groups, then reality will come to resemble the model.
Paul Krugman wrote "I don’t think we need to take that as an immutable fact of life; but still, what are the alternatives?"
Daniel Kuehn, criticized James M. Buchanan. He argued, "if you have a problem with politicians – criticize politicians," not Keynes. He also argued that empirical evidence makes it pretty clear that Buchanan was wrong.Daniel Kuehn, The Significance of James Buchanan
James Tobin argued, if advising government officials, politicians, voters, it's not for economists to play games with them.
Keynes implicitly rejected this argument, in "soon or late it is ideas not vested interests which are dangerous for good or evil."
Brad DeLong has argued that politics is the main motivator behind objections to the view that government should try to serve a stabilizing macroeconomic role. Paul Krugman argued that a regime that by and large lets markets work, but in which the government is ready both to rein in excesses and fight slumps is inherently unstable, due to intellectual instability, political instability, and financial instability.
New classical
Another influential school of thought was based on the Lucas critique of Keynesian economics. This called for greater consistency with microeconomic theory based on rational choice theory, and in particular emphasized the idea of rational expectations. Lucas and others argued that Keynesian economics required remarkably foolish and short-sighted behaviour from people, which totally contradicted the economic understanding of their behaviour at a micro level. New classical economics introduced a set of macroeconomic theories that were based on optimizing microeconomic behaviour. These models have been developed into the real business-cycle theory, which argues that business cycle fluctuations can to a large extent be accounted for by real (in contrast to nominal) shocks.
Beginning in the late 1950s new classical macroeconomists began to disagree with the methodology employed by Keynes and his successors. Keynesians emphasized the dependence of consumption on disposable income and, also, of investment on current profits and current cash flow. In addition, Keynesians posited a Phillips curve that tied nominal wage inflation to unemployment rate. To support these theories, Keynesians typically traced the logical foundations of their model (using introspection) and supported their assumptions with statistical evidence. New classical theorists demanded that macroeconomics be grounded on the same foundations as microeconomic theory, profit-maximizing firms and rational, utility-maximizing consumers.
The result of this shift in methodology produced several important divergences from Keynesian macroeconomics:
Independence of consumption and current income (life-cycle permanent income hypothesis)
Irrelevance of current profits to investment (Modigliani–Miller theorem)
Long run independence of inflation and unemployment (natural rate of unemployment)
The inability of monetary policy to stabilize output (rational expectations)
Irrelevance of taxes and budget deficits to consumption (Ricardian equivalence)
See also
Adam Smith
Consumerism
Crisis theory
Economic theories
Game theory
Invisible hand
Job guarantee
Pareto principle
References
Further reading
Thorough and entertaining intellectual history.
Study of the evolution of Keynes's ideas.
A thorough and thoughtful reader's guide.
A useful collection of critical reviews.
Contains "Mr Keynes and the classics" and other essays relating to Keynes.
Lectures and discussion from a colloquium in 1978.
Keynes, John Maynard (Feb. 1937). "Reply to Viner". Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 209–223. A valuable paper, in which Keynes restates many of his ideas in the light of criticisms. It has no agreed title and is also known as The General Theory of Employment or as the 1937 QJE paper.
Edited by Sir Austin Robinson and Donald Moggridge. Vol VII is the General Theory ; Vols XIII and XIV contain writings on its preparation, defence and development.
Markwell, Donald, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006.
Not easily obtainable. Vol 3 contains reviews of the General Theory.
Stein, Herbert. "Tax cut in Camelot." Trans-action (1969) 6: 38–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02806371Society excerpt
Stein, Herbert. The fiscal revolution in America'' (1969) Online free to borrow
External links
"We are all Keynesians now" – Historic article from Time magazine, 1965
John Maynard Keynes
Eponymous economic ideologies
Schools of economic thought
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17327 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic%20energy | Kinetic energy | In physics, the kinetic energy of an object is the energy that it possesses due to its motion.
It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless its speed changes. The same amount of work is done by the body when decelerating from its current speed to a state of rest. Formally, a kinetic energy is any term in a system's Lagrangian which includes a derivative with respect to time.
In classical mechanics, the kinetic energy of a non-rotating object of mass m traveling at a speed v is . In relativistic mechanics, this is a good approximation only when v is much less than the speed of light.
The standard unit of kinetic energy is the joule, while the English unit of kinetic energy is the foot-pound.
History and etymology
The adjective kinetic has its roots in the Greek word κίνησις kinesis, meaning "motion". The dichotomy between kinetic energy and potential energy can be traced back to Aristotle's concepts of actuality and potentiality.
The principle in classical mechanics that E ∝ mv2 was first developed by Gottfried Leibniz and Johann Bernoulli, who described kinetic energy as the living force, vis viva. Willem 's Gravesande of the Netherlands provided experimental evidence of this relationship. By dropping weights from different heights into a block of clay, Willem 's Gravesande determined that their penetration depth was proportional to the square of their impact speed. Émilie du Châtelet recognized the implications of the experiment and published an explanation.
The terms kinetic energy and work in their present scientific meanings date back to the mid-19th century. Early understandings of these ideas can be attributed to Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, who in 1829 published the paper titled Du Calcul de l'Effet des Machines outlining the mathematics of kinetic energy. William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, is given the credit for coining the term "kinetic energy" c. 1849–1851. Rankine, who had introduced the term "potential energy" in 1853, and the phrase "actual energy" to complement it, later cites William Thomson and Peter Tait as substituting the word "kinetic" for "actual".
Overview
Energy occurs in many forms, including chemical energy, thermal energy, electromagnetic radiation, gravitational energy, electric energy, elastic energy, nuclear energy, and rest energy. These can be categorized in two main classes: potential energy and kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is the movement energy of an object. Kinetic energy can be transferred between objects and transformed into other kinds of energy.
Kinetic energy may be best understood by examples that demonstrate how it is transformed to and from other forms of energy. For example, a cyclist uses chemical energy provided by food to accelerate a bicycle to a chosen speed. On a level surface, this speed can be maintained without further work, except to overcome air resistance and friction. The chemical energy has been converted into kinetic energy, the energy of motion, but the process is not completely efficient and produces heat within the cyclist.
The kinetic energy in the moving cyclist and the bicycle can be converted to other forms. For example, the cyclist could encounter a hill just high enough to coast up, so that the bicycle comes to a complete halt at the top. The kinetic energy has now largely been converted to gravitational potential energy that can be released by freewheeling down the other side of the hill. Since the bicycle lost some of its energy to friction, it never regains all of its speed without additional pedaling. The energy is not destroyed; it has only been converted to another form by friction. Alternatively, the cyclist could connect a dynamo to one of the wheels and generate some electrical energy on the descent. The bicycle would be traveling slower at the bottom of the hill than without the generator because some of the energy has been diverted into electrical energy. Another possibility would be for the cyclist to apply the brakes, in which case the kinetic energy would be dissipated through friction as heat.
Like any physical quantity that is a function of velocity, the kinetic energy of an object depends on the relationship between the object and the observer's frame of reference. Thus, the kinetic energy of an object is not invariant.
Spacecraft use chemical energy to launch and gain considerable kinetic energy to reach orbital velocity. In an entirely circular orbit, this kinetic energy remains constant because there is almost no friction in near-earth space. However, it becomes apparent at re-entry when some of the kinetic energy is converted to heat. If the orbit is elliptical or hyperbolic, then throughout the orbit kinetic and potential energy are exchanged; kinetic energy is greatest and potential energy lowest at closest approach to the earth or other massive body, while potential energy is greatest and kinetic energy the lowest at maximum distance. Disregarding loss or gain however, the sum of the kinetic and potential energy remains constant.
Kinetic energy can be passed from one object to another. In the game of billiards, the player imposes kinetic energy on the cue ball by striking it with the cue stick. If the cue ball collides with another ball, it slows down dramatically, and the ball it hit accelerates its speed as the kinetic energy is passed on to it. Collisions in billiards are effectively elastic collisions, in which kinetic energy is preserved. In inelastic collisions, kinetic energy is dissipated in various forms of energy, such as heat, sound and binding energy (breaking bound structures).
Flywheels have been developed as a method of energy storage. This illustrates that kinetic energy is also stored in rotational motion.
Several mathematical descriptions of kinetic energy exist that describe it in the appropriate physical situation. For objects and processes in common human experience, the formula ½mv² given by Newtonian (classical) mechanics is suitable. However, if the speed of the object is comparable to the speed of light, relativistic effects become significant and the relativistic formula is used. If the object is on the atomic or sub-atomic scale, quantum mechanical effects are significant, and a quantum mechanical model must be employed.
Newtonian kinetic energy
Kinetic energy of rigid bodies
In classical mechanics, the kinetic energy of a point object (an object so small that its mass can be assumed to exist at one point), or a non-rotating rigid body depends on the mass of the body as well as its speed. The kinetic energy is equal to 1/2 the product of the mass and the square of the speed. In formula form:
where is the mass and is the speed (magnitude of the velocity) of the body. In SI units, mass is measured in kilograms, speed in metres per second, and the resulting kinetic energy is in joules.
For example, one would calculate the kinetic energy of an 80 kg mass (about 180 lbs) traveling at 18 metres per second (about 40 mph, or 65 km/h) as
When a person throws a ball, the person does work on it to give it speed as it leaves the hand. The moving ball can then hit something and push it, doing work on what it hits. The kinetic energy of a moving object is equal to the work required to bring it from rest to that speed, or the work the object can do while being brought to rest: net force × displacement = kinetic energy, i.e.,
Since the kinetic energy increases with the square of the speed, an object doubling its speed has four times as much kinetic energy. For example, a car traveling twice as fast as another requires four times as much distance to stop, assuming a constant braking force. As a consequence of this quadrupling, it takes four times the work to double the speed.
The kinetic energy of an object is related to its momentum by the equation:
where:
is momentum
is mass of the body
For the translational kinetic energy, that is the kinetic energy associated with rectilinear motion, of a rigid body with constant mass , whose center of mass is moving in a straight line with speed , as seen above is equal to
where:
is the mass of the body
is the speed of the center of mass of the body.
The kinetic energy of any entity depends on the reference frame in which it is measured. However, the total energy of an isolated system, i.e. one in which energy can neither enter nor leave, does not change over time in the reference frame in which it is measured. Thus, the chemical energy converted to kinetic energy by a rocket engine is divided differently between the rocket ship and its exhaust stream depending upon the chosen reference frame. This is called the Oberth effect. But the total energy of the system, including kinetic energy, fuel chemical energy, heat, etc., is conserved over time, regardless of the choice of reference frame. Different observers moving with different reference frames would however disagree on the value of this conserved energy.
The kinetic energy of such systems depends on the choice of reference frame: the reference frame that gives the minimum value of that energy is the center of momentum frame, i.e. the reference frame in which the total momentum of the system is zero. This minimum kinetic energy contributes to the invariant mass of the system as a whole.
Derivation
Without vectors and calculus
The work W done by a force F on an object over a distance s parallel to F equals
.
Using Newton's Second Law
with m the mass and a the acceleration of the object and
the distance traveled by the accelerated object in time t, we find with for the velocity v of the object
With vectors and calculus
The work done in accelerating a particle with mass m during the infinitesimal time interval dt is given by the dot product of force F and the infinitesimal displacement dx
where we have assumed the relationship p = m v and the validity of Newton's Second Law. (However, also see the special relativistic derivation below.)
Applying the product rule we see that:
Therefore, (assuming constant mass so that dm = 0), we have,
Since this is a total differential (that is, it only depends on the final state, not how the particle got there), we can integrate it and call the result kinetic energy. Assuming the object was at rest at time 0, we integrate from time 0 to time t because the work done by the force to bring the object from rest to velocity v is equal to the work necessary to do the reverse:
This equation states that the kinetic energy (Ek) is equal to the integral of the dot product of the velocity (v) of a body and the infinitesimal change of the body's momentum (p). It is assumed that the body starts with no kinetic energy when it is at rest (motionless).
Rotating bodies
If a rigid body Q is rotating about any line through the center of mass then it has rotational kinetic energy () which is simply the sum of the kinetic energies of its moving parts, and is thus given by:
where:
ω is the body's angular velocity
r is the distance of any mass dm from that line
is the body's moment of inertia, equal to .
(In this equation the moment of inertia must be taken about an axis through the center of mass and the rotation measured by ω must be around that axis; more general equations exist for systems where the object is subject to wobble due to its eccentric shape).
Kinetic energy of systems
A system of bodies may have internal kinetic energy due to the relative motion of the bodies in the system. For example, in the Solar System the planets and planetoids are orbiting the Sun. In a tank of gas, the molecules are moving in all directions. The kinetic energy of the system is the sum of the kinetic energies of the bodies it contains.
A macroscopic body that is stationary (i.e. a reference frame has been chosen to correspond to the body's center of momentum) may have various kinds of internal energy at the molecular or atomic level, which may be regarded as kinetic energy, due to molecular translation, rotation, and vibration, electron translation and spin, and nuclear spin. These all contribute to the body's mass, as provided by the special theory of relativity. When discussing movements of a macroscopic body, the kinetic energy referred to is usually that of the macroscopic movement only. However, all internal energies of all types contribute to a body's mass, inertia, and total energy.
Fluid dynamics
In fluid dynamics, the kinetic energy per unit volume at each point in an incompressible fluid flow field is called the dynamic pressure at that point.
Dividing by V, the unit of volume:
where is the dynamic pressure, and ρ is the density of the incompressible fluid.
Frame of reference
The speed, and thus the kinetic energy of a single object is frame-dependent (relative): it can take any non-negative value, by choosing a suitable inertial frame of reference. For example, a bullet passing an observer has kinetic energy in the reference frame of this observer. The same bullet is stationary to an observer moving with the same velocity as the bullet, and so has zero kinetic energy. By contrast, the total kinetic energy of a system of objects cannot be reduced to zero by a suitable choice of the inertial reference frame, unless all the objects have the same velocity. In any other case, the total kinetic energy has a non-zero minimum, as no inertial reference frame can be chosen in which all the objects are stationary. This minimum kinetic energy contributes to the system's invariant mass, which is independent of the reference frame.
The total kinetic energy of a system depends on the inertial frame of reference: it is the sum of the total kinetic energy in a center of momentum frame and the kinetic energy the total mass would have if it were concentrated in the center of mass.
This may be simply shown: let be the relative velocity of the center of mass frame i in the frame k. Since
Then,
However, let the kinetic energy in the center of mass frame, would be simply the total momentum that is by definition zero in the center of mass frame, and let the total mass: . Substituting, we get:
Thus the kinetic energy of a system is lowest to center of momentum reference frames, i.e., frames of reference in which the center of mass is stationary (either the center of mass frame or any other center of momentum frame). In any different frame of reference, there is additional kinetic energy corresponding to the total mass moving at the speed of the center of mass. The kinetic energy of the system in the center of momentum frame is a quantity that is invariant (all observers see it to be the same).
Rotation in systems
It sometimes is convenient to split the total kinetic energy of a body into the sum of the body's center-of-mass translational kinetic energy and the energy of rotation around the center of mass (rotational energy):
where:
Ek is the total kinetic energy
Et is the translational kinetic energy
Er is the rotational energy or angular kinetic energy in the rest frame
Thus the kinetic energy of a tennis ball in flight is the kinetic energy due to its rotation, plus the kinetic energy due to its translation.
Relativistic kinetic energy of rigid bodies
If a body's speed is a significant fraction of the speed of light, it is necessary to use relativistic mechanics to calculate its kinetic energy. In special relativity theory, the expression for linear momentum is modified.
With m being an object's rest mass, v and v its velocity and speed, and c the speed of light in vacuum, we use the expression for linear momentum , where .
Integrating by parts yields
Since ,
is a constant of integration for the indefinite integral.
Simplifying the expression we obtain
is found by observing that when and , giving
resulting in the formula
This formula shows that the work expended accelerating an object from rest approaches infinity as the velocity approaches the speed of light. Thus it is impossible to accelerate an object across this boundary.
The mathematical by-product of this calculation is the mass-energy equivalence formula—the body at rest must have energy content
At a low speed (v ≪ c), the relativistic kinetic energy is approximated well by the classical kinetic energy. This is done by binomial approximation or by taking the first two terms of the Taylor expansion for the reciprocal square root:
So, the total energy can be partitioned into the rest mass energy plus the Newtonian kinetic energy at low speeds.
When objects move at a speed much slower than light (e.g. in everyday phenomena on Earth), the first two terms of the series predominate. The next term in the Taylor series approximation
is small for low speeds. For example, for a speed of the correction to the Newtonian kinetic energy is 0.0417 J/kg (on a Newtonian kinetic energy of 50 MJ/kg) and for a speed of 100 km/s it is 417 J/kg (on a Newtonian kinetic energy of 5 GJ/kg).
The relativistic relation between kinetic energy and momentum is given by
This can also be expanded as a Taylor series, the first term of which is the simple expression from Newtonian mechanics:
This suggests that the formulae for energy and momentum are not special and axiomatic, but concepts emerging from the equivalence of mass and energy and the principles of relativity.
General relativity
Using the convention that
where the four-velocity of a particle is
and is the proper time of the particle, there is also an expression for the kinetic energy of the particle in general relativity.
If the particle has momentum
as it passes by an observer with four-velocity uobs, then the expression for total energy of the particle as observed (measured in a local inertial frame) is
and the kinetic energy can be expressed as the total energy minus the rest energy:
Consider the case of a metric that is diagonal and spatially isotropic (gtt, gss, gss, gss). Since
where vα is the ordinary velocity measured w.r.t. the coordinate system, we get
Solving for ut gives
Thus for a stationary observer (v = 0)
and thus the kinetic energy takes the form
Factoring out the rest energy gives:
This expression reduces to the special relativistic case for the flat-space metric where
In the Newtonian approximation to general relativity
where Φ is the Newtonian gravitational potential. This means clocks run slower and measuring rods are shorter near massive bodies.
Kinetic energy in quantum mechanics
In quantum mechanics, observables like kinetic energy are represented as operators. For one particle of mass m, the kinetic energy operator appears as a term in the Hamiltonian and is defined in terms of the more fundamental momentum operator . The kinetic energy operator in the non-relativistic case can be written as
Notice that this can be obtained by replacing by in the classical expression for kinetic energy in terms of momentum,
In the Schrödinger picture, takes the form where the derivative is taken with respect to position coordinates and hence
The expectation value of the electron kinetic energy, , for a system of N electrons described by the wavefunction is a sum of 1-electron operator expectation values:
where is the mass of the electron and is the Laplacian operator acting upon the coordinates of the ith electron and the summation runs over all electrons.
The density functional formalism of quantum mechanics requires knowledge of the electron density only, i.e., it formally does not require knowledge of the wavefunction. Given an electron density , the exact N-electron kinetic energy functional is unknown; however, for the specific case of a 1-electron system, the kinetic energy can be written as
where is known as the von Weizsäcker kinetic energy functional.
See also
Escape velocity
Foot-pound
Joule
Kinetic energy penetrator
Kinetic energy per unit mass of projectiles
Kinetic projectile
Parallel axis theorem
Potential energy
Recoil
Notes
References
Oxford Dictionary 1998
External links
Dynamics (mechanics)
Forms of energy | [
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17330 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s%20Royal%20Rifle%20Corps | King's Royal Rifle Corps | The King's Royal Rifle Corps was an infantry rifle regiment of the British Army that was originally raised in British North America as the Royal American Regiment during the phase of the Seven Years' War in North America known in the United States as 'The French and Indian War.' Subsequently numbered the 60th Regiment of Foot, the regiment served for more than 200 years throughout the British Empire. In 1958, the regiment joined the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and the Rifle Brigade in the Green Jackets Brigade and in 1966 the three regiments were formally amalgamated to become the Royal Green Jackets. The KRRC became the 2nd Battalion, Royal Green Jackets. On the disbandment of the 1st Battalion, Royal Green Jackets in 1992, the RGJ's KRRC battalion was redesignated as the 1st Battalion, Royal Green Jackets, eventually becoming 2nd Battalion, The Rifles in 2007.
History
French and Indian War
The King's Royal Rifle Corps was raised in the American colonies in 1756 as the 62nd (Royal American) Regiment to defend the thirteen colonies against attack by the French and their Native American allies. After Braddock's defeat in 1755, royal approval for a new regiment, as well as funds, were granted by parliament just before Christmas 1755 – hence the regiment's traditional birthday of Christmas Day. However, parliamentary delays meant that it was 4 March 1756 before a special act of parliament created four battalions of 1,000 men each to include foreigners for service in the Americas.
A regimental history compiled in 1879 states that, in November 1755, Parliament voted the sum of £81,000 for the purpose of raising a regiment of four battalions, each one thousand strong, for service in British North America. To provide experienced personnel, Parliament passed the Commissions to Foreign Protestants Act 1756 (29 Geo. 2 c. 5) The Earl of Loudoun, who as commander-in-chief of the Forces in North America, was appointed colonel-in-chief of the regiment. About fifty officers' commissions were given to Germans and Swiss, and none were allowed to rise above the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
According to a modern history of the regiment, the idea for creating this unique force was proposed by Jacques Prevost, a Swiss soldier and adventurer who was a friend of the Duke of Cumberland (the Duke was the King's second son and also Commander-in-Chief of the Forces). Prevost recognised the need for soldiers who understood forest warfare, unlike the regulars who were brought to America in 1755 by General Edward Braddock.
The regiment was intended to combine the characteristics of a colonial corps with those of a foreign legion. Swiss and German forest fighting experts, American colonists and British volunteers from other British regiments were recruited. These men were Protestants, an important consideration for fighting against the predominantly Catholic French. The officers were also recruited from Europe – not from the American colonies – and consisted of English, Scots, Irish, Dutch, Swiss and Germans. It was the first time foreign officers were commissioned as British Army officers. In total, the regiment consisted of 101 officers, 240 non-commissioned officers and 4,160 enlisted men. The battalions were raised on Governors Island, New York. The regiment was renumbered the 60th (Royal American) Regiment in February 1757 when the 50th (Shirley's) and 51st (Pepperrell's) foot regiments were removed from the British Army roll after their surrender at Fort Oswego.
Among the distinguished foreign officers given commissions in the 60th (Royal Americans) was Henry Bouquet, a Swiss citizen, whose forward-looking ideas on tactics, training and man-management (including the unofficial introduction of the rifle and more practical clothing suited to bush-fighting) would come to be accepted as standard in the British Army many years in the future. Bouquet was commanding officer of the 1st battalion, and with his fellow battalion commanders, worked to form units that were better suited to warfare in the forests and lakes of northeast America.
Elements of the new regiment fought at Louisbourg in June 1758, the Cape Sable Campaign in September 1758 and Quebec in September 1759, and finally the Montreal Campaign from July to September 1760 which finally wrested Canada from France. At Quebec General James Wolfe is said to have granted the 60th the motto (Swift and Bold). To reward and maintain their service and loyalty, Parliament passed the American Protestant Soldier Naturalization Act 1762 (2 Geo. 3 c. 25), which offered British naturalization to those officers, engineers and soldiers who had or would serve for two years, with certain conditions and on the model of the Plantation Act 1740.
These earlier engagements were conventional battles on the European model, but fighting during Pontiac's War in 1763 was of a very different character. The frontier war threatened the British control of North America. The new regiment at first lost several outlying garrisons such as Fort Michilimackinac, later a detachment fought under Bouquet's leadership at the victory of Bushy Run in August 1763.
The 60th was uniformed and equipped in a similar manner to other British regiments with red coats and cocked hats or grenadier caps, but on campaign, swords were replaced with hatchets, and coats and hats cut down for ease of movement in the woods.
American Revolutionary War
Two additional battalions of the regiment (the 3rd and 4th battalions) were raised in England in 1775, principally of men recruited from England and Hanover in 1775 for service in the American Revolutionary War. After assembly in the Isle of Wight, both battalions were sent in 1776 to Florida where they were joined by detachments from 1st and 2nd Battalions.
These battalions were deployed to Georgia and were involved in skirmishes at Sudbury in January 1779, the Battle of Briar Creek in March 1779, the Siege of Savannah in October 1779 where elements from the 4th Battalion captured the Colour of the 2nd South Carolina Regiment, and at Augusta in September 1780. The 3rd and 4th battalions were disbanded in June 1783.
Napoleonic Wars
During the Napoleonic Wars, the regiment saw action in the Peninsular War. The first four battalions had been raised as regular line battalions, but in 1797 a 5th battalion had been raised on Barbados, with additional companies formed on the Isle of Wight, and equipped entirely with rifles. The troops of the 5th battalion were so effective that Sir Arthur Wellesley recommended their use to the divisional commanders describing them as the "most useful, active and brave troops in the field".
A 7th battalion was raised specifically for service in the American War of 1812.
Anglo-Egyptian War and Second Boer War
After the Napoleonic Wars, the regiment received a new title: first, in 1815, its name was changed to The Duke of York's Own Rifle Corps and then, in 1830, to the King's Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC). In 1858, the Rifle Depot at Winchester was made their headquarters. The regiment served in the Anglo-Egyptian War in 1882. During the rest of the 1800s, the unit also was active in China, Canada (Wolseley expedition), Afghanistan, India, Burma and South Africa. The regiment was deployed during the Second Boer War from the outset playing a key role in the first battle at Talana Hill. Two officers from the regiment were awarded the Victoria Cross; Lieutenant Frederick Hugh Sherston Roberts and Lieutenant Llewelyn Alberic Emilius Price-Davies. Private Frederick Corbett also received the Victoria Cross for his action at Kafr Dowar, Egypt, on 5 August 1882; his VC was later rescinded when he was convicted of embezzlement, theft, and being absent without leave.
Following the end of the war in South Africa, the 1st battalion was transferred to Malta, where it arrived in October 1902.
In 1908, the Volunteers and Militia were reorganised nationally, with the former becoming the Territorial Force and the latter the Special Reserve; the regiment now had two Reserve but no Territorial battalions.
First World War
Regular Army
The 1st Battalion landed at Rouen as part of the 6th Brigade in the 2nd Division in August 1914 for service on the Western Front. It saw action at the Battle of Mons in August 1914, the First Battle of the Marne and the First Battle of the Aisne in September 1914 and First Battle of Ypres in October 1914. It fought at the Battle of Festubert in May 1915, the Battle of Loos in September 1915 and the Battle of the Somme in Autumn 1916 before taking part in the advance to the Hindenburg Line, the Battle of Arras in November 1917, the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, the Second Battle of the Somme in Autumn 1918 and the Battle of the Selle in October 1918.
The 2nd Battalion landed at Le Havre as part of the 2nd Brigade in the 1st Division in August 1914 for service on the Western Front and saw action at the Battle of Aubers Ridge in May 1915.
The 3rd Battalion landed at Le Havre as part of the 80th Brigade in the 27th Division in December 1914 for service on the Western Front and saw action at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915.
The 4th Battalion landed at Le Havre as part of the 80th Brigade in the 27th Division in December 1914 for service on the Western Front and saw action at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915 but moved to Salonika in November 1915 before returning to France in June 1918.
Territorial force
The regiment did not have any territorial force battalions.
New armies
The 7th (Service) Battalion landed at Boulogne-sur-Mer as part of the 41st Brigade in the 14th (Light) Division in August 1914 for service on the Western Front and saw action the Second Battle of Ypres in May 1915, the Battle of Delville Wood in July 1916 and the Battle of Flers–Courcelette in September 1916 as well as the advance to the Hindenburg Line, the Battle of Arras in April 1917, the Battle of Langemark in August 1917, the First Battle of Passchendaele in October 1917 and the Second Battle of Passchendaele in November 1917 before taking part in the Battle of St Quentin in March 1918 and the Battle of the Avre in April 1918.
The 8th (Service) Battalion landed at Boulogne-sur-Mer as part of the 41st Brigade in the 14th (Light) Division in May 1915 for service on the Western Front and saw action most of the same battles as the 7th Battalion. The 9th (Service) Battalion landed at Boulogne-sur-Mer as part of the 42nd Brigade in the 14th (Light) Division in May 1915 for service on the Western Front and saw action most of the same battles as the 7th and 8th battalions.
The 10th (Service) Battalion and 11th (Service) Battalion landed at Boulogne-sur-Mer as part of the 59th Brigade in the 20th (Light) Division in July 1915 for service on the Western Front and saw action at the Battle of Mont Sorrel in June 1916, the Battle of Delville Wood in July 1916 and the Battle of Guillemont in September 1916 as well as the Battle of Flers–Courcelette in September 1916, the Battle of Morval in September 1916 and the Battle of Le Transloy in October 1916 before taking part in the advance to the Hindenburg Line, the Battle of Langemarck in August 1917, the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge in September 1917, the Battle of Polygon Wood in September 1917 and the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917.
The 12th (Service) Battalion landed at Boulogne-sur-Mer as part of the 60th Brigade in the 20th (Light) Division in July 1915 for service on the Western Front and saw action most of the same battles as the 10th and 11th Battalions. The 13th (Service) Battalion landed at Boulogne-sur-Mer as part of the 111th Brigade in the 37th Division in July 1915 for service on the Western Front and saw action at the Battle of Morval in September 1916, the advance to the Hindenburg Line and the Battle of Arras in April 1917 as well as the Battle of Passchendaele in Autumn 1917, the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917 and the Hundred Days Offensive in Autumn 1918 before taking part in the Battles of the Hindenburg Line and the Final Advance in Picardy.
The 16th (Service) Battalion (Church Lads Brigade) landed at Le Havre as part of the 100th Brigade in the 33rd Division in November 1915 for service on the Western Front.
The 17th (Service) Battalion (British Empire League) landed at Le Havre as part of the 117th Brigade in the 39th Division in March 1916 for service on the Western Front.
The 18th (Service) Battalion (Arts & Crafts) landed at Le Havre as part of the 122nd Brigade in the 41st Division on 3 May 1916 for service on the Western Front.
The 20th (Service) Battalion (British Empire League Pioneers) landed at Le Havre as pioneer battalion for the 3rd Division in March 1916 for service on the Western Front. The 21st (Service) Battalion (Yeoman Rifles) landed in France as part of the 124th Brigade in the 41st Division in May 1916 for service on the Western Front but moved to Italy in November 1917 before returning to France in March 1918.
Seven members of the regiment received the Victoria Cross.
Inter-war years
After 1918, the unit returned to garrison duties in India, Palestine and Ireland. In 1922, the regiment was reduced from four to two battalions with the third and fourth being disbanded. In 1926, the Regiment was reorganised as one of the first mechanised infantry regiments.
Second World War
The 1st Battalion, KRRC, commanded initially by Lieutenant Colonel William Gott, was deployed to North Africa upon war's outbreak and saw action as part of the pivot group within the 7th Armoured Division at the Battle of Sidi Rezegh in November 1941, the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942 and the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942 during the Western Desert Campaign. Rifleman John Beeley was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his actions during Operation Crusader in North Africa in late 1941. The battalion, now part of the 2nd Armoured Brigade of the 1st Armoured Division, was then engaged in action throughout the final stages of the Tunisian Campaign. The battalion, now commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Edward Williams, served in the Italian Campaign then with the independent 9th Armoured Brigade and finally the 6th Armoured Division's 61st Infantry Brigade.
The 2nd Battalion, KRRC, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Wilson, was part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that landed in France in May 1940. The battalion, which was part of the 30th Infantry Brigade, 1st Armoured Division, and now commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Euan Miller, was lost in the defence of Calais, where the brigade slowed the German advance and enabled the Dunkirk evacuation to proceed. The battalion was reformed in the summer of 1940 under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Erskine and transferred to the 22nd Armoured Brigade of the 1st Armoured Division. The reformed battalion took part in the Battle of Gazala in May 1942 and the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942 during the North African Campaign, forming part of the Division's 7th Motor Brigade during the latter engagement and transferring to 4th Armoured Brigade in January 1943. Now under Lieutenant Colonel W. Heathcote-Amory, the battalion continued serving with 4th Armoured Brigade in the Normandy landings in June 1944 and the subsequent campaign in North-West Europe, finally leaving 1st Division six days after VE Day. Two officers of note served with the battalion in its final campaign of the war, Roland Gibbs and Edwin Bramall.
The 1st Battalion of the Queen Victoria's Rifles (QFR) was a Territorial Army (TA) unit which had been closely associated with the KRRC. The battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel J. A. M. Elison-Mccartney, was initially part of the TA 1st London Division, serving as the division's motorcycle battalion. However, like the 2nd Battalion, it was also lost in the defence of Calais in May 1940. The battalion was later reformed in the United Kingdom and, in December 1940, transferred to the 27th Armoured Brigade, part of the newly formed 9th Armoured Division.
The 9th Battalion (The Rangers) was deployed to the Mediterranean theatre as part of the 1st Armoured Brigade in the 7th Armoured Division. It saw action in the Greek campaign in April 1941 before being disbanded in August 1942.
Royal Green Jackets
In 1958 for administrative purposes, the KRRC was brigaded with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and the Rifle Brigade to form the Green Jackets Brigade. In 1958, the Regiment was re-titled the 2nd Green Jackets, the King's Royal Rifle Corps, while the two other regiments of the Green Jackets Brigade were re-titled the 1st Green Jackets (43rd and 52nd) and 3rd Green Jackets, the Rifle Brigade (Prince Consort's Own) respectively. In 1966, the three regiments were amalgamated to form the three battalions of the Royal Green Jackets.
Regimental museum
The regimental collection is held by the Royal Green Jackets (Rifles) Museum which is based at Peninsula Barracks in Winchester.
Territorial battalions
The territorial battalions were as follows:
Queen Victoria's Rifles
The Rangers
The Queen's Westminsters
In the Second World War, the following territorial battalions were formally made part of the KRRC:
1st Battalion Queen Victoria's Rifles – 7th Battalion KRRC
2nd Battalion Queen Victoria's Rifles – 8th Battalion KRRC
1st Battalion The Rangers – 9th Battalion KRRC
2nd Battalion The Rangers – 10th Battalion KRRC
1st Battalion The Queen's Westminsters – 11th Battalion KRRC
2nd Battalion The Queen's Westminsters – 12th Battalion KRRC
Cadet battalions
There were two cadet battalions: 1st Cadet Battalion, The King's Royal Rifle Corps and Queen Victoria's Rifles Cadet Corps (re-titled the 2nd Cadet Battalion, The King's Royal Rifle Corps in 1945). Over the years, the formation of the cadet battalions was changed regularly, due to the changes to do with rules and the commanding officer.
The 1st Cadet Battalion owes its foundation to the Reverend Freeman Wills, who was commissioned into the Volunteer Army in the rank of captain on 26 July 1890. He was also Vicar of St Agatha's just behind Sun Street, Finsbury Square. On receiving his commission he decided to form a cadet company within the 1st Cadet Battalion, the Royal West Surrey Regiment. The Company quickly expanded to become the 2nd Cadet Battalion, the Royal West Surrey Regiment, at which point he moved the battalion headquarters to No. 2 Finsbury Square (and in 1904 to 42 Sun Street, which he had specially built for the purpose). In 1894 he applied to Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, Colonel-in-Chief, to affiliate to the Regiment, with the title of 1st Cadet Battalion, the King's Royal Rifle Corps. Consent was granted on 8 November 1894 and the Battalion has remained a part of the Regiment ever since.
In the days of their foundation, Cadet battalions were privately organized and funded. On becoming a part of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, subscriptions began to flow in and, after the commanding officer had spent nearly £1,000, the Battalion was placed on a financial basis that many Volunteer Corps would have envied. There were to be many ups and down in later years, especially when recognition of the Cadet Force was withdrawn between the two World Wars, but fortunately the enthusiasm and commitment of those involved consistently triumphed over the parsimony of Governments.
In 1900, when volunteers were urgently needed for the Second Boer War, the Commanding Officer, Colonel Freeman Croft-Wills persuaded the War Office to accept a
Company of the older Cadets, principally N.C.O.s (Non-Commissioned Officers), the company being enrolled in the City Imperial Volunteers. Around 100 cadets thus served in South Africa with this unit, whilst other Cadets and ex-Cadets served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and other units. Four were killed in action, one serving with the 1st Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps at the Battle of Dundee, and the others with units of the C.I.V.s. Their comrades erected brass plaques in their memory in the Drill Hall at Sun Street. These are now displayed in the Cadet Company Office here at Davies Street.
In recognition of this service, King Edward VII granted the Battalion the honour of wearing on its accoutrements the Battle Honour "South Africa 1900–1902" (Army Order 151 of 1905). The announcement of this privilege was made to the Battalion by His Majesty, King George V, then Prince of Wales, when, accompanied by Her Majesty Queen Mary, he distributed the prizes at the Guildhall in the City of London. The 1st Cadet Battalion King's Royal Rifle Corps are the only Cadet Unit in the United Kingdom to have been granted such an honour and are permitted to wear the miniature 60th Cap Badge with the single Battle Honour, and call their Cadets "Riflemen".
The 2nd Cadet Battalion, the King's Royal Rifle Corps was formed in 1942 when a Home Guard instruction was issued ordering each Home Guard battalion to raise a cadet unit. Lieutenant-Colonel R.L. Clark of Queen Victoria's Rifles was given the task and on 15 May 1942 the Queen Victoria's Rifles Cadet Corps was born. Over the next three years the unit expanded to five companies, which in April 1945 led to it being re-titled the 2nd Cadet Battalion, The King's Royal Rifle Corps. In 1951 the 1st and 2nd Cadet Battalion were amalgamated. This resulted in the disposal of the Headquarters of the 1st Cadet Battalion at 42 Sun Street. In 1954, the Battalion office of the 'new' 1st Cadet Battalion was established at 56 Davies Street, where it remains to this day.
Today, the KRRC 1st Cadet Battalion still exists, with the following units making up the Battalion:
A Company, 231 KRRC (Paddington) Rifles ACF
B Company, 232 KRRC (Westminster) Rifles ACF
C Company, 233 KRRC (Camden) Rifles ACF
D Company, 234 KRRC (Putney) RGJ ACF; until recently, when they formed the London Oratory School RGJ ACF unit (now CCF), although they were rebadged as Irish Guards in 2010 (making them the last remaining RGJ unit).
All these ACF units are currently in the Middlesex and Northwest London Sector Army Cadet Force.
Alliances
– The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada (1956–1966)
– Sydney University Regiment
See also
:Category:Battle honours of the King's Royal Rifle Corps
:Category:King's Royal Rifle Corps officers
:Category:King's Royal Rifle Corps soldiers
Rifle Brigade – sister regiment sharing much common history and traditions
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
Infantry regiments of the British Army
Rifle regiments
Rifle regiments of the British Army
Military units and formations established in 1755
Loyalist military units in the American Revolution
Regiments of the British Army in the American Revolutionary War
Military units and formations of the United Kingdom in the Peninsular War
Military units and formations in Winchester
Military units and formations in Hampshire
British light infantry
Regiments of the British Army in World War II
Regiments of the British Army in World War I
Military units and formations disestablished in 1966
British military units and formations of the War of 1812 | [
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17333 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan%20languages | Khoisan languages | The Khoisan languages (; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of the 20th century, they were thought to be genealogically related to each other, but this is no longer accepted. They are now held to comprise three distinct language families and two language isolates.
All Khoisan languages but two are indigenous to southern Africa and belong to three language families. The Khoe family appears to have migrated to southern Africa not long before the Bantu expansion. Ethnically, their speakers are the Khoikhoi and the San (Bushmen). Two languages of east Africa, those of the Sandawe and Hadza, originally were also classified as Khoisan, although their speakers are ethnically neither Khoikhoi nor San.
Before the Bantu expansion, Khoisan languages, or languages like them, were likely spread throughout southern and eastern Africa. They are currently restricted to the Kalahari Desert, primarily in Namibia and Botswana, and to the Rift Valley in central Tanzania.
Most of the languages are endangered, and several are moribund or extinct. Most have no written record. The only widespread Khoisan language is Khoekhoe (also known as Khoekhoegowab, Nàmá or Damara) of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa, with a quarter of a million speakers; Sandawe in Tanzania is second in number with some 40–80,000, some monolingual; and the ǃKung language of the northern Kalahari spoken by some 16,000 or so people. Language use is quite strong among the 20,000 speakers of Naro, half of whom speak it as a second language.
Khoisan languages are best known for their use of click consonants as phonemes. These are typically written with characters such as ǃ and ǂ. Clicks are quite versatile as consonants, as they involve two articulations of the tongue which can operate partially independently. Consequently, the languages with the greatest numbers of consonants in the world are Khoisan. The Juǀʼhoan language has 48 click consonants among nearly as many non-click consonants, strident and pharyngealized vowels, and four tones. The ǃXóõ and ǂHõã languages are even more complex.
Validity
Khoisan was proposed as one of the four families of African languages in Joseph Greenberg's classification (1949–1954, revised in 1963). However, linguists who study Khoisan languages reject their unity, and the name "Khoisan" is used by them as a term of convenience without any implication of linguistic validity, much as "Papuan" and "Australian" are. It has been suggested that the similarities of the Tuu and Kxʼa families are due to a southern African Sprachbund rather than a genealogical relationship, whereas the Khoe (or perhaps Kwadi–Khoe) family is a more recent migrant to the area, and may be related to Sandawe in East Africa.
Ernst Oswald Johannes Westphal is known for his early rejection of the Khoisan language family (Starostin 2003). Bonny Sands (1998) concluded that the family is not demonstrable with current evidence. Anthony Traill at first accepted Khoisan (Traill 1986), but by 1998 concluded that it could not be demonstrated with current data and methods, rejecting it as based on a single typological criterion: the presence of clicks. Dimmendaal (2008) summarized the general view with, "it has to be concluded that Greenberg's intuitions on the genetic unity of Khoisan could not be confirmed by subsequent research. Today, the few scholars working on these languages treat the three [southern groups] as independent language families that cannot or can no longer be shown to be genetically related" (p. 841). Starostin (2013) accepts a relationship between Sandawe and Khoi is plausible, as is one between Tuu and Kxʼa, but sees no indication of a relationship between Sandawe and Khoi on the one hand and Tuu and Kxʼa on the other, or between any of them and Hadza.
Janina Brutt-Griffler claims, "given that such colonial borders were generally arbitrarily drawn, they grouped large numbers of ethnic groups that spoke many languages." She hypothesizes that this took place within efforts to prevent the spread of English during European colonization and prevent the entrance of the majority into the middle class.
Khoisan language variation
Anthony Traill noted the Khoisan languages' extreme variation. Despite their shared clicks, the Khoisan languages diverge significantly from each other. Traill demonstrated this linguistic diversity in the data presented in the below table. The first two columns include words from the two Khoisan language isolates, Sandawe and Hadza. The following three are languages from the Khoe family, the Kxʼa family, and the Tuu family, respectively.
Families
The branches that were once considered part of so-called Khoisan are now considered independent families, since it has not been demonstrated that they are related according to the standard comparative method.
See Khoe languages for speculations on the linguistic history of the region.
Hadza
With about 800 speakers in Tanzania, Hadza is no longer seen as a Khoisan language and appears to be unrelated to any other language. Genetically, the Hadza people are unrelated to the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa, and their closest relatives may be among the Pygmies of Central Africa.
Sandawe
There is some indication that Sandawe (about 40,000 speakers in Tanzania) may be related to the Khoe family, such as a congruent pronominal system and some good Swadesh-list matches, but not enough to establish regular sound correspondences. Sandawe is not related to Hadza, despite their proximity.
Khoe
The Khoe family is both the most numerous and diverse family of Khoisan languages, with seven living languages and over a quarter million speakers. Although little Kwadi data is available, proto-Khoe–Kwadi reconstructions have been made for pronouns and some basic vocabulary.
?Khoe–Kwadi
Kwadi (extinct)
Khoe
Khoekhoe This branch appears to have been affected by the Kxʼa–Tuu sprachbund.
Nama (ethnonyms Khoekhoen, Nama, Damara) (a dialect cluster including ǂAakhoe and Haiǁom)
Eini (extinct)
South Khoekhoe
Korana (moribund)
Xiri (moribund; a dialect cluster)
Tshu–Khwe (or Kalahari) Many of these languages have undergone partial click loss.
East Tshu–Khwe (East Kalahari)
Shua (a dialect cluster including Deti, Tsʼixa, ǀXaise, and Ganádi)
Tsoa (a dialect cluster including Cire Cire and Kua)
West Tshu–Khwe (West Kalahari)
Kxoe (a dialect cluster including ǁAni and Buga)
Naro (a dialect cluster, including ǂHaba)
Gǁana–Gǀwi (a dialect cluster including Gǁana and Gǀwi)
A Haiǁom language is listed in most Khoisan references. A century ago the Haiǁom people spoke a Ju dialect, probably close to ǃKung, but they now speak a divergent dialect of Nama. Thus their language is variously said to be extinct or to have 18,000 speakers, to be Ju or to be Khoe. (Their numbers have been included under Nama above.) They are known as the Saa by the Nama, and this is the source of the word San.
Tuu
The Tuu family consists of two language clusters, which are related to each other at about the distance of Khoekhoe and Tshukhwe within Khoe. They are typologically very similar to the Kxʼa languages (below), but have not been demonstrated to be related to them genealogically (the similarities may be an areal feature).
Tuu
Taa
ǃXoon (4200 speakers. A dialect cluster.)
Lower Nossob (Two dialects, ǀʼAuni and ǀHaasi. Extinct.)
ǃKwi
Nǁng (A dialect cluster. Moribund.)
ǀXam (A dialect cluster. Extinct.)
ǂUngkue (A dialect cluster. Extinct.)
ǁXegwi (Extinct.)
Kxʼa
The Kxʼa family is a relatively distant relationship formally demonstrated in 2010.
Kxʼa
ǂʼAmkoe (200 speakers, Botswana. Moribund. A dialect cluster of Nǃaqriaxe, (Eastern) ǂHoan, and Sasi)
ǃKung (also ǃXun or Ju, formerly Northern Khoisan) is a dialect cluster. (~45,000 speakers.) Juǀʼhoan is the best-known dialect.
Classification by Starostin (2013)
Starostin (2013) gives the following classification of the Khoisan "macrofamily," which he considers to be a single coherent language family. However, this classification is not widely accepted.
Hadza
Macro-Khoisan (excl. Hadza)
Sandawe-Khoi-Kwadi
Sandawe
Khoi-Kwadi
Kwadi
Khoe (= Khoi)
Khoikhoi
Kalahari Khoi
Peripheral Khoisan
Southern Khoisan (= !Kwi-Taa ~ Tuu)
!Kwi
Taa
Ju-hoan
Western Hoan
Northern Khoisan (= Ju)
Other "click languages"
Not all languages using clicks as phonemes are considered Khoisan. Most others are neighboring Bantu languages in southern Africa: the Nguni languages (Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, Phuthi, and Northern Ndebele); Sotho; Yeyi in Botswana; and Mbukushu, Kwangali, and Gciriku in the Caprivi Strip. Clicks are spreading to a few additional neighboring languages. Of these languages, Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele and Yeyi have intricate systems of click consonants; the others, despite the click in the name Gciriku, more rudimentary ones. There is also the South Cushitic language Dahalo in Kenya, which has dental clicks in a few score words, and an extinct and presumably artificial Australian ritual language called Damin, which had only nasal clicks.
The Bantu languages adopted the use of clicks from neighboring, displaced, or absorbed Khoisan populations (or from other Bantu languages), often through intermarriage, while the Dahalo are thought to have retained clicks from an earlier language when they shifted to speaking a Cushitic language; if so, the pre-Dahalo language may have been something like Hadza or Sandawe. Damin is an invented ritual language, and has nothing to do with Khoisan.
These are the only languages known to have clicks in normal vocabulary. Occasionally other languages are said by laypeople to have "click" sounds. This is usually a misnomer for ejective consonants, which are found across much of the world, or is a reference to paralinguistic use of clicks such as English tsk! tsk!
Comparative vocabulary
Sample basic vocabulary for Khoisan language families:
See also
Khoisan word lists (Wiktionary)
Languages of Botswana
Languages of Namibia
References
Bibliography
Ehret, Christopher. 1986. "Proposals on Khoisan Reconstruction." In African Hunter-Gatherers (International Symposium), edited by Franz Rottland & Rainer Vossen, 105-130. Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, special issue 7.1. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
Ehret, Christopher. 2003. "Toward reconstructing Proto-South Khoisan." In Mother Tongue 8.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1955. Studies in African Linguistic Classification. New Haven: Compass Publishing Company. (Reprints, with minor corrections, a series of eight articles published in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology from 1949 to 1954.)
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The Languages of Africa. (Heavily revised version of Greenberg 1955.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (From the same publisher: second, revised edition, 1966; third edition, 1970. All three editions simultaneously published at The Hague by Mouton Publishers)
Güldemann, Tom and Rainer Vossen. 2000. "Khoisan." In African Languages: An Introduction, edited by Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, 99-122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Honken, Henry. 1988. "Phonetic Correspondences among Khoisan Affricates." In New Perspectives on the Study of Khoisan, edited by Rainer Vossen, 47-65. Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung 7. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1988.
Honken, Henry. 1998. "Types of sound correspondence patterns in Khoisan languages." In Language, Identity and Conceptualization among the Khoisan, edited by Mathias Schladt, 171-193. Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung/Research in Khoisan studies 15. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
Köhler, O. 1971. "Die Khoe-sprachigen Buschmänner der Kalahari." In Forschungen zur allgemeinen und regionalen Geschichte (Festschrift Kurt Kayser), 373–411. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner.
Sands, Bonny. 1998. Eastern and Southern African Khoisan: Evaluating Claims of Distant Linguistic Relationships. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
Sands, Bonny. 1998. "Comparison and Classification of Khoisan languages." In Language History and Linguistic Description in Africa, edited by Ian Maddieson and Thomas J. Hinnebusch, 75-85. Trenton: Africa World Press.
Schladt, Mathias (editor). 1998. Language, Identity, and Conceptualization among the Khoisan. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
Starostin, George. 2008. "From modern Khoisan languages to Proto-Khoisan: The Value of Intermediate Reconstructions." (Originally published in Aspects of Comparative Linguistics 3 (2008), 337-470, Moscow: RSUH Publishers.)
Starostin, George. 2013. Languages of Africa: An attempt at a lexicostatistical classification. Volume I: Methodology. Khoesan Languages. Moscow.
Traill, Anthony. 1986. "Do the Khoi have a place in the San? New data on Khoisan linguistic relationships." In African Hunter-gatherers (International Symposium), Franz Rottland and Rainer Vossen, 407-430. Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, special issue 7.1. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
Treis, Yvonne. 1998. "Names of Khoisan languages and Their Variants." In Language, Identity, and Conceptualization Among the Khoisan, edited by Matthias Schladt. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 463–503.
Vossen, Rainer. 1997. Die Khoe-Sprachen. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Sprachgeschichte Afrikas. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
Vossen, Rainer. 2013. The Khoesan Languages. Oxon: Routledge.
Westphal, E.O.J. 1971. "The Click Languages of Southern and Eastern Africa." In Current Trends in Linguistics, Volume 7: Linguistics in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by T.A. Sebeok. Berlin: Mouton, 367–420.
Winter, J.C. 1981. "Die Khoisan-Familie." In Die Sprachen Afrikas, edited by Bernd Heine, Thilo C. Schadeberg, and Ekkehard Wolff. Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 329–374.
Proposed language families | [
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17334 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katina%20Paxinou | Katina Paxinou | Katina Paxinou (; 17 December 1900– 22 February 1973) was a Greek film and stage actress.
She started her stage career in Greece in 1928 and was one of the founding members of the National Theatre of Greece in 1932. The outbreak of World War II found her in the United Kingdom and she later moved to the United States, where she made her film debut in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. She appeared in a few more Hollywood films, before returning to Greece in the early 1950s. She became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1951. She then focused on her stage career and appeared in a number of European films including Rocco and His Brothers (1960).
Early life
Paxinou was born Ekaterini Konstantopoulou in 1900, the daughter of Vassilis Konstantopoulos and Eleni Malandrinou. She trained as an opera singer at the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève and later in Berlin and Vienna. According to her biography in a 1942 Playbill, Paxinou's family disowned her after she decided to seek a permanent stage career.
Career
Paxinou made her debut at the Municipal Theatre of Piraeus in 1920 in the operatic version of Maurice Maeterlinck's Sister Beatrice, with a score by Dimitri Mitropoulos. She first appeared in a play in 1928, as a member of Marika Kotopouli's troupe, in an Athens production of Henry Bataille's The Naked Woman. In 1931, she joined Aimilios Veakis' troupe along with Alexis Minotis, where she translated and appeared in the first of Eugene O'Neill's plays to be staged in Greece, Desire Under the Elms. She also appeared in Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and August Strindberg's The Father.
In 1932, Paxinou was among the actors who inaugurated the recently re-founded National Theatre of Greece, where she worked until 1940. During her stay in the National Theatre, she distinguished herself on Greek stage starring in major plays, such as Sophocles' Electra, Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts and William Shakespeare's Hamlet, which were also performed in London, Frankfurt and Berlin.
When World War II began, Paxinou was performing in London. Unable to return to Greece, she emigrated in May 1941 to the United States, where she had earlier appeared in 1931, performing Clytemnestra in a modern Greek version of Electra.
She was selected to play the role of Pilar in the film For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), for which she won an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture. She made one British film, Uncle Silas (1947), which features Jean Simmons in the main female role and worked in Italy for 20th Century Fox, playing the mother of Tyrone Power's character in Prince of Foxes (1949). After this film, Paxinou worked for a Hollywood studio only once more, again playing a gypsy woman in the religious epic The Miracle (1959).
In 1950, Paxinou resumed her stage career. In her native Greece, she formed the Royal Theatre of Athens with Alexis Minotis, her principal director and husband since 1940.
Paxinou made several appearances on the Broadway stage and television as well. She played the lead in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler for 12 performances at New York City's Longacre Theatre, opening on 28 June 1942. She also played the principal role in the first production in English of Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, at the ANTA Playhouse in New York in 1951, and a BBC television production of Lorca's Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre), broadcast on 2 June 1959.
Death
Paxinou died after a long battle with cancer in Athens on 22 February 1973 at the age of 72. She was survived by her husband and her one daughter from her first marriage to Ioannis Paxinos, whose surname she continued using after their divorce. Her remains are buried at First Cemetery of Athens.
Museum
The Paxinou-Minotis Museum is an Athens museum featuring memorabilia of the life of Paxinou, including furniture, paintings and sketches, photographs, books and personal effects donated by Paxinou's husband, director Alexis Minotis, and include his personal library and theatrical archive.
Filmography
References
External links
1900 births
1973 deaths
People with acquired American citizenship
20th-century American actresses
American film actresses
American stage actresses
20th-century Greek actresses
Actresses from Athens
Best Supporting Actress Academy Award winners
Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe (film) winners
Burials at the First Cemetery of Athens
Deaths from cancer in Greece
Greek film actresses
Greek stage actresses
Actors from Piraeus
Malandrinos family
Greek expatriates in the United States
Expatriate actresses in the United States | [
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17335 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus%20Barbie | Klaus Barbie | Nikolaus Barbie (25 October 1913 – 25 September 1991) was a German member of the Nazi Party, known as the "Butcher of Lyon" for having personally tortured prisoners of the Gestapo—primarily Jews and members of the French Resistance—while stationed in Lyon under the collaborationist Vichy regime. After the war, United States intelligence services, which employed him for his anti-Marxist efforts, aided his escape to Bolivia, where he advised the regime on how to repress opposition through torture.
The West German Intelligence Service later recruited him. Barbie is suspected of having had a role in the Bolivian coup d'état orchestrated by Luis García Meza in 1980. After the fall of the dictatorship, Barbie no longer had the protection of the government in La Paz. In 1983, he was extradited to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. Although he had been sentenced to death in absentia twice earlier, in 1947 and 1954, capital punishment had been abolished in France in 1981. Barbie died of cancer in prison in 1991, at age 77.
Early life and education
Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie was born on 25 October 1913 in Godesberg, later renamed Bad Godesberg, which is today part of Bonn. The Barbie family came from Merzig, in the Saar near the French border. It is likely that his patrilineal ancestors were French Roman Catholics named Barbier who left France at the time of the French Revolution. In 1914, his father, also named Nikolaus, was conscripted to fight in the First World War. He returned an angry, bitter man. He was wounded in the neck at Verdun and captured by the French, whom he hated, and he never recovered his health. He became an alcoholic who abused his children. Until 1923, when he was 10, Klaus Barbie attended the local school where his father taught. Afterwards, he attended a boarding school in Trier, and was relieved to be away from his abusive father. In 1925, the entire Barbie family moved to Trier.
In June 1933, Barbie's younger brother Kurt, died at the age of 18, of a chronic illness. Later that year, their father died. The death of his father derailed plans for the 20-year-old Barbie to study theology, or otherwise become an academic, as his peers had expected. While unemployed, Barbie was conscripted into the Nazi labour service, the Reichsarbeitsdienst. On 26 September 1935, aged 22, he joined the SS (member 272,284), and began working in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS security service, which acted as the intelligence-gathering arm of the Nazi Party. On 1 May 1937, he became member 4,583,085 of the Nazi Party.
Second World War
After the German conquest and occupation of the Netherlands, Barbie was assigned to Amsterdam. He had been pre-assigned to Adolf Eichmann's Amt (Department) IV/B-4. This department was responsible for identification, roundup and deportation of Dutch Jews and Freemasons. On 11 October 1940, Barbie arrested , Grand Master of the Grand Orient of the Netherlands. In March 1941, van Tongeren was transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where, in freezing conditions, he died two weeks later. On 1 April, Barbie summoned Van Tongeren's daughter, Charlotte, to SD headquarters and informed her that her father had died of an infection in both ears and had been cremated.
In 1942, he was sent to Dijon, France in the Occupied Zone. In November of the same year, at the age of 29, he was assigned to Lyon as the head of the local Gestapo. He established his headquarters at the Hôtel Terminus in Lyon, where he personally tortured adult and child prisoners. He became known as the "Butcher of Lyon". The daughter of a French Resistance leader based in Lyon said her father was beaten and his skin torn, and that his head was immersed in buckets of ammonia and cold water; he could not sit or stand and died three days later from burns to his skin.
Historians estimate that Barbie was directly responsible for the deaths of up to 14,000 people, personally participating in roundups such as the Rue Sainte-Catherine Roundup which saw 84 people arrested in a single day. He arrested Jean Moulin, a high-ranking member of the French Resistance and his most prominent captive. In 1943, he was awarded the Iron Cross (First Class) by Adolf Hitler for his campaign against the French Resistance and the capture of Moulin.
In April 1944, Barbie ordered the deportation to Auschwitz of a group of 44 Jewish children from an orphanage at Izieu. He then rejoined the SiPo-SD of Lyon in its retreat to Bruyères, where he led an anti-partisan attack in Rehaupal in September 1944.
U.S. intelligence work in post-War Europe
In 1947, Barbie was recruited as an agent for the 66th Detachment of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). The U.S. used Barbie and other Nazi Party members to further anti-communist efforts in Europe. Specifically, they were interested in British interrogation techniques which Barbie had experienced firsthand, and the identities of former SS officers British intelligence agencies might be interested in recruiting. Later, the CIC housed him in a hotel in Memmingen, and he reported on French intelligence activities in the French zone of occupied Germany because they suspected that the French had been infiltrated by the KGB and GPU.
The US Department of Justice report to the US Senate in 1983 opens with the summary paragraph:
As the investigation of Klaus Barbie has shown, officers of the United States government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and in arranging his escape from the law. As a direct result of that action, Klaus Barbie did not stand trial in France in 1950; he spent 33 years as a free man and a fugitive from justice.
The French discovered that Barbie was in U.S. hands, and having sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes, made a plea to John J. McCloy, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, to hand him over for execution, but McCloy allegedly refused. Instead, the CIC helped him flee to Bolivia assisted by "ratlines" organized by U.S. intelligence services, and by Croatian Roman Catholic clergy, including Krunoslav Draganović. The CIC asserted that Barbie knew too much about the network of German spies the CIC had planted in various European communist organizations, and were suspicious of communist influence within the French government, but their protection of Barbie may have been as much to avoid the embarrassment of having recruited him in the first place. Other authors have suggested that the anticommunist element of Italian fascism and the protection of the Vatican allowed Klaus Barbie and other Nazis to flee to Bolivia.
In 1965, Barbie was recruited by the West German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), under the codename "Adler" (Eagle) and the registration number V-43118. His initial monthly salary of 500 Deutsche Mark was transferred in May 1966 to an account of the Chartered Bank of London in San Francisco. During his time with the BND, Barbie made at least 35 reports to the BND headquarters in Pullach.
Bolivia
Barbie emigrated to Bolivia in 1951, where he lived well for 30 years in Cochabamba, under the alias Klaus Altmann. It was easier and less embarrassing for him to find employment there than in Europe, and he enjoyed excellent relations with high-ranking Bolivian officials, including Bolivian dictators Hugo Banzer and Luis García Meza. "Altmann" was known for his German nationalist and anti-communist stances. While engaged in arms-trade operations in Bolivia, he was appointed to the rank of lieutenant colonel within the Bolivian Armed Forces.
Barbie collaborated with René Barrientos' regime, including teaching the general's private paramilitaries named "Furmont" how torture can best be used. The regime's political repression against leftist groups was helped by Barbie's knowledge about intelligence work, torture and interrogations. In 1972 under General Banzer (with whom Barbie collaborated even more openly), he assisted in illegal arrests, interrogations and murders of opposition and progressive groups. Journalists and activists who wrote or spoke about the regime's crimes against human rights were arrested and many fell victim to so-called "disappearances", the state's secret murders and abductions of leftists. Barbie actively participated in the regime's oppression of opponents.
Barbie was strongly linked to the neo-Nazi paramilitary member Álvaro de Castro, who was his personally hired bodyguard and the two participated in criminal actions and businesses together. De Castro had connections with powerful drug barons and the illegal drug trade and, together with Barbie (under the name Altmann) and an Austrian company, sold weapons to the drug cartels, and when de Castro was arrested he admitted in interviews that he had earlier worked for drug lords in the country. Other sources say Barbie most likely also had connections with these organizations. Initially, he worked for Roberto Suárez Gómez who eventually introduced him to Colombian traffickers. Barbie met with Pablo Escobar and several other high ranking members of the Medellín cartel in the late 1970s, and agreed to arrange for security of Escobar's raw coca supply, from its cultivation until it reached processing plants in Colombia. In exchange, Escobar agreed to fund Barbie's anti-communist activities. De Castro continued to correspond with Barbie when Barbie was later under arrest. Their connections also provided intelligence information to US authorities at the US Embassy. A group called "The Fiancées of Death", which included German Nazis and Fascists, had links to some of Barbie's actions in Bolivia.
Barbie earlier also carried out a large arms purchase of tanks from Austria to the Bolivian army. These were then used in a coup d'état.
People who met Barbie during his time in Bolivia have said that he was a firm and fanatic believer in the Nazi ideology and an anti-Semite. Barbie and de Castro reportedly talked about the cases and searches for Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, whom Barbie supported and wanted to assist in remaining on the run.
Manhunt
Barbie was identified as being in Peru in 1971 by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld (Nazi hunters from France) who came across a secret document that revealed his alias. On 19 January 1972, this information was published in the French newspaper L'Aurore, along with a photograph of Altmann which the Klarsfelds obtained from a German expatriate living in Lima, Peru.
Led by Beate Klarsfeld, French journalist Ladislas de Hoyos and cameraman Christian van Ryswyck flew to La Paz in January 1972 in order to find and interview Klaus Barbie posing as his alias Klaus Altmann. The interview took place on 3 February 1972 in the Department of the Interior building and the following day, in prison where Klaus was placed under protection by the Bolivian authorities. In the videotape, and while the interview was conducted in Spanish, Ladislas de Hoyos steers away from the previously agreed upon questions by asking whether Barbie has ever been to Lyon in French, a language he is not supposed to understand under his fake identity, to which Klaus Barbie automatically responds by the negative in German. Ladislas de Hoyos gave him photos of members of Resistance he had tortured, asking him if he recognized their faces, and while he returned them in denial, his fingerprints unmistakenly betrayed him. It was in this interview, later broadcast on French TV Channel Antenne 2 that he was recognized by French resistance member Simone Lagrange who had been tortured by Klaus Barbie in 1944.
Despite global outcry, Barbie was able to return to Bolivia where the government refused to extradite him, stating that France and Bolivia did not have an extradition treaty and that the statute of limitations on his crimes had expired. Barbie's close fascist friends knew who he was, but to the public Barbie insisted he was none other than his innocent alter-ego "Altmann" and in the videotaped interview conducted by Ladislas de Hoyos which he allowed, he continued to lie about never having been in Lyon, never knowing Jean Moulin or having been in the Gestapo. However, in the 1970s, the community of refugee Jews who had survived or escaped the war, openly discussed the fact that Barbie was the war criminal from Lyon now living on the Calle Landaeta in La Paz and frequenting the Café de La Paz daily.
Journalist and reporter Peter McFarren and a journalist for The New York Times said that while they were outside Barbie's house in Bolivia in 1981, wanting to speak to him for an article, they saw Barbie in a window while they were taking photos and shortly thereafter they were taken away by twelve armed paramilitary men who had quickly arrived in a van and asked what they were doing there.
The testimony of Italian insurgent Stefano Delle Chiaie before the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism suggests that Barbie took part in the "cocaine coup" of Luis García Meza, when the regime forced its way to power in Bolivia in 1980.
Extradition, trial, and death
In 1983, the newly elected democratic government of Hernán Siles Zuazo arrested Barbie in La Paz on the pretext of his owing the government US$10,000 for goods he was supposed to have delivered but did not. A few days later, the government delivered him to France to stand trial.
Shortly after Barbie's extradition, evidence emerged that Barbie had worked for US intelligence in Germany and that US agents may have been instrumental in Barbie's flight to Bolivia to escape prosecution in France. Allan Ryan, Director of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the US Justice Department, recommended to US Attorney General William French Smith that the matter be investigated. Following a lengthy investigation and a full report that was released to the public, Ryan concluded that "officers of the United States government were directly responsible for protecting a person wanted by the government of France on criminal charges and in arranging his escape from the law.” Ryan felt that the initial decision for the U.S. government to use Barbie during Cold War counter-intelligence work, while reprehensible in light of his war-crimes, might be defended on national security interest grounds. Doing so was no different from what other World War II victor nations were doing at the time, and appeared to have been done without any U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) knowledge of Barbie's atrocities in Lyon. After those atrocities became well publicized, however, Ryan regarded it as indefensible for CIC personnel to lie to higher U.S. authorities and help Barbie escape Europe to Bolivia rather than honor an outstanding French warrant for his arrest. As a result of Ryan's report and personal recommendation, the U.S. government made a formal apology to France for enabling Barbie to escape French justice for 33 years.
In 1984, Barbie was indicted for crimes committed as Gestapo chief in Lyon between 1942 and 1944, chief among which was the Rue Sainte-Catherine Roundup. The jury trial started on 11 May 1987 in Lyon before the Rhône Cour d'Assises. Unusually, the court allowed the trial to be filmed because of its historical value. A special courtroom was constructed with seating for an audience of about 700. The head prosecutor was Pierre Truche. Barbie's role in Hitler's Final Solution was the issue.
Barbie's defence was funded by Swiss pro-nazi financier François Genoud and led by attorney Jacques Vergès. Barbie was tried on 41 separate counts of crimes against humanity, based on the depositions of 730 Jews and French Resistance survivors who described how he tortured and murdered prisoners. The father of French Minister for Justice Robert Badinter had died in Sobibor after being deported from Lyon during Barbie's tenure.
Barbie gave his name as Klaus Altmann, the name that he used while in Bolivia. He claimed that his extradition was technically illegal and asked to be excused from the trial and returned to his cell at Prison Saint-Paul. This was granted. He was brought back to court on 26 May 1987 to face some of his accusers, about whose testimony he had "nothing to say".
Barbie's defence lawyer, Vergès, had a reputation for attacking the French political system, particularly in the historic French colonial empire. His strategy was to use the trial to talk about war crimes committed by France since 1945. He got the prosecution to drop some of the charges against Barbie due to French legislation that had protected French citizens accused of the same crimes under the Vichy regime and in French Algeria. Vergès tried to argue that Barbie's actions were no worse than the supposedly ordinary actions of colonialists worldwide, and that his trial was tantamount to selective prosecution. During his trial, Barbie said, "When I stand before the throne of God, I shall be judged innocent."
The court rejected the defence's argument. On 4 July 1987, Barbie was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in Lyon four years later of leukemia and spine and prostate cancer at the age of 77.
Personal life
In April 1939, Barbie became engaged to Regina Margaretta Willms, the 23-year-old daughter of a postal clerk; they had two children, a son named Klaus-Georg Altmann and a daughter named Ute Messner. In 1983, Françoise Croizier, Klaus Barbie's French daughter-in-law, said in an interview that the CIA kidnapped Klaus-Georg in 1946 to make sure his father carried out intelligence missions for the agency. Croizier met Klaus-Georg while both were students in Paris; they married in 1968, had three children and lived in Europe and Bolivia using the surname Altmann. Croizier said when she married she did not know who her father-in-law was, but that she could guess the reasons for a German to settle in South America after the war. Klaus-Georg died in a hang-gliding accident in 1981.
In media
The 1988 American documentary film Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, directed by the German-French director Marcel Ophuls, details Barbie's life between childhood and the trial near the end of his life. The film received the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
The British–French documentary film My Enemy's Enemy (Mon Meilleur Ennemi in French) is the story of Klaus Barbie, following him through World War II and post-war hiding journey in Bolivia. It depicts his involvement in the assassination of Che Guevara. It also discusses his French trial for war crimes committed in Lyon, such as the torture of Jean Moulin.
In the 2001 film Rat Race, the Pear family visits a museum dedicated to Klaus Barbie, located in the southwest United States, after mistakenly thinking it was a museum dedicated to the famous doll.
Barbie is played by Marc Rissmann in the 2019 movie A Call to Spy.
Barbie is portrayed by Matthias Schweighöfer in the 2020 film Resistance, which is a free adaptation of the experiences of the French mime Marcel Marceau during World War II, when he helped to save Jewish children from deportation to Nazi Germany as a member of the Jewish resistance. Barbie is the main antagonist as the group operates within Lyon.
See also
Operation Condor
Operation Bloodstone
Glossary of Nazi Germany
List of Nazi Party leaders and officials
Alice Vansteenberghe
References
Further reading
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-hrsp/legacy/2011/02/04/08-02-83barbie-rpt.pdf
A chapter in this book also follows how top Nazis made their way to Argentina and Latin America.
Hammerschmidt, Peter: "Die Tatsache allein, daß V-43 118 SS-Hauptsturmführer war, schließt nicht aus, ihn als Quelle zu verwenden". Der Bundesnachrichtendienst und sein Agent Klaus Barbie, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft (ZfG), 59. Jahrgang, 4/2011. METROPOL Verlag. Berlin 2011, S. 333–349.
Case No. 77, Fn 908 KsD Lyon IV-B (gez. Ostubaf. Barbie) an BdS, Paris IV-B, 6 April 1944, RF-1235.
External links
French Judicial Archives on Klaus Barbie
Klaus Barbie at the German National Library
Marcel Ophüls's
Kevin Macdonald’s
(English: "Terror's Advocate")
1913 births
1991 deaths
SS-Hauptsturmführer
Antisemitism in Germany
German people convicted of crimes against humanity
German people who died in prison custody
German prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment
Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment by France
Prisoners who died in French detention
German people imprisoned abroad
People convicted of murder by France
War crimes in France
German fascists
German Roman Catholics
Holocaust perpetrators in France
Nazis in South America
Gestapo personnel
Federal Intelligence Service informants
People of the Central Intelligence Agency
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Bolivian military personnel
Bolivian anti-communists
Anti-Masonry
People extradited to France
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People from the Rhine Province
People extradited from Bolivia
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17337 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir | Kashmir | Kashmir () is the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term "Kashmir" denoted only the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal Range. Today, the term encompasses a larger area that includes the Indian-administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, the Pakistani-administered territories of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, and the Chinese-administered territories of Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract.
In the first half of the first millennium, the Kashmir region became an important centre of Hinduism and later of Buddhism; later still, in the ninth century, Kashmir Shaivism arose. In 1339, Shah Mir became the first Muslim ruler of Kashmir, inaugurating the Salatin-i-Kashmir or Shah Mir dynasty. The region was part of the Mughal Empire from 1586 to 1751, and thereafter, until 1820, of the Afghan Durrani Empire. That year, the Sikh Empire, under Ranjit Singh, annexed Kashmir. In 1846, after the Sikh defeat in the First Anglo-Sikh War, and upon the purchase of the region from the British under the Treaty of Amritsar, the Raja of Jammu, Gulab Singh, became the new ruler of Kashmir. The rule of his descendants, under the paramountcy (or tutelage) of the British Crown, lasted until the Partition of India in 1947, when the former princely state of the British Indian Empire became a disputed territory, now administered by three countries: India, Pakistan, and China.
Etymology
The word Kashmir was derived from the ancient Sanskrit language and was referred to as . The Nilamata Purana describes the valley's origin from the waters, a lake called Sati-saras. A popular local etymology of Kashmira is that it is land desiccated from water. Geologists agree that the Valley was formerly a lake, and the lake drained through the gap of Baramulla (Varahamula) which matches with the Hindu legends.
An alternative etymology derives the name from the name of the Vedic sage Kashyapa who is believed to have settled people in this land. Accordingly, Kashmir would be derived from either kashyapa-mir (Kashyapa's Lake) or kashyapa-meru (Kashyapa's Mountain).
The word has been referenced to in a Hindu scripture mantra worshipping the Hindu goddess Sharada and is mentioned to have resided in the land of kashmira, or which might have been a reference to the Sharada Peeth.
The Ancient Greeks called the region Kasperia, which has been identified with Kaspapyros of Hecataeus of Miletus (apud Stephanus of Byzantium) and Kaspatyros of Herodotus (3.102, 4.44). Kashmir is also believed to be the country meant by Ptolemy's Kaspeiria. The earliest text which directly mentions the name Kashmir is in Ashtadhyayi written by the Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini during the 5th century BC. Pāṇini called the people of Kashmir Kashmirikas. Some other early references to Kashmir can also be found in Mahabharata in Sabha Parva and in puranas like Matsya Purana, Vayu Purana, Padma Purana and Vishnu Purana and Vishnudharmottara Purana.
Huientsang, the Buddhist scholar and Chinese traveller, called Kashmir kia-shi-milo, while some other Chinese accounts referred to Kashmir as ki-pin (or Chipin or Jipin) and ache-pin.
Cashmeer is an archaic spelling of modern Kashmir, and in some countries it is still spelled this way. Kashmir is called Cachemire in French, Cachemira in Spanish, Caxemira in Portuguese, Caixmir in Catalan, Casmiria in Latin, Cașmir in Romanian, and Cashmir in Occitan.
In the Kashmiri language, Kashmir itself is known as Kasheer.
Terminology
The Government of India and Indian sources, refer to the territory under Pakistan control "Pakistan-occupied Kashmir" ("POK"). The Government of Pakistan and Pakistani sources refer to the portion of Kashmir administered by India as "Indian-occupied Kashmir" ("IOK") or "Indian-held Kashmir" (IHK);
The terms "Indian-administered Kashmir" and "Pakistani-administered Kashmir" are often used by neutral sources for the parts of the Kashmir region controlled by each country.
History
Hinduism and Buddhism in Kashmir
During the ancient and medieval periods, Kashmir was an important centre for the development of a Hindu-Buddhist syncretism, in which Madhyamaka and Yogachara were blended with Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta. The Buddhist Mauryan emperor Ashoka is often credited with having founded the old capital of Kashmir, Shrinagari, now ruins on the outskirts of modern Srinagar. Kashmir was long a stronghold of Buddhism. As a Buddhist seat of learning, the Sarvastivada school strongly influenced Kashmir. East and Central Asian Buddhist monks are recorded as having visited the kingdom. In the late 4th century CE, the famous Kuchanese monk Kumārajīva, born to an Indian noble family, studied Dīrghāgama and Madhyāgama in Kashmir under Bandhudatta. He later became a prolific translator who helped take Buddhism to China. His mother Jīva is thought to have retired to Kashmir. Vimalākṣa, a Sarvāstivādan Buddhist monk, travelled from Kashmir to Kucha and there instructed Kumārajīva in the Vinayapiṭaka.
Karkoṭa Empire (625–885 CE) was a powerful Hindu empire, which originated in the region of Kashmir. It was founded by Durlabhvardhana during the lifetime of Harsha. The dynasty marked the rise of Kashmir as a power in South Asia. Avanti Varman ascended the throne of Kashmir on 855 CE, establishing the Utpala dynasty and ending the rule of Karkoṭa dynasty.
According to tradition, Adi Shankara visited the pre-existing (Sharada Peeth) in Kashmir in the late 8th century or early 9th century CE. The Madhaviya Shankaravijayam states that this temple had four doors for scholars from the four cardinal directions. The southern door of Sarvajna Pitha was opened by Adi Shankara. According to tradition, Adi Shankara opened the southern door by defeating in debate all the scholars there in all the various scholastic disciplines such as Mīmāṃsā, Vedanta and other branches of Hindu philosophy; he ascended the throne of Transcendent wisdom of that temple.
Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1020 CE) was one of India's greatest philosophers, mystics and aestheticians. He was also considered an important musician, poet, dramatist, exegete, theologian, and logician – a polymathic personality who exercised strong influences on Indian culture. He was born in the Kashmir Valley in a family of scholars and mystics and studied all the schools of philosophy and art of his time under the guidance of as many as fifteen (or more) teachers and gurus. In his long life he completed over 35 works, the largest and most famous of which is Tantrāloka, an encyclopaedic treatise on all the philosophical and practical aspects of Trika and Kaula (known today as Kashmir Shaivism). Another one of his very important contributions was in the field of philosophy of aesthetics with his famous Abhinavabhāratī commentary of Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata Muni.
In the 10th century Mokshopaya or Moksopaya Shastra, a philosophical text on salvation for non-ascetics (moksa-upaya: 'means to release'), was written on the Pradyumna hill in Srinagar. It has the form of a public sermon and claims human authorship and contains about 30,000 shloka's (making it longer than the Ramayana). The main part of the text forms a dialogue between Vashistha and Rama, interchanged with numerous short stories and anecdotes to illustrate the content. This text was later (11th to the 14th century CE) expanded and vedanticised, which resulted in the Yoga Vasistha.
Queen Kota Rani was medieval Hindu ruler of Kashmir, ruling until 1339. She was a notable ruler who is often credited for saving Srinagar city from frequent floods by getting a canal constructed, named after her "Kutte Kol". This canal receives water from Jhelum River at the entry point of city and again merges with Jhelum river beyond the city limits.
Shah Mir Dynasty
Shams-ud-Din Shah Mir (reigned 1339–42) was the first Muslim ruler of Kashmir and founder of the Shah Mir dynasty. Kashmiri historian Jonaraja in his Dvitīyā Rājataraṅginī mentioned Shah Mir was from the country of Panchagahvara (identified as the Panjgabbar valley between Rajouri and Budhal), and his ancestors were Kshatriya who converted to Islam. Scholar A. Q. Rafiqi states:
Rinchan, from Ladakh, and Lankar Chak, from Dard territory near Gilgit, came to Kashmir and played a notable role in the subsequent political history of the Valley. All the three men were granted Jagirs (feudatory estates) by the King. Rinchan became the ruler of Kashmir for three years.
Shah Mir was the first ruler of the Shah Mir dynasty, which was established in 1339. Muslim ulama, such as Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, arrived from Central Asia to proselytize in Kashmir and their efforts converted thousands of Kashmiris to Islam and Hamadani's son also convinced Sikander Butshikan to enforce Islamic law. By the late 1400s most Kashmiris had accepted Islam. Persian was introduced in Kashmir by the Šāh-Miri dynasty (1349–1561) and started to flourish under Sultan Zayn-al-ʿĀbedin (1420–70).
Mughal rule
The Mughal padishah (emperor) Akbar conquered Kashmir from 1585 to 1586, taking advantage of Kashmir's internal Sunni-Shia divisions, and thus ended indigenous Kashmiri Muslim rule. Akbar added it to the Kabul Subah (encompassing modern-day northeastern Afghanistan, northern Pakistan and the Kashmir Valley of India), but Shah Jahan carved it out as a separate subah (imperial top-level province) with its seat at Srinagar. Kashmir became the northernmost region of Mughal India as well as a pleasure ground in the summertime. They built Persian water-gardens in Srinagar, along the shores of Dal Lake, with cool and elegantly proportioned terraces, fountains, roses, jasmine and rows of chinar trees.
Afghan rule
The Afghan Durrani dynasty's Durrani Empire controlled Kashmir from 1751, when 15th Mughal padshah (emperor) Ahmad Shah Bahadur's viceroy Muin-ul-Mulk was defeated and reinstated by the Durrani founder Ahmad Shah Durrani (who conquered, roughly, modern day Afghanistan and Pakistan from the Mughals and local rulers), until the 1820 Sikh triumph. The Afghan rulers brutally repressed Kashmiris of all faiths (according to Kashmiri historians).
Sikh rule
In 1819, the Kashmir Valley passed from the control of the Durrani Empire of Afghanistan to the conquering armies of the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh of the Punjab, thus ending four centuries of Muslim rule under the Mughals and the Afghan regime. As the Kashmiris had suffered under the Afghans, they initially welcomed the new Sikh rulers. However, the Sikh governors turned out to be hard taskmasters, and Sikh rule was generally considered oppressive, protected perhaps by the remoteness of Kashmir from the capital of the Sikh Empire in Lahore. The Sikhs enacted a number of anti-Muslim laws, which included handing out death sentences for cow slaughter, closing down the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar, and banning the adhan, the public Muslim call to prayer. Kashmir had also now begun to attract European visitors, several of whom wrote of the abject poverty of the vast Muslim peasantry and of the exorbitant taxes under the Sikhs. High taxes, according to some contemporary accounts, had depopulated large tracts of the countryside, allowing only one-sixteenth of the cultivable land to be cultivated. Many Kashmiri peasants migrated to the plains of the Punjab. However, after a famine in 1832, the Sikhs reduced the land tax to half the produce of the land and also began to offer interest-free loans to farmers; Kashmir became the second highest revenue earner for the Sikh Empire. During this time Kashmir shawls became known worldwide, attracting many buyers, especially in the West.
The state of Jammu, which had been on the ascendant after the decline of the Mughal Empire, came under the sway of the Sikhs in 1770. Further in 1808, it was fully conquered by Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Gulab Singh, then a youngster in the House of Jammu, enrolled in the Sikh troops and, by distinguishing himself in campaigns, gradually rose in power and influence. In 1822, he was anointed as the Raja of Jammu. Along with his able general Zorawar Singh Kahluria, he conquered and subdued Rajouri (1821), Kishtwar (1821), Suru valley and Kargil (1835), Ladakh (1834–1840), and Baltistan (1840), thereby surrounding the Kashmir Valley. He became a wealthy and influential noble in the Sikh court.
Princely state
In 1845, the First Anglo-Sikh War broke out. According to The Imperial Gazetteer of India:
Gulab Singh contrived to hold himself aloof till the battle of Sobraon (1846), when he appeared as a useful mediator and the trusted advisor of Sir Henry Lawrence. Two treaties were concluded. By the first the State of Lahore (i.e. West Punjab) handed over to the British, as equivalent for one crore indemnity, the hill countries between the rivers Beas and Indus; by the second the British made over to Gulab Singh for 75 lakhs all the hilly or mountainous country situated to the east of the Indus and the west of the Ravi i.e. the Vale of Kashmir.
Drafted by a treaty and a bill of sale, and constituted between 1820 and 1858, the Princely State of Kashmir and Jammu (as it was first called) combined disparate regions, religions, and ethnicities: to the east, Ladakh was ethnically and culturally Tibetan and its inhabitants practised Buddhism; to the south, Jammu had a mixed population of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs; in the heavily populated central Kashmir valley, the population was overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim, however, there was also a small but influential Hindu minority, the Kashmiri brahmins or pandits; to the northeast, sparsely populated Baltistan had a population ethnically related to Ladakh, but which practised Shia Islam; to the north, also sparsely populated, Gilgit Agency, was an area of diverse, mostly Shiʻa groups; and, to the west, Punch was Muslim, but of different ethnicity than the Kashmir valley. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, in which Kashmir sided with the British, and the subsequent assumption of direct rule by Great Britain, the princely state of Kashmir came under the suzerainty of the British Crown.
In the British census of India of 1941, Kashmir registered a Muslim majority population of 77%, a Hindu population of 20% and a sparse population of Buddhists and Sikhs comprising the remaining 3%. That same year, Prem Nath Bazaz, a Kashmiri Pandit journalist wrote: "The poverty of the Muslim masses is appalling. ... Most are landless laborers, working as serfs for absentee [Hindu] landlords ... Almost the whole brunt of official corruption is borne by the Muslim masses." Under the Hindu rule, Muslims faced hefty taxation, discrimination in the legal system and were forced into labor without any wages. Conditions in the princely state caused a significant migration of people from the Kashmir Valley to Punjab of British India. For almost a century until the census, a small Hindu elite had ruled over a vast and impoverished Muslim peasantry. Driven into docility by chronic indebtedness to landlords and moneylenders, having no education besides, nor awareness of rights, the Muslim peasants had no political representation until the 1930s.
1947 and 1948
Ranbir Singh's grandson Hari Singh, who had ascended the throne of Kashmir in 1925, was the reigning monarch in 1947 at the conclusion of British rule of the subcontinent and the subsequent partition of the British Indian Empire into the newly independent Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. According to Burton Stein's History of India, Kashmir was neither as large nor as old an independent state as Hyderabad; it had been created rather off-handedly by the British after the first defeat of the Sikhs in 1846, as a reward to a former official who had sided with the British. The Himalayan kingdom was connected to India through a district of the Punjab, but its population was 77 per cent Muslim and it shared a boundary with Pakistan. Hence, it was anticipated that the maharaja would accede to Pakistan when the British paramountcy ended on 14–15 August. When he hesitated to do this, Pakistan launched a guerrilla onslaught meant to frighten its ruler into submission. Instead the Maharaja appealed to Mountbatten for assistance, and the governor-general agreed on the condition that the ruler accede to India. Indian soldiers entered Kashmir and drove the Pakistani-sponsored irregulars from all but a small section of the state. The United Nations was then invited to mediate the quarrel. The UN mission insisted that the opinion of Kashmiris must be ascertained, while India insisted that no referendum could occur until all of the state had been cleared of irregulars.
In the last days of 1948, a ceasefire was agreed under UN auspices. However, since the plebiscite demanded by the UN was never conducted, relations between India and Pakistan soured, and eventually led to two more wars over Kashmir in 1965 and 1999.
Current status and political divisions
India has control of about half the area of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which comprises Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, while Pakistan controls a third of the region, divided into two provinces, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh are administered by India as union territories. They formed a single State until 5 August 2019, when the state was bifurcated and its limited autonomy was revoked.
According to Encyclopædia Britannica:
Although there was a clear Muslim majority in Kashmir before the 1947 partition and its economic, cultural, and geographic contiguity with the Muslim-majority area of the Punjab (in Pakistan) could be convincingly demonstrated, the political developments during and after the partition resulted in a division of the region. Pakistan was left with territory that, although basically Muslim in character, was thinly populated, relatively inaccessible, and economically underdeveloped. The largest Muslim group, situated in the Valley of Kashmir and estimated to number more than half the population of the entire region, lay in Indian-administered territory, with its former outlets via the Jhelum valley route blocked.
The eastern region of the former princely state of Kashmir is also involved in a boundary dispute that began in the late 19th century and continues into the 21st. Although some boundary agreements were signed between Great Britain, Afghanistan and Russia over the northern borders of Kashmir, China never accepted these agreements, and China's official position has not changed following the communist revolution of 1949 that established the People's Republic of China. By the mid-1950s the Chinese army had entered the north-east portion of Ladakh.
By 1956–57 they had completed a military road through the Aksai Chin area to provide better communication between Xinjiang and western Tibet. India's belated discovery of this road led to border clashes between the two countries that culminated in the Sino-Indian War of October 1962.
The region is divided amongst three countries in a territorial dispute: Pakistan controls the northwest portion (Northern Areas and Kashmir), India controls the central and southern portion (Jammu and Kashmir) and Ladakh, and the People's Republic of China controls the northeastern portion (Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract). India controls the majority of the Siachen Glacier area, including the Saltoro Ridge passes, whilst Pakistan controls the lower territory just southwest of the Saltoro Ridge. India controls of the disputed territory, Pakistan controls , and the People's Republic of China controls the remaining .
Jammu and Azad Kashmir lie south and west of the Pir Panjal range, and are under Indian and Pakistani control respectively. These are populous regions. Gilgit-Baltistan, formerly known as the Northern Areas, is a group of territories in the extreme north, bordered by the Karakoram, the western Himalayas, the Pamir, and the Hindu Kush ranges. With its administrative centre in the town of Gilgit, the Northern Areas cover an area of and have an estimated population approaching 1 million (10 lakhs).
Ladakh is between the Kunlun mountain range in the north and the main Great Himalayas to the south. Capital towns of the region are Leh and Kargil. It is under Indian administration and was part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir until 2019. It is one of the most sparsely populated regions in the area and is mainly inhabited by people of Indo-Aryan and Tibetan descent. Aksai Chin is a vast high-altitude desert of salt that reaches altitudes up to . Geographically part of the Tibetan Plateau, Aksai Chin is referred to as the Soda Plain. The region is almost uninhabited, and has no permanent settlements.
Though these regions are in practice administered by their respective claimants, neither India nor Pakistan has formally recognised the accession of the areas claimed by the other. India claims those areas, including the area "ceded" to China by Pakistan in the Trans-Karakoram Tract in 1963, are a part of its territory, while Pakistan claims the entire region excluding Aksai Chin and Trans-Karakoram Tract. The two countries have fought several declared wars over the territory. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 established the rough boundaries of today, with Pakistan holding roughly one-third of Kashmir, and India one-half, with a dividing line of control established by the United Nations. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 resulted in a stalemate and a UN-negotiated ceasefire.
Geography
The Kashmir region lies between latitudes 32° and 36° N, and longitudes 74° and 80° E. It has an area of . It is bordered to the north and east by China (Xinjiang and Tibet), to the northwest by Afghanistan (Wakhan Corridor), to the west by Pakistan (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab) and to the south by India (Himachal Pradesh and Punjab).
The topography of Kashmir is mostly mountainous. It is traversed mainly by the Western Himalayas. The Himalayas terminate in the western boundary of Kashmir at Nanga Parbat. Kashmir is traversed by three rivers namely Indus, Jehlum and Chenab. These river basins divide the region into three valleys separated by high mountain ranges. The Indus valley forms the north and north-eastern portion of the region which include bare and desolate areas of Baltistan and Ladakh. The upper portion of the Jhelum valley forms the proper Vale of Kashmir surrounded by high mountain ranges. The Chenab valley forms the southern portion of the Kashmir region with its denuded hills towards the south. It includes almost the whole of the Jammu province. High altitude lakes are frequent at high elevations. Lower down in the Vale of Kashmir there are many freshwater lakes and large areas of swamplands which include Wular Lake, Dal Lake and Hokersar near Srinagar.
To the north and northeast, beyond the Great Himalayas, the region is traversed by the Karakoram mountains. To the northwest lies the Hindu Kush mountain range. The upper Indus River separates the Himalayas from the Karakoram. The Karakoram is the most heavily glaciated part of the world outside the polar regions. The Siachen Glacier at and the Biafo Glacier at rank as the world's second and third longest glaciers outside the polar regions. Karakoram has four eight-thousander mountain peaks with K2, the second highest peak in the world at .
The Indus River system forms the drainage basin of the Kashmir region. The river enters the region in Ladakh at its southeastern corner from the Tibetan Plateau, and flows northwest to run a course through the entire Ladakh and Gilgit-Baltistan. Almost all the rivers originating in these region are part of the Indus river system. After reaching the end of the Greaty Himalayan range, the Indus turns a corner and flows southwest into the Punjab plains. The Jhelum and Chenab rivers also follow a course roughly parallel to this, and join the Indus river in southern Punjab plains in Pakistan.
The geographical features of the Kashmir region differ considerably from one part to another. The lowest part of the region consists of the plains of Jammu at the southwestern corner, which continue into the plains of Punjab at an elevation of below 1000 feet. Mountains begin at 2000 feet, then raising to 3000–4000 feet in the "Outer Hills", a rugged country with ridges and long narrow valleys. Next within the tract lie the Middle Mountains which are 8000–10,000 feet in height with ramifying valleys. Adjacent to these hills are the lofty Great HImalayan ranges (14000–15000 feet) which divide the drainage of the Chenab and Jehlum from that of the Indus. Beyond this range lies a wide tract of moutainous country of 17000–22000 feet in Ladakh and Baltistan.
Climate
Kashmir has a different climate for every region owing to the great variation of the level of the altitude. The temperatures ranges from the tropical heat of the Punjab summer to the intensity of the cold which keeps the perpetual snow on the mountains. Jammu Division, excluding the upper parts of the Chenab Valley, features a humid subtropical climate. The Vale of Kashmir has a moderate climate. The Astore Valley and some parts of Gilgit-Baltistan features a semi-Tibatan climate. While as the other parts of Gilgit-Baltistan and Ladakh have Tibetan climate which is considered as almost rainless climate.
The southwestern Kashmir which includes much of the Jammu province and Muzaffarabad falls within the reach of Indian monsoon. The Pir Panjal Range acts as an effective barrier and blocks these monsoon tracts in reaching the main Kashmir Valley and the Himalayan slopes. These areas of the region receive much of the precipitation from the wind currents of the Arabian Sea. The Himalayan slope and the Pir Panjal witness greatest snow melting from March until June. These variations in snow melting and rainfall have led to destructive inundations of the main valley. One instance of such Kashmir flood of a larger proportion is recorded in the 12th-century book Rajatarangini. A single cloudburst in July, 1935 caused the upper Jehlum river level to rise 11 feet. The 2014 Kashmir floods inundated the Kashmir city of Srinagar and submerged hundreds of other villages.
Flora and fauna
Kashmir has a recorded forest area of along with some national parks and reserves. The forests vary according to the climatic conditions and the altitude. Kashmir forests range from the tropical deciduous forests in the foothills of Jammu and Muzafarabad, to the temperate forests throughout the Vale of Kashmir and to the alpine grasslands and high altitude medows in Gilgit-Baltistan and Ladakh.
The Kashmir region has four well defined zones of vegetation in the tree growth, due to the difference in elevation. The tropical forests up to 1500 m, are known as the Phulai (Acacia modesta) and Olive (Olea cuspid ata) Zone. There occur semi-deciduous species of Shorea robusta, Acacia catechu, Dalbergia sissoo, Albizia lebbeck, Garuga pinnata, Terminalia bellirica and T. tomentosa and Pinus roxburghii are found at higher elevations. The temperate zone between (1,500–3,500 m) is referred as the Chir Pine (Finns longifolia). This zone is dominated by oaks (Quercus spp.) and Rhododendron spp. The Blue Pine (Finns excelsa) Zone with Cedrus deodara, Abies pindrow and Picea smithiana occur at elevations between 2,800 and 3,500 m. The Birch (Betula utilis) Zone has Herbaceous genera of Anemone, Geranium, Iris, Lloydia, Potentilla and Primula interspersed with dry dwarf alpine scrubs of Berberis, Cotoneaster, Juniperus and Rhododendron are prevalent in alpine grasslands at 3,500 m and above.
Kashmir is referred as a beauty spot of the medicinal and herbaceous flora in the Himalayas. There are hundreds of different species of wild flowers recorded in the alpine meadows of the region. The botanical garden and the tulip gardens of Srinagar built in the Zabarwans grow 300 breeds of flora and 60 varieties of tulips respectively. The later is considered as the largest Tulip Garden of Asia.
Kashmir region is home to rare species of animals, many of which are protected by sanctuaries and reserves. The Dachigam National Park in the Valley holds the last viable population of Kashmir stag (Hangul) and the largest population of black bear in Asia. In Gilgit-Baltistan the Deosai National Park is designated to protect the largest population of Himalayan brown bears in the western Himalayas. Snow leopards are found in high density In the Hemis National Park in Ladakh. The region is home to musk deer, markhor, leopard cat, jungle cat, red fox, jackal, Himalayan wolf, serow, Himalayan yellow-throated marten, long-tailed marmot, Indian porcupine, Himalayan mouse-hare, langur and Himalayan weasel. At least 711 bird species are recorded in the valley alone with 31 classified as globally threatened species.
Demographics
In the 1901 Census of the British Indian Empire, the population of the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu was 2,905,578. Of these, 2,154,695 (74.16%) were Muslims, 689,073 (23.72%) Hindus, 25,828 (0.89%) Sikhs, and 35,047 (1.21%) Buddhists (implying 935 (0.032%) others).
The Hindus were found mainly in Jammu, where they constituted a little less than 60% of the population. In the Kashmir Valley, the Hindus represented "524 in every 10,000 of the population (i.e. 5.24%), and in the frontier wazarats of Ladhakh and Gilgit only 94 out of every 10,000 persons (0.94%)." In the same Census of 1901, in the Kashmir Valley, the total population was recorded to be 1,157,394, of which the Muslim population was 1,083,766, or 93.6% and the Hindu population 60,641. Among the Hindus of Jammu province, who numbered 626,177 (or 90.87% of the Hindu population of the princely state), the most important castes recorded in the census were "Brahmans (186,000), the Rajputs (167,000), the Khattris (48,000) and the Thakkars (93,000)."
In the 1911 Census of the British Indian Empire, the total population of Kashmir and Jammu had increased to 3,158,126. Of these, 2,398,320 (75.94%) were Muslims, 696,830 (22.06%) Hindus, 31,658 (1%) Sikhs, and 36,512 (1.16%) Buddhists. In the last census of British India in 1941, the total population of Kashmir and Jammu (which as a result of the Second World War, was estimated from the 1931 census) was 3,945,000. Of these, the total Muslim population was 2,997,000 (75.97%), the Hindu population was 808,000 (20.48%), and the Sikh 55,000 (1.39%).
The Kashmiri Pandits, the only Hindus of the Kashmir valley, who had stably constituted approximately 4 to 5% of the population of the valley during Dogra rule (1846–1947), and 20% of whom had left the Kashmir valley by 1950, began to leave in much greater numbers in the 1990s. According to a number of authors, approximately 100,000 of the total Kashmiri Pandit population of 140,000 left the valley during that decade. Other authors have suggested a higher figure for the exodus, ranging from the entire population of over 150, to 190 thousand (1.5 to 190,000) of a total Pandit population of 200 thousand (200,000), to a number as high as 300 thousand (300,000).
People in Jammu speak Hindi, Punjabi and Dogri, the Kashmir Valley speaks Kashmiri and the sparsely inhabited Ladakh speaks Tibetan and Balti.
The population of Indian-administered union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh combined is 12,541,302 and Pakistani-administered territory of Azad Kashmir is 2,580,000 and Gilgit-Baltistan is 870,347.
Economy
Kashmir's economy is centred around agriculture. Traditionally the staple crop of the valley was rice, which formed the chief food of the people. In addition, Indian corn, wheat, barley and oats were also grown. Given its temperate climate, it is suited for crops like asparagus, artichoke, seakale, broad beans, scarletrunners, beetroot, cauliflower and cabbage. Fruit trees are common in the valley, and the cultivated orchards yield pears, apples, peaches, and cherries. The chief trees are deodar, firs and pines, chenar or plane, maple, birch and walnut, apple, cherry.
Historically, Kashmir became known worldwide when Cashmere wool was exported to other regions and nations (exports have ceased due to decreased abundance of the cashmere goat and increased competition from China). Kashmiris are well adept at knitting and making Pashmina shawls, silk carpets, rugs, kurtas, and pottery. Saffron, too, is grown in Kashmir. Srinagar is known for its silver-work, papier-mâché, wood-carving, and the weaving of silk. The economy was badly damaged by the 2005 Kashmir earthquake which, as of 8 October 2005, resulted in over 70,000 deaths in the Pakistani-administered territory of Azad Kashmir and around 1,500 deaths in Indian-administered territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
Transport
Transport is predominantly by air or road vehicles in the region. Kashmir has a long modern railway line that started in October 2009, and was last extended in 2013 and connects Baramulla, in the western part of Kashmir, to Srinagar and Banihal. It is expected to link Kashmir to the rest of India after the construction of the railway line from Katra to Banihal is completed.
In culture
Irish poet Thomas Moore's 1817 romantic poem Lalla Rookh is credited with having made Kashmir (spelt Cashmere in the poem) "a household term in Anglophone societies", conveying the idea that it was a kind of paradise (an old idea going back to Hindu and Buddhist texts in Sanskrit).
See also
1941 Census of Jammu and Kashmir
Human rights abuses in Kashmir
Kashmiris
List of Jammu and Kashmir-related articles
List of Kashmiri people
Theory of Kashmiri descent from lost tribes of Israel
Notes
References
Bibliography
General history
.
.
.
.
.
.
Kashmir history
Historical sources
Blank, Jonah. "Kashmir–Fundamentalism Takes Root", Foreign Affairs, 78.6 (November/December 1999): 36–42.
Drew, Federic. 1877. The Northern Barrier of India: a popular account of the Jammoo and Kashmir Territories with Illustrations; 1st edition: Edward Stanford, London. Reprint: Light & Life Publishers, Jammu. 1971.
Evans, Alexander. Why Peace Won't Come to Kashmir, Current History (Vol 100, No 645) April 2001 p. 170–175.
Hussain, Ijaz. 1998. "Kashmir Dispute: An International Law Perspective", National Institute of Pakistan Studies.
Irfani, Suroosh, ed "Fifty Years of the Kashmir Dispute": Based on the proceedings of the International Seminar held at Muzaffarabad, Azad Jammu and Kashmir 24–25 August 1997: University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Muzaffarabad, AJK, 1997.
Joshi, Manoj Lost Rebellion: Kashmir in the Nineties (Penguin, New Delhi, 1999).
Khan, L. Ali The Kashmir Dispute: A Plan for Regional Cooperation 31 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 31, p. 495 (1994).
Knight, E. F. 1893. Where Three Empires Meet: A Narrative of Recent Travel in: Kashmir, Western Tibet, Gilgit, and the adjoining countries. Longmans, Green, and Co., London. Reprint: Ch'eng Wen Publishing Company, Taipei. 1971.
Knight, William, Henry. 1863. Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet. Richard Bentley, London. Reprint 1998: Asian Educational Services, New Delhi.
Köchler, Hans. The Kashmir Problem between Law and Realpolitik. Reflections on a Negotiated Settlement. Keynote speech delivered at the "Global Discourse on Kashmir 2008." European Parliament, Brussels, 1 April 2008.
Moorcroft, William and Trebeck, George. 1841. Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab; in Ladakh and Kashmir, in Peshawar, Kabul, Kunduz, and Bokhara... from 1819 to 1825, Vol. II. Reprint: New Delhi, Sagar Publications, 1971.
Neve, Arthur. (Date unknown). The Tourist's Guide to Kashmir, Ladakh, Skardo &c. 18th Edition. Civil and Military Gazette, Ltd., Lahore. (The date of this edition is unknown – but the 16th edition was published in 1938).
Stein, M. Aurel. 1900. Kalhaṇa's Rājataraṅgiṇī–A Chronicle of the Kings of Kaśmīr, 2 vols. London, A. Constable & Co. Ltd. 1900. Reprint, Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1979.
Younghusband, Francis and Molyneux, Edward 1917. Kashmir. A. & C. Black, London.
Norelli-Bachelet, Patrizia. "Kashmir and the Convergence of Time, Space and Destiny", 2004; . First published as a four-part series, March 2002 – April 2003, in 'Prakash', a review of the Jagat Guru Bhagavaan Gopinath Ji Charitable Foundation. Kashmir and the Convergence of Time Space and Destiny by Patrizia Norelli Bachelet
Muhammad Ayub. An Army; Its Role & Rule (A History of the Pakistan Army from Independence to Kargil 1947–1999). Pittsburgh: Rosedog Books, 2005. .
External links
Instrument of Accession
United Nations Military Observers Group in Kashmir
Official website of the Jammu and Kashmir Government (Indian-administered Kashmir)
Official website of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Government (Pakistan-administered Kashmir)
Disputed territories in Asia
Divided regions
Geography of India
Geography of Pakistan
Historical regions
Kashmiri-speaking countries and territories
Regions of Asia
Frozen conflict zones | [
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17339 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall%20Square%20Research | Kendall Square Research | Kendall Square Research (KSR) was a supercomputer company headquartered originally in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1986, near Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was co-founded by Steven Frank and Henry Burkhardt III, who had formerly helped found Data General and Encore Computer and was one of the original team that designed the PDP-8. KSR produced two models of supercomputer, the KSR1 and KSR2. It went bankrupt in 1994.
Technology
The KSR systems ran a specially customized version of the OSF/1 operating system, a Unix variant, with programs compiled by a KSR-specific port of the Green Hills Software C and FORTRAN compilers. The architecture was shared memory implemented as a cache-only memory architecture or "COMA". Being all cache, memory dynamically migrated and replicated in a coherent manner based on the access pattern of individual processors. The processors were arranged in a hierarchy of rings, and the operating system mediated process migration and device access. Instruction decode was hardwired, and pipelining was used. Each KSR1 processor was a custom 64-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) CPU clocked at 20 MHz and capable of a peak output of 20 million instructions per second (MIPS) and 40 million floating-point operations per second (MFLOPS). Up to 1088 of these processors could be arranged in a single system, with a minimum of eight. The KSR2 doubled the clock rate to 40 MHz and supported over 5000 processors. The KSR-1 chipset was fabricated by Sharp Corporation while the KSR-2 chipset was built by Hewlett-Packard.
Software
Besides the traditional scientific applications, KSR with Oracle Corporation, addressed the massively parallel database market for commercial applications. The KSR-1 and -2 supported Micro Focus COBOL and C/C++ programming languages, and the Oracle database and the MATISSE OODBMS from ADB, Inc. Their own product, the KSR Query Decomposer, complemented the functions of the Oracle product for SQL uses. The TUXEDO transaction monitor for OLTP was also provided. The KAP program (Kuck & Associate Preprocessor) provided for pre-processing for source code analysis and parallelization. The runtime environment was termed PRESTO, and was a POSIX compliant multithreading manager.
Hardware
The KSR-1 processor was implemented as a four-chip set in 1.2 micrometer complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS). These chips were: the cell execution unit, the floating point unit, the arithmetic logic unit, and the external I/O unit (XIO). The CEU handled instruction fetch (two per clock), and all operations involving memory, such as loads and stores. 40-bit addresses were used, going to full 64-bit addresses later. The integer unit had 32, 64-bit-wide registers. The floating point unit is discussed below. The XIO had the capacity of 30 MB/s throughput to I/O devices. It included 64 control and data registers.
The KSR processor was a 2-wide VLIW, with instructions of 6 types: memory reference (load and store), execute, control flow, memory control, I/O, and inserted. Execute instructions included arithmetic, logical, and type conversion. They were usually triadic register in format. Control flow refers to branches and jumps. Branch instructions were two cycles. The programmer (or compiler) could implicitly control the quashing behavior of the subsequent two instructions that would be initiated during the branch. The choices were: always retain the results, retain results if branch test is true, or retain results if branch test is false. Memory control provided synchronization primitives. I/O instructions were provided. Inserted instructions were forced into a flow by a coprocessor. Inserted load and store were used for direct memory access (DMA) transfers. Inserted memory instructions were used to maintain cache coherency. New coprocessors could be interfaced with the inserted instruction mechanism. IEEE standard floating point arithmetic was supported. Sixty-four 64-bit wide registers were included.
The following example of KSR assembly performs an indirect procedure call to an address held in the procedure's constant block, saving the return address in register c14. It also saves the frame pointer, loads integer register zero with the value 3, and increments integer register 31 without changing the condition codes. Most instructions have a delay slot of 2 cycles and the delay slots are not interlocked, so must be scheduled explicitly, else the resulting hazard means wrong values are sometimes loaded.
finop ; movb8_8 %i2,%c10
finop ; cxnop
finop ; cxnop
add8.ntr 75,%i31,%i31 ; ld8 8(%c10),%c4
finop ; st8 %fp,504(%sp)
finop ; cxnop
movi8 3, %i0 ; jsr %c14,16(%c4)
In the KSR design, all of the memory was treated as cache. The design called for no home location- to reduce storage overheads and to software transparently, dynamically migrate/replicate memory based on where it was be utilized; A Harvard architecture, separate bus for instructions and memory was used. Each node board contained 256 kB of I-cache and D-cache, essentially primary cache. At each node was 32 MB of memory for main cache. The system level architecture was shared virtual memory, which was physically distributed in the machine. The programmer or application only saw one contiguous address space, which was spanned by a 40-bit address. Traffic between nodes traveled at up to 4 gigabytes per second. The 32 megabytes per node, in aggregate, formed the physical memory of the machine.
Specialized input/output processors could be used in the system, providing scalable I/O. A 1088 node KSR1 could have 510 I/O channels with an aggregate in excess of 15 GB/s. Interfaces such as Ethernet, FDDI, and HIPPI were supported.
History
As the company scaled up quickly to enter production, they moved in the late 1980s to 170 Tracer Lane, Waltham, Massachusetts.
KSR refocused its efforts from the scientific to the commercial marketplace, with emphasis on parallel relational databases and OLTP operations. It then got out of the hardware business, but continued to market some of its data warehousing and analysis software products.
The first KSR1 system was installed in 1991. With new processor hardware, new memory hardware and a novel memory architecture, a new compiler port, a new port of a relatively new operating system, and exposed memory hazards, early systems were noted for frequent system crashes. KSR called their cache-only memory architecture (COMA) by the trade name Allcache; reliability problems with early systems earned it the nickname Allcrash, although memory was not necessarily the root cause of crashes. A few KSR1 models were sold, and as the KSR2 was being rolled out, the company collapsed amid accounting irregularities involving the overstatement of revenue.
KSR used a proprietary processor because 64-bit processors were not commercially available. However, this put the small company in the difficult position of doing both processor design and system design. The KSR processors were introduced in 1991 at 20 MHz and 40 MFlops. At that time, the 32-bit Intel 80486 ran at 50 MHz and 50 MFlops. When the 64-bit DEC Alpha was introduced in 1992, it ran at up to 192 MHz and 192 MFlops, while the 1992 KSR2 ran at 40 MHz and 80 MFlops.
One customer of the KSR2, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a United States Department of Energy facility, purchased an enormous number of spare parts, and kept their machines running for years after the demise of KSR.
KSR, along with many of its competitors (see below), went bankrupt during the collapse of the supercomputer market in the early 1990s. KSR went out of business in February 1994, when their stock was delisted from the stock exchange.
Competition
KSR's competitors included MasPar Computer Corporation, Thinking Machines, Meiko Scientific, and various old-line (and still surviving) companies like IBM and Intel.
References
Further reading
"BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; Pools of Memory, Waves of Dispute" John Markoff, The New York Times - 29 January 1992
Supercomputers
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Companies based in Massachusetts
Defunct computer companies based in Massachusetts | [
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17341 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinglassie | Kinglassie | Kinglassie (Scottish Gaelic: Cill Ghlaise) is a small village and parish in central Fife, Scotland. It is located two miles southwest of Glenrothes. In 2011, the population of the village was 1,684.
The civil parish has a population of 22,543 (in 2011).
History
The village of Kinglassie (pronounced Kin-glassie) lies to the north of the Lochty Burn, southwest of Glenrothes in Fife, and two miles southeast of Perth and Kinross district.
The name of the village derives from Scottish Gaelic, although the exact meaning is obscure. The name was first recorded as "Kilglassin" in 1127. The first element, kil, is from the Gaelic, cill, meaning monk's cell or church, but was changed to kin or ceann, meaning head or end, by the 13th century. The element 'glassie' may refer to the Irish saint Glaisne, or may be glasin, meaning the place of the burn. Taken together this gives "St Glaisne's Church" or "Church of the Burn" as possible meanings.
Little of antiquity remains, except for the Dogton Stone, with its Celtic cross, situated in a field about a mile (1.5 km) to the south. For many years, Kinglassie was a weaving village, but in the 19th and 20th centuries it developed as a mining town.
From a very early period through to the Reformation, Scotland was dotted over with certain divisions of lands known as "Schyres." Thus, in the immediate neighbourhood of Kinross were Kynros-Schyre, Portmocke-Schyre, Kinglassy-Schyre, Muchard-Schyre, and Doloure-Schyre. These Schyres must not be confused with the shire of the present day; they were simply divisions of land, similar in extent to an average modern parish.
Kinglassie has a primary school, Mitchell Hall (1896) and the Miners' Welfare Institute (est. 1931). Fife Airport lies about a mile (1.5 km) to the north and, on a hill overlooking the farm of Redwells, stands Blythe's Folly, a tower built in 1812 by an eccentric Leith ship owner. Kinglassie's development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was marked by its rapid expansion to house mine workers. Many mine workers perished or were injured during the life of the mine. The mine was plagued by water flooding problems. The Kinglassie Pit started in 1908 and closed in 1967. The Westfield open cast coal mine lies to the west of the village and is still regarded as the biggest man-made hole in Europe by local people.
Glastian of Kinglassie B (AC) (also known as Glastian of MacGlastian) was born in Fife, Scotland. He died at Kinglassie (Kinglace), Scotland, in 830. As bishop of Fife, Saint Glastian mediated in the bloody civil war between the Picts and the Scots. When the Picts were subjugated, Glastian did much to alleviate their lot. He is the patron saint of Kinglassie in Fife and is venerated in Kyntire (Benedictines, Husenbeth).
School
Kinglassie Primary School has a roll of approximately 270 pupils. The school was built to designs by the architect George Charles Campbell in 1912. It has a butterfly type plan consisting of two single storey rendered wings either side of a hexagon shaped hall. The central portion of the façade is two storeys high and of red sandstone, with generous steps leading to a central formal entrance. It is a category B listed building.
The Pupil Council represents pupils in the school. The eco-committee consists of pupils, staff, parents, and members of the wider community, and is proactive in promoting conservation initiatives throughout the school. A parent council represents the parent body and raises funds for various initiatives. In addition, children are supported in class by a growing number of parent helpers and the school is well-supported by parents generally.
Local landmarks
Blythe's Tower, built in 1812, is a four-storey square tower, high, built of rubble with ashlar string courses and a crenellated parapet. It is a category B listed building. The tower's interior was formerly floored to afford access to an observation platform. The tower was built by a linen merchant to view ships as they entered the Forth, affording him the opportunity to procure the best goods at port. During World War II, the tower was used as a look out tower by the home guard.
The Dogton Stone, lies in a field to the south of Kinglassie at Grid reference - NT 236 968. The stone is a fragment of a free standing cross erected by the Picts, it probably dates from the 9th Century. The lower portion of the stone is all that remains of the cross and badly eroded decoration including a figure of an armed horseman above two beasts can be discerned. No one is certain why the stone was erected at this spot. It is a scheduled monument.
The Mitchell Hall, built in 1896, was donated to the community by Alexander Mitchell. Mitchell also donated the first Parish Church organ. The Mitchell Hall is used by local community groups and is an asset to the wider Fife community.
Culture
The Kinglassie & District Pipe Band was reformed in 1982. It is currently in Grade 4a and its members are mostly of school age.
Fife mining museum, formed in 1992, is located in Kinglassie at the back of the Kinglassie Miners Welfare Institute. The museum closed recently.
The town is a key stop on the Fife Pilgrim Way walking route, being a historically popular rest point for pilgrims making their way to St Andrews.
Notable people
Sir William Reid (25 April 1791 – 31 October 1858), governor of Bermuda (1839–46), Barbados (1846–48), and Malta (1851–58); knighted 1851.
Jimmy Bonthrone, footballer and manager (16 June 1929 – 7 June 2008) played for East Fife 1947–58, Dundee 1958–60; manager, East Fife 1963–69, Aberdeen 1971–75; general manager, East Fife 1980–94; married (two sons).
Willie Fernie (22 November 1928 – 1 July 2011) was a Scottish footballer who played for the Scotland national football team in both the 1954 and 1958 FIFA World Cups. He also played for Celtic 1948–1958, Middlesbrough 1958–1960, St. Mirren 1961–1963, Partick Thistle 1963, Alloa 1963, Fraserburgh 1963–1964, Coleraine 1964 and Bangor 1964–1965 before becoming manager of Kilmarnock FC 1973–1977.
T. McEwen junior, Scottish Motorcycle Speed Champion, the championships held on the West Sands, St Andrews on Saturday. He retained the medium-weight and heavyweight titles he secured in 1937 and also added the light-weight championship.
Alan Murray, founder of Alan Murray Architects, award-winning Edinburgh architectural firm.
References
kinglassie
Parishes in Fife
Mining communities in Fife | [
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17342 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalat%2C%20Pakistan | Kalat, Pakistan | Kalāt or Qalāt (Brahui/Balochi: قلات), historically known as Qīqān, is a historical town located in Kalat District, Balochistan, Pakistan. Kalat is the capital of Kalat District and is known locally as Kalat-e-Brahui and Kalat-e-Sewa.
Qalat, formerly Qilat, is located roughly in the center of Balochistan, Pakistan, It was the capital of the Kalat Khanate. The current Khan of Kalat is a ceremonial title held by Mir Suleman Dawood Jan, and efforts have been made by the Pakistani government to reconcile with him; his son Prince Mohammed, who is next in line to be the Khan of Kalat, is pro-Pakistan.
Climate
Kalat features a cold desert climate (BWk) under the Köppen climate classification. The average temperature in Kalat is , while the annual precipitation averages . June is the driest month with of rainfall, while January, the wettest month, has an average precipitation of .
July is the warmest month of the year with an average temperature of . The coldest month January has an average temperature of . The all-time lowest recorded temperature in Kalat was −17 °C on 20 January 1978, while the highest temperature ever recorded was 38 °C on 19 June 1977.
Demographics
The population is mostly Muslim, with a Hindu population of two percent. In addition, there are some Hindu Hindkowan merchants who have settled in Kalat.
Kalat Kali Temple
There is a Hindu mandir below citadel of the city dedicated to Goddess Kali. This mandir dates back to pre-Islamic era of South Asia associated with Hindu Hindkowans Bhatia caste.
History
The town of Kalat is said to have been founded by and named Qalat-e Sewa (Sewa's Fort), after Sewa, a legendary hero of the Brahui people.
The Brahui Speaking tribes arrived from east in the Qalat area way before the arrival of Balochi speaking tribes from the west. The Brohis established a large kingdom in the 15th century, but it soon declined and the region fell to Mughals for a short period. The brahui speaking Khans of Qalat were dominant from the 17th century onwards until the arrival of the British in the 19th century. A treaty was signed in 1876 to make Qalat part of the British Empire.
In 1947, the Khan of Kalat reportedly acceded to the dominion of Pakistan.
In 1948, Qalat became part of Pakistan when the British withdrew. The last Khan of Qalat was formally removed from power in 1955, but the title is still claimed by his descendants. The current Khan of Qalat is Mir Suleman Dawood Khan Ahmadzai.
References
Kalat district - The Planning and Development Department of the Government of Balochistan
External links
The Land and People of Baluchistan
Populated places in Kalat District
sv:Kalat | [
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17348 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kordofanian%20languages | Kordofanian languages | The Kordofanian languages are a geographic grouping of five language groups spoken in the Nuba Mountains of the Kurdufan, Sudan: Talodi–Heiban languages, Lafofa languages, Rashad languages, Katla languages and Kadu languages. The first four groups are sometimes regarded as branches of the hypothetical Niger–Congo family, whereas Kadu is now widely seen as a branch of the proposed Nilo-Saharan family.
History
In 1963, Joseph Greenberg added them to the Niger–Congo family, creating his Niger–Kordofanian proposal. The Kordofanian languages have not been shown to be more distantly related than other branches of Niger–Congo, however, and they have not been shown to constitute a valid group. Today, the Kadu languages are excluded, and the others are usually included in Niger–Congo proper.
Roger Blench notes that the Talodi and Heiban families have the noun class systems characteristic of the Atlantic–Congo core of Niger–Congo but that the two Katla languages have no trace of ever having had such a system. However, the Kadu languages and some of the Rashad languages appear to have acquired noun classes as part of a Sprachbund rather than having inherited them. Blench concludes that Talodi and Heiban are core Niger–Congo whereas Katla and Rashad form a peripheral branch along the lines of Mande.
Heiban, Katloid, and Talodi are also grouped together in an automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013). However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.
Talodi–Heiban languages
The Heiban languages, also called Koalib or Koalib–Moro, and the Talodi languages, also called Talodi–Masakin, are part of the Talodi–Heiban group.
Lafofa languages
Lafofa (Tegem) was for a time classified with Talodi, but appears to be a separate branch of Niger–Congo.
Rashad languages
The number of Rashad languages, also called Tegali–Tagoi, varies among descriptions, from two (Williamson & Blench 2000), three (Ethnologue), to eight (Blench ms). Tagoi has a noun-class system like the Atlantic–Congo languages, which is apparently borrowed, but Tegali does not.
Katla languages
The two Katla languages have no trace of ever having had a Niger–Congo-type noun-class system.
Kadu languages
Since the work of Thilo Schadeberg in 1981, the "Tumtum" or Kadu branch is now widely seen as Nilo-Saharan. However, the evidence is slight, and a conservative classification would treat it as an independent family.
Reconstruction
Quint (2020) suggests that Proto-Kordofanian can be reconstructed from the Heibanian, Talodian, Rashadian, Katloid, and Lafofa languages. His Proto-Kordofanian reconstructions are as follows:
Lexical isoglosses
Starostin (2018) lists the following common lexical isoglosses in the Kordofanian languages. Potential cognates are highlighted in bold.
{| class="wikitable sortable"
! Proto-language
! eye
! bone
! egg
! tooth
! ear
! tongue
! head
! I
! thou
|-
! Proto-Heiban
| *=ey
| *=uya
| *=ɛɲɔ(ŋ)
| *=iŋa-t̪
| *=ɛːni
| *=ŋɛla
| *=da
| *(i)ɲ=i
| *(u)ŋ=a
|-
! Proto-Talodi
| *=igi
| *=umV
| *=uwi(ŋ)
| *=iɲi-t
| *=ɛːnu
| *=lʊŋɛ
| *=âs
| *ŋ=i
| *(u)ŋ=a
|-
! (Proto-)Lafofa
| =î
| =uami
| =uwɛ-
| =ɛːŋı
|
| liaŋi
| =ay
| ɲɛ-
| ŋɔ-
|-
! Proto-Katla-Tima
| *=igi
| *=uga
| *=iwɔɲ
|
| *=ɔnɔ
| *=liŋi
| *=as
| ɲɔŋ
| ŋaŋ
|-
! Proto-Rashad
| *=i(ŋ)gə
| *=uh
| *iye (?)
| *=iɲi-n
| *=əni-n
| *=ŋəla
| *=as
| *ŋ=i
| *ŋ=ɔ
|-
! Proto-Kadu
| *=yV
| *kuɓa
| *sule
| *=kini
| *=ɛːsɔ
| *ŋaɗɔ
| *=at̪u
| *aʔa
| *oʔo
|}
Comparative vocabulary
Sample basic vocabulary of the Heiban, Talodi, Rashad, and Lafofa branches:
Note: In table cells with slashes, the singular form is given before the slash, while the plural form follows the slash.
Numerals
Comparison of numerals in individual languages:
See also
Languages of the Nuba Mountains
References
Bibliography
Herman Bell. 1995. The Nuba Mountains: Who Spoke What in 1976? (archive link). Being a study of the published results from a major project of the Institute of African and Asian Studies: the Language Survey of the Nuba Mountains.
Roger Blench. Unpublished. Does Kordofanian constitute a group and if not, where does its languages fit into Niger-Congo?
Roger Blench. Unpublished. Kordofanian and Niger–Congo: new and revised lexical evidence.
Roger Blench, 2011, Should Kordofanian be split up?, Nuba Hills Conference, Leiden
P. A. and D. N. MacDiarmid. 1931. "The languages of the Nuba Mountains." Sudan Notes and Records 14: 149-162.
Carl Meinhof. 1915-1919. "Sprachstudien im egyptischen Sudan". Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen 9-9. "1. Tagoy." 6: 164-161. "2. Tumale". 6:182-205. "11. Tegele." 7:110-131. "12. Rashad." 7:132.
Thilo C. Schadeberg. 1981a. A survey of Kordofanian. SUGIA Beiheft 1-2. Hamburg:Helmut Buske Verlag.
Thilo C. Schadeberg. 1981b. "Das Kordofanische". Die Sprachen Afrikas. Band 1: Niger–Kordofanisch, ed. by Bernd Heine, T. C. Schadeberg, Ekkehard Wolff, pp. 117–28 SUGIA Beiheft 1-2. Hamburg:Helmut Buske Verlag.
Thilo C. Schadeberg. 1981c. "The classification of the Kadugli language group". Nilo-Saharan, ed. by T. C. Schadeberg and M. Lionel Bender, pp. 291–305. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Brenda Z. Seligmann. 1910-11. "Note on the language of the Nubas of Southern Kordofan." Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen 1:167-188.
Roland C. Stevenson. 1956-57. "A survey of the phonetics and grammatical structure of the Nuba Mountains languages, with particular reference to Otoro, Katcha, and Nyimang." Afrika und Übersee 40:73-84, 93-115; 41:27-65, 117-152, 171-196.
Tucker, A. N. and M. A. Bryan. 1956. The Non-Bantu Languages of North-Eastern Africa. (Handbook of African Languages, Part III.) Oxford University Press: London.
A. N. Tucker and M. A. Bryan. 1966. Linguistic Analyses/The Non-Bantu Languages of North-Eastern Africa. (Handbook of African Languages.) Oxford University Press: London.
Tutschek, Lorenz. 1848. "Über die Tumale-Sprache." Gelehrte Anzeigen, herausgegeben von Mitgliedern der k. bayer. Akademie der Wissenschaften. Nrs. 91-93; Spalten 729-52. (=Bulletin der königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften. Nrs. 29-31.)
Tutschek, Lorenz.. 1848-50. "On the Tumali language". Proceedings of the Philological Society for 1846-47 and 1847-48. Vol 3:239-54. Proceedings of the Philological Society for 1848-49 and 1849-50. Vol. 4:138-9.
External links
Roger Blench: Kordofanian materials
Niger–Congo languages
South Kordofan | [
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17350 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khuriya%20Muriya%20Islands | Khuriya Muriya Islands | The Khuriya Muriya Islands (also Kuria Muria, Kooria Mooria, Curia Muria) (; transliterated: Juzur Khurīyā Murīyā or Khūryān Mūryān) are a group of five islands in the Arabian Sea, off the southeastern coast of Oman. The islands form part of the province of Shalim and the Hallaniyat Islands in the governorate of Dhofar.
History
In antiquity the islands were called the Zenobii or Zenobiou Islands (; ) or Doliche (). The islands were mentioned by several early writers including Ptolemy (vi. 7. § 47) who numbered them as seven small islands lying in Khuriya Muriya Bay (; ), towards the entrance of the "Persian Gulf" (most likely the modern Gulf of Aden).
In 1854 the sultan of Muscat (later Muscat and Oman, now Oman) presented the islands to Queen Victoria as a gift and responsibility for the islands was granted to the Bombay government in British India. There was some concern at the time that the deed of cession was null since the sultan had no rights over the archipelago. The Red Sea and India Telegraph Company, formed in 1858, intended to use one of the islands as a base for a telegraph connection between Aden and Karachi but the project was abandoned in 1861 after sections of the cable failed. A group of Liverpool entrepreneurs were granted monopoly rights to harvest the abundant guano deposits, but after having met resistance from the local inhabitants who considered that resource theirs, and questions in the British parliament about the advisability of granting monopoly rights to anyone, the mining was abandoned after some 200,000 tons had been extracted between 1855 and 1860. During that period, the archipelago presented a busy scene, with up to 52 ships present on one occasion. When Colonel Miles visited the archipelago in 1883, less than 40 inhabitants lived on Al-Hallaniyah, the main island. The islanders lived in huts of unmortared stone with mat roofs, and at certain seasons they moved to caves. They lived on fish, shellfish and goat's milk, occasionally exchanging dried fish for dates and rice from passing ships. They fished entirely with hooks since they had neither boat nor nets.
In 1886, the islands were attached administratively to Aden. Due to their remoteness, the lack of anchorages and the fact that the inhabitants continued to consider themselves subjects of the Sultan of Muscat, the islands remained un-administered and, for decades, were only sporadically visited by British officials. While technically part of Aden Colony, the islands, because of their remoteness and inaccessibly, were left to the supervision of the British Resident in the Persian Gulf. As a British possession until 1967, they were administered by the Governor of Aden until 1953, then by the British High Commissioner until 1963, and finally by the British Chief Political Resident of the Persian Gulf (based in Bahrain). On 30 November 1967, Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the United Nations, announced that in accordance with the wishes of the local inhabitants, the islands would be returned to Muscat and Oman, despite criticism from President Qahtan Muhammad al-Shaabi that the islands should be transferred to the People's Republic of South Yemen. The boundary between the two countries was not formally settled until 1992 when it was agreed that the islands were on Oman's side of the line.
Important Bird Area
The island group has been designated an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it supports seabird breeding colonies of red-billed tropicbirds, tropical shearwaters, masked boobies, Socotra cormorants, sooty gulls, and bridled and greater crested terns. Other significant birds are resident mourning wheatears and visiting Jouanin's petrels.
Islands
See also
Al-Hallaniyah
Masirah Island
References
Further reading
Mackintosh-Smith, Tim: Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah
External links
WorldStatesmen - Oman
Hazlitt, Classical Gazetteer, "Zenobii ins."
Hazlitt, Classical Gazetteer, "Doliche"
Nautical Information (Sailing Directions)
Islands of Oman
Disputed islands
Territorial disputes of Yemen
Territorial disputes of Oman
Oman–Yemen relations
Seabird colonies
Important Bird Areas of Oman
Important Bird Areas of Indian Ocean islands | [
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17351 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khwaja%20Ahmad%20Abbas | Khwaja Ahmad Abbas | Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (7 June 1914 – 1 June 1987) was an Indian film director, screenwriter, novelist, and a journalist in Urdu, Hindi and English languages. He won four National Film Awards in India, and internationally his films won Palme d'Or (Golden Palm Grand Prize) at Cannes Film Festival (out of three Palme d'Or nominations) and the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. As a director and screenwriter, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas is considered one of the pioneers of Indian parallel or neo-realistic cinema.
As a director, he made Hindustani films. Dharti Ke Lal (1946), about the Bengal famine of 1943, was one of Indian cinema's first social-realist films, and opened up the overseas market for Indian films in the Soviet Union. Pardesi (1957) was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Shehar Aur Sapna (1963) won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film, while Saat Hindustani (1969) and Do Boond Pani (1972) both won the National Film Awards for Best Feature Film on National Integration.
As a screenwriter, he wrote a number of neo-realistic films, such as Dharti Ke Lal (which he directed), Neecha Nagar (1946) which won the Palme d'Or at the first Cannes Film Festival, Naya Sansar (1941), Jagte Raho (1956), and Saat Hindustani (which he also directed). He is also known for writing the best of Raj Kapoor's films, including the Palme d'Or nominated Awaara (1951), as well as Shree 420 (1955), Mera Naam Joker (1970), Bobby (1973) and Henna (1991).
His column ‘Last Page’ is one of the longest-running newspaper columns in the history of Indian journalism. The column began in 1935, in The Bombay Chronicle, and moved to the Blitz after the Chronicle'''s closure, where it continued until his death in 1987. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1969.
Biography
Early life and education
Abbas was born in Panipat, Undivided Punjab. He was born in the home of Altaf Hussain Hali, a student of Mirza Ghalib. His grandfather Khwaja Gulam Abbas was one of the chief rebels of the 1857 Rebellion movement, and the first martyr of Panipat to be blown from the mouth of a cannon. Abbas's father Ghulam-Us-Sibtain graduated from Aligarh Muslim University, was a tutor of a prince and a businessman, who modernised the preparation of Unani medicines. Abbas's mother, Masroor Khatoon, was the daughter of Sajjad Husain, an educator.
Abbas attended Hali Muslim High School, which was established by his great grandfather, Hali. He was instructed to read the Arabic text of the Quran and his childhood dreams swung at the compulsive behest of his father. Abbas matriculated at the age of fifteen.
He gained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature in 1933 and a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1935 from Aligarh Muslim University.
Career
After leaving university, Abbas began his career as a journalist at the National Call, a New Delhi-based newspaper. Later while studying law in 1934, started Aligarh Opinion.
He joined The Bombay Chronicle in 1935 as a political correspondent and later became a film critic for the newspaper.
He entered films as a part-time publicist for Bombay Talkies in 1936, a production house owned by Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani, to whom he sold his first screenplay Naya Sansar (1941).
While at The Bombay Chronicle, (1935–1947), he started a weekly column called 'Last Page', which he continued when he joined the Blitz magazine. "The Last Page", (‘Azad Kalam’ in the Urdu edition), thus became the longest-running political column in India's history (1935–87). A collection of these columns was later published as two books. He continued to write for The Blitz and Mirror till his last days.
Meanwhile, he had started writing scripts for other directors, Neecha Nagar for Chetan Anand and Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani for V. Shantaram.
In 1945, he made his directorial debut with a film based on the Bengal famine of 1943, Dharti Ke Lal (Children of the Earth) for the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA). In 1951, he founded his own production company called Naya Sansar, which consistently produced films that were socially relevant including, Anhonee, Munna, Rahi (1953), based on a Mulk Raj Anand story, was on the plight of workers on tea plantations, the National Film Award winner, Shehar Aur Sapna (1964) and Saat Hindustani (1969), which won the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration and is also remembered as Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan's debut film.
Abbas wrote 73 books in English, Hindi and Urdu. Abbas was considered a leading light of the Urdu short story. His best known fictional work remains 'Inquilab', based Communal violence, which made him a household name in Indian literature. Like Inquilab, many of his works were translated into many Indian, and foreign languages, like Russian, German, Italian, French and Arabic.
Abbas interviewed several renowned personalities in literary and non-literary fields, including the Russian Prime Minister Khrushchov, American President Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Mao-Tse-Tung and Yuri Gagarin.
He went on to write scripts for Jagte Raho, and most of the prominent Raj Kapoor films including Awaara, Shri 420, Mera Naam Joker, Bobby and Henna.
His autobiography, I Am not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography, was published in 1977 and again in 2010.
Censorship case
In 1968, Abbas made a documentary film called Char Shaher Ek Kahani (A Tale of Four Cities). The film depicted the contrast between the luxurious life of the rich in the four cities of Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Delhi and that of the squalor and poverty of the poor. He approached the Central Board of Film Certification to obtain a 'U' (Unrestricted Public Exhibition) certificate. Abbas was however informed by the regional office of the Board that film was not eligible to be granted a 'U' certificate but was suitable for exhibition only for adults. His appeal to the revising committee of the Central Board of Film Certification led to the decision of the censors being upheld.
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas further appealed to the Central Government but the government decided to grant the film a 'U' certificate provided certain scenes were cut. Following this, Abbas approached the Supreme Court of India by filing a writ petition under Article 19(1) of the Indian Constitution. He claimed that his fundamental right of free speech and expression was denied by the Central Government's refusal to grant the film a 'U' certificate. Abbas also challenged the constitutional validity of pre-censorship on films.
However the Supreme Court of India upheld the constitutional validity pre-censorship on films.
Awards and honours
Films
1942: BFJA Awards: Best Screenplay: Naya Sansar (1941)
1946: Wrote screenplay for Neecha Nagar, which became the only Indian film to win the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the Cannes Film Festival.
1951: Wrote screenplay for Awaara, which was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
1956: Wrote screenplay for Jagte Raho, which won the Crystal Globe Grand Prix at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1957, and the Certificate of Merit at the fourth National Film Awards.
1958 Cannes Film Festival: Pardesi nominated for Palme d'Or (Golden Palm)
1960: All India Certificate of Merit for the Second Best Children's Film – Idd Mubarak 1964: National Film Award for Best Feature Film: Shehar Aur Sapna 1964: Maharashtra State Award: Fakira 1965: International Film Festival Awards (Santa Barbara, USA)): Hamara Ghar 1966: Jury Member: 16th Berlin International Film Festival
1970: Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration at National Film Awards: Saat Hindustani 1972: Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration at National Film Awards: Do Boond Pani 1980: Gold Award for direction: The NaxalitesLiterary
Haryana State Robe of Honour for literary achievements in 1969, the Ghalib Award for his contribution to Urdu prose literature in 1983
Vorosky Literary Award of the Soviet Union in 1984, Urdu Akademi Delhi Special Award 1984, Maharashtra State Urdu Akademi Award in 1985 and the Soviet Award for his contribution to the cause of Indo-Soviet Friendship in 1985.
Filmography
Naya Sansar (1941) – Screenplay, Story
Dharti Ke Lal (1946) – Screenwriter, director, producer
Dr. Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (1946) – Screenwriter, Story
Neecha Nagar (1946) – Screenwriter
Aaj Aur Kal (1947) – Director
Awara (1951) – Screenwriter, Dialogue
Anhonee (1952) – Screenwriter, Dialogue, Story, director, producer
Rahi 1953 – Director
Munna (1954) – Screenwriter, director, producer
Shree 420 (1955) – Screenwriter, Dialogue, Story
Jagte Raho (1956) – Screenwriter
Pardesi (1957)– Screenwriter, director
Char Dil Char Rahen (1959) – Screenwriter, Dialogue, director
Eid Mubarak (1960) Documentary / Short – Director
Gir Game Sanctuary (1961) Documentary – Director
Flight to Assam (1961) – Director
Gyara Hazar Ladkian (1962) – Director
Teen Gharaney (1963) – Director
Shehar Aur Sapna (1964) – Director, screenwriter
Hamara Ghar (1964) – Director
Tomorrow Shall Be Better (1965) Documentary – Director
Aasman Mahal (1965) – Director
Bambai Raat Ki Bahon Mein (1967) – Writer, director, producer
Dharti Ki Pukaar (1967) Short Film – Director
Chaar Shaher Ek Kahani (1968) Documentary – Director
Saat Hindustani (1969) – Director, producer
Mera Naam Joker (1970) – Screenwriter, Story
Do Boond Pani (1971) – Director
Bharat Darshan (1972) Documentary - Director
Luv Kush (1972) Short film - Director
Bobby (1973) – Screenwriter, Story
Kal Ki Baat (1973) Short Film – Director
Achanak (1973) – Screenwriter
Juhu (1973) (TV) – Director
Faslah (1974) – Director, producer
Papa Miya of Aligarh (1975) Documentary – Director
Phir Bolo Aaye Sant Kabir (1976) Documentary – Director
Dr. Iqbal (1978) – Documentary – Director
The Naxalites (1980) – Screenwriter, director
Hindustan Hamara (1983) Documentary / Short – Director
Love in Goa (1983) – Screenwriter
Nanga Fakir (1984) (TV) – Director
Ek Aadmi (1988) – Director
Akanksha (1989) (TV) – Dialogue, Screenplay
Henna (1991) – Story
Books
His books in English, Urdu and Hindi include: including:
Outside India: The Adventures of a Roving Reporter, Hali Pub. House, Delhi, 1939.
An Indian looks at America (The Rampart library of good reading), 1943.
An Indian looks at America, Thacker, Bombay, 1943.
Tomorrow is ours! A novel of the India of Today; Bombay, Popular Book Depot, 1943.
"Let India fight for freedom", Bombay, Sound magazine (Publication dept.), 1943.
Defeat for death: A story without names, Padmaja Publications 1944.
"...and One Did Not Come Back!", Sound magazine, 1944
A report to Gandhiji: A survey of Indian and world events during the 21 months of Gandhiji's incarceration, 1944
Invitation to Immortality: a one-act play, Bombay: Padma Pub., 1944.
Not all Lies. Delhi: Rajkamal Pub., 1945.
Blood and stones and other stories. Bombay: Hind Kitabs, 1947
Rice and other stories, Kutub, 1947
Kashmir fights for freedom, 1948
I Write as I Feel, Hind Kitabs, Bombay, 1948
Cages of freedom and other stories, Bombay, Hind Kitabs Ltd., 1952.
China can make it: Eye-witness account of the amazing industrial progress in new China, 1952.
In the Image of Mao Tse-Tung, Peoples Publishing House, 1953
INQILAB. First Great Novel of the Indian Revolution, Jaico Publishing House, 1958
Face To Face with Khrushchov, Rajpal & Sons, 1960
Till We Reach the Stars. The Story of Yuri Gagarin, Asia Pub. House, 1961
The Black sun and Other stories, Jaico Publishing House, 1963.
Raat ki bahon mein, Hindi, Radhakr̥ishṇa Prakashan, 1965.
Indira Gandhi; return of the red rose, Hind Pocket Books, New Delhi, 1966.
Divided heart, Paradise Publications, 1968
When Night Falls, 1968.
Chabili, Hindi, Allahabad, Mitra Prakashan, 1968.
The most beautiful woman in the world, Paradise Publications, 1968
Salma aur Samundar, Urdu/Hindi, New Delhi, Komala Pocket Books, 1969.
Mera Naam Joker, 1970
Maria, Delhi, Hind Pocket Books, 1971.
Teen Pahiye, Urdu/Hindi, Delhi, Rajpal & Sons, 1971.
Bobby, Urdu/Hindi, 1973
Boy meets Girl, Sterling Publishers, 1973
That Woman: Her Seven Years in Power; New Delhi, Indian Book Co., 1973
Jawaharlal Nehru: Portrait of an integrated Indian; New Delhi, NCERT, 1974.
Fasilah", Urud/Hindi, Hind Pocket Books, Delhi, 1974
Distant dream, New Delhi, Sterling Pub., 1975.
The walls of glass: A novel, 1977
Barrister-at-law: A play about the early life of Mahatma Gandhi, New Delhi, Orient Paperbacks, 1977.
Men and women: Specially selected long and short stories, 1977
Mad, mad, mad world of Indian films, 1977
I Am not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography, New Delhi, 1977.
Four Friends, Arnold-Heinemann, New Delhi, 1977.
20 March 1977: a day like any other day, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1978.
Janata in a jam?, 1978.
The Naxalites, Lok Publications, 1979.
Bread, beauty, and revolution: being a chronological selection from the Last pages, 1947 to 1981, Marwah Publications, New Delhi, 1982.
Nili Sari aur Doosri Kahaniyan̲, Urdu, Maktabah-e-Jamia, New Delhi, 1982.
The gun and other stories, Arnold-Heinemann, New Delhi, 1985.
The Thirteenth Victim, Amar Prakashan, 1986.
The World Is My Village: A Novel With An Index, Ajanta, 1984.
Bombay My Bombay: A Love Story of the City, Ajanta Publications/Ajanta Books International, 1987.
Indira Gandhi: The Last Post; Bombay, Ramdas G. Bhatkal, 1989
Defeat for death: a story without names. Baroda: Padmaja Pub., 1994
How Films Are Made, National Book Trust, 1999,
Soney Chandi ke Butt, Urdu, Alhamra, 2001,
For detailed listing :South Asian literature in English, Pre-independence era
Books on Khwaja Ahmad Abbas
Ahmad Hasib, The Novels of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Seema. 1987
Hemendra Singh Chandalia, Ethos of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, novelist, film-maker, and journalist: A study in social realism, Bohra Prakashan (1996)
Raj Narain Raz, Khawaja Ahmed Abbas-Ifkar. Guftar, Kirdar, Haryana Urdu Akademi
Vasudev and Lenglet, eds., Indian Cinema Super-bazaar, Vikas, New Delhi, 1978.
Articles on Khwaja Ahmad Abbas
Dr. R.G. Mathapati, "Abbas: An Island"
Indian Film Culture (New Delhi), no. 4, September 1964.
Film World, vol. 1, no. 10, October 1978.
Ghish, S., "K. A. Abbas: A Man in Tune with History", Screen (Bombay), 19 June 1987.
Obituary in Jump Cut (Berkeley, California), no. 33, February 1988.
Abbas, Communicator of repute, The Dawn, 13 October 2002.
Shoba S. Rajgopal, The Legacy of Ajitha
Ismat Chughtai, "Bachu", Urdu
V. P. Sathe, "K.A. Abbas, The Crusader", Filmfare, 16–30 June 1987
See also
Indian Writers
IPTA
References
Cited sources
S. Ghosh, "K. A. Abbas: A Man in Tune with History", Screen (Bombay), 19 June 1987, p. 14.
Dictionary of Films (Berkeley: U. of CA Press, 1977), p. 84.
Shyamala A. Narayan, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 1 1976; vol. 11: pp. 82 – 94.
Ravi Nandan Sinha, Essays on Indian Literature in English''. Jaipur, Book Enclave, 2002, ch. 7.
External links
K.A. Abbas at Film Reference
K.A. Abbas- The Dawn
Filmography – NY Times
1914 births
1987 deaths
People from Panipat
Aligarh Muslim University alumni
Urdu-language short story writers
Hindi-language film directors
Urdu-language film directors
20th-century Indian Muslims
Indian male screenwriters
Indian columnists
Indian autobiographers
Indian male novelists
Indian male journalists
Indian People's Theatre Association people
Recipients of the Padma Shri in arts
Hindi film producers
20th-century Indian novelists
Screenwriters from Haryana
Journalists from Haryana
Novelists from Haryana
Directors who won the Best Feature Film National Film Award
Directors who won the Best Children's Film National Film Award
Producers who won the Best Film on National Integration National Film Award
Directors who won the Best Film on National Integration National Film Award
20th-century Indian screenwriters | [
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17353 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine%20MacLean | Katherine MacLean | Katherine Anne MacLean (January 22, 1925 – September 1, 2019) was an American science fiction author best known for her short fiction of the 1950s which examined the impact of technological advances on individuals and society.
Profile
Damon Knight wrote, "As a science fiction writer she has few peers; her work is not only technically brilliant but has a rare human warmth and richness." Brian Aldiss noted that she could "do the hard stuff magnificently," while Theodore Sturgeon observed that she "generally starts from a base of hard science, or rationalizes psi phenomena with beautifully finished logic."
According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, she "was in the vanguard of those sf writers trying to apply to the soft sciences the machinery of the hard sciences".
Her stories have been included in anthologies and a few have had radio and television adaptations. Three collections of her stories have been published.
It was while she worked as a laboratory technician in 1947 that she began writing science fiction. Strongly influenced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory, her fiction has often demonstrated foresight about scientific advances.
She died on September 1, 2019 at the age of 94.
Awards
MacLean received a Nebula Award in 1971 for her novella "The Missing Man" (Analog, March, 1971) and she was a Professional Guest of Honor at the first WisCon in 1977. She was honored in 2003 by the Science Fiction Writers of America as an SFWA Author Emeritus. In 2011, she received the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.
Collections
The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy (Avon, 1962), her first short story collection, includes "The Diploids" (a.k.a. "Six Fingers"), "Feedback", "Pictures Don't Lie", "Incommunicado", "The Snow Ball Effect", "Defense Mechanism" and "And Be Merry" (a.k.a. "The Pyramid in the Desert").
Her second collection, The Trouble with You Earth People (Donning/Starblaze, 1980) contains "The Trouble with You Earth People", "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl", "Syndrome Johnny", "Trouble with Treaties" (with Tom Condit), "The Origin of the Species", "Collision Orbit", "The Fittest", "These Truths", "Contagion", "Brain Wipe" and her Nebula Award-winning "The Missing Man".
Short stories and novelettes
"Defense Mechanism" (1949). This tale of hidden telepathic abilities was Katherine MacLean's first story to see print when it was published in Astounding Science Fiction (October, 1949).
"And Be Merry" (1950). Originally in Astounding Science Fiction (February, 1950), this story was first anthologized in Groff Conklin's Omnibus of Science Fiction (Crown, 1952) and has also been published under the title "The Pyramid in the Desert." In January 2006, MacLean reflected on the science behind the story:
"And Be Merry" (Eat Drink and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die) A lab biologist, female, takes advantage of her husband going off on an archeology trip, to use the privacy to experiment on herself for rejuvenation by a severe and dangerous method. Succeeding, she contemplates immortality, finding that safety from accidental death has become so valuable to her that she becomes a coward, cowering from all possible risk, seeing shelter in a hospital, and is only rescued from mindless panic by her husband finding her, realizing the source of her terror and rescuing her from immortality by claiming she has a slow growing tumor in an unreachable part of the body.
Finding she has no chance of evading eventual death, she immediately loses her obsession with safety, becomes interested in biochemistry again, and invents a new theory. (New at the time.) Mutation from background radiation does not just strike the sperm and egg making chromosome changes in the embryo and mutated progeny, it also strikes the chromosomes in each cell of any living creature, damages and mutates them also, and produces cancer. This cannot be prevented. She called it "somatic mutation" and used the new concept of body deterioration by slow radiation damage (age) to underpin her rediscovered recklessness, and be happy.
Even now most biotechs have not fully accepted the implication that every cell in the body can generate an entire copy of the person. But perhaps a copy will be changed and mutated for the worse by exposure to ambient radiation and other mutagens. Perhaps a cell needs to generate a placenta around it to develop into an entire body. Something like that is holding up the biochemists from successfully making copies of individuals from body or blood cells. Not for long! I wrote three more stories with novel genetic ideas before 1953. Some have not been followed up by scientists yet.
"Incommunicado" (1950). In this novelette about communication and computers, written by MacLean in 1947, she demonstrated an ability to foresee the future evolution of personal computers. Passages in this story anticipate such latter-day digital configurations as Google Book Search, Google Video Search, PDA devices, podcasting and portable music players. At a space station operated by a computer, the station's workers begin to unconsciously develop a musical rapport with their computer in a feedback loop. When published in the June 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, cover artist Miller contributed one of the more striking Astounding covers of the 1950s, blending an emotional musical performance with cyber technology. The story was reprinted a decade later in Groff Conklin's anthology, Six Great Short Science Fiction Novels (Dell, 1960), followed by MacLean's collection, The Diploids (Avon, 1962). In January, 2006, MacLean recalled this incident, trying to gate-crash a convention of electronic engineers a few years after Incommunicado was published in 1950:
In the 1930s and 1940s, scientists and boys planning to be scientists read Astounding (Analog) with close attention to the hottest most promising ideas and took them up as soon as they could get funded lab space. They did not openly express their gratitude to science fiction, because the funding depended on keeping claim to have originated the ideas they had put so much work into testing and verifying....
"I hastily looked around for a door to a lecture hall where I could sneak some listening time and get a line on current research, and be out of sight before the desk was reoccupied by the guardian of the gate....
Too late, a man built like a fullback in a business suit was bearing down on me. "I see you don't have your badge. May I have your name? I'll look it up in the registry...."
"Katherine MacLean, I came in because I am interested in--"
He interrupted. "Katherine MacLean! Are you that Katherine MacLean?" He gripped my hand and hung on. Who was that Katherine Maclean? Was I being mistaken for someone else?
"Are you the Katherine MacLean who wrote 'Incommunicado'?"
Speechless with relief, I nodded. I would not be arrested or thrown out if they would accept me as a science fiction writer. He kept his grip on my hand and turned around and bellowed to his group of chatting friends, "Guess who I've got here. The little woman who wrote 'Incommunicado'!"
...I had not been aware that my playing with communication ideas would attract the attention of prestigious Bell Telephone researchers. I had left radio and wavelength theory to my Dad as one of his hobbies and learned early that I could get a nasty shock from playing with his wiring. I could not account for their enthusiasm. I went back to the typewriter and lost myself in the story again.
The point is, that scientists not only read Astounding-Analog, they were fans of the writers and understood all the Ideas, even the obscure Ideas that were merely hinted at.
"Feedback" (1951). A sociological setback occurs when conformity becomes a closed circle, prompting even more conformity; a teacher who speaks in favor of individuality is regarded as subversive. Originally in Astounding Science Fiction (July, 1951).
"Syndrome Johnny" (1951). Published before it was even certain that DNA carried genetic information, this story is about a series of engineered retroviral plagues, initially propagated by blood transfusion, that are genetically re-engineering the human race. First published in Galaxy Science Fiction (July, 1951).
"Pictures Don't Lie'" (1951). Radio contact with extraterrestrial ship arriving on Earth. Originally in Galaxy Science Fiction (August, 1951), it was adapted to radio, television and comic books. The adaptation on the UK series Out of This World was telecast August 11, 1962. The EC Comics version of this story was "Chewed Out!", illustrated by Joe Orlando for Weird Science 12 (March–April 1952). In expanding the basic premise and adding comedic elements, scripter Al Feldstein established the setting as Blytheville, Arkansas. On several occasions MacLean noted that she ranked EC's interpretation as superior to her own story.
"The Man Who Staked the Stars" (1952, as Charles Dye). A business mobster under investigation is slowly turned against himself by an internal doppelgänger. Originally in Planet Stories (July, 1952). This story is available online free in Project Gutenberg.
"The Snowball Effect" (1952). A sociology professor, challenged to prove his theories of the dynamic growth of organizations, rewrites the rules of a smalltown sewing circle to have "more growth drive than the Roman Empire." He is far more successful than he ever anticipated. Originally in Galaxy Science Fiction (September, 1952), and adapted for the X Minus One radio series in 1956.
"Games" (1953). A boy becomes the characters in his make-believe games. Originally in Galaxy Science Fiction (March, 1953). Available online
"The Diploids" (1953). In this novella, a young lawyer suspects he may be an alien because of certain physical and biochemical abnormalities but discovers that he is a commercial human embryonic cell line, sold for research and illegally grown to maturity. Originally in Thrilling Wonder Stories (April, 1953). Also titled "Six Fingers."
"Cosmic Checkmate" (1958). This collaboration by MacLean and Charles V. De Vet, published in Astounding Science Fiction (March, 1958), was nominated for a 1959 Hugo. It was expanded as Second Game in 1962 and again in 1981. Two gamers play a multi-level game to determine whether Earth's civilization wins.
"Unhuman Sacrifice" (1958). Published in Astounding Science Fiction (March, 1958), reprinted in Damon Knight's anthology A Century of Science Fiction (1962). The attempts of a missionary to spread the word on an alien planet are frustrated by the aliens' life cycle.
"The Kidnapping of Baroness 5" (1995) Originally published in Analog; republished in the anthologies Women of Other Worlds (edited by Helen Merrick & Tess Williams) and A Woman's Liberation (edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams). In a post-apocalyptic world, a geneticist struggles to help preserve and lengthen the lives of the genetically damaged descendants of the survivors of a genetic experiment to extend the human lifespan that went horribly wrong. Instead, with each generation, lifespan gets shorter, and as less and less knowledge is passed down to each succeeding generation, society has regressed to a feudal state. She fits into society by casting herself as a sort of "good witch" cum healer, passing off her medical expertise and her efforts to correct the damage to the human aging process as magic.
"Contagion" (1950). Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction (October 1950), reprinted in Women of Wonder (1975).
Novels
The Man in the Bird Cage (1971)
Missing Man (1975). In a balkanized New York City, an engineer working for the city's disaster planning section has his inside knowledge exploited to cause disasters. The novel is a fix-up of MacLean's three Rescue Squad stories, including the 1971 Nebula Award-winning novella of the same name.
Dark Wing (1979) with husband Carl West. In a world where medical knowledge has been outlawed, a young man discovers a medical kit, remnant of times past, which he uses to help those around him and to fight his way towards a better understanding of science and medicine.
Memoir
For Martin Greenberg's Fantastic Lives: Autobiographical Essays by Notable Science Fiction Writers (Southern Illinois University Press, 1981) she wrote "The Expanding Mind," a memoir of her youth and the impact of science fiction on the mind of a young girl.
For Eric Leif Davin's Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965, MacLean supplied a detailed description of her negotiations with John W. Campbell in regard to the publication of her earliest stories.
References
Listen to
X Minus One: "The Snowball Effect" (August 14, 1956)
X Minus One: "Pictures Don't Lie" (October 24, 1956)
Episode 4 of the podcast Buxom Blondes with Ray Guns (Hannah Wolfe, February 17, 2018) features two 1954 stories by Katherine MacLean.
External links
1925 births
2019 deaths
People from Glen Ridge, New Jersey
Writers from New Jersey
20th-century American novelists
American science fiction writers
American women short story writers
American women novelists
Nebula Award winners
Women science fiction and fantasy writers
20th-century American women writers
20th-century American short story writers
21st-century American women | [
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17354 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru | Kuru | Kuru may refer to:
Anthropology and history
Kuru (disease), a type of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy associated with the cannibalistic funeral practices of the Fore people
Kuru (mythology), part of Meithei mythology
Kuru Kingdom, a powerful Indo-Aryan tribe and kingdom during the Vedic period (Early Iron Age) and later a republic during the Mahajanapada period in India
King Kuru (Vedic Hindu era), the imputed ancestral king of Indo-Aryan Kuru tribe
Kuru (sport), a traditional Bhutanese sport
Kuru, also called sintak, a traditional game of stones from the Philippines
Places
Kuru River, a river in South Sudan
Kuru, Finland, municipality
Kuru, Iran
Kuru, Nigeria
Kuru, Ida-Viru County, village in Iisaku Parish, Ida-Viru County, Estonia
Kuru, Lääne-Viru County, village in Tapa Parish, Lääne-Viru County, Estonia
Kuru block, a community development block in Jharkhand, India
Kuru, Lohardaga, a village in Jhankhand, India
Transport
, an Australian patrol boat operational between 1938 and 1943
S/S Kuru, a Finnish lake steamer
People
Ahmet Kuru (born 1982), Turkish footballer
Büşra Kuru (born 2001), German-born Turkish women's footballer
Taygun Kuru (born 1990), Turkish-German footballer
Uğur Arslan Kuru (born 1989), Turkish footballer
Kuruvilla Pandikattu (born 1957), Indian philosopher
Other uses
Kuru (film), a Japanese supernatural horror film
KURU (FM), a radio station (89.1 FM) licensed to serve Silver City, New Mexico, United States
Kuru kulla, a genus dromaeosaurid theropod
See also
Kourou (disambiguation)
Kurus (disambiguation)
Kuru Kuru (disambiguation)
Kurultai, a political and military council of ancient Mongol and Turkic chiefs and khans | [
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17355 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth%20Kaunda | Kenneth Kaunda | Kenneth David Kaunda (28 April 1924 – 17 June 2021), also known as KK, was a Zambian politician who served as the first president of Zambia from 1964 to 1991. He was at the forefront of the struggle for independence from British rule. Dissatisfied with Harry Nkumbula's leadership of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress, he broke away and founded the Zambian African National Congress, later becoming the head of the United National Independence Party (UNIP).
Kaunda was the first president of the independent Zambia. In 1973 following tribal and inter-party violence, all political parties except UNIP were banned through an amendment of the constitution after the signing of the Choma Declaration. At the same time, Kaunda oversaw the acquisition of majority stakes in key foreign-owned companies. The 1973 oil crisis and a slump in export revenues put Zambia in a state of economic crisis. International pressure forced Kaunda to change the rules that had kept him in power. Multi-party elections took place in 1991, in which Frederick Chiluba, the leader of the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy, ousted Kaunda.
He was briefly stripped of Zambian citizenship in 1999, but the decision was overturned the following year.
Early life
Kenneth Kaunda was born on 28 April 1924 at Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, then part of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, and was the youngest of eight children. His father, the Reverend David Kaunda, was an ordained Church of Scotland missionary and teacher, who had been born in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and had moved to Chinsali, to work at Lubwa Mission. His mother was also a teacher and was the first African woman to teach in colonial Zambia. They were both teachers among the Bemba ethnic group which is located in northern Zambia. His father died when Kenneth was a child. This is where Kenneth Kaunda received his education until the early 1940s. He later on followed in his parents' footsteps and became a teacher; first in colonial Zambia but then in the middle of the 1940s he moved to what is now Tanzania. He also worked in Southern Rhodesia. He attended Munali Training Centre in Lusaka between 1941 and 1943. Early in his career, he read the writings of Mahatma Gandhi that he said: "went straight to my heart."
Kaunda was a teacher at the Upper Primary School and Boarding Master at Lubwa and then Headmaster at Lubwa from 1943 to 1945. For a time, he worked at the Salisbury and Bindura Mine. In early 1948, he became a teacher in Mufulira for the United Missions to the Copperbelt (UMCB). He was then assistant at an African Welfare Centre and Boarding Master of a Mine School in Mufulira. In this period, he was leading a Pathfinder Scout Group and was Choirmaster at a Church of Central Africa congregation. He was also Vice-Secretary of the Nchanga Branch of Congress.
Independence struggle and presidency
In 1949 Kaunda entered politics and became the founding member of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress. On 11 November 1953 he moved to Lusaka to take up the post of Secretary General of the Africa National Congress (ANC), under the presidency of Harry Nkumbula. The combined efforts of Kaunda and Nkumbula failed to mobilise native African peoples against the European-dominated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In 1955 Kaunda and Nkumbula were imprisoned for two months with hard labour for distributing subversive literature. The two leaders drifted apart as Nkumbula became increasingly influenced by white liberals and failing to defend indigenous Africans, Kuanda led a dissident group to Nkumbula that eventually broke with the ANC and founded his own party, the Zambian African National Congress (ZANC) in October 1958. ZANC was banned in March 1959 and in Kaunda was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, which he spent first in Lusaka, then in Salisbury.
While Kaunda was in prison, Mainza Chona and other nationalists broke away from the ANC and, in October 1959, Chona became the first president of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), the successor to ZANC. However, Chona did not see himself as the party's main founder. When Kaunda was released from prison in January 1960 he was elected president of UNIP. In 1960 he visited Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta and afterwards, in July 1961, Kaunda organised a civil disobedience campaign in Northern Province, the so-called Cha-cha-cha campaign, which consisted largely of arson and obstructing significant roads. Kaunda subsequently ran as a UNIP candidate during the 1962 elections. This resulted in a UNIP–ANC Coalition Government, with Kaunda as Minister of Local Government and Social Welfare. In January 1964, UNIP won the next major elections, defeating their ANC rivals and securing Kaunda's position as prime minister. On 24 October 1964 he became the first president of an independent Zambia, appointing Reuben Kamanga as his vice-president.
Educational policies
At the time of its independence, Zambia's modernisation process was far from complete. The nation's educational system was one of the most poorly developed in all of Britain's former colonies, and it had just a hundred university graduates and no more than 6,000 indigenous inhabitants with two years or more of secondary education. Because of this, Zambia had to invest heavily in education at all levels. Kaunda instituted a policy where all children, irrespective of their parents' ability to pay, were given free exercise books, pens, and pencils. The parents' main responsibility was to buy uniforms, pay a token "school fee" and ensure that the children attended school. This approach meant that the best pupils were promoted to achieve their best results, all the way from primary school to university level. Not every child could go to secondary school, for example, but those who did were well educated.
The University of Zambia was opened in Lusaka in 1966, after Zambians all over the country had been encouraged to donate whatever they could afford towards its construction. Kaunda was appointed Chancellor and officiated at the first graduation ceremony in 1969. The main campus was situated on the Great East Road, while the medical campus was located at Ridgeway near the University Teaching Hospital. In 1979 another campus was established at the Zambia Institute of Technology in Kitwe. In 1988 the Kitwe campus was upgraded and renamed the Copperbelt University, offering business studies, industrial studies and environmental studies.
Other tertiary-level institutions established during Kaunda's era were vocationally focused and fell under the aegis of the Department of Technical Education and Vocational Training. They include the Evelyn Hone College and the Natural Resources Development College (both in Lusaka), the Northern Technical College at Ndola, the Livingstone Trades Training Institute in Livingstone, and teacher-training colleges.
Economic policies
Kaunda's newly independent government inherited a country with one of the most vibrant economies in sub-Saharan Africa, largely on account of its rich mineral deposits, albeit one that was largely under the control of foreign and multinational interests.
For example, the British South Africa Company (BSAC, founded by Cecil Rhodes) still retained commercial assets and mineral rights that it had acquired from a concession signed with the Litunga of Bulozi in 1890. Only by threatening to expropriate it on the eve of independence did Kaunda manage to get favourable concessions from the BSAC.
His ineptness at economic management blighted his country's development after independence. Despite having some of the finest farming land in Africa, Kaunda adopted the same socialist agricultural policies as Tanzania, with disastrous results.
Deciding on a planned economy, Zambia instituted a programme of national development, under the direction of the National Commission for Development Planning, which instituted a "Transitional Development Plan" and the "First National Development Plan". The two operations brought major investment in infrastructure and manufacturing sectors. In April 1968, Kaunda initiated the Mulungushi Reforms, which sought to bring Zambia's foreign-owned corporations under national control under the Industrial Development Corporation. Over the subsequent years a number of mining corporations were nationalised, although the country's banks, such as Barclays and Standard Chartered, remained foreign-owned. The Zambian economy suffered a setback from 1973, when rising oil prices and falling copper prices combined to reduce the state's income from the nationalised mines. The country fell into debt with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Third National Development Plan had to be abandoned as crisis management replaced long-term planning. His weak attempts at economic reforms in the 1980s hastened Zambia's decline. A number of negotiations with the IMF followed, and by 1990 Kaunda was forced into partial privatisation of the state-owned corporations. The country's economic woes ultimately contributed to his fall from power.
One-party state and "African socialism"
In 1964, shortly before independence, violence broke out between supporters of the Lumpa Church, led by Alice Lenshina. Kaunda temporarily banned the church and ordered Lumpa's arrest.
From 1964 onwards, Kaunda's government developed clearly authoritarian characteristics. Becoming increasingly intolerant of opposition, Kaunda banned all parties except UNIP following violence during the 1968 elections. However, in early 1972, he faced a new threat in the form of Simon Kapwepwe's decision to leave UNIP and found a rival party, the United Progressive Party, which Kaunda immediately attempted to suppress. Next, he appointed the Chona Commission, which was set up under the chairmanship of Mainza Chona in February 1972. Chona's task was to make recommendations for a new Zambian constitution which would effectively reduce the nation to a one-party state. The commission's terms of reference did not permit it to discuss the possible faults of Kaunda's decision, but instead to concentrate on the practical details of the move to a one-party state. Finally, Kaunda neutralised Nkumbula by getting him to join UNIP and accept the Choma Declaration on 27 June 1973. The new constitution was formally promulgated on 25 August of that year. At the first elections under the new system held that December, Kaunda was the sole candidate.
With all opposition having been eliminated, Kaunda allowed the creation of a personality cult. He developed a left nationalist-socialist ideology, called Zambian Humanism. This was based on a combination of mid-20th-century ideas of central planning/state control and what he considered basic African values: mutual aid, trust, and loyalty to the community. Similar forms of African socialism were introduced inter alia in Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah ("Consciencism") and Tanzania by Julius Nyerere ("Ujamaa"). To elaborate his ideology, Kaunda published several books: Humanism in Zambia and a Guide to its Implementation, Parts 1, 2 and 3. Other publications on Zambian Humanism are: Fundamentals of Zambian Humanism, by Timothy Kandeke; Zambian Humanism, religion and social morality, by Rev. Fr. Cleve Dillion-Malone, S.J., and Zambian Humanism: some major spiritual and economic challenges, by Justin B. Zulu. Kaunda on Violence (US title, The Riddle of Violence) was published in 1980.
As president of UNIP, and under the country's one-party state system, Kaunda was the only candidate for president of the republic in the general elections of 1978, 1983, and 1988, each time with official results showing over 80 per cent of voters approving his candidacy. Parliamentary elections were also controlled by Kaunda. In the 1978 UNIP elections, Kaunda amended the party's constitution to bring in rules that invalidated the challengers' nominations: Kapwepwe was told he could not stand because only people who had been members for five years could be nominated to the presidency (he had only rejoined UNIP three years before); Nkumbula and a third contender, businessman Robert Chiluwe, were outmanoeuvred by introducing a new rule that said each candidate needed the signatures of 200 delegates from each province to back their candidacy.
Foreign policy
During his early presidency Kaunda was an outspoken supporter of the anti-apartheid movement and opposed white minority rule in Southern Rhodesia. Although his nationalisation of the copper mining industry in the late 1960s and the volatility of international copper prices contributed to increased economic problems, matters were aggravated by his logistical support for the black nationalist movements in Ian Smith's Rhodesia, South West Africa, Angola, and Mozambique. Kaunda's administration later attempted to serve the role of a mediator between the entrenched white minority and colonial governments and the various guerrilla movements which were aimed at overthrowing these respective administrations. Beginning in the early 1970s, he began permitting the most prominent guerrilla organisations, such as the Rhodesian ZANU and the African National Congress, to use Zambia as a base for their operations. Former ANC president Oliver Tambo even spent a significant proportion of his 30-year exile living and working in Zambia. Joshua Nkomo, leader of ZAPU, also erected military encampments there, as did SWAPO and its military wing, the People's Liberation Army of Namibia.
In the first twenty years of Kaunda's presidency, he and his advisors sought numerous times to acquire modern weapons from the United States. In a letter written to US president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, Kaunda inquired if the United States would provide him with long range missile systems; all of his requests for modern weapons were refused by the United States. In 1980, Kaunda purchased sixteen MiG-21 jets from the Soviet Union, which ultimately provoked a reaction from the United States. Kaunda responded to the United States, stating that the after numerous failed attempts to purchase weapons, buying from the Soviets was justified in his duty to protect his citizens, and Zambian national security. His attempted purchase of American weapons may have been a political tactic to use fear to establish his one-party rule over Zambia.
From April 1975, when he visited US president Gerald Ford at the White House in Washington D.C. and delivered a powerful speech calling for the United States to play a more active and constructive role in southern Africa. Until approximately 1984, Kaunda was arguably the key African leader involved in the international diplomacy regarding the conflicts in Angola, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Namibia. He hosted Henry Kissinger's 1976 trip to Zambia, got along very well with Jimmy Carter, and worked closely with President Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Chester Crocker. While there were disagreements between Kaunda and US leaders (such as when Zambia purchased Soviet MiG fighters or when he accused two American diplomats of being spies), Kaunda generally enjoyed a positive relationship with the United States during these years.
On 26 August 1975, Kaunda acted as mediator along with the Prime Minister of South Africa, B. J. Vorster, at the Victoria Falls Conference to discuss possibilities for an internal settlement in Southern Rhodesia with Ian Smith and the black nationalists. After the Lancaster House Agreement, Kaunda attempted to seek similar majority rule in South West Africa. He met with P. W. Botha in Botswana in 1982 to debate this proposal, but apparently failed to make a serious impression.
Meanwhile, the anti-white minority insurgency conflicts of southern Africa continued to place a huge economic burden on Zambia as white minority governments were the country's main trading partners. In response, Kaunda negotiated the TAZARA Railway (Tanzam) linking Kapiri Mposhi in the Zambian Copperbelt with Tanzania's port of Dar-es-Salaam on the Indian Ocean. Completed in 1975, this was the only route for bulk trade which did not have to transit white-dominated territories. This precarious situation lasted more than 20 years, until the abolition of apartheid in South Africa.
For much of the Cold War Kaunda was a strong supporter of the Non-Aligned Movement. He hosted a NAM summit in Lusaka in 1970 and served as the movement's chairman from 1970 to 1973. He maintained a close friendship with Yugoslavia's long-time leader Josip Broz Tito and was remembered by many Yugoslav officials for weeping openly over Tito's casket in 1980. He also visited and welcomed Romania's president, Nicolae Ceaușescu, in the 1970s. In 1986, the University of Belgrade (Yugoslavia) awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Kaunda had frequent but cordial differences with US president Ronald Reagan whom he met 1983 and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher mainly over what he saw as a blind eye being turned towards South African apartheid. He always maintained warm relations with the People's Republic of China who had provided assistance on many projects in Zambia, including the Tazara Railway.
Prior to the first Gulf War, Kaunda cultivated a friendship with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, whom he claimed to have attempted to dissuade from invading Kuwait. A street in Lusaka was named in Saddam's honour, although the name was later changed when both leaders had left power.
In August 1989, Farzad Bazoft was detained in Iraq for alleged espionage. He was accompanied by a British nurse, Daphne Parish, who was arrested as well. Bazoft was an Iranian-born freelance journalist attempting to expose Saddam's mass murder of Iraqi Kurds. Bazoft was later tried, convicted, and executed, but Kaunda managed to negotiate for his female companion's release.
Kaunda served as chairman of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) from 1970 to 1971 and again from 1987 to 1988.
Fall from power
Matters quickly came to a head in 1990. In July, amid three days of rioting in the capital, Kaunda announced a referendum on whether to legalise other parties would be held that October. However, he himself argued for maintaining UNIP's monopoly, claiming that a multiparty system would lead to chaos. The announcement almost came too late; hours later, a disgruntled officer went on the radio to announce Kaunda had been overthrown. The coup attempt was broken three to four hours later, but it was clear Kaunda and the UNIP were reeling. Kaunda tried to mollify the opposition by moving the referendum to August 1991; the opposition claimed the original date did not allow enough time for voter registration.
While expressing willingness to have the Zambian people vote on a multiparty system, Kaunda maintained that only a one-party state could prevent tribalism and violence from engulfing the country. By September, however, opposition demands forced Kaunda to reverse course. He cancelled the referendum, and instead recommended constitutional amendments that would dismantle UNIP's monopoly on power. He also announced a snap general election for the following year, two years before it was due. He signed the necessary amendments into law in December.
At these elections, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), helmed by trade union leader Frederick Chiluba, swept UNIP from power in a landslide. In the presidential election, Kaunda was roundly defeated, taking only 24 per cent of the vote to Chiluba's 75 per cent. UNIP was cut down to only 25 seats in the National Assembly. One of the issues in the campaign was a plan by Kaunda to turn over one quarter of the nation's land to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian guru who promised that he would use it for a network of utopian agricultural enclaves that proponents said would create "Heaven on Earth". Kaunda was forced in a television interview to deny practising Transcendental Meditation. When Kaunda handed power to Chiluba on 2 November, 1991, he became the second mainland African head of state to allow free multiparty elections and to relinquish power peacefully after he had lost. The first, Mathieu Kérékou of Benin, had done so in March of that year.
Post-presidency
After leaving office, Kaunda clashed frequently with Chiluba's government and the MMD. Chiluba later attempted to deport Kaunda on the grounds that he was a Malawian. The MMD-dominated government under the leadership of Chiluba had the constitution amended, barring citizens with foreign parentage from standing for the presidency, to prevent Kaunda from contesting the next elections in 1996. After the 1997 coup attempt, on Boxing Day in 1997 he was arrested by paramilitary policemen. However, many officials in the region appealed against this; on New Year's Eve of the same year, he was placed under house arrest until his court date. In 1999 Kaunda was declared stateless by the Ndola High Court in a judgment delivered by Justice Chalendo Sakala. Kaunda however successfully challenged this decision in the Supreme Court of Zambia, which declared him to be a Zambian citizen in the Lewanika and Others vs. Chiluba ruling.
On 4 June 1998, announced that he was resigning as United National Independence Party leader and retiring from politics.
After retiring, he was involved in various charitable organisations. His most notable contribution was his zeal in the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS. One of Kaunda's children was claimed by the pandemic in the 1980s. From 2002 to 2004, he was an African President-in-Residence at the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University.
In September 2019, Kaunda said that it was regrettable that the late President Robert Mugabe was maligned and subjected to mudslinging by some sections of the world, who were against his crusade of bringing social justice and equity to Zimbabwe.
Personal life and death
Kaunda married Betty Kaunda in 1946, with whom he had eight children. She died on 19 September 2012, aged 84, while visiting one of their daughters in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Since Kenneth Kaunda was known to wear a safari suit (safari jacket paired with trousers) constantly, the safari suit is still commonly referred to as a "Kaunda suit" throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
He also wrote music about the independence he hoped to achieve, although only one song has been known to many Zambians ("Tiyende pamodzi ndi mtima umo" literally meaning "Let's walk together with one heart").
On 14 June 2021, Kaunda was admitted to Maina Soko Military Hospital in Lusaka to be treated for an undisclosed medical condition. The Zambian government said medics were doing everything they could to make him recover, though it was not clear what his health condition was. On 15 June 2021, it was revealed that he was being treated for pneumonia, which according to his doctor, had been a recurring problem in his health. On 17 June 2021 it was confirmed that he died at the age of 97 after a short illness at Maina Soko Military Hospital. He was survived by 30 grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.
President Edgar Lungu announced on his Facebook page that Zambia will observe 21 days of national mourning. On 21 June, Vice-President Inonge Wina announced that Kaunda's remains would be taken on a funeral procession around the country's provinces, with church services in each provincial capital, prior to a state funeral at National Heroes Stadium in Lusaka on 2 July and interment at the Presidential Burial Site on 7 July.
Several other nations also announced periods of state mourning, including Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Tanzania. President of Singapore Halimah Yacob offered her condolences to the politicians and people of Zambia for Kaunda's death.
Awards and honours
Foreign honours
Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry (Portugal)—28 May 1975
Supreme Companion of O. R. Tambo (South Africa)—10 December 2002
Commander of the Most Courteous Order of Lesotho (Lesotho)—4 October 2007
Awards
On 21 May 1963, he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Fordham University.
On 19 October 2007 Kaunda was the recipient of the 2007 Ubuntu Award.
Publications
See also
Michael Sata
Harry Nkumbula
Simon Kapwepwe
History of Christianity in Zambia
References
Bibliography
DeRoche, Andy. Kenneth Kaunda, the United States and Southern Africa (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)
"Kaunda, Kenneth". Encyclopædia Britannica. Accessed 19 May 2006.
Hall, Richard. The High Price of Principles: Kaunda and the White South (1969)
Ipenburg, At. All Good Men: The Development of Lubwa Mission, Chinsali, Zambia, 1905–1967 (1992)
Macpherson, Fergus. Kenneth Kaunda: The Times and the Man (1974)
Mulford, David C. Zambia: The Politics of Independence, 1957–1964 (1967)
External links
1964: President Kaunda takes power in Zambia
Kaunda on the non-aligned movement
Kaunda on Mugabe
Kenneth Kaunda, the United States and Southern Africa by Andy deRoche
Faces of Africa
1924 births
2021 deaths
African pan-Africanists
Bemba
Deaths from pneumonia in Zambia
Grand Crosses of the Order of Prince Henry
Heads of government who were later imprisoned
Local government ministers of Zambia
Members of the Legislative Council of Northern Rhodesia
Members of the National Assembly (Zambia)
People from Chinsali District
Presidents of Zambia
Prime Ministers of Zambia
Prisoners and detainees of Rhodesia
Recipients of the Order of the Companions of O. R. Tambo
Secretaries-General of the Non-Aligned Movement
Socialist rulers
United National Independence Party politicians
Zambian independence activists
Zambian people of Malawian descent
Zambian politicians convicted of crimes
Zambian Presbyterians
Zambian prisoners and detainees
Chinsali | [
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17357 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K9 | K9 | K9 or K-9 may refer to:
Animal
K9, the nickname of police dogs and the police dog unit itself
Canine or Canis, a genus including dogs, wolves, coyotes, and jackals
Fictional dogs
K9 (Doctor Who), the name of several robotic canines in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who
K-9 (Looney Tunes), a dog in the Looney Tunes cartoon series
K9 Murphy, a mechanical dog in the Japanese television series Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger
Computing
AMD K9, a microprocessor
K-9 Mail, a mail client for the Android operating system
K9 Web Protection, a web content control software
K9Copy, a DVD backup and authoring program for Unix-like operating systems
Entertainment
K-9 (film), a 1989 American film
K-9 (film series), a film series consisting of four movies
K-9 (TV series) a British/Australian comedy/adventure series starring the same character as featured in Doctor Who
K9, a television station serving Boise, Idaho, now known as KNIN-TV
Sonata in G for Keyboard and Violin, K. 9, a sonata by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Military
HMAS K9, an Australian submarine
K-9 (missile), a Soviet short-range air-to-air missile
K9 Thunder, a 155mm self-propelled artillery used by the Republic of Korea Armed Forces
Kahr K9, a variant of the Kahr K series, a 9×19mm Parabellum semi-automatic pistol manufactured by the American company Kahr Arms
Pusan East (K-9) Air Base, an abandoned air base in Busan, South Korea
Automotive
Kia K9, a full-size luxury sedan
K-9 (Kansas highway), a state highway in Kansas, US
BYD K9, a battery electric bus
Other
K9 glass, an inexpensive variety of crown glass
K9, a children's shoe size
See also
Canine (disambiguation)
Kanine (disambiguation) | [
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17359 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2 | K2 | K2, occasionally known as Mount Godwin-Austen, at above sea level, is the second-highest mountain on Earth, after Mount Everest (at ). It lies in the Karakoram range, partially in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-administered Kashmir and partially in a China-administered territory of the Kashmir region included in the Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County of Xinjiang.
K2 also became popularly known as the Savage Mountain after George Bell—a climber on the 1953 American expedition—told reporters, "It's a savage mountain that tries to kill you." Of the five highest mountains in the world, K2 is the deadliest; approximately one person dies on the mountain for every four who reach the summit. Other nicknames for K2 include The King of Mountains and The Mountaineers' Mountain, as well as The Mountain of Mountains after prominent Italian climber Reinhold Messner titled his book about K2 the same.
The summit was reached for the first time by the Italian climbers Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni, on the 1954 Italian expedition led by Ardito Desio. In January 2021, K2 became the final eight-thousander to be summited in the winter; the mountaineering feat was accomplished by a team of Nepalese climbers, led by Nirmal Purja and Mingma Gyalje Sherpa.
K2 is the only 8,000+ metre peak that has never been climbed from its eastern face. Ascents have almost always been made in July and August, which are typically the warmest times of the year; K2's more northern location makes it more susceptible to inclement and colder weather. The peak has now been climbed by almost all of its ridges. Although the summit of Everest is at a higher altitude, K2 is a more difficult and dangerous climb, due in part to its more inclement weather. , only 377 people have completed the ascent to its summit. There have been 91 deaths during attempted climbs, according to the list maintained on the list of deaths on eight-thousanders.
Name
The name K2 is derived from notation used by the Great Trigonometrical Survey of British India. Thomas Montgomerie made the first survey of the Karakoram from Mount Haramukh, some to the south, and sketched the two most prominent peaks, labelling them K1 and K2, where the K stands for Karakoram.
The policy of the Great Trigonometrical Survey was to use local names for mountains wherever possible and K1 was found to be known locally as Masherbrum. K2, however, appeared not to have acquired a local name, possibly due to its remoteness. The mountain is not visible from Askole, the last village to the south, or from the nearest habitation to the north, and is only fleetingly glimpsed from the end of the Baltoro Glacier, beyond which few local people would have ventured. The name Chogori, derived from two Balti words, chhogo ཆོ་གྷའོ་ ("big") and ri རི ("mountain") (چھوغوری) has been suggested as a local name, but evidence for its widespread use is scant. It may have been a compound name invented by Western explorers or simply a bemused reply to the question "What's that called?" It does, however, form the basis for the name Qogir () by which Chinese authorities officially refer to the peak. Other local names have been suggested including Lamba Pahar ("Tall Mountain" in Urdu) and Dapsang, but are not widely used.
With the mountain lacking a local name, the name Mount Godwin-Austen was suggested, in honour of Henry Godwin-Austen, an early explorer of the area. While the name was rejected by the Royal Geographical Society, it was used on several maps and continues to be used occasionally.
The surveyor's mark, K2, therefore continues to be the name by which the mountain is commonly known. It is now also used in the Balti language, rendered as Kechu or KetuCarter, op cit. Carter notes a generalisation of the word Ketu: "A new word, ketu, meaning 'big peak', seems to be entering the Balti language." ( ). The Italian climber Fosco Maraini argued in his account of the ascent of Gasherbrum IV that while the name of K2 owes its origin to chance, its clipped, impersonal nature is highly appropriate for so remote and challenging a mountain. He concluded that it was:
André Weil named K3 surfaces in mathematics partly after the beauty of the mountain K2.
Geographical setting
K2 lies in the northwestern Karakoram Range. It is located in the Baltistan region of Gilgit–Baltistan, Pakistan, and the Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County of Xinjiang, China. The Tarim sedimentary basin borders the range on the north and the Lesser Himalayas on the south. Melt waters from glaciers, such as those south and east of K2, feed agriculture in the valleys and contribute significantly to the regional fresh-water supply.
K2 is ranked 22nd by topographic prominence, a measure of a mountain's independent stature, because it is part of the same extended area of uplift (including the Karakoram, the Tibetan Plateau, and the Himalaya) as Mount Everest, in that it is possible to follow a path from K2 to Everest that goes no lower than , at the Kora La on the Nepal/China border in the Mustang Lo. Many other peaks far lower than K2 are more independent in this sense. It is, however, the most prominent peak within the Karakoram range.
K2 is notable for its local relief as well as its total height. It stands over above much of the glacial valley bottoms at its base. It is a consistently steep pyramid, dropping quickly in almost all directions. The north side is the steepest: there it rises over above the K2 (Qogir) Glacier in only of horizontal distance. In most directions, it achieves over of vertical relief in less than .
A 1986 expedition led by George Wallerstein made an inaccurate measurement showing that K2 was taller than Mount Everest, and therefore the tallest mountain in the world. A corrected measurement was made in 1987, but by then the claim that K2 was the tallest mountain in the world had already made it into many news reports and reference works.
Height
K2's height given on maps and encyclopedias is . In the summer of 2014, a Pakistani-Italian expedition to K2, named "K2 60 Years Later", was organized to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of K2. One of the goals of the expedition was to accurately measure the height of the mountain using satellite navigation. The height of K2 measured during this expedition was .
Geology
The mountains of K2 and Broad Peak, and the area westward to the lower reaches of Sarpo Laggo glacier, consist of metamorphic rocks, known as the K2 Gneiss, and part of the Karakoram Metamorphic Complex. The K2 Gneiss consists of a mixture of orthogneiss and biotite-rich paragneiss. On the south and southeast face of K2, the orthogneiss consists of a mixture of a strongly foliated plagioclase-hornblende gneiss and a biotite-hornblende-K-feldspar orthogneiss, which has been intruded by garnet-mica leucogranitic dikes. In places, the paragneisses include clinopyroxene-hornblende-bearing psammites, garnet (grossular)-diopside marbles, and biotite-graphite phyllites. Near the memorial to the climbers who have died on K2, above Base Camp on the south spur, thin impure marbles with quartzites and mica schists, called the Gilkey-Puchoz sequence, are interbanded within the orthogneisses. On the west face of Broad Peak and south spur of K2, lamprophyre dikes, which consist of clinopyroxene and biotite-porphyritic vogesites and minettes, have intruded the K2 gneiss. The K2 Gneiss is separated from the surrounding sedimentary and metasedimentary rocks of the surrounding Karakoram Metamorphic Complex by normal faults. For example, a fault separates the K2 gneiss of the east face of K2 from limestones and slates comprising nearby Skyang Kangri.
40Ar/39Ar ages of 115 to 120 million years ago obtained from and geochemical analyses of the K2 Gneiss demonstrate that it is a metamorphosed, older, Cretaceous, pre-collisional granite. The granitic precursor (protolith) to the K2 Gneiss originated as the result of the production of large bodies of magma by a northward-dipping subduction zone along what was the continental margin of Asia at that time and their intrusion as batholiths into its lower continental crust. During the initial collision of the Asia and Indian plates, this granitic batholith was buried to depths of about or more, highly metamorphosed, highly deformed, and partially remelted during the Eocene Period to form gneiss. Later, the K2 Gneiss was then intruded by leucogranite dikes and finally exhumed and uplifted along major breakback thrust faults during post-Miocene time. The K2 Gneiss was exposed as the entire K2-Broad Peak-Gasherbrum range experienced rapid uplift with which erosion rates have been unable to keep pace.
Climbing history
Early attempts
The mountain was first surveyed by a British team in 1856. Team member Thomas Montgomerie designated the mountain "K2" for being the second peak of the Karakoram range. The other peaks were originally named K1, K3, K4, and K5, but were eventually renamed Masherbrum, Gasherbrum IV, Gasherbrum II, and Gasherbrum I, respectively. In 1892, Martin Conway led a British expedition that reached "Concordia" on the Baltoro Glacier.
The first serious attempt to climb K2 was undertaken in 1902 by Oscar Eckenstein, Aleister Crowley, Jules Jacot-Guillarmod, Heinrich Pfannl, Victor Wessely, and Guy Knowles via the Northeast Ridge. In the early 1900s, modern transportation did not exist in the region: it took "fourteen days just to reach the foot of the mountain".
After five serious and costly attempts, the team reached —although considering the difficulty of the challenge, and the lack of modern climbing equipment or weatherproof fabrics, Crowley's statement that "neither man nor beast was injured" highlights the relative skill of the ascent. The failures were also attributed to sickness (Crowley was suffering the residual effects of malaria), a combination of questionable physical training, personality conflicts, and poor weather conditions—of 68 days spent on K2 (at the time, the record for the longest time spent at such an altitude) only eight provided clear weather.
The next expedition to K2, in 1909, led by Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, reached an elevation of around on the South East Spur, now known as the Abruzzi Spur (or Abruzzi Ridge). This would eventually become part of the standard route, but was abandoned at the time due to its steepness and difficulty. After trying and failing to find a feasible alternative route on the West Ridge or the North East Ridge, the Duke declared that K2 would never be climbed, and the team switched its attention to Chogolisa, where the Duke came within of the summit before being driven back by a storm.
The next attempt on K2 was not made until 1938, when the First American Karakoram expedition led by Charles Houston made a reconnaissance of the mountain. They concluded that the Abruzzi Spur was the most practical route and reached a height of around before turning back due to diminishing supplies and the threat of bad weather.Curran, pp.73–80
The following year, the 1939 American Karakoram expedition led by Fritz Wiessner came within of the summit but ended in disaster when Dudley Wolfe, Pasang Kikuli, Pasang Kitar, and Pintso disappeared high on the mountain.Curran pp. 81–94
Charles Houston returned to K2 to lead the 1953 American expedition. The attempt failed after a storm pinned down the team for 10 days at , during which time climber Art Gilkey became critically ill. A desperate retreat followed, during which Pete Schoening saved almost the entire team during a mass fall (known simply as The Belay), and Gilkey was killed, either in an avalanche or in a deliberate attempt to avoid burdening his companions. Despite the retreat and tragic end, the expedition has been given iconic status in mountaineering history.McDonald, pp. 119–140 The Gilkey Memorial was built in his memory at the mountain's foot.
Success and repeats
The 1954 Italian Karakoram expedition finally succeeded in ascending to the summit of K2 via the Abruzzi Spur on 31 July 1954. The expedition was led by Ardito Desio, and the two climbers who reached the summit were Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni. The team included a Pakistani member, Colonel Muhammad Ata-ullah, who had been a part of the 1953 American expedition. Also on the expedition were Walter Bonatti and Pakistani Hunza porter Amir Mehdi, who both proved vital to the expedition's success in that they carried oxygen tanks to for Lacedelli and Compagnoni. The ascent is controversial because Lacedelli and Compagnoni established their camp at a higher elevation than originally agreed with Mehdi and Bonatti. It being too dark to ascend or descend, Mehdi and Bonatti were forced to overnight without shelter above 8,000 metres leaving the oxygen tanks behind as requested when they descended. Bonatti and Mehdi survived, but Mehdi was hospitalised for months and had to have his toes amputated because of frostbite. Efforts in the 1950s to suppress these facts to protect Lacedelli and Compagnoni's reputations as Italian national heroes were later brought to light. It was also revealed that the moving of the camp was deliberate, a move apparently made because Compagnoni feared being outshone by the younger Bonatti. Bonatti was given the blame for Mehdi's hospitalisation.
On 9 August 1977, 23 years after the Italian expedition, Ichiro Yoshizawa led the second successful ascent, with Ashraf Aman as the first native Pakistani climber. The Japanese expedition took the Abruzzi Spur and used more than 1,500 porters.
The third ascent of K2 was in 1978, via a new route, the long and corniced Northeast Ridge. The top of the route traversed left across the East Face to avoid a vertical headwall and joined the uppermost part of the Abruzzi route. This ascent was made by an American team, led by James Whittaker; the summit party was Louis Reichardt, Jim Wickwire, John Roskelley, and Rick Ridgeway. Wickwire endured an overnight bivouac about below the summit, one of the highest bivouacs in history. This ascent was emotional for the American team, as they saw themselves as completing a task that had been begun by the 1938 team forty years earlier.
Another notable Japanese ascent was that of the difficult North Ridge on the Chinese side of the peak in 1982. A team from the led by Isao Shinkai and put three members, Naoe Sakashita, Hiroshi Yoshino, and Yukihiro Yanagisawa, on the summit on 14 August. However Yanagisawa fell and died on the descent. Four other members of the team achieved the summit the next day.
The first climber to reach the summit of K2 twice was Czech climber Josef Rakoncaj. Rakoncaj was a member of the 1983 Italian expedition led by Francesco Santon, which made the second successful ascent of the North Ridge (31 July 1983). Three years later, on 5 July 1986, he reached the summit via the Abruzzi Spur (double with Broad Peak West Face solo) as a member of Agostino da Polenza's international expedition.
The first woman to summit K2 was Polish climber Wanda Rutkiewicz on 23 June 1986. Liliane and Maurice Barrard who had summitted later that day, fell during the descent; Liliane Barrard's body was found on 19 July 1986 at the foot of the south face.
In 1986, two Polish expeditions summitted via two new routes, the Magic Line and the Polish Line (Jerzy Kukuczka and Tadeusz Piotrowski). Piotrowski fell to his death as the two were descending. This latter route has never been repeated.
Thirteen climbers from several expeditions died in the 1986 K2 Disaster. Another six mountaineers died on 13 August 1995, while eleven climbers died in the 2008 K2 disaster.
Recent attempts
2004
In 2004, the Spanish climber Carlos Soria Fontán became the oldest person ever to summit K2, at the age of 65.
2008
On 1 August 2008, a group of climbers went missing after a large piece of ice fell during an avalanche, taking out the fixed ropes on part of the route; four climbers were rescued, but 11, including Meherban Karim from Pakistan and Ger McDonnell, the first Irish person to reach the summit, were confirmed dead.
2009
Despite several attempts, nobody reached the summit.
2010
On 6 August 2010, Fredrik Ericsson, who intended to ski from the summit, joined Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner on the way to the summit of K2. Ericsson fell and was killed. Kaltenbrunner aborted her summit attempt.
Despite several attempts, nobody reached the summit.
2011
On 23 August 2011, a team of four climbers reached the summit of K2 from the North side. Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner became the first woman to complete all 14 eight-thousanders without supplemental oxygen. Kazakhs Maxut Zhumayev and Vassiliy Pivtsov completed their eight-thousanders quest. The fourth team member was Dariusz Załuski from Poland.
2012
The year started with a Russian team aiming for a first winter ascent. The expedition ended with the death of Vitaly Gorelik due to frostbite and pneumonia. The Russian team cancelled the ascent. In the summer season, K2 saw a record crowd standing on its summit—28 climbers in a single day—bringing the total for the year to 30.
2013
On 28 July 2013, two New Zealanders, Marty Schmidt and his son Denali, died after an avalanche destroyed their camp. A guide had reached their camp, but said they were nowhere to be seen and the campsite tent showed signs of having been hit by an avalanche. British climber Adrian Hayes, who was with the group, later posted on his Facebook page that the campsite had been wiped out.
2014
On 26 July 2014, the first team of Pakistani climbers scaled K2. There were six Pakistani and three Italian climbers in the expedition, called K2 60 Years Later, according to BBC. Previously, K2 had only been summitted by individual Pakistanis as part of international expeditions. Another team, consisting of Pasang Lhamu Sherpa Akita, Maya Sherpa, and Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, became the first Nepali women to climb K2.
On 27 July 2014, Garrett Madison led a team of three American climbers and six Sherpas to summit K2.
On 31 July 2014, Boyan Petrov completed the first Bulgarian ascent, just 8 days after climbing Broad Peak. Boyan is among the very few climbers with diabetes to climb above 7000 m without the use of supplemental oxygen.
2017
On 28 July 2017, Vanessa O'Brien led an international team of 12 with Mingma Gyalje Sherpa of Dreamers Destination to the summit of K2 and became the first British and American woman to summit K2, and the eldest woman to summit K2 at the age of 52 years old. She paid tribute to Julie Tullis and Alison Hargreaves, two British women who summited K2, in 1986 and 1995 respectively, but died during their descents. Other notable summits included John Snorri Sigurjónsson and Dawa Gyalje Sherpa who joined his sister (Dawa Yangzum Sherpa), becoming the second set of siblings to summit K2. Both Mingma Gyalje Sherpa and Fazal Ali recorded their second K2 summits.
2018
On 22 July 2018, Garrett Madison became the first American climber to reach the summit of K2 more than once when he led an international team of eight climbers, nine Nepali Sherpas, four Pakistani high altitude porters, and two other Madison Mountaineering guides to the summit.
On 22 July 2018, Polish mountaineer and mountain runner Andrzej Bargiel became the first person to ski down from summit to base camp.
2019
On 25 July 2019, Anja Blacha became the first German woman to summit K2. She climbed without the use of supplemental oxygen.
Winter expeditions
1987/1988 — Polish-Canadian-British expedition led by Andrzej Zawada from the Pakistani side, consisting of 13 Poles, 7 Canadians and 4 Brits. 2 March Krzysztof Wielicki and Leszek Cichy established camp III at 7,300 metres above sea, followed by Roger Mear and Jean-Francois Gagnon few days later. Hurricane winds and frostbite forced the team to retreat.
2002/2003 — Netia K2 Polish Winter Expedition. The team of fourteen climbers was led by Krzysztof Wielicki, and included four members from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Georgia. They intended to climb North Ridge. Marcin Kaczkan, Piotr Morawski and Denis Urubko established camp IV at 7,650 metres above sea level. The final ascent started by Kaczkan and Urubko failed due to the destruction of the tent by harsh weather in camp IV and Kaczkan's cerebral edema.
2011/2012 — Russian expedition. Nine Russian climbers attempted K2's Abruzzi Spur route. They managed to reach 7,200 metres above sea level (Vitaly Gorelik, Valery Shamalo and Nicholas Totmyanin), but had to retreat due to hurricane-force winds as well as frostbite on both of Gorelik's hands. After their descent to base camp and an unsuccessful call for Gorelik's evacuation (helicopter could not reach them through the worsening weather), the climber died of pneumonia and cardiac arrest. Following the incident, the expedition was called off.
2017/2018 — Polish National Winter Expedition led by Krzysztof Wielicki, consisting of 13 climbers, started in the end of December 2017. The team initially attempted to summit via the south-southeastern spur (Cesen route), switching to the Abruzzi Spur after an injury on the previous route. Via the Cesen/Basque route they reached up to 6300 m, while on the Abruzzi Spur route they reached up to 7400 m. However, Denis Urubko reported that during his solo attempt he probably reached up to 7600 m.
2021 — Ten climbers from an international expedition made the first winter summit on 16 January 2021. The group all summited together, and consisted of Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, Nirmal Purja, Gelje Sherpa, Mingma David Sherpa, Mingma Tenzi Sherpa, Dawa Temba Sherpa, Pem Chhiri Sherpa, Kilu Pemba Sherpa, Dawa Tenjing Sherpa, and Sona Sherpa. The summiting group consisted entirely of indigenous climbers from Nepal. Nirmal Purja was the only one who reached the summit without the use of supplemental oxygen. The summit temperature was −40° Celsius. On the same day Spanish team member Sergi Mingote died on the descent from Camp III; he fell somewhere between Camp I and Advanced Base Camp. Other famous climbers who lost their lives on the same expedition include Atanas Skatov, Ali Sadpara, and John Snorri.
Climbing routes and difficulties
There are a number of routes on K2, of somewhat different character, but they all share some key difficulties, the first being the extremely high altitude and resulting lack of oxygen: there is only one-third as much oxygen available to a climber on the summit of K2 as there is at sea level.
The second is the propensity of the mountain to experience extreme storms of several days duration, which have resulted in many of the deaths on the peak. The third is the steep, exposed, and committing nature of all routes on the mountain, which makes retreat more difficult, especially during a storm. Despite many attempts the first successful winter ascents occurred only in 2021. All major climbing routes lie on the Pakistani side. The base camp is also located on the Pakistani side.
Abruzzi Spur
The standard route of ascent, used by 75% of all climbers, is the Abruzzi Spur, located on the Pakistani side, first attempted by Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi in 1909. This is the peak's southeast ridge, rising above the Godwin-Austen Glacier. The spur proper begins at an altitude of , where Advanced Base Camp is usually placed. The route follows an alternating series of rock ribs, snow/ice fields, and some technical rock climbing on two famous features, "House's Chimney" and the "Black Pyramid." Above the Black Pyramid, dangerously exposed and difficult to navigate slopes lead to the easily visible "Shoulder", and thence to the summit. The last major obstacle is a narrow couloir known as the "Bottleneck", which places climbers dangerously close to a wall of seracs that form an ice cliff to the east of the summit. It was partly due to the collapse of one of these seracs around 2001 that no climbers reached the summit in 2002 and 2003.
On 1 August 2008, 11 climbers from several expeditions died during a series of accidents, including several ice falls in the Bottleneck.
North Ridge
Almost opposite from the Abruzzi Spur is the North Ridge, which ascends the Chinese side of the peak. It is rarely climbed, partly due to very difficult access, involving crossing the Shaksgam River, which is a hazardous undertaking. In contrast to the crowds of climbers and trekkers at the Abruzzi basecamp, usually at most two teams are encamped below the North Ridge. This route, more technically difficult than the Abruzzi, ascends a long, steep, primarily rock ridge to high on the mountain—Camp IV, the "Eagle's Nest" at —and then crosses a dangerously slide-prone hanging glacier by a leftward climbing traverse, to reach a snow couloir which accesses the summit.
Besides the original Japanese ascent, a notable ascent of the North Ridge was the one in 1990 by Greg Child, Greg Mortimer, and Steve Swenson, which was done alpine style above Camp 2, though using some fixed ropes already put in place by a Japanese team.
Other routes
Because 75% of people who climb K2 use the Abruzzi Spur, these listed routes are rarely climbed. No one has climbed the East Face of the mountain due to the instability of the snow and ice formations on that side. Besides the East Face, the North Face has not yet been climbed either. In 2007 Denis Urubko and Serguey Samoilov intended to climb the K2's North Face but they were stymied by increasingly deteriorating conditions. After finding their intended route menaced by growing avalanche danger, they traversed onto the normal North Ridge route and summited on 2 October 2007, making the latest summer season ascent of the peak in history.
Northeast Ridge Long and corniced, finishes on uppermost part of Abruzzi route. Ridge first crossed by a Polish expedition led by Janusz Kurczab in 1976. The team was not able to summit due to poor weather. First climbed by Louis Reichardt and James Wickwire on 6 September 1978
West Ridge First climbed in 1981 by a Japanese team. This route starts on the distant Negrotto Glacier and goes through unpredictable bands of rock and snowfields.
Southwest Pillar or "Magic Line" Very technical, and second most demanding. First climbed in 1986 by the Polish-Slovak trio Piasecki-Wróż-Božik. Since then Jordi Corominas from Spain has been the only successful climber on this route (he summitted in 2004), despite many other attempts.
South Face or "Polish Line" or "Central Rib" Extremely exposed, demanding, and dangerous. In July 1986, Jerzy Kukuczka and Tadeusz Piotrowski summitted on this route. Piotrowski was killed while descending on the Abruzzi Spur. The route starts off the first part of the Southwest Pillar, and then deviates into a totally exposed, snow-covered cliff area, then through a gully known as "The Hockey Stick", and then goes up to yet another exposed cliff-face, and the route continues through yet another extremely exposed section all the way up to the point where the route joins with the Abruzzi Spur about before the summit. Reinhold Messner called it a suicidal route and so far, no one has repeated Kukuczka and Piotrowski's achievement. "The route is so avalanche-prone, that no one else has ever considered a new attempt."
Northwest Face First ascent via this route was in 1990 by a Japanese team; this route is located on the Chinese side of the mountain. This route is known for its chaotic rock and snowfields all the way up to the summit.
Northwest Ridge First climbed in 1991 by a French team: Pierre Beghin and Christophe Profit. Finishes on North Ridge. Second attempt in 1995 by an American team, they reached 8100 metres the 2 August before turning back in deteriorating weather.
South-southeast spur or "Cesen route" or "Basque route" It runs the pillar between the Abruzzi Spur and the Polish Route. It connects with the Abruzzi Spur on the Shoulder, above the Black Pyramid and below the Bottleneck; since it avoids the Black Pyramid, it is considered safer. In 1986, Tomo Česen ascended to via this route. The first summit via this route was by a Basque team in 1994.
West Face Technical difficulty at high altitude, first climbed by a Russian team in 2007. This route is almost entirely made up of rock crevasses and snow-covered couloirs.
Use of supplemental oxygen
For most of its climbing history, K2 was not usually climbed with supplemental oxygen, and small, relatively lightweight teams were the norm. However, the 2004 season saw a great increase in the use of oxygen: 28 of 47 summitteers used oxygen in that year.
Acclimatisation is essential when climbing without oxygen to avoid some degree of altitude sickness.
K2's summit is well above the altitude at which high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), or high altitude cerebral edema (HACE) can occur. In mountaineering, when ascending above an altitude of , the climber enters what is known as the death zone.
Films
K2 (1991), an adventure drama film adaption of Patrick Meyers' original stage play, directed by Franc Roddam and loosely based on the story of Jim Wickwire and Louis Reichardt, the first Americans to summit K2
Vertical Limit (2000), an American survival thriller film directed by Martin Campbell
K2: Siren of the Himalayas (2012), an American documentary film directed by Dave Ohlson, that follows a group of climbers during their 2009 attempt to summit K2 on the 100-year anniversary of the Duke of Abruzzi’s landmark K2 expedition in 1909
The Summit (2012), a documentary film about the 2008 K2 disaster, directed by Nick Ryan
K2: The Impossible Descent (2020), a documentary film about Polish ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel's 2018 K2 climb and descent on skis, directed by Sławomir Batyra and Steven Robillard
Disasters
1986 K2 disaster
1995 K2 disaster
2008 K2 disaster
Passes Windy Gap''' is a -high mountain pass at east of K2, north of Broad Peak, and south of Skyang Kangri.
See also
List of books about K2
Concordia
Gilgit–Baltistan
Kangchenjunga (3rd highest after Everest and K2)
List of deaths on eight-thousanders
List of highest mountains
List of mountains in Pakistan
List of peaks by prominence
List of tallest mountains in the Solar System
Trans-Karakoram Tract
Notes
References
Bibliography
External links
Himalaya-Info.org page on K2 (German)
How high is K2 really?—Measurements in 1996 gave 8614.27±0.6 m a.m.s.l
Aleister Crowley's account of the 1902 K2 expedition
The climbing history of K2 from the first attempt in 1902 until the Italian success in 1954.
From Everest-K2 Posters
Northern Pakistan—highly detailed placemarks of towns, villages, peaks, glaciers, rivers and minor tributaries in Google Earth
Map of K2
List of ascents to December 2007
'K2: The Killing Peak' Men's Journal November 2008 feature
Achille Compagnoni —Daily Telegraph obituary
Dr Charles Houston —Daily Telegraph'' obituary
k2climb.net
China–Pakistan border
Eight-thousanders of the Karakoram
Highest points of Chinese provinces
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17360 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo%20dragon | Komodo dragon | The Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis), also known as the Komodo monitor, is a member of the monitor lizard family Varanidae that is endemic to the Indonesian islands of Komodo, Rinca, Flores, and Gili Motang. It is the largest extant species of lizard, growing to a maximum length of , and weighing up to approximately .
As a result of their size, Komodo dragons are apex predators, and dominate the ecosystems in which they live. Komodo dragons hunt and ambush prey including invertebrates, birds, and mammals. It has been claimed that they have a venomous bite; there are two glands in the lower jaw which secrete several toxic proteins. The biological significance of these proteins is disputed, but the glands have been shown to secrete an anticoagulant. Komodo dragons' group behavior in hunting is exceptional in the reptile world. The diet of Komodo dragons mainly consists of Javan rusa (Rusa timorensis), though they also eat considerable amounts of carrion. Komodo dragons also occasionally attack humans.
Mating begins between May and August, and the eggs are laid in September; as many as 20 eggs are deposited at a time in an abandoned megapode nest or in a self-dug nesting hole. The eggs are incubated for seven to eight months, hatching in April, when insects are most plentiful. Young Komodo dragons are vulnerable and dwell in trees to avoid predators, such as cannibalistic adults. They take 8 to 9 years to mature and are estimated to live up to 30 years.
Komodo dragons were first recorded by Western scientists in 1910. Their large size and fearsome reputation make them popular zoo exhibits. In the wild, their range has contracted due to human activities, and is likely to contract further from the effects of climate change; due to this, they are listed as Endangered by the IUCN Red List. They are protected under Indonesian law, and Komodo National Park was founded in 1980 to aid protection efforts.
Taxonomic history
Komodo dragons were first documented by Europeans in 1910, when rumors of a "land crocodile" reached Lieutenant van Steyn van Hensbroek of the Dutch colonial administration. Widespread notoriety came after 1912, when Peter Ouwens, the director of the Zoological Museum of Bogor, Java, published a paper on the topic after receiving a photo and a skin from the lieutenant, as well as two other specimens from a collector.
The first two live Komodo dragons to arrive in Europe were exhibited in the Reptile House at London Zoo when it opened in 1927. Joan Beauchamp Procter made some of the earliest observations of these animals in captivity and she demonstrated their behaviour at a Scientific Meeting of the Zoological Society of London in 1928.
The Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by W. Douglas Burden in 1926. After returning with 12 preserved specimens and two live ones, this expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong. It was also Burden who coined the common name "Komodo dragon." Three of his specimens were stuffed and are still on display in the American Museum of Natural History.
The Dutch island administration, realizing the limited number of individuals in the wild, soon outlawed sport hunting and heavily limited the number of individuals taken for scientific study. Collecting expeditions ground to a halt with the occurrence of World War II, not resuming until the 1950s and 1960s, when studies examined the Komodo dragon's feeding behavior, reproduction, and body temperature. At around this time, an expedition was planned in which a long-term study of the Komodo dragon would be undertaken. This task was given to the Auffenberg family, who stayed on Komodo Island for 11 months in 1969. During their stay, Walter Auffenberg and his assistant Putra Sastrawan captured and tagged more than 50 Komodo dragons.
Research from the Auffenberg expedition proved to be enormously influential in raising Komodo dragons in captivity. Research after that of the Auffenberg family has shed more light on the nature of the Komodo dragon, with biologists such as Claudio Ciofi continuing to study the creatures.
Etymology
The Komodo dragon is also sometimes known as the Komodo monitor or the Komodo Island monitor in scientific literature, although this name is uncommon. To the natives of Komodo Island, it is referred to as ora, buaya darat ('land crocodile'), or biawak raksasa ('giant monitor').
Evolutionary history
The evolutionary development of the Komodo dragon started with the genus Varanus, which originated in Asia about 40 million years ago and migrated to Australia, where it evolved into giant forms (the largest of all being the recently extinct Megalania), helped by the absence of competing placental carnivorans. Around 15 million years ago, a collision between the continental landmasses of Australia and Southeast Asia allowed these larger varanids to move back into what is now the Indonesian archipelago, extending their range as far east as the island of Timor.
The Komodo dragon is believed to have differentiated from its Australian ancestors about 4 million years ago. However, recent fossil evidence from Queensland suggests the Komodo dragon actually evolved in Australia, before spreading to Indonesia.
Dramatic lowering of sea level during the last glacial period uncovered extensive stretches of continental shelf that the Komodo dragon colonised, becoming isolated in their present island range as sea levels rose afterwards. Fossils of extinct Pliocene species of similar size to the modern Komodo dragon, such as Varanus sivalensis, have been found in Eurasia as well, indicating that they fared well even in environments containing competition, such as mammalian carnivores, until the climate change and extinction events that marked the beginning of the Pleistocene.
Genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA shows the Komodo dragon to be the closest relative (sister taxon) of the lace monitor (V. varius), with their common ancestor diverging from a lineage that gave rise to the crocodile monitor (Varanus salvadorii) of New Guinea.
A 2021 study had shown that during the Miocene, Komodo dragons had hybridized with the ancestors of the Australian sand monitor (V. gouldii), thus providing further evidence that the Komodo dragon had once inhabited Australia.
Genetic analysis indicates that the population from northern Flores is genetically distinct from other populations of the species.
Description
In the wild, adult Komodo dragons usually weigh around , although captive specimens often weigh more. According to Guinness World Records, an average adult male will weigh and measure , while an average female will weigh and measure . The largest verified wild specimen was long and weighed , including its undigested food.
The Komodo dragon has a tail as long as its body, as well as about 60 frequently replaced, serrated teeth that can measure up to in length. Its saliva is frequently blood-tinged because its teeth are almost completely covered by gingival tissue that is naturally lacerated during feeding. It also has a long, yellow, deeply forked tongue. Komodo dragon skin is reinforced by armoured scales, which contain tiny bones called osteoderms that function as a sort of natural chain-mail. The only areas lacking osteoderms on the head of the adult Komodo dragon are around the eyes, nostrils, mouth margins, and pineal eye, a light-sensing organ on the top of the head. Where lizards typically have one or two varying patterns or shapes of osteoderms, komodos have four: rosette, platy, dendritic, and vermiform. This rugged hide makes Komodo dragon skin a poor source of leather. Additionally, these osteoderms become more extensive and variable in shape as the Komodo dragon ages, ossifying more extensively as the lizard grows. These osteoderms are absent in hatchlings and juveniles, indicating that the natural armor develops as a product of age and competition between adults for protection in intraspecific combat over food and mates.
Senses
As with other varanids, Komodo dragons have only a single ear bone, the stapes, for transferring vibrations from the tympanic membrane to the cochlea. This arrangement means they are likely restricted to sounds in the 400 to 2,000 hertz range, compared to humans who hear between 20 and 20,000 hertz. They were formerly thought to be deaf when a study reported no agitation in wild Komodo dragons in response to whispers, raised voices, or shouts. This was disputed when London Zoological Garden employee Joan Procter trained a captive specimen to come out to feed at the sound of her voice, even when she could not be seen.
The Komodo dragon can see objects as far away as , but because its retinas only contain cones, it is thought to have poor night vision. It can distinguish colours, but has poor visual discrimination of stationary objects.
As with many other reptiles, the Komodo dragon primarily relies on its tongue to detect, taste, and smell stimuli, with the vomeronasal sense using the Jacobson's organ, rather than using the nostrils. With the help of a favorable wind and its habit of swinging its head from side to side as it walks, a Komodo dragon may be able to detect carrion from away. It only has a few taste buds in the back of its throat. Its scales, some of which are reinforced with bone, have sensory plaques connected to nerves to facilitate its sense of touch. The scales around the ears, lips, chin, and soles of the feet may have three or more sensory plaques.
Behaviour and ecology
The Komodo dragon prefers hot and dry places and typically lives in dry, open grassland, savanna, and tropical forest at low elevations. As an ectotherm, it is most active in the day, although it exhibits some nocturnal activity. Komodo dragons are solitary, coming together only to breed and eat. They are capable of running rapidly in brief sprints up to , diving up to , and climbing trees proficiently when young through use of their strong claws. To catch out-of-reach prey, the Komodo dragon may stand on its hind legs and use its tail as a support. As it matures, its claws are used primarily as weapons, as its great size makes climbing impractical.
For shelter, the Komodo dragon digs holes that can measure from wide with its powerful forelimbs and claws. Because of its large size and habit of sleeping in these burrows, it is able to conserve body heat throughout the night and minimise its basking period the morning after. The Komodo dragon hunts in the afternoon, but stays in the shade during the hottest part of the day. These special resting places, usually located on ridges with cool sea breezes, are marked with droppings and are cleared of vegetation. They serve as strategic locations from which to ambush deer.
Diet
Komodo dragons are apex predators. They are carnivores; although they have been considered as eating mostly carrion, they will frequently ambush live prey with a stealthy approach. When suitable prey arrives near a dragon's ambush site, it will suddenly charge at the animal at high speeds and go for the underside or the throat.
Komodo dragons do not deliberately allow the prey to escape with fatal injuries but try to kill prey outright using a combination of lacerating damage and blood loss. They have been recorded as killing wild pigs within seconds, and observations of Komodo dragons tracking prey for long distances are likely misinterpreted cases of prey escaping an attack before succumbing to infection. Komodo dragons have been observed knocking down large pigs and deer with their strong tails. They are able to locate carcasses using their keen sense of smell, which can locate a dead or dying animal from a range of up to .
Komodo dragons eat by tearing large chunks of flesh and swallowing them whole while holding the carcass down with their forelegs. For smaller prey up to the size of a goat, their loosely articulated jaws, flexible skulls, and expandable stomachs allow them to swallow prey whole. The undigested vegetable contents of a prey animal's stomach and intestines are typically avoided. Copious amounts of red saliva the Komodo dragons produce help to lubricate the food, but swallowing is still a long process (15–20 minutes to swallow a goat). A Komodo dragon may attempt to speed up the process by ramming the carcass against a tree to force it down its throat, sometimes ramming so forcefully that the tree is knocked down. A small tube under the tongue that connects to the lungs allows it to breathe while swallowing.
After eating up to 80% of its body weight in one meal, it drags itself to a sunny location to speed digestion, as the food could rot and poison the dragon if left undigested in its stomach for too long. Because of their slow metabolism, large dragons can survive on as few as 12 meals a year. After digestion, the Komodo dragon regurgitates a mass of horns, hair, and teeth known as the gastric pellet, which is covered in malodorous mucus. After regurgitating the gastric pellet, it rubs its face in the dirt or on bushes to get rid of the mucus, suggesting it does not relish the scent of its own excretions.
The eating habits of Komodo dragons follow a hierarchy, with the larger animals generally eating before the smaller ones. The largest male typically asserts his dominance and the smaller males show their submission by use of body language and rumbling hisses. Dragons of equal size may resort to "wrestling." Losers usually retreat, though they have been known to be killed and eaten by victors.
The Komodo dragon's diet is wide-ranging, and includes invertebrates, other reptiles (including smaller Komodo dragons), birds, bird eggs, small mammals, monkeys, wild boar, goats, deer, horses, and water buffalo. Young Komodos will eat insects, eggs, geckos, and small mammals, while adults prefer to hunt large mammals. Occasionally, they attack and bite humans. Sometimes they consume human corpses, digging up bodies from shallow graves. This habit of raiding graves caused the villagers of Komodo to move their graves from sandy to clay ground, and pile rocks on top of them, to deter the lizards. The Komodo dragon may have evolved to feed on the extinct dwarf elephant Stegodon that once lived on Flores, according to evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond.
The Komodo dragon drinks by sucking water into its mouth via buccal pumping (a process also used for respiration), lifting its head, and letting the water run down its throat.
Saliva
Although previous studies proposed that Komodo dragon saliva contains a variety of highly septic bacteria that would help to bring down prey, research in 2013 suggested that the bacteria in the mouths of Komodo dragons are ordinary and similar to those found in other carnivores. Komodo dragons have good mouth hygiene. To quote Bryan Fry: "After they are done feeding, they will spend 10 to 15 minutes lip-licking and rubbing their head in the leaves to clean their mouth ... Unlike people have been led to believe, they do not have chunks of rotting flesh from their meals on their teeth, cultivating bacteria." Nor do Komodo dragons wait for prey to die and track it at a distance, as vipers do; observations of them hunting deer, boar and in some cases buffalo reveal that they kill prey in less than half an hour.
The observation of prey dying of sepsis would then be explained by the natural instinct of water buffalos, who are not native to the islands where the Komodo dragon lives, to run into water after escaping an attack. The warm, faeces-filled water would then cause the infections. The study used samples from 16 captive dragons (10 adults and six neonates) from three US zoos.
Antibacterial immune factor
Researchers have isolated a powerful antibacterial peptide from the blood plasma of Komodo dragons, VK25. Based on their analysis of this peptide, they have synthesized a short peptide dubbed DRGN-1 and tested it against multidrug-resistant (MDR) pathogens. Preliminary results of these tests show that DRGN-1 is effective in killing drug-resistant bacterial strains and even some fungi. It has the added observed benefit of significantly promoting wound healing in both uninfected and mixed biofilm infected wounds.
Venom
In late 2005, researchers at the University of Melbourne speculated the perentie (Varanus giganteus), other species of monitors, and agamids may be somewhat venomous. The team believes the immediate effects of bites from these lizards were caused by mild envenomation. Bites on human digits by a lace monitor (V. varius), a Komodo dragon, and a spotted tree monitor (V. scalaris) all produced similar effects: rapid swelling, localised disruption of blood clotting, and shooting pain up to the elbow, with some symptoms lasting for several hours.
In 2009, the same researchers published further evidence demonstrating Komodo dragons possess a venomous bite. MRI scans of a preserved skull showed the presence of two glands in the lower jaw. The researchers extracted one of these glands from the head of a terminally ill dragon in the Singapore Zoological Gardens, and found it secreted several different toxic proteins. The known functions of these proteins include inhibition of blood clotting, lowering of blood pressure, muscle paralysis, and the induction of hypothermia, leading to shock and loss of consciousness in envenomated prey. As a result of the discovery, the previous theory that bacteria were responsible for the deaths of Komodo victims was disputed.
Other scientists have stated that this allegation of venom glands "has had the effect of underestimating the variety of complex roles played by oral secretions in the biology of reptiles, produced a very narrow view of oral secretions and resulted in misinterpretation of reptilian evolution." According to these scientists "reptilian oral secretions contribute to many biological roles other than to quickly dispatch prey." These researchers concluded that, "Calling all in this clade venomous implies an overall potential danger that does not exist, misleads in the assessment of medical risks, and confuses the biological assessment of squamate biochemical systems." Evolutionary biologist Schwenk says that even if the lizards have venom-like proteins in their mouths they may be using them for a different function, and he doubts venom is necessary to explain the effect of a Komodo dragon bite, arguing that shock and blood loss are the primary factors.
Reproduction
Mating occurs between May and August, with the eggs laid in September. During this period, males fight over females and territory by grappling with one another upon their hind legs, with the loser eventually being pinned to the ground. These males may vomit or defecate when preparing for the fight. The winner of the fight will then flick his long tongue at the female to gain information about her receptivity. Females are antagonistic and resist with their claws and teeth during the early phases of courtship. Therefore, the male must fully restrain the female during coitus to avoid being hurt. Other courtship displays include males rubbing their chins on the female, hard scratches to the back, and licking. Copulation occurs when the male inserts one of his hemipenes into the female's cloaca. Komodo dragons may be monogamous and form "pair bonds," a rare behavior for lizards.
Female Komodos lay their eggs from August to September and may use several types of locality; in one study, 60% laid their eggs in the nests of orange-footed scrubfowl (a moundbuilder or megapode), 20% on ground level and 20% in hilly areas. The females make many camouflage nests/holes to prevent other dragons from eating the eggs. Clutches contain an average of 20 eggs, which have an incubation period of 7–8 months. Hatching is an exhausting effort for the neonates, which break out of their eggshells with an egg tooth that falls off before long. After cutting themselves out, the hatchlings may lie in their eggshells for hours before starting to dig out of the nest. They are born quite defenseless and are vulnerable to predation. Sixteen youngsters from a single nest were on average 46.5 cm long and weighed 105.1 grams.
Young Komodo dragons spend much of their first few years in trees, where they are relatively safe from predators, including cannibalistic adults, as juvenile dragons make up 10% of their diets. The habit of cannibalism may be advantageous in sustaining the large size of adults, as medium-sized prey on the islands is rare. When the young approach a kill, they roll around in faecal matter and rest in the intestines of eviscerated animals to deter these hungry adults. Komodo dragons take approximately 8 to 9 years to mature, and may live for up to 30 years.
Parthenogenesis
A Komodo dragon at London Zoo named Sungai laid a clutch of eggs in late 2005 after being separated from a male company for more than two years. Scientists initially assumed she had been able to store sperm from her earlier encounter with a male, an adaptation known as superfecundation. On 20 December 2006, it was reported that Flora, a captive Komodo dragon living in the Chester Zoo in England, was the second known Komodo dragon to have laid unfertilised eggs: she laid 11 eggs, and seven of them hatched, all of them male. Scientists at Liverpool University in England performed genetic tests on three eggs that collapsed after being moved to an incubator, and verified Flora had never been in physical contact with a male dragon. After Flora's eggs' condition had been discovered, testing showed Sungai's eggs were also produced without outside fertilization. On 31 January 2008, the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas, became the first zoo in the Americas to document parthenogenesis in Komodo dragons. The zoo has two adult female Komodo dragons, one of which laid about 17 eggs on 19–20 May 2007. Only two eggs were incubated and hatched due to space issues; the first hatched on 31 January 2008, while the second hatched on 1 February. Both hatchlings were males.
Komodo dragons have the ZW chromosomal sex-determination system, as opposed to the mammalian XY system. Male progeny prove Flora's unfertilized eggs were haploid (n) and doubled their chromosomes later to become diploid (2n) (by being fertilized by a polar body, or by chromosome duplication without cell division), rather than by her laying diploid eggs by one of the meiosis reduction-divisions in her ovaries failing. When a female Komodo dragon (with ZW sex chromosomes) reproduces in this manner, she provides her progeny with only one chromosome from each of her pairs of chromosomes, including only one of her two sex chromosomes. This single set of chromosomes is duplicated in the egg, which develops parthenogenetically. Eggs receiving a Z chromosome become ZZ (male); those receiving a W chromosome become WW and fail to develop, meaning that only males are produced by parthenogenesis in this species.
It has been hypothesised that this reproductive adaptation allows a single female to enter an isolated ecological niche (such as an island) and by parthenogenesis produce male offspring, thereby establishing a sexually reproducing population (via reproduction with her offspring that can result in both male and female young). Despite the advantages of such an adaptation, zoos are cautioned that parthenogenesis may be detrimental to genetic diversity.
Incidents with humans
Attacks on humans are rare, but Komodo dragons have been responsible for several human fatalities, in both the wild and in captivity. According to data from Komodo National Park spanning a 38-year period between 1974 and 2012, there were 24 reported attacks on humans, five of them fatal. Most of the victims were local villagers living around the national park. Reports of attacks include:
1974: A visiting Swiss tourist, Baron Rudolf von Reding von Biberegg, who disappeared on Komodo Island, may have been killed and eaten by Komodo dragons.
2001: A Komodo dragon attacked Phil Bronstein, an investigative journalist and former husband of actress Sharon Stone, in the Los Angeles Zoo.
2007: An 8-year-old boy on Komodo Island died from his injuries after being attacked by one.
2008: A group of five scuba divers were stranded on the beach of Rinca Island, and were attacked by Komodo dragons. After two days, the divers' ordeal ended when they were picked up by an Indonesian rescue boat.
2009: a 31-year-old Komodo Island local, died from his injuries later after being attacked by two dragons. He had fallen from a tree while he was picking sugar apples.
2009: Maen, a national park guide stationed on Rinca Island, was ambushed and bitten by a Komodo dragon which had walked into his office and lay under his desk. Despite suffering some injuries, the guide survived.
May 2017: Lon Lee Alle, a 50-year-old Singaporean tourist (or Loh Lee Aik, said to be 68), was attacked by a Komodo dragon on Komodo Island. The victim survived the attack, but his left leg was severely injured.
November 2017: Yosef Paska, a local construction worker, was attacked on Rinca Island and taken to Labuan Bajo by speedboat for treatment.
Conservation
The Komodo dragon is classified by the IUCN as Endangered and is listed on the IUCN Red List. The species' sensitivity to natural and man-made threats has long been recognized by conservationists, zoological societies, and the Indonesian government. Komodo National Park was founded in 1980 to protect Komodo dragon populations on islands including Komodo, Rinca, and Padar. Later, the Wae Wuul and Wolo Tado Reserves were opened on Flores to aid Komodo dragon conservation.
Komodo dragons generally avoid encounters with humans. Juveniles are very shy and will flee quickly into a hideout if a human comes closer than about . Older animals will also retreat from humans from a shorter distance away. If cornered, they may react aggressively by gaping their mouth, hissing, and swinging their tail. If they are disturbed further, they may attack and bite. Although there are anecdotes of unprovoked Komodo dragons attacking or preying on humans, most of these reports are either not reputable or have subsequently been interpreted as defensive bites. Only very few cases are truly the result of unprovoked attacks by atypical individuals who lost their fear of humans.
Volcanic activity, earthquakes, loss of habitat, fire, tourism, loss of prey due to poaching, and illegal poaching of the dragons themselves have all contributed to the vulnerable status of the Komodo dragon. A major future threat to the species is climate change via both aridification and sea level rise, which can affect the low-lying habitats and valleys that the Komodo dragon depends on, as Komodo dragons do not range into the higher-altitude regions of the islands they inhabit. Based on projections, climate change will lead to a decline in suitable habitat of 8.4%, 30.2%, or 71% by 2050 depending on the climate change scenario. Without effective conservation actions, populations on Flores are extirpated in all scenarios, while in the more extreme scenarios, only the populations on Komodo and Rinca persist in highly reduced numbers. Rapid climate change mitigation is crucial for conserving the species in the wild. Other scientists have disputed the conclusions about the effects of climate change on Komodo dragon populations.
Under Appendix I of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), commercial international trade of Komodo dragon skins or specimens is prohibited. Despite this, there are occasional reports of illegal attempts to trade in live Komodo dragons. The most recent attempt was in March 2019, when Indonesian police in the East Java city of Surabaya reported that a criminal network had been caught trying to smuggle 41 young Komodo dragons out of Indonesia. The plan was said to include shipping the animals to several other countries in Southeast Asia through Singapore. It was hoped that the animals could be sold for up to 500 million rupiah (around US$35,000) each. It was believed that the Komodo dragons had been smuggled out of East Nusa Tenggara province through the port at Ende in central Flores.
In 2013, the total population of Komodo dragons in the wild was assessed as 3,222 individuals, declining to 3,092 in 2014 and 3,014 in 2015. Populations remained relatively stable on the bigger islands (Komodo and Rinca), but decreased on smaller islands, such as Nusa Kode and Gili Motang, likely due to diminishing prey availability. On Padar, a former population of Komodo dragons has recently become extinct, of which the last individuals were seen in 1975. It is widely assumed that the Komodo dragon died out on Padar following a major decline of populations of large ungulate prey, for which poaching was most likely responsible.
In captivity
Komodo dragons have long been sought-after zoo attractions, where their size and reputation make them popular exhibits. They are, however, rare in zoos because they are susceptible to infection and parasitic disease if captured from the wild, and do not readily reproduce in captivity. The first Komodo dragons were displayed at London Zoo in 1927. A Komodo dragon was exhibited in 1934 in the United States at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., but it lived for only two years. More attempts to exhibit Komodo dragons were made, but the lifespan of the animals proved very short, averaging five years in the National Zoological Park. Studies were done by Walter Auffenberg, which were documented in his book The Behavioral Ecology of the Komodo Monitor, eventually allowed for more successful management and breeding of the dragons in captivity. As of May 2009, there were 35 North American, 13 European, one Singaporean, two African, and two Australian institutions which housed captive Komodo dragons.
A variety of behaviors have been observed from captive specimens. Most individuals become relatively tame within a short time, and are capable of recognising individual humans and discriminating between familiar and unfamiliar keepers. Komodo dragons have also been observed to engage in play with a variety of objects, including shovels, cans, plastic rings, and shoes. This behavior does not seem to be "food-motivated predatory behavior."
Even seemingly docile dragons may become unpredictably aggressive, especially when the animal's territory is invaded by someone unfamiliar. In June 2001, a Komodo dragon seriously injured Phil Bronstein, the then-husband of actress Sharon Stone, when he entered its enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo after being invited in by its keeper. Bronstein was bitten on his bare foot, as the keeper had told him to take off his white shoes and socks, which the keeper stated could potentially excite the Komodo dragon as they were the same colour as the white rats the zoo fed the dragon. Although he survived, Bronstein needed to have several tendons in his foot reattached surgically.
See also
Asian water monitor
Komodo Indonesian Fauna Museum and Reptile Park
Papua monitor (Varanus salvadorii), a monitor lizard often asserted to be the longest extant lizard
Toxicofera, a hypothetical clade encompassing all venomous reptiles, including the Komodo dragon
Varanus priscus (formerly known as Megalania prisca), a huge extinct varanid lizard of Pleistocene Australia
References
Further reading
External links
Apex predators
Articles containing video clips
Endangered fauna of Asia
Endemic fauna of Indonesia
Extant Zanclean first appearances
Fauna of the Lesser Sunda Islands
Komodo National Park
Monitor lizards
National symbols of Indonesia
Reptiles described in 1912
Reptiles of Indonesia
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17361 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiln | Kiln | A kiln is a thermally insulated chamber, a type of oven, that produces temperatures sufficient to complete some process, such as hardening, drying, or chemical changes. Kilns have been used for millennia to turn objects made from clay into pottery, tiles and bricks. Various industries use rotary kilns for pyroprocessing—to calcinate ores, to calcinate limestone to lime for cement, and to transform many other materials.
Pronunciation and etymology
Kiln descends from the Old English cylene (), which was borrowed from Old Welsh 'Cylyn' which was in turn borrowed from the Latin culīna, kitchen, cooking-stove, burning-place.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, kiln was spelt as cyline, cylene, cyln(e) in Old English. In Middle English as kulne, kyllne, kilne, kiln, kylle, kyll, kil, kill, keele, kiele. In Middle English the final "n" had become silent in most areas, resulting in the "kill" spelling instead of the etymological kiln.
In the 14th century, Middle English speakers began to pronounce "kiln" as "kil" with the "n" silent.
In James A. Bowen's book English Words as Spoken and Written for Upper Grades (1900), he points out that “kiln” contains the digraph “ln,” a combination of two letters that make one sound: “The digraph ln, n silent, occurs in kiln. A fall down the kiln can kill you.” Bowen noted that “kill” and “kiln” are homophones.
The modern pronunciation of this word, where the "n" is pronounced, has become widely used. This is due to a phenomenon known as spelling pronunciation, where the assumed pronunciation of a word is surmised from its spelling and differs from its actual pronunciation. This is common in words with silent letters.
Uses of kilns
Pit fired pottery was produced for thousands of years before the earliest known kiln, which dates to around 6000 BC, and was found at the Yarim Tepe site in modern Iraq. Neolithic kilns were able to produce temperatures greater than 900 °C (1652 °F).
Uses include:
Annealing, fusing and deforming glass, or fusing metallic oxide paints to the surface of glass
Heat treatment for metallic workpieces
Ceramics
Brickworks
Melting metal for casting
Calcination of ore in a rotary kiln prior to smelting
Pyrolysis of chemical materials
Heating limestone with clay in the manufacture of Portland cement, the cement kiln
Heating limestone to make quicklime or calcium oxide, the lime kiln
Heating gypsum to make plaster of Paris
For cremation (at high temperature)
Drying of tobacco leaves
Drying malted barley for brewing and other fermentations
Drying hops for brewing (known as a hop kiln or oast house)
Drying corn (grain) before grinding or storage, sometimes called a corn kiln, corn drying kiln
Drying green lumber so it can be used immediately
Drying wood for use as firewood
Heating wood to the point of pyrolysis to produce charcoal
Ceramic kilns
Kilns are an essential part of the manufacture of all ceramics. Ceramics require high temperatures so chemical and physical reactions will occur to permanently alter the unfired body. In the case of pottery, clay materials are shaped, dried and then fired in a kiln. The final characteristics are determined by the composition and preparation of the clay body and the temperature at which it is fired. After a first firing, glazes may be used and the ware is fired a second time to fuse the glaze into the body. A third firing at a lower temperature may be required to fix overglaze decoration. Modern kilns often have sophisticated electronic control systems, although pyrometric devices are often also used.
Clay consists of fine-grained particles that are relatively weak and porous. Clay is combined with other minerals to create a workable clay body. The firing process includes sintering. This heats the clay until the particles partially melt and flow together, creating a strong, single mass, composed of a glassy phase interspersed with pores and crystalline material. Through firing, the pores are reduced in size, causing the material to shrink slightly. This crystalline material predominantly consists of silicon and aluminium oxides.
In the broadest terms, there are two types of kilns: intermittent and continuous, both being an insulated box with a controlled inner temperature and atmosphere.
A continuous kiln, sometimes called a tunnel kiln, is long with only the central portion directly heated. From the cool entrance, ware is slowly moved through the kiln, and its temperature is increased steadily as it approaches the central, hottest part of the kiln. As it continues through the kiln, the temperature is reduced until the ware exits the kiln nearly at room temperature. A continuous kiln is energy-efficient, because heat given off during cooling is recycled to pre-heat the incoming ware. In some designs, the ware is left in one place, while the heating zone moves across it. Kilns in this type include:
Hoffmann kiln
Bull’s Trench kiln
Habla (Zig-Zag) kiln
Roller kiln: A special type of kiln, common in tableware and tile manufacture, is the roller-hearth kiln, in which wares placed on bats are carried through the kiln on rollers.
In the intermittent kiln, the ware is placed inside the kiln, the kiln is closed, and the internal temperature is increased according to a schedule. After the firing is completed, both the kiln and the ware are cooled. The ware is removed, the kiln is cleaned and the next cycle begins. Kilns in this type include:
Clamp kiln
Skove kiln
Scotch kiln
Down-draft kiln
Shuttle kilns: this is a car-bottom kiln with a door on one or both ends. Burners are positioned top and bottom on each side, creating a turbulent circular air flow. This type of kiln is generally a multi-car design and is used for processing whitewares, technical ceramics and refractories in batches. Depending upon the size of ware, shuttle kilns may be equipped with car-moving devices to transfer fired and unfired ware in and out of the kiln. Shuttle kilns can be either updraft or downdraft. A shuttle kiln derives its name from the fact that kiln cars can enter a shuttle kiln from either end of the kiln, whereas a tunnel kiln has flow in only one direction.
Kiln technology is very old. Kilns developed from a simple earthen trench filled with pots and fuel pit firing, to modern methods. One improvement was to build a firing chamber around pots with baffles and a stoking hole. This conserved heat. A chimney stack improved the air flow or draw of the kiln, thus burning the fuel more completely.
Chinese kiln technology has always been a key factor in the development of Chinese pottery, and until recent centuries was the most advanced in the world. The Chinese developed kilns capable of firing at around 1,000 °C before 2000 BC. These were updraft kilns, often built below ground. Two main types of kiln were developed by about 200 AD and remained in use until modern times. These are the dragon kiln of hilly southern China, usually fuelled by wood, long and thin and running up a slope, and the horseshoe-shaped mantou kiln of the north Chinese plains, smaller and more compact. Both could reliably produce the temperatures of up to 1300 °C or more needed for porcelain. In the late Ming, the egg-shaped kiln or zhenyao was developed at Jingdezhen and mainly used there. This was something of a compromise between the other types, and offered locations in the firing chamber with a range of firing conditions.
Both Ancient Roman pottery and medieval Chinese pottery could be fired in industrial quantities, with tens of thousands of pieces in a single firing. Early examples of simpler kilns found in Britain include those that made roof-tiles during the Roman occupation. These kilns were built up the side of a slope, such that a fire could be lit at the bottom and the heat would rise up into the kiln.
Traditional kilns include:
Dragon kiln of south China: thin and long, climbing up a hillside. This type spread to the rest of East Asia giving the Japanese anagama kiln, arriving via Korea in the 5th century. This kiln usually consists of one long firing chamber, pierced with smaller ware stacking ports on one side, with a firebox at one end and a flue at the other. Firing time can vary from one day to several weeks. Traditional anagama kilns are also built on a slope to allow for a better draft. The Japanese noborigama kiln is an evolution from anagama design as a multi-chamber kiln where wood is stacked from the front firebox at first, then only through the side-stoking holes with the benefit of having air heated up to from the front firebox, enabling more efficient firings.
Khmer Kiln: quite similar to the anagama kiln; however, traditional Khmer Kilns had a flat roof. Chinese, Korean or Japanese kilns have an arch roof. These types of kiln vary in size and can measure in the tens of meters. The firing time also varies and can last several days.
Bottle kiln: a type of intermittent kiln, usually coal-fired, formerly used in the firing of pottery; such a kiln was surrounded by a tall brick hovel or cone, of typical bottle shape. The tableware was enclosed in sealed fireclay saggars; as the heat and smoke from the fires passed through the oven it would be fired at temperatures up to .
Biscuit kiln: The first firing would take place in the biscuit kiln.
Glost kiln: The biscuit-ware was glazed and given a second glost firing in the larger glost kilns.
Mantou kiln of north China, smaller and more compact than the dragon kiln
Muffle kiln: This was used to fire over-glaze decoration, at a temperature under . In these cool kilns the smoke from the fires passed through flues outside the oven.
Catenary arch kiln: Typically used for the firing of pottery using salt, these by their form (a catenary arch) tend to retain their shape over repeated heating and cooling cycles, whereas other types require extensive metalwork supports.
Sèvres kiln: invented in Sèvres, France, it efficiently generated high-temperatures to produce waterproof ceramic bodies and easy-to-obtain glazes. It features a down-draft design that produces high temperature in shorter time, even with wood-firing.
Bourry box kiln, similar to previous one
Modern kilns
With the industrial age, kilns were designed to use electricity and more refined fuels, including natural gas and propane. Many large industrial pottery kilns use natural gas, as it is generally clean, efficient and easy to control. Modern kilns can be fitted with computerized controls allowing for fine adjustments during the firing. A user may choose to control the rate of temperature climb or ramp, hold or soak the temperature at any given point, or control the rate of cooling. Both electric and gas kilns are common for smaller scale production in industry and craft, handmade and sculptural work.
The temperature of some kilns is controlled by pyrometric cones—devices that begin to melt at specific temperatures.
Modern kilns include:
Retort kiln: a type of kiln which can reach temperatures around for extended periods of time. Typically, these kilns are used in industrial purposes, and feature movable charging cars which make up the bottom and door of the kiln.
Electric kilns: kilns operated by electricity were developed in the 20th century, primarily for smaller scale use such as in schools, universities, and hobby centers. The atmosphere in most designs of electric kiln is rich in oxygen, as there is no open flame to consume oxygen molecules. However, reducing conditions can be created with appropriate gas input, or by using saggars in a particular way.
Feller kiln: brought contemporary design to wood firing by re-using unburnt gas from the chimney to heat intake air before it enters the firebox. This leads to an even shorter firing cycle and less wood consumption. This design requires external ventilation to prevent the in-chimney radiator from melting, being typically in metal. The result is a very efficient wood kiln firing one cubic metre of ceramics with one cubic meter of wood.
Microwave assisted firing: this technique combines microwave energy with more conventional energy sources, such as radiant gas or electric heating, to process ceramic materials to the required high temperatures. Microwave-assisted firing offers significant economic benefits.
Microwave kiln: These small kilns are designed to be placed inside a standard microwave oven. The kiln body is made from a porous ceramic material lined with a coating that absorbs microwave energy. The microwave kiln is placed inside a microwave oven and heated to the desired temperature. The heating process is much less controlled than most modern electric kilns, as there is no built-in temperature monitoring. The user must monitor the process closely to achieve the desired results, adjusting time and power levels programmed on the microwave oven. A small hole in the lid of the kiln can be used to estimate the interior temperature visually, as hot materials will glow. Microwave kilns are designed to reach internal temperatures of over 1400°C, hot enough to work some types of glass, metals, and ceramics, while the outside of the kiln remains cool enough to handle with hot pads or tongs. After firing, the kiln should be removed from the microwave oven and placed on heat-proof surface while it is allowed to cool. Microwave kilns are limited in size, usually no more than 8 inches in diameter.
Top-hat kiln: an intermittent kiln of a type sometimes used to fire pottery. The ware is set on a refractory hearth, or plinth, over which a box-shaped cover is lowered.
Wood-drying kiln
Green wood coming straight from the felled tree has far too high a moisture content to be commercially useful and will rot, warp and split. Both hardwoods and softwood must be left to dry out until the moisture content is between 18% and 8%. This can be a long process, or it is speeded up by use of a kiln. A variety of kiln technologies exist today: conventional, dehumidification, solar, vacuum and radio frequency.
Conventional wood dry kilns are either package-type (side-loader) or track-type (tram) construction. Most hardwood lumber kilns are side-loader kilns in which fork trucks are used to load lumber packages into the kiln. Most softwood kilns are track types in which the timber (US: "lumber") is loaded on kiln/track cars for loading the kiln. Modern high-temperature, high-air-velocity conventional kilns can typically dry green wood in 10 hours down to a moisture content of 18%. However, 1-inch-thick green red oak requires about 28 days to dry down to a moisture content of 8%.
Heat is typically introduced via steam running through fin/tube heat exchangers controlled by on/off pneumatic valves. Humidity is removed by a system of vents, the specific layout of which are usually particular to a given manufacturer. In general, cool dry air is introduced at one end of the kiln while warm moist air is expelled at the other. Hardwood conventional kilns also require the introduction of humidity via either steam spray or cold water misting systems to keep the relative humidity inside the kiln from dropping too low during the drying cycle. Fan directions are typically reversed periodically to ensure even drying of larger kiln charges.
Most softwood kilns operate below temperature. Hardwood kiln drying schedules typically keep the dry bulb temperature below . Difficult-to-dry species might not exceed .
Dehumidification kilns are similar to other kilns in basic construction and drying times are usually comparable. Heat comes primarily from an integral dehumidification unit that also removes humidity. Auxiliary heat is often provided early in the schedule to supplement the dehumidifier.
are conventional kilns, typically built by hobbyists to keep initial investment costs low. Heat is provided via solar radiation, while internal air circulation is typically passive.
Vacuum and radio frequency kilns reduce the air pressure to attempt to speed up the drying process. A variety of these vacuum technologies exist, varying primarily in the method heat is introduced into the wood charge. Hot water platten vacuum kilns use aluminum heating plates with the water circulating within as the heat source, and typically operate at significantly reduced absolute pressure. Discontinuous and SSV (super-heated steam) use atmosphere pressure to introduce heat into the kiln charge. The entire kiln charge comes up to full atmospheric pressure, the air in the chamber is then heated and finally a vacuum is pulled as the charge cools. SSV run at partial-atmospheres, typically around 1/3 of full atmospheric pressure, in a hybrid of vacuum and conventional kiln technology (SSV kilns are significantly more popular in Europe where the locally harvested wood is easier to dry than the North American woods.) RF/V (radio frequency + vacuum) kilns use microwave radiation to heat the kiln charge, and typically have the highest operating cost due to the heat of vaporization being provided by electricity rather than local fossil fuel or waste wood sources.
The economics of different wood drying technologies are based on the total energy, capital, insurance/risk, environmental impacts, labor, maintenance, and product degradation costs. These costs, which can be a significant part of plant costs, involve the differential impact of the presence of drying equipment in a specific plant. Every piece of equipment from the green trimmer to the infeed system at the planer mill is part of the "drying system". The true costs of the drying system can only be determined when comparing the total plant costs and risks with and without drying.
Kiln dried firewood was pioneered during the 1980s, and was later adopted extensively in Europe due to the economic and practical benefits of selling wood with a lower moisture content (with optimal moisture levels of under 20% being much easier to achieve).
The total (harmful) air emissions produced by wood kilns, including their heat source, can be significant. Typically, the higher the temperature at which the kiln operates, the larger the quantity of emissions that are produced (per pound of water removed). This is especially true in the drying of thin veneers and high-temperature drying of softwoods.
Gallery
See also
Kiln furniture
Notes
References
Hamer, Frank and Janet. The Potter's Dictionary of Materials and Techniques. A & C Black Publishers, Limited, London, England, Third Edition 1991. .
Smith, Ed. Dry Kiln Design Manual. J.E. Smith Engineering and Consulting, Blooming Grove, Texas. Available for purchase from author J.E. Smith
M. Kornmann and CTTB, "Clay bricks and roof tiles, manufacturing and properties", Soc. industrie minérale, Paris, (2007)
External links
Kilns and Firing Structures entry in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology
Information about the history of bottle ovens (kilns) from Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, UK.
How the Bottle Kiln Works (from thepotteries.org)
Industrial furnaces
Pottery
Firing techniques
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17362 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi%20%28bird%29 | Kiwi (bird) | Kiwi ( ) are flightless birds endemic to New Zealand of the genus Apteryx () and family Apterygidae (). Approximately the size of a domestic chicken, kiwi are by far the smallest living ratites (which also include ostriches, emus, rheas and cassowaries).
DNA sequence comparisons have yielded the surprising conclusion that kiwi are much more closely related to the extinct Malagasy elephant birds than to the moa with which they shared New Zealand. There are five recognised species, four of which are currently listed as vulnerable, and one of which is near-threatened. All species have been negatively affected by historic deforestation but currently the remaining large areas of their forest habitat are well protected in reserves and national parks. At present, the greatest threat to their survival is predation by invasive mammalian predators.
The kiwi's egg is one of the largest in proportion to body size (up to 20% of the female's weight) of any species of bird in the world. Other unique adaptations of kiwi, such as their hairlike feathers, short and stout legs, and using their nostrils at the end of their long beak to detect prey before they ever see it, have helped the bird to become internationally well-known.
The kiwi is recognised as an icon of New Zealand, and the association is so strong that the term Kiwi is used internationally as the colloquial demonym for New Zealanders.
Etymology
The Māori language word is generally accepted to be "of imitative origin" from the call. However, some linguists derive the word from Proto-Nuclear Polynesian , which refers to Numenius tahitiensis, the bristle-thighed curlew, a migratory bird that winters in the tropical Pacific islands. With its long decurved bill and brown body, the curlew resembles the kiwi. So when the first Polynesian settlers arrived, they may have applied the word kiwi to the new-found bird. The word is usually uncapitalised when used for the birds. The plural is either the anglicised kiwis or, consistent with the Māori language, appearing as kiwi without an ‑s.
The genus name Apteryx is derived from Ancient Greek 'without wing': (), 'without' or 'not'; (), 'wing'.
Taxonomy and systematics
Although it was long presumed that the kiwi was closely related to the other New Zealand ratites, the moa, recent DNA studies have identified its closest relative as the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar, and among extant ratites, the kiwi is more closely related to the emu and the cassowaries than to the moa.
Research published in 2013 on an extinct genus, Proapteryx, known from the Miocene deposits of the Saint Bathans Fauna, found that it was smaller and probably capable of flight, supporting the hypothesis that the ancestor of the kiwi reached New Zealand independently from moas, which were already large and flightless by the time kiwi appeared.
Species
There are five known species of kiwi, with a number of subspecies.
Relationships in the genus Apteryx
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Image !! Scientific name !! Common name !! Distribution !! Description
|-
|||Apteryx haastii||Great spotted kiwi or roroa || New Zealand || The largest species, standing about tall, with females weighing about and males about . It has grey-brown plumage with lighter bands. The female lays one egg a year, which both parents incubate. The population is estimated at over 20,000, distributed through the more mountainous parts of northwest Nelson, the northern West Coast, and the Southern Alps / Kā Tiritiri o te Moana of the South Island.
|-
|||Apteryx owenii||Little spotted kiwi || Kapiti Island || A small kiwi the size of a bantam, standing tall, with the female weighing . She lays one egg, which is incubated by the male. This small, docile kiwi is unable to withstand predation by introduced pigs, stoats and cats, leading to its extinction on the mainland. There are about 1350 on Kapiti Island and it has been introduced to other predator-free islands, where it appears to be getting established with about 50 on each island.
|-
| || Apteryx rowi||Okarito kiwi, rowi or Okarito brown kiwi || South Island || The Okarito kiwi, first identified as a new species in 1994, is slightly smaller than the North Island brown kiwi, with a greyish tinge to the plumage and sometimes white facial feathers. Females lay up to three eggs in a season, each one in a different nest. Male and female both incubate. Distribution is now limited to a small area on the West Coast, but studies of ancient DNA have shown that, in prehuman times, it was far more widespread on the western side of the South Island and lived in the lower half of the North Island, where it was the only kiwi species detected.
|-
| || Apteryx australis||Southern brown kiwi, tokoeka or common kiwi || South Island ||Almost as big as the great spotted kiwi and similar in appearance to the brown kiwi, though its plumage is lighter in colour. It is relatively numerous. Ancient DNA studies have shown that, in prehuman times, the distribution of this species included the east coast of the South Island. Several subspecies are recognised:
The Stewart Island southern brown kiwi, Apteryx australis lawryi, is from Stewart Island/Rakiura.
The northern Fiordland tokoeka (Apteryx australis ?) and southern Fiordland tokoeka (Apteryx australis ?) live in Fiordland, the remote southwest part of the South Island. These sub-species of tokoeka are relatively common and are nearly tall.
The Haast southern brown kiwi or Haast tokoeka, ''Apteryx australis 'Haast, is the rarest taxon of kiwi with only about 300 individuals. It was identified as a distinct form in 1993. It occurs only in a restricted area in the Haast Range of the Southern Alps at an altitude of . This form is distinguished by a more strongly downcurved bill and more rufous plumage.
|-
| || Apteryx mantelli or Apteryx australis||North Island brown kiwi || North Island || A. mantelli (or A. australis before 2000 and still in some sources) females stand about tall and weigh about , while the males weigh about . The plumage is streaky red-brown and spiky. The female usually lays two eggs, which are incubated by the male. The North Island brown has demonstrated a remarkable resilience: it adapts to a wide range of habitats, including non-native forests and some farmland. It is widespread in the northern two-thirds of the North Island and is the most numerous kiwi, with about 35,000 remaining.
|-
|}
Description
Their adaptation to a terrestrial life is extensive: like all the other ratites (ostrich, emu, rhea and cassowary), they have no keel on the sternum to anchor wing muscles. The vestigial wings are so small that they are invisible under the bristly, hair-like, two-branched feathers. While most adult birds have bones with hollow insides to minimise weight and make flight practicable, kiwi have marrow, like mammals and the young of other birds. With no constraints on weight due to flight requirements, brown kiwi females carry and lay a single egg that may weigh as much as . Like most other ratites, they have no uropygial gland (preen gland). Their bill is long, pliable and sensitive to touch, and their eyes have a reduced pecten. Their feathers lack barbules and aftershafts, and they have large vibrissae around the gape. They have 13 flight feathers, no tail and a small pygostyle. Their gizzard is weak and their caecum is long and narrow.
The eye of the kiwi is the smallest relative to body mass in all avian species resulting in the smallest visual field as well. The eye has small specialisations for a nocturnal lifestyle, but kiwi rely more heavily on their other senses (auditory, olfactory, and somatosensory system). The sight of the kiwi is so underdeveloped that blind specimens have been observed in nature, showing how little they rely on sight for survival and foraging. In an experiment, it was observed that one-third of a population of A. rowi in New Zealand under no environmental stress had ocular lesions in one or both eyes. The same experiment examined three specific specimens that showed complete blindness and found them to be in good physical standing outside of ocular abnormalities. A 2018 study revealed that the kiwi's closest relatives, the extinct elephant birds, also shared this trait despite their great size.
Unlike virtually every other palaeognath, which are generally small-brained by bird standards, kiwi have proportionally large encephalisation quotients. Hemisphere proportions are even similar to those of parrots and songbirds, though there is no evidence of similarly complex behaviour.
Behaviour and ecology
Before the arrival of humans in the 13th century or earlier, New Zealand's only endemic mammals were three species of bat, and the ecological niches that in other parts of the world were filled by creatures as diverse as horses, wolves and mice were taken up by birds (and, to a lesser extent, reptiles, insects and gastropods).
The kiwi's mostly nocturnal habits may be a result of habitat intrusion by predators, including humans. In areas of New Zealand where introduced predators have been removed, such as sanctuaries, kiwi are often seen in daylight. They prefer subtropical and temperate podocarp and beech forests, but they are being forced to adapt to different habitat, such as sub-alpine scrub, tussock grassland, and the mountains. Kiwi have a highly developed sense of smell, unusual in a bird, and are the only birds with nostrils at the end of their long beaks. Kiwi eat small invertebrates, seeds, grubs, and many varieties of worms. They also may eat fruit, small crayfish, eels and amphibians. Because their nostrils are located at the end of their long beaks, kiwi can locate insects and worms underground using their keen sense of smell, without actually seeing or feeling them. This sense of smell is due to a highly developed olfactory chamber and surrounding regions. It is a common belief that the kiwi relies solely on its sense of smell to catch prey but this has not been scientifically observed. Lab experiments have suggested that A. australis can rely on olfaction alone but is not consistent under natural conditions. Instead, the kiwi may rely on auditory and/or vibrotactile cues.
Once bonded, a male and female kiwi tend to live their entire lives as a monogamous couple. During the mating season, June to March, the pair call to each other at night, and meet in the nesting burrow every three days. These relationships may last for up to 20 years. They are unusual among other birds in that, along with some raptors, they have a functioning pair of ovaries. (In most birds and in platypuses, the right ovary never matures, so that only the left is functional.Fitzpatrick, F.L., (1934). Unilateral and bilateral ovaries in raptorial birds. The Wilson Bulletin, 46(1): 19-22)
Kiwi eggs can weigh up to one-quarter the weight of the female. Usually, only one egg is laid per season. The kiwi lays one of the largest eggs in proportion to its size of any bird in the world, so even though the kiwi is about the size of a domestic chicken, it is able to lay eggs that are about six times the size of a chicken's egg. The eggs are smooth in texture, and are ivory or greenish white. The male incubates the egg, except for the great spotted kiwi, A. haastii, in which both parents are involved. The incubation period is 63–92 days. Producing the huge egg places significant physiological stress on the female; for the thirty days it takes to grow the fully developed egg, the female must eat three times her normal amount of food. Two to three days before the egg is laid there is little space left inside the female for her stomach and she is forced to fast.
It was believed that the large eggs were a trait of much larger moa-like ancestors, and that kiwis retained large eggs as an evolutionarily neutral trait as they became smaller. However, research in the early 2010s suggested that kiwis were descended from smaller flighted birds that flew to New Zealand and Madagascar, where they gave rise to kiwis and elephant birds. The large egg is instead thought to be an adaptation for precocity, enabling kiwi chicks to hatch mobile and with yolk to sustain them for two and half weeks. The large eggs would be safe in New Zealand's historical absence of egg-eating ground predators, while the mobile chicks would be able to evade chick-eating flying predators.
Lice in the genus Apterygon and in the subgenus Rallicola (Aptericola) are exclusively ectoparasites of kiwi species.
Status and conservation
Nationwide studies show that only around 5–10% of kiwi chicks survive to adulthood without management. As at 2018 over 70% of Kiwi populations are unmanaged. However, in areas under active pest management, survival rates for North Island brown kiwi can be far higher. For example, prior to a joint 1080 poison operation undertaken by DOC and the Animal Health Board in Tongariro Forest in 2006, 32 kiwi chicks were radio-tagged. 57% of the radio-tagged chicks survived to adulthood.
Efforts to protect kiwi have had some success, and in 2017 two species were downlisted from endangered to vulnerable by the IUCN. In 2018 the Department of Conservation released its current Kiwi Conservation Plan.
Sanctuaries
In 2000, the Department of Conservation set up five kiwi sanctuaries focused on developing methods to protect kiwi and to increase their numbers.
There are three kiwi sanctuaries in the North Island:
Whangarei Kiwi Sanctuary (for Northland brown kiwi)
Moehau Kiwi Sanctuary on the Coromandel Peninsula (Coromandel brown kiwi)
Tongariro Kiwi Sanctuary near Taupo (western brown kiwi)
and two in the South Island:
Okarito Kiwi Sanctuary (Okarito kiwi)
Haast Kiwi Sanctuary (Haast tokoeka)
A number of other mainland conservation islands and fenced sanctuaries have significant populations of kiwi, including:
Zealandia fenced sanctuary in Wellington (little spotted kiwi)
Maungatautari Restoration Project in Waikato (brown kiwi)
Bushy Park Forest Reserve near Kai Iwi, Whanganui (brown kiwi)
Otanewainuku Forest in the Bay of Plenty (brown kiwi)
Hurunui Mainland Island, south branch, Hurunui River, North Canterbury (great spotted kiwi)
North island brown kiwi were introduced to the Cape Sanctuary in Hawke's Bay between 2008 and 2011, which in turn provided captive-raised chicks that were released back into Maungataniwha Native Forest.
Sanctuaries for kiwi are also referred to as 'kōhanga sites' from the Māori word for 'nest' or 'nursery'.
Operation Nest Egg
Operation Nest Egg is a programme run by the BNZ Save the Kiwi Trust—a partnership between the Bank of New Zealand, the Department of Conservation and the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society. Kiwi eggs and chicks are removed from the wild and hatched and/or raised in captivity until big enough to fend for themselves—usually when they weigh around 1200 grams (42 ounces). They are then returned to the wild. An Operation Nest Egg bird has a 65% chance of surviving to adulthood—compared to just 5% for wild-hatched and raised chicks. The tool is used on all kiwi species except little spotted kiwi.
1080 poison
In 2004, anti-1080 activist Phillip Anderton posed for the New Zealand media with a kiwi he claimed had been poisoned. An investigation revealed that Anderton lied to journalists and the public. He had used a kiwi that had been caught in a possum trap. Extensive monitoring shows that kiwi are not at risk from the use of biodegradable 1080 poison.
Threats
Introduced mammalian predators, namely stoats, dogs, ferrets, and cats, are the principal threats to kiwi. The biggest threat to kiwi chicks is stoats, while dogs are the biggest threat to adult kiwi. Stoats are responsible for approximately half of kiwi chick deaths in many areas through New Zealand. Young kiwi chicks are vulnerable to stoat predation until they reach about in weight, at which time they can usually defend themselves. Cats also to a lesser extent prey on kiwi chicks. These predators can cause large and abrupt declines in populations. In particular, dogs find the distinctive strong scent of kiwi irresistible and easy to track, such that they can catch and kill kiwi in seconds. Motor vehicle strike is a threat to all kiwi where roads cross through their habitat. Badly set possum traps often kill or maim kiwi.
Habitat destruction is another major threat to kiwi; restricted distribution and small size of some kiwi populations increases their vulnerability to inbreeding. Research has shown that the combined effect of predators and other mortality (accidents etc.) results in less than 5% of kiwi chicks surviving to adulthood.
Relationship to humans
The Māori traditionally believed that kiwi were under the protection of Tāne Mahuta, god of the forest. They were used as food and their feathers were used for kahu kiwi—ceremonial cloaks. Today, while kiwi feathers are still used, they are gathered from birds that die naturally, through road accidents, or predation, and from captive birds. Kiwi are no longer hunted and some Māori consider themselves the birds' guardians.
Scientific documentation
In 1813, George Shaw named the genus Apteryx in his species description of the southern brown kiwi, which he called "the southern apteryx". Captain Andrew Barclay of the ship Providence provided Shaw with the specimen. Shaw's description was accompanied by two plates, engraved by Frederick Polydore Nodder; they were published in volume 24 of The Naturalist's Miscellany.
Zoos
In 1851, London Zoo became the first zoo to keep kiwi. The first captive breeding took place in 1945. As of 2007 only 13 zoos outside New Zealand hold kiwi. The Frankfurt Zoo has 12, the Berlin Zoo has seven, Walsrode Bird Park has one, the Avifauna Bird Park in the Netherlands has three, the San Diego Zoo has five, the San Diego Zoo Safari Park has one, the National Zoo in Washington, DC has eleven, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute has one, and the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium has three.
As a national symbol
The kiwi as a symbol first appeared in the late 19th century in New Zealand regimental badges. It was later featured in the badges of the South Canterbury Battalion in 1886 and the Hastings Rifle Volunteers in 1887. Soon after, the kiwi appeared in many military badges; and in 1906, when Kiwi Shoe Polish was widely sold in the UK and the US, the symbol became more widely known.
During the First World War, the name "Kiwis" for New Zealand soldiers came into general use, and a giant kiwi (now known as the Bulford kiwi) was carved on the chalk hill above Sling Camp in England. Usage has become so widespread that all New Zealanders overseas and at home are now commonly referred to as "Kiwis".
The kiwi has since become the best-known national symbol for New Zealand, and the bird is prominent in the coat of arms, crests and badges of many New Zealand cities, clubs and organisations. At the national level, the red silhouette of a kiwi is in the centre of the roundel of the Royal New Zealand Air Force. The kiwi is featured in the logo of the New Zealand Rugby League, and the New Zealand national rugby league team are nicknamed the Kiwis.
A kiwi has featured on the reverse side of three New Zealand coins: the one florin (two-shilling) coin from 1933 to 1966, the twenty-cent coin from 1967 to 1990, and the one-dollar coin since 1991. In currency trading the New Zealand dollar is often referred to as "the kiwi".
See also
Birds of New Zealand
Conservation in New Zealand
References
Notes
Further reading
Burbidge, M.L., Colbourne, R.M., Robertson, H.A., and Baker, A.J. (2003). Molecular and other biological evidence supports the recognition of at least three species of brown kiwi. Conservation Genetics, 4(2):167–77
Cooper, Alan et al. (2001). Complete mitochondrial genome sequences of two extinct moas clarify ratite evolution. Nature, 409''': 704–07.
SavetheKiwi.org
Le Duc, D., G. Renaud, A. Krishnan, M.S. Almen, L. Huynen, S. J. Prohaska, M. Ongyerth, B. D. Bitarello, H. B. Schioth, M. Hofreiter, et al. 2015. Kiwi genome provides insights into the evolution of a nocturnal lifestyle. Genome Biology 16:147-162.
External links
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Flightless birds
Higher-level bird taxa restricted to New Zealand
Birds of New Zealand
Ratites
National symbols of New Zealand
Extant Miocene first appearances
Taxa named by George Shaw | [
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17363 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwifruit | Kiwifruit | Kiwifruit (often shortened to kiwi in North America and continental Europe) or Chinese gooseberry is the edible berry of several species of woody vines in the genus Actinidia. The most common cultivar group of kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa 'Hayward') is oval, about the size of a large hen's egg: in length and in diameter. It has a thin, fuzzy, fibrous, tart but edible light brown skin and light green or golden flesh with rows of tiny, black, edible seeds. The fruit has a soft texture with a sweet and unique flavour.
Kiwifruit is native to central and eastern China. The first recorded description of the kiwifruit dates to the 12th century during the Song dynasty. In the early 20th century, cultivation of kiwifruit spread from China to New Zealand, where the first commercial plantings occurred. The fruit became popular with British and American servicemen stationed in New Zealand during World War II, and later became commonly exported, first to Great Britain and then to California in the 1960s.
Etymology
Early varieties were described in a 1904 nursery catalogue as having "...edible fruits the size of walnuts, and the flavour of ripe gooseberries", leading to the name Chinese gooseberry. In 1962, New Zealand growers began calling it "kiwifruit" () due to its fuzzy appearance similar to the kiwi bird for export marketing, and the name was first registered by Turners & Growers on 15 June 1959 and later commercially adopted in 1974. In New Zealand and Australia, the word "kiwi" alone either refers solely to the bird or is used as a nickname for New Zealanders; it is almost never used to refer to the fruit. Kiwifruit has since become a common name for all commercially grown green kiwifruit from the genus Actinidia. In the United States and Canada, the shortened name kiwi is commonly used when referring to the fruit.
History
Kiwifruit is native to central and eastern China. The first recorded description of the kiwifruit dates to 12th century China during the Song dynasty. As it was usually collected from the wild and consumed for medicinal purposes, the plant was rarely cultivated or bred. Cultivation of kiwifruit spread from China in the early 20th century to New Zealand, where the first commercial plantings occurred. The fruit became popular with British and American servicemen stationed in New Zealand during World War II, and was later exported, first to Great Britain and then to California in the 1960s.
In New Zealand during the 1940s and 1950s, the fruit became an agricultural commodity through the development of commercially viable cultivars, agricultural practices, shipping, storage, and marketing.
Species and cultivars
The genus Actinidia comprises around 60 species. Their fruits are quite variable, although most are easily recognised as kiwifruit because of their appearance and shape. The skin of the fruit varies in size, hairiness and colour. The flesh varies in colour, juiciness, texture and taste. Some fruits are unpalatable, while others taste considerably better than the majority of commercial cultivars.
The most commonly sold kiwifruit is derived from A. deliciosa (fuzzy kiwifruit). Other species that are commonly eaten include A. chinensis (golden kiwifruit), A. coriacea (Chinese egg gooseberry), A. arguta (hardy kiwifruit), A. kolomikta (Arctic kiwifruit), A. melanandra (purple kiwifruit), A. polygama (silver vine) and A. purpurea (hearty red kiwifruit).
Fuzzy kiwifruit
Most kiwifruit sold belongs to a few cultivars of A. deliciosa (fuzzy kiwifruit): 'Hayward', 'Blake' and 'Saanichton 12'. They have a fuzzy, dull brown skin and bright green flesh. The familiar cultivar 'Hayward' was developed by Hayward Wright in Avondale, New Zealand, around 1924. It was initially grown in domestic gardens, but commercial planting began in the 1940s.
'Hayward' is the most commonly available cultivar in stores. It is a large, egg-shaped fruit with a sweet flavour. 'Saanichton 12', from British Columbia, is somewhat more rectangular than 'Hayward' and comparably sweet, but the inner core of the fruit can be tough. 'Blake' can self-pollinate, but it has a smaller, more oval fruit and the flavour is considered inferior.
Kiwi berries
Kiwi berries are edible fruits the size of a large grape, similar to fuzzy kiwifruit in taste and internal appearance, but the thin, smooth green skin and lack of fuzz makes eating the entire fruit more pleasant. They are primarily produced by three species: Actinidia arguta (hardy kiwi), A. kolomikta (Arctic kiwifruit) and A. polygama (silver vine). They are fast-growing, climbing vines, durable over their growing season. They are referred to as "kiwi berry, baby kiwi, dessert kiwi, grape kiwi, or cocktail kiwi".
The cultivar 'Issai' is a hybrid of hardy kiwi and silver vine which can self-pollinate. Grown commercially because of its relatively large fruit, 'Issai' is less hardy than most hardy kiwi.
Actinidia chinensis
Actinidia chinensis (golden kiwifruit) has a smooth, bronze skin, with a beak shape at the stem attachment. Flesh colour varies from bright green to a clear, intense yellow. This species is 'sweeter and more aromatic' in flavour compared to A. deliciosa, similar to some subtropical fruits. One of the most attractive varieties has a red 'iris' around the centre of the fruit and yellow flesh outside. The yellow fruit obtains a higher market price and, being less hairy than the fuzzy kiwifruit, is more palatable for consumption without peeling.
A commercially viable variety of this red-ringed kiwifruit, patented as EnzaRed, is a cultivar of the Chinese hong yang variety.
'Hort16A' is a golden kiwifruit cultivar marketed worldwide as Zespri Gold. This cultivar suffered significant losses in New Zealand in 2010–2013 due to the PSA bacterium. A new cultivar of golden kiwifruit, Gold3, was found to be more disease-resistant and most growers have now changed to this cultivar. 'Gold3', marketed by Zespri as SunGold is not quite as sweet as 'Hort16A', and lacks its usually slightly pointed tip.
Clones of the new variety SunGold have been used to develop orchards in China, resulting in partially successful legal efforts in China by Zespri to protect their intellectual property. In 2021, Zespri estimated that around 5,000 hectares of Sungold orchards were being cultivated in China, mainly in the Sichuan province.
Cultivation
Kiwifruit can be grown in most temperate climates with adequate summer heat. Where fuzzy kiwifruit (A. deliciosa) is not hardy, other species can be grown as substitutes.
Breeding
Often in commercial farming, different breeds are used for rootstock, fruit bearing plants and pollinators. Therefore, the seeds produced are crossbreeds of their parents. Even if the same breeds are used for pollinators and fruit bearing plants, there is no guarantee that the fruit will have the same quality as the parent. Additionally, seedlings take seven years before they flower, so determining whether the kiwi is fruit bearing or a pollinator is time consuming. Therefore, most kiwifruits, with the exception of rootstock and new cultivars, are propagated asexually. This is done by grafting the fruit producing plant onto rootstock grown from seedlings or, if the plant is desired to be a true cultivar, rootstock grown from cuttings of a mature plant.
Pollination
Kiwifruit plants generally are dioecious, meaning a plant is either male or female. The male plants have flowers that produce pollen, the females receive the pollen to fertilise their ovules and grow fruit; most kiwifruit requires a male plant to pollinate the female plant. For a good yield of fruit, one male vine for every three to eight female vines is considered adequate. Some varieties can self pollinate, but even they produce a greater and more reliable yield when pollinated by male kiwifruit. Cross-species pollination is often (but not always) successful as long as bloom times are synchronised.
In nature, the species are pollinated by birds and native bumblebees, which visit the flowers for pollen, not nectar. The female flowers produce fake anthers with what appears to be pollen on the tips in order to attract the pollinators, although these fake anthers lack the DNA and food value of the male anthers.
Kiwifruit growers rely on honey bees, the principal ‘for-hire’ pollinator, but commercially grown kiwifruit is notoriously difficult to pollinate. The flowers are not very attractive to honey bees, in part because the flowers do not produce nectar and bees quickly learn to prefer flowers with nectar.
Honey bees are inefficient cross-pollinators for kiwifruit because they practice “floral fidelity”. Each honey bee visits only a single type of flower in any foray and maybe only a few branches of a single plant. The pollen needed from a different plant (such as a male for a female kiwifruit) might never reach it were it not for the cross-pollination that principally occurs in the crowded colony; it is in the colonies that bees laden with different pollen literally cross paths.
To deal with these pollination challenges, some producers blow collected pollen over the female flowers. Most common, though, is saturation pollination, in which the honey bee populations are made so large (by placing hives in the orchards at a concentration of about 8 hives per hectare) that bees are forced to use this flower because of intense competition for all flowers within flight distance.
Maturation and harvest
Kiwifruit is picked by hand and commercially grown on sturdy support structures, as it can produce several tonnes per hectare, more than the rather weak vines can support. These are generally equipped with a watering system for irrigation and frost protection in the spring.
Kiwifruit vines require vigorous pruning, similar to that of grapevines. Fruit is borne on 'one-year-old and older' canes, but production declines as each cane ages. Canes should be pruned off and replaced after their third year. In the northern hemisphere the fruit ripens in November, while in the southern it ripens in May. Four year-old plants can produce up to per acre while eight year-old plants can produce per acre. The plants produce their maximum at eight to ten years old. The seasonal yields are variable; a heavy crop on a vine one season generally comes with a light crop the following season.
Storage
Fruits harvested when firm will ripen when stored properly for long periods. This allows fruit to be sent to market up to 8 weeks after harvest.
Firm kiwifruit ripen after a few days to a week when stored at room temperature, but should not be kept in direct sunlight. Faster ripening occurs when placed in a paper bag with an apple, pear, or banana. Once a kiwifruit is ripe, however, it is preserved optimally when stored far from other fruits, as it is very sensitive to the ethylene gas they may emit, thereby tending to over-ripen even in the refrigerator. If stored appropriately, ripe kiwifruit normally keep for about one to two weeks.
Pests and diseases
Pseudomonas syringae actinidiae (PSA) was first identified in Japan in the 1980s. This bacterial strain has been controlled and managed successfully in orchards in Asia. In 1992, it was found in northern Italy. In 2007/2008, economic losses were observed, as a more virulent strain became more dominant (PSA V). In 2010 it was found in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty kiwifruit orchards in the North Island. The yellow-fleshed cultivars were particularly susceptible. New, resistant varieties were selected in research funded by the government and fruit growers so that the industry could continue.
Scientists reported they had worked out the strain of PSA affecting kiwifruit from New Zealand, Italy and Chile originated in China.
Production
In 2018, global production of kiwifruit was 4 million tonnes, led by China with slightly more than half of the world total. Italy, New Zealand, Iran, Greece and Chile were other significant producers. In China, kiwifruit is grown mainly in the mountainous area upstream of the Yangtze River, as well as Sichuan.
Production history
Kiwifruit exports rapidly increased from the late '1960s to early 1970s' in New Zealand. By 1976, exports exceeded the amount consumed domestically. Outside of Australasia, New Zealand kiwifruit are marketed under the brand-name label, Zespri. The general name, "Zespri", has been used for marketing of all cultivars of kiwifruit from New Zealand since 2012.
In the 1980s, many countries outside New Zealand began to grow and export kiwifruit. In Italy, the infrastructure and techniques required to support grape production were adapted to the kiwifruit. This, coupled with being close to the European kiwifruit market, led to Italians becoming the leading producer of kiwifruit 'in 1989'. The growing season of Italian kiwifruit does not overlap much with the New Zealand or the Chilean growing seasons, therefore direct competition between New Zealand or Chile was not a significant factor.
Much of the breeding to refine the green kiwifruit was undertaken by the Plant & Food Research Institute (formerly HortResearch) during the decades of '1970–1999'. In 1990, the New Zealand Kiwifruit Marketing Board opened an office for Europe in Antwerp, Belgium
Human consumption
Kiwifruit may be eaten raw, made into juices, used in baked goods, prepared with meat or used as a garnish. The whole fruit, including the skin, is suitable for human consumption; however, the skin of the fuzzy varieties is often discarded due to its texture. Sliced kiwifruit has long been used as a garnish atop whipped cream on pavlova, a meringue-based dessert. Traditionally in China, kiwifruit was not eaten for pleasure, but was given as medicine to children to help them grow and to women who have given birth to help them recover.
Raw kiwifruit contains actinidain (also spelled actinidin) which is commercially useful as a meat tenderizer and possibly as a digestive aid. Actinidain also makes raw kiwifruit unsuitable for use in desserts containing milk or any other dairy products because the enzyme digests milk proteins. This applies to gelatin-based desserts, due to the fact that the actinidain will dissolve the proteins in gelatin, causing the dessert to either liquefy or prevent it from solidifying.
Nutrition
In a amount, green kiwifruit provides of food energy, is 83% water and 15% carbohydrates, with negligible protein and fat (table). It is particularly rich in vitamin C (112% DV) and vitamin K (38% DV), has a moderate content of vitamin E (10% DV), with no other micronutrients in significant content. Gold kiwifruit has similar nutritional value, but higher vitamin C content, (194% DV, table).
Kiwifruit seed oil contains on average 62% alpha-linolenic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid. Kiwifruit pulp contains carotenoids, such as provitamin A beta-carotene, lutein and zeaxanthin.
Allergies
Allergy to kiwifruit was first described in 1981, and there have since been reports of the allergy presenting with numerous symptoms from localized oral allergy syndrome to life-threatening anaphylaxis.
The actinidain found in kiwifruit can be an allergen for some individuals, including children. The most common symptoms are unpleasant itching and soreness of the mouth, with wheezing as the most common severe symptom; anaphylaxis may occur.
References
Further reading
Actinidia
Edible fruits
Berries
Chinese fruit
Food plant cultivars
Garden plants of Asia
Vines | [
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17364 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel%20Canal | Kiel Canal | The Kiel Canal (, literally "North-[to]-East [Baltic] Sea canal", formerly known as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kanal) is a freshwater canal in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. The canal was finished in 1895, but later widened, and links the North Sea at Brunsbüttel to the Baltic Sea at Kiel-Holtenau. An average of is saved by using the Kiel Canal instead of going around the Jutland Peninsula. This not only saves time but also avoids storm-prone seas and having to pass through the Danish straits.
The Kiel Canal is the world's most frequented artificial waterway with an annual average of 32,000 ships (90 daily), transporting approximately 100 million tonnes of goods.
Besides its two sea entrances, the Kiel Canal is linked, at Oldenbüttel, to the navigable River Eider by the short Gieselau Canal.
History
The first connection between the North and Baltic Seas was constructed while the area was ruled by Denmark–Norway. It was called the Eider Canal, and used stretches of the Eider River for the link between the two seas. Completed during the reign of Christian VII of Denmark in 1784, the Eiderkanal was a part of a waterway from Kiel to the Eider River's mouth at Tönning on the west coast. It was only wide with a depth of , which limited the vessels that could use the canal to 300 tonnes.
After 1864, the Second Schleswig War put Schleswig-Holstein under the government of Prussia (from 1871 the German Empire). A new canal was sought by merchants and by the German navy, which wanted to link its bases in the Baltic and the North Sea without the need to sail around Denmark.
Construction and expansion
In June 1887, construction started at Holtenau, near Kiel. The canal took over 9,000 workers eight years to build. On 20 June 1895 Kaiser Wilhelm II officially opened the canal for transiting from Brunsbüttel to Holtenau. The next day a ceremony took place in Holtenau, where Wilhelm II named the waterway the Kaiser Wilhelm Kanal (after his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I), and laid the final stone. British director Birt Acres filmed the opening of the canal; the Science Museum in London preserves surviving footage of this early film. The first vessel to pass through the canal was the aviso , sent through in late April (before the canal officially opened) to determine if it was ready for use.
To cope with the increasing traffic and the demands of the Imperial German Navy, between 1907 and 1914 the canal was widened by Germany to allow Dreadnought-sized battleships to pass through, allowing them to travel between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea without having to go around Denmark. Two larger canal locks in Brunsbüttel and Holtenau were installed to complete the enlargement.
After World War I
After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles required the canal to be open to vessels of commerce and of war of any nation at peace with Germany, while leaving it under German administration. (The United States opposed this proposal to avoid setting a precedent for similar concessions on the Panama Canal.) The government under Adolf Hitler repudiated its international status in 1936, but the canal was reopened to all traffic after World War II. In 1948, the current name was adopted.
The canal was partially closed for a period in March 2013 after two lock gates failed at the western end near Brunsbüttel. Ships larger than were forced to navigate via Skagerrak, a detour. The failure was blamed on neglect and a lack of funding by the German Federal Government, which has been in financial dispute with the state of Schleswig-Holstein regarding the canal. Germany's Transport Ministry promised rapid repairs.
Operation
There are detailed traffic rules for the canal. Each vessel in passage is classified in one of six traffic groups according to its dimensions. Larger ships are obliged to accept pilots and specialised canal helmsmen, in some cases even the assistance of a tugboat. Furthermore, there are regulations regarding the passing of oncoming ships. Larger ships may also be required to moor at the bollards provided at intervals along the canal to allow the passage of oncoming vessels. Special rules apply to pleasure craft.
All permanent, fixed bridges crossing the canal since its construction have a clearance of .
Maximum length for ships passing the Kiel Canal is , with the maximum width (beam) of ; these ships can have a draught of up to . Ships up to a length of may have a draught up to . The bulker Ever Leader (deadweight 74001 t) is considered to be the cargo ship that to date has come closest to the overall limits.
Crossings
Several railway lines and federal roads (Autobahnen and Bundesstraßen) cross the canal on eleven fixed links. The bridges have a clearance of allowing for ship heights up to . The oldest bridge still in use is the Levensau High Bridge from 1893; however, the bridge will be replaced in the course of a canal expansion already underway. In sequence and in the direction of the official kilometre count from west (Brunsbüttel) to east (Holtenau) these crossings are:
Brunsbüttel High Bridge, four lane crossing of Bundesstraße 5
Hochdonn High Bridge of the Marsh Railway
Hohenhörn High Bridge for Autobahn 23
Grünental High Bridge for railway line Neumünster-Heide and Bundesstraße 204
Rendsburg High Bridge for the Neumünster–Flensburg railway, from which a transporter bridge, used by local traffic, is suspended
Kanaltunnel Rendsburg, road tunnel for Bundesstraße 77 (four lanes)
Rendsburg pedestrian tunnel
Rade High Bridge for Autobahn A7
Levensau High Bridge from 1893 for the Kiel–Flensburg railway and a local road
New Levensau High Bridge for Bundesstraße 76 (four lanes)
Holtenau High Bridges, two parallel bridges with three car lanes each as well as pavements for pedestrians and cyclists
Local traffic is also served by 14 ferry lines. Most noteworthy is the “hanging ferry” (, literally: "hovering ferry") beneath the Rendsburg High Bridge which needs to be replaced after a collision with a ship in 2016. All ferries are run by the Canal Authority and their use is free of charge.
See also
List of canals in Germany
References
External links
Official site
Time-lapse movie "Kiel-Canal Transit In 9 Minutes" released by UNITED CANAL AGENCY
Movie about a container ship transiting the canal
Ship canals
Canal
Canals in Germany
Bodies of water of Schleswig-Holstein
Federal waterways in Germany
Canals opened in 1895
1895 establishments in Germany | [
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17367 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad%20Emil%20Bloch | Konrad Emil Bloch | Konrad Emil Bloch (), ForMemRS (21 January 1912 – 15 October 2000) was a German American biochemist. Bloch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1964 (joint with Feodor Lynen) for discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism.
Life and career
Bloch was born in Neisse (Nysa), in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia. He was the second child of middle-class parents Hedwig (Striemer) and Frederich D. "Fritz" Bloch. He was a student Carolinum in Nysa and then 1930 to 1934, he studied chemistry at the Technical University of Munich. In 1934, due to the Nazi persecutions of Jews, he fled to the Schweizerische Forschungsinstitut in Davos, Switzerland, before moving to the United States in 1936. Later he was appointed to the department of biological chemistry at Yale Medical School.
In the United States, Bloch enrolled at Columbia University, and received a PhD in biochemistry in 1938. He taught at Columbia from 1939 to 1946. From there he went to the University of Chicago and then to Harvard University as Higgins Professor of Biochemistry in 1954, a post he held until 1982. After retirement at Harvard, he served as the Mack and Effie Campbell Tyner Eminent Scholar Chair in the College of Human Sciences at Florida State University.
Bloch shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1964 with his compatriat Feodor Lynen, for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism. Their work showed that the body first makes squalene from acetate over many steps and then converts the squalene to cholesterol. He traced all the carbon atoms in cholesterol back to acetate. Some of his research was conducted using radioactive acetate in bread mold: this was possible because fungi also produce squalene. He confirmed his results using rats. He was one of several researchers who showed that acetyl Coenzyme A is turned into mevalonic acid. Both Bloch and Lynen then showed that mevalonic acid is converted into chemically active isoprene, the precursor to squalene. Bloch also discovered that bile and a female sex hormone were made from cholesterol, which led to the discovery that all steroids were made from cholesterol. His Nobel Lecture was "The Biological Synthesis of Cholesterol."
In 1985, Bloch became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1988, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.
Bloch and his wife Lore Teutsch first met in Munich. They married in the U.S. in 1941. They had two children, Peter Conrad Bloch and Susan Elizabeth Bloch, and two grandchildren, Benjamin Nieman Bloch and Emilie Bloch Sondel. They lived for many decades in the mid-century modern enclave Six Moon Hill in Lexington, Massachusetts . He was fond of skiing, tennis, and music. Konrad died in Burlington, Massachusetts of congestive heart failure in 2000, aged 88. Lore Bloch died in 2010 aged 98.
See also
List of Jewish Nobel laureates
References
External links
Konrad Bloch, Nobel Lecture, The biological synthesis of cholesterol, 11 December 1964
Eugene P. Kennedy, «Konrad Bloch», Biographical Memoirs – Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (vol. 147, no. 1, 2003, pp. 67–72)
Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine
American Nobel laureates
German Nobel laureates
20th-century American biologists
20th-century German biologists
American biochemists
German biochemists
Jewish American scientists
Jewish German scientists
Jewish chemists
Kolegium Carolinum Neisse alumni
Columbia University alumni
Columbia University faculty
Florida State University faculty
Harvard University faculty
University of Chicago faculty
National Medal of Science laureates
People from Lexington, Massachusetts
People from the Province of Silesia
Technical University of Munich alumni
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
German emigrants to the United States
People from Nysa, Poland
Silesian Jews
1912 births
2000 deaths | [
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17370 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSC | KSC | KSC may refer to:
Karlsruher SC, a German association football club, based in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg
Keene State College, New Hampshire, US
Kelsey-Seybold Clinic, Houston, US, NASA-affiliated
Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida, US
Kenya Social Congress
Kilogram-force per square centimetre
Knights of Saint Columba, a UK Catholic lay society
Knights of the Southern Cross, an Australian Catholic lay society
Košice International Airport, Košice, Slovakia, IATA airport code
Kurtis Sport Car, US
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Czech and Slovak: Komunistická strana Československa, KSČ), 1921-1992 | [
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17372 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klement%20Gottwald | Klement Gottwald | Klement Gottwald (; 23 November 1896 – 14 March 1953) was a Czech communist politician, who was the leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1929 until his death in 1953–titled as general secretary until 1945 and as chairman from 1945 to 1953. He was the first leader of Communist Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1953.
He was the 14th prime minister of Czechoslovakia from July 1946 until June 1948, the first Communist to hold the post. In June 1948, he was elected as Czechoslovakia's first Communist president, four months after the 1948 coup d'état in which his party seized power with the backing of the Soviet Union. He held the post until his death.
Early life
Childhood and youth
Klement Gottwald was born either in Heroltice or Dědice (part of Vyškov) as the illegitimate son of a poor peasant. The exact place of his birth remains unknown. Before the World War I he was trained in Vienna as a carpenter but also actively participated in the activities of the Social Democratic youth movement.
Personal life
Klement Gottwald was married to Marta Gottwaldová who, like him, came from a poor family and was an illegitimate child. Although his wife stood by him through his endeavours, and was his faithful companion, she never joined the Communist Party. They had one daughter, Marta.
First World War
From 1915 to 1918 Gottwald was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. It is believed that he fought in the Battle of Zborov, which would mean that he fought there against future General and President Ludvík Svoboda, who fought on the side of the Czechoslovak Legion. Thomas Jakl of the Military History Institute called Gottwald's participation in Zborova a legend: Gottwald was in a hospital in Vienna during the time of the battle. In the summer of 1918, Gottwald deserted from the army. After the establishment of the first Czechoslovak Republic, he served for two years in the Czechoslovak Army. From 1920 to 1921 he worked in Rousinov as a cabinetmaker.
Career
Sports instructor and journalist
After the collapse of the Union of Workers sports associations (SDTJ), the Communist-oriented party of the organization split off in 1921 and created the Federation of Worker's Sports Unions (FDTJ). Gottwald was able to unify the organization to gain considerable power in the local districts, and became the mayor of the 20th district of the FDTJ. In June 1921, he participated in the first Spartakiada in Prague. In September 1921 he moved from Rousinov to Banská Bystrica, where he became the editor of the communist magazine "Hlas Ľudu" (Voice of the people). At the same time, he was planning FDTJ events at the Banská Bystrica district. He became the local mayor of the district, and was the managing director of the 47th district of the FDJT. Later, he moved to Žilina and became editor in chief of the magazine Spartacus. In 1922 he moved to Vrútky, where by decision of the KSČ Central Committee, they merged a number of communist magazines and their editors together. In 1924, the editorial staff finally moved to Ostrava, where Gottwald finally resettled.
Beginning of political activity
In 1926, Gottwald became a functionary of the Communist Party, and editor of the Communist Press. From 1926 to 1929 he worked in Prague, where he aided the Secretariat of the KSČ to form a pro-Moscow opposition against the then in power anti-Moscow leadership. From 1928 he was a member of the Comintern. Following Comintern policy initiated by Stalin, he carried out the Bolshevization of the Party.
In February 1929, at the Fifth Congress of the KSČ, Gottwald was elected party general secretary, alongside Guttmann, Šverma, Slánský, Kopecký and the Reimans (known as "the Karlín boys").
In the second half of 1930, the Communist Party carried out a number of reforms in accordance and response with the changes in those of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, namely the introduction of the policy of the formation of the "Popular front against Fascism". In September and October 1938, Gottwald was one of the main leaders of the opposition against the adoption of the Munich Agreement.
Exile to the USSR
After the banning of the Communist Party, Gottwald emigrated to the Soviet Union in November 1938. While there, he opposed the party policy of backing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet leadership saw the front against fascism as a great opportunity to assert themselves in Czechoslovakia, promoting interest in supporting Gottwald after the liberation of Czechoslovakia. In 1943, Gottwald agreed with representatives of the Czechoslovak-government-in-exile located in London, along with President Edvard Beneš, to unify domestic and foreign anti-fascist resistance and form the National Front. This proved helpful for Gottwald as it helped secure Communist influence in post-war Czechoslovakia.
Return to Czechoslovakia and events leading up to the coup
In 1945, Gottwald gave up the general secretary's post to Rudolf Slánský and was elected to the new position of party chairman. On 10 May 1945 Gottwald returned to Prague as the deputy premier under Zdeněk Fierlinger and as the chairman of the National Front. In March 1946, he became prime minister after leading the KSČ to a 38% share of the vote. This was easily the best showing for a Czechoslovak party in a free election at the time; previously, no party had ever won more than 25 percent.
Gottwald was a firm supporter of the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, gaining mainstream credibility with many Czechs through the use of nationalist rhetoric, exhorting the population to "prepare for the final retribution for White Mountain, for the return of the Czech lands to the Czech people. We will expel for good all descendants of the alien German nobility."
Coup d'état
By the summer of 1947, however, the KSČ's popularity had significantly dwindled, particularly after the Soviets pressured Czechoslovakia to turn down Marshall Plan aid after initially accepting it. Most observers believed Gottwald would be turned out of office at the elections due in May 1948. The Communists' dwindling popularity, combined with France and Italy dropping the Communists from their coalition governments, prompted Joseph Stalin to order Gottwald to begin efforts to eliminate parliamentary opposition to Communism in Czechoslovakia.
Outwardly, though, Gottwald kept up the appearance of working within the system, announcing that he intended to lead the Communists to an absolute majority in the upcoming election—something no Czechoslovak party had ever done. The endgame began in February 1948, when a majority of the Cabinet directed the Communist interior minister, Václav Nosek, to stop packing the police force with Communists. Nosek ignored this directive, with Gottwald's support. In response, 12 non-Communist ministers resigned. They believed that without their support, Gottwald would be unable to govern and be forced to either give way or resign. Beneš initially supported their position, and refused to accept their resignations. Gottwald not only refused to resign, but demanded the appointment of a Communist-dominated government under threat of a general strike. His Communist colleagues occupied the offices of the non-Communist ministers.
On 25 February, Beneš, fearing Soviet intervention, gave in. He accepted the resignations of the non-Communist ministers and appointed a new government in accordance with Gottwald's specifications. Although ostensibly still a coalition, it was dominated by Communists and pro-Moscow Social Democrats. The other parties were still nominally represented, but with the exception of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk they were fellow travellers handpicked by the Communists. From this date forward, Gottwald was effectively the most powerful man in Czechoslovakia.
On 9 May, the National Assembly, now a docile tool of the Communists, approved the so-called Ninth-of-May Constitution. While it was not a completely Communist document, its Communist imprint was strong enough that Beneš refused to sign it. Later that month, elections were held in which voters were presented with a single list from the National Front, now a Communist-controlled patriotic organization.
Beneš resigned on 2 June. In accordance with the 1920 Constitution, Gottwald took over most presidential functions until 14 June, when he was formally elected as President.
Leadership of Czechoslovakia
Gottwald initially tried to take a semi-independent line. However, that changed shortly after a meeting with Stalin. Under his direction, Gottwald imposed the Soviet model of government on the country. He nationalized the country's industry and collectivized its farms. There was considerable resistance within the government to Soviet influence on Czechoslovak politics. In response, Gottwald instigated a series of purges, first to remove non-communists, later to remove some communists as well. Some were executed. Prominent Communists who became victims of these purges and were defendants in the Prague Trials included Rudolf Slánský, the party's general secretary, Vlado Clementis (the Foreign Minister) and Gustáv Husák (the leader of an administrative body responsible for Slovakia), who was dismissed from office for "bourgeois nationalism". Slánský and Clementis were executed in December 1952, and hundreds of other government officials were sent to prison. Husák was rehabilitated in the 1960s and became the leader of Czechoslovakia in 1969.
In a famous photograph from 21 February 1948, described also in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, Clementis stands next to Gottwald. When Vladimír Clementis was charged in 1950, he was erased from the photograph (along with the photographer Karel Hájek) by the state propaganda department.
Death
Gottwald was a long-time alcoholic and suffered from heart disease caused by
syphilis that had gone untreated for several years. Shortly after attending Stalin's funeral on 9 March 1953, one of his arteries burst. He died five days later on 14 March 1953, aged 56. He was the first Czechoslovak president to die in office.
Gottwald's embalmed body was initially displayed in a mausoleum at the site of the Jan Žižka national monument in the district of Žižkov, Prague. In 1962, the personality cult ended and it was no longer deemed appropriate to show Gottwald's body. There are accounts that in 1962 Gottwald's body had blackened and was decomposing due to a botched embalming, although other witnesses have disputed this. His body was cremated, the ashes returned to the Žižka Monument and placed in a sarcophagus.
After the end of the communist period, Gottwald's ashes were removed from the Žižka Monument (in 1990) and placed in a common grave at Prague's Olšany Cemetery, together with the ashes of about 20 other communist leaders which had also originally been placed in the Žižka Monument. The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia now maintains that common grave.
After Gottwald
He was succeeded as de facto leader of Czechoslovakia by Antonín Novotný, who became First Secretary of the KSČ. Antonín Zápotocký, who had been prime minister since 1948, succeeded Gottwald as president.
In tribute, Zlín, a city in Moravia, now the Czech Republic, was renamed Gottwaldov after him from 1949 to 1989. Zmiiv, a city in Kharkiv Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, was named Gotvald after him from 1976 to 1990.
A major square and park in Bratislava was named Gottwaldovo námestie after him, later becoming Námestie Slobody (Freedom square) immediately following the Velvet Revolution. The original eponym persists today, the square being referred to by locals as Gottko. A bridge in Prague that is now called Nuselský Most was once called Gottwaldův Most, and the abutting metro station now called Vyšehrad was called Gottwaldova.
A Czechoslovak 100 Koruna banknote issued on 1 October 1989 as part of the 1985–89 banknote series included a portrait of Gottwald. This note was so poorly received by Czechoslovaks that it was removed from official circulation on 31 December 1990 and was promptly replaced with the previous banknote issue of the same denomination.
In 2005 he was voted "The Greatest Villain" in the Největší Čech poll of the Czech Television (a program under the BBC licence 100 Greatest Britons). He received 26% of the votes.
Wiesenau in Brandenburg, (former East) Germany keeps a street named after Gottwald.
See also
History of Czechoslovakia
Order of Klement Gottwald
Photo manipulation
Czechoslovak Communist party
References
Further reading
August, František, and David Rees. Red star over Prague (1984).
Pons, Silvio and Robert Service, eds. A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism (2010) pp 345–348.
Skilling, H. Gordon, ed. Czechoslovakia 1918–88: Seventy Years from Independence (Springer, 1991).
Taborsky, Edward. Communism in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1960 (Princeton University Press, 2015).
External links
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1896 births
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People from Vyškov District
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Leaders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
Presidents of Czechoslovakia
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Members of the Interim National Assembly of Czechoslovakia
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Burials at Olšany Cemetery | [
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17375 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettlebaston | Kettlebaston | Kettlebaston is a village and a civil parish with just over 30 inhabitants in the Babergh district of Suffolk, England, located around east of Lavenham. From the 2011 Census the population of the village was not maintained and is included in the civil parish of Chelsworth. It derives its name from Kitelbeornastuna, (Kitelbjorn's farmstead - O.Scand. pers. name + O.E. Tun), later evolving to Kettlebarston, (which is how the name is still pronounced), and finally to the current spelling. Its existence was first recorded in 1086 in the Domesday Book.
History
Once in an area of great wealth, the demise of the mediaeval wool trade was indirectly the saving of the village, (as we know it today), since the locals were unable to afford the expense of upgrading their houses with the latest architectural fashions. The number of timber-framed houses slowly declined over the years, as did the population - from over 200 at its peak, to the point when the village was on the brink of extinction. By the 1960s, with the road no more than an unmade track, and no electricity or mains water supplies, (it still has no gas or main drains), Kettlebaston was barely standing. In the "Spotlight On The Suffolk Scene" article, of the Chronicle & Mercury in June 1949, it was noted that a great many houses were category five - derelict, and ready for demolition.
As the agricultural workers left the land in search of other jobs, due to the increased mechanisation of farm work, "outsiders" discovered the secluded beauty of the rural Suffolk countryside, and a new age dawned. The tiny workmen's cottages, which once housed huge families - and some stock and chickens according to local accounts - were lovingly renovated and converted, and the village was reborn, and went on to proudly win Babergh Best Kept Village, and runner up in the Suffolk Community Council Best Kept Village Competition, in 1989.
The village sign, bearing two crossed sceptres topped with doves, was erected to mark the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. It also commemorates that, in 1445, Henry VI granted the manor of Kettlebaston to William de la Pole, 1st Marquess of Suffolk, in return for the service of carrying a golden sceptre at the coronation of all the future Kings of England, and an ivory sceptre to carry at the coronation of Margaret of Anjou, and all future Queens. This honour continued until Henry VIII resumed the manor, although it was later regranted it was without the royal service.
Parish church
The parish church of St Mary the Virgin has Norman origins, and features a font from around 1200. The building is listed as Grade I. It is recorded that the church was then "built anew" in 1342, remaining largely unchanged until targeted by Protestant iconoclasts in the 1540s. Today it features one of Suffolk's finest post-Reformation rood screens, designed by Father Ernest Geldart and decorated by Patrick Osborne, and Enid Chadwick, and a rare Sacred Heart altar upon a Stuart Holy Table. It now lacks the small lead spire which once topped the tower.
Regarded as a place of pilgrimage to the followers of the Anglo-Catholic movement from all over the UK, Kettlebaston was the liturgically highest of all Suffolk's Anglican churches. From 1930, until his retirement in 1964, Reverend Father Harold Clear Butler said Roman Mass every day, and celebrated High Mass and Benediction on Sundays. He also removed state notices from the porch, and refused to keep registers, or to recognise the office of the local Archdeacon of Sudbury. Despite opposition, the church finally received electric heating and lighting in 2014.
The village today
The current village has no shop, school, or pub.
Notable residents
Patrick Murdoch ( -1774); author, publisher and mathematician.
External links
Kettlebaston Online (incorporating the Y2K Project). Contains a wealth of historical data and photographs relating to the village's past as well as current material.
References
Villages in Suffolk
Babergh
Civil parishes in Suffolk | [
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17378 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl%20Amadeus%20Hartmann | Karl Amadeus Hartmann | Karl Amadeus Hartmann (2 August 1905 – 5 December 1963) was a German composer. Sometimes described as the greatest German symphonist of the 20th century, he is now largely overlooked, particularly in English-speaking countries.
Life
Born in Munich, the son of Friedrich Richard Hartmann, and the youngest of four brothers of whom the elder three became painters, Hartmann was himself torn, early in his career, between music and the visual arts. He was much affected in his early political development by the events of the unsuccessful Workers’ Revolution in Bavaria that followed the collapse of the German empire at the end of World War I (see Bavarian Soviet Republic). He remained an idealistic socialist for the rest of his life.
At the Munich Academy in the 1920s, Hartmann studied with Joseph Haas, a pupil of Max Reger, and later received intellectual stimulus and encouragement from the conductor Hermann Scherchen, an ally of the Schoenberg school, with whom he had a nearly lifelong mentor-protégé relationship. He voluntarily withdrew completely from musical life in Germany during the Nazi era, while remaining in Germany, and refused to allow his works to be played there. An early symphonic poem, Miserae (1933–1934, first performed in Prague, 1935) was condemned by the Nazi regime but his work continued to be performed, and his fame grew, abroad. A number of Hartmann’s compositions show the profound effect of the political climate. His Miserae (1933-34) was dedicated to his 'friends...who sleep for all eternity; we do not forget you (Dachau, 1933-34)', referring to Dachau Concentration Camp, and was condemned by the Nazis. His piano sonata 27 April 1945 portrays 20,000 prisoners from Dachau whom Hartmann witnessed being led away from Allied forces at the end of the war.
During World War II, though already an experienced composer, Hartmann submitted to a course of private tuition in Vienna by Schoenberg’s pupil Anton Webern (with whom he often disagreed on a personal and political level). Although stylistically their music had little in common, he clearly felt that he needed, and benefited from, Webern's acute perfectionism.
After the fall of Adolf Hitler, Hartmann was one of the few prominent surviving anti-fascists in Bavaria whom the postwar Allied administration could appoint to a position of responsibility. In 1945, he became a dramaturge at the Bavarian State Opera and there, as one of the few internationally recognized figures who had survived untainted by any collaboration with the Nazi regime, he became a vital figure in the rebuilding of (West) German musical life. Perhaps his most notable achievement was the Musica Viva concert series, which he founded and ran for the rest of his life in Munich. Beginning in November 1945, the concerts reintroduced the German public to 20th-century repertoire, which had been banned since 1933 under National Socialist aesthetic policy. Hartmann also provided a platform for the music of young composers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, helping to establish such figures as Hans Werner Henze, Luigi Nono, Luigi Dallapiccola, Carl Orff, Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Luciano Berio, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and many others. Hartmann also involved sculptors and artists such as Jean Cocteau, Le Corbusier, and Joan Miró in exhibitions at Musica Viva.
He was accorded numerous honours after the war, including the Musikpreis of the city of Munich in March 1949. This was followed by the Kunstpreis of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste (1950), the Arnold Schönberg Medal of the IGNM (1954), the Große Kunstpreis of the Land Nordrhein-Westfalen (1957), as well as the Ludwig Spohr Award of the city of Braunschweig, the Schwabing Kunstpreis (1961) and the Bavarian Medal of Merit (1959). Hartmann became a member of the Academy of Arts in Munich (1952) and Berlin (1955) and received an honorary doctorate from Spokane Conservatory, Washington (1962). His socialist sympathies did not extend to the Soviet Union's variety of communism, and in the 1950s, he refused an offer to move to East Germany.
Hartmann continued to base his activities in Munich for the remainder of his life, and his administrative duties came to absorb much of his time and energy. This reduced his time for composition, and his last years were dogged by serious illness. In 1963, he died of stomach cancer at the age of 58, leaving his last work – an extended symphonic Gesangsszene for voice and orchestra on words from Jean Giraudoux’s apocalyptic drama Sodom and Gomorrah – unfinished.
Output and style
Hartmann completed a number of works, most notably eight symphonies. The first of these, and perhaps emblematic of the difficult genesis of many of his works, is Symphony No. 1, Essay for a Requiem (Versuch eines Requiems). It began in 1936 as a cantata for alto solo and orchestra loosely based on a few poems by Walt Whitman. It soon became known as Our Life: Symphonic Fragment (Unser Leben: Symphonisches Fragment) and was intended as a comment on the generally miserable conditions for artists and liberal-minded people under the early Nazi regime. After the defeat of the Third Reich in World War II, the regime's real victims had become clear, and the cantata's title was changed to Symphonic Fragment: Attempt at a Requiem to honor the millions killed in the Holocaust. Hartmann revised the work in 1954–55 as his Symphony No. 1, and published it in 1956. As this example indicates, he was a highly self-critical composer and many of his works went through successive stages of revision. He also suppressed most of his substantial orchestral works of the late 1930s and the war years, either allowing them to remain unpublished or, in several cases, reworking them – or portions of them – into the series of numbered symphonies that he produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Perhaps the most frequently performed of his symphonies are No. 4, for strings, and No. 6; probably his most widely known work, through performances and recordings, is his Concerto funebre for violin and strings, composed at the beginning of World War II and making use of a Hussite chorale and a Russian revolutionary song of 1905.
Hartmann attempted a synthesis of many different idioms, including musical expressionism and jazz stylization, into organic symphonic forms in the tradition of Bruckner and Mahler. His early works are both satirical and politically engaged. But he admired the polyphonic mastery of J.S. Bach, the profound expressive irony of Mahler, and the neoclassicism of Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith. In the 1930s he developed close ties with Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály in Hungary, and this is reflected in his music to some extent. In the 1940s, he began to take an interest in Schoenbergian twelve-tone technique; though he studied with Webern his own idiom was closer to Alban Berg. In the 1950s, Hartmann started to explore the metrical techniques pioneered by Boris Blacher and Elliott Carter. Among his most-used forms are three-part adagio slow movements, fugues, variations and toccatas.
Reputation and legacy
Significantly, championed his music following his death: Scherchen, his most noted advocate, died in 1966. Some have suggested that this accelerated the disappearance of Hartmann's music from public view in the years following his death. Conductors who regularly performed Hartmann's music include Rafael Kubelik and Ferdinand Leitner, who recorded the third and sixth symphonies. More recent champions of works by Hartmann include Ingo Metzmacher and Mariss Jansons.
Hans Werner Henze said of Hartmann's music:
Symphonic architecture was essential for him... as a suitable medium for reflecting the world as he experienced and understood it – as an agonizingly dramatic battle, as contradiction and conflict – in order to be able to achieve self-realization in its dialectic and to portray himself as a man among men, a man of this world, and not out of this world.
The English composer John McCabe wrote his Variations on a Theme of Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1964) in tribute. It uses the opening of Hartmann's Fourth Symphony as its theme. Henze made a version of Hartmann's Piano Sonata No. 2 for full orchestra.
List of works
Operas
Wachsfigurenkabinett, five short operas (1929–30; three not completed), libretti by Erich Bormann
Das Leben und Sterben des heiligen Teufels
Der Mann, der vom Tode auferstand (unfinished; completed by Günter Bialas and Hans Werner Henze)
Chaplin-Ford-Trott, 'scenic jazz cantata' (unfinished; completed by Wilfried Hiller)
Fürwahr? (unfinished; completed by Henze)
Die Witwe von Ephesus
Des Simplicius Simplicissimus Jugend (1934–35; revised 1956–57 as Simplicius Simplicissimus), libretto by Hermann Scherchen, Wolfgang Petzer and Hartmann after Jakob von Grimmelhausen
Symphonic works
(i) Up to 1945 – mostly later suppressed
Miserae, Symphonic Poem (1933–4)
Symphony L'Oeuvre (1937–38; material re-used in Symphony No. 6)
Symphonic Concerto for string orchestra and soprano (1938; later partly used in Symphony No. 4)
Sinfonia Tragica (1940, rev. 1943; first movement re-used in Symphony No. 3)
Symphoniae Drammaticae (1941–43), consisting of:
Overture China kampft (1942, rev. 1962 as Symphonische Ouvertüre)
Symphonische Hymnen (1941–43)
Symphonic Suite Vita Nova for reciter and orchestra (1941–42, unfinished)
Adagio for large orchestra (1940–44, revised as Symphony No. 2)
Symphony Klagegesang (1944; portions re-used in Symphony No. 3)
(ii) After 1945
Symphony No. 1, Versuch eines Requiems for alto and orchestra (1955) – revised version of Symphonisches Fragment (on texts by Walt Whitman)
Symphony No. 2 (1946) – revised version of Adagio
Symphony No. 3 (1948–49) – adapted from portions of Symphony Klagegesang and Sinfonia Tragica
Symphony No. 4 for string orchestra (1947–48) – adapted from Symphonic Concerto for strings
Symphony No. 5, Symphonie concertante (1950) – adapted from Concerto for wind and double basses
Symphony No. 6 (1951–53) – adapted from Symphony L'Oeuvre
Symphony No. 7 (1957–58)
Symphony No. 8 (1960–62)
Concertos
Lied for trumpet and wind instruments (1932)
Concerto for wind instruments and solo trumpet (1933); recomposed as Concerto for wind instruments and double basses (1948–9), whence Symphony No.5
Cello Concerto (1933, lost, probably unfinished)
Symphonie-Divertissement for bassoon, tenor trombone, double bass and chamber orchestra (c. 1934, unfinished)
Kammerkonzert for clarinet, string quartet and string orchestra (1930–35)
Concerto funebre for violin and string orchestra (1939, rev. 1959) (originally entitled Musik der Trauer)
Concerto for piano, wind instruments and percussion (1953)
Concerto for viola, piano, wind instruments and percussion (1954–6)
Vocal works
Cantata (1929) for 6-part a cappella choir on texts by Johannes R. Becher and Karl Marx
Profane Messe (1929) for a cappella chorus on a text by Max See
Kantate for soprano and orchestra on texts by Walt Whitman (1936); later retitled Lamento and in 1938 revised as Symphonisches Fragment, whence Symphony No.1
Friede Anno '48 (1936–37) for soprano solo, mixed chorus and piano; revised 1955 as Lamento for soprano and piano
Gesangsszene (1962–63) for baritone and orchestra on a text from Sodom and Gomorrah by Jean Giraudoux
Chamber and instrumental
2 Kleine Suiten for piano (c. 1924-6)
2 Sonatas for unaccompanied violin (1927)
2 Suites for Unaccompanied violin (1927)
Jazz Toccata and Fugue for piano (1927–8)
Tanzsuite for clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet and trombone (1931)
Kleines Konzert for string quartet and percussion (1932)
Burleske Musik for wind instruments, percussion and piano (1931)
Sonatina for piano (1931)
Toccata variata for wind instruments, piano and percussion (1931–2)
Piano Sonata No.1 (1932)
String Quartet No.1, Carillon (1933)
Piano Sonata No.2, 27.IV.45 (1945)
String Quartet No.2 (1945–6)
References
Sources
The Lebrecht Weekly
External links
Comprehensive website with biography, chronology and works
Text about K. A. Hartmann
Biography at Schott Music
1905 births
1963 deaths
20th-century classical composers
Academy of Fine Arts, Munich alumni
Deaths from stomach cancer
German classical composers
Musicians from Munich
German male classical composers
20th-century German composers
20th-century German male musicians
Deaths from cancer in Germany | [
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17379 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kami | Kami | (often taken to mean "gods", though the concept is more involved than that) are the spirits, phenomena or "holy powers" that are venerated in the religion of Shinto. They can be elements of the landscape, forces of nature, as well as beings and the qualities that these beings express; they can also be the spirits of venerated dead people. Many kami are considered the ancient ancestors of entire clans (some ancestors became kami upon their death if they were able to embody the values and virtues of kami in life). Traditionally, great or sensational leaders like the Emperor could be or became kami.
In Shinto, kami are not separate from nature, but are of nature, possessing positive and negative, and good and evil characteristics. They are manifestations of , the interconnecting energy of the universe, and are considered exemplary of what humanity should strive towards. Kami are believed to be "hidden" from this world, and inhabit a complementary existence that mirrors our own: . To be in harmony with the awe-inspiring aspects of nature is to be conscious of .
The word from Western philosophy that deals with the same concept is numinous, which has been variously taken to mean both a subjective sense of spiritual awe and any entity that evokes that sense.
Etymology
Kami is the Japanese word for a deity, divinity, or spirit. It has been used to describe mind (心霊), God (ゴッド), supreme being (至上者), one of the Shinto deities, an effigy, a principle, and anything that is worshipped.
Although deity is the common interpretation of kami, some Shinto scholars argue that such a translation can cause a misunderstanding of the term. The wide variety of usage of the word kami can be compared to the Sanskrit Deva and the Hebrew Elohim, which also refer to God, gods, angels, or spirits.
Some etymological suggestions are:
Kami may, at its root, simply mean spirit, or an aspect of spirituality. It is written with the kanji , Sino-Japanese reading shin or jin. In Chinese, the character means deity.
In the Ainu language, the word kamuy refers to an animistic concept very similar to Japanese kami. The matter of the words' origins is still a subject of debate; but it is generally suggested that the word kami is a loanword from early Japanese that was adopted by the Ainu.
In his Kojiki-den, Motoori Norinaga gave a definition of kami: "...any being whatsoever which possesses some eminent quality out of the ordinary, and is awe-inspiring, is called kami."
Because Japanese does not normally distinguish grammatical number in nouns (the singular and plural forms of nouns in Japanese are the same), it is sometimes unclear whether kami refers to a single or multiple entities. When a singular concept is needed, is used as a suffix. The reduplicated term generally used to refer to multiple kami is kamigami.
Gender is also not implied in the word kami, and as such, it can be used to refer to any gender.
History
While Shinto has no founder, no overarching doctrine, and no religious texts, the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), written in 712 CE, and the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), written in 720 CE, contain the earliest record of Japanese creation myths. The Kojiki also includes descriptions of various kami.
In the ancient traditions there were five defining characteristics of kami:
Kami are of two minds. They can nurture and love when respected, or they can cause destruction and disharmony when disregarded. Kami must be appeased in order to gain their favor and avoid their wrath. Traditionally, kami possess two souls, one gentle (nigi-mitama) and the other assertive (ara-mitama); additionally, in Yamakage Shinto (see Ko-Shintō), kami have two additional souls that are hidden: one happy (saki-mitama) and one mysterious (kushi-mitama).
Kami are not visible to the human realm. Instead, they inhabit sacred places, natural phenomena, or people during rituals that ask for their blessing.
They are mobile, visiting their places of worship, of which there can be several, but never staying forever.
There are many different varieties of kami. There are 300 different classifications of kami listed in the Kojiki, and they all have different functions, such as the kami of wind, kami of entryways, and kami of roads.
Lastly, all kami have a different guardianship or duty to the people around them. Just as the people have an obligation to keep the kami happy, the kami have to perform the specific function of the object, place, or idea they inhabit.
Kami are an ever-changing concept, but their presence in Japanese life has remained constant. The kami's earliest roles were as earth-based spirits, assisting the early hunter-gatherer groups in their daily lives. They were worshipped as gods of the earth (mountains) and sea. As the cultivation of rice became increasingly important and predominant in Japan, the kami's identity shifted to more sustaining roles that were directly involved in the growth of crops; roles such as rain, earth, and rice. This relationship between early Japanese people and the kami was manifested in rituals and ceremonies meant to entreat the kami to grow and protect the harvest. These rituals also became a symbol of power and strength for the early Emperors. (See .)
There is a strong tradition of myth-histories in the Shinto faith; one such myth details the appearance of the first emperor, grandson of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. In this myth, when Amaterasu sent her grandson to earth to rule, she gave him five rice grains, which had been grown in the fields of heaven (Takamagahara). This rice made it possible for him to transform the "wilderness".
Social and political strife have played a key role in the development of new sorts of kami, specifically the goryō-shin (the sacred spirit kami). Goryō are the vengeful spirits of the dead whose lives were cut short, but they were calmed by the devotion of Shinto followers and are now believed to punish those who do not honor the kami.
The pantheon of kami, like the kami themselves, is forever changing in definition and scope. As the needs of the people have shifted, so too have the domains and roles of the various kami. Some examples of this are related to health, such as the kami of smallpox whose role was expanded to include all contagious diseases, or the kami of boils and growths who has also come to preside over cancers and cancer treatments.
In the ancient animistic religions, kami were understood as simply the divine forces of nature. Worshippers in ancient Japan revered creations of nature which exhibited a particular beauty and power such as waterfalls, mountains, boulders, animals, trees, grasses, and even rice paddies. They strongly believed the spirits or resident kami deserved respect.
In 927 CE, the was promulgated in fifty volumes. This, the first formal codification of Shinto rites and norito (liturgies and prayers) to survive, became the basis for all subsequent Shinto liturgical practice and efforts. It listed all of the 2,861 Shinto shrines existing at the time, and the 3,131 official-recognized and enshrined kami. The number of kami has grown and far exceeded this figure through the following generations as there are over 2,446,000 individual kami enshrined in Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine alone.
Shinto belief
Kami are the central objects of worship for the Shinto belief. The ancient animistic spirituality of Japan was the beginning of modern Shinto, which became a formal spiritual institution later, in an effort to preserve the traditional beliefs from the encroachment of imported religious ideas. As a result, the nature of what can be called kami is very general and encompasses many different concepts and phenomena.
Some of the objects or phenomena designated as kami are qualities of growth, fertility, and production; natural phenomena like wind and thunder; natural objects like the sun, mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks; some animals; and ancestral spirits. Included within the designation of ancestral spirits are spirits of the ancestors of the Imperial House of Japan, but also ancestors of noble families as well as the spirits of the ancestors of all people, which when they died were believed to be the guardians of their descendants.
There are other spirits designated as kami as well. For example, the guardian spirits of the land, occupations, and skills; spirits of Japanese heroes, men of outstanding deeds or virtues, and those who have contributed to civilization, culture, and human welfare; those who have died for the state or the community; and the pitiable dead. Not only spirits superior to man can be considered kami; spirits that are considered pitiable or weak have also been considered kami in Shinto.
The concept of kami has been changed and refined since ancient times, although anything that was considered to be kami by ancient people will still be considered kami in modern Shinto. Even within modern Shinto, there are no clearly defined criteria for what should or should not be worshipped as kami. The difference between modern Shinto and the ancient animistic religions is mainly a refinement of the kami-concept, rather than a difference in definitions.
Although the ancient designations are still adhered to, in modern Shinto many priests also consider kami to be anthropomorphic spirits, with nobility and authority. One such example is the mythological figure Amaterasu-ōmikami, the sun goddess of the Shinto pantheon. Although these kami can be considered deities, they are not necessarily considered omnipotent or omniscient, and like the Greek Gods, they had flawed personalities and were quite capable of ignoble acts. In the myths of Amaterasu, for example, she could see the events of the human world, but had to use divination rituals to see the future.
There are considered to be three main variations of kami: , , and . ("" literally means eight million, but idiomatically it expresses "uncountably many" and "all-around"—like many East Asian cultures, the Japanese often use the number 8, representing the cardinal and ordinal directions, to symbolize ubiquity.) These classifications of kami are not considered strictly divided, due to the fluid and shifting nature of kami, but are instead held as guidelines for grouping them.
The ancestors of a particular family can also be worshipped as kami. In this sense, these kami are worshipped not because of their godly powers, but because of a distinctive quality or virtue. These kami are celebrated regionally, and several miniature shrines (hokora) have been built in their honor. In many cases, people who once lived are thus revered; an example of this is Tenjin, who was Sugawara no Michizane (845–903 CE) in life.
Within Shinto it is believed that the nature of life is sacred because the kami began human life. Yet people cannot perceive this divine nature, which the kami created, on their own; therefore, magokoro, or purification, is necessary in order to see the divine nature. This purification can only be granted by the kami. In order to please the kami and earn magokoro, Shinto followers are taught to uphold the four affirmations of Shinto.
The first affirmation is to hold fast to tradition and the family. Family is seen as the main mechanism by which traditions are preserved. For instance, in marriage or birth, tradition is potentially observed and passed onto future generations. The second affirmation is to have a love of nature. Nature objects are worshipped as sacred because the kami inhabit them. Therefore, to be in contact with nature means to be in contact with the gods. The third affirmation is to maintain physical cleanliness. Followers of Shinto take baths, wash their hands, and rinse out their mouths often. The last affirmation is to practice matsuri, which is the worship and honor given to the kami and ancestral spirits.
Shinto followers also believe that the kami are the ones who can either grant blessings or curses to a person. Shinto believers desire to appease the evil kami to "stay on their good side", and also to please the good kami. In addition to practicing the four affirmations daily, Shinto believers also wear omamori to aid them in remaining pure and protected. Mamori are charms that keep the evil kami from striking a human with sickness or causing disaster to befall them.
The kami are both worshipped and respected within the religion of Shinto. The goal of life to Shinto believers is to obtain magokoro, a pure sincere heart, which can only be granted by the kami. As a result, Shinto followers are taught that humankind should venerate both the living and the nonliving, because both possess a divine superior spirit within: the kami.
Ceremonies and festivals
One of the first recorded rituals we know of is , the ceremony in which the Emperor offers newly harvested rice to the kami to secure their blessing for a bountiful harvest. A yearly festival, Niiname-sai is also performed when a new Emperor comes to power, in which case it is called . In the ceremony, the Emperor offers crops from the new harvest to the kami, including rice, fish, fruits, soup, and stew. The Emperor first feasts with the deities, then the guests. The feast could go on for some time; for example, Emperor Shōwa's feast spanned two days.
Visitors to a Shinto shrine follow a purification ritual before presenting themselves to the kami. This ritual begins with hand washing and swallowing and later spitting a small amount of water in front of the shrine to purify the body, heart, and mind. Once this is complete they turn their focus to gaining the kami's attention. The traditional method of doing this is to bow twice, clap twice and bow again, alerting the kami to their presence and desire to commune with them. During the last bow, the supplicant offers words of gratitude and praise to the kami; if they are offering a prayer for aid they will also state their name and address. After the prayer and/or worship they repeat the two bows, two claps and a final bow in conclusion.
Shinto practitioners also worship at home. This is done at a kamidana (household shrine), on which an ofuda with the name of their protector or ancestral kami is positioned. Their protector kami is determined by their or their ancestors' relationship to the kami.
Ascetic practices, shrine rituals and ceremonies, and Japanese festivals are the most public ways that Shinto devotees celebrate and offer adoration for the kami. Kami are celebrated during their distinct festivals that usually take place at the shrines dedicated to their worship. Many festivals involve believers, who are usually intoxicated, parading, sometimes running, toward the shrine while carrying mikoshi (portable shrines) as the community gathers for the festival ceremony. Yamamoto Guji, the high priest at the Tsubaki Grand Shrine, explains that this practice honors the kami because "it is in the festival, the matsuri, the greatest celebration of life can be seen in the world of Shinto and it is the people of the community who attend festivals as groups, as a whole village who are seeking to unlock the human potential as children of kami". During the New Year Festival, families purify and clean their houses in preparation for the upcoming year. Offerings are also made to the ancestors so that they will bless the family in the future year.
Shinto ceremonies are so long and complex that in some shrines it can take ten years for the priests to learn them. The priesthood was traditionally hereditary. Some shrines have drawn their priests from the same families for over a hundred generations. It is not uncommon for the clergy to be female priestesses. The priests (kannushi) may be assisted by miko, young unmarried women acting as shrine maidens. Neither priests nor priestesses live as ascetics; in fact, it is common for them to be married, and they are not traditionally expected to meditate. Rather, they are considered specialists in the arts of maintaining the connection between the kami and the people.
In addition to these festivals, ceremonies marking rites of passage are also performed within the shrines. Two such ceremonies are the birth of a child and the Shichi-Go-San. When a child is born they are brought to a shrine so that they can be initiated as a new believer and the kami can bless them and their future life. The Shichi-Go-San (the Seven-Five-Three) is a rite of passage for five-year-old boys and three- or seven-year-old girls. It is a time for these young children to personally offer thanks for the kami's protection and to pray for continued health.
Many other rites of passage are practiced by Shinto believers, and there are also many other festivals. The main reason for these ceremonies is so that Shinto followers can appease the kami in order to reach magokoro. Magokoro can only be received through the kami. Ceremonies and festivals are long and complex because they need to be perfect to satisfy the kami. If the kami are not pleased with these ceremonies, they will not grant a Shinto believer magokoro.
Notable kami
Amaterasu Ōmikami, the sun goddess and chief deity of Shinto
Ebisu, one of seven gods of fortune
Fūjin, the god of wind
Hachiman, the god of war
Junshi Daimyojin, the god of provocation
Inari Ōkami, the god of rice and agriculture
Izanagi-no-Mikoto, the first man
Izanami-no-Mikoto, the first woman
Kotoamatsukami, the primary kami trinity
Omoikane, the deity of wisdom
Raijin, the god of lightning, thunder and storms
Ryūjin, the Japanese dragon god of sea and storms
Sarutahiko Ōkami, the kami of earth
Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the god of the sea and storms
Tenjin, the poetry god
Tsukuyomi, the moon god
In popular culture
See also
Ainu religion
Philippine mythology
Anito, counterparts of kami in northern Philippines
Animism
Chinese folk religion
Diwata, counterparts of kami in central and southern Philippines
Geist
Genius loci and Numen, similar concepts of ancient Rome
Glossary of Shinto
Hyang, parallel concepts of kami in Indonesian faith
İye
Kamuy
Korean Shamanism
Koshintō
Kotodama
Landvættir, similar natural and spiritual beings in Norse religion
Loa, similar natural and spiritual beings in Vodou/Voodoo religion
List of Shinto kami
Mana
Pneuma
Religion in Japan
Ryukyuan religion
Shen (Chinese religion)
Shintai
Tuatha Dé Danann, similar natural and spiritual beings in Ancient-Irish Paganism.
Taoism
References
Further reading
Chamberlain, Basil H. (translated by). 1919. The Kojiki, Records of Ancient Matters. Asiatic Society of Japan.
Clarke, Roger. 2000. "". The Independent. 7 April 2000.
Fisher, Mary P. 2008. Living Religions seventh edition.
External links
Introduction: Kami, Encyclopedia of Shinto
Kami, Gods of Japan
Evolution of the Concept of Kami, Itō Mikiharu
Japanese deities
Japanese mythology
Nature spirits
Shinto terminology
Tutelary deities | [
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17381 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koalang | Koalang | Koalang is a term coined by Janusz A. Zajdel, a Polish science fiction writer. It is a language used by people in a totalitarian world called Paradyzja in his 1984 novel of the same name. The "ko-al" in "koalang" derives from the Polish words 'kojarzeniowo-aluzyjny' ("associative-allusive").
Because Paradyzja is a space station, and activity is tracked by automatic cameras and analysed, mostly, by computers, its people created an Aesopian language, which is full of metaphors that are impossible for computers to grasp. The meaning of every sentence depended on the context. For example, "I dreamt about blue angels last night" means "I was visited by the police last night."
The software that analyzes sentences is self-learning. Thus, a phrase that is used to describe something metaphorically should not be used again in the same context.
Zajdel paid a tribute to George Orwell's newspeak and to Aldous Huxley, by naming one of the main characters Nikor Orley Huxwell.
In the 1980s, the youth magazine Na Przełaj (Short Cut) printed rock lyrics in a column titled KOALANG, hinting that the songs' texts contained content camouflaged from censorship.
See also
Darmok
Metaphorical language
References
Fictional languages
Polish science fiction
Janusz Zajdel
1984 neologisms
Fictional elements introduced in 1984 | [
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17382 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobellite | Kobellite | Kobellite is a gray, fibrous, metallic mineral with the chemical formula . It is also a sulfide mineral consisting of antimony, bismuth, and lead. It is a member of the izoklakeite - berryite series with silver and iron substituting in the copper site and a varying ratio of bismuth, antimony, and lead. It crystallizes with monoclinic pyramidal crystals. The mineral can be found in ores and deposits of Hvena, Sweden; Ouray, Colorado; and Wake County, North Carolina, US. The mineral was named after Wolfgang Franz von Kobell (1803–1882), a German mineralogist.
See also
List of minerals
List of minerals named after people
References
Lead minerals
Copper(I) minerals
Bismuth minerals
Antimony minerals
Sulfosalt minerals
Orthorhombic minerals
Minerals in space group 58 | [
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17383 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayak | Kayak | A kayak is a small, narrow watercraft which is typically propelled by means of a double-bladed paddle. The word kayak originates from the Greenlandic word qajaq ().
The traditional kayak has a covered deck and one or more cockpits, each seating one paddler. The cockpit is sometimes covered by a spray deck that prevents the entry of water from waves or spray, differentiating the craft from a canoe. The spray deck makes it possible for suitably skilled kayakers to roll the kayak: that is, to capsize and right it without it filling with water or ejecting the paddler.
Some modern boats vary considerably from a traditional design but still claim the title "kayak", for instance in eliminating the cockpit by seating the paddler on top of the boat ("sit-on-top" kayaks); having inflated air chambers surrounding the boat; replacing the single hull with twin hulls; and replacing paddles with other human-powered propulsion methods, such as foot-powered rotational propellers and "flippers". Kayaks are also being sailed, as well as propelled by means of small electric motors, and even by outboard gas engines.
The kayak was first used by the indigenous Aleut, Inuit, Yupik and possibly Ainu hunters in subarctic regions of the world.
History
Kayaks (Inuktitut: qajaq (ᖃᔭᖅ ), Yup'ik: qayaq (from qai- "surface; top"), Aleut: Iqyax) were originally developed by the Inuit, Yup'ik, and Aleut. They used the boats to hunt on inland lakes, rivers and coastal waters of the Arctic Ocean, North Atlantic, Bering Sea and North Pacific oceans. These first kayaks were constructed from stitched seal or other animal skins stretched over a wood or whalebone-skeleton frame. (Western Alaskan Natives used wood whereas the eastern Inuit used whalebone due to the treeless landscape). Kayaks are believed to be at least 4,000 years old. The oldest existing kayaks are exhibited in the North America department of the State Museum of Ethnology in Munich, with the oldest dating from 1577.
Native people made many types of boats for different purposes. The Aleut baidarka was made in double or triple cockpit designs, for hunting and transporting passengers or goods. An umiak is a large open-sea canoe, ranging from , made with seal skins and wood. It is considered a kayak although it was originally paddled with single-bladed paddles, and typically had more than one paddler.
Native builders designed and built their boats based on their own experience and that of the generations before them passed on through oral tradition. The word "kayak" means "man's boat" or "hunter's boat", and native kayaks were a personal craft, each built by the man who used it—with assistance from his wife, who sewed the skins—and closely fitting his size for maximum maneuverability. The paddler wore a tuilik, a garment that was stretched over the rim of the kayak coaming and sealed with drawstrings at the coaming, wrists, and hood edges. This enabled the "eskimo roll" and rescue to become the preferred methods of recovery after capsizing, especially as few Inuit could swim; their waters are too cold for a swimmer to survive for long.
Instead of a tuilik, most traditional kayakers today use a spray deck made of waterproof synthetic material stretchy enough to fit tightly around the cockpit rim and body of the kayaker, and which can be released rapidly from the cockpit to permit easy exit.
Inuit kayak builders had specific measurements for their boats. The length was typically three times the span of his outstretched arms. The width at the cockpit was the width of the builder's hips plus two fists (and sometimes less). The typical depth was his fist plus the outstretched thumb (hitch hiker). Thus typical dimensions were about long by wide by deep. This measurement system confounded early European explorers who tried to duplicate the kayak because each kayak was a little different.
Traditional kayaks encompass three types: Baidarkas, from the Bering Sea & Aleutian Islands, the oldest design, whose rounded shape and numerous chines give them an almost blimp-like appearance; West Greenland kayaks, with fewer chines and a more angular shape, with gunwales rising to a point at the bow and stern; and East Greenland kayaks that appear similar to the West Greenland style, but often fit more snugly to the paddler and possess a steeper angle between gunwale and stem, which lends maneuverability.
Most of the Aleut people in the Aleutian Islands eastward to Greenland Inuit relied on the kayak for hunting a variety of prey—primarily seals, though whales and caribou were important in some areas. Skin-on-frame kayaks are still being used for hunting by Inuit people in Greenland, because the smooth and flexible skin glides silently through the waves. In other parts of the world home builders are continuing the tradition of skin on frame kayaks, usually with modern skins of canvas or synthetic fabric, such as sc. ballistic nylon.
Contemporary traditional-style kayaks trace their origins primarily to the native boats of Alaska, northern Canada, and Southwest Greenland. The use of fabric kayaks on wooden frames called a foldboat or folding kayak (German Faltboot or Hardernkahn) became widely popular in Europe beginning in 1907 when they were mass-produced by Johannes Klepper and others. This type of kayak was introduced to England and Europe by John MacGregor (sportsman) in 1860, but Klepper was the first person to mass-produce these boats made of collapsible wooden frames covered by waterproof rubberized canvas. By 1929, Klepper and Company were making 90 foldboats a day. Joined by other European manufacturers, by the mid-1930s there were an estimated half-million foldboat kayaks in use throughout Europe. First Nation masters of the roll taught this technique to Europeans during this time period.
These boats were tough and intrepid individuals were soon doing amazing things in them. In June 1928, a German named Franz Romer Sea kayak rigged his long foldboat with a sail and departed from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands carrying of tinned food and of water. Fifty-eight days and later he reached Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Another German, Oskar Speck, paddled his foldboat down the Danube and four years later reached the Australian coast after having traveled roughly 14,000 miles across the Pacific.
These watercraft were brought to the United States and used competitively in 1940 at the first National Whitewater Championship held in America near Middledam, Maine, on the Rapid River (Maine). One “winner,” Royal Little, crossed the finish line clinging to his overturned foldboat. Upstream, the river was “strewn with many badly buffeted and some wrecked boats.” Two women were in the competition, Amy Lang and Marjory Hurd. With her partner Ken Hutchinson, Hurd won the double canoe race. Lang won the doubles foldboat event with her partner, Alexander "Zee" Grant.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Alexander “Zee” Grant was most likely America's best foldboat pilot. Grant kayaked the Gates of Lodore on the Green River (Colorado River tributary) in Dinosaur National Monument in 1939 and the Middle Fork Salmon River in 1940. In 1941, Grant paddled a foldboat through Grand Canyon National Park. He outfitted his foldboat, named Escalante, with a sponson on each side of his boat and filled the boat with beach balls. As with nearly all American foldboat enthusiasts of the day, he did not know how to roll his boat.
Fiberglass mixed with resin composites, invented in the 1930s and 1940s, were soon used to make kayaks and this type of watercraft saw increased use during the 1950s, including in the US. Kayak Slalom World Champion Walter Kirschbaum built a fiberglass kayak and paddled it through Grand Canyon in June 1960. He knew how to roll and only swam once, in Hance Rapid (see List of Colorado River rapids and features). Like Grant's foldboat, Kirschbaum's fiberglass kayak had no seat and no thigh braces.
Inflatable rubberized fabric boats were first introduced in Europe and rotomolded plastic kayaks first appeared in 1973. Most kayaks today are made from roto-molded polyethylene resins. The development of plastic and rubberized inflatable kayaks arguably initiated the development of freestyle kayaking as we see it today since these boats could be made smaller, stronger, and more resilient than fiberglass boats.
Design principles
Typically, kayak design is largely a matter of trade-offs: directional stability ("tracking") vs maneuverability; stability vs speed; and primary vs secondary stability. Multihull kayaks face a different set of trade-offs. The paddler's body shape and size is an integral part of the structure, and will also affect the trade-offs made.
Attempting to lift and carry a kayak by oneself or improperly is a significant cause of kayaking injuries. Good lifting technique, sharing loads, and not using needlessly large and heavy kayaks prevents injuries.
Displacement
If the displacement of a kayak is not enough to support the passenger(s) and gear, it will sink. If the displacement is excessive, the kayak will float too high, catch the wind and waves uncomfortably, and handle poorly; it will probably also be bigger and heavier and than it needs to be. Being excessively big will create more drag, and the kayak will move more slowly and take more effort. Rolling is easier in lower-displacement kayaks. On the other hand, a higher deck will keep the paddler(s) drier and make self-rescue and coming through surf easier. Many beginning paddlers who use a sit-in kayak feel more secure in a kayak with a weight capacity substantially more than their own weight. Maximum volume in a sit-in kayak is helped by a wide hull with high sides. But paddling ease is helped by lower sides where the paddler sits and a narrower width.
While the kayak's buoyancy must be more than the loaded kayak, the optimal amount of excess buoyancy varies somewhat with kayak type, purpose, and personal taste (squirt boats, for instance, have very little positive buoyancy). Displacements obviously must also vary greatly with paddler weight. Most manufacturers make kayaks for paddlers weighing , with some kayaks for paddlers down to . Kayaks made for paddlers under are almost all very beamy and intended for beginners.
About 20% of the US population are not in this weight range; either they are too heavy, and will sink almost all commercial kayaks, or they are too light and small to paddle the smallest ones without difficulty. In the United States, those who are too heavy are fairly equally split between men and women, while those too light include many women, most pre-teens, and some teens, but less than 1% of men. Paddling an oversized kayak can be extremely tiring, especially if it is square with a flat bottom. Oversized kayaks for children mean that they are likely to need to be towed towards the end of a paddle. Some commercial kayaks are made to fit small adults and children, and a few are built narrower, to fit women (see section on stability, below).
Length
As a general rule, a longer kayak is faster: it has a higher hull speed. It can also be narrower for a given displacement, reducing the drag, and it will generally track (follow a straight line) better than a shorter kayak. On the other hand, it is less maneuverable. Very long kayaks are less robust, and may be harder to store and transport. Some recreational kayak makers try to maximize hull volume (weight capacity) for a given length as shorter kayaks are easier to transport and store.
Kayaks that are built to cover longer distances such as touring and sea kayaks are longer, generally . With touring kayaks the keel is generally more defined (helping the kayaker track in a straight line). Whitewater kayaks, which generally depend upon river current for their forward motion, are short, to maximize maneuverability. These kayaks rarely exceed in length, and play boats may be only long. Recreational kayak designers try to provide more stability at the price of reduced speed, and compromise between tracking and maneuverability, ranging from .
Rocker
Length alone does not fully predict a kayak's maneuverability: a second design element is rocker, i.e. its lengthwise curvature. A heavily rockered boat curves more, shortening its effective waterline. For example, an kayak with no rocker is in the water from end to end. In contrast, the bow and stern of a rockered boat are out of the water, shortening its lengthwise waterline to only . Rocker is generally most evident at the ends, and in moderation improves handling. Similarly, although a rockered whitewater boat may only be about a meter shorter than a typical recreational kayak, its waterline is far shorter and its maneuverability far greater. When surfing, a heavily rockered boat is less likely to lock into the wave as the bow and stern are still above water. A boat with less rocker cuts into the wave and makes it harder to turn while surfing.
Beam profile
The overall width of a kayak's cross-section is its beam. A wide hull is more stable and packs more displacement into a shorter length. A narrow hull has less drag and is generally easier to paddle; in waves, it will ride more easily and stay dryer.
A narrower kayak makes a somewhat shorter paddle appropriate and a shorter paddle puts less strain on the shoulder joints. Some paddlers are comfortable with a sit-in kayak so narrow that their legs extend fairly straight out. Others want sufficient width to permit crossing their legs inside the kayak.
Types of stability
Primary (sometimes called initial) stability describes how much a boat tips, or rocks back and forth when displaced from level by paddler weight shifts. Secondary stability describes how stable a kayak feels when put on edge or when waves are passing under the hull perpendicular to the length of the boat. For kayak rolling, tertiary stability, or the stability of an upside-down kayak, is also important (lower tertiary stability makes rolling up easier).
Primary stability is often a big concern to a beginner, while secondary stability matters both to beginners and experienced travelers. By example, a wide, flat-bottomed kayak will have high primary stability and feel very stable on flat water. However, when a steep wave breaks on such a boat, it can be easily overturned because the flat bottom is no longer level. By contrast, a kayak with a narrower, more rounded hull with more hull flare can be edged or leaned into waves and (in the hands of a skilled kayaker) provides a safer, more comfortable response on stormy seas. Kayaks with only moderate primary, but excellent secondary stability are, in general, considered more seaworthy, especially in challenging conditions.
The shape of the cross section affects stability, maneuverability, and drag. Hull shapes are categorized by roundness, flatness, and by the presence and angle of chines. This cross-section may vary along the length of the boat.
A chine typically increases secondary stability by effectively widening the beam of the boat when it heels (tips). A V-shaped hull tends to travel straight (track) well but makes turning harder. V-shaped hulls also have the greatest secondary stability. Conversely, flat-bottomed hulls are easy to turn, but harder to direct in a constant direction. A round-bottomed boat has minimal area in contact with the water, and thus minimizes drag; however, it may be so unstable that it will not remain upright when floating empty, and needs continual effort to keep it upright. In a skin-on-frame kayak, chine placement may be constrained by the need to avoid the bones of the pelvis.
Sea kayaks, designed for open water and rough conditions, are generally narrower at and have more secondary stability than recreational kayaks, which are wider , have a flatter hull shape, and more primary stability.
Stability from body shape and skill level
The body of the paddler must also be taken into account. A paddler with a low center of gravity (COG) will find all boats more stable; for a paddler with a high center of gravity, all boats will feel tippier. On average, women have a lower COG than men. Women generally may fit a kayak about 10% narrower than the kayak that would fit a similarly sized man. Commercial kayaks made for women are rare. Unisex kayaks are built for men. Younger children have proportionately smaller and lighter bodies, but near-adult-size heads, and thus a higher center of gravity. A paddler with narrow shoulders will also want a narrower kayak.
Newcomers will often want a craft with high primary stability (see above). The southern method is a wider kayak. The West Greenland method is a removable pair of outriggers, lashed across the stern deck. Such an outrigger pair is often homemade of a small plank and found floats such as empty bottles or plastic ducks. Outriggers are also made commercially, especially for fishing kayaks and sailing. If the floats are set so that they are both in the water, they give primary stability, but produce more drag. If they are set so that they are both out of the water when the kayak is balanced, they give secondary stability.
Hull surface profile
Some kayak hulls are categorized according to the shape from bow to stern
Common shapes include:
Symmetrical: the widest part of the boat is halfway between bow and stern.
Fish form: the widest part is forward (in front) of the midpoint.
Swede form: the widest part is aft (behind) midpoint.
Seating position and contact points
Traditional-style and some modern types of kayaks (e.g. sit-on-top) require that paddler be seated with their legs stretched in front of them, in a right angle, in a position called the "L" kayaking position. Other kayaks offer a different sitting position, in which the paddler's legs are not stretched out in front of them, and the thigh brace bears more on the inside than the top of the thighs (see diagram).
A kayaker must be able to move the hull of their kayak by moving their lower body, and brace themselves against the hull (mostly with the feet) on each stroke. Most kayaks therefore have footrests and a backrest. Some kayaks fit snugly on the hips; others rely more on thigh braces. Mass-produced kayaks generally have adjustable bracing points. Many paddlers also customize their kayaks by putting in shims of closed-cell foam, or more elaborate structure, to make it fit more tightly.
Paddling puts substantial force through the legs, alternately with each stroke. The knees should therefore not be hyperextended. Separately, if the kneecap is in contact with the boat, or in the knee joint is in torsion, this will cause pain and may injure the knee. Insufficient foot space will cause painful cramping and inefficient paddling. The paddler should generally be in a comfortable position.
Materials and construction
Today almost all kayaks are commercial products intended for sale rather than for the builder's personal use.
Fiberglass hulls are stiffer than polyethylene hulls, but they are more prone to damage from impact, including cracking. Most modern kayaks have steep V sections at the bow and stern, and a shallow V amidships. Fiberglass kayaks may be "laid-up" in a mold by hand, in which case they are usually more expensive than polyethylene kayaks, which are rotationally molded in a machine. The deck and hull are often made separately and then joined at a horizontal seam.
Plastic kayaks are rotationally molded ('rotomolded') from a various grades and types of polyethylene resins ranging from soft to hard. Such kayaks are seamless and particularly resistant to impact, but heavy.
Inflatable kayaks are increasingly popular due to their ease of storage and transport, as well as the ability to be deflated for extended portage. Although slower than hardshell kayaks, many higher-end models often constructed of hypalon, as opposed to cheaper PVC designs, begin to approach the performance of traditional sea kayaks. Being inflatable they are virtually unsinkable and often more stable than hardshell designs. New drop-stitch technology means slab, rather than tube shapes are used in the designs with higher inflation pressures (up to ), leading to considerably faster, though often less stable kayaks which rival hardshell boats in performance.
Solid wooden hulls don't necessarily require significant skill and handiwork, depending on how they are made. Three main types are popular, especially for the home builder: plywood stitch & glue (S&G), strip-built, and hybrids which have a stitch & glue hull and a strip-built deck. Kayaks made from wood sheathed in fiberglass have proven successful, especially as the price of epoxy resin has decreased in recent years.
Stitch & glue designs typically use modern, marine-grade plywood with a thickness of about . After cutting out the required pieces of hull and deck (kits often have these pre-cut), a series of small holes are drilled along the edges. Copper wire is then used to "stitch" the pieces together through the holes. After the pieces are temporarily stitched together, they are glued with epoxy and the seams reinforced with fiberglass. When the epoxy dries, the copper stitches are removed. Sometimes the entire boat is then covered in fiberglass for additional strength and waterproofing though this adds greatly to the weight and is unnecessary. Construction is fairly straightforward, but because plywood does not bend to form compound curves, design choices are limited. This is a good choice for the first-time kayak builder as the labor and skills required (especially for kit versions) is considerably less than for strip-built boats which can take 3 times as long to build.
Strip-built designs are similar in shape to rigid fiberglass kayaks but are generally both lighter and tougher. Like their fiberglass counterparts the shape and size of the boat determines performance and optimal uses. The hull and deck are built with thin strips of lightweight wood, often thuja (Western Red cedar), pine or redwood. The strips are edge-glued together around a form, stapled or clamped in place, and allowed to dry. Structural strength comes from a layer of fiberglass cloth and epoxy resin, layered inside and outside the hull. Strip–built kayaks are sold commercially by a few companies, priced US$4,000 and up. An experienced woodworker can build one for about US$400 in 200 hours, though the exact cost and time depend on the builder's skill, the materials and the size and design. As a second kayak project, or for the serious builder with some woodworking expertise, a strip–built boat can be an impressive piece of work. Kits with pre-cut and milled wood strips are commercially available.
Skin-on-frame (SOF) boats are often more traditional in design, materials, and construction. They were traditionally made with driftwood frames, jointed, pegged, and lashed together, and covered with stretched seal skin, as those were the most readily available materials in the Arctic regions (other skins and baleen framing members were also used at need). A "poor man's kayak" might be frameless and stuffed with a snow "frame". Today, seal skin is usually replaced with canvas or nylon cloth covered with paint, polyurethane, or a hypalon rubber coating, on a wooden or aluminum frame. Modern skin-on-frame kayaks often possess greater impact resistance than their fiberglass counterparts, but are less durable against abrasion or sharp objects. They are often the lightest kayaks. Like the older skin-on-frame kayaks, they are often home-built to fit a specific paddler. Engineer Xyla Foxlin built a kayak out of transparent wood as well as LEDs to create a floating vessel that lights up at night, which she calls the Rainbowt.
A special type of skin-on-frame kayak is the folding kayak. It has a collapsible frame, of wood, aluminum or plastic, or a combination thereof, and a skin of water-resistant and durable fabric. Many types have air sponsons built into the hull, making the kayak float even if flooded.
Modern design
Most modern kayaks differ greatly from native kayaks in design, manufacturing and usage. They are often designed with computer-aided design (CAD) software, often in combination with CAD customized for naval design.
Modern kayaks serve diverse purposes, ranging from slow and easy touring on placid water, to racing and complex maneuvering in fast-moving whitewater, to fishing and long-distance ocean excursions. Modern forms, materials and construction techniques make it possible to effectively serve these needs while continuing to leverage the insights of the original Arctic inventors.
Kayaks are long—, short—, wide—, or as narrow as the paddler's hips—for example . They may attach one or two stabilizing hulls (outriggers), have twin hulls like catamarans, inflate or fold. They move via paddles, pedals that turn propellers or underwater flippers, under sail, or motor. They're made of wood/canvas, wood, carbon fiber, fiberglass, Kevlar, polyethylene, polyester, rubberized fabric, neoprene, nitrylon, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyurethane, and aluminum. They may sport rudders, fins, bulkheads, seats, eyelets, foot braces and cargo hatches. They accommodate 1-3 or more paddlers/riders.
Types
Modern kayaks have evolved into specialized types that may be broadly categorized according to their application as sea or touring kayaks, whitewater (or river) kayaks, surf kayaks, racing kayaks, fishing kayaks, and recreational kayaks. The broader kayak categories today are 'sit-in' (SI), which is inspired mainly by traditional kayak forms, 'sit-on-top' (SOT), which evolved from paddle boards that were outfitted with footrests and a backrest, 'hybrid', which are essentially canoes featuring a narrower beam and a reduced free board enabling the paddler to propel them from the middle of the boat, using a double blade paddle (i.e. 'kayak paddle'), and twin hull kayaks offering each of the paddler's legs a narrow hull of its own.
In recent decades, kayaks design have proliferated to a point where the only broadly accepted denominator for them is their being designed mainly for paddling using a kayak paddle featuring two blades i.e. 'kayak paddle'. However, even this inclusive definition is being challenged by other means of human powered propulsion, such as foot activated pedal drives combined with rotating or sideways moving propellers, electric motors, and even outboard motors.
Recreational
Recreational kayaks are designed for the casual paddler interested in fishing, photography, or a peaceful paddle on a lake, flatwater stream or protected salt water away from strong ocean waves. These boats presently make up the largest segment of kayak sales. Compared to other kayaks, recreational kayaks have a larger cockpit for easier entry and exit and a wider beam () for more stability. They are generally less than in length and have limited cargo capacity. Less expensive materials like polyethylene and fewer options keep these boats relatively inexpensive. Most canoe/kayak clubs offer introductory instruction in recreational boats. They do not perform as well in the sea. The recreational kayak is usually a type of touring kayak.
Sea
Sea kayaks are typically designed for travel by one, two or even three paddlers on open water and in many cases trade maneuverability for seaworthiness, stability, and cargo capacity. Sea-kayak sub-types include "skin-on-frame" kayaks with traditionally constructed frames, open-deck "sit-on-top" kayaks, and recreational kayaks.
The sea kayak, though descended directly from traditional types, is implemented in a variety of materials. Sea kayaks typically have a longer waterline, and provisions for below-deck storage of cargo. Sea kayaks may also have rudders or skegs (fixed rudder) and upturned bow or stern profiles for wave shedding. Modern sea kayaks usually have two or more internal bulkheads. Some models can accommodate two or sometimes three paddlers.
Sit-on-top
Sealed-hull ("unsinkable") craft were developed for leisure use, as derivatives of surfboards (e.g. paddle or wave skis), or for surf conditions. Variants include planing surf craft, touring kayaks, and sea marathon kayaks. Increasingly, manufacturers build leisure 'sit-on-top' variants of extreme sports craft, typically using polyethylene to ensure strength and affordability, often with a skeg for directional stability.
Sit-on-top kayaks come in 1-4 paddler configurations. Sit-on-top kayaks are particularly popular for fishing and SCUBA diving, since participants need to easily enter and exit the water, change seating positions, and access hatches and storage wells. Ordinarily the seat of a sit-on-top is slightly above water level, so the center of gravity for the paddler is higher than in a traditional kayak. To compensate for the higher center of gravity, sit-on-tops are often wider and slower than a traditional kayak of the same length.
Water that enters the cockpit of a sit-on-top kayak drains out through scupper holes—tubes that run from the cockpit to the bottom of the hull. The cockpit is thus self-bailing. The hull may be sealed, or perforated by hatches and deck fixtures. Contrary to popular belief, the sit-on-top kayak hull is not self-bailing, since water penetrating it does not drain out automatically, as it does in bigger boats equipped with self-bailing systems. Furthermore, the sit-on-top hull cannot be molded in a way that would assure water tightness, and water may get in through various holes in its hull, usually around hatches and deck accessories. If the sit-on-top kayak is loaded to a point where such perforations are covered with water, or if the water paddled is rough enough that such perforations often go under water, the sit-on-top hull may fill with water without the paddler noticing it in time. If a sealed hull develops a split or hole, it will also fill and sink.
Surf
Specialty surf boats typically have flat bottoms, and hard edges, similar to surf boards. The design of a surf kayak promotes the use of an ocean surf wave (moving wave) as opposed to a river or feature wave (moving water). They are typically made from rotomolded plastic, or fiberglass.
Surf kayaking comes in two main varieties, High Performance (HP) and International Class (IC). High Performance boats tend to have a lot of nose rocker, little to no tail rocker, flat hulls, sharp rails and up to four fins set up as either a three fin thruster or a quad fin. This enables them to move at high speed and maneuver dynamically. International Class boats have to be at least long and until a recent rule change had to have a convex hull; now flat and slightly concave hulls are also allowed, although fins are not. Surfing on international boats tends to be smoother and more flowing, and they are thought of as kayaking's long boarding. Surf boats come in a variety of materials ranging from tough but heavy plastics to super light, super stiff but fragile foam–cored carbon fiber. Surf kayaking has become popular in traditional surfing locations, as well as new locations such as the Great Lakes.
Waveskis
A variation on the closed-cockpit surf kayak is called a waveski. Although the waveski offers dynamics similar to a sit–on–top, its paddling technique and surfing performance and construction can be similar to surfboard designs.
Whitewater
Whitewater kayaks are rotomolded in a semi-rigid, high impact plastic, usually polyethylene. Careful construction ensures that the boat remains structurally sound when subjected to fast-moving water. The plastic hull allows these kayaks to bounce off rocks without leaking, although they scratch and eventually puncture with enough use. Whitewater kayaks range from long. There are two main types of whitewater kayak, playboats and river-running boats. Creekboats (for small rivers) and squirt boats are more specialized.
Playboat
One type, the playboat, is short, with a scooped bow and blunt stern. These trade speed and stability for high maneuverability. Their primary use is performing tricks in individual water features or short stretches of river. In playboating or freestyle competition (also known as rodeo boating), kayakers exploit the complex currents of rapids to execute a series of tricks, which are scored for skill and style.
Creekboats and river-running kayaks
The other primary type is the creek boat, which gets its name from its purpose: running narrow, low-volume waterways. Creekboats are longer and have far more volume than playboats, which makes them more stable, faster and higher-floating. Many paddlers use creekboats in "short boat" downriver races, and they are often seen on large rivers where their extra stability and speed may be necessary to get through rapids.
Between the creekboat and playboat extremes is a category called river–running kayaks. These medium–sized boats are designed for rivers of moderate to high volume, and some, known as river running playboats, are capable of basic playboating moves. They are typically owned by paddlers who do not have enough whitewater involvement to warrant the purchase of more–specialized boats.
Squirt boats
Squirt boating involves paddling both on the surface of the river and underwater. Squirt boats must be custom-fitted to the paddler to ensure comfort while maintaining the low interior volume necessary to allow the paddler to submerge completely in the river.
Racing
Whitewater
White water racers combine a fast, unstable lower hull portion with a flared upper hull portion to combine flat water racing speed with extra stability in open water: they are not fitted with rudders and have similar maneuverability to flat water racers. They usually require substantial skill to achieve stability, due to extremely narrow hulls. Whitewater racing kayaks, like all racing kayaks, are made to regulation lengths, usually of fiber reinforced resin (usually epoxy or polyester reinforced with Kevlar, glass fiber, carbon fiber, or some combination). This form of construction is stiffer and has a harder skin than non-reinforced plastic construction such as rotomolded polyethylene: stiffer means faster, and harder means fewer scratches and therefore also faster.
Flatwater sprint
Sprint kayak is a sport held on calm water. Crews or individuals race over 200 m, 500 m, 1000 m or 5000 m with the winning boat being the first to cross the finish line. The paddler is seated, facing forward, and uses a double-bladed paddle pulling the blade through the water on alternate sides to propel the boat forward. In competition the number of paddlers within a boat is indicated by a figure besides the type of boat; K1 signifies an individual kayak race, K2 pairs, and K4 four-person crews. Kayak sprint has been in every summer olympics since it debuted at the 1936 summer olympics. Racing is governed by the International Canoe Federation.
Slalom
Slalom kayaks are flat–hulled, and—since the early 1970s—feature low profile decks. They are highly maneuverable, and stable but not fast in a straight line.
Surfskis
A specialized variant of racing craft called a surf ski has an open cockpit and can be up to long but only wide, requiring expert balance and paddling skill. Surf skis were originally created for surf and are still used in races in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. They have become popular in the United States for ocean races, lake races and even downriver races.
Marathon
Marathon races vary in distances from ten kilometres to over 1000 kilometres for multi-day stage races.
Specialty and hybrids
The term "kayak" is increasingly applied to craft that look little like traditional kayaks.
Inflatable
Inflatables, also known as the duckies or IKs, can usually be transported by hand using a carry bag. They are generally made of hypalon (a kind of neoprene), nitrilon (nitrile-rubberized fabric), PVC, or polyurethane-coated cloth. They can be inflated with foot, hand or electric pumps. Multiple compartments in all but the least expensive increase safety. They generally use low pressure air, almost always below .
While many inflatables are non-rigid, essentially pointed rafts, best suited for use on rivers and calm water, the higher-end inflatables are designed to be hardy, seaworthy vessels. Recently some manufacturers have added an internal frame (folding-style) to a multi-section inflatable sit-on-top kayak to produce a seaworthy boat. Fully drop-stitch inflatable kayaks are also available, which are inflated to 8-10 PSI. They are much stiffer, which enhances their paddling characteristics to vastly outperform traditional inflatable kayaks.
The appeal of inflatable kayaks is their portability, their durability (they don't dent), ruggedness in white water (they bounce off rocks rather than break) and their easy storage. In addition, inflatable kayaks generally are stable, have a small turning radius and are easy to master, although some models take more effort to paddle and are slower than traditional kayaks.
Because inflatable kayaks aren't as sturdy as traditional, hard-shelled kayaks, a lot of people tend to steer away from them. However, there have been considerable advancements in inflatable kayak technology over recent years.
Folding
Folding kayaks are direct descendants of the skin-on-frame boats used by the Inuit and Greenlandic peoples. Modern folding kayaks are constructed from a wooden or aluminum frame over which is placed a synthetic skin made of polyester, cotton canvas, polyurethane, or Hypalon. They are more expensive than inflatable kayaks, but have the advantage of greater stiffness and consequently better seaworthiness.
Walter Höhn (English Hoehn) had built, developed and then tested his design for a folding kayak in the white-water rivers of Switzerland from 1924 to 1927. In 1928, on emigrating to Australia, he brought 2 of them with him, lodged a patent for the design and proceeded to manufacture them.
In 1942 the Australian Director of Military operations approached him to develop them for Military use. Orders were placed and eventually a total of 1024, notably the MKII & MKIII models, were produced by him and another enterprise, based on his 1942 patent (No. 117779)
Pedal
A kayak with pedals allows the kayaker to propel the vessel with a rotating propeller or underwater "flippers" rather than with a paddle. In contrast to paddling, kayakers who pedal kayaks use their legs rather than their arms. This allows for increased stamina and free hands while moving, making pedal kayaks popular among fishers.
Twin hull and outrigger
Traditional multi-hull vessels such as catamarans and outrigger canoes benefit from increased lateral stability without sacrificing speed, and these advantages have been successfully applied in twin hull kayaks. Outrigger kayaks attach one or two smaller hulls to the main hull to enhance stability, especially for fishing, touring, kayak sailing and motorized kayaking.
Twin hull kayaks feature two long and narrow hulls, and since all their buoyancy is distributed as far as possible from their center line, they are more stable than mono hull kayaks outfitted with outriggers.
Fishing
While native people of the Arctic regions hunted rather than fished from kayaks, in recent years kayak sport fishing has become popular in both fresh and salt water, especially in warmer regions. Traditional fishing kayaks are characterized by wide beams of up to that increase their lateral stability. Some are equipped with outriggers that increase their stability, and others feature twin hulls enabling stand up paddling and fishing. Compared with motorboats, fishing kayaks are inexpensive and have few maintenance costs. Many kayak anglers like to customize their kayaks for fishing, a process known as 'rigging'.
Military
Kayaks were adapted for military use in the Second World War. Used mainly by British Commandos and special forces, principally the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPPs), the Special Boat Service and the Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment. The latter made perhaps the best known use of them in the Operation Frankton raid on Bordeaux harbor. Both the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS) used kayaks for reconnaissance in the 1982 Falklands War. US Navy SEALs reportedly used them at the start of Unified Task Force operations in Somalia in 1992. The SBS currently use Klepper two-person folding kayaks that can be launched from surfaced submarines or carried to the surface by divers from submerged ones. They can be parachuted from transport aircraft at sea or dropped from the back of Chinook helicopters. US Special Forces have used Kleppers but now primarily use Long Haul folding kayaks, which are made in the US.
The Australian Military MKII and MKIII folding kayaks were extensively used during the 1941-1945 Pacific War for some 33 raids and missions on and around the South-East Asian islands. Documentation for this will be found in the National Archives of Australia official records, reference No. NAA K1214-123/1/06. They were deployed from disguised watercraft, submarines, Catalina aircraft, P.T. boats, motor launches and by parachute.
See also
Aleutian kayak
Boat
Canoe
Canoe & Kayak UK
Canoe polo
Canyoning
Creeking
Flyak
Freeboating
Kayak angst
Kayak fishing
Kayaking
Packraft
Playboating
Recreational kayak
Sea kayaking
Squirt boating
Surf kayaking
Umiak
Waveski
Whitewater slalom
References
Bibliography
External links
International Canoe Federation The International federation of kayak and canoe bodies
The Canadian Museum of Civilization – Native Watercraft in Canada
British Canoe Union The National Governing Body of Kayaking in the UK
USA Canoe and Kayak The National Governing Body of Kayaking in the U.S.
Greenlandinc terms for the parts of a kayak
A kayak made from clear wood and fiberglass with LEDs YouTube video
Inuit transport
Canoeing and kayaking equipment
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17385 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial%20German%20Navy | Imperial German Navy | The Imperial German Navy is the common English term for the Imperial Navy () of the German Empire. It existed between 1871 and 1919, growing out of the small Prussian Navy (from 1867 the North German Federal Navy), which was mainly for coast defence. Kaiser Wilhelm II greatly expanded the navy. The key leader was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who greatly expanded the size and quality of the navy, while adopting the sea power theories of American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. The result was a naval arms race with Britain as the German navy grew to become one of the greatest maritime forces in the world, second only to the Royal Navy.
The German surface navy proved ineffective during the First World War; its only major engagement, the Battle of Jutland, was a draw, but it kept the surface fleet largely in port for the rest of the war. The submarine fleet was greatly expanded and threatened the British supply system. As part of the Armistice, the Imperial Navy's main ships were ordered to be turned over to the Allies but they were instead scuttled by their own crews. All ships of the Imperial Navy bore the title SMS, for (His Majesty's Ship).
Achievements
The Imperial Navy achieved some important operational feats. At the Battle of Coronel, it inflicted the first major defeat on the Royal Navy in over one hundred years, although the German squadron of ships was subsequently defeated at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, only one ship escaping destruction. The Navy also emerged from the fleet action of the Battle of Jutland having destroyed more ships than it lost, although the strategic value of both of these encounters was minimal.
The Imperial Navy was the first to operate submarines successfully on a large scale in wartime, with 375 submarines commissioned by the end of the First World War, and it also operated zeppelins. Although it was never able to match the number of ships of the Royal Navy, it had technological advantages, such as better shells and propellant for much of the Great War, meaning that it never lost a ship to a catastrophic magazine explosion from an above-water attack, although the elderly pre-dreadnought sank rapidly at Jutland after a magazine explosion was caused by an underwater attack.
1871 to 1888, Kaiser Wilhelm I
The unification of Germany under Prussian leadership was the defining point for the creation of the Imperial Navy in 1871. The newly created emperor, Wilhelm I, as King of Prussia, had previously been head of state of the strongest state forming part of the new empire. The navy remained the same as that operated by the empire's predecessor organisation in the unification of Germany, the North German Confederation, which itself in 1867 had inherited the navy of the Kingdom of Prussia. Article 53 of the new Empire's constitution recognised the existence of the Navy as an independent organisation, but until 1888 it was commanded by army officers and initially adopted the same regulations as the Prussian army. Supreme command was vested in the emperor, but its first appointed chief was General der Infanterie (General of the Infantry) Albrecht von Stosch. Kiel on the Baltic Sea and Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea served as the Navy's principal naval bases. The former Navy Ministry became the Imperial Admiralty on 1 February 1872, while Stosch became formally an admiral in 1875. Initially the main task of the new Imperial Navy was coastal protection, with France and Russia seen as Germany's most likely future enemies. The Imperial Navy's tasks were then to prevent any invasion force from landing and to protect coastal towns from possible bombardment.
In March 1872 a German Imperial Naval Academy was created at Kiel for training officers, followed in May by the creation of a 'Machine Engineer Corps', and in February 1873 a 'Medical Corps'. In July 1879 a separate 'Torpedo Engineer Corps' was created dealing with torpedoes and mines.
In May 1872 a ten-year building programme was instituted to modernise the fleet. This called for eight armoured frigates, six armoured corvettes, twenty light corvettes, seven monitors, two floating batteries, six avisos, eighteen gunboats and twenty-eight torpedo boats, at an estimated cost of 220 million gold marks. The building plan had to be approved by the Reichstag, which controlled the allocation of funds, although one-quarter of the money came from French war reparations.
In 1883 Stosch was replaced by another general, Count Leo von Caprivi. At this point the navy had seven armoured frigates and four armoured corvettes, 400 officers and 5,000 ratings. The objectives of coastal defence remained largely unchanged, but there was a new emphasis on development of the torpedo, which offered the possibility of relatively small ships successfully attacking much larger ones. In October 1887 the first torpedo division was created at Wilhelmshaven and the second torpedo division based at Kiel. In 1887 Caprivi requested the construction of ten armoured frigates.
Greater importance was placed at this time on development of the army, which was expected to be more important in any war. However, the Kiel Canal was commenced in June 1887, which connected the North Sea with the Baltic through the Jutland peninsula, allowing German ships to travel between the two seas avoiding waters controlled by other countries. This shortened the journey for commercial ships, but specifically united the two areas principally of concern to the German navy, at a cost of 150 million marks.
Later, the protection of German maritime trade routes became important. This soon involved the setting up of some overseas supply stations, so called Auswärtige Stationen (foreign stations) and in the 1880s the Imperial Navy played a part in helping to secure the establishment of German colonies and protectorates in Africa, Asia and Oceania.
1888 to 1897 under Kaiser Wilhelm II
In June 1888 Wilhelm II became Emperor after the death of his father Frederick III, who ruled for only 99 days. He started his reign with the intention of doing for the navy what his grandfather Wilhelm I had done for the army. The creation of a maritime empire to rival the British and French empires became an ambition to mark Germany as a truly global great power. Wilhelm became Grand Admiral of the German Navy, but also was awarded honorific titles from all over Europe, becoming admiral in the British, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Austro-Hungarian and Greek navies. On one occasion he wore the uniform of a British admiral to receive the visiting British ambassador. At this time the Imperial Navy had 534 officers and 15,480 men.
The concept of expanding naval power, inevitably at the cost of not expanding other forces, was opposed by the three successive heads of the German armed forces, Waldersee, Schlieffen and Moltke between 1888 and 1914. It would also have been more widely opposed, had the Kaiser's intentions been widely known. Instead, he proceeded with a plan to expand the navy slowly, justifying enlargement step by step.
In July 1888 Wilhelm II appointed Vice-Admiral Alexander von Monts as head of the admiralty. Monts oversaw the design of the , four of which were constructed by 1894 at a cost of 16 million marks each and displacement of 10,000 tons.
In 1889 Wilhelm II reorganised top level control of the navy by creating a Navy Cabinet (Marine-Kabinett) equivalent to the German Imperial Military Cabinet which had previously functioned in the same capacity for both the army and navy. The Head of the navy cabinet was responsible for promotions, appointments, administration and issuing orders to naval forces. Captain Gustav von Senden-Bibran was appointed as its first head and remained so until 1906, when he was replaced by the long-serving Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller. The existing Imperial admiralty was abolished and its responsibilities divided between two organisations. A new position of Chief of the Imperial Naval High Command was created, being responsible for ship deployments, strategy and tactics, an equivalent to the supreme commander of the Army. Vice admiral Max von der Goltz was appointed in 1889 and remained in post until 1895. Construction and maintenance of ships and obtaining supplies was the responsibility of the State Secretary of the Imperial Navy Office (Reichsmarineamt), responsible to the chancellor and advising the Reichstag on naval matters. The first appointee was Rear Admiral Karl Eduard Heusner, followed shortly by Rear Admiral Friedrich von Hollmann from 1890 to 1897. Each of these three heads of department reported separately to Wilhelm II.
In 1895 funding was agreed for five battleships of the , completed by 1902. The ships were innovative for their time, introducing a complex system of watertight compartments and storing coal along the sides of the ship to help absorb explosions. However, the ships went against the trend for increasingly larger main guns, having smaller diameter guns than the Brandenburg design, but with a quick-loading design and more powerful secondary armaments. Costs rose to 21 million marks each, as had size to 11,500 tons.
In 1892 Germany had launched the protected cruiser , the first navy ship to have triple propellers. She was succeeded by five protected cruisers, the last 'protected', as distinct from 'armoured' cruiser class constructed by Germany. The ships, completed between 1898 and 1900, had deck armour but not side armour and were intended for overseas duties. Shortages of funding meant it was not possible to create several designs of cruisers specialised for long range work, or more heavily armoured for fleet work. Work commenced on an armoured cruiser design, started in 1896 and commissioned in 1900.
1897 to 1906 Tirpitz and the Navy Bills
On 18 June 1897 Rear-Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was appointed State Secretary of the Navy, where he remained for nineteen years. Tirpitz advocated the cause of an expanded navy necessary for Germany to defend her territories abroad. He had great success in persuading parliament to pass successive Navy bills authorising expansions of the fleet. German foreign policy as espoused by Otto von Bismarck had been to deflect the interest of great powers abroad while Germany consolidated her integration and military strength. Now Germany was to compete with the rest. Tirpitz started with a publicity campaign aimed at popularising the navy. He created popular magazines about the navy, arranged for Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History, which argued the importance of naval forces, to be translated into German and serialised in newspapers, arranged rallies in support and invited politicians and industrialists to naval reviews. Various pressure groups were formed to lobby politicians and spread publicity. One such organisation, the navy league or Flottenverein, was organized by principals in the steel industry (Alfred Krupp), ship yards and banks, gaining more than one million members. Political parties were offered concessions, such as taxes on imported grain, in exchange for their support for naval bills.
On 10 April 1898 the first Navy Bill was passed by the Reichstag. It authorised the maintenance of a fleet of 19 battleships, 8 armoured cruisers, 12 large cruisers and 30 light cruisers to be constructed by 1 April 1904. Existing ships were counted in the total, but the bill provided for ships to be replaced every 25 years on an indefinite basis. Five million marks annually was allocated to run the navy, with a total budget of 408 million marks for shipbuilding. This would bring the German fleet to a strength where it could contemplate challenging France or Russia, but would remain clearly inferior to the world's largest fleet, the Royal Navy.
Following the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Boer War, a second navy bill was passed on 14 June 1900. This approximately doubled the allocated number of ships to 38 battleships, 20 armoured cruisers, 38 light cruisers. Significantly, the bill set no overall cost limit for the building program. Expenditure for the navy was too great to be met from taxation: the Reichstag had limited powers to extend taxation without entering into negotiations with the constituent German states, and this was considered politically unviable. Instead, the bill was financed by massive loans. Tirpitz, in 1899 was already exploring the possibilities for extending the battleship total to 45, a target which rose to 48 by 1909.
Tirpitz's ultimate goal was a fleet capable of rivaling the Royal Navy. As British public opinion was turned against Germany, Admiral Sir John Fisher twice – in 1904 and 1908 – proposed using Britain's current naval superiority to 'Copenhagen' the German fleet, that is, to launch pre-emptive strikes against the Kiel and Wilhelmshaven naval bases as the Royal Navy had done against the Danish navy in 1801 and 1807." Tirpitz argued that if the fleet could achieve two-thirds the number of capital ships possessed by Britain then it stood a chance of winning in a conflict. Britain had to maintain a fleet throughout the world and consider other naval powers, whereas the German fleet could be concentrated in German waters . Attempts were made to play down the perceived threat to Britain, but once the German fleet reached the position of equalling the other second-rank navies, it became impossible to avoid mention of the one great fleet it was intended to challenge. Tirpitz hoped that other second-rank powers might ally with Germany, attracted by its navy. The policy of commencing what amounted to a naval arms race did not properly consider how Britain might respond. British policy, stated in the Naval Defence Act of 1889, was to maintain a navy superior to Britain's two largest rivals combined. The British Admiralty estimated that the German navy would be the world's second largest by 1906.
Major reforms of the Royal Navy were undertaken, particularly by Fisher as First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1909. 154 older ships, including 17 battleships, were scrapped to make way for newer vessels. Reforms in training and gunnery were introduced to make good perceived deficiencies, which in part Tirpitz had counted upon to provide his ships with a margin of superiority. More capital ships were stationed in British home waters. A treaty with Japan in 1902 meant that ships could be withdrawn from East Asia, while the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904 meant that Britain could concentrate on guarding Channel waters, including the French coast, while France would protect British interests in the Mediterranean. By 1906 it was considered that Britain's only likely naval enemy was Germany.
Five battleships of the were constructed from 1899 to 1904 at a cost of 22 million marks per ship. Five ships of the were built between 1901 and 1906 for the slightly greater 24 million marks each. Technological improvements meant that rapid fire guns could be made larger, so the Braunschweig class had a main armament of guns. Due to torpedo improvements in range and accuracy, emphasis was placed on a secondary armament of smaller guns to defend against them. The five s constructed between 1903 and 1908 had similar armament as the Braunschweig class, but heavier armour, for the slightly greater sum of 24.5 million marks each.
Development of armoured cruisers also continued. Fürst Bismarcks design was improved upon in the subsequent , completed in 1902. Two ships of the were commissioned in 1904, followed by two similar armoured cruisers commissioned in 1905 and 1906, at costs around 17 million marks each. and followed, between 1904 and 1908, and cost an estimated for 20.3 million marks. Main armament was eight guns, but with six and eighteen guns for smaller targets. Eight light cruisers were constructed between 1902 and 1907, developed from the earlier . The ships had ten guns and were named after German towns. was the first German cruiser to be fitted with turbine engines, which were also trialled in torpedo boat S-125. Turbines were faster, quieter, lighter, more reliable and more fuel efficient at high speeds. The first British experimental design (the destroyer ) had been constructed in 1901 and as a result Tirpitz had set up a special commission to develop turbines. No reliable German design was available by 1903, so British Parsons turbines were purchased.
Command reorganisation
In 1899, the Imperial Naval High Command was replaced by the German Imperial Admiralty Staff (Admiralstab) responsible for planning, the training of officers, and naval intelligence. In time of war it was to assume overall command, but in peace acted only advisory. Direct control of various elements of the fleet was subordinated to officers commanding those elements, accountable to the Kaiser.
The reorganisations suited the Kaiser who wanted to maintain direct control of his ships. A disadvantage was that it split apart the integrated military command structure which before had balanced the importance of the navy within overall defence considerations. It suited Alfred von Tirpitz, because it removed the influence of the admiralty staff from naval planning, but left him the possibility, in wartime, to reorganise command around himself. Wilhelm II, however, never agreed to relinquish direct control of his fleet.
1906 to 1908, The Dreadnought and innovation: First Novelle
On 3 December 1906 the Royal Navy received a new battleship, . She became famous as the first of a new concept in battleship design, using all big gun, single size of calibre armament. She used turbine propulsion for greater speed and less space required by the machinery, and guns arranged so that three times as many could be brought to bear when firing ahead, and twice as many when firing broadside. The design was not a uniquely British concept as similar ships were being built around the world, nor was it uniquely intended as a counter to German naval expansion, but the effect was to immediately require Germany to reconsider its naval building program. The battleship design was complemented by the introduction of a variant with lighter armour and greater speed, which became the battlecruiser.
The revolution in design, together with improvements in personnel and training severely brought into question the German assumption that a fleet of two-thirds the size of the Royal Navy would at least stand a chance in an engagement. By 1906 Germany was already spending 60% of revenue upon the army. Either an enormous sum now had to be found to develop the navy further, or naval expansion had to be abandoned. The decision to continue was taken by Tirpitz in September 1905 and agreed by Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow and the Kaiser, while Dreadnought was still at the planning stage. The larger ships would naturally be more expensive, but also would require enlargement of harbours, locks and the Kiel canal, all of which would be enormously expensive. Estimated cost for new dreadnoughts was placed at 36.5 million marks for 19,000 tons displacement ships (larger than Dreadnought at 17,900 tons), and 27.5 million marks for battle-cruisers. 60 million mark was allocated for dredging the canal. The Reichstag was persuaded to agree to the program and passed a Novelle (a supplementary law) amending the navy bills and allocating 940 million marks for a dreadnought program and the necessary infrastructure. Two dreadnoughts and one battlecruiser were to be built each year.
Construction of four s began in 1907 under the greatest possible secrecy. The chief German naval designer was Hans Bürkner. A principle was introduced that the thickness of side armour on a ship would equal the calibre of the large guns, while ships were increasingly divided internally into watertight compartments to make them more resistant to flooding when damaged. The design was hampered by the necessity to use reciprocating engines instead of the smaller turbines, since no sufficiently powerful design was available and acceptable to the German navy. Turrets could not be placed above the centre of the ship and instead had to be placed at the side, meaning two of the six turrets would always be on the wrong side of the ship when firing broadsides. Main armament was twelve 28 cm guns. The ships were all completed by 1910, over budget, averaging 37.4 million marks each. In 1910 they were transferred from Kiel to Wilhelmshaven, where two new large docks had been completed and more were under construction.
The first German battlecruiser——was commenced March 1908. Four Parsons turbines were used, improving speed to 27 knots and reducing weight. Four twin turrets mounted 28 cm guns; although the two centre turrets were still placed one either side of the ship, they were offset so could now fire either side. The design was considered a success, but the cost at 35.5 million marks was significantly above the 1906 allocation. Light cruiser development continued with the light cruisers, which were to become famous for their actions in the start of World War I in the Pacific. The ships were 3,300 tons, and armed with ten 10.5 cm rapid fire guns and a speed around 24 knots. cost 7.5 million marks, and 6 million marks. Four were produced between 1907 and 1911 at 4,400 tons and around 8 million marks each. These had turbines, twelve 10.5 cm guns as main armament, but were also equipped to carry and lay 100 mines. From 1907 onward, all torpedo boats were constructed using turbine engines.
Despite their ultimate importance, the German navy declined to take up the cause of another experiment, the submarine, until 1904. The first submarine, was delivered in December 1906, built by Krupp's Germania yard in Kiel. The first submarine had 238 ton displacement on the surface and 283 tons submerged. The kerosene engine developed 10 knots on the surface with a range of . Submerged, the ship could manage 50 nautical miles at 5 knots using battery electric propulsion. The ships followed a design by Maxime Laubeuf first used successfully in 1897, having a double hull and flotation tanks around the outside of the main crew compartments. The submarine had just one torpedo tube at the front and a total of three torpedoes. The early engines were noisy and smoky, so that a considerable boost to the usefulness of the submarine came with the introduction of quieter and cleaner diesel engines in 1910, which were much more difficult for an enemy to detect.
1908 to 1912, Second Novelle
German expenditure on ships was steadily rising. In 1907, 290 million marks was spent on the fleet, rising to 347 million marks or 24 percent of the national budget in 1908, with a predicted budget deficit of 500 million marks. By the outbreak of World War I, one billion marks had been added to Germany's national debt because of naval expenditures. While each German ship was more expensive than the last, the British managed to reduce the cost of the succeeding generations of (3 ships) and (3) battleships. Successive British battlecruisers were more expensive, but less so than their German equivalents. Overall, German ships were some 30% more expensive than the British. This all contributed to growing opposition in the Reichstag to any further expansion, particularly when it was clear that Britain intended to match and exceed any German expansion program. In the fleet itself, complaints were beginning to be made in 1908 about underfunding and shortages of crews for the new ships. The State Secretary of the Treasury, Hermann von Stengel, resigned because he could see no way to resolve the budget deficit.
The elections of 1907 had returned a Reichstag more favourable to military exploits, following the refusal of the previous parliament to grant funds to suppress uprisings in colonies in German South-West Africa. Despite the difficulties, Tirpitz persuaded the Reichstag to pass a further Novelle in March 1908. This reduced the service life for ships from 25 years to 20 years, allowing for faster modernisation, and increased the building rate to four capital ships per year. Tirpitz's target was a fleet of 16 battleships and 5 battlecruisers by 1914, and 38 battleships and 20 battlecruisers by 1920. There were also to be 38 light cruisers, and 144 torpedo boats. The bill contained a restriction, that building would fall to two ships per year in 1912, but Tirpitz was confident of changing this at a later date. He anticipated that German industry, now heavily involved in shipbuilding, would back a campaign to maintain a higher construction rate.
Four battleships of the were laid down in 1909–10, with displacements of 22,800 tons, twelve guns in 6 turrets, reciprocating engines generating a maximum speed of 21 knots, and a price tag of 46 million marks. Again, the turret configuration was dictated by the need to use the centre of the ship for machinery, despite the disadvantage of the turret layout. The ships were now equipped with torpedoes.
The s built between 1909 and 1913 introduced a change in design as turbine engines were finally approved. The ships had ten 30.5 cm guns, losing two of the centre side turrets but gaining an additional turret astern on the centre line. As with the Von der Tann design, which was drawn up at a similar time, all guns could be fired either side in broadsides, meaning more guns could come to bear than with the Helgoland design, despite having fewer in total. Five ships were constructed rather than the usual four, one to act as a fleet flagship. One ship, the , was equipped with only two turbines rather than three, with the intention of having an additional diesel engine for cruising, but the Howaldt engine could not be developed in time. Luitpold had a top speed of 20 knots as a result, compared to 22 knots for the other ships. The ships were larger than the preceding class at 24,700 tons, but cheaper at 45 million marks. They formed part of the third squadron of the High Seas Fleet as it was constituted for World War I.
Between 1908 and 1912 two s were constructed, adding an extra turret on the centre line astern, raised above the aft turret, but still using 28 cm guns. became part of the High Seas Fleet, but became part of the Mediterranean squadron and spent World War I as part of the Ottoman navy. The ships cost 42.6 and 41.6 million marks, with maximum speed of 28 knots. was constructed as a slightly enlarged version of the Moltke design, reaching a maximum speed of 29 knots. All cruisers were equipped with turbine engines from 1908 onwards. Between 1910 and 1912 four light cruisers were constructed of 4,600 tons, at around 7.4 million marks each. The ships were fitted with oil burners to improve the effectiveness of their main coal fueling. These were followed by the similar but slightly enlarged and marginally faster and light cruisers.
In 1907 a naval artillery school was established at Sonderburg (north of Kiel). This aimed to address the difficulties with the new generation of guns, which with potentially greater range required aiming devices capable of directing them at targets at those extreme ranges. By 1914, experiments were being conducted with guns in increasing sizes up to . Capital ships were fitted with spotting tops high up on masts with range finding equipment, while ship design was altered to place turrets on the centre line of the ship for improved accuracy.
The four s were commenced between October 1911 and May 1912 and entered service in 1914 at a cost of 45 million marks, forming the other part of the Third Squadron of the High Seas Fleet. They were 28,500 tons, with a maximum speed of 21 knots from three triple-stage Brown-Boverie-Parsons turbines. Main armament was five double turrets housing twin 30.5 cm guns, arranged with two turrets fore and aft and one in the centre of the ship. The second turret at either end was raised higher than the outer so that it could fire over the top (superfiring). As with Prinzregent Luitpold, the ships were originally intended to have one diesel engine for cruising, but these were never developed and turbines were fitted instead. The ships were equipped with torpedo nets, trailed along the hull intended to stop torpedoes, but these reduced maximum speed to an impractical 8 knots and were later removed.
Construction began in 1910 of the first submarine powered by twin diesel engines. U-19 was twice the size of the first German submarine, had five times the range at cruising at 8 knots, or 15 knots maximum. There were now two bow and two stern torpedo tubes, with six torpedoes carried. The ships were designed to operate at a depth of , though could go to .
1912 to 1914, Third Novelle
Spending on the navy increased inexorably year by year. In 1909 Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow and Treasury Secretary Reinhold von Sydow attempted to pass a new budget boosting taxes in an attempt to reduce the deficit. The Social Democratic parties refused to accept the increased taxes on goods, while the conservatives opposed increases in inheritance taxes. Bülow and Sydow resigned in defeat and Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg became Chancellor. His attempted solution was to initiate negotiations with Britain for an agreed slow down in naval building. Negotiations came to nothing when in 1911 the Agadir Crisis brought France and Germany into conflict. Germany attempted to 'persuade' France to cede territory in the Middle Congo in return for giving France a free hand in Morocco. The effect was to raise concerns in Britain over Germany's expansionist aims, and encouraged Britain to form a closer relationship with France, including naval cooperation. Tirpitz saw this once again as an opportunity to press for naval expansion and the continuation of the four capital ships per year building rate into 1912. The January 1912 elections brought a Reichstag where the Social Democrats, opposed to military expansion, became the largest party.
The German army, mindful of the steadily increasing proportion of spending going to the navy, demanded an increase of 136,000 men to bring its size closer to that of France. In February 1912 the British war minister, Viscount Haldane, came to Berlin to discuss possible limits to naval expansion. Meanwhile, in Britain, the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill made a speech describing the German navy as a 'luxury', which was considered an insult when reported in Germany. The talks came to nothing, ending in recriminations over who had offered what. Bethmann-Hollweg argued for a guaranteed proportion of expenditure for the army, but failed when army officers refused to support him publicly. Tirpitz argued for six new capital ships, and got three, together with 15,000 additional sailors in a new combined military budget passed in April 1912. The new ships, together with the existing reserve flagship and four reserve battleships were to become one new squadron for the High Seas Fleet. In all the fleet would have five squadrons of eight battleships, twelve large cruisers and thirty small, plus additional cruisers for overseas duties. Tirpitz intended that with the rolling program of replacements, the existing coastal defence squadron of old ships would become a sixth fleet squadron, while the eight existing battle-cruisers would be joined by eight more as replacements for the large cruisers presently in the overseas squadrons. The plan envisaged a main fleet of 100,000 men, 49 battleships and 28 battlecruisers by 1920. The Kaiser commented of the British, "... we have them up against the wall."
Although Tirpitz had succeeded in getting more ships, the proportion of military expenditure on the navy declined in 1912 and thereafter, from 35% in 1911 to 33% in 1912 and 25% in 1913. This reflected a change in attitude amongst military planners that a land war in Europe was increasingly likely, and a turning away from Tirpitz's scheme for worldwide expansion using the navy. In 1912 General von Moltke commented, "I consider war to be unavoidable, and the sooner the better." The Kaiser's younger brother, Admiral Prince Heinrich of Prussia, considered that the cost of the navy was now too great. In Britain, Churchill announced an intention to build two capital ships for every one constructed by Germany, and reorganised the fleet to move battleships from the Mediterranean to Channel waters. A policy was introduced of promoting British naval officers by merit and ability rather than time served, which saw rapid promotions for Jellicoe and Beatty, both of whom had important roles in the forthcoming World War I. By 1913 the French and British had plans in place for joint naval action against Germany, and France moved its Atlantic fleet from Brest to Toulon, replacing British ships.
Britain also escalated the arms race by expanding the capabilities of its new battleships. The five 1912 of 32,000 tons would have guns and would be completely oil-fuelled, allowing a speed of 25 knots. For 1912–13 Germany concentrated on battlecruisers, with three ships of 27,000 tons and 26–27 knots maximum speed, costing 56–59 million marks each. These had four turrets mounting two 30.5 cm guns arranged in two turrets either end, with the inner turret superfiring over the outer. was the first German ship to have anti-aircraft guns fitted.
In 1913, Germany responded to the British challenge by laying down two battleships. These did not enter service until after the Battle of Jutland, so failed to take part in any major naval action of the war. They had displacement of 28,600 tons, a crew of 1,100 and a speed of 22 knots, costing 50 million marks. Guns were arranged in the same pattern as the preceding battle-cruisers, but were now increased to diameter. The ships had four 8.8 cm anti-aircraft and also sixteen 15 cm lighter guns, but were coal fuelled. It was considered that coal bunkers at the sides of the ship added to protection against penetrating shells, but Germany also did not have a reliable supply of fuel oil. Two more ships of the class were later laid down, but never completed.
Three light cruisers commenced construction in German yards in 1912–1913 ordered by the Russian Navy, costing around 9 million marks. The ships were seized at the outbreak of World War I becoming , and . Two larger cruisers, and were also commenced and entered service in 1915. More torpedo boats were constructed, with gradually increasing sizes having reached 800 tons for the V-25 to V-30 craft constructed by AG Vulcan in Kiel before 1914. In 1912 Germany created a Mediterranean squadron consisting of the battle-cruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau.
Air power
Naval trials of balloons began in 1891, but the results were unsatisfactory and none were purchased by the navy. In 1895 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin attempted to interest both the army and navy in his new rigid airships, but without success. The Zeppelin rigids were considered too slow and there were concerns with their reliability operating over water. In 1909 the navy rejected proposals for aircraft to be launched from ships, and again in 1910 declined Zeppelin's airships. Finally in 1911, trials with aircraft began and in 1912 Tirpitz agreed to purchase the first airship for naval reconnaissance at a cost of 850,000 marks.
The machine had insufficient range () to operate over Britain, but had machine guns for use against aircraft and experimental bombs. The following year ten more were ordered and a new naval air division was created at Johannisthal, near Berlin. However, in September 1913 L 1 was destroyed in a storm, while the following month L 2 was lost in a gas explosion. Orders for the undelivered machines were cancelled, leaving the navy with one machine, the L 3.
In 1910 Prince Heinrich had learned to fly and supported the cause of naval aviation. In 1911 experiments took place with Albatros seaplanes and in 1912 Tirpitz authorized 200,000 marks for seaplane trials. The Curtiss seaplane was adopted. By 1913 there were four aeroplanes, now including a British Sopwith, and long-term plans to create six naval air stations by 1918. By 1914, the Marine-Fliegerabteilung, the naval counterpart to the well-established Fliegertruppe land-based aviation units of the Army, comprised twelve seaplanes and one landplane and disposed of a budget of 8.5 million marks. Trials in 1914 using seaplanes operating with the fleet were less than impressive; out of four taking part one crashed, one was unable to take off and only one succeeded in all tasks. The most successful aircraft had been the British design, and indeed experiments in Britain had been proceeding with the support of Winston Churchill, and included converting ferries and liners into seaplane carriers.
World War I
By the start of the First World War, the German Imperial Navy possessed 22 pre-Dreadnoughts, 14 dreadnought battleships and 4 battle-cruisers. A further three ships of the König class were completed between August and November 1914, and two Bayern-class battleships entered service in 1916. The battlecruisers Derfflinger, , and were completed in September 1914, March 1916, and May 1917, respectively. All but the latest pre-Dreadnoughts were soon decommissioned, so that their crews could be transferred to more useful vessels.
The main fighting forces of the navy were to become the High Seas Fleet and the U-boat fleet. Smaller fleets were deployed to the German overseas protectorates, the most prominent being assigned to the East Asia Station at Tsingtao.
The German Navy's U-boats were also instrumental in the sinking of the passenger liner and auxiliary cruiser, the on 7 May 1915, which was one of the main events that led to the USA joining the war two years later in 1917.
Engagements
Notable battles fought by the Navy were:
Battle of Heligoland Bight (Rear Admiral Leberecht Maass) – 1914
Battle of Coronel (Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee) – 1914. The German East Asia Squadron defeated the British West Indies Squadron
Battle of the Falkland Islands (Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee) – 1914. The East Asia Squadron was defeated by British battlecruisers
Battle of Dogger Bank (Vice Admiral Franz Hipper) – 1915. Armoured cruiser Blücher sank and British battlecruiser Lion put out of action.
Battle of the Gulf of Riga (Vice Admiral Ehrhard Schmidt)
Battle of Jutland (Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer; Vice Admiral Franz Hipper) -1916. In the largest naval battle of the war several British ships were sunk or damaged but the High Seas Fleet was unable to damage the British Grand Fleet sufficiently to threaten the blockade of Germany .
Operation Albion, including Battle of Moon Sound (Vice Admiral Ehrhard Schmidt) – 1917. In the Baltic against Russian forces.
First Battle of the Atlantic – U-boat warfare
Notable minor battles:
Battle of Gotland
First Battle of Dover Strait – 1916. Torpedo boat attack on Dover Barrage
Second Battle of Dover Strait – 1917. Attack on Dover Barrage
Battle of Cocos
Raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby – 1914. Bombardment of British east coast ports.
Pursuit of Goeben and Breslau
Bombardment of Yarmouth and Lowestoft – 1916. Bombardment of British east coast ports.
Battle of Trindade
Minor engagements included the commerce raiding carried out by the Emden, , and the sailing ship and commerce raider .
The Imperial Navy carried out land operations, e.g. operating the long-range Paris Gun which was based on a naval gun. The Siege of Tsingtao used naval troops as Tsingtao was a naval base, and also as the Imperial Navy was directly under the Imperial Government (the German Army was made up of regiments from the various states).
Following the Battle of Jutland, the capital ships of the Imperial Navy had been confined to inactive service in harbor. In October 1918, the Imperial Naval Command in Kiel under Admiral Franz von Hipper, without authorization, planned to dispatch the fleet for a last battle against the Royal Navy in the English Channel. The naval order of 24 October 1918 and the preparations to sail first triggered the Kiel Mutiny among the affected sailors and then a general revolution which was to sweep aside the monarchy within a few days.
Marines
The Marines were referred to as Seebataillone (sea battalions). They served in the Prussian Navy, the North German Federal Navy, the Imperial German Navy and in the modern German Navy.
Naval aviation
The Marine-Fliegerabteilung consisted of Zeppelins (airships), observation balloons and fixed-wing aircraft.
The main use of the Zeppelins was in reconnaissance over the North Sea and the Baltic, where the endurance of the craft led German warships to a number of Allied vessels. Zeppelin patrolling had priority over any other airship activity. During the entire war around 1,200 scouting flights were made. During 1915 the German Navy had some 15 Zeppelins in commission and was able to have two or more patrolling continuously at any one time. They kept the British ships from approaching Germany, spotted when and where the British were laying sea-mines, and later aided in the destruction of those mines. Zeppelins would sometimes land on the sea surface next to a minesweeper, bring aboard an officer and show him the lay of the mines. The Naval and Army Air Services also directed a number of strategic raids against Britain, leading the way in bombing techniques and also forcing the British to bolster their anti-aircraft defences. The possibility of airship raids were approved by the Kaiser on 9 January 1915, although he excluded London as a target and further demanded that no attacks be made on historic or government buildings or museums. The night-time raids were intended to target only military sites on the east coast and around the Thames estuary, but difficulties in navigation and the height from which the bombs were dropped made accurate bombing impossible, and most bombs fell on civilian targets or open countryside.
Stationed in North Sea coastal airfields, German naval aircraft often fought against their British counterparts of the Royal Naval Air Service. Naval pilots flew aircraft that were also used by the German Army's Luftstreitkräfte in addition to seaplanes. Theo Osterkamp was one of the original naval pilots, the first German pilot to fly a land-based aircraft to England on a reconnaissance mission, and its leading ace with 32 victories. By war's end, the roster of German naval flying aces also included Gotthard Sachsenberg (31 victories), Alexander Zenzes (18 victories), Friedrich Christiansen (13 victories), Karl Meyer (8 victories), Karl Scharon (8 victories), and Hans Goerth (7 victories). Another decorated aviator was Gunther Plüschow who shot down a Japanese plane during the Siege of Tsingtao and was the only German combatant to escape from a prison camp in Britain.
List of aircraft that were assigned to naval air service:
Kaiserliche Werft Danzig 1105 – trainer
Hansa-Brandenburg W.12 – fighter floatplane
Hansa-Brandenburg W.29 – fighter floatplane
Naval Air Service Units included:Marine Jagdgruppe Flandern composed of:
Marine Feld Jasta I
Marine Feldflieger Abteilung II
Post war
After the end of World War I, the bulk of the navy's modern ships (74 in all) were interned at Scapa Flow (November 1918), where the entire fleet (with a few exceptions) was scuttled by its crews on 21 June 1919 on orders from its commander, Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter.
Ernest Cox subsequently salvaged many of the Scapa Flow ships.
The surviving ships of the Imperial Navy became the basis for the Reichsmarine of the Weimar Republic.
Ranks and ratings
The Imperial German Navy's rank and rating system combined that of Prussia's with the navies of other northern states.
War crimes
The Imperial German Navy was implicated in several war crimes committed during the First World War, most notably:
Raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby in 1914, in which several British ports were bombarded causing hundreds of civilian deaths.
The U-boat campaign. Prize rules, which required commerce raiders to warn their targets and allow time for the crew to board lifeboats were disregarded and commercial vessels were sunk regardless of nationality, cargo, or destination. Following the 1915 sinking of the the practice was withdrawn, but was then resumed in February 1917. This outraged the U.S. public, prompting the U.S. to enter the war on Allied side.
The execution of the civilian captain Charles Fryatt, who, while in command of the passenger ship , attempted to ram the submarine .
The sinking of the hospital ships HMHS Llandovery Castle, HS Koningin Regentes and HMHS Dover Castle.
See also
Anglo-German naval arms race
German entry into World War I
German Imperial Admiralty
Imperial German plans for the invasion of the United Kingdom
Kriegsmarine
List of German Imperial Navy ships
List of naval ships of Germany
Marine-Regatta-Verein
Naval warfare of World War I
Reichsflotte
References
Works cited
Franks, Norman; Bailey, Frank W.; Guest, Russell. Above the Lines: The Aces and Fighter Units of the German Air Service, Naval Air Service and Flanders Marine Corps, 1914–1918. Grub Street, 1993. , .
Halpern, Paul G. A naval history of World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995).
Lehmann, Ernst A.; Mingos, Howard. The Zeppelins: The Development of the Airship, with the Story of the Zepplin Air Raids in the World War. Chapter VI: "THE NORTH SEA PATROL—THE ZEPPELINS AT JUTLAND"(online chapter).
Further reading
Bird, Keith. "The Tirpitz Legacy: The Political Ideology of German Sea Power," Journal of Military History, July 2005, Vol. 69 Issue 3, pp 821–825.
Bönker, Dirk. Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States before World War I (2012)excerpt and text search; online review
Dodson, Aidan. The Kaiser’s Battlefleet: German Capital Ships 1871–1918 (Seaforth Publishing, 2016).
Epkenhans, Michael. Tirpitz: Architect of the German High Seas Fleet (2008).
Hobson, Rolf. "The German School of Naval Thought and the Origins of the Tirpitz Plan 1875-1900." Forsvarsstudier no. 2/1996 93pp online free
Kelly, Patrick J. "Strategy, Tactics, and Turf Wars: Tirpitz and the Oberkommando der Marine, 1892–1895," Journal of Military History, Oct 2002, Vol. 66 Issue 4, pp. 1033–1060
Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1989) online free to borrow
Kennedy, Paul. The Rise And Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976)
Kennedy, Paul. "Strategic Aspects of the Anglo-German Naval Race", in Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy 1870–1915 (1983)
Olivier, David H. German Naval Strategy, 1856-1888: Forerunners to Tirpitz (2004).
Parkinson, Roger. Dreadnought: The Ship that Changed the World (IB Tauris, 2014).
Rahn, Werner. "German Navies from 1848 to 2016: Their Development and Courses from Confrontation to Cooperation." Naval War College Review 70.4 (2017). online
Sondhaus, Lawrence. "'The Spirit of the Army’at Sea: The Prussian-German Naval Officer Corps, 1847–1897." International History Review 17.3 (1995): 459–484.
Steinberg, Jonathan. Yesterday's Deterrent. Tilpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (1965).
Woodward, E.L. Great Britain and the German Navy (1935) 535pp; scholarly history online
Primary sources
Scheer, Admiral Reinhard. Germany's High Sea Fleet in the World War (reprint Frontline Books, 2014).
In German
Cord Eberspächer: Die deutsche Yangtse-Patrouille. Deutsche Kanonenbootpolitik in China im Zeitalter des Imperialismus 1900–1914 (The German Yangtse Patrol. German gunboat diplomacy in China in the age of imperialism), Bochum 2004.
Gerhard Wiechmann: Die preußisch-deutsche Marine in Lateinamerika 1866–1914. Eine Studie deutscher Kanonenbootpolitik (The Prussian-German Navy in Latin America 1866–1914. A study of German gunboat diplomacy 1866–1914), Bremen 2002, .
Schneider, Dennis: Die Flottenpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1890er Jahre bis zum Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges, GRIN Verlag 2009.
External links
Imperial German Navy in World War I
German Naval History WW1
Kaiserliche Marine Deployment 1914
U-boat War in World War One
Historical footage of various vessels of the Imperial German Navy, filmportal.de
Disbanded navies
Military of the German Empire
Military of the German Empire by branch
Naval history of Germany
1871 establishments in Germany
1918 disestablishments in Germany
Military units and formations established in 1871
Military units and formations disestablished in 1918 | [
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17386 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsmarine | Kriegsmarine | The Kriegsmarine (, ) was the navy of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It superseded the Imperial German Navy of the German Empire (1871–1918) and the inter-war Reichsmarine (1919–1935) of the Weimar Republic. The Kriegsmarine was one of three official branches, along with the Heer and the Luftwaffe, of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces from 1935 to 1945.
In violation of the Treaty of Versailles, the Kriegsmarine grew rapidly during German naval rearmament in the 1930s. The 1919 treaty had limited the size of the German navy and prohibited the building of submarines.
Kriegsmarine ships were deployed to the waters around Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) under the guise of enforcing non-intervention, but in reality supported the Nationalists against the Spanish Republicans.
In January 1939, Plan Z, a massive ship-building program, was ordered, calling for surface naval parity with the British Royal Navy by 1944. When World War II broke out in September 1939, Plan Z was shelved in favour of a crash building program for submarines (U-boats) instead of capital surface warships, and land and air forces were given priority of strategic resources.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine (as for all branches of armed forces during the period of absolute Nazi power) was Adolf Hitler, who exercised his authority through the Oberkommando der Marine ("High Command of the Navy").
The Kriegsmarine most significant ships were the U-boats, most of which were constructed after Plan Z was abandoned at the beginning of World War II. Wolfpacks were rapidly assembled groups of submarines which attacked British convoys during the first half of the Battle of the Atlantic but this tactic was largely abandoned by May 1943 when U-boat losses mounted. Along with the U-boats, surface commerce raiders (including auxiliary cruisers) were used to disrupt Allied shipping in the early years of the war, the most famous of these being the heavy cruisers Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer and the battleship Bismarck. However, the adoption of convoy escorts, especially in the Atlantic, greatly reduced the effectiveness of surface commerce raiders against convoys.
Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Kriegsmarine remaining ships were divided up among the Allied powers and were used for various purposes including minesweeping. Some were loaded with superfluous chemical weapons and scuttled.
History
Post–World War I origins
Under the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Germany was only allowed a minimal navy of 15,000 personnel, six capital ships of no more than 10,000 tons, six cruisers, twelve destroyers, twelve torpedo boats and no submarines or aircraft carriers. Military aircraft were also banned, so Germany could have no naval aviation. Under the treaty Germany could only build new ships to replace old ones. All the ships allowed and personnel were taken over from the Kaiserliche Marine, renamed the Reichsmarine.
From the outset, Germany worked to circumvent the military restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. The Germans continued to develop U-boats through a submarine design office in the Netherlands (NV Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw) and a torpedo research program in Sweden where the G7e torpedo was developed.
Even before the Nazi seizure of power on 30 January 1933 the German government decided on 15 November 1932 to launch a prohibited naval re-armament program that included U-boats, airplanes and an aircraft carrier.
The launching of the first pocket battleship, in 1931 (as a replacement for the old pre-dreadnought battleship Preussen) was a step in the formation of a modern German fleet. The building of the Deutschland caused consternation among the French and the British as they had expected that the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles would limit the replacement of the pre-dreadnought battleships to coastal defence ships, suitable only for defensive warfare. By using innovative construction techniques, the Germans had built a heavy ship suitable for offensive warfare on the high seas while still abiding by the letter of the treaty.
Nazi control
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler soon began to more brazenly ignore many of the Treaty restrictions and accelerated German naval rearmament. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 18 June 1935 allowed Germany to build a navy equivalent to 35% of the British surface ship tonnage and 45% of British submarine tonnage; battleships were to be limited to no more than 35,000 tons. That same year the Reichsmarine was renamed as the Kriegsmarine. In April 1939, as tensions escalated between the United Kingdom and Germany over Poland, Hitler unilaterally rescinded the restrictions of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.
The building-up of the German fleet in the time period of 1935–1939 was slowed by problems with marshaling enough manpower and material for ship building. This was because of the simultaneous and rapid build-up of the German army and air force which demanded substantial effort and resources. Some projects, like the D-class cruisers and the P-class cruisers, had to be cancelled.
Spanish Civil War
The first military action of the Kriegsmarine came during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Following the outbreak of hostilities in July 1936 several large warships of the German fleet were sent to the region. The heavy cruisers and , and the light cruiser were the first to be sent in July 1936. These large ships were accompanied by the 2nd Torpedo-boat Flotilla. The German presence was used to covertly support Franco's Nationalists although the immediate involvement of the was humanitarian relief operations and evacuating 9,300 refugees, including 4,550 German citizens. Following the brokering of the International Non-Intervention Patrol to enforce an international arms embargo the Kriegsmarine was allotted the patrol area between Cabo de Gata (Almeria) and Cabo de Oropesa. Numerous vessels served as part of these duties including . On 29 May 1937 the Deutschland was attacked off Ibiza by two bombers from the Republican Air Force. Total casualties from the Republican attack were 31 dead and 110 wounded, 71 seriously, mostly burn victims. In retaliation the Admiral Scheer shelled Almeria on 31 May killing 19–20 civilians, wounding 50 and destroying 35 buildings. Following further attacks by Republican submarines against the off the port of Oran between 15 and 18 June 1937 Germany withdrew from the Non-Intervention Patrol.
U-boats also participated in covert action against Republican shipping as part of Operation Ursula. At least eight U-boats engaged a small number of targets in the area throughout the conflict. (By comparison the Italian Regia Marina operated 58 submarines in the area as part of the Sottomarini Legionari.)
Plan Z
The Kriegsmarine saw as her main tasks the controlling of the Baltic Sea and winning a war against France in connection with the German army, because France was seen as the most likely enemy in the event of war. But in 1938 Hitler wanted to have the possibility of winning a war against Great Britain at sea in the coming years. Therefore, he ordered plans for such a fleet from the Kriegsmarine. From the three proposed plans (X, Y and Z) he approved Plan Z in January 1939. This blueprint for the new German naval construction program envisaged building a navy of approximately 800 ships during the period 1939–1947. Hitler demanded that the program was to be completed by 1945. The main force of Plan Z were six H-class battleships. In the version of Plan Z drawn up in August 1939 the German fleet was planned to consist of the following ships by 1945:
4 aircraft carriers
10 battleships
15 armored ships (Panzerschiffe)
3 battlecruisers
5 heavy cruisers
44 light cruisers
158 destroyers and torpedo boats
249 submarines
Numerous smaller craft
Personnel strength was planned to rise to over 200,000.
The planned naval program was not very far advanced by the time World War II began. In 1939 two s and two H-class battleships were laid down and parts for two further H-class battleships and three s were in production. The strength of the German fleet at the beginning of the war was not even 20% of Plan Z. On 1 September 1939, the navy still had a total personnel strength of only 78,000, and it was not at all ready for a major role in the war. Because of the long time it would take to get the Plan Z fleet ready for action and shortage in workers and material in wartime, Plan Z was essentially shelved in September 1939 and the resources allocated for its realization were largely redirected to the construction of U-boats, which would be ready for war against the United Kingdom more quickly.
World War II
The Kriegsmarine participated in the Battle of Westerplatte and the Battle of the Danzig Bay during the invasion of Poland. In 1939, major events for the Kriegsmarine were the sinking of the British aircraft carrier and the British battleship and the loss of the at the Battle of the River Plate. Submarine attacks on Britain's vital maritime supply routes (Battle of the Atlantic) started immediately at the outbreak of war, although they were hampered by the lack of well placed ports from which to operate. Throughout the war the Kriegsmarine was responsible for coastal artillery protecting major ports and important coastal areas. It also operated anti-aircraft batteries protecting major ports.
In April 1940, the German Navy was heavily involved in the invasion of Norway, where it suffered significant losses, which included the heavy cruiser sunk by artillery and torpedoes from Norwegian shore batteries at the Oscarsborg Fortress in the Oslofjord. Ten destroyers were lost in the Battles of Narvik (half of German destroyer strength at the time), and two light cruisers, the Königsberg which was bombed and sunk by Royal Navy aircraft in Bergen, and the Karlsruhe which was sunk off the coast of Kristiansand by a British submarine. The Kriegsmarine did in return sink some British warships during this campaign, including the aircraft carrier .
The losses in the Norwegian Campaign left only a handful of undamaged heavy ships available for the planned, but never executed, invasion of the United Kingdom (Operation Sea Lion) in the summer of 1940. There were serious doubts that the invasion sea routes could have been protected against British naval interference. The Fall of France and the conquest of Norway gave German submarines greatly improved access to British shipping routes in the Atlantic. At first, British convoys lacked escorts that were adequate either in numbers or equipment and, as a result, the submarines had much success for few losses (this period was dubbed the First Happy Time by the Germans).
Italy entered the war in June 1940, and the Battle of the Mediterranean began: from September 1941 to May 1944 some 62 German submarines were transferred there, sneaking past the British naval base at Gibraltar. The Mediterranean submarines sank 24 major Allied warships (including 12 destroyers, 4 cruisers, 2 aircraft carriers and 1 battleship) and 94 merchant ships (449,206 tons of shipping). None of the Mediterranean submarines made it back to their home bases, as they were all either sunk in battle or scuttled by their crews at the end of the war.
In 1941 one of the four modern German battleships, sank while breaking out into the Atlantic for commerce raiding. Bismarck was in turn hunted down by much superior British forces after being crippled by an air-launched torpedo. She was subsequently scuttled after being rendered a burning wreck by two British battleships.
In November of 1941 during the Battle of the Mediterranean, German submarineU-331 sank British battleship Barham, which had a magazine explosion and sank in minutes, with the loss of 862, or 2/3 of her crew.
During 1941, the Kriegsmarine and the United States Navy became de facto belligerents, although war was not formally declared, leading to the sinking of the . This course of events were the result of the American decision to support Britain with its Lend-Lease program and the subsequent decision to escort Lend-Lease convoys with American war ships through the western part of the Atlantic.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent German declaration of war against the United States in December 1941 led to another phase of the Battle of the Atlantic. In Operation Drumbeat and subsequent operations until August 1942, a large number of Allied merchant ships were sunk by submarines off the American coast as the Americans had not prepared for submarine warfare, despite clear warnings (this was the so-called Second Happy Time for the German Navy). The situation became so serious that military leaders feared for the whole Allied strategy. The vast American ship building capabilities and naval forces were however now brought into the war and soon more than offset any losses inflicted by the German submariners. In 1942, the submarine warfare continued on all fronts, and when German forces in the Soviet Union reached the Black Sea, a few submarines were eventually transferred there.
In February 1942, the three large warships stationed on the Atlantic coast at Brest were evacuated back to German ports for deployment to Norway. The ships had been repeatedly damaged by air attacks by the RAF, the supply ships to support Atlantic sorties had been destroyed by the Royal Navy, and Hitler now felt that Norway was the "zone of destiny" for these ships. The two battleships and and the heavy cruiser passed through the English Channel (Channel Dash) on their way to Norway despite British efforts to stop them. Not since the Spanish Armada in 1588 had any warships in wartime done this. It was a tactical victory for the Kriegsmarine and a blow to British morale, but the withdrawal removed the possibility of attacking allied convoys in the Atlantic with heavy surface ships.
With the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 Britain started to send Arctic convoys with military goods around Norway to support their new ally. In 1942 German forces began heavily attacking these convoys, mostly with bombers and U-boats. The big ships of the Kriegsmarine in Norway were seldom involved in these attacks, because of the inferiority of German radar technology, and because Hitler and the leadership of the Kriegsmarine feared losses of these precious ships. The most effective of these attacks was the near destruction of Convoy PQ 17 in July 1942. Later in the war German attacks on these convoys were mostly reduced to U-boat activities and the mass of the allied freighters reached their destination in Soviet ports.
The Battle of the Barents Sea in December 1942 was an attempt by a German naval surface force to attack an Allied Arctic convoy. However, the advantage was not pressed home and they returned to base. There were serious implications: this failure infuriated Hitler, who nearly enforced a decision to scrap the surface fleet. Instead, resources were diverted to new U-boats, and the surface fleet became a lesser threat to the Allies.
After December 1943 when had been sunk in an attack on an Arctic convoy in the Battle of North Cape by , most German surface ships in bases at the Atlantic were blockaded in, or close to, their ports as a fleet in being, for fear of losing them in action and to tie up British naval forces. The largest of these ships, the battleship , was stationed in Norway as a threat to Allied shipping and also as a defence against a potential Allied invasion. When she was sunk, after several attempts, by British bombers in November 1944 (Operation Catechism), several British capital ships could be moved to the Far East.
From late 1944 until the end of the war, the surviving surface fleet of the Kriegsmarine (heavy cruisers: , , , , light cruisers: , , ) was heavily engaged in providing artillery support to the retreating German land forces along the Baltic coast and in ferrying civilian refugees to the western Baltic Sea parts of Germany (Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein) in large rescue operations. Large parts of the population of eastern Germany fled the approaching Red Army out of fear for Soviet retaliation (mass rapes, killings and looting by Soviet troops did occur). The Kriegsmarine evacuated two million civilians and troops in the evacuation of East Prussia and Danzig from January to May 1945. It was during this activity that the catastrophic sinking of several large passenger ships occurred: and were sunk by Soviet submarines, while was sunk by British bombers, each sinking claiming thousands of civilian lives. The Kriegsmarine also provided important assistance in the evacuation of the fleeing German civilians of Pomerania and Stettin in March and April 1945.
A desperate measure of the Kriegsmarine to fight the superior strength of the Western Allies from 1944 was the formation of the Kleinkampfverbände (Small Battle Units). These were special naval units with frogmen, manned torpedoes, motorboats laden with explosives and so on. The more effective of these weapons and units were the development and deployment of midget submarines like the Molch and Seehund. In the last stage of the war, the Kriegsmarine also organized a number of divisions of infantry from its personnel.
Between 1943 and 1945, a group of U-boats known as the Monsun Boats (Monsun Gruppe) operated in the Indian Ocean from Japanese bases in the occupied Dutch East Indies and Malaya. Allied convoys had not yet been organized in those waters, so initially many ships were sunk. However, this situation was soon remedied. During the later war years, the Monsun Boats were also used as a means of exchanging vital war supplies with Japan.
During 1943 and 1944, due to Allied anti-submarine tactics and better equipment the U-boat fleet started to suffer heavy losses. The turning point of the Battle of the Atlantic was during Black May in 1943, when the U-boat fleet started suffering heavy losses and the number of Allied ships sunk started to decrease. Radar, longer range air cover, sonar, improved tactics and new weapons all contributed. German technical developments, such as the Schnorchel, attempted to counter these. Near the end of the war a small number of the new Elektroboot U-boats (XXI and XXIII) became operational, the first submarines designed to operate submerged at all times. The Elektroboote had the potential to negate the Allied technological and tactical advantage, although they were deployed too late to see combat in the war.
War crimes
Following the capture of Liepāja in Latvia by the Germans on 29 June 1941, the town came under the command of the Kriegsmarine. On 1 July 1941, the town commandant Korvettenkapitän Stein ordered that ten hostages be shot for every act of sabotage, and further put civilians in the zone of targeting by declaring that Red Army soldiers were hiding among them in civilian attire.
On 5 July 1941 Korvettenkapitän Brückner, who had taken over from Stein, issued a set of anti-Jewish regulations in the local newspaper, Kurzemes Vārds. Summarized these were as follows:
All Jews were to wear the yellow star on the front and back of their clothing;
Shopping hours for Jews were restricted to 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon. Jews were only allowed out of their residences for these hours and from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.;
Jews were barred from public events and transportation and were not to walk on the beach;
Jews were required to leave the pavement if they encountered a German in uniform;
Jewish shops were required to display the sign "A Jewish-owned business" in the window;
Jews were to surrender all radios, typewriters, uniforms, arms and means of transportation
On 16 July 1941, Fregattenkapitän Dr. Hans Kawelmacher was appointed the German naval commandant in Liepāja. On 22 July, Kawelmacher sent a telegram to the German Navy's Baltic Command in Kiel, which stated that he wanted 100 SS and fifty Schutzpolizei (protective police) men sent to Liepāja for "quick implementation Jewish problem". Kawelmacher hoped to accelerate killings complaining: "Here about 8,000 Jews... with present SS-personnel, this would take one year, which is untenable for [the] pacification of Liepāja." Kawelmacher on 27 July 1941: "Jewish problem Libau largely solved by execution of about 1,100 male Jews by Riga SS commando on 24 and 25.7."
In post-war 1945, U-boat Commander Heinz-Wilhelm Eck of was tried and executed with two of his crewmen for shooting at survivors; was alleged to have shot at sunken ship survivors, but as the vessel was lost at sea with its crew, there was no investigation.
Post-war division
After the war, the German surface ships that remained afloat (only the cruisers and , and a dozen destroyers were operational) were divided among the victors by the Tripartite Naval Commission. The US used the heavy cruiser in nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in 1946 as a target ship for the Operation Crossroads. Some (like the unfinished aircraft carrier ) were used for target practice with conventional weapons, while others (mostly destroyers and torpedo boats) were put into the service of Allied navies that lacked surface ships after the war. The training barque SSS Horst Wessel was recommissioned USCGC Eagle and remains in active service, assigned to the United States Coast Guard Academy. The British, French and Soviet navies received the destroyers, and some torpedo boats went to the Danish and Norwegian navies. For the purpose of mine clearing, the Royal Navy employed German crews and minesweepers from June 1945 to January 1948, organized in the German Mine Sweeping Administration, the GMSA, which consisted of 27,000 members of the former Kriegsmarine and 300 vessels.
The destroyers and the Soviet share light cruiser were all retired by the end of the 1950s, but five escort destroyers were returned from the French to the new West German navy in the 1950s and three 1945 scuttled type XXI and XXIII U-boats were raised by West Germany and integrated into their new navy. In 1956, with West Germany's accession to NATO, a new navy was established and was referred to as the Bundesmarine (Federal Navy). Some Kriegsmarine commanders like Erich Topp and Otto Kretschmer went on to serve in the Bundesmarine. In East Germany the Volksmarine (People's Navy) was established in 1956. With the reunification of Germany in 1990, it was decided to use the name Deutsche Marine (German Navy).
Major wartime operations
Wikinger ("Viking") (1940) – foray by destroyers into the North Sea
Weserübung ("Operation Weser") (1940) – invasion of Denmark and Norway
Juno (1940) – operation to disrupt Allied supplies to Norway
Nordseetour (1940) – first Atlantic operation of Admiral Hipper
Berlin (1941) – Atlantic cruise of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau
Rheinübung ("Rhine exercise") (1941) – breakout by Bismarck and Prinz Eugen
Doppelschlag ("Double blow") (1942) – anti-shipping operation off Novaya Zemlya by Admiral Scheer and Admiral Hipper
Sportpalast (1942) – aborted operation (including Tirpitz) to attack Arctic convoys
Rösselsprung ("Knights Move") (1942) – operation (including Tirpitz) to attack Arctic convoy PQ 17
Wunderland (1942) – anti-shipping operation in Kara Sea by Admiral Scheer
Paukenschlag ("Drumbeat" ("Beat of the Kettle Drum"); "Second Happy Time") (1942) – U-boat campaign off the United States east coast
Neuland ("New Land") (1942) – U-boat campaign in the Caribbean Sea; launched in conjunction with Operation Drumbeat
Regenbogen ("Rainbow") (1942) – failed attack on Arctic convoy JW-51B, by Admiral Hipper and Lützow
Cerberus (1942) – movement of capital ships from Brest to home ports in Germany (Channel Dash)
Ostfront ("East front") (1943) – final operation of Scharnhorst, to intercept convoy JW 55B
Domino (1943) – second aborted Arctic sortie by Scharnhorst, Prinz Eugen and destroyers
Zitronella ("Lemon extract") (1943) – raid upon Allied-occupied Spitzbergen (Svalbard)
Hannibal (1945) – evacuation proceedings from Courland, Danzig-West Prussia and East Prussia
Deadlight (1945) – the British Royal Navy's postwar scuttling of Kriegsmarine U-boats
Ships
By the start of World War II, much of the Kriegsmarine were modern ships: fast, well-armed and well-armoured. This had been achieved by concealment but also by deliberately flouting World War I peace terms and those of various naval treaties. However, the war started with the German Navy still at a distinct disadvantage in terms of sheer size with what were expected to be its primary adversaries – the navies of France and Great Britain. Although a major re-armament of the navy (Plan Z) was planned, and initially begun, the start of the war in 1939 meant that the vast amounts of material required for the project were diverted to other areas. The sheer disparity in size when compared to the other European powers navies prompted German naval commander in chief Grand Admiral Erich Raeder to write of his own navy once the war began "The surface forces can do no more than show that they know how to die gallantly." A number of captured ships from occupied countries were added to the German fleet as the war progressed. Though six major units of the Kriegsmarine were sunk during the war (both Bismarck-class battleships and both Scharnhorst-class battleships, as well as two heavy cruisers), there were still many ships afloat (including four heavy cruisers and four light cruisers) as late as March 1945.
Some ship types do not fit clearly into the commonly used ship classifications. Where there is argument, this has been noted.
Surface ships
The main combat ships of the Kriegsmarine (excluding U-boats):
Aircraft carriers
Construction of the was started in 1936 and construction of an unnamed sister ship was started two years later in 1938, but neither ship was completed. In 1942 conversion of three German passenger ships (Europa, Potsdam, Gneisenau) and two unfinished cruisers, the captured French light cruiser and the German heavy cruiser , to auxiliary carriers was begun. In November 1942 the conversion of the passenger ships was stopped because these ships were now seen as too slow for operations with the fleet. But conversion of one of these ships, the Potsdam, to a training carrier was begun instead. In February 1943 all the work on carriers was halted because of the German failure during the Battle of the Barents Sea which convinced Hitler that big warships were useless.
All engineering of the aircraft carriers like catapults, arresting gears and so on were tested and developed at the Erprobungsstelle See Travemünde (Experimental Place Sea in Travemünde) including the airplanes for the aircraft carriers, the Fieseler Fi 167 ship-borne biplane torpedo and reconnaissance bomber and the navalized versions of two key early war Luftwaffe aircraft: the Messerschmitt Bf 109T fighter and Junkers Ju 87C Stuka dive bomber.
Battleships
The Kriegsmarine completed four battleships during its existence. The first pair were the 11-inch gun , consisting of the and , which participated in the invasion of Norway (Operation Weserübung) in 1940, and then in commerce raiding until the Gneisenau was heavily damaged by a British air raid in 1942 and the Scharnhorst was sunk in the Battle of the North Cape in late 1943. The second pair were the 15-inch gun , consisting of the and . The Bismarck was sunk on her first sortie into the Atlantic in 1941 (Operation Rheinübung) although she did sink the battlecruiser Hood and severely damaged the battleship Prince of Wales, while the Tirpitz was based in Norwegian ports during most of the war as a fleet in being, tying up Allied naval forces, and subject to a number of attacks by British aircraft and submarines. More battleships were planned (the H-class), but construction was abandoned in September 1939.
Pocket battleships (Panzerschiffe)
The pocket battleships were the (renamed Lützow), , and . Modern commentators favour classifying these as "heavy cruisers" and the Kriegsmarine itself reclassified these ships as such (Schwere Kreuzer) in 1940. In German language usage these three ships were designed and built as "armoured ships" (Panzerschiffe) – "pocket battleship" is an English label.
The Graf Spee was scuttled by her own crew in the Battle of the River Plate, in the Rio de la Plata estuary in December 1939. Admiral Scheer was bombed on 9 April 1945 in port at Kiel and badly damaged, essentially beyond repair, and rolled over at her moorings. After the war that part of the harbor was filled in with rubble and the hulk buried. Lützow (ex-Deutschland) was bombed 16 April 1945 in the Baltic off Schwinemünde just west of Stettin, and settled on the shallow bottom. With the Soviet Army advancing across the Oder, the ship was destroyed in place to prevent the Soviets capturing anything useful. The wreck was dismantled and scrapped in 1948–1949.
Pre-dreadnought battleships
The World War I era Pre-dreadnought battleships and were used mainly as training ships, although they also participated in several military operations, with the latter bearing the distinction of firing the opening shots of WWII. and were converted into radio-guided target ships in 1928 and 1930 respectively. was decommissioned in 1931 and struck from the naval register in 1936. Plans to convert her into a radio-controlled target ship for aircraft was canceled because of the outbreak of war in 1939.
Battlecruisers
Three s were ordered in 1939, but with the start of the war the same year there were not enough resources to build the ships.
Heavy cruisers
, , and
Never completed: ,
Light cruisers
The term "light cruiser" is a shortening of the phrase "light armoured cruiser". Light cruisers were defined under the Washington Naval Treaty by gun caliber. Light cruiser describes a small ship that was armoured in the same way as an armoured cruiser. In other words, like standard cruisers, light cruisers possessed a protective belt and a protective deck. Prior to this, smaller cruisers tended to be of the protected cruiser model and possessed only an armoured deck. The Kriegsmarine light cruisers were as follows:
Never completed: three s
Never completed: KH-1 and KH-2 (Kreuzer (cruiser) Holland 1 and 2). Captured in the Netherlands 1940. Both being on the stocks and building continued for the Kriegsmarine.
In addition, the former Kaiserliche Marine light cruiser was captured by Germans on 11 September 1943 after the capitulation of Italy. She was pressed into Kriegsmarine service for a brief time before being destroyed by British MTBs.
Auxiliary cruisers
During the war, some merchant ships were converted into "auxiliary cruisers" and nine were used as commerce raiders sailing under false flags to avoid detection, and operated in all oceans with considerable effect. The German designation for the ships was 'Handelstörkreuzer' thus the HSK serial assigned. Each had as well an administrative label more commonly used, e.g. Schiff 16 = Atlantis, Schiff 41 = Kormoran, etc. The auxiliary cruisers were:
(HSK-1, Schiff 36)
(HSK-2, Schiff 16)
(HSK-3, Schiff 21)
(HSK-4, Schiff 10)
(HSK-5, Schiff 33)
(HSK-6, Schiff 23)
(HSK-7, Schiff 45)
(HSK-8, Schiff 41)
(HSK-9, Schiff 28)
(HSK number not assigned, Schiff 14, never active in raider operations.)
(HSK not assigned, Schiff 5, never active in raider operations, used as a training ship)
Destroyers
Although the German World War II destroyer (Zerstörer) fleet was modern and the ships were larger than conventional destroyers of other navies, they had problems. Early classes were unstable, wet in heavy weather, suffered from engine problems and had short range. Some problems were solved with the evolution of later designs, but further developments were curtailed by the war and, ultimately, by Germany's defeat. In the first year of World War II, they were used mainly to sow offensive minefields in shipping lanes close to the British coast.
Torpedo boats
These vessels evolved through the 1930s from small vessels, relying almost entirely on torpedoes, to what were effectively small destroyers with mines, torpedoes and guns. Two classes of fleet torpedo boats were planned, but not built, in the 1940s.
E-boats (Schnellboote)
The E-boats were fast attack craft with torpedo tubes. Over 200 boats of this type were built for the Kriegsmarine.
Troop ships
, , , , .
Miscellaneous
Thousands of smaller warships and auxiliaries served in the Kriegsmarine, including minelayers, minesweepers, mine transports, netlayers, floating AA and torpedo batteries, command ships, decoy ships (small merchantmen with hidden weaponry), gunboats, monitors, escorts, patrol boats, sub-chasers, landing craft, landing support ships, training ships, test ships, torpedo recovery boats, dispatch boats, aviso, fishery protection ships, survey ships, harbor defense boats, target ships and their radio control vessels, motor explosive boats, weather ships, tankers, colliers, tenders, supply ships, tugs, barges, icebreakers, hospital and accommodation ships, floating cranes and docks, and many others. The Kriegsmarine employed hundreds of auxiliary Vorpostenboote during the war, mostly civilian ships that were drafted and fitted with military equipment, for use in coastal operations.
Submarines
The Submarine Arm of the Kriegsmarine was titled the U-bootwaffe ("submarine force").
At the outbreak of war, it had a fleet of 57 submarines. This was increased steadily until mid-1943, when losses from Allied counter-measures matched the new vessels launched.
The principal types were the Type IX, a long range type used in the western and southern Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans; the Type VII, the most numerous type, used principally in the north Atlantic; and the small Type II, for coastal waters. Type X was a small class of minelayers and Type XIV was a specialized type used to support distant U-boat operations – the "Milchkuh" (Milkcow).
Types XXI and XXIII, the "Elektroboot", could have negated much of the Allied anti-submarine tactics and technology, but only a few of this new type of U-boat became ready for combat at the end of the war. Post-war, they became the prototype for modern conventional submarines, such as the Soviet .
During World War II, about 60% of all U-boats commissioned were lost in action; 28,000 of the 40,000 U-boat crewmen were killed during the war and 8,000 were captured. The remaining U-boats were either surrendered to the Allies or scuttled by their own crews at the end of the war.
Captured ships
The military campaigns in Europe yielded a large number of captured vessels, many of which were under construction. Nations represented included Austria (riverine craft), Czechoslovakia (riverine craft), Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, United States (several landing craft) and Italy (after the armistice). Few of the incomplete ships of destroyer size or above were completed, but many smaller warships and auxiliaries were completed and commissioned into Kriegsmarine during the war. Additionally many captured or confisticated foreign civilian ships (merchantmen, fishing boats, tugboats etc.) were converted into auxiliary warships or support ships.
Major enemy warships sunk or destroyed
The first warship sunk in World War II was the destroyer of the Polish Navy by Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers of the carrier air group of aircraft carrier on 3 September 1939. This carrier air group (Trägergeschwader 186) was part of the Luftwaffe but at that time under command of the Kriegsmarine.
Organization
Command structure
Adolf Hitler was the Commander-in-Chief of all German armed forces, including the Kriegsmarine. His authority was exercised through the Oberkommando der Marine, or OKM, with a Commander-in-Chief (Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine), a Chief of Naval General Staff (Chef des Stabes der Seekriegsleitung) and a Chief of Naval Operations (Chef der Operationsabteilung). The first Commander-in-Chief of the OKM was Erich Raeder who was the Commander-in-Chief of the Reichsmarine when it was renamed and reorganized in 1935. Raeder held the post until falling out with Hitler after the German failure in the Battle of the Barents Sea. He was replaced by Karl Dönitz on 30 January 1943 who held the command until he was appointed President of Germany upon Hitler's suicide in April 1945. Hans-Georg von Friedeburg was then Commander-in-Chief of the OKM for the short period of time until Germany surrendered in May 1945.
Subordinate to these were regional, squadron and temporary flotilla commands. Regional commands covered significant naval regions and were themselves sub-divided, as necessary. They were commanded by a Generaladmiral or an Admiral. There was a Marineoberkommando for the Baltic Fleet, Nord, Nordsee, Norwegen, Ost/Ostsee (formerly Baltic), Süd and West. The Kriegsmarine used a form of encoding called Gradnetzmeldeverfahren to denote regions on a map.
Each squadron (organized by type of ship) also had a command structure with its own Flag Officer. The commands were Battleships, Cruisers, Destroyers, Submarines (Führer der Unterseeboote), Torpedo Boats, Minesweepers, Reconnaissance Forces, Naval Security Forces, Big Guns and Hand Guns, and Midget Weapons.
Major naval operations were commanded by a Flottenchef. The Flottenchef controlled a flotilla and organized its actions during the operation. The commands were, by their nature, temporary.
The Kriegsmarine ship design bureau, known as the Marineamt, was administered by officers with experience in sea duty but not in ship design, while the naval architects who did the actual design work had only a theoretical understanding of design requirements. As a result the German surface fleet was plagued by design flaws throughout the war.
Communication was undertaken using an eight-rotor system of Enigma encoding.
Air units
The Luftwaffe had a near-complete monopoly on all German military aviation, including naval aviation, a major source of ongoing interservice rivalry with the Kriegsmarine. Catapult-launched spotter planes like Arado Ar 196 twin-float seaplanes were manned by the so-called Bordfliegergruppen (shipboard flying group). In addition, Trägergeschwader 186 (Carrier Air Wing 186) operated two Gruppen (Trägergruppe I/186 and Trägergruppe II/186) equipped with navalized Messerschmitt Bf 109T and Junkers Ju 87C Stuka; these units were intended to serve aboard the aircraft carrier which was never completed, yet provided the Kriegsmarine with some air-power from bases on land. Furthermore, five coastal groups (Küstenfliegergruppen) with reconnaissance aircraft, torpedo bombers, Minensuch aerial minesweepers and air-sea rescue seaplanes supported the Kriegsmarine, although with lesser resources as the war progressed.
Coastal artillery, flak and radar units
The coastal batteries of the Kriegsmarine were stationed on the German coasts. With the conquering and occupation of other countries coastal artillery was stationed along the coasts of these countries, especially in France and Norway as part of the Atlantic Wall. Naval bases were protected by flak-batteries of the Kriegsmarine against enemy air raids. The Kriegsmarine also manned the Seetakt sea radars on the coasts.
Marines
At the beginning of World War II, on 1 September 1939, the Marine Stoßtrupp Kompanie (Marine Attack Troop Company) landed in Danzig from the old battleship for conquering a Polish bastion at Westerplatte. A reinforced platoon of the Marine Stoßtrupp Kompanie landed with soldiers of the German Army from destroyers on 9 April 1940 in Narvik. In June 1940 the Marine Stoßtrupp Abteilung (Marine Attack Troop Battalion) was flown in from France to the Channel Islands to occupy this British territory.
In September 1944 amphibious units unsuccessfully tried to capture the strategic island Suursaari in the Gulf of Finland from Germany's former ally Finland (Operation Tanne Ost).
With the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 and the Soviet advance from the summer of 1944 the Kriegsmarine started to form regiments and divisions for the battles on land with superfluous personnel. With the loss of naval bases because of the Allied advance more and more navy personnel were available for the ground troops of the Kriegsmarine. About 40 regiments were raised and from January 1945 on six divisions. Half of the regiments were absorbed by the divisions.
Personnel strength
Ranks and uniforms
Many different types of uniforms were worn by the Kriegsmarine; here is a list of the main ones:
Dienstanzug (Service suit)
Kleiner Dienstanzug (Lesser service uniform)
Ausgehanzug (Suit for walking out)
Sportanzug (Sportswear)
Tropen-und Sommeranzug (Tropical and summer suit) – uniforms for hot climates
Große Uniform (Parade uniform)
Kleiner Gesellschaftsanzug (Small party suit)
Großer Gesellschaftsanzug (Full dress uniform)
See also
Glossary of German military terms
Alwin-Broder Albrecht
Karl Dönitz
Erich Raeder
Horst Wessel
List of Kriegsmarine ships
List of Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross recipients of the Kriegsmarine
List of ships of the German navies
List of World War II torpedoes of Germany
Uniforms and insignia of the Kriegsmarine
Notes
External links
The Nazi German Navy 1935-1945 (Kriegsmarine)
The photo album of Kriegsmarine minelayer ‘Roland’ crew member. Photos of minelayers on combat missions and various Kriegsmarine vessels.
Naval history of World War II
Wehrmacht
Military history of Germany during World War II
1935 establishments in Germany
Disbanded navies | [
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17387 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights%20of%20Labor | Knights of Labor | Knights of Labor (K of L), officially Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, was an American labor federation active in the late 19th century, especially the 1880s. It operated in the United States as well in Canada, and had chapters also in Great Britain and Australia. Its most important leader was Terence V. Powderly. The Knights promoted the social and cultural uplift of the worker, and demanded the eight-hour day. In some cases it acted as a labor union, negotiating with employers, but it was never well organized or funded. It was notable in its ambition to organize across lines of gender and race and in the inclusion of both skilled and unskilled labor. After a rapid expansion in the mid-1880s, it suddenly lost its new members and became a small operation again. The Knights of Labor had served, however, as the first mass organization of the working class of the United States.
It was founded by Uriah Stephens on December 28, 1869, reached 28,000 members in 1880, then jumped to 100,000 in 1884. By 1886, 20% of all workers were affiliated, nearly 800,000 members. Its frail organizational structure could not cope as it was battered by charges of failure and violence and calumnies of the association with the Haymarket Square riot. Most members abandoned the movement in 1886–1887, leaving at most 100,000 in 1890. Many opted to join groups that helped to identify their specific needs, instead of the KOL which addressed many different types of issues. The Panic of 1893 terminated the Knights of Labor's importance. Remnants of the Knights of Labor continued in existence until 1949, when the group's last 50-member local dropped its affiliation.
Origins
In 1869, Uriah Smith Stephens, James L. Wright, and a small group of Philadelphia tailors founded a secret organization known as the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor. The collapse of the National Labor Union in 1873 left a vacuum for workers looking for organization. The Knights became better organized with a national vision when, in 1879, they replaced Stephens with Terence V. Powderly, who was just 30 years old at the time. The body became popular with Pennsylvania coal miners during the economic depression of the mid-1870s, then it grew rapidly. The KOL was a diverse industrial union open to all workers. The leaders felt that it was best to have a versatile population in order to get points of view from all aspects. The Knights of Labor barred five groups from membership: bankers, land speculators, lawyers, liquor dealers and gamblers. Its members included low skilled workers, railroad workers, immigrants, and steel workers.
As membership expanded, the Knights began to function more as a labor union and less of a secret organization. During the 1880s, the Knights of Labor played a huge role in independent and third-party movements. Local assemblies began not only to emphasize cooperative enterprises, but to initiate strikes to win concessions from employers. The Knights of Labor brought together workers of different religions, races and genders and helped them all create a bond and unify all for the same cause. The new leader Powderly opposed strikes as a "relic of barbarism", but the size and the diversity of the Knights afforded local assemblies a great deal of autonomy.
In 1882, the Knights ended their membership rituals and removed the words "Noble Order" from their name. This was intended to mollify the concerns of Catholic members and the bishops who wanted to avoid any resemblance to freemasonry.
Though initially averse to strikes to advance their goals, the Knights did aid various strikes and boycotts. The Wabash Railroad strike in 1885 saw Powderly finally adapt and support an eventually successful strike against Jay Gould's Wabash Line. Gould met with Powderly and agreed to call off his campaign against the Knights of Labor, which had caused the turmoil originally. This gave momentum to the Knights and membership surged. By 1886, the Knights had more than 700,000 members.
The Knights' primary demand was for the eight-hour workday. They also called for legislation to end child and convict labor as well as a graduated income tax. They also supported cooperatives. The only woman to hold office in the Knights of Labor, Leonora Barry, worked as an investigator. She described the horrific conditions in factories employing women and children. These reports made Barry the first person to collect national statistics on the American working woman.
Powderly and the Knights tried to avoid divisive political issues, but in the early 1880s, many Knights had become followers of Henry George's ideology known now as Georgism. In 1883, Powderly officially recommended George's book and announced his support of "single tax" on land values. During the New York mayoral election of 1886, Powderly was able to successfully push the organization towards the favor of Henry George.In 1886, the Knights became of the part of the short lived United Labor Party, an alliance of labor organizations formed in support of George's campaign in the 1886 New York City mayoral election.
The Knights of Labor helped to bring together many different types of people from all different walks of life; for example Catholic and Protestant Irish-born workers. The KOL appealed to them because they worked very closely with the Irish Land League. The Knights had a mixed record on inclusiveness and exclusiveness. They accepted women and blacks (after 1878) and their employers as members, and advocating the admission of blacks into local assemblies. However, the organization tolerated the segregation of assemblies in the South. Bankers, doctors, lawyers, stockholders, and liquor manufacturers were excluded because they were considered unproductive members of society. Asians were also excluded, and in November 1885, a branch of the Knights in Tacoma, Washington violently expelled the city's Chinese workers, who amounted to nearly a tenth of the overall city population at the time. The Union Pacific Railroad came into conflict with the Knights. When the Knights in Wyoming refused to work more hours in 1885, the railroad hired Chinese workers as strikebreakers and to stir up racial animosity. The result was the Rock Springs massacre, that killed scores of Chinese workers, and drove the rest out of Wyoming. About 50 African-American sugar-cane laborers organized by the Knights went on strike and were murdered by strikebreakers in the 1887 Thibodaux massacre in Louisiana. The Knights strongly supported passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Contract Labor Law of 1885, as did many other labor groups, demonstrating the limits of their commitment to solidarity. While they claimed to not be "against immigration", their anti-Asian racism demonstrated the limits and inconsistency of their anti-racist platform.
Decline
The Knights of Labor attracted many Catholics, who were a large part of the membership, perhaps a majority. Powderly was also a Catholic. However, the Knights's use of secrecy, similar to the Masons, during its early years concerned many bishops of the Church. The Knights used secrecy and deception to help prevent employers from firing members.
After the Archbishop of Quebec condemned the Knights in 1884, twelve American archbishops voted 10 to 2 against doing likewise in the United States. Furthermore, Cardinal James Gibbons and Bishop John Ireland defended the Knights. Gibbons went to the Vatican to talk to the hierarchy.
In 1886, right after the peak of the Knights of Labor, they started to lose more members to the American Federation of Labor. It has been believed that the fall of the Knights of Labor was due to their lack of adaptability and beliefs in the old-style industrial capitalism.
Legacy
Though often overlooked, the Knights of Labor contributed to the tradition of labor protest songs in America. The Knights frequently included music in their regular meetings, and encouraged local members to write and perform their work. In Chicago, James and Emily Talmadge, printers and supporters of the Knights of Labor, published the songbook "Labor Songs Dedicated to the Knights of Labor" (1885). The song "Hold the Fort" [also "Storm the Fort"], a Knights of Labor pro-labor revision of the hymn by the same name, became the most popular labor song prior to Ralph Chaplin's IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) anthem "Solidarity Forever". Pete Seeger often performed this song and it appears on a number of his recordings. Songwriter and labor singer Bucky Halker includes the Talmadge version, entitled "Our Battle Song," on his CD Don't Want Your Millions (Revolting Records 2000). Halker also draws heavily on the Knights songs and poems in his book on labor song and poetry, For Democracy, Workers and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865-1895 (University of Illinois Press, 1991).
Immigration restriction
The Knights of Labor supported the Chinese Exclusion Act because it believed that industrialists were using Chinese workers as a wedge to keep wages low.
Grand Master Workmen
Uriah Smith Stephens (1869–1879)
Terence V. Powderly (1879–1893)
James Sovereign (1893–1901)
John Hayes (1901–1917)
See also
Labor unions in the United States
Labor federation competition in the United States
IWW
Olivier-David Benoît
Mary Harris Jones
References
Further reading
Scholarly studies
Arvidsson, Stefan The style and mythology of socialism: socialist idealism, 1871-1914. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017.
Browne, Henry J. The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1949.
Case, Theresa Ann. The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor (2010) 1886
Commons, John R. et al., History of Labour in the United States: Volume 2, 1860-1896. (4 vol 1918). vol 2
Conell, Carol, and Kim Voss. "Formal Organization and the Fate of Social Movements: Craft Association and Class Alliance in the Knights of Labor," American Sociological Review Vol. 55, No. 2 (Apr., 1990), pp. 255–269 in JSTOR, focus on steel industry
Fink, Leon. "The New Labor History and the Powers of Historical Pessimism: Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights of Labor," Journal of American History Vol. 75, No. 1 (Jun., 1988), pp. 115–136 in JSTOR, historiography
Fink, Leon/ Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Grob, Gerald N. "The Knights of Labor and the Trade Unions, 1878-1886," Journal of Economic History Vol. 18, No. 2 (Jun., 1958), pp. 176–192 in JSTOR
Kaufman, Jason. "Rise and Fall of a Nation of Joiners: The Knights of Labor Revisited," Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 31, No. 4 (Spring, 2001), pp. 553–579 in JSTOR statistical study of competition with other unions and with fraternal societies for members
Levine, Susan. "Labor's True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor," Journal of American History Vol. 70, No. 2 (Sep., 1983), pp. 323–339 in JSTOR
Levine, Susan. True Women: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984.
McLaurin, Melton Alonza. The Knights of Labor in the South. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.
Phelan, Craig. Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor (Greenwood, 2000), scholarly biography online edition
Voss, Kim. The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Sociological study. online
Ware, Norman J. The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860 - 1895: A Study In Democracy. (1929).
Weir, Robert E. Beyond Labor's Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) online edition
Weir, Robert E. (1997). A fragile alliance: Henry George and the Knights of Labor. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 56, 421–439.
Weir, Robert E. Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in Gilded Age Social Movement (Wayne State University Press, 2000)
Wright, Carroll D. "An Historical Sketch of the Knights of Labor," Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1887), pp. 137–168. in JSTOR
Outside U.S.
Gregory Kealey and Brian Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Parfitt, Steven. Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Parfitt, Steven. "The First-and-a-half International: The Knights of Labor and the History of International Labour Organization in the Nineteenth Century." Labour History Review 80.2 (2015): 135–167.
Parfitt, Steven. "Completing the Order’s History Down Under: The Knights of Labor in Australia." Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History 110 (2016): 1-18.
Parfitt, Steven. "Constructing the Global History of the Knights of Labor." Labor 14.1 (2017): 13–37.
, shows that American workers in the window glass industry set up an English chapter in 1884 to watch the business in Europe; it remained small
Leon Watillon and Frederic Meyers, The Knights of Labor in Belgium. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978. Also in partial translation by Frederic Meyers, Institute of Industrial Relations, Los Angeles, 1959: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/28722/bk0003t812j/?brand=oac4
Primary sources
By Knights
William Baillie Baird papers, at the University of Maryland libraries. Baird was a commissioned organizer of the Knights of Labor.
By others
A.C. Dunham, "The Knights of Labor," New Englander and Yale Review, vol. 45, no. 195 (June 1886), pp. 490–498.
John Stephens Durham, "The Labor Unions and the Negro," Atlantic Monthly, vol. 81, no. 484 (February 1898), pp. 222–231.
Henry George, "The New Party," North American Review, vol. 145, no. 368 (July 1887), pp. 1–8.
Rufus Hatch, "The Labor Crisis," North American Review, vol. 142, no. 355 (June 1886), pp. 602–607.
Richard J. Hinton, "American Labor Organizations," North American Review, vol. 140, no. 338 (January 1885), pp. 48–63.
M.E.J. Kelley, "Women and the Labor Movement, North American Review, vol. 166, no. 497 (April 1898), pp. 408–418.
George Frederic Parsons, "The Labor Question," Atlantic Monthly, vol. 58, no. 345 (July 1886), pp. 97–113.
Carroll D. Wright, "An Historical Sketch of the Knights of Labor," Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1887), pp. 137–168.
External links
Record of proceedings of the General Assembly of the Knights of Labor 1878
"Select Bibliography of Terence V. Powderly and the Knights of Labor," Catholic University of America. Retrieved October 8, 2006.
Knights of Labor
Cooperative organizers
Defunct trade unions in the United States
Defunct American political movements
Service organizations based in the United States
Trade unions in Canada
Trade unions in New Zealand
National trade union centers of the United States
Trade unions established in 1869
1869 establishments in the United States
Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States
Anti-immigration politics in the United States | [
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17390 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite | Kryptonite | Kryptonite is a fictional material that appears primarily in Superman stories. In its best-known form, it is a green, crystalline material originating from Superman's home world of Krypton that emits a unique radiation that weakens Superman. It is generally harmless to humans in the short term, but deadly in the long term. There are other varieties of kryptonite, such as red and gold kryptonite, which have different but still generally negative effects on Superman. Due to Superman's popularity, kryptonite has become a byword for an extraordinary exploitable weakness, synonymous with "Achilles' heel". Batman and Lex Luthor are two notable individuals who have pieces of kryptonite with them—the former being trusted by Superman to stop him if he goes rogue, and the latter using the mineral to ward off Superman, sometimes incorporating it into weapons to try to kill him.
Origin
An unpublished 1940 story titled "The K-Metal from Krypton", written by Superman creator Jerry Siegel, featured a prototype of kryptonite. It was a mineral from the planet Krypton that drained Superman of his strength while giving superhuman powers to mortals. This story was rejected because in it Superman reveals his identity to Lois Lane.
The mineral known as kryptonite, not to be confused with the real element krypton, was first officially introduced in the radio serial The Adventures of Superman, in the story "The Meteor from Krypton", broadcast in June 1943. An apocryphal story claims that kryptonite was introduced to give Superman's voice actor, Bud Collyer, the possibility to take a vacation at a time when the radio serial was performed live. In an episode where Collyer would not be present to perform, Superman would be incapacitated by kryptonite, and a substitute voice actor would make groaning sounds. This tale was recounted by Julius Schwartz in his memoir. However, the historian Michael J. Hayde disputes this: in "The Meteor From Krypton", Superman is never exposed to kryptonite. If kryptonite allowed Collyer to take vacations, that was a fringe benefit discovered later. More likely, kryptonite was introduced as a plot device for Superman to discover his origin.
In the radio serial, Krypton was located in the same solar system as Earth, in the same orbit, but on the opposite side of the Sun. This provided an easy explanation for how kryptonite found its way to Earth.
Kryptonite was incorporated into the comic mythos with Superman #61 (November 1949). Editor Dorothy Woolfolk stated in an interview with Florida Today in August 1993 that she "felt Superman's invulnerability was boring."
The only substance in the universe that kryptonite radiation (from any variety) cannot penetrate is lead.
Forms, colors and effects
Various forms of the fictional material have been created over the years in Superman publications and programs.
In other media
Television
Live action
The Adventures of Superman (1952–1958) featured kryptonite in the episodes "Panic in the Sky", "The Defeat of Superman", "Superman Week", "The Deadly Rock", "The Magic Secret", "The Gentle Monster" and "All That Glitters".
Superboy (1988–1992) featured green kryptonite in the episodes: "Kryptonite Kills" and "Metallo", "Bride of Bizarro", "Kryptonite Kid", and "Obituary for a Super-Hero". The red variety was featured in the episode "Super Menace". A Bizarro white variant was featured in the episode "The Battle with Bizarro", which heals the title character.
Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–1997) featured green kryptonite in the episodes "The Green, Green Glow of Home", "Barbarians at the Planet", "The House of Luthor", "Metallo", "Top Copy", "Tempus Fugitive" and "Battleground Earth". The red variety was featured in the episodes "Individual Responsibility", "Ultrawoman" and "Lethal Weapon".
Smallville (2001–2011) featured kryptonite on a regular basis. A large quantity of the green variety descends to Earth in a meteor shower, arriving in the town of Smallville, Kansas with the spaceship containing the infant Kal-El. The material is colloquially referred to by Smallville residents as "meteor rock", but is eventually called "kryptonite" by Clark Kent once he discovers his origins in season two episode "Visitor" (in real life, the area near Brenham, Kansas is known as the site of a major meteorite strike between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago). Aside from being harmful to Clark Kent, the mineral produces bizarre changes in flora and fauna. It also occasionally bestows metahuman abilities on humans depending on the circumstances of their exposure to it, such as a girl treated for a rare bone disease acquiring shapeshifting powers. These people are commonly known by the inhabitants of Smallville as "Meteor Freaks". The green variety of the mineral appears in several episodes every season, although other varieties appear, including: red in "Red" (2002), "Exodus", "Exile", "Phoenix" (2003), "Unsafe" (2005), "Crimson" (2007) and "Upgrade" (2010); black, formed when superheating green kryptonite in "Crusade" (2004) and "Doomsday" (2009); silver in "Splinter" (2005); blue in "Blue" (2007), "Persona" (2008), "Kandor" (2009), "Salvation" (2010) and "Harvest" (2011); as a gem in "Persuasion" (2010) and gold (introduced in Earth Two) in "Luthor", "Prophecy" and "Finale" (2011). Smallville was the first appearance of a black kryptonite that would split a person into their good and evil sides, before later being brought into the comic book canon in Supergirl (vol. 5) #2 (Oct. 2005).
Kryptonite has made several appearances in the Arrowverse:
Supergirl (2015–present) features green kryptonite in the episodes "Pilot", "Stronger Together", "Hostile Takeover", "For the Girl Who Has Everything", "Distant Sun" and "Immortal Kombat". The DEO manages to synthesize and create blue kryptonite which is featured in the episode "Bizarro". Red kryptonite is featured in the episode "Falling" as a failed attempt to recreate green kryptonite by Maxwell Lord. Silver kryptonite is featured in the episode "Nevertheless, She Persisted". In season 3, the black kryptonite is pivotal to its arc, first appearing in the episode "The Fanatical", in which it is being referred to as Harun-El by Kryptonians. The Worldkiller Coven from Krypton, headed by dark priestess Selena, schemes to use the Harun-El to terraform Earth into a Krypton-like planet for Kryptonians to inhabit. The protagonists uses the Harun-El to split the Worldkiller Coven's servant, Reign, from her human alter-ego Samantha Arias. By the end of the season finale, it is revealed that Supergirl's being is also divided after her exposure to it during her final battle with Reign. In season 4, Lena Luthor develops a serum derived from Harun-El, and Lex Luthor, Agent Liberty and James Olsen develop metahuman abilities after being injected with it such as enhanced speed, durability, strength, and a healing factor.
Green kryptonite appears briefly in the crossover event "Crisis on Earth-X". During a confrontation with Overgirl, Supergirl's Earth-X counterpart, Oliver Queen fires an arrow at her containing a kryptonite arrowhead, impaling Overgirl's shoulder. An astonished Supergirl asks Oliver why he has a kryptonite arrow, to which Oliver replies: "In case an evil you ever showed up!"
Kryptonite also appears in the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" crossover event: In Part Two, the Bruce Wayne of Earth-99 keeps kryptonite in the Batcave and had used it to kill his Earth's Superman. He uses it on Supergirl, but is killed by Earth-1's Kate Kane before he can kill her. Kate then collects the kryptonite in his possession. In Part Three, Batwoman intended to use the kryptonite on Supergirl to stop a dangerous plan of hers, but instead reveals it to her as an act of faith. Supergirl tells her to keep it, saying that she "[has] the courage" that Kate will never have to use it.
In the Batwoman episode "A Secret Kept From All the Rest", Lucius Fox states in his journal that green kryptonite is the only thing capable of penetrating the Batsuit. In the season 1 finale episode "O, Mouse!", as Alice tries to locate kryptonite, Luke finds it and manages to destroy it. But Kate reveals to both of them that she has another kryptonite rock given to her from Crisis. The bullet was later used by Hush on Ryan Wilder when she became Batwoman. This caused her pain until she was treated when the plant she owned turned out to be a Desert Rose from Coryana.
In Superman & Lois, Superman is targeted by "The Stranger", who uses green kryptonite against him in their initial fight. Meanwhile, Morgan Edge unearths a large batch of X-kryptonite from a Smallville mine, which has made the local population susceptible for the Eradicator, a device which Edge uses to implant Kryptonian consciousnesses into humans. Eventually it is revealed that the Stranger is John Henry Irons from an alternate Earth where Superman led a superpowered army to attack Metropolis as he makes it his mission to defeat the Earth-Prime Superman and thwart Edge's experiments before the same thing can happen again.
Animation
The Brady Kids (1972–1973) featured green kryptonite in the episode "Cindy's Super Friend" which shows Clark Kent attempting to become Superman in the Kids' clubhouse, only to be incapacitated by a piece of green kryptonite used as part of a rock collection.
Super Friends (1973–1986) features kryptonite in the episodes "Super Friends: Rest in Peace" ("Krypton steel"); "Darkseid's Golden Trap" (gold); "Terror From the Phantom Zone" (blue, green, and red); "Return of the Phantoms" (green); "Rokan: Enemy from Space" (green); "Bazarowurld" (red and blue); "Revenge of Bizarro" (red and blue); Will the World Collide?" (green); "Uncle Mxyzptlk" (red); "The Death of Superman" (green); "Batman: Dead or Alive" (green).
Superman (1988) features a kryptonite ring worn by Lex Luthor. On the episode "The Hunter", Superman's enemy transforms his body into kryptonite.
Superman: The Animated Series (1996–2000) offers an explanation of the effect of the material on Superman. This series and The New Batman Adventures (1997–1999) showcase a three-part crossover story arc called "World's Finest" that demonstrates the effect of kryptonite poisoning on humans.
Justice League (2001–2004) explores the same theme where Lex Luthor develops cancer from his long term exposure to a piece of kryptonite he kept with him without taking precautions to contain it, as seen in the episode "Injustice for All", unlike Batman who keeps it in a lead pocket case, a strong deterrent against the object in his utility belt.
In Batman Beyond (1999–2001) the two-part episode "The Call" reveals that kryptonite has been kept safe in the distant future as a deterrent against Superman due to the hero's past as a rogue agent under Darkseid's mind manipulation.
Krypto the Superdog (2005–2006) features green, red and a purple-spotted variation.
Legion of Super Heroes (2006–2008) features green kryptonite.
Young Justice (2010–2013, 2018) features green kryptonite in the episode "Auld Acquaintance".
In Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "Battle of the Superheroes!", Superman is infected with a red kryptonite necklace secretly given to Lois Lane by Lex Luthor, which causes Superman to become evil. Now Batman must work with Krypto the Superdog to hold off Superman until the effects of the red kryptonite wear off.
In Lego DC Super Hero Girls, Lena Luthor developed a series of kryptonites with one of six different colors each, which effect everyone that comes near them by changing their emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear, distrust and forgetfulness, while the green ones only act as normal kryptonite that only affects Supergirl. She is usually seen assisting the Female Furies and Eclipso, though the latter of which Lena always hinders her plans in the end, hindering her own plans in the process.
In DC Super Hero Girls, green kryptonite has been used by Catwoman to weaken Supergirl and by Lex Luthor to trap both Superman and Supergirl in capsules, while Ra's al Ghul once used red kryptonite to mind control Supergirl into destroying a boy band concert.
Films
In Superman (1978) Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) deduces that a meteorite found in Addis Ababa is actually a radioactive piece of the exploded planet Krypton. Luthor uses the mineral to weaken Superman (Christopher Reeve), who is saved by Luthor's lover Eve Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine).
In Superman III (1983) billionaire Ross Webster (Robert Vaughn) orders the creation of synthetic green kryptonite. Computer programmer Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor) uses tar to compensate for an unknown component of kryptonite, causing the newly created mineral to eventually turn Superman evil and split the hero into two beings (making its effects more in line with red and black kryptonite). Gorman's "supercomputer" later fights Superman and uses a kryptonite ray.
In Superman Returns (2006) Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) steals the Addis Ababa L9 Pallasite meteorite and uses kryptonite to create a new Kryptonian landmass and a shard for use against Superman. The film describes kryptonite's formula as "sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide with fluorine". A year after the film was released, a substance with a similar formula was discovered, jadarite, a coincidence which led to media attention. The new mineral, unlike the fictional material in the movie, does not contain fluorine and does not have a green glow, an effect normally associated with nuclear radiation in both real life and popular culture.
In Justice League: The New Frontier (2008), Batman mentions he keeps some kryptonite in case he needs to fight Superman.
In Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths (2010) an alternate universe version of Lex Luthor uses blue kryptonite against the villain Ultraman.
In Justice League: Doom (2012), the villain Metallo wounds Superman with a kryptonite bullet, but he is saved by the JLA.
In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), green kryptonite is discovered by men working for Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) at the bottom of the Indian Ocean (after Superman's battle with the World Engine in Man of Steel) and experimented with by Luthor, who learns of its harmful effect on Kryptonians when the corpse of General Zod is exposed to it. The kryptonite is then stolen from Luthor by Batman (Ben Affleck), who uses it to create kryptonite gas pellets and a kryptonite-tipped spear, both of which he later uses in battle with Superman (Henry Cavill). Doomsday is also shown to be weakened by kryptonite, allowing Superman to use the spear to kill him in the film's climax.
Video games
In Superman: Atari 2600 (1978) Luthor has created kryptonite satellites and scattered them around Metropolis that take away Superman's ability to fly when touched. Superman must then walk around Metropolis until he finds and meets Lois Lane to regain his powers.
In the 1988 Kemco Superman game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, defeating random enemies may cause red or green Kryptonite to appear, which must be avoided or else it will damage the player's health. A blue crystal restores the player's health, explained in the manual as Kryptonian power crystals akin to the 1978 film.
Superman 64 (1999) it appears as kryptonite fog, coined as an excuse for the game's poor draw distance.
In the crossover fighting game Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe (2008) kryptonite weakens Superman when exposed, while it makes his Mortal Kombat universe counterpart, the thunder god Raiden, stronger.
In Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (2012) kryptonite is used to power Lex Luthor's weapon, the "Deconstructor".
Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure (2013) showcases the material in different forms.
Kryptonite is one of the foundation elements in Lego Dimensions.
Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013) features a kryptonite laser designed as a fail-safe against Superman should he turn against humanity.
Gold and green kryptonite appear in the story mode of Injustice 2.
Serials
Columbia Pictures produced two 15-part motion picture serials that used kryptonite as a plot device: Superman (1948) and Atom Man vs. Superman (1950).
Music
Songs:
"Kryptonite" by 3 Doors Down (2000).
"Party Up (Up in Here)" by DMX (2000).
"Kryptonite (I'm on It)" by rap group Purple Ribbon All-Stars (2006).
"Kryptonite" By Mario ft. Rich Boy from his third studio album Go
"Fashion Is My Kryptonite" by Bella Thorne and Zendaya (2012).
"Ready or Not" by Bridgit Mendler (2012).
"Shut Up and Dance" by Walk the Moon (2014).
"Get Your Cape On" by Jordyn Kane (2015).
Pocket Full of Kryptonite, a 1991 album by Spin Doctors. The album's title is drawn from a line in the song "Jimmy Olsen's Blues", which is featured on the album.
In the title track for his album Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, Travis Tritt sings about picking a fight when he feels like Superman "only to find my opponent is holding kryptonite".
The 2000 song, "Superman (It's Not Easy)" by "Five for Fighting" mentions kryptonite: "...digging for Kryptonite on this one way street.".
The Genesis song "The Carpet Crawlers" mentions kryptonite: "Mild-mannered Supermen are held in kryptonite...".
"There's a Moon in the Sky" by The B-52's mentions kryptonite: "you get a mouth, a mouthful of red kryptonite".
"Jam on It" by Newcleus features a "battle" between the band and Superman, and they "rock his butt with a 12-inch cut called disco kryptonite."
"One Thing" by One Direction mentions kryptonite: "you're my kryptonite"
"Pineapple Kryptonite" by ATARASHII GAKKO!
"Kryptonita", a 1991 album by Miguel Mateos.
See also
Trinitite
References
External links
The Superman Homepage's section on kryptonite
Howstuffworks.com: "How Kryptonite Works"
1943 in comics
Superman
Vulnerability
Fictional elements introduced in 1943 | [
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17391 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo | Kosovo | Kosovo, officially the Republic of Kosovo, is a partially recognised de facto sovereign state in Southeast Europe. It lies at the centre of the Balkans, occupying an area of , with a population of about 1.8 million; it is bordered by Serbia to the north and east, North Macedonia to the southeast, Albania to the southwest, and Montenegro to the west. Most of central Kosovo is dominated by the vast plains and fields of Metohija and Kosovo. The Accursed Mountains and Šar Mountains rise in the southwest and southeast, respectively. Its capital and largest city is Pristina.
In classical antiquity, the central tribe which emerged in the territory of Kosovo were Dardani, who formed an independent polity known as the Kingdom of Dardania in the 4th century BCE. It was annexed by the Roman Empire by the 1st century BCE, and for the next millennium the territory remained part of the Byzantine Empire, whose rule was eroded by Slavic invasions beginning in the 6th–7th century CE. In the centuries thereafter, control of the area alternated between the Byzantines and the First Bulgarian Empire. By the 13th century, Kosovo became the core of the Serbian medieval state, and has also been the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church from the 14th century, when its status was upgraded to a patriarchate. Ottoman expansion in the Balkans in the late 14th and 15th century led to the decline and fall of the Serbian Empire; the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 is considered to be one of the defining moments in Serbian medieval history. The Ottomans fully conquered the region after the Second Battle of Kosovo. The Ottoman Empire ruled the area until the early 20th century.
In the late 19th century, Kosovo was the center of the Albanian National Movement and where the Albanian revolt of 1910 and Albanian revolt of 1912 took place. Following their defeat in the Balkan Wars, the Ottomans ceded Kosovo to Serbia and Montenegro. Both countries joined Yugoslavia after World War I, and following a period of Yugoslav unitarianism in the Kingdom, the post-World War II Yugoslav constitution established the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within the Yugoslav constituent republic of Serbia. Tensions between Kosovo's Albanian and Serb communities simmered through the 20th century and occasionally erupted into major violence, culminating in the Kosovo War of 1998 and 1999, which resulted in the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army, and the establishment of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. Ultimately, Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008, and has since gained diplomatic recognition as a sovereign state by 97 member states of the United Nations. Serbia does not officially recognise Kosovo as a sovereign state and continues to claim it as its constituent Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, although it accepts the governing authority of the Kosovo institutions as a part of the 2013 Brussels Agreement.
Kosovo is a developing country, with an upper-middle-income economy. It has experienced solid economic growth over the last decade as measured by international financial institutions, and growth every year since the onset of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Kosovo is a member of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and has applied for membership of Interpol and for observer status in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
Name
The entire region that today corresponds to the territory is commonly referred to in English simply as Kosovo and in Albanian as Kosova (definite form, ) or ("indefinite" form, ). In Serbia, a formal distinction is made between the eastern and western areas; the term () is used for the eastern part centred on the historical Kosovo Field, while the western part is called Metohija () (known as Dukagjini in Albanian).
Kosovo (, ) is the Serbian neuter possessive adjective of kos (кос) "blackbird", an ellipsis for Kosovo Polje, 'blackbird field', the name of a plain situated in the eastern half of today's Kosovo and the site of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Field. The name of the plain was applied to the Kosovo Province created in 1864.
Albanians also refer to Kosovo as Dardania, the name of an ancient kingdom and later Roman province, which covered the territory of modern-day Kosovo. The name is derived from the ancient tribe of the Dardani, possibly related to a Proto-Albanian word dardā, which means "pear". The former Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova had been an enthusiastic backer of a "Dardanian" identity, and the Kosovan presidential flag and seal refer to this national identity. However, the name "Kosova" remains more widely used among the Albanian population.
The current borders of Kosovo were drawn while part of Yugoslavia in 1945, when the Autonomous Region of Kosovo and Metohija (1945–1963) was created as an administrative division of the new People's Republic of Serbia. In 1963, it was raised from the level of an autonomous region to the level of an autonomous province as the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija (1963–1968). In 1968, the dual name "Kosovo and Metohija" was reduced to a simple "Kosovo" in the name of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo. In 1990, the province was renamed the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija.
The official conventional long name of the state is Republic of Kosovo, as defined by the Constitution of Kosovo, and is used to represent Kosovo internationally. Additionally, as a result of an arrangement agreed between Pristina and Belgrade in talks mediated by the European Union, Kosovo has participated in some international forums and organisations under the title "Kosovo*" with a footnote stating "This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSC 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo declaration of independence". This arrangement, which has been dubbed the "asterisk agreement", was agreed in an 11-point arrangement agreed on 24 February 2012.
History
Early development
The strategic position including the abundant natural resources were favorable for the development of human settlements in Kosovo, as is highlighted by the hundreds of archaeological sites identified throughout its territory. The first archaeological expedition in Kosovo was organised by the Austro-Hungarian army during the World War I in the Illyrian tumuli burial grounds of Nepërbishti within the district of Prizren. Since 2000, the increase in archaeological expeditions has revealed many, previously unknown sites. The earliest documented traces in Kosovo are associated to the Stone Age, namely there are indications that cave dwellings might have existed, as for instance the Radivojce Cav close the spring of the Drin River, then there are some indications at Grnčar Cave in the municipality of Vitina and the Dema and Karamakaz Caves in municipality of Peja and others.
Human settlement during the Paleolithic has not yet been confirmed by archaeological expeditions. The earliest archaeological evidence of organised settlement, which have been found in Kosovo, belong to the Neolithic Starčevo and Vinča cultures. Vlashnjë and Runik are important sites of the Neolithic era. The rock art paintings at Mrrizi i Kobajës, near Vlashnjë are the first find of prehistoric art in Kosovo. Amongst the finds of excavations in Neolithic Runik is a baked-clay ocarina, which is the first musical instrument to ever be recorded in Kosovo. The beginning of the Bronze Age coincides with the presence of tumuli burial grounds in western Kosovo as in the site of Romajë.
Therefore, until arguments of Paleolithic and Mesolithic man are confirmed, Neolithic man, respectively the Neolithic sites are considered the chronological beginning of population in Kosovo. From this period until today Kosovo has been inhabited, and traces of activities of societies from prehistoric, ancient and up to medieval time are visible throughout its territory. Whereas, in some archaeological sites, multilayer settlements clearly reflect the continuity of life through centuries.
The Dardani were the most important Paleo-Balkan tribe in the region of Kosovo. A wide area which consists of Kosovo, parts of Northern Macedonia and eastern Serbia was named Dardania after them in classical antiquity. The eastern parts of the region were at the Thraco-Illyrian contact zone. In archaeological research, Illyrian names are predominant in western Dardania (present-day Kosovo), while Thracian names are mostly found in eastern Dardania (present-day south-eastern Serbia).
Thracian names are absent in western Dardania; some Illyrian names appear in the eastern parts. Thus, their identification as either an Illyrian or Thracian tribe has been a subject of debate; the ethnolinguistic relationship between the two groups being largely uncertain and debated itself as well. The correspondence of Illyrian names – including those of the ruling elite – in Dardania with those of the southern Illyrians suggests a "thracianization" of parts of Dardania. The Dardani retained an individuality and succeeded to maintain themselves as a community after Roman conquest and they played an important role in the formation of new groupings in the Roman era.
The Roman state annexed Dardania by the first century CE. The importance of the area lay in its mining potential (metalla Dardana) which was heavily exploited in the CE centuries as highlighted by the large mining complex of Municipium Dardanorum and the designation of part of the region as an imperial mining district. Kosovo was part of two provinces, Praevalitana and Dardania. Ulpiana is the most important municipium which developed in Kosovo. It was refounded as Justiniana Secunda under Justinian in the 6th century CE.
Middle Ages
In the next centuries, Kosovo was a frontier province of the Byzantine Empire. The region was exposed to an increasing number of raids from the 4th century CE onward, culminating with the Slavic migrations of the 6th and 7th centuries.
There is one intriguing line of argument to suggest that the Slav presence in Kosovo and southernmost part of the Morava valley may have been quite weak in the first one or two centuries of Slav settlement. Only in the ninth century do we see the expansion of a strong Slav (or quasi-Slav) power into this region. Under a series of ambitious rulers, the Bulgarians – a Slav population which absorbed, linguistically and culturally, its ruling elite of Turkic Bulgars – pushed westwards across modern Macedonia and eastern Serbia, until by the 850's they had taken over Kosovo and were pressing on the border of Rasci.
The First Bulgarian Empire acquired Kosovo by the mid 9th century, but Byzantine control was restored by the late 10th century. In 1072, the leaders of the Bulgarian Uprising of Georgi Voiteh traveled from their center in Skopje to Prizren and held a meeting in which they invited Mihailo Vojislavljević of Duklja to send them assistance. Mihailo sent his son, Constantine Bodin with 300 of his soldiers. After they met, the Bulgarian magnates proclaimed him "Emperor of the Bulgarians". The uprising was defeated by Nikephoros Bryennios. Demetrios Chomatenos is the last Byzantine archbishop of Ohrid to include Prizren in his jurisdiction until 1219. Stefan Nemanja had seized the area along the White Drin in 1185-95 and the ecclesiastical split of Prizren from the Patriarchate in 1219 was the final act of establishing Nemanjić rule. Konstantin Jireček concluded, from the correspondence of archbishop Demetrios of Ohrid (1216–36), that Dardania (modern Kosovo) was increasingly populated by Albanians and the expansion started from Gjakova and Prizren area, prior to the Slavic expansion.
The zenith of Serbian power was reached in 1346, with the formation of the Serbian Empire (1346-1371). During the 13th and 14th centuries, Kosovo became a political, cultural and religious centre of the Serbian Kingdom. In the late 13th century, the seat of the Serbian Archbishopric was moved to Peja, and rulers centred themselves between Prizren and Skopje, during which time thousands of Christian monasteries and feudal-style forts and castles were erected. Stefan Dušan used Prizren Fortress as one of his temporary courts for a time. When the Serbian Empire fragmented into a conglomeration of principalities in 1371, Kosovo became the hereditary land of the House of Branković. In the late 14th and the 15th centuries parts of Kosovo, the easternmost area of which was located near Pristina, were part of the Principality of Dukagjini, which was later incorporated into an anti-Ottoman federation of all Albanian principalities, the League of Lezhë.
Medieval Monuments in Kosovo is a today combined UNESCO World Heritage Site consisting of four Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries. The constructions were founded by members of Nemanjić dynasty, the most important dynasty of Serbia in the Middle Ages.
Ottoman rule
In the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, Ottoman forces defeated a coalition led by Lazar of Serbia. Some historians, most notably Noel Malcolm, argue that the battle of Kosovo in 1389 did not end with an Ottoman victory and "Serbian statehood did survive for another seventy years." Soon after, Lazar's son accepted Turkish nominal vassalage (as did some other Serbian principalities) and Lazar's daughter was married to the Sultan to seal the peace. By 1459, Ottomans conquered the new Serbian capital of Smederevo, leaving Belgrade and Vojvodina under Hungarian rule until second quarter of the 16th century.
Kosovo was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1455 to 1912, at first as part of the eyalet of Rumelia, and from 1864 as a separate province (vilayet). During this time, Islam was introduced to the population. The Vilayet of Kosovo was an area much larger than today's Kosovo; it included all today's Kosovo territory, sections of the Sandžak region cutting into present-day Šumadija and Western Serbia and Montenegro along with the Kukës municipality, the surrounding region in present-day northern Albania and also parts of north-western North Macedonia with the city of Skopje (then Üsküp), as its capital. Between 1881 and 1912 (its final phase), it was internally expanded to include other regions of present-day North Macedonia, including larger urban settlements such as Štip (İştip), Kumanovo (Kumanova) and Kratovo (Kratova). According to some historians, Serbs likely formed a majority of Kosovo from the 8th to the mid-19th century. Nevertheless, this claim is difficult to prove, as historians who base their works on Ottoman sources of the time give solid evidence that at least the western and central parts of Kosovo had an Albanian majority. The scholar Fredrick F. Anscombe shows that Prizren and Vushtrri (Vulçitrin) had no Serbian population in early 17th century. Prizren was inhabited by a mix of Catholic and Muslim Albanians, while Vushtrri had a mix of Albanian and Turkish speakers, followed by tiny a Serbian minority. Gjakova was founded by Albanians in the 16th century, and Peja (İpek) had a continuous presence of the Albanian Kelmendi tribe. Central Kosovo was mixed, but large parts of the Drenica Valley were ethnically Albanian. Central Kosovo, as well as the cities of Prizren, Gjakova, and the region of Has regularly supplied the Ottoman forces with levies and mercenaries.
In the early sixteenth century, a large migration of Albanians into Kosovo resulted in a sizeable ethnic Albanian presence in some parts of Western Kosovo which continued into the next century. Historian Noel Malcolm challenges this view, using Ottoman documents that recorded migrants coming into the Kosovo region from the 15th to the 18th century and Albanian Catholic sources from the 17th century of northern Albania which recorded migrations out of the region, Malcolm argues majority of the migrants into the Kosovo region during this period were not Albanian. The population of Kosovo was also much bigger than that of northern and central Albania and its rate of growth lower. Kosovo was part of the wider Ottoman region to be occupied by Austrian forces during the Great War of 1683–99, but the Ottomans re-established their rule of the region. Such acts of assistance by the Austrian Empire (then arch-rivals of the Ottoman Empire), or Russia, were always abortive or temporary at best. In 1690, the Serbian Patriarch Arsenije III led thousands people from Kosovo to the Christian north, in what came to be known as the Great Serb Migration. Anscombe casts doubt on the fact that this exodus affected Kosovo, since there is no evidence that parts of Kosovo were depopulated. Evidence of depopulation can only be found in areas between Niš and Belgrade. Some Albanians from Skopje and other regions were displaced in order to fill some areas around Niš, but there is no evidence that such events took place in Kosovo. In 1766, the Ottomans abolished the Patriarchate of Peja and fully imposed the jizya on its non-Muslim population.
Although initially stout opponents of the advancing Turks, Albanian chiefs ultimately came to accept the Ottomans as sovereigns. The resulting alliance facilitated the mass conversion of Albanians to Islam. Given that the Ottoman Empire's subjects were divided along religious (rather than ethnic) lines, Islamisation greatly elevated the status of Albanian chiefs. Prior to this, they were organised along simple tribal lines, living in the mountainous areas of modern Albania (from Kruje to the Šar range). Soon, they expanded into a depopulated Kosovo, as well as northwestern Macedonia, although some might have been autochthonous to the region. However, Banac favours the idea that the main settlers of the time were Vlachs. Centuries earlier, Albanians of Kosovo were predominantly Christian and Albanians and Serbs for the most part co-existed peacefully. The Ottomans appeared to have a more deliberate approach to converting the Roman Catholic population of whom were mostly Albanians as compared to adherents of Eastern Orthodoxy who were mostly Serbs, as they viewed the former less favorably due to its allegiance to Rome, a competing regional power.
Many Albanians gained prominent positions in the Ottoman government. "Albanians had little cause of unrest", according to author Dennis Hupchik. "If anything, they grew important in Ottoman internal affairs." In the 19th century, there was an awakening of ethnic nationalism throughout the Balkans. The underlying ethnic tensions became part of a broader struggle of Christian Serbs against Muslim Albanians. The ethnic Albanian nationalism movement was centred in Kosovo. In 1878 the League of Prizren () was formed.
This was a political organisation that sought to unify all the Albanians of the Ottoman Empire in a common struggle for autonomy and greater cultural rights, although they generally desired the continuation of the Ottoman Empire. The League was dis-established in 1881 but enabled the awakening of a national identity among Albanians. Albanian ambitions competed with those of the Serbs. The Kingdom of Serbia wished to incorporate this land that had formerly been within its empire.
The modern Albanian-Serbian conflict has its roots in the expulsion of the Albanians in 1877–1878 from areas that became incorporated into the Principality of Serbia. During and after the Serbian–Ottoman War of 1876–78, between 30,000 and 70,000 Muslims, mostly Albanians, were expelled by the Serb army from the Sanjak of Niš and fled to the Kosovo Vilayet. According to Austrian data, by the 1890s Kosovo was 70% Muslim (nearly entirely of Albanian descent) and less than 30% non-Muslim (primarily Serbs). In May 1901, Albanians pillaged and partially burned the cities of Novi Pazar, Sjenica and Pristina, and massacred Serbs in the area of Kolašin.
Kingdom of Yugoslavia
The Young Turk movement took control of the Ottoman Empire after a coup in 1912 which deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The movement supported a centralised form of government and opposed any sort of autonomy desired by the various nationalities of the Ottoman Empire. An allegiance to Ottomanism was promoted instead. An Albanian uprising in 1912 exposed the empire's northern territories in Kosovo and Novi Pazar, which led to an invasion by the Kingdom of Montenegro. The Ottomans suffered a serious defeat at the hands of Albanians in 1912, culminating in the Ottoman loss of most of its Albanian-inhabited lands. The Albanians threatened to march all the way to Salonika and reimpose Abdul Hamid.
A wave of Albanians in the Ottoman army ranks also deserted during this period, refusing to fight their own kin. In September 1912, a joint Balkan force made up of Serbian, Montenegrin, Bulgarian and Greek forces drove the Ottomans out of most of their European possessions. The rise of nationalism hampered relations between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, due to influence from Russians, Austrians and Ottomans. After the Ottomans' defeat in the First Balkan War, the 1913 Treaty of London was signed with Western Kosovo (Metohija) ceded to the Kingdom of Montenegro and Eastern Kosovo ceded to the Kingdom of Serbia. During the Balkan wars over 100,000 Albanians left Kosovo and around 20,000 were killed. Soon, there were concerted Serbian colonisation efforts in Kosovo during various periods between Serbia's 1912 takeover of the province and World War II. So the population of Serbs in Kosovo fell after World War II, but it had increased considerably before then.
An exodus of the local Albanian population occurred. Serbian authorities promoted creating new Serb settlements in Kosovo as well as the assimilation of Albanians into Serbian society. Numerous colonist Serb families moved into Kosovo, equalising the demographic balance between Albanians and Serbs. During 1912-1915, masses of Albanians would flee Kosovo. The figures of Albanians forcefully expelled from Kosovo range between 60,000-239,807, while Malcolm mentions 100,000-120,000. In combination with the politics of extermination and expulsion, there was also a process of assimilation through religious conversion of Albanian Muslims and Albanian Catholics into the Serbian Orthodox religion which took place as early as 1912. These politics seem to have been inspired by the nationalist ideologies of Ilija Garašanin and Jovan Cvijić.
In the winter of 1915–16, during World War I, Kosovo saw the retreat of the Serbian army as Kosovo was occupied by Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary. In 1918, the Allied Powers pushed the Central Powers out of Kosovo. After the end of World War I, the Kingdom of Serbia was transformed into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians on 1 December 1918.
Kosovo was split into four counties, three being a part of Serbia (Zvečan, Kosovo and southern Metohija) and one of Montenegro (northern Metohija). However, the new administration system since 26 April 1922 split Kosovo among three districts (oblast) of the Kingdom: Kosovo, Raška and Zeta. In 1929, the country was transformed into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the territories of Kosovo were reorganised among the Banate of Zeta, the Banate of Morava and the Banate of Vardar. In order to change the ethnic composition of Kosovo, between 1912 and 1941 a large-scale Serbian re-colonisation of Kosovo was undertaken by the Belgrade government. Meanwhile, Kosovar Albanians' right to receive education in their own language was denied alongside other non-Slavic or unrecognised Slavic nations of Yugoslavia, as the kingdom only recognised the Slavic Croat, Serb, and Slovene nations as constituent nations of Yugoslavia, while other Slavs had to identify as one of the three official Slavic nations while non-Slav nations were only deemed as minorities.
Albanians and other Muslims were forced to emigrate, mainly with the land reform which struck Albanian landowners in 1919, but also with direct violent measures. In 1935 and 1938 two agreements between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Turkey were signed on the expatriation of 240,000 Albanians to Turkey, which was not completed because of the outbreak of World War II.
After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, most of Kosovo was assigned to Italian-controlled Albania, with the rest being controlled by Germany and Bulgaria. A three-dimensional conflict ensued, involving inter-ethnic, ideological, and international affiliations, with the first being most important. Albanian collaborators persecuted Serb and Montenegrin settlers, with an estimated 10,000 killed and between 70,000 and 100,000 expelled or transferred to concentration camps in Pristina and Mitrovica. Nonetheless, these conflicts were relatively low-level compared with other areas of Yugoslavia during the war years, with two Serb historians also estimating that 12,000 Albanians lost their lives. An official investigation conducted by the Yugoslav government in 1964 recorded nearly 8,000 war-related fatalities in Kosovo between 1941 and 1945, 5,489 of whom were Serb and Montenegrin and 2,177 of whom were Albanian. There had been large-scale Albanian immigration from Albania to Kosovo which is by some scholars estimated in the range from 72,000 to 260,000 people (with a tendency to escalate, the last figure being in a petition of 1985). Some historians and contemporary references emphasise that a large-scale migration of Albanians from Albania to Kosovo is not recorded in Axis documents.
Communist Yugoslavia
The province as in its outline today first took shape in 1945 as the Autonomous Kosovo-Metohian Area. Until World War II, the only entity bearing the name of Kosovo had been a political unit carved from the former vilayet which bore no special significance to its internal population. In the Ottoman Empire (which previously controlled the territory), it had been a vilayet with its borders having been revised on several occasions. When the Ottoman province had last existed, it included areas which were by now either ceded to Albania, or found themselves within the newly created Yugoslav republics of Montenegro, or Macedonia (including its previous capital, Skopje) with another part in the Sandžak region of southwest Serbia.
Tensions between ethnic Albanians and the Yugoslav government were significant, not only due to ethnic tensions but also due to political ideological concerns, especially regarding relations with neighbouring Albania. Harsh repressive measures were imposed on Kosovo Albanians due to suspicions that there were sympathisers of the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha of Albania. In 1956, a show trial in Pristina was held in which multiple Albanian Communists of Kosovo were convicted of being infiltrators from Albania and were given long prison sentences. High-ranking Serbian communist official Aleksandar Ranković sought to secure the position of the Serbs in Kosovo and gave them dominance in Kosovo's nomenklatura.
Islam in Kosovo at this time was repressed and both Albanians and Muslim Slavs were encouraged to declare themselves to be Turkish and emigrate to Turkey. At the same time Serbs and Montenegrins dominated the government, security forces, and industrial employment in Kosovo. Albanians resented these conditions and protested against them in the late 1960s, accusing the actions taken by authorities in Kosovo as being colonialist, as well as demanding that Kosovo be made a republic, or declaring support for Albania.
After the ouster of Ranković in 1966, the agenda of pro-decentralisation reformers in Yugoslavia, especially from Slovenia and Croatia, succeeded in the late 1960s in attaining substantial decentralisation of powers, creating substantial autonomy in Kosovo and Vojvodina, and recognising a Muslim Yugoslav nationality. As a result of these reforms, there was a massive overhaul of Kosovo's nomenklatura and police, that shifted from being Serb-dominated to ethnic Albanian-dominated through firing Serbs in large scale. Further concessions were made to the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo in response to unrest, including the creation of the University of Pristina as an Albanian language institution. These changes created widespread fear among Serbs that they were being made second-class citizens in Yugoslavia. By the 1974 Constitution of Yugoslavia, Kosovo was granted major autonomy, allowing it to have its own administration, assembly, and judiciary; as well as having a membership in the collective presidency and the Yugoslav parliament, in which it held veto power.
In the aftermath of the 1974 constitution, concerns over the rise of Albanian nationalism in Kosovo rose with the widespread celebrations in 1978 of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the League of Prizren. Albanians felt that their status as a "minority" in Yugoslavia had made them second-class citizens in comparison with the "nations" of Yugoslavia and demanded that Kosovo be a constituent republic, alongside the other republics of Yugoslavia. Protests by Albanians in 1981 over the status of Kosovo resulted in Yugoslav territorial defence units being brought into Kosovo and a state of emergency being declared resulting in violence and the protests being crushed. In the aftermath of the 1981 protests, purges took place in the Communist Party, and rights that had been recently granted to Albanians were rescinded – including ending the provision of Albanian professors and Albanian language textbooks in the education system.
Due to very high birth rates, the proportion of Albanians increased from 75% to over 90%. In contrast, the number of Serbs barely increased, and in fact dropped from 15% to 8% of the total population, since many Serbs departed from Kosovo as a response to the tight economic climate and increased incidents with their Albanian neighbours. While there was tension, charges of "genocide" and planned harassment have been debunked as an excuse to revoke Kosovo's autonomy. For example, in 1986 the Serbian Orthodox Church published an official claim that Kosovo Serbs were being subjected to an Albanian program of 'genocide'.
Even though they were disproved by police statistics, they received wide attention in the Serbian press and that led to further ethnic problems and eventual removal of Kosovo's status. Beginning in March 1981, Kosovar Albanian students of the University of Pristina organised protests seeking that Kosovo become a republic within Yugoslavia and demanding their human rights. The protests were brutally suppressed by the police and army, with many protesters arrested. During the 1980s, ethnic tensions continued with frequent violent outbreaks against Yugoslav state authorities, resulting in a further increase in emigration of Kosovo Serbs and other ethnic groups. The Yugoslav leadership tried to suppress protests of Kosovo Serbs seeking protection from ethnic discrimination and violence.
Breakup of Yugoslavia and Kosovo War
Inter-ethnic tensions continued to worsen in Kosovo throughout the 1980s. In 1989, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, employing a mix of intimidation and political maneuvering, drastically reduced Kosovo's special autonomous status within Serbia and started cultural oppression of the ethnic Albanian population. Kosovar Albanians responded with a non-violent separatist movement, employing widespread civil disobedience and creation of parallel structures in education, medical care, and taxation, with the ultimate goal of achieving the independence of Kosovo.
In July 1990, the Kosovo Albanians proclaimed the existence of the Republic of Kosova, and declared it a sovereign and independent state in September 1992. In May 1992, Ibrahim Rugova was elected its president in an election in which only Kosovo Albanians participated. During its lifetime, the Republic of Kosova was only officially recognised by Albania. By the mid-1990s, the Kosovo Albanian population was growing restless, as the status of Kosovo was not resolved as part of the Dayton Agreement of November 1995, which ended the Bosnian War. By 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic Albanian guerrilla paramilitary group that sought the separation of Kosovo and the eventual creation of a Greater Albania, had prevailed over the Rugova's non-violent resistance movement and launched attacks against the Yugoslav Army and Serbian police in Kosovo, resulting in the Kosovo War. The situation escalated further when Yugoslav and Serbian forces committed numerous massacres against Kosovo Albanians, such as the Prekaz massacre in which one of the KLA founders Adem Jasheri was surrounded in his home along with his extended family. In total 58 Kosovo Albanians were killed in this massacre, including 18 women and 10 children, in a massacre where mortars were fired on the houses and snipers shot those who fled. This massacre along with others would motivate many Albanian men to join the KLA.
By 1998, international pressure compelled Yugoslavia to sign a ceasefire and partially withdraw its security forces. Events were to be monitored by Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observers according to an agreement negotiated by Richard Holbrooke. The ceasefire did not hold and fighting resumed in December 1998, culminating in the Račak massacre, which attracted further international attention to the conflict. Within weeks, a multilateral international conference was convened and by March had prepared a draft agreement known as the Rambouillet Accords, calling for the restoration of Kosovo's autonomy and the deployment of NATO peacekeeping forces. The Yugoslav delegation found the terms unacceptable and refused to sign the draft. Between 24 March and 10 June 1999, NATO intervened by bombing Yugoslavia aimed to force Milošević to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, though NATO could not appeal to any particular motion of the Security Council of the United Nations to help legitimise its intervention. Combined with continued skirmishes between Albanian guerrillas and Yugoslav forces the conflict resulted in a further massive displacement of population in Kosovo.
During the conflict, roughly a million ethnic Albanians fled or were forcefully driven from Kosovo. In 1999 more than 11,000 deaths were reported to the office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia prosecutor Carla Del Ponte. , some 3,000 people were still missing, of which 2,500 are Albanian, 400 Serbs and 100 Roma. By June, Milošević agreed to a foreign military presence in Kosovo and the withdrawal of his troops. During the Kosovo War, over 90,000 Serbian and other non-Albanian refugees fled the war-torn province. In the days after the Yugoslav Army withdrew, over 80,000 Serb and other non-Albanians civilians (almost half of 200,000 estimated to live in Kosovo) were expelled from Kosovo, and many of the remaining civilians were victims of abuse. After Kosovo and other Yugoslav Wars, Serbia became home to the highest number of refugees and IDPs (including Kosovo Serbs) in Europe.
In some villages under Albanian control in 1998, militants drove ethnic-Serbs from their homes. Some of those who remained are unaccounted for and are presumed to have been abducted by the KLA and killed. The KLA detained an estimated 85 Serbs during its 19 July 1998 attack on Orahovac. 35 of these were subsequently released but the others remained. On 22 July 1998, the KLA briefly took control of the Belaćevac mine near the town of Obilić. Nine Serb mineworkers were captured that day and they remain on the International Committee of the Red Cross's list of the missing and are presumed to have been killed. In August 1998, 22 Serbian civilians were reportedly killed in the village of Klečka, where the police claimed to have discovered human remains and a kiln used to cremate the bodies. In September 1998, Serbian police collected 34 bodies of people believed to have been seized and murdered by the KLA, among them some ethnic Albanians, at Lake Radonjić near Glođane (Gllogjan) in what became known as the Lake Radonjić massacre. Human Rights Watch have raised questions about the validity of at least some of these allegations made by Serbian authorities.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) prosecuted crimes committed during the Kosovo War. Nine senior Yugoslav officials, including Milošević, were indicted for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed between January and June 1999. Six of the defendants were convicted, one was acquitted, one died before his trial could commence, and one (Milošević) died before his trial could conclude. Six KLA members were charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes by the ICTY following the war, but only one was convicted.
In total around 10,317 civilians were killed during the war, of whom 8,676 were Albanians, 1,196 Serbs and 445 Roma and others in addition to 3,218 killed members of armed formations.
Post-war
On 10 June 1999, the UN Security Council passed UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which placed Kosovo under transitional UN administration (UNMIK) and authorised Kosovo Force (KFOR), a NATO-led peacekeeping force. Resolution 1244 provided that Kosovo would have autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and affirmed the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia, which has been legally succeeded by the Republic of Serbia.
Estimates of the number of Serbs who left when Serbian forces left Kosovo vary from 65,000 to 250,000. Within post-conflict Kosovo Albanian society, calls for retaliation for previous violence done by Serb forces during the war circulated through public culture. Widespread attacks against Serbian cultural sites commenced following the conflict and the return of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees to their homes. In 2004, prolonged negotiations over Kosovo's future status, sociopolitical problems and nationalist sentiments resulted in the Kosovo unrest. 11 Albanians and 16 Serbs were killed, 900 people (including peacekeepers) were injured, and several houses, public buildings and churches were damaged or destroyed.
International negotiations began in 2006 to determine the final status of Kosovo, as envisaged under UN Security Council Resolution 1244. The UN-backed talks, led by UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari, began in February 2006. Whilst progress was made on technical matters, both parties remained diametrically opposed on the question of status itself.
In February 2007, Ahtisaari delivered a draft status settlement proposal to leaders in Belgrade and Pristina, the basis for a draft UN Security Council Resolution which proposed 'supervised independence' for the province. A draft resolution, backed by the United States, the United Kingdom and other European members of the Security Council, was presented and rewritten four times to try to accommodate Russian concerns that such a resolution would undermine the principle of state sovereignty.
Russia, which holds a veto in the Security Council as one of five permanent members, had stated that it would not support any resolution which was not acceptable to both Belgrade and Kosovo Albanians. Whilst most observers had, at the beginning of the talks, anticipated independence as the most likely outcome, others have suggested that a rapid resolution might not be preferable.
After many weeks of discussions at the UN, the United States, United Kingdom and other European members of the Security Council formally 'discarded' a draft resolution backing Ahtisaari's proposal on 20 July 2007, having failed to secure Russian backing. Beginning in August, a "Troika" consisting of negotiators from the European Union (Wolfgang Ischinger), the United States (Frank G. Wisner) and Russia (Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko) launched a new effort to reach a status outcome acceptable to both Belgrade and Pristina. Despite Russian disapproval, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and France appeared likely to recognise Kosovar independence. A declaration of independence by Kosovar Albanian leaders was postponed until the end of the Serbian presidential elections (4 February 2008). A significant portion of politicians in both the EU and the US had feared that a premature declaration could boost support in Serbia for the nationalist candidate, Tomislav Nikolić.
Provisional self-government
In November 2001, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe supervised the first elections for the Assembly of Kosovo. After that election, Kosovo's political parties formed an all-party unity coalition and elected Ibrahim Rugova as president and Bajram Rexhepi (PDK) as Prime Minister. After Kosovo-wide elections in October 2004, the LDK and AAK formed a new governing coalition that did not include PDK and Ora. This coalition agreement resulted in Ramush Haradinaj (AAK) becoming Prime Minister, while Ibrahim Rugova retained the position of President. PDK and Ora were critical of the coalition agreement and have since frequently accused that government of corruption.
Parliamentary elections were held on 17 November 2007. After early results, Hashim Thaçi who was on course to gain 35 per cent of the vote, claimed victory for PDK, the Democratic Party of Kosovo, and stated his intention to declare independence. Thaçi formed a coalition with current president Fatmir Sejdiu's Democratic League which was in second place with 22 percent of the vote. The turnout at the election was particularly low. Most members of the Serb minority refused to vote.
After declaration of independence
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008. recognised its independence, including all of its immediate neighbours, with the exception of Serbia. However, 15 states have subsequently withdrawn recognition of the Republic of Kosovo. Russia and China do not recognise Kosovo's independence. Since declaring independence, it has become a member of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, though not of the United Nations.
The Serb minority of Kosovo, which largely opposes the declaration of independence, has formed the Community Assembly of Kosovo and Metohija in response. The creation of the assembly was condemned by Kosovo's President Fatmir Sejdiu, while UNMIK has said the assembly is not a serious issue because it will not have an operative role.
On 8 October 2008, the UN General Assembly resolved, on a proposal by Serbia, to ask the International Court of Justice to render an advisory opinion on the legality of Kosovo's declaration of independence. The advisory opinion, which is not binding over decisions by states to recognise or not recognise Kosovo, was rendered on 22 July 2010, holding that Kosovo's declaration of independence was not in violation either of general principles of international law, which do not prohibit unilateral declarations of independence, nor of specific international law – in particular UNSCR 1244 – which did not define the final status process nor reserve the outcome to a decision of the Security Council.
Some rapprochement between the two governments took place on 19 April 2013 as both parties reached the Brussels Agreement, an agreement brokered by the EU that would allow the Serb minority in Kosovo to have its own police force and court of appeals. The agreement is yet to be ratified by either parliament.
Governance
Kosovo is a multi-party parliamentary representative democratic republic. It is governed by legislative, executive and judicial institutions, which derive from the constitution, although, until the Brussels Agreement, North Kosovo was in practice largely controlled by institutions of Serbia or parallel institutions funded by Serbia. Legislative functions are vested in both the Parliament and the ministers within their competencies. The Government exercises the executive power and is composed of the Prime Minister as the head of government, the Deputy Prime Ministers and the Ministers of the various ministries.
The judiciary is composed of the Supreme Court and subordinate courts, a Constitutional Court, and independent prosecutorial institutions. There also exist multiple independent institutions defined by the constitution and law, as well as local governments. It specifies that Kosovo is a "secular state" and neutral in matters of religious beliefs. Freedom of belief, conscience and religion is guaranteed with religious autonomy ensured and protected. All citizens are equal before the law and gender equality is ensured by the constitution. The Constitutional Framework guarantees a minimum of ten seats in the 120-member Assembly for Serbs, and ten for other minorities, and also guarantees Serbs and other minorities places in the Government.
The president serves as the head of state and represents the unity of the people, elected every five years, indirectly by the parliament through a secret ballot by a two-thirds majority of all deputies. The head of state invested primarily with representative responsibilities and powers. The president has the power to return draft legislation to the parliament for reconsideration and has a role in foreign affairs and certain official appointments. The Prime Minister serves as the head of government elected by the parliament. Ministers are nominated by the Prime Minister, and then confirmed by the parliament. The head of government exercises executive power of the territory.
Corruption is a major problem and an obstacle to the development of democracy in the country. Those in the judiciary appointed by the government to fight corruption are often government associates. Moreover, prominent politicians and party operatives who commit offences are not prosecuted due to the lack of laws and political will. Organised crime also poses a threat to the economy due to the practices of bribery, extortion and racketeering.
The government of Kosovo has exhibited severe shortcomings in the coordination of local and state police forces fighting international crime in the country. Since 2018, Kosovo Police was observed to raid warehouses and pharmacy establishments in Pristina and Mitrovica with no prior warning or coordination with city law enforcement. The smuggling of contraband goods, firearms as well as illicit drugs is a major obstacle for Kosovo's economic development and international recognition.
Foreign relations and military
The foreign relations of Kosovo are conducted through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Pristina. , 97 out of 193 United Nations member states recognise the Republic of Kosovo. Within the European Union, it is recognised by 22 of 27 members and is a potential candidate for the future enlargement of the European Union.
Kosovo is member of several international organisations including the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, International Road and Transport Union, Regional Cooperation Council, Council of Europe Development Bank, Venice Commission and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In 2015, Kosovo's bid to become a member of UNESCO fell three votes short of the two-thirds majority required to join. Almost 21 countries maintain diplomatic missions in Kosovo. Kosovo maintains 24 diplomatic missions and 28 consular missions abroad.
The relations with Albania are in a special case considering that both countries share the same language and culture. The Albanian language is one of the official languages of Kosovo. Albania has an embassy in the capital Pristina and Kosovo an embassy in Tirana. In 1992, Albania was the only country whose parliament voted to recognise the Republic of Kosova. Albania was also one of the first countries to officially announce its recognition of the Republic of Kosovo in February 2008.
The Global Peace Index 2020 ranked Kosovo 85th out of 163 countries. Kosovo's biggest challenges were identified in the areas of ongoing conflicts and societal safety and security, which are affected by Kosovo's relations to its neighbors and its domestic societal and political stability.
Kosovo's military is the Kosovo Security Force. The President holds the title of commander-in-chief of the military. Citizens over the age of 18 are eligible to serve in the Kosovo Security Force. Members of the force are protected from discrimination on the basis of gender or ethnicity. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) led the Kosovo Force (KFOR) and the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) in 2008, started preparations for the formation of the Kosovo Security Force. In 2014, the former Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi declared, that the National Government had decided to establish a Defence Ministry in 2019 and to officially transform the Kosovo Security Force into the Kosovan Armed Forces, an army which would meet all the standards of NATO members with the aim to join the alliance in the future. In December 2018, the parliament of Kosovo changed the mandate of the Kosovo Security Force by law and converted it to an army. It additionally established a Ministry of Defense.
Law
The judicial system of Kosovo is a civil law system divided between courts with regular civil and criminal jurisdiction and administrative courts with jurisdiction over litigation between individuals and the public administration. As of the Constitution of Kosovo, the judicial system is composed of the Supreme Court, which is the highest judicial authority, a Constitutional Court, and an independent prosecutorial institution. All of them are administered by the Judicial Council located in Pristina. The Kosovo Police is the main state law enforcement agency in the nation. After the Independence of Kosovo in 2008, the force became the governmental agency. The agency carries nearly all general police duties such as criminal investigation, patrol activity, traffic policing, border control.
The Ahtisaari Plan envisaged two forms of international supervision of Kosovo after its independence such as the International Civilian Office (ICO), which would monitor the implementation of the Plan and would have a wide range of veto powers over legislative and executive actions, and the European Union Rule of Law Mission to Kosovo (EULEX), which would have the narrower mission of deploying police and civilian resources with the aim of developing the Kosovo Police and judicial systems but also with its own powers of arrest and prosecution.
The declaration of independence and subsequent Constitution granted these bodies the powers assigned to them by the Ahtisaari Plan. Since the Plan was not voted on by the UN Security Council, the ICO's legal status within Kosovo was dependent on the de facto situation and Kosovo legislation; it was supervised by an International Steering Group (ISG) composed of the main states which recognised Kosovo. It was never recognised by Serbia or other non-recognising states. EULEX was also initially opposed by Serbia, but its mandate and powers were accepted in late 2008 by Serbia and the UN Security Council as operating under the umbrella of the continuing UNMIK mandate, in a status-neutral way, but with its own operational independence. The ICO's existence terminated on 10 September 2012, after the ISG had determined that Kosovo had substantially fulfilled its obligations under the Ahtisaari Plan. EULEX continues its existence under both Kosovo and international law; in 2012 the Kosovo president formally requested a continuation of its mandate until 2014. Its mandate was further extended in 2016, 2018, and 2020 and its current mandate expires in June 2021. Since 2018, the mandate of EULEX has been greatly reduced and it now only has a monitoring role.
Minorities
The relations between Kosovar Albanians and Kosovar Serbs have been hostile since the rise of nationalism in the Balkans during the 19th century. During Communism in Yugoslavia, the ethnic Albanians and Serbs were strongly irreconcilable, with sociological studies during the Tito-era indicating that ethnic Albanians and Serbs rarely accepted each other as neighbors or friends and few held inter-ethnic marriages. Ethnic prejudices, stereotypes and mutual distrust between ethnic Albanians and Serbs have remained common for decades. The level of intolerance and separation between both communities during the Tito-period was reported by sociologists to be worse than that of Croat and Serb communities in Yugoslavia, which also had tensions but held some closer relations between each other.
Despite their planned integration into the Kosovar society and their recognition in the Kosovar constitution, the Romani, Ashkali, and Egyptian communities continue to face many difficulties, such as segregation and discrimination, in housing, education, health, employment and social welfare. Many camps around Kosovo continue to house thousands of Internally Displaced People, all of whom are from minority groups and communities. Because many of the Roma are believed to have sided with the Serbs during the conflict, taking part in the widespread looting and destruction of Albanian property, Minority Rights Group International report that Romani people encounter hostility by Albanians outside their local areas.
Administrative divisions
Kosovo is divided into seven districts (; ), according to the Law of Kosovo and the Brussels Agreement of 2013, which stipulated the formation of new municipalities with Serb majority populations. The districts are further subdivided into 38 municipalities (; ). The largest and most populous district of Kosovo is the District of Pristina with the capital in Pristina, having a surface area of and a population of 477,312.
Geography
Defined in a total area of , Kosovo is landlocked and located in the center of the Balkan Peninsula in Southeastern Europe. It lies between latitudes 42° and 43° N, and longitudes 20° and 22° E. The northernmost point is Bellobërda at 43° 14' 06" northern latitude; the southernmost is Restelica at 41° 56' 40" northern latitude; the westernmost point is Bogë at 20° 3' 23" eastern longitude; and the easternmost point is Desivojca at 21° 44' 21" eastern longitude. The highest point is Velika Rudoka at above sea level, and the lowest is the White Drin at .
Most of the borders of Kosovo are dominated by mountainous and high terrain. The most noticeable topographical features are the Accursed Mountains and the Šar Mountains. The Accursed Mountains, are a geological continuation of the Dinaric Alps. The mountains run laterally through the west along the border with Albania and Montenegro. The southeast is predominantly the Šar Mountains, which constitute the border with North Macedonia. Besides the mountain ranges, Kosovo's territory consists mostly of two major plains, the Kosovo Plain in the east and the Metohija Plain in the west.
Kosovo's hydrological resources are relatively small; there are few lakes in Kosovo, the largest of which are Lake Gazivoda, Lake Radoniq, Lake Batlava and Lake Badovc. In addition to these, Kosovo also does have karst springs, thermal and mineral water springs. The longest rivers of Kosovo include the White Drin, the South Morava and the Ibar. Sitnica, a tributary of Ibar, is the largest river lying completely within Kosovo's territory. River Nerodimka represents Europe's only instance of a river bifurcation flowing into the Black Sea and Aegean Sea.
Climate
Most of Kosovo experiences predominantly a Continental climate with Mediterranean and Alpine influences. Nevertheless, the climate is strongly influenced by Kosovo's proximity to the Adriatic Sea in the west, the Aegean Sea in the south as well as the European continental landmass in the north.
The coldest areas is the mountainous region in the west and southeast, whereas an Alpine climate is prevalent. The warmest areas are mostly in the extreme southern areas close to the border with Albania, characterised by the Mediterranean climate. Mean monthly temperature ranges between (in January) and (in July). Mean annual precipitation ranges from per year, and is well distributed year-round.
To the northeast, the Kosovo Plain and Ibar Valley are drier with total precipitation of about per year and more influenced by continental air masses, with colder winters and very hot summers. In the southwest, climatic area of Metohija receives more mediterranean influences with warmer summers, somewhat higher precipitation () and heavy snowfalls in the winter. The mountainous areas of the Accursed Mountains in the west, Šar Mountains on the south and Kopaonik in the north experiences alpine climate, with high precipitation ( per year, short and fresh summers, and cold winters. The average annual temperature of Kosovo is . The warmest month is July with average temperature of , and the coldest is January with . Except Prizren and Istok, all other meteorological stations in January recorded average temperatures under .
Biodiversity
Located in Southeastern Europe, Kosovo receives floral and faunal species from Europe and Eurasia. Forests are widespread in Kosovo and cover at least 39% of the region. Phytogeographically, it straddles the Illyrian province of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. In addition, it falls within three terrestrial ecoregions: Balkan mixed forests, Dinaric Mountains mixed forests, and Pindus Mountains mixed forests. Kosovo's biodiversity is conserved in two national parks, eleven nature reserves and one hundred three other protected areas. The Bjeshkët e Nemuna National Park and Sharr Mountains National Park are the most important regions of vegetation and biodiversity in Kosovo. Kosovo had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 5.19/10, ranking it 107th globally out of 172 countries.
Flora encompasses more than 1,800 species of vascular plant species, but the actual number is estimated to be higher than 2,500 species. The diversity is the result of the complex interaction of geology and hydrology creating a wide variety of habitat conditions for flora growth. Although, Kosovo represents only 2.3% of the entire surface area of the Balkans, in terms of vegetation it has 25% of the Balkan flora and about 18% of the European flora. The fauna is composed of a wide range of species. The mountainous west and southeast provide a great habitat for several rare or endangered species including brown bears, lynxes, wild cats, wolves, foxes, wild goats, roebucks and deers. A total of 255 species of birds have been recorded, with raptors such as the golden eagle, eastern imperial eagle and lesser kestrel living principally in the mountains of Kosovo.
Demographics
The population of Kosovo, as defined by Agency of Statistics, was estimated in 2011 to be approximately 1,740,000. The overall life expectancy at birth is 76.7 years; 74.1 years for males and 79.4 years for females. Kosovo ranks 11th most populous in the Balkans and 149th in the world.
In 2005, the Provisional Institutions of Self Government estimated the population of Kosovo to be between 1.9 and 2.2 million with the Albanians and Serbs being the largest ethnic groups followed by other groups such as Bosniak, Gorani, Turkish and Romani. However, according to the 2009 CIA World Factbook, Kosovo's population stands at 1,804,838 persons. It stated that ethnic composition was 88% Albanians, 7% Serbs and 5% of other ethnic groups including Bosniaks, Gorani, Romani, Turks, Ashkalis, Balkan Egyptians and Janjevci – Croats.
Albanians, steadily increasing in number, may have constituted a majority in Kosovo since the 19th century, although the region's historical ethnic composition is disputed. Kosovo's political boundaries do not quite coincide with the ethnic boundary by which Albanians compose an absolute majority in every municipality; for example, Serbs form a local majority in North Kosovo and two other municipalities, while there are large areas with an Albanian majority outside of Kosovo, namely in the neighbouring regions of former Yugoslavia: the north-west of North Macedonia, and in the Preševo Valley in Southern Serbia.
At 1.3% per year as of 2008 data, ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have the fastest rate of growth in population in Europe. Over an 82-year period (1921–2003) the population of Kosovo grew to 460% of its original size. Whereas Albanians constituted 60% of Kosovo's 500,000 person population in 1931, by 1991 they reached 81% of Kosovo's 2 million person population. In the second half of the 20th century, Kosovo Albanians had three times higher birth rates than Serbs. In addition, most of Kosovo's pre-1999 Serb population relocated to Serbia proper following the ethnic cleansing campaign in 1999. Municipalities of Kosovo are largely rural, with only eight municipalities having more than 40,000 inhabitants living in the urban areas.
The official languages of Kosovo are Albanian and Serbian and the institutions are committed to ensure the equal use of both languages. Turkish, Bosnian and Roma hold the status of official languages at municipal level if the linguistic community represents at least 5% of the total population of municipality.
Albanian is spoken as a first language by approximately 95% of the population, while Bosnian and Serbian are spoken by 1.7% and 1.6% of the population, respectively. Due to the boycott of the census of North Kosovo, Bosnian resulted in being the second largest language after Albanian however, Serbian is de facto the second largest language in Kosovo.
Although both Albanian and Serbian are official languages, municipal civil servants are only required to speak one of them in a professional setting and, according to Language Commissioner of Kosovo, Slaviša Mladenović, statement from 2015, no organisations have all of their documents in both languages. The Law on the Use of Languages gives Turkish the status of an official language in the municipality of Prizren, irrespective of the size of the Turkish community living there.
A 2020 research report funded by the EU shows that there is a limited scale of trust and overall contact between the major ethnic groups in Kosovo.
Religion
Kosovo is a secular state with no state religion; freedom of belief, conscience and religion is explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution of Kosovo. Kosovan society is strongly secularised and is ranked first in Southern Europe and ninth in the world as free and equal for tolerance towards religion and atheism.
In the 2011 census, 95.6% of the population of Kosovo was counted as Muslim and 3.7% as Christian including 2.2% as Roman Catholic and 1.5% as Eastern Orthodox. The remaining 0.3% of the population reported having no religion, or another religion, or did not provide an adequate answer. Protestants, although recognised as a religious group in Kosovo by the government, were not represented in the census. The census was largely boycotted by the Kosovo Serbs (who predominantly identify as Serbian Orthodox Christians), especially in North Kosovo, leaving the Serb population underrepresented.
Islam is the most widely practiced religion in Kosovo and was introduced in the Middle Ages by the Ottomans. Today, Kosovo has the highest percentage of Muslims in Europe after Turkey. The majority of the Muslim population of Kosovo are ethnic Albanians, Turks, and Slavs such as Gorani and Bosniaks.
Christianity has a long and continuous history in Kosovo which can be traced back to the Roman invasion of the region. During the Middle Ages, the entire Balkan Peninsula had been Christianised initially by the Romans and subsequently by the Byzantine Empire. Followers of the Roman Catholic Church are predominantly Albanians while ethnic Serbs follow the Eastern Orthodox Church. In 2008, Protestant pastor Artur Krasniqi, primate of the Kosovo Protestant Evangelical Church, claimed that "as many as 15,000" Kosovar Albanians had converted to Protestantism since 1985.
Relations between the Albanian Muslim and Albanian Catholic communities in Kosovo are good, however, both communities have few or no relations with the Serbian Orthodox community. In general, the Albanians define their ethnicity by language and not by religion, while religion reflects a distinguishing identity feature among the Slavs of Kosovo and elsewhere.
Economy
The economy of Kosovo is a transitional economy. It suffered from the combined results of political upheaval, the Serbian dismissal of Kosovo employees and the following Yugoslav Wars. Despite declining foreign assistance, the GDP has mostly grown since its declaration of independence. This was despite the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the subsequent European debt crisis. Additionally, the inflation rate has been low. Most economic development has taken place in the trade, retail and construction sectors. Kosovo is highly dependent on remittances from the diaspora, FDI and other capital inflows. Kosovo is one of the poorest countries in Europe. In 2018, the International Monetary Fund reported that approximately one-sixth of the population lived below the poverty line and one-third of the working age population was unemployed, the highest rate in Europe.
Kosovo's largest trading partners are Albania, Italy, Switzerland, China, Germany and Turkey. The Euro is its official currency. The Government of Kosovo has signed free-trade agreements with Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania and North Macedonia. Kosovo is a member of CEFTA, agreed with UNMIK, and enjoys free trade with most nearby non-European Union countries.
The secondary sector accounted for 22.60% of GDP and a general workforce of 800,000 employees in 2009. There are several reasons for this stagnation, ranging from consecutive occupations, political turmoil and the War in Kosovo in 1999. The electricity sector is considered one of the sectors with the greatest potential of development. In April 2020 Kosovo with KOSTT, the government-owned Transmission System Operator, declared its independence from the Serbian electricity transmission operator Elektromreža Srbije with a vote by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, ENTSO-E, which has paved the way for Kosovo to become an independent regulatory zone for electricity. The vote confirms that a connection agreement will be signed between ENTSO-E and KOSTT, allowing KOSTT to join the 42 other transmission operators. A joint energy bloc between Kosovo and Albania, is in work after an agreement which was signed in December 2019. With that agreement Albania and Kosovo will now be able to exchange energy reserves, which is expected to result in €4 million in savings per year for Kosovo. Kosovo has large reserves of lead, zinc, silver, nickel, cobalt, copper, iron and bauxite. The nation has the 5th largest lignite reserves in the world and the 3rd in Europe. The Directorate for Mines and Minerals and the World Bank estimated that Kosovo had €13.5 billion worth of minerals in 2005.
The primary sector is based on small to medium-sized family-owned dispersed units. 53% of the nation's area is agricultural land, 41% forest and forestry land, and 6% for others. The arable land is mostly used for corn, wheat, pastures, meadows and vineyards. It contributes almost to 35% of GDP including the forestry sector. Wine has historically been produced in Kosovo. The wine industry is successful and has been growing after the war. The main heartland of Kosovo's wine industry is in Orahovac, where millions of litres of wine are produced. The main cultivars include Pinot noir, Merlot, and Chardonnay. Kosovo exports wines to Germany and the United States. During the "glory days" of the wine industry, grapes were grown from the vineyard area of 9,000ha, divided into private and public ownership, and spread mainly throughout the south and west of Kosovo. The four state-owned wine production facilities were not as much "wineries" as they were "wine factories". Only the Rahovec facility that held approximately 36% of the total vineyard area had the capacity of around 50 million litres annually. The major share of the wine production was intended for exports. At its peak in 1989, the exports from the Rahovec facility amounted to 40 million litres and were mainly distributed to the German market.
Tourism
The natural values of Kosovo represent quality tourism resources. The description of Kosovo's potential in tourism is closely related to its geographical location, in the center of the Balkan Peninsula in Southeastern Europe. It represents a crossroads which historically dates back to antiquity. Kosovo serves as a link in the connection between Central and Southern Europe and the Adriatic Sea and Black Sea. The mountainous west and southeast of Kosovo has great potential for winter tourism. Skiing takes place at the winter resort of Brezovica within the Šar Mountains.
Kosovo is generally rich in various topographical features, including high mountains, lakes, canyons, steep rock formations and rivers. Brezovica ski resort, with the close proximity to the Pristina Airport (60 km) and Skopje International Airport (70 km), is a possible destination for international tourists. Other major attractions include the capital, Pristina, the historical cities of Prizren, Peja and Gjakova but also Ferizaj and Gjilan.
The New York Times included Kosovo on the list of 41 places to visit in 2011.
Transport
Currently, there are two main motorways in Kosovo: the R7 connecting Kosovo with Albania and the R6 connecting Pristina with the Macedonian border at Elez Han. The construction of the new R7.1 Motorway began in 2017.
The R7 Motorway (part of Albania-Kosovo Highway) links Kosovo to Albania's Adriatic coast in Durrës. Once the remaining European route (E80) from Pristina to Merdare section project will be completed, the motorway will link Kosovo through the present European route (E80) highway with the Pan-European corridor X (E75) near Niš in Serbia. The R6 Motorway is currently under construction. Forming part of the E65, it is the second motorway constructed in the region and it links the capital Pristina with the border with North Macedonia at Elez Han, which is about from Skopje. Construction of the motorway started in 2014 and it is going to be finished in 2018.
Trainkos operates daily passenger trains on two routes: Pristina – Fushë Kosovë – Pejë, as well as Pristina – Fushë Kosovë – Ferizaj – Skopje, North Macedonia (the latter in cooperation with Macedonian Railways). In addition, Srbija Voz, subsidiary of Serbian Railways, operates a train service from Kraljevo, Serbia to North Mitrovica. Also, freight trains run throughout the country.
The nation hosts two airports, Pristina International Airport and Gjakova Airport. Pristina International Airport is located southwest of Pristina. It is Kosovo's only international airport and the only port of entry for air travelers to Kosovo. Gjakova Airport was built by the Kosovo Force (KFOR) following the Kosovo War, next to an existing airfield used for agricultural purposes, and was used mainly for military and humanitarian flights. The local and national government plans to offer Gjakova Airport for operation under a public-private partnership with the aim of turning it into a civilian and commercial airport.
Infrastructure
Health
In the past, Kosovo's capabilities to develop a modern health care system were limited.
Low GDP during 1990 worsened the situation even more. However, the establishment of Faculty of Medicine in the University of Pristina marked a significant development in health care. This was also followed by launching different health clinics which enabled better conditions for professional development.
Nowadays the situation has changed, and the health care system in Kosovo is organised into three sectors: primary, secondary and tertiary health care.
Primary health care in Pristina is organised into thirteen family medicine centres and fifteen ambulatory care units. Secondary health care is decentralised in seven regional hospitals. Pristina does not have any regional hospital and instead uses University Clinical Center of Kosovo for health care services. University Clinical Center of Kosovo provides its health care services in twelve clinics, where 642 doctors are employed. At a lower level, home services are provided for several vulnerable groups which are not able to reach health care premises. Kosovo health care services are now focused on patient safety, quality control and assisted health.
Education
Education for primary, secondary, and tertiary levels is predominantly public and supported by the state, run by the Ministry of Education. Education takes place in two main stages: primary and secondary education, and higher education.
The primary and secondary education is subdivided into four stages: preschool education, primary and low secondary education, high secondary education and special education. Preschool education is for children from the ages of one to five. Primary and secondary education is obligatory for everyone. It is provided by gymnasiums and vocational schools and also available in languages of recognised minorities in Kosovo, where classes are held in Albanian, Serbian, Bosnian, Turkish and Croatian. The first phase (primary education) includes grades one to five, and the second phase (low secondary education) grades six to nine. The third phase (high secondary education) consists of general education but also professional education, which is focused on different fields. It lasts four years. However, pupils are offered possibilities of applying for higher or university studies. According to the Ministry of Education, children who are not able to get a general education are able to get a special education (fifth phase).
Higher education can be received in universities and other higher-education institutes. These educational institutions offer studies for Bachelor, Master and PhD degrees. The students may choose full-time or part-time studies.
Media
Kosovo ranked 58th in the 2008 Press Freedom Index report compiled by the Reporters Without Borders, while in 2016, it ranked 90th. The Media consists of different kinds of communicative media such as radio, television, newspapers, and internet web sites. Most of the media survive from advertising and subscriptions. As according to IREX there are 92 radio stations and 22 television stations.
Culture
Arts
The architecture of Kosovo dates back to the Neolithic, Bronze and Middle Ages. It has been influenced by the presence of different civilisations and religions as evidenced by the structures which have survived to this day.
Kosovo is home to many monasteries and churches from the 13th and 14th centuries that represent the Serbian Orthodox legacy. Architectural heritage from the Ottoman Period includes mosques and hamams from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Other historical architectural structures of interest include kullas from the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as a number of bridges, urban centers and fortresses. While some vernacular buildings are not considered important in their own right, taken together they are of considerable interest. During the 1999 conflict in Kosovo, many buildings that represent this heritage were destroyed or damaged. In the Dukagjini region, at least 500 kullas were attacked, and most of them destroyed or otherwise damaged.
In 2004, UNESCO recognised the Visoki Dečani monastery as World Heritage Site for its outstanding universal value. Two years later, the site of patrimony was extended as a serial nomination, to include three other religious monuments: Patriarchate of Peja, Our Lady of Ljeviš and Gračanica monastery under the name of Medieval Monuments in Kosovo. It consists of four Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries, which represent the fusion of the eastern Orthodox Byzantine and the western Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture to form the Palaiologian Renaissance style. The construction was founded by members of Nemanjić dynasty, the most important dynasty of Serbia in the Middle Ages.
These monuments have come under attack, especially during the 2004 ethnic violence. In 2006, the property was inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger due to difficulties in its management and conservation stemming from the region's political instability.
Kosovan art was unknown to the international public for a very long time, because of the regime, many artists were unable to display their art in art galleries, and so were always on the lookout for alternatives, and even resorted to taking matters into their own hands. Until 1990, artists from Kosovo presented their art in many prestigious worldwide renowned centers. They were affirmed and evaluated highly because of their unique approach to the arts considering the circumstances in which they were created, making them distinguished and original.
In February 1979, the Kosova National Art Gallery was founded. It became the highest institution of visual arts in Kosovo. It was named after one of the most prominent artists of Kosovo Muslim Mulliqi. Engjëll Berisha, Masar Caka, Tahir Emra, Abdullah Gërguri, Hysni Krasniqi, Nimon Lokaj, Aziz Nimani, Ramadan Ramadani, Esat Valla and Lendita Zeqiraj are some of few Albanian painters born in Kosovo.
Cuisine
The Kosovan cuisine is mixed with influences of the Albanian and Serbian origins of its majority population. Located at the crossroad of Albanian, Ottoman, Romance and Slavic cultures, Kosovo has enriched its own cuisine adopting and maintaining some of their cooking traditions and techniques.
Food is an important component in the social life of the people of Kosovo particularly during religious holidays such as Christmas, Easter and Ramadan. For festive occasions, Baklava, Lokum and Halva are traditionally prepared in almost every household throughout Kosovo and the Balkans regardless of ethnicity or cultural identity.
Perhaps the most prominent and traditional examples of Kosovan food include the Flia and Pite which are served with assorted vegetables, fruit preserves, honey and yogurt. Flia is composed of multiple layered crepe and is predominantly brushed with cream while Pite are filled with a mixture of salty cheese, meat, potatoes or leek.
The cuisine of Kosovo features a wide range of fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs such as salt, red and black pepper and vegeta. The people of Kosovo enjoy a wide variety of meat and fish products among other chicken, beef, kebab, Sujuk and lamb which is considered to be the traditional meat for religious occasions due to its religious connections.
Tea such as Albanian-style mountain tea or Russian and Turkish-style black tea are a widely consumed beverage throughout Kosovo and particularly served at cafés, restaurants or at home. Coffee is another popular drink although Kosovo is steeped in culture and their coffee culture is a big part of the modern society.
Sports
Sport is a significant component of the society and culture of Kosovo. The most prominent sports in Kosovo include football, basketball, judo, boxing, volleyball and handball. The Olympic Committee of Kosovo became a full member of the International Olympic Committee in 2014. It participated at the 2015 European Games in Azerbaijan, 2019 European Games in Minsk and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil.
By far the most popular sport in Kosovo is football. 1922 saw the founding of Kosovo's first clubs, including KF Vëllaznimi and FC Prishtina. During the Cold War era from 1945 until 1991, football in former Yugoslavia advanced so rapidly that in 1946, the Federation of Kosovo was formed as a subsidiary of the Federation of Yugoslavia. Prishtina were the nation's most successful club during that period, spending five years in the top-tier Yugoslav First League and reaching the semi-finals of the 1987-88 Yugoslav Cup. In 1991, an unsanctioned Kosovar league system known as the Liga e Pavarur e Kosovës ("Independent League of Kosovo") was set up, running parallel to the official Yugoslav leagues; in 1999, in the wake of the Kosovo War, this became Kosovo's official league system.
Three footballers from Kosovo – Milutin Šoškić, Fahrudin Jusufi, and Vladimir Durković – were part of the Yugoslavia squad that won a gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics and a silver medal at the 1960 European Championship. Kosovar-born goalkeeper Stevan Stojanović became the first goalkeeper to captain a European Cup-winning team when he captained Red Star Belgrade to victory in the 1991 European Cup Final.
The 2010s saw an increase in the number of Kosovar players of Albanian origin playing in top European teams. These include Lorik Cana, who captained Marseille and Sunderland as well as the Albanian national team; Valon Behrami who played for West Ham United, Udinese, and the Swiss national team; Xherdan Shaqiri, who won the 2018-19 UEFA Champions League with Liverpool and also plays for Switzerland internationally; and Adnan Januzaj, who began his career at Manchester United and currently represents Belgium.
Basketball is also a popular sport in Kosovo. The first championship was held in 1991, with the participation of eight teams. The Basketball Federation of Kosovo was accepted as a full member of FIBA on 13 March 2015. Notable players born in Kosovo who played for the successful Yugoslavia and Serbia national teams include Zufer Avdija, Marko Simonović and Dejan Musli, some of whom continue to competing for Serbia despite FIBA's recognition of Kosovo.
Judoka Majlinda Kelmendi became World Champion in 2013 and 2014, and also the European Champion in 2014. At the Summer Olympics 2016, Kelmendi became the first decorated Kosovan athlete to win a gold medal, also the first gold medal for Kosovo in a major sport tournament. Nora Gjakova won the first medal for Kosovo at the first European Games in 2015, when she earned bronze in 57 kg category. In the second European Games in 2019, Kelmendi won a gold medal, Gjakova a silver medal and Loriana Kuka a bronze medal.
Music
Although the music in Kosovo is diverse, authentic Albanian and Serbian music still exist. Albanian music is characterised by the use of the Çifteli. Classical music is well known in Kosovo and has been taught at several music schools and universities. In 2014, Kosovo submitted their first film for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with Three Windows and a Hanging directed by Isa Qosja.
In the past, epic poetry in Kosovo and Northern Albania was sung on a lahuta and then a more tuneful çiftelia was used which has two strings-one for the melody and one for drone. Kosovan music is influenced by Turkish music due to the almost 500-year span of Ottoman rule in Kosovo though Kosovan folklore has preserved its originality and exemplary. Archaeological research tells how old this tradition is and how it was developed in parallel with other traditional music in the Balkans. Roots dating to the 5th century BC have been found in paintings on stones of singers with instruments. (There is a famous portrait of "Pani" holding an instrument similar to a flute).
The contemporary music artists Rita Ora, Dua Lipa and Era Istrefi, are all of Albanian origin and have achieved international recognition for their music. One widely recognised musician from Prizren is guitarist Petrit Çeku, winner of several international prizes.
Serbian music from Kosovo presents a mixture of traditional music, which is part of the wider Balkan tradition, with its own distinctive sound, and various Western and Turkish influences. Serb songs from Kosovo were an inspiration for 12th song wreath by composer Stevan Mokranjac. Most of Serbian music from Kosovo was dominated by church music, with its own share of sung epic poetry. Serbian national instrument Gusle is also used in Kosovo.
Viktorija is the only artist from Kosovo who represented Yugoslavia in the Eurovision Song Contest as part of Aska in 1982. Singer Rona Nishliu finished 5th in the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest, while Lindita represented Albania in 2017. Several Serbian singers from Kosovo have also participated in the Serbian national selection for the Eurovision Song Contest. Nevena Božović represented Serbia in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest and twice in the Eurovision Song Contest, firstly as a member of Moje 3 in 2013 and as a solo act in 2019.
Cinema
The film industry of Kosovo dates from the 1970s. In 1969, the parliament of Kosovo established Kosovafilm, a state institution for the production, distribution and showing of films. Its initial director was the actor Abdurrahman Shala, followed by writer and noted poet Azem Shkreli, under whose direction the most successful films were produced. Subsequent directors of Kosovafilm were Xhevar Qorraj, Ekrem Kryeziu and Gani Mehmetaj. After producing seventeen feature films, numerous short films and documentaries, the institution was taken over by the Serbian authorities in 1990 and dissolved. Kosovafilm was reestablished after Yugoslav withdrawal from the region in June 1999 and has since been endeavoring to revive the film industry in Kosovo.
The International Documentary and Short Film Festival is the largest film event in Kosovo. The Festival is organised in August in Prizren, which attracts numerous international and regional artists. In this annually organised festival, films are screened twice a day in three open-air cinemas as well as in two regular cinemas. Except for its films, the festival is also well known for lively nights after the screening. Various events happen within the scope of the festival: workshops, DokuPhoto exhibitions, festival camping, concerts, which altogether turn the city into a charming place to be. In 2010, Dokufest was voted as one of the 25 best international documentary festivals.
International actors of Albanian origin from Kosovo include Arta Dobroshi, James Biberi, Faruk Begolli and Bekim Fehmiu. The Prishtina International Film Festival is the largest film festival, held annually in Pristina, in Kosovo that screens prominent international cinema productions in the Balkan region and beyond, and draws attention to the Kosovar film industry.
The movie Shok was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film at the 88th Academy Awards. The movie was written and directed by Oscar nominated director Jamie Donoughue, based on true events during the Kosovo war. Shok's distributor is Ouat Media, and the social media campaign is led by Team Albanians.
Holidays
See also
List of Kosovo Albanians
Outline of Kosovo
Notes
References
Sources
External links
United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo
European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo
Government of the Republic of Kosovo
Serbian Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija
Kosovo. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
Albanian-speaking countries and territories
Serbian-speaking countries and territories
Disputed territories in Europe
Southeastern European countries
Southern European countries
States and territories established in 2008
States with limited recognition
2008 establishments in Kosovo
Bosnian-speaking countries and territories
Countries in Europe
Landlocked countries
Balkan countries
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17392 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konqueror | Konqueror | Konqueror is a free and open-source web browser and file manager that provides web access and file-viewer functionality for file systems (such as local files, files on a remote FTP server and files in a disk image). It forms a core part of the KDE Software Compilation. Developed by volunteers, Konqueror can run on most Unix-like operating systems. The KDE community licenses and distributes Konqueror under GNU GPL-2.0-or-later.
The name "Konqueror" echoes a colonization paradigm to reference the two primary competitors at the time of the browser's first release: "first comes the Navigator, then Explorer, and then the Konqueror".
It also follows the KDE naming convention: the names of most KDE programs begin with the letter K.
Konqueror first appeared with version 2 of KDE on October 23, 2000. It replaces its predecessor, KFM (KDE file manager). With the release of KDE 4, Dolphin replaced Konqueror as the default KDE file manager, but the KDE community continues to maintain Konqueror as the default KDE web browser.
Major supported protocols
Konqueror can utilize all KIOslaves installed on the user's system. Some examples include:
FTP and SFTP/SSH browser
Samba (Microsoft file-sharing) browser
HTTP browser
IMAP mail client
ISO (CD image) viewer
VNC viewer
A complete list is available in the KDE Info Center's Protocols section.
User interface
Konqueror supports tabbed document interface and Split views, wherein a window can contain multiple documents in tabs. Multiple document interfaces are not supported, however it is possible to recursively divide a window to view multiple documents simultaneously, or simply open another window.
Konqueror's user interface is somewhat reminiscent of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, though it is more customizable. It works extensively with "panels", which can be rearranged or added. For example, one could have an Internet bookmarks panel on the left side of the browser window, and by clicking a bookmark, the respective web page would be viewed in the larger panel to the right. Alternatively, one could display a hierarchical list of folders in one panel and the content of the selected folder in another. Panels are quite flexible and can even include, among other KParts (components), a console window, a text editor, a media player. Panel configurations can be saved, and there are some default configurations. (For example, "Midnight Commander" displays a screen split into two panels, where each one contains a folder, Web site, or file view.)
Navigation functions (back, forward, history, etc.) are available during all operations. Most keyboard shortcuts can be remapped using a graphical configuration, and navigation can be conducted through an assignment of letters to nodes on the active file by pressing the control key. The address bar has extensive autocompletion support for local directories, past URLs, and past search terms.
Web browser
Konqueror has been developed as an autonomous web browser project. It uses KHTML as its browser engine, which is compliant with HTML and supports JavaScript, Java applets, CSS, SSL, and other relevant open standards. An alternative layout engine, kwebkitpart, is available from the Extragear.
While KHTML is the default web-rendering engine, Konqueror is a modular application and other rendering engines are available. Especially the WebKitPart that uses the KHTML-derived WebKit engine has seen a lot of support in the KDE 4 series. One thing to note, is when the KHTML rendering backend is chosen, the user can choose to make a full archive of any given webpage, which is stored in an archive file with the ".war" extension.
Konqueror integrates several customizable search services which can be accessed by entering the service's abbreviation code (for example, gg: for Google, or wp: for Wikipedia) followed by the search term(s). One can add their own search service; for instance, to retrieve English Wikipedia articles, a shortcut may be added with the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=\{@}&go=Go.
KHTML's rendering speed is on par with that of competing browsers, but sites with customized JavaScript are often problematic due to KHTML's much smaller mind- and market-share, resulting in fewer JavaScript features built into the JS engine.
Kubuntu's 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release switched the default browser from Konqueror to rekonq. Kubuntu subsequently switched from rekonq to Firefox, with the release of 14.04 Trusty Tahr.
File manager
Konqueror also allows browsing the local directory hierarchy—either by entering locations in the address bar, or by selecting items in the file browser window. It allows browsing in different views, which differ in their usage of icons and layout. Files can also be executed, viewed, copied, moved, and deleted.
The user can also open an embedded version of Konsole, via KDE's KParts technology, in which they can directly execute shell commands. In addition to the Konsole KPart, Konqueror can also use a Filelight KPart, to view a radial diagram of the user's filesystem.
Although this functionality has not been removed from Konqueror, as of KDE 4, Dolphin has replaced Konqueror as the default file manager. Dolphin can – like Konqueror – divide each window or tab into multiple panes. Konqueror makes more powerful use of this feature, allowing as many vertically and horizontally divided panes as desired. Each can link to different content or even remote locations, so that Konqueror becomes a powerful graphical tool to manage content on multiple servers all in one window, "dragging and dropping" files between locations.
File viewer
Using the KParts object model, Konqueror executes components that are capable of viewing (and sometimes editing) specific filetypes and embeds their client area directly into the Konqueror panel in which the respective files have been opened. This makes it possible to, for example, view an OpenDocument (via Calligra) or PDF document directly within Konqueror. Any application that implements the KParts model correctly can be embedded in this fashion.
KParts can also be used to embed certain types of multimedia content into HTML pages; for example, the KMPlayer KPart enables Konqueror to show embedded video on web pages.
KIO
In addition to browsing files and web sites, Konqueror utilizes KIO plugins to extend its capabilities well beyond those of other browsers and file managers. It uses components of KIO, the KDE I/O plugin system, to access different protocols such as HTTP and FTP (support for these is built-in), WebDAV, SMB (Windows shares), SFTP and FISH (a handy replacement to the latter when the SFTP subsystem is disabled on the remote host).
Similarly, Konqueror can use KIO plugins (called IOslaves) to access ZIP files and other archives, to process ed2k links (edonkey/emule), or even to browse audio CDs, ("audiocd:/") and rip them via drag-and-drop. Likewise, the "man:" and "info:" IOslaves can be used to fetch man and info formatted documentation.
Konqueror Embedded
An embedded systems version, Konqueror Embedded is available. Unlike the full version of Konqueror, Embedded Konqueror is purely a web browser. It does not require KDE or even the X window system. A single static library, it is designed to be as small as possible, while providing all necessary functions of a web browser, such as support for HTML 4, CSS, JavaScript, cookies, and SSL.
Download Manager
KGet is a free download manager for KDE and is the default download manager for Konqueror. It is part of the KDE Network package. By default it is the download manager used for Konqueror, but can also be used with Mozilla Firefox and Chromium-based web browsers as well as rekonq. KGet was featured by Tux Magazine and Free Software Magazine.
History
On KDE 3, KGet 0.8.x, 1 supported HTTP/FTP download.
On KDE Software Compilation 4, KGet 2 was released; it supported bandwidth throttling segmentation, multi-threading, and the BitTorrent protocol.
Features
Downloading files from FTP, HTTP(S) and BitTorrent sources.
Pausing and resuming of downloading files, as well as the ability to restart a download.
Gives of information about current and pending downloads.
Embedding into system tray of the host system.
Integration with the KDE Konqueror and Rekonq web browsers.
Metalink support which contain multiple URLs for downloads, along with checksums and other information.
Automatically tags downloaded files with download information (such as the download URL) using Nepomuk.
Download from multiple servers to speed up download time (segmented file transfer).
See also
Comparison of file managers
Comparison of web browsers
Comparison of download managers
KHTML
KJS
KSVG
List of web browsers
rekonq
KIO
References
External links
Konqueror Embedded homepage
1996 software
Applications using D-Bus
Cross-platform web browsers
Free file managers
Free web browsers
KDE Applications
POSIX web browsers
Software using the GPL license
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17394 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key%20signature | Key signature | In Western musical notation, a key signature is a set of sharp (), flat (), or rarely, natural () symbols placed on the staff at the beginning of a section of music. The initial key signature in a piece is placed immediately after the clef at the beginning of the first line. If the piece contains a section in a different key, the new key signature is placed at the beginning of that section.
In a key signature, a sharp or flat symbol on a line or space of the staff indicates that the note represented by that line or space is to be played a semitone higher (sharp) or lower (flat) than it would otherwise be played. This applies through the end of the piece or until another key signature is indicated. Each symbol applies to all notes in the same pitch class—for example, a flat on the third line of the treble staff (as in the diagram) indicates that all notes appearing as Bs are played as B-flats. This convention was not universal until the late Baroque and early Classical period—music published in the 1720s and 1730s may have key signatures showing sharps or flats in both octaves for notes which fall within the staff.
Most of this article addresses key signatures that represent the diatonic keys of Western music. These contain either flats or sharps, but not both, and the different key signatures add flats or sharps according to the order shown in the circle of fifths.
Each major and minor key has an associated key signature, showing up to seven flats or seven sharps, that indicates the notes used in its scale. Music was sometimes notated with a key signature that did not match its key in this way—this can be seen in some Baroque pieces, or transcriptions of traditional modal folk tunes.
Conventions
With any note as a starting point, a certain series of intervals produces a major scale: whole step, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. Starting on C, this yields C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C (a C-major scale). There are no sharps or flats in this scale, so the key signature for C has no sharps or flats in it. Starting on any other note requires that at least one of these notes be changed (raised or lowered) to preserve the major scale pattern. These raised or lowered notes form the key signature. Starting the pattern on D, for example, yields D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D, so the key signature for D major has two sharps—F and C. Key signatures indicate that this applies to the section of music that follows, showing the reader which key the music is in, and making it unnecessary to apply accidentals to individual notes.
In standard music notation, the order in which sharps or flats appear in key signatures is uniform, following the circle of fifths: F, C, G, D, A, E, B, and B, E, A, D, G, C, F. Musicians can identify the key by the number of sharps or flats shown, since they always appear in the same order. A key signature with one sharp must show F-sharp, which indicates G major or E minor.
There can be exceptions to this, especially in 20th-century music, if a piece uses an unorthodox or synthetic scale and an invented key signature to reflect that. This may consist of sharps or flats that are not in the usual order, or of sharps combined with flats (e.g., F and B). Key signatures of this kind can be found in the music of Béla Bartók, for example.
In a score, transposing instruments will show a different key signature to reflect their transposition but their music is in the same concert key as the other instruments. Percussion instruments with indeterminate pitch will not show a key signature, and timpani parts are sometimes written without a key signature (early timpani parts were sometimes notated with the high drum as "C" and the low drum a fourth lower as "G", with actual pitches indicated at the beginning of the music, e.g., "timpani in D–A"). In polytonal music, where different parts are actually in different keys sounding together, instruments may be notated in different keys.
Notational conventions
The order in which sharps or flats appear in key signatures is illustrated in the diagram of the circle of fifths. Starting the major scale pattern (whole step, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half) on C requires no sharps or flats. Proceeding clockwise in the diagram starts the scale a fifth higher, on G. Starting on G requires one sharp, F, to form a major scale. Starting another fifth higher, on D, requires F and C. This pattern continues, raising the seventh scale degree of each successive key. As the scales become notated in flats, this is shown by eliminating one of the flats. This is strictly a function of notation—the seventh scale degree is still being raised by a semitone compared to the previous key in the sequence. Going counter-clockwise from C results in lowering the fourth scale degree with each successive key (starting on F requires a B to form a major scale). Each major key has a relative minor key that shares the same key signature. The relative minor is always a minor third lower than its relative major.
The key signatures with seven flats and seven sharps are usually notated in their enharmonic equivalents. C major (seven sharps) is usually written as D major (five flats) and C major is usually written as B major.
Key signatures can be extended through double sharps and double flats but this is extremely rare. The key of G major can be expressed with a double sharp on F (F) and single sharps on the other six pitches. As with the seven-sharp and seven-flat examples, the simpler enharmonic key can be used instead (A is enharmonically equivalent with only four flats).
The key signature may be changed at any time in a piece by providing a new signature. If the new signature has no sharps or flats, a signature of naturals, as shown, is used to cancel the preceding signature. If a change in signature occurs at the start of a new line on the page, where a signature would normally appear, the new signature is customarily repeated at the end of the previous line to make the change more conspicuous.
Variants of standard conventions
Traditionally, when the key signature changes from sharps to flats or vice versa, the old key signature is cancelled with the appropriate number of naturals before the new one is inserted. Many more recent publications (newer music or newer editions of older music) dispense with the naturals (unless the new key signature is C major) and simply insert the new signature.
Similarly, when a flat key changes to fewer flats, or a sharp key changes to fewer sharps, the convention was to use naturals to cancel the flats or sharps that are being subtracted before the new signature is written. Again, more modern usage often simply shows the new signature without these naturals.
When a flat key changes to more flats or a sharp key changes to more sharps, the new signature is simply written in without using naturals to cancel the old signature. This convention applies in both traditional and newer styles.
At one time it was usual to precede the new signature with a double barline even if it was not otherwise required, but it has become increasingly common to simply retain a single barline. The courtesy signature that appears at the end of a line immediately before a change is usually preceded by an additional barline and the line at the very end of the staff is omitted.
If both naturals and a new key signature appear at a key signature change, there are also modern variations about where a barline will be placed. In some scores by Debussy the barline is placed after the naturals but before the new key signature. Hitherto, it would have been usual to place all the symbols after the barline.
The A which is the fifth sharp in the sharp signatures may occasionally be notated on the top line of the bass staff, whereas it is more usually found in the lowest space on that staff. An example of this can be seen in the full score of Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome, in the third section, "Pines of the Janiculum" (which is in B major), in the bass-clef instrumental parts.
In the case of seven-flat key signatures, the final F may occasionally be seen on the second-top line of the bass staff, whereas it would more usually appear on the space below the staff. An example of this can be seen in Isaac Albéniz's Iberia: first movement, "Evocación", which is in A minor.
Major scale structure
Scales with sharp key signatures
There can be up to seven sharps in a key signature, appearing in this order: . The key note or tonic of a piece in a major key is a semitone above the last sharp in the signature. For example, the key of D major has a key signature of F and C, and the tonic (D) is a semitone above C. Each scale starting on the fifth scale degree of the previous scale has one new sharp, added in the order shown.
Scales with flat key signatures
There can be up to seven flats in a key signature, applied as: The major scale with one flat is F major. In all major scales with flat key signatures, the tonic in a major key is a perfect fourth below the last flat. When there is more than one flat, the tonic is the note of the second-to-last flat in the signature. In the major key with four flats (B E A D), for example, the second to last flat is A, indicating a key of A major. Each new scale starts a fifth below (or a fourth above) the previous one.
Relationship between key signature and key
Key signatures are a notational device in diatonic or tonal music that define the key and its diatonic scale without the need for accidentals. Music can be notated using other means, and the key of a piece of music may not always conform to the notated key signature. This is particularly true in pre-Baroque music, when the concept of key had not yet evolved to its present state.
More extensive pieces often change key (modulate) during contrasting sections. These sections are sometimes indicated with a change of key signature, but are sometimes indicated using accidentals.
The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 538 by Bach has a key signature with no sharps or flats, indicating that it may be in D, in the Dorian, but the Bs that occur in the piece are written with accidentals, making the music actually in D minor.
Additional terminology
Keys which are associated with the same key signature are called relative keys.
When musical modes, such as Lydian or Dorian, are written using key signatures, they are called transposed modes.
Use outside of the Western common-practice period
Key signatures are also used in music that does not come from the Western common-practice-period. This includes folk music, non-Western music, and Western music from before or after the common practice period.
Klezmer music uses scales other than diatonic major or minor, such as Freygish (Phrygian). Because of the limitations of the traditional highland bagpipe scale, key signatures are often omitted from written pipe music, which otherwise would be written with two sharps, F and C. (The pipes are incapable of playing F and C so the sharps are not notated.) 20th century composers such as Bartók and Rzewski (see below) experimented with non-diatonic key signatures.
Earlier notation styles
In music from the Baroque period, it is common to see key signatures in which the notes are annotated in a different order from the modern practice, or with the same note-letter annotated for each octave.
Unusual signatures
The 15 key signatures that form diatonic scales are sometimes called standard key signatures. Other scales are written either with a standard key signature and use accidentals as required, or with a nonstandard key signature. Examples of the latter include the E (right hand), and F and G (left hand) used for the С diminished (С octatonic) scale in Bartók's Crossed Hands (no. 99, vol. 4, Mikrokosmos); the B, E and F used for the D Phrygian dominant scale in Frederic Rzewski's God to a Hungry Child; and the E and D (right hand) and the B, A, G (left hand) in György Ligeti's Galamb Borong (no. 7 from the second book of the Études pour piano), and B, E, D,G (both hands) in Pour Irina (no. 16 from the same work's third book).
There are also examples of conflicting standard signatures, as in no. 3 of Sergei Prokofiev's Sarcasms, op. 17 (three sharps in the right hand, and five flats in the left hand), and four numbers of Ligeti's Études pour piano: no. 1 from the first book (none in the right hand, and five sharps in the left hand), no. 10 from the second book (Der Zauberlehrling; none in the right hand, and five flats in the left hand in bars 67-87); no. 11 from the second book (En Suspens; five flats in the right hand and none in the left hand, with the opposite later on); and no. 12 from the second book (Entrelacs; none in the right hand and five flats in the left hand, with the opposite later on)
No sharps or flats in a key signature can indicate that the music is in the key of C major / A minor or that the piece is modal or atonal, and does not have a key signature. An example is Bartók's Piano Sonata, which has no fixed key and is highly chromatic.
If not bound by common practice conventions, microtones can also be notated in a key signature; which microtonal symbols are used depends on the system.
History
The use of a one-flat signature developed in the Medieval period, but signatures with more than one flat did not appear until the 16th century, and signatures with sharps not until the mid-17th century.
When signatures with multiple flats first came in, the order of the flats was not standardized, and often a flat appeared in two different octaves, as shown at right. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, it was common for different voice parts in the same composition to have different signatures, a situation called a partial signature or conflicting signature. This was actually more common than complete signatures in the 15th century. The 16th-century motet Absolon fili mi by Pierre de La Rue (formerly attributed to Josquin des Prez) features two voice parts with two flats, one part with three flats, and one part with four flats.
Baroque music written in minor keys often was written with a key signature with fewer flats than we now associate with their keys; for example, movements in C minor often had only two flats (because the A would frequently have to be sharpened to A in the ascending melodic minor scale, as would the B).
Table
See also
Key signature names and translations
Major and minor
Parallel key
Relative key
Theoretical key
Universal key
References
Musical notation
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17395 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutia | Kutia | Kutia or kutya is a ceremonial grain dish with sweet gravy traditionally served by Eastern Orthodox Christians and Byzantine Catholic Christians predominantly in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia during the Christmas - Feast of Jordan holiday season or as part of a funeral feast. The word with a descriptor is also used to describe the eves of Christmas, New Year, and Feast of Jordan days.
Etymology
The word kutia is a borrowing from the Greek language κουκκί (bean) or κόκκος (grain).
Description
Ukraine
In Ukraine kutіa is one of the two essential ritual dishes at the Ukrainian Christmas Eve Supper (also known as Svyata vecherya). The ritual significance of kutia, as well as uzvar, is quite ancient. Ukrainian ethnographer Fedir Vovk traces the origins of these dishes to the Neolithic era. Before dinner, the kutia is placed in the corner ("kut") under the icons, the most honorable place in the house. The pot with the kutia was to stand in this corner from Rizdvo (Christmas) to the Old New Year (January 14). There is also a custom of sending children with kutia to relatives, usually grandparents and godparents. After dinner, the kutia is left on the table for the whole night with spoons for the dead ancestors, "so that our relatives would have dinner and not be angry with us." The religious nature of the dish is emphasized by an ancient custom, when the head of the family approached the window or went out into the yard with a spoonful of kutia and, addressing the frost, invited him three times to take part in dinner with the family. When the frost does not appear, he is advised not to appear, not to do harm to crops, etc .: "Frost, frost, come to us to eat kutia, and if you don't come, don't come for the rye, wheat and other crops."
Kutia is the first out of twelve dishes served for Svyata vecherya to be tasted. The head of the family takes the first spoon of the kutia, raises it up and calls out to the souls of departed family members to join them on this night. He then tastes the kutia, and throws the rest of the spoonful up to the ceiling. As many kernels of grain as stick to the ceiling, there should be swarms of bees and newborn cattle in the coming year. As many poppy seeds as remained on the ceiling, each hen should lay as many eggs in the coming year. Everyone present eats a spoonful of kutia, after which the other dishes are brought out an eaten.
The main ingredients used to make traditional kutia are: wheatberries, poppy seeds and honey. At times, walnuts, dried fruit and raisins are added as well. Kutia is a Lenten dish and no milk or egg products can be used. There are known kutia recipes that use pearl barley or millet instead of wheatberries.
Kolyvo is a Ukrainian ritual dish similar to kutia, but includes no poppy seeds. Kolyvo is served at remembrance services.
Other countries
A dish of boiled grains (usually wheat berries) mixed with honey, nuts, spices, and a few other ingredients is traditional in other countries as well:
Bulgaria – kolivo
Greece – koliva
Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan – ameh masslouk or snuniye
Romania – colivă
Russia – (also) sochivo
Serbia – koljivo (to wit: sacrifice), or simply: žito (ie, wheat)
Sicily – cuccìa
Syria – sliha or burbara (for Eid il-Bur-bara, St. Barbara's Feast throughout the Middle East)
Somewhat similar, but with a different origin, and somewhat different ingredients, is the Islamic, especially Turkish, sweet dish of Ashure.
See also
Frumenty
Koliva
List of desserts
Memorial service in the Eastern Orthodox Church
Slava
References
External links
The Video-recipe of Kutia with English subtitles
Christmas food
Poppy seeds
Russian cuisine
Slavic cuisine
Ukrainian cuisine
Wheat dishes
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17396 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid%20Rock | Kid Rock | Robert James Ritchie (born January 17, 1971), known professionally as Kid Rock (also known as Bobby Shazam), is an American singer, songwriter and rapper. His style alternates between rock, hip hop, country, and heavy metal. A self-taught musician, he plays every instrument in his backing band and has overseen production on all but two of his albums.
Kid Rock started his music career as a rapper and DJ, releasing his debut album Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast (1990) on Jive Records. His subsequent independent releases The Polyfuze Method (1993) and Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp (1996) saw him developing a more distinctive style, which was fully realized on his breakthrough album Devil Without a Cause (1998), which sold 14 million copies. This album and its follow-up, Cocky (2001), were noted for blending elements of hip hop, country, rock and heavy metal. His most successful single from that period, "Cowboy" (1999), is considered a pioneering song in the country rap genre. His best-selling singles overall are "Picture" (2002) and "All Summer Long" (2008). Starting with his 2007 album Rock n Roll Jesus, his musical output has tended to be in the country and rock styles.
Early life
Kid Rock was born Robert James Ritchie in Romeo, Michigan, on January 17, 1971, the son of Susan and William Ritchie, who owned multiple car dealerships. He was raised in his father's home on a property, where he regularly helped his family pick apples and care for their horses. His younger sister, Jill Ritchie, is an actress. In the 1980s, he became interested in hip hop, began to breakdance, and taught himself how to rap and DJ while performing in talent shows in and around Detroit.
Career
Early career, signing with Jive Records and Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast (1988–1990)
Kid Rock began his professional music career as a member of a hip hop music group called The Beast Crew in the late 1980s. During this time, he met rapper D-Nice. That relationship would eventually lead to him becoming the opening act at local shows for Boogie Down Productions.
During this time, Kid Rock began a professional association with producer Mike E. Clark, who, after some initial skepticism with the idea of a "white" rapper, found himself impressed with Kid Rock's energetic and well-received performance where the artist, using his own turntables and equipment, actually prepared his own beats to demonstrate his skills for Clark.
In 1988, Clark produced a series of demos with Kid Rock and that eventually led to offers from six major record labels, including Atlantic and CBS Records.
In 1989, Kid Rock became a shareholder in an independent record label that was formed by Alvin Williams and Earl Blunt of EB-Bran Productions, called "Top Dog" Records. Later, that investment would become a 25% ownership stake.
With the help of D-Nice, Kid Rock signed with Jive Records at the age of 17, releasing his debut studio album, Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast in 1990. According to Kid Rock, the contract with Jive resulted in animosity from fellow rapper Vanilla Ice, who felt that he should have been signed with Jive instead of Kid Rock.
The album made Kid Rock one of the two biggest rap stars in Detroit in 1990, along with local independent rapper Esham. To promote the album, Kid Rock toured nationally with Ice Cube, D-Nice, Yo-Yo and Too Short; Detroit artist Champtown served as Kid Rock's DJ on this tour. During instore promotions for the album, Kid Rock met and developed a friendship with local rapper Eminem, who frequently challenged Kid Rock to rap battles.
Ultimately, unfavorable comparisons to Vanilla Ice led to Jive dropping Kid Rock, according to Mike E. Clark.
Signing with Continuum Records and The Polyfuze Method (1992–1995)
In 1992, Kid Rock signed with local independent record label Continuum. Around this time, Kid Rock met local hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse through Mike E. Clark, who was producing the duo. While ICP member Violent J disliked Kid Rock's music, he wanted the rapper to appear on ICP's debut album, Carnival of Carnage, believing the appearance would gain ICP notice, since Kid Rock was a nationally successful artist. Noting that local rapper Esham was paid $500 to appear on ICP's album, Violent J claims that Kid Rock demanded $600 to record his guest appearance, alleging that Esham and Kid Rock had a feud over who was the bigger rapper. Kid Rock showed up to record the song "Is That You?" intoxicated, but re-recorded his vocals and record scratching the following day.
In 1993, Kid Rock recorded his second studio album, The Polyfuze Method, with producer Mike E. Clark, who worked with Kid Rock to help give the album more of a rock-oriented sound than his debut.
Kid Rock also began releasing his "Bootleg" cassette series to keep local interest in his music.
Later in the year, Kid Rock recorded the EP Fire It Up at White Room Studios in downtown Detroit, run by brothers Michael and Andrew Nehra, who were forming the rock-soul band Robert Bradley's Blackwater Surprise. The EP featured the heavy rock song "I Am the Bullgod" and a cover of Hank Williams Jr.'s country song "A Country Boy Can Survive".
By 1994, Kid Rock's live performances had mostly been backed by DJs Blackman and Uncle Kracker, but Kid Rock soon began to utilize more and more live instrumentation into his performances, and formed the rock band Twisted Brown Trucker.
After breaking up with his girlfriend, Kid Rock moved engineer Bob Ebeling into his apartment. During a recording session with Mike E. Clark, the producer discovered that Kid Rock could sing when he recorded a reworked cover of Billy Joel's "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me", entitled "It's Still East Detroit to Me", which Clark claims led him to encourage Kid Rock to sing more.
During this time, Kid Rock developed animosity towards other Detroit artists, including Insane Clown Posse; according to Mike E. Clark, who worked with both artists, Kid Rock was frustrated with ICP's local success, as Kid Rock disliked ICP's music, and wanted to become more successful than ICP.
Through extensive promoting, including distributing tapes on consignment to local stores and giving away free samplers of his music, Kid Rock developed a following among an audience which DJ Uncle Kracker described as "white kids who dropped acid and liked listening to gangsta rap"; this following included local rapper Joe C, who had been attending Kid Rock concerts as a fan, but upon meeting Kid Rock, was invited to perform on stage as Kid Rock's hype man.
Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp and local breakthrough (1996)
Kid Rock's stage presence became honed with the addition of a light show, pyrotechnics, dancers and a light-up backdrop bearing the name "Kid Rock", and 1996 saw the release of his most rock-oriented album to date, Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp; the album's title came from Bob Eberling, who told a sleepless, alcoholic, drug-using Kid Rock, "Dude, you are the early-morning, stoned pimp." According to Kid Rock, who distributed the album himself, Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp sold 14,000 copies.
Kid Rock developed his stage persona, performing dressed in 1970s pimp clothing with a real, possibly loaded, gun down the front of his pants.
Though Kid Rock became known for frequent partying, and using drugs and alcohol, he was primarily focused on increasing his success and fame, placing himself as a businessman first; the result of this drive led to increased success locally.
Signing with Atlantic Records, Devil Without a Cause and national success (1997–2000)
Kid Rock's attorney, Tommy Valentino, increased his stature by helping him get articles written about Kid Rock and Twisted Brown Trucker in major publications, including the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal magazine, but though his management tried to interest local record labels in his music, they told his management team that they were not interested in signing a white rapper, to which Valentino told them, "He's not a white rapper. He's a rock star and everything in between."
In 1997, Jason Flom, head of Lava Records, attended one of Kid Rock's performances, and met with Kid Rock, who later gave him a demo containing the songs "Somebody's Gotta Feel This" and "I Got One for Ya", which led to Kid Rock signing with Atlantic Records. As part of his recording deal, Kid Rock received $150,000 from the label.
By this time Kid Rock had fully developed his stage persona, and musical style and wanted to make a "redneck, shit-kicking rock 'n' roll rap" album, resulting in his fourth studio album, Devil Without a Cause, recorded at the White Room in Detroit and mixed at the Mix Room in Los Angeles.
Through extensive promoting, including appearances on 1999 MTV VMA (including a performance alongside Aerosmith and Run-DMC) and performing at Woodstock 1999, Devil Without a Cause sold 14 million copies, the album's success spurred by Kid Rock's breakthrough hit single "Bawitdaba".
In 2000, Kid Rock was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best New Artist, despite having been active in the music industry for over 10 years. Kid Rock's success, however, was marked by tragedy, with the death of friend and collaborator Joe C.
In May 2000, Kid Rock released the compilation album "The History Of Rock", behind the single "American Bad Ass". The song sampled Metallica's 1991 song "Sad but True", peaking at No. 20 on the mainstream rock chart. Kid Rock would join Metallica on their 2000 Summer Sanitarium Tour along with Korn and System Of A Down. Kid Rock and Jonathan Davis filled in on vocals for an injured James Hetfield in Atlanta on July 7, 2000. Kid Rock performed American Bad Ass along with the Metallica classics Sad But True, Nothing Else Matters, Fuel and Enter Sandman along with covers of Turn The Page and Fortunate Son. The History Of Rock was certified double platinum and Kid Rock embarked on 2000s History Of Rock and 2001's American Bad Ass Tour's. American Bad Ass was nominated for the Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2001, losing out to Rage Against the Machine's "Guerrilla Radio". His song with Robert Bradley "Higher" was featured in a TV spot for Gatorade.
Continued success and shift away from hip hop (1999–2008)
In 1999, Kid Rock made his voice acting debut in an episode of The Simpsons in the episode "Kill the Alligator and Run" playing himself, alongside Joe C. Kid Rock also appeared in comedy film Joe Dirt, starring David Spade. Kid Rock was in the live-action/animated film Osmosis Jones, voicing a bacterial cell version of himself named "Kidney Rock"; Kid Rock and Joe C had also recorded the song "Cool Daddy Cool" for the film's soundtrack album before Joe C's death. In November, Kid Rock released his fifth studio album, Cocky, which was dedicated to Joe C. The album became a hit, spurred by the crossover success of the single "Picture", a country ballad featuring Sheryl Crow which introduced Kid Rock to a wider audience and was ultimately the most successful single on the album.
In support of the album, Kid Rock performed on the Cocky Tour in 2002 and opened for Aerosmith with Run DMC on The Girls Of Summer Tour During this period, Uncle Kracker began his solo career full-time. He was replaced by underground Detroit rapper Paradime.
In 2001, Kid Rock filed a lawsuit to gain full control over the Top Dog record label, resulting in his receiving full ownership of the label in 2003.
In 2002, Kid Rock covered ZZ Top's "Legs" to serve as WWE Diva Stacy Keibler's theme song; it also appeared on the album WWF Forceable Entry. The same year, Kid Rock performed alongside Chuck D and Grandmaster Flash in tribute to slain DJ Jam Master Jay.
2003 saw the release of Kid Rock's self-titled sixth album, which shifted his music further away from hip hop; the lead single was a cover of Bad Company's "Feel Like Makin' Love". The same year, Kid Rock contributed to the tribute album I've Always Been Crazy: A Tribute to Waylon Jennings, honoring the late country singer by covering the song "Luckenbach, Texas" in collaboration with country singer Kenny Chesney.
In 2004, he performed at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show, in a controversial appearance that spurred criticism from Veterans of Foreign Wars and Senator Zell Miller for wearing the American flag with one slit in the middle, as a poncho; Kid Rock was accused of "desecrating" the flag. Kid Rock also appeared on the track 'My Name is Robert Too' on American blues artist R. L. Burnside's final studio album, A Bothered Mind.
In September 2005, Kid Rock filled in for Johnny Van Zant, the lead singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd, on the band's hit "Sweet Home Alabama" at the Hurricane Katrina benefit concert.
In 2006, Kid Rock stopped displaying the Confederate flag at his concerts. The following year, Kid Rock released his seventh studio album, Rock N Roll Jesus, which was his first release to chart at #1 on the Billboard 200, selling 172,000 copies in its first week and going on to sell over 5 million copies. In July 2007, Kid Rock was featured in the cover of Rolling Stone magazine for the second time. The album's third single, "All Summer Long", became a global hit, utilizing a mash up of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" and Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London".
In 2008, Kid Rock recorded and made a music video for the song "Warrior" for a National Guard advertising campaign.
Continued recording and controversies (2010–present)
In 2010, Kid Rock released his country-oriented eighth studio album, Born Free, produced by Rick Rubin, and featuring guest appearances by Sheryl Crow and Bob Seger.
In 2011, Kid Rock was honored by the NAACP, which sparked protests stemming from his past display of the Confederate flag in his concerts. During the ceremony, Kid Rock elaborated on his display of the flag, stating, "[I] never flew the flag with hate in my heart [...] I love America, I love Detroit, and I love black people." Kid Rock's publicist announced that 2011 was the year he officially distanced himself from the flag.
The following year, Kid Rock performed alongside Travie McCoy and The Roots in honor of the Beastie Boys, during the band's induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. 2012 also saw the release of Kid Rock's ninth studio album, Rebel Soul; he said that he wanted the album to feel like a greatest hits album, but with new songs. One of the songs on the album, "Cucci Galore", introduced Kid Rock's alter ego, Bobby Shazam.
In 2013, Kid Rock performed on the "Best Night Ever" tour, where he motioned to charge no more than $20 for his tickets. The following year, he moved to Warner Bros. Records, releasing his only album on the label, First Kiss, which he self-produced. The album debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 and sold more than 354,000 copies in the United States. Subsequently, after leaving Warner Bros., Kid Rock signed with the country label Broken Bow Records.
In 2015, following the Charleston church shooting, the Michigan chapter of the National Action Network protested outside of the Detroit Historical Museum which honored Kid Rock; activists urged Kid Rock to renounce the Confederate flag. Kid Rock wrote an email to Fox News Channel host Megyn Kelly, stating, "Please tell the people who are protesting to kiss my ass". The same day, the National Action Network protested Chevrolet for sponsoring Kid Rock's tour.
On July 12, 2017, Kid Rock shared a photo of a "Kid Rock for US Senate" yard sign on Twitter. However, he denied that he was running, citing his upcoming album release and tour. He later clarified that the campaign was a hoax. He donated $122,000, raised by selling "Kid Rock for U.S. Senate" merchandise, to a voter registration group.
Also in July, he released two singles from his next album, "Po-Dunk" and "Greatest Show on Earth", both released on the same day. In November of that year, he released his eleventh studio album, Sweet Southern Sugar. The same year also saw Kid Rock publicly advocate measures against ticket scalpers at his shows by making tickets more affordable for fans. Instead of getting paid for the show, he gets a percentage of concession and ticket sales.
In November 2017, Kid Rock fired his publicist, Kirt Webster, after Webster was accused of sexual misconduct.
In January 2018, the National Hockey League announced Kid Rock as the headlining entertainer for their January 28 All-Star Game, sparking negative online responses from hockey fans. Hockey player Jeremy Roenick praised the choice and condemned Kid Rock's critics, saying, "Kid Rock is the most talented musician, I think ever, on the planet, because you can put any instrument in your hand or on your mouth and you can play anything and rock a house and sing any kind of genre."
It was also announced that, in March 2018, Kid Rock would perform on Lynyrd Skynyrd's final tour before the Southern rock band retired, alongside Hank Williams Jr., Bad Company, the Marshall Tucker Band and 38 Special.
Kid Rock released his first greatest hits album titled Greatest Hits: You Never Saw Coming on September 21, 2018.
On March 29, 2020, Kid Rock released his first single under the name "DJ Bobby Shazam", entitled "Quarantine", which featured an old-school hip hop sound. The artist stated all proceeds from the single's sales will go to fight COVID-19.
During Kid Rock's 50th birthday livestream, he announced that he would be releasing a triple album consisting of a hip hop disc, a country music disc and a rock disc which would contain 30 new songs and 20 previously unreleased songs; the first single from the album, "Don't Tell Me How To Live", featuring the band Monster Truck, was released on November 18, 2021, and featured a rap rock sound reminiscent of his Devil Without a Cause album. On December 17, 2021 he released a cover of "Ala-Freaking-Bama" by Trace Adkins titled "Ala-Fuckin-Bama".
On January 25, 2022, Kid Rock released a single, "We The People" where he blasts the media, Dr. Anthony Fauci, masks, COVID-19 restrictions, and Big Tech all to the chorus of Let's Go Brandon. That same day, he also released "Rockin'" and "The Last Dance". On January 28, 2022, he announced on his upcoming Bad Reputation Tour that he would not perform at venues that require masks and proof of vaccination and would cancel shows at such places.
Musical style
Kid Rock's music is noted for its eclectic sound, which draws from genres such as hip hop, rap rock, rap metal, hard rock, heavy metal, Southern rock, country, nu metal, blues, funk and soul.
Kid Rock's music has been described by Pitchfork as a cross between Run-DMC, Lynyrd Skynyrd and AC/DC. MTV compared Kid Rock's songs "I Am the Bullgod" and "Roving Gangster (Rollin')" to a cross between Alice in Chains and Public Enemy.
Kid Rock's debut album Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast featured a straightforward hip hop sound. With the recording of his follow-up album, The Polyfuze Method, Kid Rock began to feature more of a rap rock sound; the album served as a crossroads between his hip hop and rock career, still maintaining a strong hip hop sound, while beginning Kid Rock's use of rock and roll and country music influences.
His third album, Early Morning Stoned Pimp, featured what MTV described as "a more eclectic collection of funk, rap, soul, and rock". Beginning with The Polyfuze Method and Early Morning Stoned Pimp, Kid Rock began to utilize sampling of country and rock music to shape his sound.
Devil Without a Cause saw Kid Rock's sound shift to rap metal, while Cocky shifted his sound yet again, featuring more ballads. Entertainment Weekly described the album's sound as a "blend of low-rider hip-hop and strip-mall heavy metal".
His 2003 self-titled album saw his sound shift once again, being described by critics as hard rock, swamp rock and outlaw country. Rock n Roll Jesus and Born Free were described as heartland rock. Born Free, First Kiss and Sweet Southern Sugar were also noted for having a predominantly country sound.
Kid Rock's lyricism ranges from the braggadocio to the introspective; many of his raps consist of broad, humorous boasting, while other songs in his catalog have dealt with more serious topics, including poverty, war, race relations, interracial dating, abortion and patriotism.
Kid Rock's influences include Bob Seger and the Beastie Boys.
Cowboys & Indians claims that Kid Rock's song "Cowboy" had a major impact on the country music scene; the magazine alleges that artists Jason Aldean and Big & Rich, among others, were influenced by the song's country rap style.
Personal life
Relationships
In eighth grade, Ritchie began an on-and-off relationship with classmate Kelley South Russell that lasted for the next decade. In summer 1993, Russell gave birth to his son, Robert James Ritchie Jr. They raised a total of three children together, two of whom Ritchie believed to be his. They split up in late 1993 when Ritchie discovered that only one of the two was his. He subsequently raised his son as a single father.
In 2000, Rolling Stone reported that Ritchie was dating model Jaime King. He began dating actress Pamela Anderson in 2001 and they became engaged in April 2002, but ended their relationship in 2003. They later reconciled and were married in July 2006. Three months later, on November 10, it was announced that Anderson, who had been pregnant with Ritchie's child, had miscarried. On November 27, she filed for divorce from Ritchie in Los Angeles County Superior Court, citing irreconcilable differences. Ritchie later claimed that the divorce was due to Anderson openly criticizing his mother and sister in front of his son.
In 2014, Ritchie became a grandfather when his son's girlfriend gave birth to a daughter. In November 2017, he became engaged to longtime girlfriend Audrey Berry.
Ritchie is an ordained minister and has a firearm collection.
Public image
In 1989, Ritchie became a shareholder of the independent record label Top Dog Records, formed by Alvin Williams and Earl Blunt of EB-Bran Productions, in 1988; Ritchie's investment in the company gave him 25% ownership. In 2001, he filed a lawsuit to gain full control over the Top Dog record label, resulting in his receiving full ownership of the label in 2003. Ritchie also founded Kid Rock's Made in Detroit restaurant and bar, which specializes in Southern-style cuisine.
In 2002, Ritchie performed alongside Chuck D and Grandmaster Flash in tribute to slain DJ Jam Master Jay. His performance at the Super Bowl XXXVIII, in 2004, drew criticism from Veterans of Foreign Wars and Senator Zell Miller for wearing the American flag with one slit in the middle, as a poncho; Ritchie was accused of "desecrating" the flag.
In January 2005, Ritchie performed at the inaugural address of reelected president George W. Bush, sparking criticism from conservative groups, due to Ritchie's lyrics. In September, Kid Rock filled in for Johnny Van Zant, the lead singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd, on the band's hit "Sweet Home Alabama" at the Hurricane Katrina benefit concert. In 2007 and 2008, Ritchie toured for the United Service Organizations. Also in 2008, Ritchie recorded and made a music video for the song "Warrior" for a National Guard advertising campaign.
A philanthropist, Ritchie oversees The Kid Rock Foundation, a charity which raises funds for multiple causes, including campaigns which sent "Kid Rock care packages" to U.S. military personnel stationed overseas. Ritchie is an advocate for affordable concert tickets, and makes an effort to try and sell tickets to his performances for as low as possible to encourage increased concert attendance for lower income consumers and discourage scalping. Instead of getting paid for the show, he gets a percentage of concession and ticket sales.
In 2011, Ritchie was honored by the NAACP, which sparked protests stemming from his past display of the Confederate flag in his concerts. During the ceremony, Kid Rock elaborated on his display of the flag, stating, "[I] never flew the flag with hate in my heart [...] I love America, I love Detroit, and I love black people." Ritchie's publicist announced that 2011 was the year he officially distanced himself from the flag. In 2012, Kid Rock performed alongside Travie McCoy and The Roots in honor of the Beastie Boys, during the band's induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 2013, Ritchie criticized Republican lawmakers in New York for passing laws which made it difficult for him to keep concert ticket prices low.
In January 2015, Ritchie was criticized by fans for appearing in a photograph holding up a dead cougar that was killed on a hunting trip with Ted Nugent. In 2015, following the Charleston church shooting, the Michigan chapter of the National Action Network protested outside of the Detroit Historical Museum which honored Ritchie; activists urged Ritchie to renounce the Confederate flag, which he had displayed in concerts from 2001 to 2006. Ritchie wrote an email to Fox News Channel host Megyn Kelly, stating, "Please tell the people who are protesting to kiss my ass". The same day, the National Action Network protested Chevrolet for sponsoring Ritchie's tour. In September 2016, Ritchie was criticized for allegedly saying "Man, fuck Colin Kaepernick." during a live performance of his song "Born Free".
In November 2017, Ritchie fired his publicist, Kirt Webster, after Webster was accused of sexual misconduct. On April 6, 2018, Ritchie was inducted into the Celebrity Wing of the WWE Hall of Fame during the weekend of Wrestlemania 34.
On November 30, 2019, Ritchie drew controversy after he was recorded making a series of inappropriate statements while intoxicated at his restaurant in Nashville, including rude comments about Oprah Winfrey. After receiving major pushback for his comments, Ritchie decided to close the Detroit branch of his restaurant in December 2019, located at the Little Caesar's Arena. When asked for comment about the closure, he stated that "it's wise to go where you're celebrated, not tolerated".
In June 2021, Kid Rock attracted further controversy for using the word "faggot" onstage during a tirade against fans who were filming his performance. He later defended his remarks while reaffirming his love for his homosexual friends.
Politics and views
Ritchie is a supporter of the Republican Party, although he has routinely proclaimed himself as libertarian philosophically, stating he has socially liberal views on topics like abortion and gay marriage but conservative views on economics. Ritchie has advocated legalizing and taxing marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. He has also stated, "I don't think crazy people should have guns." He was a vocal supporter of American military involvement in the Iraq War. Ritchie has met with presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump while they were in office. Regarding his political views, Ritchie said, "I have friends everywhere. Democrat, Republican, this that and the other. [...] We're all human beings first, Americans second. Let's find some common ground and get along." However, during his speech at the 2018 WWE Hall of Fame ceremony, he stated that he wanted to "body slam some Democrats".
Ritchie supported Bill Clinton and George W. Bush during their presidencies. In 2008, Ritchie supported newly elected President Barack Obama, saying that the president's election was "a great thing for black people." In 2012, Ritchie campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney; the candidate used Ritchie's song "Born Free" as his campaign theme. In 2015, Ritchie publicly endorsed Ben Carson for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 2016 election. In February 2016, he voiced approval for Donald Trump's campaign for the same office. In September, Kid Rock was criticized for allegedly saying "fuck Colin Kaepernick" during a live performance at Fenway Park of his song "Born Free". In December, Kid Rock sparked controversy for selling vulgar T-shirts supporting Trump at concerts, including one showing a map of the United States which labelled the states which had voted against Trump as "Dumbfuckistan".
On July 12, 2017, Ritchie shared a photo of a "Kid Rock for US Senate" yard sign on Twitter. He also launched a website at kidrockforsenate.com, which sold merchandise bearing that inscription. Several weeks later, he wrote a post on his blog stating that he was still "exploring my candidacy", and that, whether or not he ran, he wanted to register people to vote, because "although people are unhappy with the government, too few are even registered to vote or do anything about it." He added that he wanted "to help working class people in Michigan and America all while still calling out these jackass lawyers who call themselves politicians." His statements sparked media speculation that he would try to run on the Republican ticket against sitting Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow, as well as enthusiasm from some prominent Republicans, including former New York Governor George Pataki, who wrote on Twitter, "Kid Rock is exactly the kind of candidate the GOP needs right now." In an October 2017 interview with Howard Stern, Ritchie put an end to the speculation, saying that he had never intended to run for Senate, adding rhetorically, "Who couldn't figure that out?". He later clarified that the campaign was a joke that he had started after a Michigan state legislator encouraged him to run for Senate. He expressed surprise at the interest his potential candidacy had received, but also disappointment that some opposed to his candidacy had brought up his previous use of the Confederate flag to label him a racist. He donated the $122,000 he had raised by selling "Kid Rock for U.S. Senate" merchandise to a voter registration group.
Legal issues
In both March 1991 and September 1997, Ritchie faced misdemeanor charges stemming from alcohol-related arrests in Michigan.
In 2005, Ritchie was charged with assaulting a DJ in a strip club.
In 2006, California pornographic film company Red Light District attempted to distribute a 1999 sex tape in which Kid Rock and Scott Stapp, lead singer of the band Creed, are seen partying and receiving oral sex from groupies; both Rock and Stapp filed with the California courts to sue the pornographers to stop the tape's distribution.
At the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, Ritchie got into a fistfight with Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, another ex of Anderson's, and was charged with assault. A month later, he was arrested and charged with battery after fighting with a Waffle House customer. He pleaded no contest to one count and was fined $1,000, as well as being required to perform 80 hours of community service and complete a six-hour anger management course.
On December 22, 2017, Kid Rock was sued by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (which closed seven months earlier) for using their slogan "Greatest Show on Earth" as the name of his 2018 tour. In January 2018, Kid Rock changed the tour's name to American Rock N' Roll Tour as a result of the lawsuit.
Discography
Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast (1990)
The Polyfuze Method (1993)
Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp (1996)
Devil Without a Cause (1998)
Cocky (2001)
Kid Rock (2003)
Rock n Roll Jesus (2007)
Born Free (2010)
Rebel Soul (2012)
First Kiss (2015)
Sweet Southern Sugar (2017)
Awards and nominations
Filmography
Film
Television
Tours
Straight From the Underground Tour (1990) (opened for Ice Cube, Too $hort, D Nice and Yo-Yo)
Pimp Of The Nation Tour (1996–1997)
Warped Tour (1998)
Devil Without a Cause (1998–1999)
M2K (2000)
Summer Sanitarium Tour (2000)
History of Rock Tour (2000)
The American Badass Tour (2001)
Cocky Tour (2002)
Girls of Summer (2002)
Rock N' Roll Pain Train (2004)
Live Trucker (2006)
Rock N' Roll Revival Tour (2008)
Vicious Cycle Tour (2008–2009)
Rock N' Roll Jesus (2009)
The Circle Tour (2010)
Born Free Tour (2011)
Care Tour (2011)
Rebel Soul Tour (2013)
$20 Best Night Ever Tour (2013)
Because We Can Tour (2013)
Rock N' Rollin Tour (2014)
First Kiss (2015)
Kid Rock 2016 Tour (2016)
American Rock N' Roll Tour (2018)
Red Blooded Rock 'n' Roll Redneck Extravaganza (2018)
Hot September Nights (2019)
References
External links
Appearances on C-SPAN
1971 births
Living people
20th-century American drummers
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American male musicians
20th-century American rappers
21st-century American drummers
21st-century American guitarists
21st-century American rappers
21st-century American singers
American country singers
American hip hop DJs
American hip hop singers
American hunters
American libertarians
American male drummers
American male guitarists
American male pianists
American male rappers
American male singer-songwriters
American multi-instrumentalists
American rock guitarists
American rock singers
American rock songwriters
Atlantic Records artists
Country musicians from Michigan
Guitarists from Detroit
Michigan Republicans
Midwest hip hop musicians
Nu metal singers
People from Clarkston, Michigan
People from Romeo, Michigan
Rap metal musicians
Rap rock musicians
Rappers from Detroit
Singers from Detroit
World Music Awards winners
WWE Hall of Fame inductees
21st-century American male singers
Singer-songwriters from Michigan | [
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17398 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaresborough%20Castle | Knaresborough Castle | Knaresborough Castle is a ruined fortress overlooking the River Nidd in the town of Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, England.
History
The castle was first built by a Norman baron in on a cliff above the River Nidd. There is documentary evidence dating from 1130 referring to works carried out at the castle by Henry I. In the 1170s Hugh de Moreville and his followers took refuge there after assassinating Thomas Becket.
William de Stuteville was appointed as Governor of Knaresborough castle in Easter 1173. After de Stuteville's death in 1203, King John gave Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, custody of all of William de Stuteville's lands and castles and the wardship of his son and heir Robert de Stuteville. However, Robert died in 1205 and William's brother Nicholas de Stuteville became William's heir. A charter dated at Lambeth 5th August 1205 confirmed that Nicholas had paid a fine of 10,000 marks for his inheritance, with the exception of the castles of Knaresborough and Boroughbridge, which were retained by the King
The King regarded Knaresborough as an important northern fortress and spent £1,290 on improvements to the castle. The castle was later rebuilt at a cost of £2,174 between 1307 and 1312 by Edward I and later completed by Edward II, including the great keep. Edward II gave the castle to Piers Gaveston and stayed there himself when the unpopular nobleman was besieged at Scarborough Castle.
Philippa of Hainault took possession of the castle in 1331, at which point it became a royal residence. The queen often spent summers there with her family. Her son, John of Gaunt acquired the castle in 1372, adding it to the vast holdings of the Duchy of Lancaster. Katherine Swynford, Gaunt's third wife, obtained the castle upon his death.
A detailed survey of the state of the castle buildings was made in 1561. The building was used by estate auditors and law courts were held in the hall.
The castle was taken by Parliamentarian troops in 1644 during the Civil War and largely destroyed in 1648, not as the result of warfare but because of an order from Parliament to dismantle all Royalist castles. Indeed many town-centre buildings are built of 'castle stone'.
Present day
The remains of the castle are open to the public and there is a charge for entry to the interior remains. The grounds are used as a public leisure space, with a bowling green and putting green open during summer. It is also used as a performing space, with bands playing most afternoons through the summer. It plays host to frequent events, such as the annual FEVA (Festival of Visual Arts and Entertainment). The property is owned by the monarch as part of the Duchy of Lancaster holdings, but is administered by Harrogate Borough Council.
Knaresborough castle has had ravens since 2000, one of which was given by the Tower of London, and an African pied crow named Mourdour. In 2018, Mourdour was filmed greeting people at the castle in a Yorkshire accent, saying "Y'alright love?" The video subsequently went viral and was reported by various news broadcasters.
Description
The castle, now much ruined, comprised two walled baileys set one behind the other, with the outer bailey on the town side and the inner bailey on the cliff side. The enclosure wall was punctuated by solid towers along its length, and a pair, visible today, formed the main gate. At the junction between the inner and outer baileys, on the north side of the castle stood a tall five-sided keep, the eastern parts of which have been pulled down. The keep had a vaulted basement, at least three upper stories, and served as a residence for the lord of the castle throughout the castle's history. The castle baileys contained residential buildings, and some foundations have survived. In 1789, historian Ely Hargrove wrote that the castle contained "only three rooms on a floor, and measures, in front, only fifty-four feet."
The upper storey of the Courthouse features a museum that includes furniture from the original Tudor Court, as well as exhibits about the castle and the town. Some of the surviving areas of the castle keep wall also bear impact scars left by bullets fired during the Civil War siege.
References
Notes
Bibliography
Fry, Plantagenet Somerset, The David & Charles Book of Castles, David & Charles, 1980, p. 249.
External links
Knaresborough Castle & Museum - official site at Harrogate Borough Council
Knaresborough Castle on castlexplorer.co.uk
Tourist attractions in North Yorkshire
Castles in North Yorkshire
Ruins in North Yorkshire
Museums in North Yorkshire
Local museums in North Yorkshire
Knaresborough
De Vesci family | [
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17399 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligra | Calligra | Calligra Suite is a graphic art and office suite by KDE. It is available for desktop PCs, tablet computers, and smartphones. It contains applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, databases, vector graphics, and digital painting.
Calligra uses the OpenDocument format as its default file format for most applications and can import other formats, such as Microsoft Office formats. Calligra relies on KDE technology and is often used in combination with KDE Plasma Workspaces.
Supported systems
Desktops
Calligra's main platform is desktop PCs running Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows, of which Linux is the best supported system.
On desktop systems, the whole range of features is available.
Smartphones and tablets
Calligra's efforts to create touchscreen-friendly versions are centered on reusable Qt Quick components. For smartphone-like formfactors 3rd party documents viewers Coffice for Android and Sailfish Office for Sailfish OS are available that make use of these components.
The Calligra project shipped Krita Sketch/Gemini and the tablet-focused Plasma Active document viewer with Calligra 2.8. Calligra 2.9 ships Calligra Gemini, an enhanced version of Calligra Active with added document editing features and runtime switching between desktop and touchscreen interfaces.
History
Calligra was created after disagreements within the KOffice community in 2010 – between KWord maintainer Thomas Zander and the other core developers. (See .) Following arbitration with the community members, several applications were renamed by both parties. Most developers, and all but KWord maintainer Thomas Zander, of particular applications joined the Calligra project. Three applications, Kexi, Krita and KPlato and the user interfaces for mobile devices have been completely moved out of KOffice and are only available within Calligra. A new application called Braindump has been added to Calligra after the split and KWord was replaced by the new word processor Calligra Words.
KOffice 2.3, released 31 December 2010, along with subsequent bugfix releases (2.3.1–2.3.3) was still a collaborative effort of both the KOffice and Calligra development teams. According to its developers, this version is stable enough for real use, and Karbon14, Krita and KSpread are recommended for production work.
On 18 May 2011 the Calligra team began releasing monthly snapshots while preparing for the release of Calligra 2.4.
The first version of the Calligra Suite for Windows was released on 21 December 2011. The package is labeled as “highly experimental” and “not yet suitable for daily use”.
The Calligra team originally scheduled to release the final 2.4 version in January 2012 but problems in the undo/redo feature of Words and Stage required a partial rewrite and caused a delay. Calligra 2.4 was released on 11 April 2012.
Calligra 2.4 launched with two mobile-oriented user interfaces: Calligra Mobile and Calligra Active. Calligra Mobile's development was initiated in summer 2009 and first shown during Akademy / Desktop Summit 2009 by KO GmbH as a simple port of KOffice to Maemo. Later Nokia hired KO to assist them with a full-fledged mobile version, including a touchscreen-friendly user interface which was presented by Nokia during Maemo Conference in October 2009. The first alpha version was made available in January 2010. Along with the launch of the Nokia N9 smartphone, Nokia released its own Poppler and Calligra-based office document viewer under GPL.
Calligra Active was launched in 2011 after the Plasma Active initiative to provide a document viewer similar to Calligra Mobile but for tablet computers.
In December 2012 KDE, KO GmbH, and Intel released Krita Sketch, a variant of Calligra's Krita painting application, for Windows 7 and 8.
On 24 March 2013 KDE developer Sebastian Sauer released Coffice, a Calligra-based document viewer, for Android.
Jolla continued Nokia's efforts on a smartphone version. In 2013 Jolla launched Sailfish Office. Sailfish Office reuses the Qt Quick components from Calligra Active.
In September 2013 a merger of Krita and Krita Sketch, named Krita Gemini, was launched on Windows 8.1. Development was funded by Intel to promote 2in1 convertible notebooks. On 5 March 2014 Krita Sketch and Gemini were also released as part of Calligra 2.8 for non-Windows platforms.
In April 2014 Intel and KO GmbH extended the promotion deal to Gemini versions of Stage and Words. On 28 August 2014 the first snapshot of Calligra Gemini was released by KO GmbH for Windows. On 21 November 2014 KDE announced that Calligra Gemini would officially be released as part of Calligra 2.9. As with Krita, this Gemini release adds a touchscreen interface to Words and Stage and users can switch between desktop and touch mode at runtime. Calligra Gemini is a continuation of Calligra Active and Sailfish Office developments but with added editing capabilities. On 19 October 2014 a Linux version was presented.
The koffice.org website was replaced by a placeholder in early September 2012. KOffice was declared unmaintained by KDE. The koffice.org domain now redirects to Calligra.org.
In Autumn 2015 Krita was split off into a project independent from Calligra, with the then current 2.9 versions though still developed as part of Calligra 2.9.
Components
Reception
Initial reception shortly after the 2.4 release was positive. Linux Pro Magazine Online's Bruce Byfield wrote "Calligra needed an impressive first release. Perhaps surprisingly, and to the development team's credit, it has managed one in 2.4", but also noted that "Words in particular is still lacking features". He concluded that Calligra is "worth keeping an eye on".
The German sister publication LinuxUser 10/2012 reviewed Calligra 2.5 on 12 September 2012. Its reception was mostly positive. Negative criticism centered on Words' stability: "During our review no Calligra module was completely free of crashes, however Words' crashes reached an amount that we cannot recommend it for general use." The reviewer Thomas Drilling on the other hand praised Calligra's usability, writing: "The consistent work flow, often stunningly intuitive workflows, and clear menu structure are well received." He then concluded: "The individual modules' quality varies: While Words shows weakness, image editor Krita, spreadsheet application Sheets, and presentation program Stage completely won us over. Flowcharting application Flow allures with its wide range of stencils which makes drawing flow charts come easy."
LinuxUser reviewed Calligra 2.6 in issue 3/2013. Reviewer Vincze-Aron Szabo reiterated positive criticism about Calligra's user interface and noted increased stability of Words compared to Calligra 2.5. Szabo's major point for negative criticism was Author's and Word's handling of long documents, resulting in decreased performance and crashes. The other reviewed components – Plan, Stage, Sheets, and Krita – were praised in terms of stability and intuitiveness.
Calligra 2.7 was reviewed by LinuxUser in its October 2013 issue. Thomas Drilling, the reviewer, drew a positive conclusion overall. Among the positive aspects he pointed out were better .docx file import than LibreOffice and the amount of new features gained by the new version of the suite. Source for negative criticism was once again Words' stability, although Drilling noted improvements in this regard.
Network World editor Bryan Lunduke wrote about Calligra 2.8 in March 2014: “Karbon is an astoundingly nice vector design tool, and Flow, a diagramming tool, is incredibly handy from the design point of view as well. […] And Words is a great word processor.” In August 2014 he wrote: “Calligra Suite has become a staple of my workflow even on non-KDE desktops.” Linux Insider also reviewed Calligra 2.8, concluding “Calligra Suite is a solid offering that has grown considerably since branching out from its traditional KOffice roots. It has something for everyone. Its tools fills the needs of writers, artists, content designers and office workers.”
In 2017, sempreupdate.com.br wrote: “[If you do not] depend on proprietary formats [...] especially .xls, .xlsx and .doc [...] and you use KDE it's worth trying. Yes, regarding LibreOffice Calligra is still two steps behind [but] it also brings small differentials that would be welcomed in LibreOffice.“
Technical details
Calligra is written with dependencies on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5. Older versions depend on KDE Platform 4 and Qt 4, and even older versions of KOffice depend on KDElibs and Qt 3. Despite that Calligra Suite is released independently of the KDE Software Compilation or of the KDE Applications.
All components of the Calligra Suite are released under free software licenses and use OpenDocument as their native file format when applicable.
The developers of Calligra plan to share as much infrastructure as possible between applications to reduce bugs and improve the user experience. This is done by common technologies like Flake and Pigment. Flake provides a way to handle shapes, which can contain text, images, formulas (via KFormula), charts (via KChart) or other objects, in a consistent way across all applications. The Calligra team also wants to create an OpenDocument library for use in other KDE applications that will allow developers to easily add support for reading and outputting OpenDocument files to their applications. Automating tasks and extending the suite with custom functionality can be done with D-Bus or with scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and JavaScript through the Kross scripting framework.
See also
Comparison of office suites
List of office suites
References
External links
Calligra development home
Free graphics software
KDE Applications
Office suites for Linux
Office suites for macOS
Office suites for Windows
Open-source office suites
Software that uses Qt
1998 software
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17401 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumimaro%20Konoe | Fumimaro Konoe | Prince was a Japanese politician and prime minister. During his tenure, he presided over the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the breakdown in relations with the United States which ultimately culminated in Japan's entry into World War II. He also played a central role in transforming his country into a totalitarian state by passing the National Mobilization Law and founding the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.
Despite Konoe's attempts to resolve tensions with the United States, the rigid timetable imposed on negotiations by the military and his own government's inflexibility regarding a diplomatic resolution set Japan on the path to war. Upon failing to reach a peace agreement, Konoe resigned as Prime Minister on 18 October 1941 prior to the outbreak of hostilities. However, he remained a close advisor to the Emperor until the end of World War II. Following the end of the war, he committed suicide on 16 December 1945.
Early life
Fumimaro Konoe was born in Tokyo on 12 October 1891 to the prominent Konoe family, one of the main branches of the ancient Fujiwara clan. This made the Konoe "head of the most prestigious, and highest ranking noble house in the realm". They had first become independent of the Fujiwara in the 12th century, when Minamoto no Yoritomo divided the Fujiwara into the Five Regent Houses (go-sekke). Japanese historian Hotta Eri described the Konoe as "First among the go-sekke"; Fumimaro would be its 29th leader. While the average height of Japanese people at that time was around 160 cm (5 ft 3 in), Konoe was over 180 cm (5 ft 11 in) tall.
Konoe's father, Atsumaro, had been politically active, having organized the Anti-Russia Society in 1903. Fumimaro's mother died shortly after his birth; his father then married her younger sister. Fumimaro was misled into thinking she was his real mother, and found out the truth when he was 12 years old after his father's death.
Fumimaro inherited family debt when his father died. Thanks to the financial support of the zaibatsu Sumitomo, which he received throughout his career, and the auction of Fujiwara heirlooms the family was able to become solvent.
Fumimaro was not the only talented member of his family: his younger brother Hidemaro Konoye later became a symphony conductor and founded NHK Symphony Orchestra.
At Kyoto Imperial University, Fumimaro studied socialism, translating Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" into Japanese. There, he met genrō Saionji Kinmochi and became his protege. After graduation, Fumimaro turned to Saionji for advice about starting a political career, and worked briefly in the home ministry before accompanying his mentor to Versailles as part of the Japanese peace delegation.
But first, Konoe completed two tasks. With his Geisha Kiku, he fathered an illegitimate child. And in December 1918, he also published an essay entitled "Reject the Anglo-American-Centered Peace" (英米本位の平和主義を排す). In this article, he argued that western democracies were supporting democracy, peace, and self-determination only hypocritically, while actually undermining those ideals through racially-discriminatory imperialism. He attacked the League of Nations as an effort to institutionalize the status quo: colonial hegemony by the western powers. Following a translation by American journalist Thomas Franklin Fairfax Millard, Saionji wrote a rebuttal in his journal, Millard's Review of the Far East. Saionji considered Konoe's writing reckless, but, after it became internationally read, Konoe was invited to dinner by Sun Yat-sen. Yat-sen admired Japan's quick modernization; at the dinner, they discussed pan-Asian nationalism.
During the Paris peace conference, Konoe was one of the Japanese diplomats who proposed the Racial Equality Proposal for the Covenant of the League of Nations. When the Racial Equality Clause came up before the committee, it received the support of Japan, France, Serbia, Greece, Italy, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, and China. However, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson overturned the vote, declaring that the clause needed unanimous support. Konoe took the rejection of the Racial Equality Clause very badly, seeing it as a humiliation of Japan.
Upon his return to Japan he published a booklet where he described his travels to France, England and America, how he was angered by rising anti-Japanese sentiment there, and how government policy in the US discriminated against Japanese immigration. He also described China as a rival to Japan in international relations.
House of Peers
In 1916, while at university, Fumimaro took his father's seat in the house of peers. After his return from Europe he was aggressively recruited by the most powerful political faction of Japan's budding Taisho democracy of the 1920s: the kenkyukai, a conservative, militaristic faction, led by Yamagata Aritomo and generally opposed to democratic reform. In September 1922, he joined them.
The opposing faction was the seiyukai, led by Hara Takashi, which drew its strength from the lower house. Eventually the seiyukai was able to gain the Aritomo's support, and Hara Takashi became premier in 1918. Konoe believed the house of peers should stay neutral in factional party politics, lest a partisan-seeming peerage have their privileges restricted. He therefore supported Takashi's seiyukai government, as did most of the kenkyukai.
However, by 1923 the seiyukai had split into two factions, and could no longer control the government. During the premiership of Kato Komei and his party, the kenseikai, Konoe supported universal male suffrage to forestall serious curtailment of the noble privileges. Konoe believed universal male suffrage was the best way to channel popular discontent and thereby reduce the chance of violent revolution. As the house of peers became allied with different political factions in the lower house, Konoe left the kenkyukai in November 1927.
Like his position in regard to the nobility, he believed that the emperor should not take political positions. In his eyes, a political emperor would diminish the imperial prestige, undermine the unifying power of the throne, expose the emperor to criticism, and potentially undermine domestic tranquillity. His greatest fear in this period of rapid industrialization would become the threat of left wing revolution, facilitated by the petty factionalism of Taisho democracy's political factions. He saw the peerage as a bulwark of stability committed to tranquillity, harmony, the maintenance of the status quo. Its function was to restrain the excesses of the elected government, but its power had to be used sparingly.
Alliance with Home Ministry
The Japanese home ministry was extremely powerful, in charge of the police, elections, public works, Shinto shrines, and land development. The home ministry was also abused to influence elections in favour of the ruling party. Despite having once believed it to be beneath the dignity of a nobleman, Konoe entered into an alliance with important home ministry officials. The most important among these officials was Yoshiharu Tazawa, whom he met after he became the managing director of the Japan Youth Hall (Nippon Seinenkan) in 1921. Konoe and his allies saw the influence of local meiboka political bosses as a threat to Japan's political stability. Universal suffrage had opened the vote to the undereducated peasantry, but local bosses, using pork-barrel politics, manipulated their influence on the government. These officials also shared Konoe's concern about party influence within the home ministry, which had seen great turnover mirroring the political upheaval occurring in the Diet. Konoe's association with the youth hall began two months after the publication of an article in July 1921, where he stressed education of the electorate's political wisdom and morality, and lamented that education only taught youth to accept ideas passively from their superiors. The Youth Corps (Seinendan) was thereafter created to foster a moral, sense of civic duty among the people, with the overall purpose of destroying the meiboka system.
In 1925 Konoe and these officials formed the Alliance for a New Japan (Shin Nippon Domei) which endorsed the concept of representative government, but rejected the value of party and local village bosses, instead advocating that new candidates from outside the parties should run for office. The Association for Election Purification (Senkyo Shukusei Domeikai) was also created, an organization whose purpose was to circumvent and weaken pork barrel local politics by supporting candidates that were not beholden to meiboka bosses. The alliance formed a political party (meiseikai), but was unable to secure popular support, and dissolved within two years of formation (in 1928).
Road to First Premiership
In the 1920s Japanese foreign policy was largely in line with Anglo-American policy, the treaty of Versailles, the Washington Naval Conference treaty, and there was agreement between the great powers over the establishment of an independent Chinese State. A flourishing party system controlled the cabinet in alliance with industry. The great depression of the 1930s, the rise Soviet military power in the east, further insistence on limitations to Japanese naval power, and increased Chinese resistance to Japanese aggression in Asia, marked the abandonment of Japanese cooperation with the Anglo-American powers. The Japanese government began to seek autonomy in foreign policy, and — as the sense of crisis deepened — unity and mobilization became overreaching imperatives.
Konoe assumed the vice presidency of the house of peers in 1931. In 1932 political parties lost control of the cabinet. Thenceforth, cabinets were formed by alliances of political elites and military factions. As Japan mobilized its resources for war, the government increased suppression of political parties and what remained of the left wing. Konoe ascended to the presidency of the house of peers in 1933 and spent the next few years mediating between elite political factions, elite policy consensus and national unity.
Meanwhile, Fumimaro sent his eldest son Fumitaka to study in the US, at Princeton, wishing to prepare him for politics and make him an able proponent of Japan in America. Unlike most of his elite contemporaries, Fumimaro had not been educated abroad due to his father's poor finances. Fumimaro visited Fumitaka in 1934 and he was shocked by rising anti-Japanese sentiment. This experience deepened his resentment of the US, which he perceived as selfish and racist, and which he blamed for its failure to avert economic disaster. In a speech in 1935 Konoe said that the "monopolization" of resources by the Anglo-American alliance must end and be replaced by an "international new deal" to help countries like Japan take care of their growing populations.
Konoe's views were thus a recapitulation of those he had expressed at Versailles, almost 20 years earlier. He still believed Japan the equal and the rival of the western powers, believed Japan had a right to expansion in China, believed that such expansion was survival, and believed that the "Anglo-American powers were hypocrites seeking to enforce their economic dominance of the world."
Prime Minister and war with China
Despite his tutelage under the liberal-leaning Saionji Kinmochi, his study of socialism at university, and his support of universal suffrage, he seemed to have had a contradictory attraction to fascism, which angered and alarmed the ageing genro. At a costume party before Saionji's daughter was married in 1937, he was reported to have dressed as Hitler. Despite these misgivings Saionji nominated Konoe to the emperor, and in June 1937 Konoe became Prime Minister.
Upon assuming office, Konoe spent the short time between then and war with China attempting to secure pardons for the ultra-nationalist leaders of the 26 February incident, who had attempted to assassinate his mentor Saionji. Konoe retained the military, and legal ministers from the previous cabinet upon assumption of the premiership, and refused to take ministers from the political parties, as he was not interested in resurrecting party government. One month later, Japanese troops clashed with Chinese troops near Peking in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Nevertheless, a consensus emerged among Japanese military leadership that the nation was not ready for war with China, and a truce was made on 11 July.
The ceasefire was broken by 20 July after Konoe's government sent more divisions to China, causing full-scale war to erupt.
In November 1937 Konoe instituted a new system of joint conference between the civil government and the military called liaison conferences. In attendance at these liaison meetings were the prime minister, the foreign minister, the ministers of the army and navy and their chiefs of general staff. This arrangement resulted in an imbalance in favor of the military since each member in attendance had an equal say in policymaking.
Prior to the capture on Nanjing, Chang Kai Shek through the German ambassador in China attempted to negotiate, but Konoe rejected the overture.
After taking Nanking, the Japanese Army was doubtful about its ability to advance up the Yangtze river valley, and favoured taking up a German offer of mediation to end the war with China. Konoe by contrast, was not interested in peace, and instead chose to escalate the war by suggesting deliberately humiliating terms that he knew Chiang Kai-shek would never accept, to win a "total victory" over China.
In January 1938, Konoe issued a statement where he declared that "Kuomintang aggression had not ceased despite its defeat," that it was "subjecting its people to great misery," and that Japan would no longer deal with Chang. Six days later he gave a speech where he blamed China for the continued conflict. When later asked for clarifications, Konoe said he meant more than just non-recognition of Chiang's regime but "rejected it" and would "eradicate it". The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote about Konoe's escalation of the war: "The one time in the decade between 1931 and 1941 that the civilian authorities in Tokyo mustered the energy, courage and ingenuity to overrule the military on a major peace issue they did so with fatal results — fatal for Japan, fatal for China, and for Konoe himself".
Due to a trade imbalance, Japan had lost a large amount of its gold reserves by late 1937. Konoe believed that a new economic system geared toward exploitation of northern China's resources was the only way to stop this economic deterioration. In response to continued US support for the so-called Open Door Policy, Konoe rejected it "as he had since Versailles, but left open possible western interests in southern China." In a declaration on 3 November 1938, Konoe said Japan seeks a new order in east Asia, that Chiang no longer spoke for China, that Japan would reconstruct China without help from foreign powers, and that a "tripartite relationship of . . . Japan, Manchukuo, and China" would "create a new culture, and realize close economic cohesion throughout east Asia."
In April 1938 Konoe and the military pushed a National Mobilization Law through the Diet which declared a state of emergency, allowed the central government to control all manpower and material, and rationed the flow of raw materials into the Japanese market. Japanese victories continued at Xuzhou, Hankow, Canton, Wuchang, and Hanyang, but Chinese resistance nonetheless continued. Konoe resigned in January 1939, leaving the war that he had a large part in making to be finished by someone else, and was appointed chairman of the Privy Council. The Japanese public, which had been told that the war was an endless series of victories, was bewildered.
Kiichirō Hiranuma succeeded him as Prime Minister. Konoe was awarded the 1st class of the Order of the Rising Sun in 1939.
Konoe's second term, the Matsuoka foreign policy
Due to dissatisfaction with the policies of Prime Minister Mitsumasa Yonai later that year, the Japanese Army demanded Konoe's return. Yonai had refused to align Japan with the Nazis; in response, the army minister Shunroku Hata resigned and the army refused to nominate a replacement. Konoe was recalled after Saionji - for the last time before his death later that year - again endorsed him.
On 23 June, Konoe resigned his position as Chairman of the Privy Council, and on 16 July 1940, the Yonai cabinet resigned and Konoe was appointed Prime Minister. Konoe did set out to end the war in with China. But Konoe also deemed political parties as too liberal and divisive, thereby aiding the pro war factions in the military. One of his first moves was to launch the League of Diet Members Supporting the Prosecution of the Holy War to counter opposition from politicians such as deputy Saitō Takao who had spoken against the Second Sino-Japanese War in the Diet on 2 February.
The Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA) was created in 1940 under Konoe as a wartime mobilization organization, ironically in alliance with local meiboka, since their cooperation was required to mobilize the rural population. Konoe's government pressured political parties to dissolve into the IRAA, he resisted calls to form a political party akin to Nazi party, believing it would revive the political strife of the 1920s. Additionally, he worried that becoming the head of a political party would be beneath the dignity of a nobleman. Instead he worked to promote the IRAA as the sole political order.
Even before Konoe had been recalled, the army had already planned an invasion of French Indochina. The invasion would secure needed resources to wage war with China, cut off western supply of Kuomintang armies, put the Japanese military in a strategic location to threaten more territory, and would hopefully intimidate the Dutch East Indies into supplying Japan with oil. The US responded with the Export Control Act, and increased aid to Chang. Despite this response foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka signed the Tripartite Pact on 27 September 1940 over the objection of some of Konoe's advisors including former Japanese ambassador to the US Kikujiro Ishii. In an 4 October press conference Konoe said that the US should not misunderstand the intentions of the tripartite powers, and should help them to build a new world order. Additionally he said that if the US did not end its provocative actions, and deliberately chose to misunderstand the actions of the tripartite powers, there would be no option left but war. In November 1940 Japan signed the Sino-Japanese treaty with Wang Jinwei, who had been a disciple of Sun Yat-sen and headed a rival Kuomintang government in Nanjing. But Konoe's Government did not relinquish all held territory to Jinwei's government, undercut its authority, and Wang's government was largely seen as an illegitimate puppet. In December 1940 the British reopened the Burma road and lent 10 million pounds to Chang's Kuomintang. Konoe recommenced negotiations with the Dutch in January 1941 in an attempt to secure an alternate source of oil.
In February 1941 Konoe chose Admiral Nomura as Japanese ambassador to the US. Matsuoka and Stalin signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in Moscow on 13 April 1941, which made it clear that the Soviets would not help the allies in the event of war with Japan. On 18 April 1941 word arrived from Nomura of a diplomatic breakthrough, a draft of understanding between the US and Japan. The basis of this agreement had been drafted by two American Maryknoll priests James Edward Walsh, and James M. Drought, who had met Roosevelt through the postmaster general Frank C. Walker. The outline of the proposal, which had been drafted in consultation with banker Tadao Ikawa, Colonel Hideo Iwakura, and Nomura, included American recognition of Manchukuo, merging Chiang's government with the Japanese backed Reorganized National Government of China, normalization of trade relations, withdrawal of Japanese troops from China, mutual respect for Chinese independence, and an agreement that Japanese immigration to the United States would proceed on the basis of equality with other nationals free from discrimination.
When Matsuoka returned to Tokyo a liaison conference was held, during which he voiced his opposition to the draft of understanding, believing it would betray their Nazi allies. After arguing that Japan should let Germany see this draft, he left the meeting citing exhaustion, Konoe also retreated to his villa also claiming a fever, instead of forcing the issue. Matsuoka pushed for an immediate attack on British Singapore and began to openly criticise Konoe and his cabinet, leading to suspicions that he wanted to replace Konoe as prime minister. Matsuoka changed the US draft into a counteroffer which essentially gutted most of the Japanese concessions in regard to China and expansion in the Pacific then had Nomura deliver it to Washington.
On Sunday, 22 June 1941, Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact by invading the Soviet Union. Coincident with the invasion, Cordell Hull delivered another amendment of the draft on understanding to the Japanese, but this time there was no recognition of the Japanese right to control of Manchukuo, the new draft also completely rejected the Japanese right of military expansion in the Pacific. Hull included a statement which in summary said that as long as Japan was allied to Hitler an agreement would be next to impossible to achieve. He did not specifically mention Matsuoka, but it was implied that he would have to be removed, as the foreign minister was now advocating an immediate attack on the Soviet Union, and did so directly to the emperor. Konoe was forced to apologize to the emperor and assure him that Japan was not about to go to war with the Soviet Union. Masanobu Tsuji had planned to assassinate Konoe if peace had occurred with the United States in order for Japan to attack the Soviet Union, who was at war with Japan's ally Germany.
Matsuoka was convinced that Barbarossa would be a quick German victory and he was now opposed to attacking Singapore because he believed it would provoke war with the western allies. After a series of liaison conferences where Matsuoka argued forcefully in favour of an attack against the Soviet Union and against further expansion southward, the decision was made to invade and occupy the southern half of French Indochina, which was formalized in an imperial conference on 2 July. Included in this imperial conference resolution was a statement that Japan would not flinch from war with the US and Britain if necessary. Beginning on 10 July Konoe held a series of liaison conferences to discuss the Japanese response to Hull's latest amendment to the draft of understanding. It was decided that a reply would not be given until the Japanese takeover of southern Indochina was complete, hoping that if it went peacefully, perhaps the US could be convinced to tolerate the occupation without intervention. On 14 July Matsuoka drafted a response — through illness — which said Japan would not abandon the tripartite pact. He attacked Hull's statement which had been aimed largely at him, and the next day he sent the response to Germany for approval. Sending the draft to the Germans without the cabinet's permission was the final straw. Konoe and his cabinet resigned en masse and reformed the government without Matsuoka on 16 July, when Matsuoka did not attend due to illness.
Third government and attempt to avoid war with the United States
Konoe's third government was formally created on 18 July, with admiral Teijiro Toyoda as foreign minister. The Roosevelt administration hoped that Matsuoka's dismissal would mean Japan was standing down from continued aggressive action; these hopes were dashed when the French government, after being threatened with military action, allowed the Japanese army to occupy all of French Indochina on 22 July. Two days later, the US cut off negotiations and froze Japanese assets, the British, Dutch, and Canadian governments following suit shortly thereafter. The same day Roosevelt met with Nomura where he told the ambassador that if Japan would agree to pull out of Indochina, and agree to its being granted a status of neutrality, Japanese assets could be unfrozen. Roosevelt implied that Japanese expansion in China would be tolerated, but Indochina was a red line. He also expressed how disturbed he was that Japan could not see that Hitler was bent on world domination. Konoe did not take aggressive action in implementing Roosevelt's offer, and could not restrain militarists, led by Hideki Tojo. As minister of war, Tojo regarded the seizure as irreversible due to its approval by the emperor.
On 28 July the Japanese began to formally occupy southern Indochina. In response on 1 August the US embargoed oil exports to Japan, surprising Konoe's cabinet. Finding a replacement source of petroleum was paramount, as the US supplied 93% of Japan's oil in 1940. Navy chief of staff Osami Nagano informed the Emperor that Japan's oil stockpiles would be completely depleted in two years. On 1 August Hachiro Arita wrote Konoe a letter which told him that he should not have let the military occupy southern Indochina while negotiations with the US were still ongoing, Konoe responded that the ships were already dispatched and could not turn back in time, and that all he could do was pray for "divine intervention".
On 6 August Konoe's government announced that it would only pull out of Indochina when the war in China was concluded, rejected Roosevelt's neutralization proposal, but promised not to expand further and asked for US mediation in ending the war in China. On 8 August Konoe requested, through Nomura, a meeting with Roosevelt. The suggestion came from Kinkazu Saionji, the grandson of his deceased mentor Saionji Kinmochi. Kinkazu advised Konoe through a monthly informal breakfast club, where Konoe consulted with civilian elites about policy. Hotsumi Ozaki, who was a friend and advisor to Konoe, was a member of this same breakfast club; he was also a member of Richard Sorge's soviet spy ring.
Nomura met with Roosevelt and told him about Konoe's summit proposal. After condemning Japanese aggression in Indochina, Roosevelt said he was open to the meeting, and suggested they could meet in Juneau, Alaska. On 3 September, a liaison conference was held where it was decided that Konoe would continue to seek peace with Roosevelt, but, at the same time, Japan would commit to war if a peace agreement did not materialize by mid October. Moreover, Japan would not abandon the tripartite pact. Konoe, Saionji, and his supporters had drafted a proposal which emphasized a willingness to withdraw troops from China, but Konoe did not introduce this proposal, and instead acceded to a proposal from the foreign ministry. The difference in the proposals being that the foreign ministry's was conditioned on an agreement being reached between China and Japan before troops would be withdrawn.
On 5 September Konoe met the emperor with chiefs of staff General Hajime Sugiyama and Admiral Osami Nagano to inform him of the cabinet's decision to commit to war in the absence of a diplomatic breakthrough. Alarmed, the emperor asked: what happened to the negotiations with Roosevelt? He asked Konoe to change the emphasis from war to negotiation; Konoe replied that would be politically impossible; and the emperor then asked why he had been kept in the dark about these military preparations. The emperor then questioned Sugiyama about the chances of success of an open war with the Occident. After Sugiyama answered positively, Hirohito scolded him, remembering that the Army had predicted that the invasion of China would be completed in only three months.
On 6 September the emperor approved the cabinet's decision at an imperial conference after being given assurance by the two chiefs of staff that diplomacy was the primary emphasis, with war only as a fall-back option in the event of diplomatic failure. That same evening, Konoe arranged a dinner in secrecy with US ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew. (This was somewhat perilous: on 15 August, Hiranuma Kiichiro, a member of Konoe's cabinet and former prime minister, had been shot six times by an ultra-nationalist because he was seen as too close to Grew.) Konoe told Grew that he was prepared to travel to meet Roosevelt on a moment's notice, Grew then urged his superiors to advise Roosevelt to accept the summit proposal.
The day after the imperial conference Konoe arranged a meeting between Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni and army minister Tojo, which was an attempt to bring the war hawk in line with Konoe. Higashikuni told Tojo that since the emperor and Konoe favoured negotiation over war, the army minister should too, and that he should quit if he could not follow a policy of non-confrontation. Tojo replied that if the western encirclement of Japan were to be accepted, Japan would cease to exist. Tojo believed that even if there was only a small chance of winning a war with the US, Japan must prepare for it and wage it rather than be encircled and destroyed.On 10 September Nomura met with Hull and was told by him that the latest Japanese offer was a non-starter, and that Japan would have to make concessions in regard to China before the summit meeting could take place. On 20 September a liaison meeting passed a revised proposal that actually hardened conditions for a withdrawal from China. At the liaison conference of 25 September, sensing that summit negotiations were stalling, Tojo and the militarists pressed the cabinet to commit to an actual deadline for war of 15 October. After this meeting Konoe told lord keeper of the privy seal Koichi Kido that he was going to resign, but Kido talked him out of it, Konoe then secluded himself in a villa at Kamakura until 2 October, leaving foreign minister Toyoda to take charge of negotiations in his absence. Toyoda asked ambassador Grew to tell Roosevelt that Konoe would only be able to grant concessions at the summit, but could not commit beforehand due to the influence of the militarists, and the risk that any conciliation beforehand would be leaked to the Germans in an effort to bring down the Konoe cabinet. Grew argued in favour of the summit to Roosevelt in a communication of 29 September.
On 1 October, Konoe summoned navy minister Oikawa to Kamakura, where he secured his commitment of cooperation in acceptance American demands, the navy being acutely aware of the long odds of victory in the event of war with the US. Oikawa returned to Tokyo and seemed to secure the cooperation of navy chief of staff Nagano, including Toyoda as foreign minister they formed a potential majority in the next liaison conference. On 2 October Hull delivered to Nomura a statement constituting the preconditions for a summit meeting. Hull made it clear that the Japanese army would have to demonstrate that they were going to pull troops out of French Indochina and China.
At the liaison conference of 4 October, Hull's response was still being processed and could not be fully discussed, Nagano changed his position and now agreed with the army and advocated a deadline for war. Konoe and Oikawa were largely silent, and did not try to bring him back to the side of negotiation, further postponing a final decision. The army and the navy were in opposition to each other and held separate high level meetings each respectively confirming their resolve to either go to war, or pull back from the brink. But Nagano continued to oppose open confrontation of the army, while Oikawa did not want to take the lead as the only member of the liaison conference to oppose war.
Konoe met privately with Tojo twice, in a failed attempt to convince him to a troop withdrawal, and to take the war option off the table on 5 and 7 October. In the 7 October meeting Konoe told Tojo that "military men take wars too lightly." Tojo's response was, "occasionally one must gather up enough courage, close one's eyes and jump off the platform of the Kiyomizu." Konoe responded that, while such a policy was okay for the individual, "if I think of the national polity that has lasted twenty six hundred years and of the hundred million Japanese belonging to this nation, I, as a person in the position of great responsibility, cannot do such a thing". The next day Tojo met with Oikawa, and showed some doubt when he told him that it would be a betrayal of those who had already died in the war for the army to pull troops out of China, but that he was also worried about the many more who would die in an eventual war with the US, and that he was considering a troop withdrawal.
Konoe held a meeting on 12 October with military ministers Tojo, Oikawa, and the foreign minister Toyoda, which became known as the Tekigaiso conference. Konoe began by saying that he had no confidence in the war they were about to wage and would not lead it, but neither Oikawa or Konoe was willing to take the lead in demanding the army agree to taking the war option off the table, Toyoda was the only member willing to declare that the imperial conference of 6 September was a mistake, implying that the war option should be taken off the table, while Tojo forcefully argued that an imperial resolution could not be violated.
On 14 October one day before the deadline, Konoe and Tojo met one last time, where Konoe attempted to impress upon Tojo the need to stand down from war, and accede to US demands for a military withdrawal from China and Indochina. Tojo ruled a troop withdrawal as out of the question. In the cabinet meeting that followed, Tojo declared that the decision of the imperial conference had been thoroughly deliberated, that hundreds of thousands of troops were being moved south as they spoke, that if diplomacy were to continue they must be sure that it would result in success, and that the imperial edict had specifically declared that negotiations must bear fruit by early October (which meant the deadline had already been passed). After this conference Tojo went to see lord keeper of the privy seal Kido, to push for Konoe's resignation.
That same evening Tojo sent Teiichi Suzuki (at that time the head of the cabinet planning board) to Konoe with a message urging him to resign, stating that if he resigned Tojo would endorse prince Higashikuni as the next prime minister. Suzuki told Konoe that Tojo realized now that the navy was unwilling to admit that it could not fight the US. He also told Konoe that Tojo believed the current cabinet must resign and bear the responsibility of wrongfully calling for the imperial edict, and only someone of Higashikuni's imperial background could reverse it. The next day on 15 October Konoe's friend and advisor Hotsumi Ozaki was exposed and arrested as a Soviet spy.
Konoe resigned on 16 October 1941, one day after having recommended Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni to the Emperor as his successor. Two days later, Hirohito chose General Tōjō as Prime Minister. In 1946, Hirohito explained this decision: "I actually thought Prince Higashikuni suitable as chief of staff of the Army; but I think the appointment of a member of the imperial house to a political office must be considered very carefully. Above all, in time of peace this is fine, but when there is a fear that there may even be a war, then more importantly, considering the welfare of the imperial house, I wonder about the wisdom of a member of the imperial family serving [as prime minister]." Six weeks later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Konoe justified his demission to his secretary Kenji Tomita. "Of course His Imperial Majesty is a pacifist and he wished to avoid war. When I told him that to initiate war was a mistake, he agreed. But the next day, he would tell me: 'You were worried about it yesterday but you do not have to worry so much.' Thus, gradually he began to lead to war. And the next time I met him, he leaned even more to war. I felt the Emperor was telling me: 'My prime minister does not understand military matters. I know much more.' In short, the Emperor had absorbed the view of the army and the navy high commands."
Post premiership, final years of the war and suicide
On 29 November 1941, at a luncheon with the emperor with all living former prime ministers in attendance, Konoe voiced his objection to war. Upon hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Konoe said regarding Japan's military success, "What on earth? I really feel a miserable defeat coming; this will only last 2 or 3 months."
Konoe played a role in the fall of the Tōjō government in 1944. In February 1945, during the first private audience he had been allowed in three years, he advised the Emperor to begin negotiations to end World War II. According to Grand Chamberlain Hisanori Fujita, Shōwa, still looking for a tennozan (a great victory), firmly rejected Konoe's recommendation.
After the beginning of the American occupation, Konoe served in the cabinet of Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, the first post-war government. Having refused to collaborate with U.S. Army officer Bonner Fellers in "Operation Blacklist" to exonerate Shōwa and the imperial family of criminal responsibility, he came under suspicion of war crimes. In December 1945, during the last call by the Americans for alleged war criminals to report to the Americans, he took potassium cyanide poison and committed suicide. His grave is at the Konoe clan cemetery at the temple of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto.
His grandson, Morihiro Hosokawa, became prime minister fifty years later.
See also
Events leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor
Nanshin-ron policy
Tekigai-sō, Konoe's villa in Suginami, Tokyo
Ancestry
References
Bibliography
Connors, Lesley. The Emperor's Advisor: Saionji Kinmochi and Pre-War Japanese Politics, Croom Helm, London, and Nissan Institute for Japanese Studies, University of Oxford, 1987
Iriye, Akira. The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, Longman, London and New York, 1987.
Jansen, Marius B. (2000). The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ;
Lash, Joseph P. Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939–1941, W. W. Norton and Co, New York, 1976.
Oka, Yoshitake. Konoe Fumimaro: A Political Biography, Translated by Shumpei Okamoto and Patricia Murray, University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo, Japan, 1983.
External links
Konoe biography from Spartacus Educational
Annotated bibliography for Fumimaro Konoe from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
Fumimaro Konoe and Asian Pacific War
1891 births
1945 deaths
20th-century prime ministers of Japan
People from Tokyo
Fujiwara clan
Government ministers of Japan
Japanese nationalists
Japanese fascists
Japanese people of World War II
Japanese politicians who committed suicide
Japanese anti-communists
Shōwa Statism
Kazoku
Konoe family
Kyoto University alumni
Members of the House of Peers (Japan)
Political party founders
Prime Ministers of Japan
Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun
Recipients of the Order of the Sacred Treasure
Suicides by cyanide poisoning
Suicides by poison in Japan
Imperial Rule Assistance Association politicians
20th-century Japanese politicians
Politicians from Tokyo
Fascist rulers | [
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17405 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow | Kowtow | A kowtow is the act of deep respect shown by prostration, that is, kneeling and bowing so low as to have one's head touching the ground. In Sinospheric culture, the kowtow is the highest sign of reverence. It was widely used to show reverence for one's elders, superiors, and especially the Emperor of China, as well as for religious and cultural objects of worship. In modern times, usage of the kowtow has been reduced.
Terminology
An alternative Chinese term is ketou; however, the meaning is somewhat altered: kou () has the general meaning of knock, whereas ke () has the general meaning of "touch upon (a surface)", tou () meaning head. The date of this custom's origin is probably sometime during the Spring and Autumn period or the Warring States period of China's history (771–221 BC), because it was a custom by the time of the Qin dynasty (221 BC – 206 BC).
Traditional usage
In Imperial Chinese protocol, the kowtow was performed before the Emperor of China. Depending on the solemnity of the situation different grades of kowtow would be used. In the most solemn of ceremonies, for example at the coronation of a new Emperor, the Emperor's subjects would undertake the ceremony of the "three kneelings and nine kowtows", the so-called grand kowtow, which involves kneeling from a standing position three times, and each time, performing the kowtow three times while kneeling. Immanuel Hsu describes the "full kowtow" as "three kneelings and nine knockings of the head on the ground".
As government officials represented the majesty of the Emperor while carrying out their duties, commoners were also required to kowtow to them in formal situations. For example, a commoner brought before a local magistrate would be required to kneel and kowtow. A commoner is then required to remain kneeling, whereas a person who has earned a degree in the Imperial examinations is permitted a seat.
Since one is required by Confucian philosophy to show great reverence to one's parents and grandparents, children may also be required to kowtow to their elderly ancestors, particularly on special occasions. For example, at a wedding, the marrying couple was traditionally required to kowtow to both sets of parents, as acknowledgement of the debt owed for their nurturing.
Confucius believed there was a natural harmony between the body and mind and therefore, whatever actions were expressed through the body would be transferred over to the mind. Because the body is placed in a low position in the kowtow, the idea is that one will naturally convert to his or her mind a feeling of respect. What one does to oneself influences the mind. Confucian philosophy held that respect was important for a society, making bowing an important ritual.
Modern Chinese usage
The kowtow, and other traditional forms of reverence, were much maligned after the May Fourth Movement. Today, only vestiges of the traditional usage of the kowtow remain. In many situations, the standing bow has replaced the kowtow. For example, some, but not all, people would choose to kowtow before the grave of an ancestor, or while making traditional offerings to an ancestor. Direct descendants may also kowtow at the funeral of an ancestor, while others would simply bow. During a wedding, some couples may kowtow to their respective parents, though the standing bow is today more common. In extreme cases, the kowtow can be used to express profound gratitude, apology, or to beg for forgiveness.
The kowtow remains alive as part of a formal induction ceremony in certain traditional trades that involve apprenticeship or discipleship. For example, Chinese martial arts schools often require a student to kowtow to a master. Likewise, traditional performing arts often also require the kowtow.
Religion
Prostration is a general practice in Buddhism, and not restricted to China. The kowtow is often performed in groups of three before Buddhist statues and images or tombs of the dead. In Buddhism it is more commonly termed either "worship with the crown (of the head)" (頂禮 ding li) or "casting the five limbs to the earth" (五體投地 wuti tou di)—referring to the two arms, two legs and forehead. For example, in certain ceremonies, a person would perform a sequence of three sets of three kowtows—stand up and kneel down again between each set—as an extreme gesture of respect; hence the term three kneelings and nine head knockings (). Also, some Buddhist pilgrims would kowtow once for every three steps made during their long journeys, the number three referring to the Triple Gem of Buddhism, the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Prostration is widely practiced in India by Hindus to give utmost respect to their deities in temples and to parents and elders. Nowadays in modern times people show the regards to elders by bowing down and touching their feet.
Diplomacy
The word "kowtow" came into English in the early 19th century to describe the bow itself, but its meaning soon shifted to describe any abject submission or groveling. The term is still commonly used in English with this meaning, disconnected from the physical act and the East Asian context.
Dutch ambassador Isaac Titsingh did not refuse to kowtow during the course of his 1794–1795 mission to the imperial court of the Qianlong Emperor. The members of the Titsingh mission, including Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest and Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes, made every effort to conform with the demands of the complex Imperial court etiquette.
The Qing courts gave bitter feedback to the Afghan emir Ahmad Shah when its Afghan envoy, presenting four splendid horses to Qianlong in 1763, refused to perform the kowtow. Coming amid tense relations between the Qing and Durrani empires, Chinese officials forbade the Afghans from sending envoys to Beijing in the future.
On two occasions, the kowtow was performed by Chinese envoys to a foreign ruler – specifically the Russian Tsar. T'o-Shih, Qing emissary to Russia whose mission to Moscow took place in 1731, kowtowed before Tsarina Anna, as per instructions by the Yongzheng Emperor, as did Desin, who led another mission the next year to the new Russian capital at St. Petersburg. Hsu notes that the Kangxi Emperor, Yongzheng's predecessor, explicitly ordered that Russia be given a special status in Qing foreign relations by not being included among tributary states, i.e. recognition as an implicit equal of China.
The kowtow was often performed in intra-Asian diplomatic relations as well. In 1636, after being defeated by the invading Manchus, King Injo of Joseon (Korea) was forced to surrender by kowtowing three times to pledge tributary status to the Qing Emperor, Hong Taiji. As was customary of all Asian envoys to Qing China, Joseon envoys kowtowed three times to the Qing emperor during their visits to China, continuing until 1896, when the Korean Empire withdrew its tributary status from Qing as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War.
The King of the Ryukyu Kingdom also had to kneel three times on the ground and touch his head nine times to the ground (), to show his allegiance to the Chinese emperors.
See also
Chinese social relations
Culture of China
Yeongeunmun
Sankin-kōtai
Finger kowtow:
Finger tapping in Chinese tea culture
Finger tapping in Yum Cha
Posture emoticons
Foot washing, another act of extreme humility
Gadaw, a Burmese form of obeisance akin to kowtow
John Moyse
Salute
Shuysky Tribute, a similar Eastern European practice
Sifu
Sujud, prostration to Allah
Orz
Dogeza
Proskynesis
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
Fairbank, John K., and Ssu-yu Teng. "On the Ch'ing tributary system." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 6.2 (1941): 135–246. online
Frevert, Ute. "Kneeling and the Protocol of Humiliation." in by Benno Gammerl, Philipp Nielsen, and Margrit, eds. Encounters with Emotions: Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity (2019): pp. 133–159 excerpt.
Gao, Hao. "The "Inner Kowtow Controversy" During the Amherst Embassy to China, 1816–1817." Diplomacy & Statecraft 27.4 (2016): 595–614.
Hevia, James L. "‘The ultimate gesture of deference and debasement’: kowtowing in China." Past and Present 203.suppl_4 (2009): 212–234.
Pritchard, Earl H. "The kotow in the Macartney embassy to China in 1793." Journal of Asian Studies 2.2 (1943): 163–203. online
Rockhill, William Woodville. "Diplomatic Missions to the Court of China: The Kotow Question I," The American Historical Review, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Apr. 1897), pp. 427–442. online
Rockhill, William Woodville. "Diplomatic Missions to the Court of China: The Kotow Question II," The American Historical Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Jul. 1897), pp. 627–643. online
Chinese culture
Etiquette
Bowing
Chinese words and phrases
Gestures of respect
Kneeling | [
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17407 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamchatka%20Oblast | Kamchatka Oblast | Kamchatka Oblast (, Kamchatskaya oblast) was, until being incorporated into Kamchatka Krai on July 1, 2007, a federal subject of Russia (an oblast). To the north, it bordered Magadan Oblast and Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. Koryak Autonomous Okrug was located in the northern part of the oblast. Including the autonomous okrug, the total area of the oblast was , encompassing the southern half of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The administrative center of Kamchatka Oblast was the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Population:
Kamchatka's natural resources include coal, gold, mica, pyrites, and natural gas. Most of the inhabitants live in the administrative center, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The main employment sectors are fishing, forestry, tourism (a growing industry), and the Russian military. There is still a large military presence on the peninsula; the home base of Russia's Pacific submarine fleet is across Avacha Bay from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky at the Rybachy base. There are also several air force bases and radar sites in Kamchatka.
As of the 2002 All-Russian Population Census, the majority of the 358,801 population is Russian (290,108), largest minorities are Ukrainian (20,870) and Koryak (7,328). The northern part of the peninsula is occupied by Koryak Autonomous Okrug, where around 6,700 Koryaks live. A small number of Evens also live here.
The oblast was established on October 20, 1932, subordinated to the Far Eastern Krai (later Khabarovsk Krai). In 1956, it became a separate oblast under its own jurisdiction.
Administrative divisions
See also
List of Chairmen of the Council of People's Deputies of Kamchatka Oblast
References
External links
The Wonders of Kamchatka
Commander Islands
Images from the Central Eurasian Information Resource - University of Washington Digital Collection
Former federal subjects of Russia
Geography of Kamchatka Krai
History of the Kamchatka Peninsula
Kamchatka Krai
Politics of Kamchatka Krai
States and territories established in 1932
States and territories disestablished in 2007
1932 establishments in the Soviet Union
2007 disestablishments in Russia | [
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17409 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznetsov | Kuznetsov | Kuznetsov, Kuznyetsov, Kuznetsoff, or Kouznetsov (masculine, ) or Kuznetsova (feminine, ) is the third most common Russian surname, an equivalent of the English "Smith" (derived from a Russian word kuznets that means blacksmith).
Men
Artists and entertainers
Aleksandr Kuznetsov (disambiguation), several people
Aleksey Alekseevich Kuznetsov (born 1941), Soviet/Russian jazz guitarist and composer
Anatoly Borisovich Kuznetsov (1930–2014), Soviet/Russian actor
Anatoly Vasilievich Kuznetsov (1929–1979), Soviet writer, author of Babi Yar
I. Kuznetsov, Russian soloist with the Alexandrov Ensemble
Ivan Sergeyevich Kuznetsov (1867–1942), Russian architect
Mikhail Kuznetsov (actor) (1918–1986), Soviet actor
Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov (1850–1929), Ukrainian portrait painter
Pavel Varfolomevich Kuznetsov (1878–1968), Russian painter
Sergey Kuznetsov, (born 1966), Russian writer
Yury Kuznetsov, (born 1946), Russian actor
Andy Kusnetzoff (born 1970), Argentine TV and radio personality
In sports
Alex Kuznetsov (born 1987), Ukrainian-American male tennis player
Aleksey Kuznetsov (disambiguation), several people
Andrey Kuznetsov (born 1991), Russian male tennis player
Artur Kuznetsov (Russian footballer) (born 1972)
Artur Kuznetsov (Ukrainian footballer) (born 1995)
Dmitri Kuznetsov (footballer born 1965), association football coach and former player
Dmitri Anatolyevich Kuznetsov (born 1972), retired Russian footballer
Evgeny Kuznetsov (born 1992), Russian ice hockey player
Evgeny Kuznetsov (diver) (born 1990), Russian diver
Maxim Kuznetsov (born 1977), Russian ice hockey player
Mikhail Kuznetsov (figure skater) (born 1988), Russian figure skater
Mikhail Kuznetsov (triathlete) (born 1971), Kazakhstani triathlete
Oleh Kuznetsov (born 1963), Ukrainian footballer and manager
Ruslan Kuznetsov (born 1980), Russian para-cyclist
Pavel Kuznetsov (weightlifter), (born 1961), Russian weightlifter
Syarhey Kuznyatsow, (born 1979), Belorussian footballer
Serhiy Kuznetsov (footballer born 1982), Ukrainian footballer
Vasili Kuznetsov (athlete) (1932–2001), Soviet decathlete
Vasili Kuznetsov (footballer) (born 1978), Russian footballer
Viktor Kuznyetsov (athlete) (born 1986), Ukrainian athlete
Viktor Kuznetsov (footballer, born 1949) (born 1949), Soviet international footballer
Viktor Kuznetsov (swimmer) (born 1961), Soviet backstroke swimmer
Vitali Kuznetsov (footballer) (born 1986), Russian footballer
Vitali Kuznetsov (judoka) (1941–2011), Soviet judoka
In politics
Alexey Kuznetsov (1905–1950), Soviet politician
Eduard Kuznetsov (born 1939), Jewish Soviet dissident and human rights activist
Vasili Kuznetsov (politician) (1901–1990), Soviet politician
Vyacheslav Nikolayevich Kuznetsov (born 1947), Belarusian politician
In the military
Fyodor Kuznetsov (1898–1961), Soviet military leader
Nikolai Gerasimovich Kuznetsov (1904–1974), Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union
Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov (1911–1944), Soviet intelligence agent and partisan
Vasily Kuznetsov (general) (1894–1964), Soviet military leader and Hero of the Soviet Union
Yuri Viktorovich Kuznetsov (1946–2020), Soviet military leader and Hero of the Soviet Union
In science and engineering
Alexander Kuznetsov (mathematician) (born 1973), Russian mathematician
Pobisk Georgievich Kuznetsov (1924-2000), Soviet Russian philosopher and scientist
Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov (1911–1995), Soviet aerospace engineer and the chief of the Kuznetsov Design Bureau
Nikolai Yakovlevich Kuznetsov (1873–1948), Russian entomologist, paleoentomologist and physiologist
Nikolay V. Kuznetsov (born 1979), Russian scientist, specialist in nonlinear dynamics and control theory
Yuri A. Kuznetsov, Russian-American mathematician
In other areas
Boris Kuznetsov (lawyer) (born 1944), Russian lawyer
Pyotr Kuznetsov (born 1964), Russian religious leader
Women
Anna Kuznetsova (born 1982), Russian human rights activist
Galyna Kuznetsova (born 1960), Ukrainian Paralympic volleyball player
Lyubov Kuznetsova (born 1928), Russian calligrapher and font designer
Maria Kouznetsova (violinist) (born 1991), Russian violinist
Maria Nikolaevna Kuznetsova (1880–1966), Russian Empire and Soviet opera singer and dancer
Nataliya Kuznetsova (born 1991), Russian powerlifter and bodybuilder
Olga Kuznetsova (born 1967), Russian middle distance runner
Svetlana Kuznetsova (born 1985), Russian tennis player
Tatyana Kuznetsova (1941–2018), Soviet cosmonaut
Valentina Kuznetsova (1937–2010), Soviet and Russian polar researcher and skier
Yelena Kuznetsova (born 1977), Kazakhstani race walker
Evgeniya Kuznetsova (born 1980), former Olympic gymnast who competed for Russia and later Bulgaria
See also
Kuznetsov Design Bureau, a Soviet/Russian aircraft engine design bureau
Admiral Kuznetsov class aircraft carrier
Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov
2233 Kuznetsov, an asteroid named for Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov (1911–1944), a Russian partisan fighter of World War II, and a Hero of the Soviet Union
Kuznetsk Basin, massive Russian coal mining region in southwestern Siberia
Leninsk-Kuznetsky, a city in the Kuznetsk Basin in Russia
Novokuznetsk, the most populous city in the Kemerovo Oblast (Russian: Ке́меровская о́бласть, Kemerovskaya oblast), also known as Kuzbass (Кузба́сс) which is a portmanteau for the Kuznetsk (Kuz) Basin (bass)
Leninsk-Kuznetsky District, an administrative district in the Kemerovo Oblast, Russia, which lies in the Kuznetsk Basin
Occupational surnames
Russian-language surnames | [
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17410 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ko%C5%82obrzeg | Kołobrzeg | Kołobrzeg ( ; , ; ), is a city in the West Pomeranian Voivodeship in north-western Poland with about 47,000 inhabitants (). Kołobrzeg is located on the Parsęta River on the south coast of the Baltic Sea (in the middle of the section divided by the Oder and Vistula Rivers). It is the capital of Kołobrzeg County.
During the Early Middle Ages, the Pomeranian tribes established a settlement at the site of modern-day Budzistowo. Thietmar of Merseburg first mentioned the site as Salsa Cholbergiensis. Around the year 1000, when the city was part of Poland, it became seat of the Diocese of Kołobrzeg, one of five oldest Polish dioceses. During the High Middle Ages, the town was expanded with an additional settlement inhabited by German settlers a few kilometers north of the stronghold and chartered with Lübeck law, which settlement eventually superseded the original Pomeranian settlement. The city later joined the Hanseatic League. Within the Duchy of Pomerania the town was the urban center of the secular reign of the prince-bishops of Cammin and their residence throughout the High and Late Middle Ages. When it was part of Brandenburgian Pomerania during the Early Modern Age, it withstood Polish and Napoleon's troops in the siege of Kolberg. From 1815, it was part of the Prussian province of Pomerania.
In the late 19th century Kolberg became a popular spa town at the Baltic Sea. In 1945, Polish and Soviet troops captured the town, while the remaining German population which had not fled the advancing Red Army was expelled in accordance to the Potsdam Agreement. Kołobrzeg, now part of post-war Poland and devastated in the preceding Battle of Kolberg, was rebuilt, but lost its status as the regional center to the nearby city of Koszalin.
Etymology
"Kołobrzeg" means "by the shore" in Polish; "koło" translates as "by" and "brzeg" means "coast" or "shore". has a similar etymology. The original name of Cholberg was taken by Polish and Kashubian linguists in the 19th and 20th centuries to reconstruct the name. After German settlement, the original name of Cholberg evolved into ().
History
Pomeranian stronghold at modern Budzistowo
According to Piskorski (1999) and Kempke (2001), Slavic and Lechitic immigration reached Farther Pomerania in the 7th century. First Slavic settlements in the vicinity of Kołobrzeg were centered around nearby deposits of salt and date to 6th and 7th century.
In the late 9th century, the Pomeranian tribes erected a fortified settlement at the site of modern part of Kołobrzeg county called Budzistowo<ref name=Schich>Winfried Schich, Ralf Gebuhr, Peter Neumeister, Wirtschaft und Kulturlandschaft: Gesammelte Beiträge 1977 bis 1999 zur Geschichte der Zisterzienser und der "Germania Slavica", BWV Verlag, 2007, p.280, </ref> near modern Kołobrzeg, replacing nearby Bardy-Świelubie, a multi-ethnic emporium, as the center of the region. The Parseta valley, where both the emporium and the stronghold were located, was one of the Pomeranians' core settlement areas. The stronghold consisted of a fortified burgh with a suburbium.Jörg Jarnut, Peter Johanek, Die Frühgeschichte der europäischen Stadt im 11. Jahrhundert, Köln-Weimar-Wien 1998, pp.273–305, republished in Winfried Schich, Ralf Gebuhr, Peter Neumeister, Wirtschaft und Kulturlandschaft – Siedlung und Wirtschaft im Bereich der Germania Slavica, BWV Verlag, 2007, p.277,
The Pomeranians mined salt in salt pans located in two downstream hills. 'Historical eras' Official webpage of the city: The local Slavic population engaged in fishery, salt trade and various crafts. They also engaged in fishing, and used the salt to conserve foodstuffs, primarily herring, for trade.Jörg Jarnut, Peter Johanek, Die Frühgeschichte der europäischen Stadt im 11. Jahrhundert, Köln-Weimar-Wien 1998, pp.273–305, republished in Winfried Schich, Ralf Gebuhr, Peter Neumeister, Wirtschaft und Kulturlandschaft – Siedlung und Wirtschaft im Bereich der Germania Slavica, BWV Verlag, 2007, p.274, Other important occupations were metallurgy and smithery, based on local iron ore reserves, other crafts like the production of combs from horn, and in the surrounding areas, agriculture.Jörg Jarnut, Peter Johanek, Die Frühgeschichte der europäischen Stadt im 11. Jahrhundert, Köln-Weimar-Wien 1998, pp.273–305, republished in Winfried Schich, Ralf Gebuhr, Peter Neumeister, Wirtschaft und Kulturlandschaft – Siedlung und Wirtschaft im Bereich der Germania Slavica, BWV Verlag, 2007, p.289, Important sites in the settlement were a place for periodical markets and a tavern, mentioned as forum et taberna in 1140.
In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Budzistowo stronghold was the largest of several smaller ones in the Persante area, and as such is thought to have functioned as the center of the local Pomeranian subtribe. By the turn from the 10th to the 11th century, the smaller burghs in the Parseta area were given up. With the area coming under control of the Polish Duke Mieszko I, only two strongholds remained and underwent an enlargement, the one at Budzistowo and a predecessor of later Białogard. These developments were most likely associated with the establishment of Polish power over this part of the Baltic coast. In the 10th century the trade of salt and fish led to the development of the settlement into a town.
Piast Poland and conversion
During Polish rule of the area in the late 10th century, the chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg (975–1018) mentions salsa Cholbergiensis as the see of the Bishopric of Kołobrzeg, set up during the Congress of Gniezno in 1000 and placed under the Archdiocese of Gniezno. The congress was organized by Polish duke Bolesław Chrobry and Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, and also led to the establishment of bishoprics in Kraków and Wrocław, connecting the territories of the Polish state. It was an important event not only in religious, but also political dimension in the history of the early Polish state, as it unified and organized medieval Polish territories.
The missionary efforts of bishop Reinbern were not successful, the Pomeranians revolted in 1005 and regained political and spiritual independence.David Warner, Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, Manchester University Press, 2001, p.358, , Michael Müller-Wille, Rom und Byzanz im Norden: Mission und Glaubenswechsel im Ostseeraum während des 8.-14. Jahrhunderts: internationale Fachkonferenz der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft in Verbindung mit der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz: Kiel, 18.-25. 9. 1994, 1997, p.105, , In 1013 Bolesław Chrobry removed his troops from Pomerania in face of war with Holy Roman Emperor Henry III. The Polish–German war ended with Polish victory, which was confirmed by the 1018 Peace of Bautzen.
During his campaigns in the early 12th century, Bolesław III Wrymouth reacquired Pomerania for Poland, and made the local "Griffin" dynasty his vassals. The stronghold was captured by the Polish army in the winter of 1107/08, when the inhabitants (cives et oppidani) including a duke (dux Pomeranorum) surrendered without resistance. A previous Polish siege of the burgh had been unsuccessful; although the duke had fled the burgh, the Polish army was unable to break through the fortifications and the two gates. The army had however looted and burned the suburbium, which was not or only lightly fortified. The descriptions given by the contemporary chroniclers make it possible that a second, purely militarily used castle existed near the settlement, yet neither is this certain nor have archaeological efforts been able to locate traces thereof. In the 12th-century Polish chronicle Gesta principum Polonorum Kołobrzeg was named a significant and famous city.
During the subsequent Christianization of the area by Otto of Bamberg at the behest of Bolesław, a St. Mary's church was built. This marked the first beginnings of German influence in the area. After Bolesław's death, as a result of the fragmentation of Poland, the Duchy of Pomerania became independent, before the dukes became vassals of Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire in the late 12th century.
Besides St. Mary's, a St. John's church and a St. Petri's chapel were built.
A painting of the town of Kołobrzeg from the 13th century is located in the Museum of Polish Arms in the city.
From the late Middle Ages to the Thirty Years' War
During the Ostsiedlung, a settlement was founded by German settlers some kilometres off the site of the Slavic/Lechitic one. It was located within the boundaries of today's downtown of Kołobrzeg and some of the inhabitants of the Polish town moved to the new settlement. On 23 May 1255 it was chartered under Lübeck law by Duke Wartislaw III of Pomerania,Gerhard Köbler, Historisches Lexikon der Deutschen Länder: die deutschen Territorien vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, 7th edition, C.H.Beck, 2007, p.341, :"1255 erhielt die deutsche Siedlung nördlich der slawischen Siedlung Stadtrect von Lübeck." and more settlers arrived, attracted by the duke. Hermann von Gleichen, German bishop of Kammin also supported the German colonisation of the region. The settlers received several privileges such as exemption from certain taxes and several benefits, making it difficult for the indigenous Pomeranian population to compete with Germans.
Henceforth, the nearby former stronghold was turned into a village and renamed "Old Town" (, , ), first documented in 1277 and used until 1945 when it was renamed "Budzistowo". A new St. Mary's church was built within the new town before the 1260s, while St. Mary's in the former Pomeranian stronghold was turned into a nuns' abbey. In 1277 St. Benedict's monastery for nuns was founded, which in the framework of the Pomeranian Reformation in 1545 was then changed into an educational institution for noble Protestant ladies.
Already in 1248, the Kammin bishops and the Pomeranian dukes had interchanged the terrae Stargard and Kolberg, leaving the bishops in charge of the latter. When in 1276 they became the souvereign of the town also, they moved their residence there, while the administration of the diocese was done from nearby Köslin (Koszalin). In 1345, the bishops became Imperial immediate dukes in their secular reign.
In 1361, the city joined the Hanseatic League. In 1446 it fought a battle against the nearby rival city of Koszalin.
When the property of the Bishopric of Kammin was secularized during the Protestant Reformation in 1534, their secular reign including the Kolberg area became intermediately ruled by a Lutheran titular bishop, before it was turned into a Sekundogenitur of the House of Pomerania.
In the 15th century the city traded with Scotland, Amsterdam and Scandinavia. Beer, salt, honey, wool and flour were exported, while merchants imported textiles from England, southern fruits, and cod liver oil. In the 16th century, the city reached 5,000 inhabitants. The indigenous Slavs in the city were discriminated, and their rights in trade and crafts were limited, with bans on performing certain types of professions and taking certain positions in the city, for instance in 1564 it was forbidden to admit native Slavs to the blacksmiths' guild.
During the Thirty Years' War, Kolberg was occupied by imperial forces from 1627 to 1630, and thereafter by Swedish forces.
Modern era: In Prussia
Kolberg, with most of Farther Pomerania, was granted to Brandenburg-Prussia in 1648 by the Treaty of Westphalia and, after the signing of the Treaty of Stettin (1653), and in accordance with the Treaty of Grimnitz, was part of the Province of Pomerania. It became part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701. In the 18th century, trade with Poland declined, while the production of textiles developed. In 1761, during the Seven Years' War, the town was captured after three subsequent sieges by the Russian commander Peter Rumyantsev. At the end of the war, however, Kolberg was returned to Prussia.
During Napoleon's invasion of Prussia during the War of the Fourth Coalition, the town was besieged from mid-March to 2 July 1807 by the Grande Armée and by insurgents from Poland against Prussian rule (a street named after General Antoni Paweł Sułkowski, who led Polish them, is located within the present-day city). As a result of forced conscription, some Poles were also among Prussian soldiers during the battle. The city's defense, led by then Lieutenant-Colonel August von Gneisenau, held out until the war was ended by the Treaty of Tilsit. Kolberg was returned to the Prussian province of Pomerania in 1815, after the final defeat of Napoleon; until 1872, it was administered within the Fürstenthum District ("Principality District", recalling the area's former special status), then it was within Landkreis Kolberg-Körlin.
Marcin Dunin, Archbishop of Poznań and Gniezno and Roman Catholic primate of Poland, was imprisoned for sedition by the Prussian authorities for ten months in 1839–1840 in the city and after his release, he tried to organise a chaplaincy for the many Polish soldiers stationed in Kolberg.
In the 19th century the city had a small but active Polish population that increased during the century to account for 1.5% of the population by 1905. The Polish community funded a Catholic school and the Church of Saint Marcin where masses in Polish were held (initially throughout the season, after about 1890 all the year), were established.‘'Związki Pomorza Zachodniego z Polską" page 100 Szymon Pałkowski, Wyższa Szkoła Inżynierska w Koszalinie 1996 Dating back to 1261 Kolberg's Jewish population amounted to 528 people in 1887, rising to 580 two years later, and although many moved to Berlin after that date they numbered around 500 by the end of the Nineteenth century
Between 1924 and 1935, the American-German painter Lyonel Feininger, a tutor at the Staatliches Bauhaus, visited Kolberg repeatedly and painted the cathedral and environs of the town.
In the May elections of 1933, the Nazi Party received by far the most votes, 9,842 out of 19,607 cast votes.
When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, the Jewish community in Kolberg comprised 200 people, and the antisemitic repression by Germany's ruling party led several of them to flee the country. A Nazi newspaper, the Kolberger Beobachter, listed Jewish shops and business that were to be boycotted. Nazis also engaged in hate propaganda against Jewish lawyers, doctors, and craftsmen. At the end of 1935, Jews were banned from working in the city's health spas. During Kristallnacht, the Jewish synagogue and homes were destroyed, and in 1938 the local Jewish cemetery was vandalised, while a cemetery shrine was turned to stable by German soldiers. In 1938, all Jews in Kolberg, as all over Germany, were renamed in official German documents as "Israel" (for males) or "Sarah" (for females). In the beginning of 1939, Jews were banned from attending German schools and the entire adult population had its driving licenses revoked. After years of discrimination and harassment, local Jews were deported by the German authorities to concentration camps in 1940.
Second World War
During the World War II the German state brought in numerous forced laborers to the city, among them many Poles. The city's economy was changed to military production-especially after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The forced laborers were threatened with everyday harassment and repression; they were forbidden from using phones, holding cultural events and sports events, they could not visit restaurants or swimming pools, or have contact with the local German population. Poles were only allowed to attend a church mass once a month – and only in the German language. They also had smaller food rations than Germans, and had to wear a sign with the letter P on their clothes indicating their ethnic background. Additionally, medical help for Polish workers was limited by the authorities. Arrests and imprisonment for various offences, such as "slow pace of work" or leaving the workspace, were everyday occurrences.
In 1944, the city was designated a fortress — Festung Kolberg. The 1807 siege was used for the last Nazi propaganda film, Kolberg shortly before the end of the war by Joseph Goebbels . It was meant to inspire the Germans with its depiction of the heroic Prussian defence during the Napoleonic Wars. Tremendous resources were devoted to filming this epic, even diverting tens of thousands of troops from the front lines to have them serve as extras in battle scenes. Ironically, the film was released in the final few weeks of Nazi Germany's existence, when most of the country's cinemas were already destroyed.
On 10 February 1945, the German torpedo-boat T-196 brought about 300 survivors of the , which had been sunk by Soviet submarine S-13 to Kolberg. As the Red Army advanced on Kolberg, most of the inhabitants and tens of thousands of refugees from surrounding areas (about 70,000 were trapped in the Kolberg Pocket), as well as 40,000 German soldiers, were evacuated from the besieged city by German naval forces in Operation Hannibal. Only about two thousand soldiers were left on 17 March to cover the last sea transports.
Between 4 and 18 March 1945, there were major battles between the Soviet and Polish forces and the German army. Because of a lack of anti-tank weapons, German destroyers used their guns to support the defenders of Kolberg until nearly all of the soldiers and civilians had been evacuated. During the fights, Polish soldiers' losses were 1,013 dead, 142 MIA and 2,652 wounded. On 18 March, the Polish Army re-enacted Poland's Wedding to the Sea ceremony, which had been celebrated for the first time in 1920 by General Józef Haller.
After the battle the city for several weeks was under Soviet administration, the Germans that had not yet fled were expelled and the city was plundered by the Soviet troops. Freed Polish forced laborers remained and were joined by Polish railwaymen from Warsaw destroyed by the Germans.
Post-war Poland
After World War II the region became part of Poland, under territorial changes demanded by the Soviet Union and the Polish Communist regime at the Potsdam Conference. Most Germans that had not yet fled were expelled from their homes. The town was re-settled by Polish citizens, many of whom were themselves Polish refugees from regions east of the Curzon line, the Kresy, from where they had been displaced by Soviet authorities.
In 2000 the city business council of Kołobrzeg commissioned a monument called the Millennium Memorial as a commemoration of "1000 years of Christianity in Pomerania", and as a tribute to Polish-German Reconciliation, celebrating the meeting of King Bolesław I of Poland and King Otto III of Germany, at the Congress of Gniezno, in the year 1000. It was designed and built by the artist Wiktor Szostalo in welded stainless steel. The two figures sit at the base of a 5-meter cross, cleft in two and being held together by a dove holding an olive branch. It is installed outside the Basilica Cathedral in the city center.
Climate
Kołobrzeg has an oceanic climate (Köppen climate classification: Cfb).
Demographics
Before the end of World War II the town was predominantly German Protestant with Polish and Jewish minorities. Almost all of the pre-war German population fled or was expelled so that since 1945, Polish Catholics make up the majority of the population. Around the turn from the 18th to the 19th century an increase of the number of Catholics was observed, because military personnel had been moved from West Prussia to the town. The mother tongue of a number of soldiers serving in the garrison of Kolberg was Polish.
Tourist destination
Kołobrzeg today is a popular tourist destination for Poles, Germans and due to the ferry connection to Bornholm also Danish people. It provides a unique combination of a seaside resort, health resort, an old town full of historic monuments and tourist entertainment options (e.g. numerous "beer gardens").
Bike path to Podczele
The town is part of the European Route of Brick Gothic network. A bike path "to Podczele", located along the seaside was commissioned on 14 July 2004. The path extends from Kołobrzeg to Podczele. The path has been financed by the European Union, and is intended to be part of a unique biking path that will ultimately circle the entire Baltic Sea. The path was breached on 24 March 2010 due to the encroachment of the sea associated with the draining of the adjacent unique Eco-Park marsh area. The government of Poland has allocated PLN 90,000 to repair the breach, and the path re-opened within a year. It was also extended in 2011 to connected with Ustronie Morskie to the east.
Oldest oak
South of Bagicz, some from Kołobrzeg, there is an 806-year-old oak (2008). Dated in the year 2000 as the oldest oak in Poland, it was named Bolesław to commemorate the king Boleslaus the Brave.
Cultural center
Kołobrzeg is also a regional cultural center. In the summer take place – a number of concerts of popular singers, musicians, and cabarets. Municipal Cultural Center, is located in the Park teatralny. Keep under attachment artistic arts, theater and dance. Patron of youth teams and the vocal choir. Interfolk organizes the annual festival, the International Meeting of the folklore and other cultural events. Cinema is a place for meetings Piast Discussion Film Club.
In Kołobrzeg there are many permanent and temporary exhibitions of artistic and historical interest. In the town hall of Kołobrzeg is located Gallery of Modern Art, where exhibitions are exposed artists from Kołobrzeg, as well as outside the local artistic circles. Gallery also conducts educational activities, including organized by the gallery of art lessons for children and young people from schools.
Pier
The Kołobrzeg Pier is currently the second longest pier in the West Pomeranian Voivodeship, after the pier in Międzyzdroje. A jetty positioned on the end of the pier enables small ships to sail for sightseeing excursions.
Museums
In town, there is a museum of Polish weapons (Muzeum Oręża Polskiego), which are presented in the collections of militaria from the early Middle Ages to the present. The palace of Braunschweig include part of museum dedicated to the history of the city. In their collections branch presents a collection of rare and common measurement tools, as well as specific measures of the workshop. The local museum is also moored at the port of ORP Fala patrol ship, built in 1964, after leaving the service transformed into a museum.
Transport
Train connections
Kołobrzeg has connections among others to Szczecin, "Solidarity" Szczecin–Goleniów Airport, Gdańsk, Poznań, Warsaw, Kraków and Lublin.
Ferry
A seasonal ferry service to Nexø on the Danish island of Bornholm is offered by the catamaran Jantar. The trip takes 15 hours and carries passengers but no cars.
Sport
SKK Kotwica Kołobrzeg – basketball club, which in the 2000s and 2010s competed in the Polish Basketball League, country's top flight
Kotwica Kołobrzeg – football club
Notable people
Petrus Pachius (1579-1641/42) a German Protestant minister, teacher and poet
Karl Wilhelm Ramler (1725–1798), poet, translator, director at Berlin theater
19th C
Hermann Plüddemann (1809–1868) a German historical painter
Ernst Maass (1856–1929) a German classical philologist.
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), physician, sociologist and early 20th century Gay rights campaigner
Paul Oestreich (1878–1959), educator, reformer
Arnold Zadikow (1884–1943), German-Jewish sculptor
Hans-Jürgen Stumpff (1889–1968), German general of Luftwaffe, co-signer of unconditional surrender 8 May 1945 in Berlin
Günther Angern (1893–1943), Wehrmacht general
20th C
Werner Krüger (1910–2003), German engineer, invented Krueger flap in 1943
Erika von Brockdorff (1911–1943), German resistance fighter
Karl-Heinz Marbach (1917–1995), German U-boat commander
Egon Krenz (born 1937), last communist leader of East Germany
Christine Lucyga (born 1944), politician
Joanna Nowicka (born 1966) a Polish archer, competed in four consecutive Summer Olympics from 1988.
Sebastian Karpiniuk (1972–2010) a Polish politician, an assistant to President of Kołobrzeg, died in plane crash
Dariusz Trafas (born 1972), athlete, javelin throw national record holder
Daria Korczyńska (born 1981) a retired track and field sprint athlete
Robert Szpak (born 1989), athlete, javelin throw, 2008 World Junior Champion
Maja Hyży (born 1989) a Polish singer, participated in the Eurovision Song Contest 2018
Famous persons connected with the city
Marcin Dunin (1774–1842) archbishop of Poznań and Gniezno, primate of Poland. Imprisoned in the fortress in the city
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, (1778–1852), father of gymnastics, was imprisoned in Kolberg fortress in the 1820s
Adolf von Lützow, (1782–1834) a Prussian officer, served with distinction in the siege of Kolberg in 1807
Wiktor Szostalo, (born 1952) sculptor and former Solidarity activist.
Jan Pogány, (born 1960) classical composer, conductor and cellist.
Ryszard Kukliński, (1930–2004) colonel and spy for NATO in the Cold War period, attended high school in the city.
International relations
Twin towns – sister cities
Kołobrzeg is twinned with:
Bad Oldesloe, Germany
Barth, Germany
Berlin Pankow, Germany
Feodosiia, Ukraine
Follonica, Italy
Koekelberg, Belgium
Landskrona, Sweden
Nexø, Denmark
Nyborg, Denmark
Pori, Finland
Simrishamn, Sweden
See also
Herbertiada
Notes
References
Bibliography
Gustav Kratz: Die Städte der Provinz Pommern – Abriss ihrer Geschichte, zumeist nach Urkunden (The Towns of the Province of Pomerania – Sketch of their History, mostly according to historical Records''). Berlin 1865 (reprinted in 1996 by Sändig Reprint Verlag, Vaduz, ; reprinted in 2011 by Kessinger Publishing, U.S.A., ), pp. 81–99 ( online)
External links
Municipal website
History of the town on the tourist promotion site
dutchy of Cassubia
Pomerania
Cities and towns in West Pomeranian Voivodeship
Kołobrzeg County
Port cities and towns of the Baltic Sea
Spa towns in Poland
Resorts in Poland
Members of the Hanseatic League
Holocaust locations in Poland | [
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17411 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konix%20Multisystem | Konix Multisystem | The Konix Multisystem was a cancelled video game system under development by Konix, a British manufacturer of computer peripherals.
Background
The Konix Multisystem began life in 1988 as an advanced Konix peripheral design intended to build on the success of the company's range of joysticks. The design, codenamed Slipstream, resembled a dashboard-style games controller, and could be configured with a steering wheel, a flight yoke, and motorbike handles. It promised advanced features such as force feedback, hitherto unheard of in home gaming.
However, it soon became apparent that the Slipstream project had the potential to be much more than a peripheral. Konix turned to their sister company Creative Devices Ltd, a computer hardware developer, to design a gaming computer to be put inside the controller to make it a stand-alone console in its own right. It was shortly after this development began that Konix founder and chairman Wyn Holloway came across a magazine article that described the work of a British group of computer hardware designers whose latest design was looking for a home.
The article in question, published in issue 10 of ACE magazine in July 1988, featured Flare Technology, a group of computer hardware designers who, having split from Sinclair Research (creators of the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum home computers), had built on their work on Sinclair's aborted Loki project to create a system known as Flare One.
Flare's prototype system was Z80 based but featured four custom chips to give it the power to compete with peers such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. The 1MB machine (128k of ROM, 128k of video RAM, 768k of system RAM) promised graphics with 256 colours on-screen simultaneously, could handle 3 million pixels per second, output 8 channel stereo and had a blitter chip that allowed vertical and horizontal hardware scrolling.
Flare were specifically aiming their machine at the gaming market, eschewing such features as 80 column text display (considered the requisite for business applications such as word processing) in favour of faster graphics handling. This meant that in spite of its modest 8-bit CPU the system compared well against the 16-bit machines in the market at the time. It could move sprites and block graphics faster than an Atari ST, and in 256 colours under conditions when the ST would only show 16 colours. It could also draw lines 3 times faster than an Amiga and even handle the maths of 3D models faster than the 32-bit Acorn Archimedes.
In spite of these specifications and bearing in mind their target gaming market, Flare aimed to retail their machine for around £200, half of what the Amiga and ST were selling for. Ultimately, Flare's resources to put it into mass production were limited.
Development
Holloway approached Flare and proposed a merger of their respective technologies to create an innovative new kind of gaming console with the computer hardware built into the main controller and in July 1988 a partnership was formed. Development work was carried out by Flare, with assistance from British games programmer Jeff Minter.
Konix wanted the machine to use a 16-bit processor, so the Z80 was removed and replaced with an 8086 processor. They also demanded that the colour palette be expanded to 4096 colours, the same as that of the Amiga. To reduce manufacturing costs, the Flare One's four custom chips were integrated into one large chip. In order to keep the cost of software down, it was decided that the software media would be 3.5” floppy discs rather than ROM cartridges used universally by consoles up to that time.
The embryonic console was revealed to the computing press at a toy fair held at Earls Court Exhibition Centre in February 1989. It boasted market leading performance, MIDI support and revolutionary peripherals including a light gun with recoil action and the Power Chair, a motorised seat designed to reproduce in the home what "sit-in" arcade games such as After Burner and Out Run delivered in the arcades using hydraulics. Another innovative feature was the ability to link two MultiSystems together to allow for head-to-head two player gaming. Release was slated for August that year.
Several games in development had a version produced for the Konix Multisystem, including Vivid Image's Hammerfist.
Specifications
CPU: 16-bit 8086 processor (running at 6 MHz)
Co-processor: ASIC processor
RAM: 128K RAM - later it would be upgraded to 256K RAM after complaints from developers.
An optional 512K RAM cartridge was considered to boost the total RAM for the machine to 768K.
Graphics:
Custom blitter
4096 colour palette
Resolutions:
256×200 (256 colours)
512×200 (16 colours)
256×200 (16 colours)
Sound:
Custom RISC-based DSP
Stereo sound
Storage: Custom 880KB 3.5" disk drive
Misc: Cartridge expansion slot
Issues and limitations
Despite the impressive specification on paper, the design did suffer from some limitations. Nick Speakman of software developer Binary Designs pointed out that "the custom chips are very powerful, but they require a lot of programming talent to get anything out of them. The screen handling [also] isn't as fast as we anticipated it to be."
Brian Pollock of software publisher Logotron highlighted the limitations caused by the shortage of RAM (kept low to keep prices down), “My only concern is memory, or lack of it. For instance, in the game that I'm writing I am using six-channel FM synthesized sound. Now that takes up a hell of a lot of memory. I couldn't usefully fit any more samples, and that's sad.”
The memory issue was also flagged by Crash magazine, which pointed out that the floppy disk format meant that games had to be loaded into the machine's RAM (originally intended to be 128k) in turn requiring the system to be constantly accessing the disk drive. Konix intended to remedy the problem with RAM upgrade cartridges, provided that the price of RAM fell in the future.
Overall though, programmers received the system positively. Jeff Minter described the controller itself as "superb," while Chris Walsh of Argonaut Games stated that "Polygon based games like Starglider 2 are going to be easy to program. The machine is geared up to rotating masses of vertices at incredible rates." However, of the original Flare One's vertex computation performance, Zarch author David Braben had noted that whilst similar levels of performance might be difficult to achieve on an Archimedes computer, the performance bottlenecks in solid 3D games were actually "scanning databases of shapes and putting polygons on screen".
Numerous game developers were recruited to produce games for the system, including Jeff Minter's Llamasoft, Electronic Arts, Psygnosis, Ocean, Palace and U.S. Gold, with Konix promising 40 games to be available by Christmas. Lucasfilm was mooted as a developer with the possibility of releasing their own branded version of the machine in the US, but nothing was ever confirmed.
Games known to be in development for the system during 1988 included Llamasoft's Attack of the Mutant Camels, System 3's Last Ninja 2, Vivid Image's Hamerfist, and Logotron's Star Ray.
Demise
Signs of trouble in the progress to the release of the console did not take long to arrive. By May the release date had slipped from August to October. By October, a first quarter 1990 release was envisaged. The December edition of The Games Machine magazine revealed the scale of the problem. According to company sources, Konix had been on the brink of calling in receivers. Cheques had bounced, employees hadn't been paid and software development had been brought to a halt in mid-October as developers had reached the stage where they could continue no further without a finished machine.
In March 1990 it was revealed that Konix had sold the rights to sell their joystick range in the UK to Spectravision who also manufactured the rival QuickShot joystick range. They had effectively sold off the family silver in order to keep the MultiSystem project alive. Autumn 1990 was to be the new release time.
Eventually, beset by delays and in spite of all of the media coverage and apparent demand for the machine, the project ultimately went under when Konix ran out of cash without a completed system ever being released. Some people, including Holloway, contend that this was due to major international competitors leaning on Konix's suppliers and financiers to prevent the project reaching the market.
Legacy
After the project was abandoned, Flare Technology began work on a new project, Flare Two, which was eventually bought by Atari and, after further development, formed the basis for the Atari Jaguar game console.
The original Flare One technology was purchased by arcade gambling machine manufacturer Bellfruit for use in their quiz machines. Drivers for these games are also included in the multi emulator MAME.
The Konix Multisystem's design was later released independently by a Chinese company called MSC (MultiSystem China) as the MSC Super MS-200E Multi-System, although this was simply an inexpensive PC games controller, without any special internal hardware.
In terms of its long lasting impact on the video game industry, perhaps the most intriguing aspect is Wyn Holloway's claim that Lucasfilm had their frequent partner Sony lined up to manufacture their version of the system, this being contemporaneous with Sony's development of the SNES-CD for Nintendo, which ultimately led to the first PlayStation.
Video taped footage showing several games being worked on for the system survives. Excerpts from the footage were later issued on the cover disc of issue 8 of Retro Gamer magazine.
References
Footnotes
Works cited
Konix MultiSystem Archive
Zogging Hell Page on the Konix Multisystem
External links
At Old-Computers.com
Press coverage
The MSC Multi-System
X86-based game consoles
Fourth-generation video game consoles
Vaporware game consoles
Video game controllers
Video game hardware | [
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17412 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein%20bottle | Klein bottle | In topology, a branch of mathematics, the Klein bottle () is an example of a non-orientable surface; it is a two-dimensional manifold against which a system for determining a normal vector cannot be consistently defined. Informally, it is a one-sided surface which, if traveled upon, could be followed back to the point of origin while flipping the traveler upside down. Other related non-orientable objects include the Möbius strip and the real projective plane. While a Möbius strip is a surface with boundary, a Klein bottle has no boundary. For comparison, a sphere is an orientable surface with no boundary.
The concept of a Klein bottle was first described in 1882 by the German mathematician Felix Klein.
Construction
The following square is a fundamental polygon of the Klein bottle. The idea is to 'glue' together the corresponding red and blue edges with the arrows matching, as in the diagrams below. Note that this is an "abstract" gluing in the sense that trying to realize this in three dimensions results in a self-intersecting Klein bottle.
To construct the Klein bottle, glue the red arrows of the square together (left and right sides), resulting in a cylinder. To glue the ends of the cylinder together so that the arrows on the circles match, one would pass one end through the side of the cylinder. This creates a circle of self-intersection – this is an immersion of the Klein bottle in three dimensions.
This immersion is useful for visualizing many properties of the Klein bottle. For example, the Klein bottle has no boundary, where the surface stops abruptly, and it is non-orientable, as reflected in the one-sidedness of the immersion.
The common physical model of a Klein bottle is a similar construction. The Science Museum in London has a collection of hand-blown glass Klein bottles on display, exhibiting many variations on this topological theme. The bottles date from 1995 and were made for the museum by Alan Bennett.
The Klein bottle, proper, does not self-intersect. Nonetheless, there is a way to visualize the Klein bottle as being contained in four dimensions. By adding a fourth dimension to the three-dimensional space, the self-intersection can be eliminated. Gently push a piece of the tube containing the intersection along the fourth dimension, out of the original three-dimensional space. A useful analogy is to consider a self-intersecting curve on the plane; self-intersections can be eliminated by lifting one strand off the plane.
Suppose for clarification that we adopt time as that fourth dimension. Consider how the figure could be constructed in xyzt-space. The accompanying illustration ("Time evolution...") shows one useful evolution of the figure. At the wall sprouts from a bud somewhere near the "intersection" point. After the figure has grown for a while, the earliest section of the wall begins to recede, disappearing like the Cheshire Cat but leaving its ever-expanding smile behind. By the time the growth front gets to where the bud had been, there is nothing there to intersect and the growth completes without piercing existing structure. The 4-figure as defined cannot exist in 3-space but is easily understood in 4-space.
More formally, the Klein bottle is the quotient space described as the square [0,1] × [0,1] with sides identified by the relations for and for .
Properties
Like the Möbius strip, the Klein bottle is a two-dimensional manifold which is not orientable. Unlike the Möbius strip, the Klein bottle is a closed manifold, meaning it is a compact manifold without boundary. While the Möbius strip can be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space R3, the Klein bottle cannot. It can be embedded in R4, however.
Continuing this sequence, for example creating a surface which cannot be embedded in R4 but can be in R5, is possible; in this case, connecting two ends of a spherinder to each other in the same manner as the two ends of a cylinder for a Klein bottle, creates a figure, referred to as a "spherinder Klein bottle", that cannot fully be embedded in R4.
The Klein bottle can be seen as a fiber bundle over the circle S1, with fibre S1, as follows: one takes the square (modulo the edge identifying equivalence relation) from above to be E, the total space, while the base space B is given by the unit interval in y, modulo 1~0. The projection π:E→B is then given by .
The Klein bottle can be constructed (in a four dimensional space, because in three dimensional space it cannot be done without allowing the surface to intersect itself) by joining the edges of two (mirrored) Möbius strips together, as described in the following limerick by Leo Moser:
The initial construction of the Klein bottle by identifying opposite edges of a square shows that the Klein bottle can be given a CW complex structure with one 0-cell P, two 1-cells C1, C2 and one 2-cell D. Its Euler characteristic is therefore . The boundary homomorphism is given by and , yielding the homology groups of the Klein bottle K to be , and for .
There is a 2-1 covering map from the torus to the Klein bottle, because two copies of the fundamental region of the Klein bottle, one being placed next to the mirror image of the other, yield a fundamental region of the torus. The universal cover of both the torus and the Klein bottle is the plane R2.
The fundamental group of the Klein bottle can be determined as the group of deck transformations of the universal cover and has the presentation .
Six colors suffice to color any map on the surface of a Klein bottle; this is the only exception to the Heawood conjecture, a generalization of the four color theorem, which would require seven.
A Klein bottle is homeomorphic to the connected sum of two projective planes. It is also homeomorphic to a sphere plus two cross-caps.
When embedded in Euclidean space, the Klein bottle is one-sided. However, there are other topological 3-spaces, and in some of the non-orientable examples a Klein bottle can be embedded such that it is two-sided, though due to the nature of the space it remains non-orientable.
Dissection
Dissecting a Klein bottle into halves along its plane of symmetry results in two mirror image Möbius strips, i.e. one with a left-handed half-twist and the other with a right-handed half-twist (one of these is pictured on the right). Remember that the intersection pictured is not really there.
Simple-closed curves
One description of the types of simple-closed curves that may appear on the surface of the Klein bottle is given by the use of the first homology group of the Klein bottle calculated with integer coefficients. This group is isomorphic to Z×Z2. Up to reversal of orientation, the only homology classes which contain simple-closed curves are as follows: (0,0), (1,0), (1,1), (2,0), (0,1). Up to reversal of the orientation of a simple closed curve, if it lies within one of the two cross-caps that make up the Klein bottle, then it is in homology class (1,0) or (1,1); if it cuts the Klein bottle into two Möbius strips, then it is in homology class (2,0); if it cuts the Klein bottle into an annulus, then it is in homology class (0,1); and if bounds a disk, then it is in homology class (0,0).
Parametrization
The figure 8 immersion
To make the "figure 8" or "bagel" immersion of the Klein bottle, one can start with a Möbius strip and curl it to bring the edge to the midline; since there is only one edge, it will meet itself there, passing through the midline. It has a particularly simple parametrization as a "figure-8" torus with a half-twist:
for 0 ≤ θ < 2π, 0 ≤ v < 2π and r > 2.
In this immersion, the self-intersection circle (where sin(v) is zero) is a geometric circle in the xy plane. The positive constant r is the radius of this circle. The parameter θ gives the angle in the xy plane as well as the rotation of the figure 8, and v specifies the position around the 8-shaped cross section. With the above parametrization the cross section is a 2:1 Lissajous curve.
4-D non-intersecting
A non-intersecting 4-D parametrization can be modeled after that of the flat torus:
where R and P are constants that determine aspect ratio, θ and v are similar to as defined above. v determines the position around the figure-8 as well as the position in the x-y plane. θ determines the rotational angle of the figure-8 as well and the position around the z-w plane. ε is any small constant and ε sinv is a small v depended bump in z-w space to avoid self intersection. The v bump causes the self intersecting 2-D/planar figure-8 to spread out into a 3-D stylized "potato chip" or saddle shape in the x-y-w and x-y-z space viewed edge on. When ε=0 the self intersection is a circle in the z-w plane <0, 0, cosθ, sinθ>.
3D pinched torus / 4D Möbius tube
The pinched torus is perhaps the simplest parametrization of the klein bottle in both three and four dimensions. It's a torus that, in three dimensions, flattens and passes through itself on one side. Unfortunately, in three dimensions this parametrization has two pinch points, which makes it undesirable for some applications. In four dimensions the z amplitude rotates into the w amplitude and there are no self intersections or pinch points.
One can view this as a tube or cylinder that wraps around, as in a torus, but its circular cross section flips over in four dimensions, presenting its "backside" as it reconnects, just as a Möbius strip cross section rotates before it reconnects. The 3D orthogonal projection of this is the pinched torus shown above. Just as a Möbius strip is a subset of a solid torus, the Möbius tube is a subset of a toroidally closed spherinder (solid spheritorus).
Bottle shape
The parametrization of the 3-dimensional immersion of the bottle itself is much more complicated.
for 0 ≤ u < π and 0 ≤ v < 2π.
Homotopy classes
Regular 3D immersions of the Klein bottle fall into three regular homotopy classes.
The three are represented by:
the "traditional" Klein bottle;
the left-handed figure-8 Klein bottle;
the right-handed figure-8 Klein bottle.
The traditional Klein bottle immersion is achiral. The figure-8 immersion is chiral. (The pinched torus immersion above is not regular, as it has pinch points, so it is not relevant to this section.)
If the traditional Klein bottle is cut in its plane of symmetry it breaks into two Möbius strips of opposite chirality. A figure-8 Klein bottle can be cut into two Möbius strips of the same chirality, and cannot be regularly deformed into its mirror image.
Painting the traditional Klein bottle in two colors can induce chirality on it, splitting its homotopy class in two.
Generalizations
The generalization of the Klein bottle to higher genus is given in the article on the fundamental polygon.
In another order of ideas, constructing 3-manifolds, it is known that a solid Klein bottle is homeomorphic to the Cartesian product of a Möbius strip and a closed interval. The solid Klein bottle is the non-orientable version of the solid torus, equivalent to
Klein surface
A Klein surface is, as for Riemann surfaces, a surface with an atlas allowing the transition maps to be composed using complex conjugation. One can obtain the so-called dianalytic structure of the space.
See also
Algebraic topology
Alice universe
Bavard's Klein bottle systolic inequality
Boy's surface
References
Citations
Sources
A classical on the theory of Klein surfaces is
External links
Imaging Maths - The Klein Bottle
The biggest Klein bottle in all the world
Klein Bottle animation: produced for a topology seminar at the Leibniz University Hannover.
Klein Bottle animation from 2010 including a car ride through the bottle and the original description by Felix Klein: produced at the Free University Berlin.
Klein Bottle, XScreenSaver "hack". A screensaver for X 11 and OS X featuring an animated Klein Bottle.
Surfaces
Geometric topology | [
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17413 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy | Kennedy | Kennedy may refer to:
People
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), 35th president of the United States
Kennedy (surname), a family name (including a list of persons with the surname)
Kennedy (given name), a given name (including a list of person with the first name)
Kennedy (commentator) (born 1972), former MTV VJ Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, who uses "Kennedy" as a stage name
Ken Anderson (wrestler) (born 1976), American professional wrestler and actor formerly known as Mr. Kennedy
Families
Kennedy family, members of which have held high political US office
Kennedy (Ireland), or O'Kennedy, a royal dynasty
Clan Kennedy, of Scotland
Fictional characters
Leon S. Kennedy, a fictional character in Resident Evil
Kennedy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), a fictional character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Places
Australia
Kennedy, Queensland, a locality in the Cassowary Coast Region, Queensland, Australia
Division of Kennedy, a Federal electoral district in Queensland, Australia
Electoral district of Kennedy, a former State electoral district in Queensland, Australia
Brazil
Presidente Kennedy, Espírito Santo, a municipality in Brazil
Presidente Kennedy, Tocantins, a municipality in Brazil
Canada
Kennedy, Ontario
Kennedy (TTC), a subway station located in Toronto, Ontario
Kennedy GO Station, a GO Transit station in Toronto, Ontario
Kennedy, Saskatchewan
Kennedys, Ontario, a community within the township of Strong, Ontario
Kennedy Channel, a sea passage between Canada and Greenland
China
Kennedy Town, Hong Kong
Kennedy Town station, a Mass Transit Railway terminus in Kennedy Town, Hong Kong
Colombia
Kennedy, Bogotá, Colombia
Lebanon
Rue John Kennedy, a street in Beirut, Lebanon
Luxembourg
Avenue John F. Kennedy
Solomon Islands
Kennedy Island, Solomon Islands
United States
Kennedy, Alabama
Kennedy, California
Kennedy, Illinois
Kennedy, Indiana
Kennedy, Minnesota
Kennedy, Missouri
Kennedy, Nebraska
Kennedy, New York
John F. Kennedy International Airport, Queens, New York
Kennedy, Wisconsin
Kennedy Plaza, Providence, Rhode Island
Kennedy Township, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida
Other places
Kennedy Lake (disambiguation)
Kennedy Road (disambiguation)
List of peaks named Kennedy
Television
Kennedy (TV series), an Irish television chat show
Kennedy (miniseries), a TV miniseries about the life of President Kennedy from 1960 to 1963
The Kennedys (miniseries), a TV miniseries chronicling the lives of the Kennedy family
The Kennedys (TV series), a British sitcom
Organizations
Kathryn Kennedy Winery, a winery in California, US
Kennedy Mall, in Dubuque, Iowa, US
Kennedy Mine, in Jackson, California, US
Kennedy's, a defunct department store in the US
Kennedy Middle School (disambiguation)
Other uses
Kennedy's disease, neuromuscular disease
Kennedy Doctrine, U.S. policy towards Latin America in the early 1960s
Kennedy march, a 50-mile-walk completed within 20 hours
Kennedy Round, international trade negotiations held during the mid-1960s
USS Kennedy, any of several U.S. naval vessels
Kennedy (horse)
See also
John F. Kennedy High School (disambiguation)
Kenedy (disambiguation)
Justice Kennedy (disambiguation) | [
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17414 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icehenge | Icehenge | Icehenge is a science fiction novel by American author Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 1984.
Though published almost ten years before Robinson's Mars trilogy, and taking place in a different version of the future, Icehenge contains elements that also appear in his Mars series, such as extreme human longevity, Martian political revolution, historical revisionism, and shifts between primary characters.
Plot
Icehenge is set at three distinct time periods, and told from the perspective of three different characters.
The first narrative is the diary of an engineer caught up in a Martian political revolution in 2248. Effectively kidnapped aboard a mutinous Martian spaceship, she provides assistance to the revolutionaries in their quest for interstellar travel, but ultimately chooses not to travel with them but to return to the doomed revolution on Mars.
The second narrative is told from the perspective of an archaeologist three centuries later. He is involved in a project investigating the failed revolution, and during this finds the engineer's diary buried near the remains of a ruined city. At the same time, a mysterious monument is found at the north pole of Pluto, tying up with a passing mention in the engineer's diary.
In the final narrative, the great-grandson of the archaeologist visits the monument on Pluto, a scaled-up version of Stonehenge carved in ice. He is investigating the possibility that both the diary and the monument were planted by a reclusive and wealthy businesswoman who lives in the orbit of Saturn.
Development history
The first part of this novel was originally published as the novella To Leave a Mark in the November 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The third part of Icehenge was originally published as the novella On the North Pole of Pluto in 1980 in the anthology Orbit 18 edited by Damon Knight. Robinson gave the novella in rough form to Ursula K. Le Guin to read and edit while he was enrolled in her writing workshop at UCSD in the spring of 1977. Views of Saturn from the space station visited by the narrator of the novel's third section were inspired by images of Saturn taken during the Voyager flybys in 1980–1981.
Publication history
1984, United States, Ace Books , Pub date October 1984, paperback
1985, United Kingdom, Futura Orbit , Pub date December 1985, paperback
1986, United Kingdom, MacDonald , Pub date October 1986, hardback
1986, France, Denoël , Pub date September 1986, paperback
1986, Italy, Editrice Nord , Pub date 1986, paperback
1987, West Germany, Bastei-Lübbe , Pub date 1987, paperback
1990, United States, Tor Books , Pub date September 1990, paperback
1997, United Kingdom, Voyager , Pub date 15 September 1997, paperback
1997, Croatia, Zagrebačka naklada , Pub date 1997, paperback
1997, Bulgaria, Лира Принт , Pub date 1997, paperback
1998, United States, Tor Orb , Pub date July 1998, paperback
2001, People's Republic of China, 漓江出版社 , Pub date 2001, paperback
2003, France, Gallimard , Pub date December 2003, paperback
2004, Spain, Minotauro , Pub date 9 March 2004, paperback
2009, United Kingdom, Voyager , Pub date 1 August 2009, paperback
References
External links
The work of disenchantment never ends: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge by Jo Walton
1984 American novels
Novels by Kim Stanley Robinson
Fiction set on Pluto
Ace Books books
Fiction set on Saturn | [
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17415 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights%20Who%20Say%20%22Ni%21%22 | Knights Who Say "Ni!" | The Knights Who Say "Ni!", also called the Knights of Ni, are a band of knights encountered by King Arthur and his followers in the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They demonstrate their power by shouting "Ni!" (pronounced "nee"), terrifying the party, whom they refuse to allow passage through their forest unless appeased through the gift of a shrubbery.
Description
The knights appear silhouetted in a misty wood, wearing robes and horned helmets; their full number is never apparent, but there are at least six. The leader of the knights, played by Michael Palin, is the only one who speaks to the party. He is nearly double Arthur's height, and wears a great helm decorated with long antlers. The other knights are large, but of human proportions, and wear visored sallet helmets decorated with cow horns. The knight explains that they are the "keepers of the sacred words 'Ni', 'Peng', and 'Neee-Wom. Arthur confides to Sir Bedivere, "those who hear them seldom live to tell the tale!"
Tasks
The knights demand a sacrifice, and when Arthur states that he merely wishes to pass through the woods, the knights begin shouting "Ni!", forcing the party to shrink back in fear. After this demonstration of their power, the head knight threatens to say "Ni!" again unless the travellers appease them with a shrubbery; otherwise they shall never pass through the wood alive. When Arthur questions the demand, the knights again shout "Ni!" until the travellers agree to bring them a shrubbery, which the head knight specifies must be "one that looks nice. And not too expensive."
In order to fulfill their promise to the Knights of Ni, the party visits a small village, where Arthur and Bedivere ask an old crone where they can obtain a shrubbery. The woman questions them, and Arthur admits that it is for the Knights who say "Ni!", whereupon she refuses to cooperate. Arthur then threatens to say "Ni!" to the old woman unless she helps them, and when she still refuses, begins shouting "Ni!". Bedivere has trouble saying the sacred word, which he pronounces "Nu!" until Arthur demonstrates the correct technique. As the crone shrinks back from their combined assault, they are interrupted by Roger the Shrubber, who laments the lack of law and order that allows ruffians to say "Ni!" to an old woman. Arthur obtains a shrubbery from Roger, and brings it to the Knights of Ni.
The head knight acknowledges that "it is a good shrubbery", but asserts that the knights cannot allow Arthur and his followers to pass through the wood because they are no longer the Knights who say "Ni!" They are now the Knights who say "Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing!" and must therefore give Arthur a test. Unable to pronounce the new name, Arthur addresses them as "Knights who until recently said 'Ni!, inquiring as to the nature of the test.
The head knight demands another shrubbery, to be placed next to but slightly higher than the first; and then Arthur "must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest—with a herring!" The knight presents a herring to be used. Arthur objects, asserting that "it can't be done!" upon which the knights recoil as though in fear and pain. It soon emerges that the knights are unable to withstand the word "it", which Arthur's party is unable to avoid saying. The knights are soon incapacitated by the word, which even the head knight cannot stop repeating, allowing Arthur and his followers to make their escape.
Film notes
In the original screenplay, it was suggested that the head knight be played by "Mike standing on John's shoulders". In the DVD commentary for the film, Michael Palin states that their use of the word "Ni!" was derived from The Goon Show. Later, Palin gave another inspiration – his history teacher at Shrewsbury School, Laurence Le Quesne, who had the habit of saying "Ni" while searching for books. Upon Arthur's return, the knights were to have said, "Neeeow...wum...ping!"
Contemporary scholarship
The Knights who say "Ni!" have been cited as an example of intentional disregard for historical accuracy in neo-medievalism, which may be contrasted with the casual disregard for historical accuracy inherent in more traditional works of the fantasy genre. However, in Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present, the authors suggest that the original characters of Monty Python and the Holy Grail actually represent medievalism, rather than neomedievalism, as many of the film's details are in fact based on authentic medieval texts and ideas. With respect to the Knights who say "Ni!", the authors suggest that Sir Bedivere's difficulty pronouncing "Ni!", despite its levity, "carries a very learned joke about the difficulties of pronouncing Middle English", alluding to the Great Vowel Shift, which occurred in English during the late medieval period.
Footnotes
References
Further reading
External links
The Knights Who Say "Ni!" – Monty Python and the Holy Grail – Official Monty Python Channel
Comedy film characters
Film characters introduced in 1975
Fictional knights
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python characters
1975 neologisms
Comedy catchphrases
Quotations from film | [
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17418 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCnstlerroman | Künstlerroman | A Künstlerroman (; plural -ane), meaning "artist's novel" in English, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It could be classified as a sub-category of Bildungsroman: a coming-of-age novel. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, one way a Künstlerroman may differ from a Bildungsroman is its ending, where a Künstlerroman hero rejects the everyday life, but a Bildungsroman hero settles for being an ordinary citizen. According to Oxford Reference, the difference may lie in a longer view across the Künstlerroman hero's whole life, not just their childhood years.
Examples by language
German
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1795 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Ludwig Tieck's 1798 Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen
Novalis's 1802 Heinrich von Ofterdingen
Hermann Hesse's Demian (1919) and Klingsor's Last Summer (1920)
Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger (1903), and Doctor Faustus (1947)
Jakob Wassermann's 1915 Das Gänsemännchen
Rainer Maria Rilke's 1910 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
English
1805 William Wordsworth's The Prelude
1847 Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
1848 Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
1850 Charles Dickens' David Copperfield
1852 Herman Melville's Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
1856 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh
1875 Henry James's Roderick Hudson
1890 Henry James's The Tragic Muse
1903 Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh
1909 Jack London's Martin Eden
1913 D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
1915 W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
1915 Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark
1916 James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1918 Wyndham Lewis's Tarr
1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
1928 Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
1929 Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel
1933 Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine
1936 George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying
1939 John Fante's Ask the Dust
1943 Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
1945 Richard Wright's Black Boy
1946 Philip Larkin's Jill
1947 W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind
1952 Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt
1952 Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley
1955 William Gaddis's The Recognitions
1961 Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy
1963 Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game
1970 Patrick White's The Vivisector
1971 Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women
1972 Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev
1973 Milan Kundera's Life Is Elsewhere
1974 Margaret Laurence's The Diviners
1978 John Irving's The World According to Garp
1981 Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books
1982 Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye
1985 Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
1988 Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye
1999 Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring
2003 Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light
2006 Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
2006 Stew's Passing Strange
2010 Patti Smith's Just Kids
2010 Eileen Myles's Inferno (A Poet's Novel)
2010 Wena Poon's Alex y Robert
2011 Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station
2017 Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
2020 Andrew Unger's Once Removed
Notes
A semiautobiographical narrative takes up two of the four books of Gray's Lanark.
In John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, the Camera Eye sections add up to a modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman.
John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of short stories that are often read as a postmodernist Künstlerroman.
French
1831, 1837 Honore de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece
1904–1905 Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe
1913– 1927 Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time
Italian
Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il Piacere, Le Vergini Delle Rocce and Il Fuoco
1975 Gavino Ledda's My Father, My Master (Padre Padrone)
2012–2015 Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels
Icelandic
Halldór Laxness's World Light
Halldór Laxness's The Fish Can Sing
Russian
Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift
Croatian
1932 Miroslav Krleža's The Return of Filip Latinovicz
Malayalam
1993 Perumbadavam Sreedharan's Oru Sankeerthanam Pole
Norwegian
2009–2011 Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (Knausgård novels)
1890 Knut Hamsun's Hunger (“Sult”)
Portuguese
1883 Maria Benedita Bormann's Lésbia
1976 Ferreira Gullar's Poema Sujo
Turkish
1896–1897 Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil's Blue and Black (Mavi ve Siyah)
1972 Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar
1959 Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak adam
Bengali
1999 Malay Roy Choudhury's Chhotoloker Chhotobela
References
Fiction by genre
German words and phrases
Lists of books by genre
Novels about artists | [
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17422 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwanzaa | Kwanzaa | Kwanzaa () is an annual celebration of African-American culture from December 26 to January 1, culminating in a communal feast called Karamu, usually on the sixth day. It was created by activist Maulana Karenga, based on African harvest festival traditions from various parts of Africa, including West and Southeast Africa. Kwanzaa was first celebrated in 1966.
History and etymology
American Maulana Karenga created Kwanzaa in 1966 during the aftermath of the Watts riots as a specifically African-American holiday. Karenga said his goal was to "give blacks an alternative to the existing holiday of Christmas and give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society." For Karenga, a major figure in the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the creation of such holidays also underscored the essential premise that "you must have a cultural revolution before the violent revolution. The cultural revolution gives identity, purpose, and direction."
According to Karenga, the name Kwanzaa derives from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, meaning "first fruits". First fruits festivals exist in Southern Africa, celebrated in December/January with the southern solstice, and Karenga was partly inspired by an account he read of the Zulu festival Umkhosi Wokweshwama. It was decided to spell the holiday's name with an additional "a" so that it would have a symbolic seven letters.
During the early years of Kwanzaa, Karenga said it was meant to be an alternative to Christmas. He believed Jesus was psychotic and Christianity was a "White" religion that Black people should shun. As Kwanzaa gained mainstream adherents, Karenga altered his position so practicing Christians would not be alienated, stating in the 1997 book Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community, and Culture that "Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday." Many African Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa do so in addition to observing Christmas.
After its initial creation in California, Kwanzaa spread outside the United States.
Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles)
Kwanzaa celebrates what its founder called the seven principles of Kwanzaa, or Nguzo Saba (originally Nguzu Saba – the seven principles of African Heritage). They were developed in 1965, a year before Kwanzaa itself. These seven principles are all Swahili words, and together comprise the Kawaida or "common" philosophy, a synthesis of nationalist, pan-Africanist, and socialist values.
Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the principles, as follows:
Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
Kujichagulia (Self-determination): To define and name ourselves, as well as to create and speak for ourselves.
Ujima (Collective work and responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems and to solve them together.
Ujamaa (Cooperative economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
Symbols
Kwanzaa celebratory symbols include a mat (Mkeka) on which other symbols are placed:
a Kinara (candle holder for seven candlesticks)
Mishumaa Saba (seven candles)
mazao (crops)
Mahindi (corn), to represent the children celebrating (and corn may be part of the holiday meal).
a Kikombe cha Umoja (unity cup) for commemorating and giving shukrani (thanks) to African Ancestors
Zawadi (gifts).
Supplemental representations include a Nguzo Saba poster, the black, red, and green bendera (flag), and African books and artworks—all to represent values and concepts reflective of African culture and contribution to community building and reinforcement.
Observances
Families celebrating Kwanzaa decorate their households with objects of art, colorful African cloth such as kente, especially the wearing of kaftans by women, and fresh fruits that represent African idealism. It is customary to include children in Kwanzaa ceremonies and to give respect and gratitude to ancestors. Libations are shared, generally with a common chalice, Kikombe cha Umoja, passed around to all celebrants. Non-African Americans also celebrate Kwanzaa. "Joyous Kwanzaa" may be used as a greeting during the holiday.
A Kwanzaa ceremony may include drumming and musical selections, libations, a reading of the African Pledge and the Principles of Blackness, reflection on the Pan-African colors, a discussion of the African principle of the day or a chapter in African history, a candle-lighting ritual, artistic performance, and, finally, a feast of faith (Karamu Ya Imani). The greeting for each day of Kwanzaa is Habari Gani?, which is Swahili for "How are you?"
At first, observers of Kwanzaa avoided the mixing of the holiday or its symbols, values, and practice with other holidays, as doing so would violate the principle of kujichagulia (self-determination) and thus violate the integrity of the holiday, which is partially intended as a reclamation of important African values. Today, some African American families celebrate Kwanzaa along with Christmas and New Year.
Cultural exhibitions include the Spirit of Kwanzaa, an annual celebration held at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts featuring interpretive dance, African dance, song and poetry.
Adherence
The popularity of celebration of Kwanzaa has declined with the waning of the popularity of the black separatist movement. Kwanzaa observation has declined in both community and commercial contexts. University of Minnesota Professor Keith Mayes did not report exact figures, noting that it is also difficult to determine these for the three other main African-American holidays. Mayes added that white institutions now also celebrate it.
The National Retail Federation has sponsored a marketing survey on winter holidays since 2004, and in 2015 found that 1.9% of those polled planned to celebrate Kwanzaa–– about six million people in the United States.
Starting in the 1990s, the holiday became increasingly commercialized, with the first Hallmark Card being sold in 1992. Some have expressed concern about this potentially damaging the holiday's values.
Recognition
The first Kwanzaa stamp, designed by Synthia Saint James, was issued by the United States Post Office in 1997, and in the same year Bill Clinton gave the first presidential declaration marking the holiday. Subsequent presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump also issued greetings to celebrate Kwanzaa.
Maya Angelou narrated a 2008 documentary film about Kwanzaa, The Black Candle, written and directed by M.K. Asante Jr. and featuring Chuck D.
Stjepan Meštrović, a sociology professor at the Texas A&M University, sees Kwanzaa as an example of postmodernism. According to Meštrović, post-modernists in modern society may view "real" traditions as racist, sexist or otherwise oppressive, but since living in a world where nothing is true is too terrifying to most people, "nice" and "synthetic" traditions like Kwanzaa have been created to cope with the nihilistic, individualistic modern society.
See also
Dashiki – a shirt or suit worn during Kwanzaa and other occasions
American holidays
References
External links
The Black Candle: a Kwanzaa film narrated by Maya Angelou
Why Kwanzaa was created by Karenga
The History Channel: Kwanzaa
Interview: Karenga discusses the evolution of the holiday and its meaning.
1966 establishments in the United States
African-American culture
Black Power
December observances
January observances
Recurring events established in 1966
Kwanzaa
Public holidays in the United States
Swahili words and phrases | [
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17423 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom%20of%20Judah | Kingdom of Judah | The Kingdom of Judah (, Yəhūdā; Ya'údâ [ia-ú-da-a-a]; Bēyt Dāwīḏ, "House of David") was an Israelite kingdom of the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. It was centered in the region of Judea, and its capital was Jerusalem. The other Israelite polity, the Kingdom of Israel, lay to the north. Modern Jews are named after and also descended from the Kingdom of Judah.
The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of two historical kingdoms, Judah and Israel. However, since the 1980s, skeptical approaches to the Biblical text and the archaeological record led some scholars to believe that the existent archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed. The Tel Dan Stele, discovered in 1993, has shown that the kingdom, in some semblance, existed by at least the mid-9th century BCE, but it does little to show to what extent.
In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified. In the 7th century BCE, the kingdom's population increased greatly, prospering under Assyrian vassalage, despite Hezekiah's revolt against the Assyrian king Sennacherib. After the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 605 BCE, the ensuing competition between the Twenty-sixth Dynasty of Egypt and the Neo-Babylonian Empire for control of the Levant resulted with the rapid decline of the kingdom. In the early-6th century BCE, Judah was weakened by a series of Babylonian invasions, and in 587/6 BCE, Jerusalem was besieged and destroyed by the second Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, who subsequently exiled the Judeans to Babylon. The fallen kingdom was then annexed as a Babylonian province.
The Jews who had been deported in the aftermath of the Babylonian conquest of Judah were eventually allowed to return following a proclamation by the Persian king Cyrus the Great that was issued after the fall of Babylon to the Achaemenid Empire. The returned Jewish population in Judah were allowed to self-rule under Persian governance. The Jews fully regained their independence only four-hundred years later, in the aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt.
Biblical and historical narrative
Jeroboam's Revolt and the Partition of the United Monarchy
According to the biblical account, the United Kingdom of Israel was founded by Saul during the late-11th century BCE, and reached its peak during the rule of David and Solomon. After the death of Solomon circa 930 BCE, the Israelites gathered in Shechem to for the coronation of Solomon's son and successor, Rehoboam. Before the coronation took place, the northern tribes, led by Jeroboam, asked the new king to reduce the heavy taxes and labor requirements that his father Solomon had imposed. Rehoboam rejected their petition: “I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, I will chastise you with scorpions" (). As a result, ten of the tribes rebelled against Rehoboam and proclaimed Jeroboam their king, forming the northern Kingdom of Israel. At first, only the tribe of Judah remained loyal to the House of David, but the tribe of Benjamin soon joined Judah. Both kingdoms, Judah in the south and Israel in the north, co-existed uneasily after the split until the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel by Assyria in 722/721.
Relations with Northern Kingdom
For the first 60 years, the kings of Judah tried to re-establish their authority over the northern kingdom, and there was perpetual war between them. Israel and Judah were in a state of war throughout Rehoboam's 17-year reign. Rehoboam built elaborate defenses and strongholds, along with fortified cities. In the fifth year of Rehoboam's reign, Shishak, pharaoh of Egypt, brought a huge army and took many cities. In the sack of Jerusalem (10th century BCE), Rehoboam gave them all of the treasures out of the temple as a tribute and Judah became a vassal state of Egypt.
Rehoboam's son and successor, Abijah of Judah, continued his father's efforts to bring Israel under his control. He fought the Battle of Mount Zemaraim against Jeroboam of Israel and was victorious with a heavy loss of life on the Israel side. According to the Books of Chronicles, Abijah and his people defeated them with a great slaughter, so that 500,000 chosen men of Israel fell slain, and Jeroboam posed little threat to Judah for the rest of his reign, and the border of the tribe of Benjamin was restored to the original tribal border.
Abijah's son and successor, Asa of Judah, maintained peace for the first 35 years of his reign, and he revamped and reinforced the fortresses originally built by his grandfather, Rehoboam. 2 Chronicles states that at the Battle of Zephath, the Egyptian-backed chieftain Zerah the Ethiopian and his million men and 300 chariots were defeated by Asa's 580,000 men in the Valley of Zephath near Maresha. The Bible does not state whether Zerah was a pharaoh or a general of the army. The Ethiopians were pursued all the way to Gerar, in the coastal plain, where they stopped out of sheer exhaustion. The resulting peace kept Judah free from Egyptian incursions until the time of Josiah, some centuries later.
In his 36th year, Asa was confronted by Baasha of Israel, who built a fortress at Ramah on the border, less than ten miles from Jerusalem. The capital became under pressure, and the military situation was precarious. Asa took gold and silver from the Temple and sent them to Ben-Hadad I, the king of Aram-Damascus, in exchange for the Damascene king cancelling his peace treaty with Baasha. Ben-Hadad attacked Ijon, Dan and many important cities of the tribe of Naphtali, and Baasha was forced to withdraw from Ramah. Asa tore down the unfinished fortress and used its raw materials to fortify Geba and Mizpah in Benjamin on his side of the border.
Asa's successor, Jehoshaphat, changed the policy towards Israel and instead pursued alliances and co-operation with the northern kingdom. The alliance with Ahab was based on marriage. The alliance led to disaster for the kingdom with the Battle of Ramoth-Gilead. He then entered into an alliance with Ahaziah of Israel for the purpose of carrying on maritime commerce with Ophir. However, the fleet that was then equipped at Ezion-Geber was immediately wrecked. A new fleet was fitted out without the co-operation of the king of Israel. Although it was successful, the trade was not prosecuted. He joined Jehoram of Israel in a war against the Moabites, who were under tribute to Israel. This war was successful, and the Moabites were subdued. However, on seeing Mesha's act of offering his own son in a human sacrifice on the walls of Kir-haresheth filled Jehoshaphat with horror, and he withdrew and returned to his own land.
Jehoshaphat's successor, Jehoram of Judah, formed an alliance with Israel by marrying Athaliah, the daughter of Ahab. Despite the alliance with the stronger northern kingdom, Jehoram's rule of Judah was shaky. Edom revolted, and he was forced to acknowledge its independence. A raid by Philistines, Arabs and Ethiopians looted the king's house and carried off all of his family except for his youngest son, Ahaziah of Judah.
Clash of empires
After Hezekiah became the sole ruler in c. 715 BCE, he formed alliances with Ashkelon and Egypt and made a stand against Assyria by refusing to pay tribute. In response, Sennacherib of Assyria attacked the fortified cities of Judah. Hezekiah paid three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold to Assyria, which required him to empty the temple and royal treasury of silver and strip the gold from the doorposts of Solomon's Temple. However, Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem in 701 BCE though the city was never taken.
During the long reign of Manasseh (c. 687/686 – 643/642 BCE), Judah was a vassal of Assyrian rulers: Sennacherib and his successors, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal after 669 BCE. Manasseh is listed as being required to provide materials for Esarhaddon's building projects and as one of a number of vassals who assisted Ashurbanipal's campaign against Egypt.
When Josiah became king of Judah in c. 641/640 BCE, the international situation was in flux. To the east, the Neo-Assyrian Empire was beginning to disintegrate, the Neo-Babylonian Empire had not yet risen to replace it and Egypt to the west was still recovering from Assyrian rule. In the power vacuum, Judah could govern itself for the time being without foreign intervention. However, in the spring of 609 BCE, Pharaoh Necho II personally led a sizable army up to the Euphrates to aid the Assyrians. Taking the coastal route into Syria at the head of a large army, Necho passed the low tracts of Philistia and Sharon. However, the passage over the ridge of hills, which shuts in on the south the great Jezreel Valley, was blocked by the Judean army, led by Josiah, who may have considered that the Assyrians and the Egyptians were weakened by the death of Pharaoh Psamtik I only a year earlier (610 BCE). Presumably in an attempt to help the Babylonians, Josiah attempted to block the advance at Megiddo, where a fierce battle was fought and Josiah was killed. Necho then joined forces with the Assyrian Ashur-uballit II, and they crossed the Euphrates and lay siege to Harran. The combined forces failed to capture the city, and Necho retreated back to northern Syria. The event also marked the disintegration of the Assyrian Empire.
On his return march to Egypt in 608 BCE, Necho found that Jehoahaz had been selected to succeed his father, Josiah. Necho deposed Jehoahaz, who had been king for only three months, and replaced him with his older brother, Jehoiakim. Necho imposed on Judah a levy of a hundred talents of silver (about 3 tons or about 3.4 metric tons) and a talent of gold (about ). Necho then took Jehoahaz back to Egypt as his prisoner, never to return.
Jehoiakim ruled originally as a vassal of the Egyptians by paying a heavy tribute. However, when the Egyptians were defeated by the Babylonians at Carchemish in 605 BCE, Jehoiakim changed allegiances to pay tribute to Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. In 601 BCE, in the fourth year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar attempted to invade Egypt but was repulsed with heavy losses. The failure led to numerous rebellions among the states of the Levant that owed allegiance to Babylon. Jehoiakim also stopped paying tribute to Nebuchadnezzar and took a pro-Egyptian position. Nebuchadnezzar soon dealt with the rebellions. According to the Babylonian Chronicles, after invading "the land of Hatti (Syria/Palestine)" in 599 BCE, he laid siege to Jerusalem. Jehoiakim died in 598 BCE during the siege and was succeeded by his son Jeconiah at an age of either eight or eighteen. The city fell about three months later, on 2 Adar (March 16) 597 BCE. Nebuchadnezzar pillaged both Jerusalem and the Temple and carted all of his spoils to Babylon. Jeconiah and his court and other prominent citizens and craftsmen, along with a sizable portion of the Jewish population of Judah, numbering about 10,000 were deported from the land and dispersed throughout the Babylonian Empire. Among them was Ezekiel. Nebuchadnezzar appointed Zedekiah, Jehoiakim's brother, the king of the reduced kingdom, who was made a tributary of Babylon.
Destruction and dispersion
Despite the strong remonstrances of Jeremiah and others, Zedekiah revolted against Nebuchadnezzar by ceasing to pay tribute to him and entered an alliance with Pharaoh Hophra. In 589 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II returned to Judah and again besieged Jerusalem. Many Jews fled to surrounding Moab, Ammon, Edom and other countries to seek refuge. The city fell after a siege, which lasted either eighteen or thirty months, and Nebuchadnezzar again pillaged both Jerusalem and the Temple and then destroyed both. After killing all of Zedekiah's sons, Nebuchadnezzar took Zedekiah to Babylon and so put an end to the independent Kingdom of Judah. According to the Book of Jeremiah, in addition to those killed during the siege, some 4,600 people were deported after the fall of Judah. By 586 BCE, much of Judah had been devastated, and the former kingdom had suffered a steep decline of both its economy and its population.
Aftermath
Babylonian Yehud
Jerusalem apparently remained uninhabited for much of the 6th century, and the centre of gravity shifted to Benjamin, the relatively unscathed northern section of the kingdom, where the town of Mizpah became the capital of the new Babylonian province of Yehud for the remnant of the Jewish population in a part of the former kingdom. That was standard Babylonian practice. When the Philistine city of Ashkelon was conquered in 604 BCE, the political, religious and economic elite (but not the bulk of the population) was banished and the administrative centre shifted to a new location.
Gedaliah was appointed governor of the Yehud province, supported by a Babylonian guard. The administrative centre of the province was Mizpah in Benjamin, not Jerusalem. On hearing of the appointment, many of the Judeans who had taken refuge in surrounding countries were persuaded to return to Judah. However, Gedaliah was soon assassinated by a member of the royal house, and the Chaldean soldiers killed. The population that was left in the land and those who had returned fled to Egypt for fear a Babylonian reprisal, under the leadership of Yohanan ben Kareah. They ignored the urging of the prophet Jeremiah against the move. In Egypt, the refugees settled in Migdol, Tahpanhes, Noph and Pathros, and Jeremiah went with them as a moral guardian.
Exile of elites to Babylon
The numbers that were deported to Babylon and that made their way to Egypt and the remnant that remained in the land and in surrounding countries are subject to academic debate. The Book of Jeremiah reports that 4,600 were exiled to Babylonia. The Books of Kings suggest that it was 10,000 and later 8,000.
Yehud under Persian rule
In 539 BCE, the Achaemenid Empire conquered Babylonia and allowed the exiles to return to Yehud Medinata and to rebuild the Temple, which was completed in the sixth year of Darius (515 BCE) under Zerubbabel, the grandson of the second to last king of Judah, Jeconiah. Yehud Medinata was a peaceful part of the Achaemenid Empire until its fall in c. 333 BCE to Alexander the Great.
Archaeological record
The formation of the Kingdom of Judah is a subject of heavy debate among scholars, and an acrimonious dispute has emerged between biblical minimalists and biblical maximalists on this particular topic.
While it is generally agreed that the stories of David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE tell little about the origins of Judah, currently, there is no consensus as to whether Judah developed as a split from the United Kingdom of Israel (as the Bible tells) or independently. Some scholars suggested that Jerusalem, the kingdom's capital, did not emerge as a significant administrative center until the end of the 8th century BCE. Before then, the archaeological evidence suggests its population was too small to sustain a viable kingdom. Much of the debate revolves around whether the archaeological discoveries conventionally dated to the 10th century should instead be dated to the 9th century, as proposed by Israel Finkelstein. Recent archaeological discoveries by Eilat Mazar in Jerusalem and Yosef Garfinkel in Khirbet Qeiyafa seem to support the existence of the United Monarchy, but the datings and identifications are not universally accepted.
The Tel Dan Stele shows an historical "House of David" ruled a kingdom south of the lands of Samaria in the 9th century BC, and attestations of several Judean kings from the 8th century BC have been discovered, but they do little to indicate how developed the state actually was. The Nimrud Tablet K.3751, dated c. 733 BCE, is the earliest known record of the name "Judah" (written in Assyrian cuneiform as Ya'uda or KUR.ia-ú-da-a-a).
The status of Jerusalem in the 10th century BCE is a major subject of debate. The oldest part of Jerusalem and its original urban core are the City of David, which does not show evidence of significant Israelite residential activity until the 9th century. However, unique administrative structures such as the Stepped Stone Structure and the Large Stone Structure, which originally formed one structure, contain material culture dated to Iron I. On account of the apparent lack of settlement activity in the 10th century BCE, Israel Finkelstein argues that Jerusalem was then a small country village in the Judean hills, not a national capital, and Ussishkin argues that the city was entirely uninhabited. Amihai Mazar contends that if the Iron I/Iron IIa dating of administrative structures in the City of David are correct, which he believes to be the case, "Jerusalem was a rather small town with a mighty citadel, which could have been a center of a substantial regional polity." William G. Dever argues that Jerusalem was a small and fortified city, probably inhabited only by the royal court, priests and clerks.
A collection of military orders found in the ruins of a military fortress in the Negev dating to the period of the Kingdom of Judah indicates widespread literacy, based on the inscriptions, the ability to read and write extended throughout the chain of command from commanders to petty officers. According to Professor Eliezer Piasetsky, who participated in analyzing the texts, "Literacy existed at all levels of the administrative, military and priestly systems of Judah. Reading and writing were not limited to a tiny elite." That indicates the presence of a substantial educational infrastructure in Judah at the time.
LMLK Seals
LMLK seals are ancient Hebrew seals stamped on the handles of large storage jars dating from reign of King Hezekiah (circa 700 BCE) discovered mostly in and around Jerusalem. Several complete jars were found in situ buried under a destruction layer caused by Sennacherib at Lachish. None of the original seals has been found, but some 2,000 impressions made by at least 21 seal types have been published.
LMLK stands for the Hebrew letters lamedh mem lamedh kaph (vocalized, lamelekh; Phoenician lāmed mēm lāmed kāp – 𐤋𐤌𐤋𐤊), which can be translated as:
"[belonging] to the king" [of Judah]
"[belonging] to King" (name of a person or deity)
"[belonging] to the government" [of Judah]
"[to be sent] to the King"
Religion
The major theme of the Hebrew Bible's narrative is the loyalty of Judah, especially its kings, to Yahweh, which it states is the God of Israel. Accordingly, all of the kings of Israel and many of the kings of Judah were "bad" in terms of the biblical narrative by failing to enforce monotheism. Of the "good" kings, Hezekiah (727–698 BCE) is noted for his efforts at stamping out idolatry (in his case, the worship of Baal and Asherah, among other traditional Near Eastern divinities), but his successors, Manasseh of Judah (698–642 BCE) and Amon (642–640 BCE), revived idolatry, which drew down on the kingdom the anger of Yahweh. King Josiah (640–609 BCE) returned to the worship of Yahweh alone, but his efforts were too late, and Israel's unfaithfulness caused God to permit the kingdom's destruction by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the Siege of Jerusalem (587/586 BCE).
However, it is now fairly well established among academic scholars that the Books of Kings is not an accurate reflection of religious views in Judah or particularly Israel of the period.
See also
Kings of Judah
List of artifacts in biblical archaeology
List of Jewish states and dynasties
United Kingdom of Israel, the kingdom before the split
Kingdom of Israel, the Northern Kingdom
Israel, the modern country
Notes
References
Sources
External links
586 BC
6th-century BC disestablishments
10th-century BC establishments
Ancient Levant
Books of Kings
Former monarchies of Western Asia
History of Palestine (region)
Historic Jewish communities
Political entities in the Land of Israel
States and territories disestablished in the 6th century BC
States and territories established in the 10th century BC
Judah | [
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17424 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom%20of%20Israel%20%28Samaria%29 | Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) | The Kingdom of Israel () or the Kingdom of Samaria was an Israelite kingdom of the Southern Levant during the Iron Age. The kingdom controlled the regions of Samaria, Galilee and parts of the Transjordan. Its capital, for the most part, was Samaria. The other Israelite polity, the Kingdom of Judah, lay to the south.
The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Israel as one of two successor states to the former United Kingdom of Israel ruled by King David and his son Solomon, the other being the Kingdom of Judah. However, historicity of the United Monarchy as described in the Bible is debated. It can said with certainty that the northern regions underwent a period of re-urbanization during the 10th century BCE, paving the way to the establishment of a kingdom ruled by the Omride dynasty in the 9th century, and that the political center of this kingdom shifted from Shechem to Samaria, where a lavish palace was built.
The Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Neo-Assyrian Empire around 720 BCE. The records of Sargon II of Assyria indicate that he deported 27,290 inhabitants of the former kingdom to Mesopotamia. This deportation became the basis for the Jewish idea of the Ten Lost Tribes. Many Israelites migrated to the southern kingdom of Judah. Foreign groups were settled by the Assyrians in the territories of the fallen kingdom.
After the destruction of Israel, the Samaritans emerged as an ethnic and religious community in the region of Samaria, claiming descent from the Israelites. With their temple on Mount Gerizim, they continued to thrive for centuries. Today, most scholars believe the Samaritans were a blend of Israelites with other nationalities whom the Assyrians had resettled in the area.
History
The main source for the history of the Kingdom of Israel is the Hebrew Bible, written by authors in Jerusalem, the capital of the Kingdom of Judah. As such, it is inspired by ideological and theological viewpoints that influence the narrative. Later anachronisms, legends and literary forms also affect the story, Some of the events are believed to be recorded long after the destruction of the kingdom. Biblical archaeology has both confirmed and challenged the biblical account. According to the Bible, David and his son Solomon ruled over a united monarchy, but on the death of Solomon, after a short interval during which the kingdom was ruled by Solomon's son Rehoboam, the northern tribes revolted and established their own kingdom under Jeroboam, who was not of the Davidic line. This northern kingdom became the Kingdom of Israel. The first mention of the name "Israel" is from an Egyptian inscription, the Merneptah Stele, dating from the Late Bronze Age (c. 1208 BCE); this gives little solid information, but does at least indicate that the name of the later kingdom was borrowed rather than originating with the kingdom itself.
The existence of an Israelite state in the north is well documented in 9th century inscriptions. The earliest mention is from the Kurkh stela of c.853 BCE, when Shalmaneser III mentions "Ahab the Israelite", plus the denominative for "land", and his ten thousand troops. This kingdom will have included parts of the lowlands (the Shephelah), the Jezreel plain, lower Galilee and parts of the Transjordan. Ahab's forces were part of an anti-Assyrian coalition, implying that the kingdom was ruled by an urban elite, possessed a royal and state cult with large urban temples, and had scribes, mercenaries, and an administrative apparatus. In all this it was similar to other recently-founded kingdoms of the time, such as Ammon and Moab.
In later Assyrian inscriptions the kingdom becomes the "House of Omri". Shalmanesser III's "Black Obelisk" mentions Jehu son of Omri, and Adad-Nirari III, who mounted an expedition into the Levant in 803, mentions the Hatti-land and Amurru-land, the cities of Tyre and Sidon, Philistia, Edom, Aram, and the mat (land) of Hu-um-ri, or Omri. Another inscription from the same king introduces a third way of talking about the kingdom, as Samaria, in the phrase "Joash of Samaria". The use of Omri's name to refer to the kingdom still survived, and was used by Sargon II in the phrase "the whole house of Omri" in describing his conquest of the city of Samaria in 722 BCE. It is significant that the Assyrians never mention the kingdom of Judah until the end of the 8th century, when it was an Assyrian vassal: possibly they never had contact with it, or possibly they regarded it as a vassal of Israel/Samaria or Aram, or possibly the southern kingdom did not exist during this period.
Today, among archaeologists, Samaria is one of the most universally accepted archaeological sites from the biblical period. At around 850 BCE, the Mesha Stele, written in Old Hebrew alphabet, records a victory of King Mesha of Moab against king Omri of Israel and his son Ahab.
Archaeological finds, ancient Near Eastern texts, and the biblical record testify that in the time of the Omride dynasty, the Kingdom of Israel ruled in the mountainous Galilee, at Hazor in the upper Jordan Valley, in large parts of Transjordan between the Arnon and the Yarmouk Rivers, and in the coastal plain of the Sharon.
Relations between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah
According to the Bible, for the first sixty years, the kings of Judah tried to re-establish their authority over the northern kingdom, and there was perpetual war between them. For the following eighty years, there was no open war between them, and, for the most part, they were in friendly alliance, co-operating against their common enemies, especially against Damascus.The conflict between Israel and Judah was resolved when Jehoshaphat, King of Judah, allied himself with the house of Ahab through marriage. Later, Jehosophat's son and successor, Jehoram of Judah, married Ahab's daughter Athaliah, cementing the alliance. However, the sons of Ahab were slaughtered by Jehu following his coup d'état around 840 BCE.
Destruction of the Kingdom, 732–720 BC
In c. 732 BCE, Pekah of Israel, while allied with Rezin, king of Aram, threatened Jerusalem. Ahaz, king of Judah, appealed to Tiglath-Pileser III, the king of Assyria, for help. After Ahaz paid tribute to Tiglath-Pileser Tiglath-Pileser sacked Damascus and Israel, annexing Aram and territory of the tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh in Gilead including the desert outposts of Jetur, Naphish and Nodab. People from these tribes including the Reubenite leader, were taken captive and resettled in the region of the Khabur River system, in Halah, Habor, Hara and Gozan (). Tiglath-Pilesar also captured the territory of Naphtali and the city of Janoah in Ephraim and an Assyrian governor was placed over the region of Naphtali. According to and , the population of Aram and the annexed part of Israel was deported to Assyria.
The remainder of the northern kingdom of Israel continued to exist within the reduced territory as an independent kingdom until around 720 BCE, when it was again invaded by Assyria and the rest of the population deported. During the three-year siege of Samaria in the territory of Ephraim by the Assyrians, Shalmaneser V died and was succeeded by Sargon II, who himself records the capture of that city thus: "Samaria I looked at, I captured; 27,280 men who dwelt in it I carried away" into Assyria. Thus, around 720 BCE, after two centuries, the kingdom of the ten tribes came to an end. Some of the Israelite captives were resettled in the Khabur region, and the rest in the land of the Medes, thus establishing Hebrew communities in Ecbatana and Rages. The Book of Tobit additionally records that Sargon had taken other captives from the northern kingdom to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, in particular Tobit from the town of Thisbe in Naphtali.
The Hebrew Bible relates that the population of the Kingdom of Israel was exiled, becoming known as the Ten Lost Tribes. To the south, the Tribe of Judah, the Tribe of Simeon (that was "absorbed" into Judah), the Tribe of Benjamin and the people of the Tribe of Levi, who lived among them of the original Israelite nation, remained in the southern Kingdom of Judah. The Kingdom of Judah continued to exist as an independent state until 586 BCE, when it was conquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
Samaritan version
The Samaritan version to the events claims that actually much of the population of the Northern Kingdom of Israel remained in place upon the Exile, including the Tribes of Naphtali, Menasseh, Benjamin and Levi - being the progenitors of the Samaritans. In their book The Bible Unearthed, authors Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman estimate that only a fifth of the population (about 40,000) were actually resettled out of the area during the two deportation periods under Tiglath-Pileser III and Sargon II. Many of the Northern Tribes also fled south to Jerusalem, which appears to have expanded in size five-fold during this period, requiring a new wall to be built, and a new source of water Siloam to be provided by King Hezekiah.
Medieval Rabbinic fable
In medieval Rabbinic fable, the concept of the ten tribes who were taken away from the House of David (who continued the rule of the southern kingdom of Judah), becomes confounded with accounts of the Assyrian deportations leading to the myth of the "Ten Lost Tribes".
Recorded history
No known non-Biblical record exists of the Assyrians having exiled people from Dan, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun or western Manasseh. Descriptions of the deportation of people from Reuben, Gad, Manasseh in Gilead, Ephraim and Naphtali indicate that only a portion of these tribes were deported and the places to which they were deported are known locations given in the accounts. The deported communities are mentioned as still existing at the time of the composition of the Books of Kings and Chronicles and did not disappear by assimilation. 2 Chronicles 30:1-18 explicitly mentions northern Israelites who had been spared by the Assyrians, in particular people of Ephraim, Manasseh, Asher, Issachar and Zebulun, and how members of the latter three returned to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem during the reign of Hezekiah.
Religion
The religious climate of the Kingdom of Israel appears to have followed two major trends. The first, that of worship of Yahweh, and the second that of worship of Baal as detailed in the Hebrew Bible () and in the Baal cycle discovered at Ugarit. This religion is sometimes referred to by modern scholars as Yahwism.
According to the Hebrew Bible (), Jeroboam built two places of worship, one at Bethel and one at far northern Dan, as alternatives to the Temple in Jerusalem. He did not want the people of his kingdom to have religious ties to Jerusalem, the capital city of the rival Kingdom of Judah. He erected golden bulls at the entrance to the temples to represent the national god. The Hebrew Bible, written from the perspective of scribes in Jerusalem, referred to these acts as the way of Jeroboam or the errors of Jeroboam ().
The Bible states that Ahab allowed the cult worship of Baal to become an acceptable religion of the kingdom. His wife Jezebel was the daughter of the Phoenician king of Tyre and a devotee to Baal worship ().
Royal houses
The Northern Kingdom had 19 kings across 9 different dynasties throughout its 208 years of existence.
List of proposed Assyrian references to Kingdom of Israel (Samaria)
The table below lists all the historical references to the Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) in Assyrian records. King Omri's name takes the Assyrian shape of "Humri", his kingdom or dynasty that of Bit Humri or alike - the "House of Humri/Omri".
See also
Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy) (the unified kingdom before the split)
Kingdom of Judah (the southern kingdom)
Israel (the modern country)
List of Jewish states and dynasties
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
External links
About Israel - The Information Center About Israel
Biblical History. The Jewish History Resource Center - Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Complete Bible Genealogy A synchronized chart of the kings of Israel and Judah
10th-century BC establishments
8th-century BC disestablishments
Books of Kings
Israel, Kingdom of
Israel
Political entities in the Land of Israel
States and territories established in the 10th century BC
States and territories disestablished in the 8th century BC | [
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17427 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elah | Elah | Elah may refer to:
Elah (Edom), the name of an Edomite clan
Elah, a name of God in Judaism
Elah, the father of Hoshea, the last king of the Israelite Kingdom of Israel
King Elah, the fourth king of Israel
Valley of Elah, where the biblical David fought Goliath
Elah, Hebrew word for "terebinth"
Elah Terrell, an American architect
See also
Allah, the Arabic word for God
El (disambiguation)
In the Valley of Elah, a 2007 film | [
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0.49136781692... |
17430 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligra%20Words | Calligra Words | Calligra Words is a word processor, which is part of Calligra Suite and developed by KDE as free software.
History
When the Calligra Suite was formed, unlike the other Calligra applications Words was not a continuation of the corresponding KOffice application – KWord. The Words was largely written from scratch – in May 2011 a completely new layout engine was announced. The first release was made available on , using the version number 2.4 to match the rest of Calligra Suite.
Reception
Initial reception of Calligra Words shortly after the 2.4 release was mixed. While Linux Pro Magazine Online's Bruce Byfield wrote “Calligra needed an impressive first release. Perhaps surprisingly, and to the development team’s credit, it has managed one in 2.4.”, he also noted that “Words in particular is still lacking features”. He concluded that Calligra is “worth keeping an eye on”.
On the other hand, Calligra Words became the default word processor in Kubuntu 12.04 – replacing LibreOffice Writer.
Formula editor
Formulas in Calligra Words are provided by the Formula plugin. It is a formula editor with a WYSIWYG interface.
See also
List of word processors
Comparison of word processors
References
W
Free word processors
Linux word processors
de:Calligra Suite#Textverarbeitung
es:Calligra Suite#KWord | [
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17431 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth%20Lee%20Pike | Kenneth Lee Pike | Kenneth Lee Pike (June 9, 1912 – December 31, 2000) was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was the originator of the theory of tagmemics, the coiner of the terms "emic" and "etic" and the developer of the constructed language Kalaba-X for use in teaching the theory and practice of translation.
In addition, he was the First President of the Bible-translating organization Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), with which he was associated from 1935 until his death.
Life
Pike was born in Woodstock, Connecticut, and studied theology at Gordon College, graduating with a B.A. in 1933. He initially wanted to do missionary work in China. When this was denied him, he studied linguistics with Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). He went to Mexico with SIL, learning Mixtec from native speakers there in 1935.
In 1937 Pike went to the University of Michigan, where he worked for his doctorate in linguistics under Charles C. Fries. His research involved living among the Mixtecs, and developing a written system for the Mixtec language with his wife, Evelyn. After gaining his Ph.D. in 1942, Pike became the First President of the Summer Institute in Linguistics. Its main function was to produce translations of the Bible in unwritten languages, and in 1951 Pike published the Mixtec New Testament. He was the President of SIL International from 1942 to 1979.
As well as and in parallel with his role at SIL, Pike spent thirty years at the University of Michigan, during which time he served as chairman of its linguistics department, professor of linguistics, and director of its English Language Institute (he did pioneering work in the field of English language learning and teaching)
and was later Professor Emeritus of the university.
Work
Pike is best known for his distinction between the emic and the etic. "Emic" (as in "phonemics") refers to the role of cultural and linguistic categories as understood from within the cultural or linguistic system that they are a part of, while "etic" (as in phonetics") refers to the analytical study of those sounds grounded outside of the system itself. Pike argued that only native speakers are competent judges of emic descriptions, and are thus crucial in providing data for linguistic research, while investigators from outside the linguistic group apply scientific methods in the analysis of language, producing etic descriptions which are verifiable and reproducible. Pike himself carried out studies of indigenous languages in Australia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Ghana, Java, Mexico, Nepal, New Guinea, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Peru.
Pike developed his theory of tagmemics to help with the analysis of languages from Central and South America, by identifying (using both semantic and syntactic elements) strings of linguistic elements capable of playing a number of different roles.
Pike's approach to the study of language put him outside the circle of the "generative" movement begun by Noam Chomsky, a dominant linguist, since Pike believed that the structure of language should be studied in context, not just single sentences, as seen in the title of his magnum opus "Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior" (1967).
He became well known for his "monolingual demonstrations". He would stand before an audience, with a large number of chalkboards. A speaker of a language unknown to him would be brought in to work with Pike. Using gestures and objects, not asking questions in a language that the person might know, Pike would begin to analyze the language before the audience.
Honors
He was a member of National Academy of Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS), and the American Anthropological Association. He served as president of LSA and LACUS and later was nominated for the Templeton Prize three years in a row.
When he was named to the Charles Carpenter Fries Professorship of Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1974, the Dean's citation noted that "his lifelong originality and energetic activity verge on the legendary". Pike was awarded honorary degrees by a number of institutions, including Huntington College, University of Chicago, Georgetown University, L'Université Réné Descartes (Sorbonne), and Albert-Ludwig Universität. Though the Nobel Prize committee did not publicize nominations, in 1983 US Senator Alan J. Dixon and US Congressman Paul Simon announced that they had nominated Pike for the Nobel Peace Prize. Academic sponsors for his nomination included Charles F. Hockett, Sydney Lamb (Rice University), Gordon J. van Wylen (Hope College), Frank H. T. Rhodes (Cornell University), André Martinet (Sorbonne), David C.C. Li (National Taiwan Normal University), and Ming Liu (Chinese University of Hong Kong).
Bibliography
See Complete list of Pike's publications (over 250)
1943: Phonetics, a Critical Analysis of Phonetic Theory and a Technique for the Practical Description of Sounds (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press)
1967: Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (The Hague: Mouton)
1970: Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, with Richard E. Young and Alton L. Becker (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World)
See also
Americanist phonetic notation#Pike
Wycliffe Global Alliance
References
Further reading
Brend, Ruth M. 1987. Kenneth Lee Pike Bibliography. Bloomington, IN: Eurasian Linguistics Association.
Emily A. Denning, "Kenneth L. Pike", in Encyclopedia of Anthropology ed. H. James Birx (2006, SAGE Publications; )
Headland, Thomas N. 2001. "Kenneth Lee Pike (1912-2000)." American Anthropologist 103(2): 505–509.
Hildebrandt, Martha. 2003. "A Portrait of Kenneth L. Pike," in Language and Life: Essays in Memory of Kenneth L. Pike. (eds.) Mary Ruth Wise, Thomas N. Headland, and Ruth M. Brend. Arlington: University of Texas at Arlington, pp. 3–10.
Pike, Eunice V. 1981. Ken Pike: Scholar and Christian. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Languages for Peace: Tribute to Kenneth L. Pike. 1985. Lake Bluff, IL: Jupiter Press.
Wise, Mary Ruth, Thomas N. Headland, and Ruth M. Brend, (eds.) 2003. Language and Life: Essays in Memory of Kenneth L. Pike. Arlington: University of Texas at Arlington.
External links
www.sil.org/klp/ Biographical profile at SIL, with autobiographical essays by Pike
Detailed chronology of Pike's life at SIL
Langmaker profile of Kalaba-X
Language By Gesture, a televised 1966 example of one of Pike's "monolingual demonstrations"
The Nature of Field Work in a Monolingual Setting, article that describes his method
Pike's Phonetics at Archive.org
1912 births
2000 deaths
People from Woodstock, Connecticut
American anthropologists
Linguists from the United States
American Christian writers
Translators of the Bible into indigenous languages of the Americas
Missionary linguists
Constructed language creators
Christian Peace Conference members
Gordon College (Massachusetts) alumni
University of Michigan alumni
University of Michigan faculty
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century translators
Linguistic Society of America presidents
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
20th-century anthropologists
20th-century linguists
Recipients of the Presidential Medal of Merit (Philippines) | [
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17432 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key | Key | Key or The Key may refer to:
Common meanings
Key (cryptography), a piece of information that controls the operation of a cryptography algorithm
Key (lock), device used to control access to places or facilities restricted by a lock
Key (map), a guide to a map's symbology
Key (music), a group of pitches in a piece
Key, on a typewriter or computer keyboard
Answer key, a list of answers to a test
Geography
Cay, also spelled key, a small, low-elevation, sandy island formed on the surface of a coral reef
United States
Key, Alabama
Key, Ohio
Key, West Virginia
Keys, Oklahoma
Florida Keys, an archipelago of about 1,700 islands in the southeast United States
Elsewhere
Rural Municipality of Keys No. 303, Saskatchewan, Canada
Key, Iran, a village in Isfahan Province, Iran
Key Island, Tasmania, Australia
The Key, New Zealand, a locality in Southland, New Zealand
Arts and media
Films
The Key (1934 film), a 1934 film directed by Michael Curtiz
The Key (1958 film), a war film directed by Carol Reed, starring William Holden and Sophia Loren
The Key, also known as Odd Obsession, a 1959 Japanese film directed by Kon Ichikawa
The Key (1961 film), a Soviet animated feature
The Key (1965 film), a Yugoslav omnibus film
The Key (1971 film), a Czechoslovakian drama
The Key (1983 film), an Italian erotic film directed by Tinto Brass, starring Stefania Sandrelli
Kelid (The Key), a 1987 Iranian film written by Abbas Kiarostami
The Key (2007 film), a French thriller film directed by Guillaume Nicloux
Key (film), a 2011 film
The Key (2014 film), an American film directed by Jefery Levy
Literature
The Key (Curley novel), a 2005 novel by Marianne Curley
The Key (Elfgren and Strandberg novel), a 2013 novel by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren
The Key (Tanizaki novel), a 1956 novel by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
"The Key" (short story), a 1966 short story by Isaac Asimov
The Key, a 1969 book of etymology by John Philip Cohane
The Key, a magazine published by Kappa Kappa Gamma
The Key, a music publication of WXPN in Philadelphia
Music
Key (music), the scale of a piece of music
Key (instrument), part of a musical instrument used for playing or tuning
Keys, short for keyboard instruments
Albums
Key (Meredith Monk album), 1971
Key (Son, Ambulance album), 2004
The Key (Joan Armatrading album), 1983
The Key (Vince Gill album), 1998
The Key (Nocturnus album), 1990
The Key (Operation: Mindcrime album), 2015
Keys (album), a 2021 album by Alicia Keys
Songs
"The Key" (Speech Debelle song), 2009
"The Key" (Ou Est Le Swimming Pool song), 2010
"Key", a song from the album Maid in Japan by Band-Maid
"The Key", a song by Edita Abdieski
"Key", a song from the album Minecraft – Volume Alpha by C418
Television
"The Key" (Code Lyoko episode), 2005
"The Key" (Prison Break episode), 2006
"The Key" (The Walking Dead), 2018
"The Key" (Yes, Prime Minister), 1986
"The Keys" (Seinfeld), a 1992 TV episode
Other uses in arts and media
Key (character), two supervillains in the DC Comics universe
Kirby's Epic Yarn (KEY), a 2010 game by Nintendo
Key, the title character of Key the Metal Idol, a Japanese anime OVA series
The Key, a painting by Jackson Pollock
People
Key (entertainer) (born 1991), South Korean entertainer
Key (surname)
Keys (surname)
Sports
Key (basketball), a restricted area around the basketball net
Frederick Keys, a Double-A minor league baseball team
Technology
Key (computing), a field in a computer file or database used to sort or retrieve records
Key (engineering), a type of coupling used to transmit rotation between a shaft and an attached item
KeY, a software verification tool
The Key (smartcard), a contactless smartcard for public transport ticketing in Britain
.key, file extension used by Keynote
Identification key, used to identify biological entities
Telegraph key, the button used by a telegraph operator
Other uses
Key (company), a Japanese visual novel studio
The Key School, an independent coeducational school in Annapolis, Maryland
Keys, a truce term used in western Scotland
Amazon Key, a service by Amazon allowing customers to get deliveries inside of their home or car
House of Keys, the directly elected lower branch of Tynwald, the parliament of the Isle of Man
Samara (fruit) or key, a type of fruit
See also
Keay, a surname
Keyes (disambiguation)
Keying (disambiguation)
Quay (disambiguation)
Qi (disambiguation)
The Keys (disambiguation) | [
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17439 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Meleon | K-Meleon | K-Meleon is an open-source, lightweight web browser for Microsoft Windows. K-Meleon can use the secure Goanna layout engine based on Mozilla's Gecko or the Gecko engine itself. K-Meleon was one of the first projects to use Gecko outside of Netscape, predating even Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey. K-Meleon runs on legacy hardware and operating systems that other modern web browsers no longer support. Instead of Web Extensions, K-Melons supports configuration files and macros to allow users to customize most aspects of the browser. The browser is available under the GNU General Public License.
Development and specifications
K-Meleon uses the native Windows application programming interface (API) to create its user interface instead of Mozilla's cross-platform XML User Interface Language (XUL) layer, and as a result, is tightly integrated into the look and feel of the Windows desktop. This approach is similar to that of Galeon and Epiphany (for the GNOME desktop), and Camino (for Mac OS X). Omitting XUL makes K-Meleon less resource-intensive than other browsers on Windows.
The first version, K-Meleon 0.1, was originally written by Christophe Thibault and released to the public on August 21, 2000. A flurry of development happened until 2003 when a number of developers stopped working on it. Dorian Boissonnade eventually took over as the primary developer of the project, and continues to maintain the project to date.
After many major release versions from 0.1 to 0.9.x, K-Meleon 1.0 introduced major modifications. The most notable change was the main K-Meleon code being updated to accommodate the Gecko 1.8.0.x rendering engine, as used in the latest releases of Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey. This update to the layout engine brought significant improvements to security and usability, including support for favicons and multi-user environments. Some themes and macros from version 0.9 were still compatible with 1.0, although the macro system was updated.
The macro system was updated further in K-Meleon 1.1, which was based on the Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine that was used in Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and SeaMonkey 1.1.
A true tabbed interface was introduced in version 1.5. Prior to this update, multiple web pages were only accessible within the same browser window using the included but optional "layers" plugin, which enabled a toolbar containing buttons representing each open page in a way that functionally mimicked tabbed browsing in every way other than appearance. These open pages were called "layers" instead of tabs.
In 2010, K-Meleon was one of the twelve browsers offered to European Economic Area users of Microsoft Windows.
As of 2012, the project was incorrectly reported as being on indefinite hold, presumably due to the fact that Mozilla stopped providing an embeddable version of the Gecko engine. This has since been clarified, as development continued.
In late 2013, the K-Meleon group began developing new versions based on Mozilla's XULRunner 24 runtime environment in place of the discontinued Gecko Runtime Environment. K-Meleon 74 was the first stable release to use updated versions of this environment.
K-Meleon 75 was released in mid-2015 with a Mozilla 31 backend, new skin and toolbar implementation, spellcheck, and form autocompletion.
Since 2019, stable builds of K-Meleon have been released using a fork of the Goanna engine.
Active branch
Since 2017, all active development on K-Meleon has taken place in the Goanna branch. Roytam forked the most recent version of K-Meleon in 2017 to run on the Goanna engine. This branch also includes tweaks and bug fixes for the K-Meleon shell from another community build. With Firefox Quantum, Mozilla rewrote most of the Gecko engine from the ground up. The Goanna engine is a maintained fork of the old Gecko engine created by Pale Moon developers. K-Meleon incorporated the improvements in web-rendering technology from Goanna Tycho and continues to port back security updates from the current version of Goanna maintained for Pale Moon.
Legacy Windows versions
K-Meleon supports many legacy versions of Windows. Windows XP and Vista are both actively supported. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows XP in 2009 and Vista in 2012. They released their final update for the XP family of operating systems on April 9, 2019, and Vista on April 11, 2017. Google dropped Windows XP support from Google Chrome on April 15, 2016, Mozilla dropped support in 2018 , and Microsoft has not made newer versions of Internet Explorer available for XP or Vista.
Even older versions of Windows receive some updates. Many older web browsers cannot access modern websites because they don't support the Transport Security Layer (TLS). An increasing number of websites are using HTTPS which encrypts communication for privacy and security using TLS. Older browsers released for Windows 9X operating systems do not include any support for TLS. Older versions of K-Meleon have received patches that allow them to access the modern web. K-Meleon 74 can access secure websites on Windows 2000 using TLS 1.2. K-Meleon 74 can run on Windows 98 using KernelEx but not natively. K-Meleon 1.5 can natively access secure websites on Windows 98 using TLS patches. However, there are no updates available for K-Meleon 1.5's web engine.
Customization
K-Meleon has a highly flexible interface design. All the menus and toolbar buttons can be customized using text-format configuration files. This feature is useful in environments where the browser must be customized for general public use, such as in a public library or Internet café. Although individual toolbars can be repositioned, users must edit toolbar configuration files to make any changes to button layouts as there is no graphical user interface (GUI) to customize them.
The use of the native Windows interface means that K-Meleon does not support Mozilla-formatted browser themes. Compatibility with Mozilla extensions is also limited, with only a few extensions that can be integrated. However, K-Meleon has its own plugins (called "kplugins") and browser themes (using Lim Chee Aun's Phoenity by default), which can extend the functionality and customize the appearance of the browser. There is also a macro plugin which allows users to extend the browser functionality without having to know the C programming language.
Release history
References: K-Meleon file releases, release notes, Wiki documentation, and Announcements forum.
See also
Comparison of feed aggregators
Comparison of lightweight web browsers
Comparison of web browsers
List of feed aggregators
List of web browsers
References
External links
2000 software
Free web browsers
Gecko-based software
Gopher clients
News aggregator software
Portable software
Windows-only free software
Windows web browsers | [
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17440 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus%20Maria%20Brandauer | Klaus Maria Brandauer | Klaus Maria Brandauer (; born Klaus Georg Steng; 22 June 1943) is an Austrian actor and director. He is also a professor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar.
Brandauer is known internationally for his roles in The Russia House (1990), Mephisto (1981), Never Say Never Again (1983), Out of Africa (1985), Hanussen (1988), Burning Secret (1988), and White Fang (1991). For his supporting role as Bror von Blixen-Finecke in the drama film Out of Africa (1985), Brandauer was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award.
He has also appeared as King Nebuchadnezzar II in 1998, in Time Life’s Jeremiah, from The Bible Collection: The Old Testament.
Brandauer has at least a working knowledge of five languages: German, Italian, Hungarian, English and French and has acted in each.
Personal life
Brandauer was born as Klaus Georg Steng in Bad Aussee, Austria. He is the son of Maria Brandauer and Georg Steng (or Stenj), a civil servant. He subsequently took his mother's first name as part of his professional name, Klaus Maria Brandauer.
His first wife was Karin Katharina Müller (14 October 1945 – 13 November 1992), an Austrian film and television director and screenwriter, from 1963 until her death in 1992, aged 47, from cancer. Both were teenagers when they married, in 1963. They had one son, Christian. Brandauer married Natalie Krenn in 2007.
Career
Brandauer began acting on stage in 1962. After working in national theatre and television, he made his film debut in English in 1972, in The Salzburg Connection. In 1975 he played in Derrick – in Season 2, Episode 8 called "Pfandhaus". His starring and award-winning role in István Szabó's Mephisto (1981) playing a self-absorbed actor, launched his international career. (He would later act in Szabó's Oberst Redl (1985).)
Following his role in Mephisto, Brandauer appeared as Maximillian Largo in Never Say Never Again (1983), a remake of the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball. Roger Ebert said of his performance: "For one thing, there's more of a human element in the movie, and it comes from Klaus Maria Brandauer, as Largo. Brandauer is a wonderful actor, and he chooses not to play the villain as a cliché. Instead, he brings a certain poignancy and charm to Largo, and since Connery always has been a particularly human James Bond, the emotional stakes are more convincing this time." He starred in Out of Africa (1985), opposite Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Brandauer was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for the performance.
In 1987, he was the Head of the Jury at the 37th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1988 he appeared in Hanussen opposite Erland Josephson and Ildikó Bánsági. Brandauer was originally cast as Marko Ramius in The Hunt for Red October. That role eventually went to Sean Connery, who played James Bond to Brandauer's Largo in Never Say Never Again. He co-starred with Connery again in The Russia House (1990). His other film roles have been in The Lightship (1986), Streets of Gold (1986), Burning Secret (1988), White Fang (1991), (1991), Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999, as director Otto Preminger), and Everyman's Feast (2002). In 1989 he participated in the great production film for the bicentennial of the French Revolution by the French television channel TF1, La Révolution française: He played the role of Georges Danton.
Brandauer first work as movie director was, in 1989, , with himself in the title role.
In August 2006, Brandauer's much-awaited production of The Threepenny Opera gained a mixed reception. Brandauer had resisted questions about how his production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's classic musical comedy about the criminal MacHeath would differ from earlier versions, and his production featured Mack the Knife in a three-piece suit and white gloves, stuck to Brecht's text, and avoided any references to contemporary politics or issues.
Awards
1982: BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles – Mephisto (nominated)
1985: Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor – Out of Africa (won)
1985: National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actor – Out of Africa (won)
1985: NYFCC Award for Best Supporting Actor – Out of Africa (won)
1986: Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture – Out of Africa (won)
1986: Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor – Out of Africa (nominated)
1987: BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role – Out of Africa (nominated)
1988: European Film Award for Best Actor – Hanussen (nominated)
1988: Golden Ciak for Best Actor – Hanussen (won)
1989: Bavarian Film Awards for Best Actor – Burning Secret (won)
1995: Andrei Tarkovsky Award for Mario and the Magician (won)
1995: Golden St. George for Mario and the Magician (nominated)
2000: Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film – Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (nominated)
2000: Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie – Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (nominated)
Filmography
See also
List of German-speaking Academy Award winners and nominees
References
External links
1943 births
20th-century Austrian male actors
21st-century Austrian male actors
Austrian film directors
Austrian male film actors
Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe (film) winners
David di Donatello winners
German Film Award winners
Living people
People from Bad Aussee | [
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17441 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing%20KC-135%20Stratotanker | Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker | The Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker is an American military aerial refueling aircraft that was developed from the Boeing 367-80 prototype, alongside the Boeing 707 airliner. It is the predominant variant of the C-135 Stratolifter family of transport aircraft. The KC-135 was the US Air Force's first jet-powered refueling tanker and replaced the KC-97 Stratofreighter. The KC-135 was initially tasked with refueling strategic bombers, but it was used extensively in the Vietnam War and later conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm to extend the range and endurance of US tactical fighters and bombers.
The KC-135 entered service with the United States Air Force (USAF) in 1957; it is one of six military fixed-wing aircraft with over 50 years of continuous service with its original operator. The KC-135 is supplemented by the larger McDonnell Douglas KC-10 Extender. Studies have concluded that many of the aircraft could be flown until 2030, although maintenance costs have greatly increased. The KC-135 is to be partially replaced by the Boeing KC-46 Pegasus.
Development
Background
Like its sibling, the commercial Boeing 707 jet airliner, the KC-135 was derived from the Boeing 367-80 jet transport "proof of concept" demonstrator, which was commonly called the "Dash-80". The KC-135 is similar in appearance to the 707, but has a narrower fuselage and is shorter than the 707. The KC-135 predates the 707, and is structurally quite different from the civilian airliner. Boeing gave the future KC-135 tanker the initial designation Model 717.
In 1954 USAF's Strategic Air Command (SAC) held a competition for a jet-powered aerial refueling tanker. Lockheed's tanker version of the proposed Lockheed L-193 airliner with rear fuselage-mounted engines was declared the winner in 1955. Since Boeing's proposal was already flying, the KC-135 could be delivered two years earlier and Air Force Secretary Harold E. Talbott ordered 250 KC-135 tankers until Lockheed's design could be manufactured. In the end, orders for the Lockheed tanker were dropped rather than supporting two tanker designs. Lockheed never produced its jet airliner, while Boeing would eventually dominate the market with a family of airliners based on the 707.
In 1954, the Air Force placed an initial order for 29 KC-135As, the first of an eventual 820 of all variants of the basic C-135 family. The first aircraft flew in August 1956 and the initial production Stratotanker was delivered to Castle Air Force Base, California, in June 1957. The last KC-135 was delivered to the Air Force in 1965.
Developed in the early 1950s, the basic airframe is characterized by 35-degree aft swept wings and tail, four underwing-mounted engine pods, a horizontal stabilizer mounted on the fuselage near the bottom of the vertical stabilizer with positive dihedral on the two horizontal planes and a hi-frequency radio antenna which protrudes forward from the top of the vertical fin or stabilizer. These basic features make it strongly resemble the commercial Boeing 707 and 720 aircraft, although it is actually a different aircraft.
Reconnaissance and command post variants of the aircraft, including the RC-135 Rivet Joint and EC-135 Looking Glass aircraft were operated by SAC from 1963 through 1992, when they were reassigned to the Air Combat Command (ACC). The USAF EC-135 Looking Glass was subsequently replaced in its role by the U.S. Navy E-6 Mercury aircraft, a new build airframe based on the Boeing 707-320B.
Engine retrofits
All KC-135s were originally equipped with Pratt & Whitney J57-P-59W turbojet engines, which produced of thrust dry, and approximately of thrust wet. Wet thrust is achieved through the use of water injection on takeoff, as opposed to "wet thrust" when used to describe an afterburning engine. of water are injected into the engines over the course of three minutes. The water is injected into the inlet and the diffuser case in front of the combustion case. The water cools the air in the engine to increase its density; it also reduces the turbine gas temperature, which is a primary limitation on many jet engines. This allows the use of more fuel for proper combustion and creates more thrust for short periods of time, similar in concept to "War Emergency Power" in a piston-engined aircraft.
In the 1980s, the first modification program retrofitted 157 Air Force Reserve (AFRES) and Air National Guard (ANG) tankers with the Pratt & Whitney TF33-PW-102 turbofan engines from 707 airliners retired in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The modified tanker, designated the KC-135E, was 14% more fuel-efficient than the KC-135A and could offload 20% more fuel on long-duration flights. Only the KC-135E aircraft were equipped with thrust reversers for aborted takeoffs and shorter landing roll-outs. The KC-135E fleet has since either been retrofitted as the R-model configuration or placed into long-term storage ("XJ"), as Congress has prevented the Air Force from formally retiring them. The final KC-135E, tail number 56-3630, was delivered by the 101st Air Refueling Wing to the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) at Davis–Monthan Air Force Base in September 2009.
The second modification program retrofitted 500 aircraft with new CFM International CFM56 (military designation: F108) high-bypass turbofan engines produced by General Electric and Safran. The CFM56 engine produces approximately of thrust, nearly a 100% increase compared to the original J57 engine. The modified tanker, designated KC-135R (modified KC-135A or E) or KC-135T (modified KC-135Q), can offload up to 50% more fuel (on a long-duration sortie), is 25% more fuel-efficient, and costs 25% less to operate than with the previous engines. It is also significantly quieter than the KC-135A, with noise levels at takeoff reduced from 126 to 99 decibels.
The KC-135R's operational range is 60% greater than the KC-135E for comparable fuel offloads, providing a wider range of basing options.
Upgrading the remaining KC-135Es into KC-135Rs is no longer in consideration; this would have cost approximately US$3 billion, $24 million per aircraft. According to Air Force data, the KC-135 fleet had a total operation and support cost in fiscal year 2001 of about $2.2 billion. The older E model aircraft averaged total costs of about $4.6 million per aircraft, while the R models averaged about $3.7 million per aircraft. Those costs include personnel, fuel, maintenance, modifications, and spare parts.
Avionics upgrades
In order to expand the KC-135's capabilities and improve its reliability, the aircraft has undergone a number of avionics upgrades. Among these was the Pacer-CRAG program (compass, radar and GPS) which ran from 1999 to 2002 and modified all the aircraft in the inventory to eliminate the Navigator position from the flight crew. The fuel management system was also replaced. The program development was done by Rockwell Collins in Iowa and installation was performed by BAE Systems at the Mojave Airport in California. Block 40.6 allows the KC-135 to comply with global air-traffic management. The latest block upgrade to the KC-135, the Block 45 program, is online with the first 45 upgraded aircraft delivered by January 2017. Block 45 adds a new glass cockpit digital display, radio altimeter, digital autopilot, digital flight director and computer updates. The original, no longer procurable, analog instruments, including all engine gauges, were replaced. Rockwell Collins again supplied the major avionic modules and the modification work is being done at Tinker AFB.
Further upgrades and derivatives
The KC-135Q variant was modified to carry JP-7 fuel necessary for the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird by separating the JP-7 from the KC-135's own fuel supply (the body tanks carrying JP-7, and the wing tanks carrying JP-4 or JP-8). The tanker also had special fuel systems for moving the different fuels between different tanks. When the KC-135Q model received the CFM56 engines, it was redesignated the KC-135T model, which was capable of separating the main body tanks from the wing tanks where the KC-135 draws its engine fuel. The only external difference between a KC-135R and a KC-135T is the presence of a clear window on the underside of the empennage of the KC-135T where a remote controlled searchlight is mounted. It also has two ground refueling ports, located in each rear wheel well so ground crews can fuel both the body tanks and wing tanks separately.
Eight KC-135R aircraft are receiver-capable tankers, commonly referred to as KC-135R(RT). All eight aircraft were with the 22d Air Refueling Wing at McConnell AFB, Kansas, in 1994. They are primarily used for force extension and Special Operations missions, and are crewed by highly qualified receiver capable crews. If not used for the receiver mission, these aircraft can be flown just like any other KC-135R.
The Multi-point Refueling Systems (MPRS) modification adds refueling pods to the KC-135's wings. The pods allow refueling of U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and most NATO tactical jet aircraft while keeping the tail-mounted refueling boom. The pods themselves are Flight Refueling Limited MK.32B model pods, and refuel via the probe and drogue method common to Navy/Marine Corps tactical jets, rather than the primary "flying boom" method used by Air Force fixed-wing aircraft. This allows the tanker to refuel two receivers at the same time, which increases throughput compared to the boom drogue adapter.
A number of KC-135A and KC-135B aircraft have been modified to EC-135, RC-135 and OC-135 configurations for use in several different roles (although these could also be considered variants of the C-135 Stratolifter family).
Design
The KC-135R has four turbofan engines, mounted under 35-degree swept wings, which power it to takeoffs at gross weights up to . Nearly all internal fuel can be pumped through the tanker's flying boom, the KC-135's primary fuel transfer method. A special shuttlecock-shaped drogue, attached to and trailing behind the flying boom, may be used to refuel aircraft fitted with probes. This apparatus is significantly more unforgiving of pilot error in the receiving aircraft than conventional trailing hose arrangements; an aircraft so fitted is also incapable of refueling by the normal flying boom method until the attachment is removed. A boom operator stationed in the rear of the aircraft controls the boom while lying prone. A cargo deck above the refueling system can hold a mixed load of passengers and cargo. Depending on fuel storage configuration, the KC-135 can carry up to of cargo.
Operational history
Introduction into service
The KC-135 was initially purchased to support bombers of the Strategic Air Command, but by the late 1960s, in the Southeast Asia theater, the KC-135 Stratotanker's ability as a force multiplier came to the fore. Midair refueling of F-105 and F-4 fighter-bombers as well as B-52 bombers brought far-flung bombing targets within reach, and allowed fighter missions to spend hours at the front, rather than a few minutes, which was usual due to their limited fuel reserves and high fuel consumption. KC-135 crews refueled both Air Force and Navy / Marine Corps aircraft; though they would have to change to probe and drogue adapters depending upon the mission, the Navy and Marine Corps not having fitted their aircraft with flying boom receptacles since the USAF boom system was impractical for aircraft carrier operations. Crews also helped to bring in damaged aircraft which could sometimes fly while being fed by fuel to a landing site or to ditch over the water (specifically those with punctured fuel tanks). KC-135s continued their tactical support role in later conflicts such as Operation Desert Storm and current aerial strategy.
SAC had the KC-135 Stratotanker in service with Regular Air Force SAC units from 1957 through 1992 and with SAC-gained ANG and AFRES units from 1975 through 1992. Following a major USAF reorganization that resulted in the inactivation of SAC in 1992, most KC-135s were reassigned to the newly created AMC. While AMC gained the preponderance of the aerial refueling mission, a small number of KC-135s were also assigned directly to United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) and the Air Education and Training Command (AETC). All AFRC KC-135s and most of the ANG KC-135 fleet became operationally-gained by AMC, while Alaska Air National Guard and Hawaii Air National Guard KC-135s became operationally-gained by PACAF.
AMC manages 396 Stratotankers, of which the AFRC and ANG fly 243 in support of AMC's mission as of May 2018. The KC-135 is one of a few military aircraft types with over 50 years of continuous service with its original operator as of 2009.
Israel was offered KC-135s again in 2013, after turning down the aging aircraft twice due to expense of keeping them flying. The IAF again rejected the offered KC-135Es, but said that it would consider up to a dozen of the newer KC-135Rs.
Research usage
Besides its primary role as an inflight aircraft refueler, the KC-135, designated NKC-135, has assisted in several research projects at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, California. One such project occurred between 1979 and 1980 when special wingtip "winglets", developed by Richard Whitcomb of the Langley Research Center, were tested at Armstrong, using an NKC-135A tanker loaned to NASA by the Air Force. Winglets are small, nearly vertical fins installed on an aircraft's wing tips. The results of the research showed that drag was reduced and range could be increased by as much as 7 percent at cruise speeds. Winglets are now being incorporated into most new commercial and military transport/passenger jets, as well as business aviation jets.
NASA also has operated several KC-135 aircraft (without the tanker equipment installed) as their famed Vomit Comet zero-gravity simulator aircraft. The longest-serving (1973 to 1995) version was KC-135A, AF Ser. No. 59-1481, named Weightless Wonder IV and registered as N930NA.
Replacements
Between 1993 and 2003, the amount of KC-135 depot maintenance work doubled, and the overhaul cost per aircraft tripled. In 1996, it cost $8,400 per flight hour for the KC-135, and in 2002 this had grown to $11,000. The Air Force's 15-year estimates project further significant cost growth through fiscal year 2017. KC-135 fleet operations and support costs were estimated to grow from about $2.2 billion in fiscal year 2003 to $5.1 billion (2003 dollars) in fiscal year 2017, an increase of over 130 percent, which represented an annual operating cost growth rate of about 6.2 percent.
The Air Force projected that E and R models have lifetime flying hour limits of 36,000 and 39,000 hours, respectively. According to the Air Force, only a few KC-135s would reach these limits by 2040, when some aircraft would be about 80 years old. A later 2005 Air Force study estimated that KC-135Es upgraded to the R standard could remain in use until 2030.
In 2006, the KC-135E fleet was flying an annual average of 350 hours per aircraft and the KC-135R fleet was flying an annual average of 710 hours per aircraft. The KC-135 fleet is currently flying double its planned yearly flying hour program to meet airborne refueling requirements, and has resulted in higher than forecast usage and sustainment costs. In March 2009, the Air Force indicated that KC-135s would require additional skin replacement to allow their continued use beyond 2018.
The USAF decided to replace the KC-135 fleet. However, the KC-135 fleet is large and will need to be replaced gradually. Initially the first batch of replacement planes was to be an air tanker version of the Boeing 767, leased from Boeing. In 2003, this was changed to contract where the Air Force would purchase 80 KC-767 aircraft and lease 20 more. In December 2003, the Pentagon froze the contract and in January 2006, the KC-767 contract was canceled. This move followed public revelations of corruption in how the contract was awarded, as well as controversy regarding the original leasing rather than outright purchase agreement. The then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld stated that that move would in no way impair the Air Force's ability to deliver the mission of the KC-767, which would be accomplished by implementing continuing upgrades to the KC-135 and KC-10 Extender fleet.
In January 2007, the U.S. Air Force formally launched the KC-X program, with a request for proposal (RFP). KC-X was the first phase of three acquisition programs meant to replace the KC-135 fleet. On 29 February 2008, the US Defense Department announced that it had selected the EADS/Northrop Grumman "KC-30" (to be designated the KC-45A) over the Boeing KC-767. Boeing protested the award on 11 March 2008, citing irregularities in the competition and bid evaluation. On 18 June 2008, the US Government Accountability Office sustained Boeing's protest of the selection of the Northrop Grumman/EADS's tanker. In February 2010, the US Air Force restarted the KC-X competition with the release of a revised request for proposal (RFP). After evaluating bids, the USAF selected Boeing's 767-based tanker design, with the military designation KC-46, as a replacement in February 2011. The first KC-46A Pegasus was delivered to the U.S. Air Force on 10 January 2019.
Two foreign users of the KC-135, the French Air Force and the Republic of Singapore Air Force took deliveries of Airbus A330 MRTTs as replacements for their Stratotankers.
Variants
KC-135A
Original production version powered by four Pratt & Whitney J57s, 732 built. Given the Boeing model numbers 717-100A, 717-146 and 717-148.
NKC-135A
Test-configured KC-135A.
KC-135B
Airborne command post version equipped with turbofan engines, 17 built. Provided with in-flight refueling capability and redesignated EC-135C. Given the model number 717-166.
KC-135D
All four RC-135As (Pacer Swan) were modified to partial KC-135A configuration in 1979. The four aircraft (serial numbers 63-8058, 63-8059, 63-8060 and 63-8061) were given a unique designation KC-135D as they differed from the KC-135A in that they were built with a flight engineer's position on the flight deck. The flight engineer's position was removed when the aircraft were modified to KC-135 standards but they retained their electrically powered wing flap secondary (emergency) drive mechanism and second air conditioning pack which had been used to cool the RC-135As on-board photo-mapping systems. Later re-engined with Pratt & Whitney TF33 engines and a cockpit update to KC-135E standards in 1990 and were retired to the 309th AMARG at Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ in 2007.
KC-135E
Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve KC-135As re-engined with Pratt & Whitney TF33-PW-102 engines from retired 707 airliners (161 modified). All E model aircraft were retired to the 309th AMARG at Davis-Monthan AFB by September 2009 and replaced with R models.
NKC-135E
Test-configured KC-135E. 55-3132 NKC-135E "Big Crow I" & 63-8050 NKC-135B "Big Crow II" used as airborne targets for the Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser carrier.
KC-135Q
KC-135As modified to carry JP-7 fuel necessary for the SR-71 Blackbird, 56 modified, survivors to KC-135T.
KC-135R (1960s)
4 JC/KC-135As converted to Rivet Stand (Later Rivet Quick) configuration for reconnaissance and evaluation of above ground nuclear test (55-3121, 59–1465, 59–1514, 58–0126; 58-0126 replaced 59-1465 after it crashed in 1967). These aircraft were powered by Pratt & Whitney J57 engines and were based at Offutt AFB, Nebraska.
KC-135R
KC-135As and some KC-135Es re-engined with CFM56 engines, more than 417 converted
KC-135R(RT)
Receiver-capable KC-135R Stratotanker; eight modified with either a Boeing or LTV receiver system and a secure voice SATCOM radio. Three of the aircraft (60-0356, -0357, and -0362) were converted to tankers from RC-135Ds, from which they retained their added equipment.
KC-135T
KC-135Q re-engined with CFM56 engines, 54 modified.
C-135F
A new-built variant for France as dual-role tanker/cargo and troop carrier aircraft. 12 were built for the French Air Force with the addition of a drogue adapter on the refueling boom. Given Boeing model numbers 717-164 and 717-165.
C-135FR
11 surviving C-135Fs upgraded with CFM International F108 turbofans between 1985 and 1988. Later modified with MPRS wing pods.
EC-135Y
An airborne command post modified in 1984 to support CINCCENT. Aircraft 55-3125 was the only EC-135Y. Unlike its sister EC-135N, it was a true tanker that could also receive in-flight refueling. Pratt & Whitney TF33-PW-102. Retired to 309th AMARG at Davis-Monthan AFB, AZ.
Operators
Chilean Air Force operates 3 KC-135Es. It received its first KC-135E in February 2010.
French Air and Space Force operates 11 C-135FRs and 3 KC-135Rs, which are being replaced by 15 Airbus A330 MRTTs, French military designation Phénix, from 2018 to 2023.
Turkish Air Force operates 7 KC-135Rs.
United States Air Force operates 398 KC-135s (156 Active duty, 70 Air Force Reserve, and 172 Air National Guard) .
57th Wing – Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada
509th Weapons Squadron – Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington
97th Air Mobility Wing – Altus Air Force Base, Oklahoma
54th Air Refueling Squadron
55th Air Refueling Squadron
412th Test Wing – Edwards AFB, California
412th Flight Test Squadron
418th Flight Test Squadron
6th Air Refueling Wing – MacDill AFB, Florida
50th Air Refueling Squadron
91st Air Refueling Squadron
99th Air Refueling Squadron – Birmingham Air National Guard Base, Alabama (Associate with 117th ARW)
22d Air Refueling Wing – McConnell AFB, Kansas
349th Air Refueling Squadron
350th Air Refueling Squadron
92d Air Refueling Wing – Fairchild AFB, Washington
92d Air Refueling Squadron
93d Air Refueling Squadron
97th Air Refueling Squadron
384th Air Refueling Squadron
912th Air Refueling Squadron – March ARB, California (Associate with 452d ARW)
375th Air Mobility Wing – Scott AFB, Illinois
906th Air Refueling Squadron (associate with 126th ARW)
18th Wing – Kadena AB, Japan
909th Air Refueling Squadron
100th Air Refueling Wing – RAF Mildenhall, England, UK
351st Air Refueling Squadron
Air Force Reserve
434th Air Refueling Wing – Grissom ARB, Indiana
72d Air Refueling Squadron
74th Air Refueling Squadron
452d Air Mobility Wing – March ARB, California
336th Air Refueling Squadron
459th Air Refueling Wing – Andrews AFB, Maryland
756th Air Refueling Squadron
507th Air Refueling Wing – Tinker AFB, Oklahoma
465th Air Refueling Squadron
730th Air Mobility Training Squadron (Altus AFB, Oklahoma)
914th Air Refueling Wing - Niagara Falls International Airport, New York
328th Air Refueling Squadron
927th Air Refueling Wing – MacDill AFB, Florida (Associate with 6th AMW)
63d Air Refueling Squadron
931st Air Refueling Group – McConnell AFB, Kansas (Associate with 22d ARW)
18th Air Refueling Squadron
940th Air Refueling Wing – Beale AFB, California
314th Air Refueling Squadron
Air National Guard
101st Air Refueling Wing – Bangor, Maine
132d Air Refueilng Squadron
108th Wing – McGuire AFB, New Jersey
141st Air Refueling Squadron
117th Air Refueling Wing – Birmingham, Alabama
106th Air Refueling Squadron
121st Air Refueling Wing – Rickenbacker ANGB, Ohio
166th Air Refueling Squadron
126th Air Refueling Wing – Scott AFB, Illinois
108th Air Refueling Squadron
127th Wing – Selfridge ANGB, Michigan
171st Air Refueling Squadron
128th Air Refueling Wing – Milwaukee, Wisconsin
126th Air Refueling Squadron
134th Air Refueling Wing – Knoxville, Tennessee
151st Air Refueling Squadron
141st Air Refueling Wing – Fairchild AFB, Washington (Associate with 92d ARW)
116th Air Refueling Squadron
151st Air Refueling Wing – Salt Lake City, Utah
191st Air Refueling Squadron
154th Wing – Hickam AFB, Hawaii
203d Air Refueling Squadron
155th Air Refueling Wing – Lincoln, Nebraska
173rd Air Refueling Squadron
161st Air Refueling Wing – Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport / Goldwater Air National Guard Base, Arizona
197th Air Refueling Squadron
168th Air Refueling Wing – Eielson AFB, Alaska
168th Air Refueling Squadron
171st Air Refueling Wing – Pittsburgh IAP Air Reserve Station, Pennsylvania
146th Air Refueling Squadron
147th Air Refueling Squadron
185th Air Refueling Wing – Sioux City, Iowa
174th Air Refueling Squadron
186th Air Refueling Wing – Meridian, Mississippi
153d Air Refueling Squadron
190th Air Refueling Wing – Topeka, Kansas
117th Air Refueling Squadron
Meta Aerospace operates 4 KC-135Rs. These aircraft were purchased from the Republic of Singapore Air Force when the latter retired them in 2019. They were delivered in late 2020.
Note Italy has been reported in some sources as operating several KC-135s, however these are actually Boeing 707-300s converted to tanker configuration.
Former operators
Republic of Singapore Air Force operated 4 former USAF KC-135R tankers, first delivered September 10, 1999; they were occasionally used as VIP, aeromedical transports and military support. The aircraft were retired in June 2019, having been replaced in service by 6 Airbus A330 MRTTs. They were subsequently purchased by private US defence services company Meta Aerospace in October 2020.
NASA (until 2004)
United States Air Force
6th Air Refueling Wing – MacDill AFB, Florida
911th Air Refueling Squadron – Seymour-Johnson AFB, North Carolina (Associate with 916th ARW)
22d Air Refueling Wing – McConnell AFB, Kansas
344th Air Refueling Squadron
916th Air Refueling Wing – Seymour Johnson AFB, North Carolina
77th Air Refueling Squadron
931st Air Refueling Group – McConnell AFB, Kansas (Associate with 22d ARW)
924th Air Refueling Squadron
Air National Guard
107th Air Refueling Wing – Niagara Falls ARS, New York
136th Air Refueling Squadron (1994–2008)
121st Air Refueling Wing – Rickenbacker ANGB, Ohio
145th Air Refueling Squadron (1975–2013)
137th Air Refueling Wing – Tinker AFB, Oklahoma
185th Air Refueling Squadron (2008–2015)
157th Air Refueling Wing – Pease ANGB, New Hampshire
133d Air Refueling Squadron (1975–2019)
163rd Air Refueling Wing – March ARB, California
196th Air Refueling Squadron (1993–2006)
184th Air Refueling Wing – McConnell AFB, Kansas
127th Air Refueling Squadron (2002–2008)
189th Air Refueling Wing – Little Rock AFB, Arkansas
154th Air Refueling Squadron (1973–1986)
Accidents
As of 2020, 52 Stratotankers have been lost to accidents during the over sixty years of service, involving 385 fatalities.
27 June 1958 USAF KC-135A, serial number 56-3599, stalled and crashed at Westover Air Force Base after the crew failed to extend the flaps on takeoff, killing all 15 on board. The aircraft was attempting a world speed record between New York and London.
31 March 1959 USAF KC-135A, 58-0002, entered a thunderstorm near Killeen, Texas. Two engines separated and one of the engines struck the tail, causing loss of control. The aircraft crashed on a hillside, killing all four crew on board. The aircraft had been delivered just six weeks before the accident.
15 October 1959 USAF KC-135A, 57-1513, collided in mid-air with B-52F 57-0036 at over Leitchfield, Kentucky, killing all six on board both aircraft.
3 February 1960 USAF KC-135A, 56–3628, crashed on takeoff in extremely gusty crosswind conditions at Roswell-Walker AFB, NM. The airplane skidded into two other KC-135 tankers (57-1449 and 57–1457) and a hangar and burst into flames. The aircraft was on a training flight, but the instructor pilot was occupying the jump seat instead of one of the pilot seats as directed by the local commander. The destruction of three aircraft, along with the death of all six in the crew plus an additional two deaths on the ground made this a unique mishap.
18 November 1960 USAF KC-135A, 56-3605, crashed on landing at Loring Air Force Base due to an excessive sink rate, killing one of 17 on board.
9 May 1962 USAF KC-135A, 56-3618, crashed on takeoff from Loring Air Force Base due to engine failure, killing all six on board.
8 August 1962 USAF KC-135A, 55-3144, crashed on approach to Runway 11 at Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts, killing all three on board. Stock footage of this same aircraft had been used during the opening credits of the film Dr. Strangelove.
10 September 1962 USAF KC-135A, 60-0352 on a flight from Ellsworth Air Force Base to Fairchild Air Force Base crashed into a mountain just 20 miles (32 km) northeast of Spokane, Washington. The flight hit fog on approach to the air base and hit Mount Kit Carson, a mountain. The crash killed all four crew and 40 passengers on board.
27 February 1963 USAF KC-135A, 56-3597, crashed on takeoff at Eielson Air Force Base due to engine separation, killing all seven on board; two on the ground died when debris from the crash struck a guard house and nearby waiting room.
21 June 1963 USAF KC-135A-BN Stratotanker, 57-1498 out of Westover AFB crashed on approach during a training flight in a wooded area near Belchertown, MA. One of the four occupants was killed.
28 August 1963 USAF KC-135A, 61-0322, collided in mid-air with KC-135A 61-0319 west of Bermuda, killing all 11 on board both aircraft.
8 July 1964 USAF KC-135A, 60-0340, collided in mid-air with F-105 Thunderchief 61-0091 during in-flight refueling over Death Valley, California, killing all five on board both aircraft.
4 January 1965 USAF KC-135A, 61-0265, crashed on climbout from Loring Air Force Base after two engines separated, killing all four on board.
16 January 1965 USAF KC-135A 57-1442, crashed after its rudder control system suffered a malfunction shortly after takeoff from McConnell Air Force Base, Kansas. The fuel-laden plane crashed at a street intersection and caused a considerable fire. A total of 30 were killed, including 23 on the ground and the seven member crew.
26 February 1965 USAF KC-135A, 63-8882, collided in mid-air with B-47E 52-0171 over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all eight on board both aircraft.
3 June 1965 USAF KC-135A, 63-0842, lost electrical power on takeoff and crashed at Walker Air Force Base, killing all five on board.
17 January 1966 A fatal collision occurred between a B-52G, 58-0256, and a KC-135A, 61-0273, flying out of Moron AB, Spain while flying over Palomares, Spain. The B-52G was on an Operation Chrome Dome mission, which required multiple air refuelings. The mishap caused both aircraft to break up in mid-air and killed all four crew members on the KC-135A and three of the seven on the B-52G, while causing radiological contamination, as nuclear weapons had to be recovered from on land and at sea, nearby.
19 May 1966 USAF KC-135A, 57-1444, of 4252nd Strategic Wing, crashed on takeoff from Kadena Air Base, killing all 11 on board as well as a motorist on nearby Highway 16. The aircraft was bound for Yokota Air Base to repair a KC-135 when it lifted off too soon during a heavy-weight takeoff.
19 January 1967 USAF KC-135A, 56-3613, crashed into Shadow Mountain, foothill of Mount Spokane (elevation MSL) while descending towards Fairchild Air Force Base, killing all nine on board.
17 January 1968 USAF KC-135A, 58-0026, stalled and crashed at Minot Air Force Base after the pilot overrotated the aircraft during takeoff in a snowstorm, killing all 13 on board including the 15th Air Force Vice Commander MGen Charles Eisenhart. This accident was instrumental in the decision to refit the KC-135 fleet with the Collins FD-109(V) integrated flight director system, in place of the earlier "round dial" cockpit layout.
30 July 1968 USAF KC-135A, 56-3655, crashed on Mount Lassen after the vertical stabilizer broke off after a sharp turn while practicing an emergency descent, killing all nine on board.
24 September 1968 USAF KC-135A, "55-3133A", crashed on landing at Wake Island, Micronesia. Aircraft developed engine problems while en route from Andersen AFB, Guam to Hickam AFB, HI and during landing at Wake Island the aircraft contacted the surface of the water and bounced onto the east end of the runway. There were 11 fatalities out 56 persons on board.
1 October 1968 USAF KC-135A, 55-3138, struck concrete and steel light poles on takeoff and crashed at U-Tapao Airport, Thailand after a loss of power in an engine and resultant loss of control, killing all four on board.
22 October 1968 USAF KC-135A, 61-0301, flew into a mountain while descending to Ching Chuan Kang Air Base, Taiwan, killing all six on board.
19 December 1969 USAF KC-135A, 56-3629, crashed into the sea on climbout from Ching Chuan Kang Air Base due to low-level windshear, killing all four on board.
3 June 1971 USAF KC-135Q, 58-0039, exploded in mid-air and crashed at Centenera, Spain, killing all five on board.
13 March 1972 KC-135A, 58-0048, crashed while landing at Carswell AFB. Its right wing struck the ground, which led to the airplane exploding and killing all 5 on board.
8 March 1973 USAF KC-135A, 63-7989, collided with KC-135 63-7980 on the ramp at Lockbourne Air Force Base and caught fire, killing two of five on board.
7 December 1975 USAF KC-135A, 60-0354, from Plattsburgh AFB, NY, crashed after takeoff at Eielson AFB, AK, killing all four crewmembers. Launch was delayed because of problems with the receiver aircraft. The KC-135 was required to sit at the end of the runway in extremely cold weather, without heat, with engines shut down. Repeated requests for a mobile heat source were denied by the command post. Landing gear failed to retract after takeoff. Crewmembers may have suffered from hypothermia.
6 February 1976 USAF KC-135A, 60-0368, flew into a mountain while descending to Torrejon Air Base, Spain, killing all seven on board. The aircraft was assigned to the 410th BMW/46th AREFS at K.I. Sawyer AFB, Michigan, but, as is often the case on Tanker Task Force deployed operations, the flight crew was from another SAC unit at Seymour-Johnson AFB, NC. Only two aircraft crew chiefs on board were from K I Sawyer AFB, MI.
26 September 1976 USAF KC-135A, 61-0296, crashed while on approach to Wurtsmith Air Force Base, Michigan, killing 15 passengers and flight crew on board. The aircraft was flying a "First Team" mission taking 10 passengers to HQ-Strategic Air Command for briefings and orientation. The crew became distracted by a cabin pressurization problem after an intermediate stop and descended into a wooded area about southwest of Alpena, Michigan. There was one survivor, reportedly a crew chief who was in the boom operator aft station (boom pod) at the time of the crash.
29 April 1977 USAF KC-135A, 58-0101 from Castle AFB hit five or six cows while practicing night takeoffs and landings at Beale AFB. Takeoff was aborted and the plane overran the runway and caught on fire. Of the crew of 7, there were no fatalities. During that time cattle strayed through a broken fence from a nearby field and onto the runway.
19 September 1979 USAF KC-135A, 58-0127, from Castle AFB crashed on the runway during a simulated engine failure on a training flight, killing 15 of 20 occupants on board.
13 March 1982 Arizona ANG KC-135A, 57-1489 collided in mid-air with a civilian Grumman-American AA-1 Yankee near Luke AFB, AZ. The collision, which occurred as the tanker was descending on an IFR flight plan through an undercast, was struck by the civilian aircraft operating VFR just below the cloud deck, causing the tail of the KC-135 to be severed by the force of the impact. The two civilians on the AA-1 and all four crew on the KC-135 were killed. Included among the dead was the squadron commander of the 197th AREFS, Lt Col James N. Floor.
19 March 1982 USAF KC-135A, 58-0031, exploded in mid-air at and crashed at Greenwood, Illinois, due to a possible overheated fuel pump, killing all 27 on board.
19 March 1985 USAF 8th AF KC-135A 61-0316 caught fire during ground refueling at Cairo International Airport (CAI), Cairo, Egypt. The interior of the airplane was burned out and the aircraft was written off as damaged beyond repair although the wing structure was used in repairing KC-135A 58-0014 (which was later converted to a KC-135E). There were no injuries reported.
28 August 1985 USAF KC-135A 59-1443 was damaged beyond repair when a student pilot allowed an engine to contact the runway during a landing attempt at Beale Air Force Base near Marysville, California. During the go-around the instructor lost control of the aircraft while performing checklist items for an in-flight fire. All seven (three instructors and four students) aboard the aircraft died in the crash.
17 June 1986 USAF KC-135A,63-7983, crashed while en route to Howard AFB, Panama. It struck a hill south of the nearby Rodman Naval Station, killing all four crew members on board. The tanker and crew were based at Grissom Air Force Base, Indiana.
13 March 1987 USAF KC-135A, 60-0361, crashed at Fairchild Air Force Base after encountering wake turbulence from a B-52, while practicing a low-level refueling display. The aircraft rolled 80 degrees to the left, which stalled both left side engines (#1 and #2). The crew was able to recover to wings level, but were too low and impacted the ground in an open area of the base. The accident killed all six on board and one person on the ground.
11 October 1988 USAF KC-135A, 60-0317, crashed at Wurtsmith Force Base after a hard landing following a steep approach during crosswinds. The airplane went off the side of the runway and broke up. A fire erupted and killed all six crewmembers on board, while 10 passengers were able to jump to safety. Pilot error was determined as the cause of the accident.
20 November 1988 USAF KC-135 suffered a failure of a sighting window next to the sextant port in the cockpit during a trans-Atlantic flight. A boom operator died when he was sucked partway through the 10-inch by 8-inch window opening as the cockpit depressurized. None of the 17 others on board were injured.
31 January 1989 USAF KC-135A, 63-7990, crashed on takeoff from Dyess AFB, TX after the water-injection system for the Pratt & Whitney J-57 engines failed and the remaining "dry" thrust was insufficient for flight at the takeoff gross weight. The mission was scheduled as a non-stop flight to Hickam AFB/Honolulu HI with an en route F-16 air refueling mission. 7 crew members and 12 passengers, including military spouses, retired military members and one child, were killed. The aircraft and crew were based at K I Sawyer AFB, MI.
20 September 1989 USAF KC-135E, 57-1481, exploded on the ground at Eielson Air Force Base due to an overheated fuel pump, killing two of seven on board. The crew was shutting down the engines when the explosion occurred.
4 October 1989 KC-135A, 56-3592, from en route from Loring Air Force Base crashed into a hill along the west side of Trans-Canada Highway 2 at Carlingford, New Brunswick due to an overheated fuel pump, killing all four crew members. After five accidents involving fuel pump overheating, crews were to keep of fuel in the tank.
11 January 1990 KC-135E, 59-1494, caught fire on the tarmac at Pease Air National Guard Base during maintenance work; there were no injuries, however the aircraft was destroyed.
6 February 1991 KC-135E, call sign "Balls 13", 58-0013 , flown by Maj. Kevin Sweeney (pilot), Capt. Jay Selanders (co-pilot), Capt. Greg Mermis (navigator), and Senior Master Sgt. Steve Stucky (boom operator), during the Gulf War, after entering severe wake turbulence from a passing KC-135, the plane lost both engines from under the left wing. The crew landed it successfully and it was later returned in service. The entire crew received the Distinguished Flying Cross for their actions.
10 December 1993 a Wisconsin Air National Guard KC-135R, 57-1470, exploded while undergoing routine ground maintenance at General Mitchell Air National Guard Base due to an overheated fuel pump. Six NCO maintenance personnel were killed.
13 January 1999 Washington Air National Guard KC-135E, 59-1452, crashed on approach in Geilenkirchen, Germany due to the horizontal stabilizer being in a 7.5 nose-up trim condition, killing all 4 crew members.
7 April 1999 Air National Guard KC-135R, 57-1418, was damaged beyond repair while undergoing a cabin pressurization check while in depot maintenance at the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center at Tinker AFB, Oklahoma. During a previous maintenance event, the pressure relief valves were secured shut and not released afterwards. This created a catastrophic explosion that nearly separated the empennage from the aircraft and destroyed the aft fuselage section. No personnel were injured or killed during the mishap, but the aircraft was a total loss.
26 September 2006 USAF KC-135R, 63-8886, was damaged beyond economical repair when it was struck by a Tupolev Tu-154 of Altyn Air, EX-85718, while stopped on a taxiway after landing at Manas Air Base. As the Tu-154 took off, its right wing struck the fairing of the KC-135R's No. 1 engine. The force of the impact nearly severed the No. 1 engine and destroyed a portion of the left wing. The resulting fire caused extensive damage to the KC-135. The Tu-154 lost about of its right wingtip, but was able to get airborne and return to the airport for an emergency landing. The tanker crew had been directed to use a taxiway which was not usable for night operations and the controller failed to note that they reported "holding short" of that taxiway, rather than "clear of" that point. The crew of the KC-135 evacuated the aircraft without serious injuries.
3 May 2013 A McConnell AFB, KS (USAF) KC-135R, 63-8877, flown by a Fairchild AFB, Washington aircrew, broke up in flight about eight minutes after taking off from Manas Air base in Kyrgyzstan, killing all three crew members. After investigation, it was determined that a rudder power control unit malfunction led to a Dutch roll oscillatory instability. Not recognizing the Dutch roll, the crew used the rudder to stay on course, which exacerbated the instability, leading to an unrecoverable flight condition. The over-stressed tail section detached and the aircraft broke apart soon after. The aircraft was at cruise altitude about 200 km west of Bishkek before it crashed in a mountainous area near the village of Chorgolu, close to the border between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Aircraft on display
55-3118 The City of Renton – KC-135A on static display at the entrance to McConnell Air Force Base, Kansas. It was the first aircraft built and was used in a variety of test roles. It was later converted to an EC-135K before reverting to a tanker configuration.
55-3130 Old Grandad – KC-135A on static display at the March Field Air Museum, March ARB, California.
55-3139 City of Atwater – KC-135A on static display at the Castle Air Museum at the former Castle AFB, California.
56-3595 – KC-135A on static display at the Barksdale Global Power Museum at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana.
56-3611 – KC-135E on static display Scott Field Heritage Air Park at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois.
56-3639 – KC-135A on static display at the Linear Air Park at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas.
56-3658 Iron Eagle – KC-135E on static display at the Kansas Aviation Museum.
57-1429 – KC-135E on static display at the Museum of the Kansas National Guard at Forbes Field Air National Guard Base in Kansas.
57-1458 – KC-135E on static display at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska.
57-1495 – KC-135E in storage at Lincoln Air National Guard Base, Nebraska.
57-1507 – KC-135E on static display at the Air Mobility Command Museum at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
57-1510 Never Forget – KC-135E on static display at the Hill Aerospace Museum at Hill Air Force Base, Utah.
59-1481 – KC-135A on static display at Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base, Texas. It was operated by NASA as N930NA and one of two KC-135s used for zero-gravity and other research purposes.
59-1487 – KC-135E on static display at the 126th Air Refueling Wing / Illinois Air National Guard complex at Scott Air Force Base.
59-1497 – KC-135E on static display at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey.
63-7998 – KC-135A on static display at the Pima Air & Space Museum, adjacent to Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona. It was operated by NASA as N931NA and is the second of their two research aircraft.
63-8005 – KC-135A on static display at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota.
Specifications (KC-135R)
See also
References
Bibliography
External links
USAF KC-135 fact sheet and photo gallery at official USAF website
KC-135 history page and KC-135 image gallery on Boeing.com
KC-135 page on awacs-spotter.nl
Photo gallery of NASA's KC-135A tanker
KC-135 page at globalsecurity.org
KC-135 page at fas.org - (not updated since late 1999, but still perhaps useful)
C-135 page at aero-web.org - Includes specs for many variants
Smart Tankers (Defence Today)
Air refueling
KC-135 Stratotanker
KC-135 Stratotanker
Quadjets
Low-wing aircraft
Aircraft first flown in 1956 | [
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17442 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsuhiro%20Otomo | Katsuhiro Otomo | is a Japanese manga artist, screenwriter, animator and film director. He is best known as the creator of Akira, in terms of both the original 1982 manga series and the 1988 animated film adaptation. He was decorated a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2005, promoted to Officier of the order in 2014, became the fourth manga artist ever inducted into the American Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2012, and was awarded the Purple Medal of Honor from the Japanese government in 2013. Otomo later received the Winsor McCay Award at the 41st Annie Awards in 2014 and the 2015 Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême, the first manga artist to receive the award. Otomo is married to Yoko Otomo. Together they have one child, a son named Shohei Otomo, who is also an artist.
Early life
Katsuhiro Otomo was born in Tome, Miyagi Prefecture and grew up in Tome District. He said that living in the very rural Tōhoku region left him with nothing to do as a child, so he read a lot of manga. As the only boy in a family with older and younger sisters, he enjoyed reading and drawing manga on his own and thought about becoming a manga artist. Limited by his parents to buying one manga book a month, Otomo typically chose Kobunsha's Shōnen magazine, which included Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka and Tetsujin 28-go by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, series which he would copy drawing in elementary school. However, he said it was after reading Shotaro Ishinomori's How to Draw Manga that he understood how to draw manga properly and started doing so more seriously.
While Otomo was in high school, he became fascinated with movies and thought about becoming an illustrator or film director. At this time, one of his friends introduced him to an editor at Futabasha, who, after seeing Otomo's manga, told the high school student to contact him if he moved to Tokyo after graduating. Otomo did exactly that, and began his career as a professional manga artist.
Career
Manga
On October 4, 1973, Otomo published his first work, a manga adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's short story Mateo Falcone, titled A Gun Report.
In 1979, after writing multiple short-stories for the magazine Weekly Manga Action, Otomo created his first science-fiction work, titled Fireball. Although the manga was never completed, it is regarded as a milestone in Otomo's career as it contained many of the same themes he would explore in his later, more successful manga such as Dōmu. Dōmu began serialization in January 1980 and ran until July 1981. It was not published in book form until 1983, when it won the Nihon SF Taisho Award. It also won the 1984 Seiun Award for Best Comic.
In a collaboration with writer Toshihiko Yahagi, Otomo illustrated Kibun wa mō Sensō about a fictional war that erupts in the border between China and the Soviet Union. It was published in Weekly Manga Action from 1980 to 1981 and collected into one volume in 1982. It won the 1982 Seiun Award for Best Comic. 38 years later, the two created the one-shot sequel Kibun wa mō Sensō 3 (Datta Kamo Shirenai) for the April 16, 2019 issue of the magazine.
Also in 1981, Otomo drew A Farewell to Weapons for the November 16 issue of Kodansha's Young Magazine. It was later included in the 1990 short story collection Kanojo no Omoide....
In 1982, Otomo began what would become his most acclaimed and famous work: Akira. Kodansha had been asking him to write a series for their new Young Magazine for some time, but he had been busy with other work. From the first meeting with the publisher, Akira was to be only about ten chapters "or something like that," so Otomo said he was really not expecting it to be a success. It was serialized for eight years and 2000 pages of artwork.
In 1990, Otomo did a brief interview with MTV for a general segment on the Japanese manga scene at the time. Otomo created the one-shot Hi no Yōjin about people who put out fires in Japan's Edo period for the debut issue of Comic Cue in January 1995.
Otomo wrote the 2001 picture book Hipira: The Little Vampire, which was illustrated by Shinji Kimura.
Otomo created the full-color work DJ Teck no Morning Attack for the April 2012 issue of Geijutsu Shincho.
Following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Otomo, a native of the Tōhoku region, designed a relief that features a boy riding a robot goldfish in rough seas, while flanked by Fūjin and Raijin. Intended to capture the region's will to overcome the natural disaster, it has been located on the first floor of the terminal building at Sendai Airport since March 2015.
In 2019, Kodansha announced that they will be re-releasing Otomo's entire body of manga since 1971 as part of "The Complete Works Project". It was noted that some of his manga were edited when initially compiled into book format, and this new project, personally overseen by Otomo, plans to restore them to how they appeared in their original serialization.
Otomo was initially reported in 2012 to be working on his first long-form manga since Akira. Planning to draw the work that is set during Japan's Meiji period without assistants, he was initially targeting a younger audience, but said the story had developed more towards an older one. Although planned to begin in fall 2012, Otomo revealed in November of that year that the series had been delayed. In 2018, Otomo said he is working on a full-length work, but the contents are secret.
Film
At the age of 25, Otomo spent about 5 million yen to make a 16 mm live-action film about an hour long. He said that making this private film showed him roughly how to make and direct movies. In 1982, Otomo made his anime debut, working as character designer for the animated film Harmagedon: Genma Wars. It was while working on this film that Otomo began to think he could do it by himself.
In 1987, Otomo directed an animated work for the first time: a segment, which he also wrote the screenplay and drew animation for, in the anthology feature Neo Tokyo. He followed this up with two segments in another anthology released that year, Robot Carnival. In 1988, he directed the animated film adaptation of his manga Akira.
Otomo was executive producer of 1995's Memories, an anthology film based on three of his stories. Additionally, he wrote the script for Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder, the latter of which he also directed.
Otomo has worked extensively with the studio Sunrise. In 1998, he directed the CG short Gundam: Mission to the Rise to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their Gundam franchise. The studio has animated and produced his 2004 feature film Steamboy, 2006's Freedom Project, and 2007's SOS! Tokyo Metro Explorers: The Next. The last, is based on Otomo's 1980 manga SOS! Tokyo Metro Explorer and follows the son of its main characters.
The 2001 animated film Metropolis features a script written by Otomo that adapts Tezuka's manga of the same name.
Otomo directed the 2006 live-action film Mushishi, based on Yuki Urushibara's manga of the same name.
In 2013, Otomo took part in Short Peace, an anthology consisting on 4 short films; he directed Combustible, a tragic love story set in the Edo period based on his 1995 manga Hi no Yōjin, while Hajime Katoki directed A Farewell to Weapons, depicting a battle in a ruined Tokyo based on Otomo's 1981 manga of the same name. Combustible won the Grand Prize in the Animation category of the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2012, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Best Animated Short at the 85th Academy Awards, but failed to get nominated.
Otomo directed the music video for Aya Nakano's 2016 song "Juku-Hatachi". He is a fan of the singer and previously drew the cover to her 2014 album Warui Kuse.
Reports have suggested that Otomo will be the executive producer of the live-action film adaptation of Akira. In 2019, he announced that he is writing and directing an animated film adaptation of his 2001 manga Orbital Era with Sunrise.
Style
Otomo said that when he started his professional career in the late 1970s, "almost all manga was gekiga like Golgo 13. So it was all gekiga or sports manga, nothing to do with science fiction." Remembering how much he loved science fiction as a child, Otomo wanted to recreate that kind of excitement; "That was in part how something like Domu came about. [...] There was no hard science fiction manga [...] so I wanted to change that and do something more realistic and believable."
Describing his characterization style, Otomo said he first tried to draw and imitate "very traditional manga-like art," such as Astro Boy. But by the time he was in high school, illustration work by people like Tadanori Yokoo and Yoshitaro Isaka was popular, so he wanted to create manga characters with this illustrative art style. When asked about how Japanese critics praise him as the first manga artist to draw realistic Japanese faces, Otomo said he always tries to balance fantasy and realism; "Depicting things too realistically actually damages the social realism of the piece, and if you go too far into the realm of fantasy, that hurts its imaginative ability." However, he said the realism of his early works probably came from having used friends as character models. French bande dessinée artist Moebius, who is known for realistic character designs, is often cited as one of Otomo's biggest influences.
Otomo includes homages to his favorite childhood manga in his work, and there were three manga authors that he really respected; Osamu Tezuka, Shotaro Ishinomori and Mitsuteru Yokoyama. He named the main computer in Fireball ATOM after Tezuka's character of the same name, the character nicknamed Ecchan in Domu is a reference to Ishinomori's Sarutobi Ecchan, and the title character of Akira is also known as No. 28 in homage to Yokoyama's Tetsujin 28-go in addition to the two series having the "same overall plot." Ever since depicting the apartment complex in Domu, Otomo has had a large interest in architecture, proclaiming, "I don't think there was anyone before me who put this much effort into their depictions of buildings." He believes this habit of drawing detailed backgrounds was influenced by Shigeru Mizuki's manga, which showed him how important backdrops are to a story. Otomo strongly praised the framing done by Tetsuya Chiba, whose work he studied a lot out of admiration, for making it easy to grasp how tangible the backgrounds and characters are.
When asked about his influences in designing the mecha in Farewell to Weapons, Otomo pointed out that Studio Nue's work was popular at the time, specifically mentioning the powered suit designs by Kazutaka Miyatake and Naoyuki Kato. He also stated that he is a fan of mecha by Takashi Watabe and Makoto Kobayashi and is fond of those seen in Neon Genesis Evangelion, but explained that all his influences are jumbled and mixed together; "In short, I digest many different things and ideas tend to pop out from that."
Legacy
It was around the 1979 publication of his Short Peace short story collection that Otomo's work became influential in Japan. Artists influenced by him and his work include Hisashi Eguchi, Naoki Urasawa, Naoki Yamamoto, Makoto Aida and Hiroya Oku. When talking in 1997 about the future of manga, Urasawa opined that "[Osamu] Tezuka created the form that exists today, then caricatures appeared next, and comics changed again when Katsuhiro Otomo came on the scene. I don't think there's any room left for further changes." Masashi Kishimoto cited Otomo as one of his two biggest influences, but liked Otomo's art style the best and imitated it while trying to develop his own.
Otomo's manga work also notably influenced a number of Japanese video game designers by the mid-1980s, including Enix's Yuji Horii (The Portopia Serial Murder Case and Dragon Quest), Capcom's Noritaka Funamizu (Gun.Smoke and Hyper Dyne Side Arms), UPL's Tsutomu Fujisawa (Ninja-Kid), Thinking Rabbit's Hiroyuki Imabayashi (Sokoban), dB-SOFT's Naoto Shinada (Volguard), Hot-B's Jun Kuriyama (Psychic City), and Microcabin's Masashi Katou (Eiyuu Densetsu Saga).
Director Satoshi Kon, who worked as an assistant to Otomo in both manga and film, cited Akira and especially Domu as influences. American film director Rian Johnson is a big fan of Otomo and pointed out similarities between how telekinesis is depicted in Domu and its depiction in his film Looper.
In 2017, the book Otomo: A Global Tribute to the Mind Behind Akira was published in Japan, France and the United States, featuring writing and artwork from 80 artists such as Masakazu Katsura, Taiyo Matsumoto, Masamune Shirow, Asaf and Tomer Hanuka, and Stan Sakai. From April 8 to May 8, 2021, comic art collector Phillipe Labaune's self-titled art gallery in New York City held "Good For Health, Bad For Education: A Tribute to Otomo" as its first exhibition. Including pieces originally curated by Julien Brugeas for the 2016 Angoulême International Comics Festival, it featured a total of 29 Otomo-inspired works by international artists such as Sara Pichelli, Paul Pope, Boulet, François Boucq, Giannis Milonogiannis and Ian Bertram.
Bibliography
Manga
Artbooks
Filmography
Director
Screenwriter
Additional work
Besides his own animation, Otomo has contributed art designs to Harmagedon: Genma Wars, the Crusher Joe film, the seven-part OVA series Freedom Project, and Space Dandy episode 22. He also oversaw the composition of the Spriggan animated film.
Notes
References
"Freedom". (May 2007) Newtype USA. p. 23.
External links
Otomo: The Complete Works
Katsuhiro Ôtomo at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
1954 births
Living people
Anime screenwriters
Annie Award winners
Officiers of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême winners
Japanese animators
Anime directors
Japanese film directors
Japanese animated film directors
Japanese animated film producers
Japanese screenwriters
Manga artists from Miyagi Prefecture
Recipients of the Medal with Purple Ribbon
Science fiction film directors
Sunrise (company) people
Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame inductees
Winner of Kodansha Manga Award (General)
Writers from Miyagi Prefecture
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17443 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate%20Bush | Kate Bush | Catherine Bush (born 30 July 1958) is an English singer, songwriter, musician, dancer and record producer. In 1978, aged 19, she topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks with her debut single "Wuthering Heights", becoming the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a self-written song. Bush has since released 25 UK Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", "Babooshka", "Running Up That Hill", "Don't Give Up" (a duet with Peter Gabriel), and "King of the Mountain". All 10 of her studio albums reached the UK Top 10, including the UK number one albums Never for Ever (1980), Hounds of Love (1985), and the compilation The Whole Story (1986). She was the first British solo female artist to top the UK album charts and the first female artist to enter the album chart at number one.
Bush began writing songs at 11. She was signed to EMI Records after Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour helped produce a demo tape. Her debut album, The Kick Inside, was released in 1978. Bush slowly gained artistic independence in album production and has produced all her studio albums since The Dreaming (1982). She took a hiatus between her seventh and eighth albums, The Red Shoes (1993) and Aerial (2005). Bush drew attention again in 2014 with her concert residency Before the Dawn, her first shows since 1979's The Tour of Life.
Bush's eclectic and experimental musical style, unconventional lyrics, and literary themes have influenced a diverse range of artists. She has been nominated for 13 British Phonographic Industry accolades, winning for Best British Female Artist in 1987, and has been nominated for three Grammy Awards. In 2002, Bush was recognised with an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. Bush was appointed a CBE in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to music. She was nominated three times for induction in the 2018, 2021 and 2022 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Life and career
1958–1974: Early life
Bush was born on 30 July 1958 in Bexleyheath, Kent, to an English doctor, general practitioner Robert Bush (1920–2008), and Hannah (1918–1992), née Daly, an Irish staff nurse, daughter of a farmer in County Waterford. She grew up in a 350-year-old former farmhouse in the outer London suburb of East Wickham, Welling, with her elder brothers, John and Paddy. Bush came from an artistic background: her mother was an amateur traditional Irish dancer, her father was an amateur pianist, Paddy worked as a musical instrument maker, and John was a poet and photographer. Both brothers were involved in the local folk music scene. She was raised as a Roman Catholic.
Bush trained at Goldsmiths College karate club, where her brother John was a karate instructor. There, she became known as "Ee-ee" because of her squeaky kiai.
Her family's musical influence inspired Bush to teach herself the piano at the age of 11. She also played the organ in a barn behind her parents' house and studied the violin. She soon began composing songs, eventually adding her own lyrics.
1975–1977: Career beginnings
Bush attended St Joseph's Convent Grammar School, a Catholic girls' school in nearby Abbey Wood which, in 1975, after she had left, became part of St Mary's and St Joseph's School in Sidcup. During this time her family produced a demo tape with over 50 of her compositions, which was turned down by record labels. Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour received the demo from Ricky Hopper, a mutual friend of Gilmour and the Bush family. Impressed, Gilmour helped the 16 year-old Bush record a more professional demo tape. Three tracks in total were recorded and paid for by Gilmour. The tape was produced by Gilmour's friend Andrew Powell, who went on to produce Bush's first two albums, and sound engineer Geoff Emerick, who had worked with the Beatles. The tape was sent to EMI executive Terry Slater, who signed her.
The British record industry was reaching a point of stagnation. Progressive rock was very popular and visually oriented rock performers were growing in popularity, thus record labels looking for the next big thing were considering experimental acts. Bush was put on retainer for two years by Bob Mercer, managing director of EMI group-repertoire division. According to Mercer, he felt Bush's material was good enough to release, but felt that if the album failed it would be demoralising and if it was successful Bush was too young to handle it. However, in a 1987 interview, Gilmour disputed this version of events, blaming EMI for initially using the "wrong" producers.
After the contract signing, EMI gave her a large advance, which she used to enroll in interpretive dance classes taught by Lindsay Kemp, a former teacher of David Bowie, and mime training with Adam Darius. For the first two years of her contract, Bush spent more time on schoolwork than recording. She left school after doing her mock A-Levels and having gained ten GCE O-Level qualifications.
Bush wrote and made demos of almost 200 songs, some of which circulated as bootlegs. From March to August 1977, she fronted the KT Bush Band at public houses in London. The band included Del Palmer (bass), Brian Bath (guitar), and Vic King (drums). She began recording her first album in August 1977.
1978–1979: The Kick Inside and Lionheart
For her debut album, The Kick Inside (1978), Bush was persuaded to use established session musicians instead of the KT Bush Band. She retained some of these even after she had brought her bandmates back on board. Her brother Paddy played the harmonica and mandolin. Stuart Elliott played some of the drums and became her main drummer on subsequent albums. The Kick Inside was released when Bush was 19, with some songs written when she was as young as 13. EMI originally wanted the more rock-oriented track "James and the Cold Gun" to be her debut single, but Bush, who already had a reputation for asserting herself in decisions about her work, insisted that it should be "Wuthering Heights".
In the United Kingdom alone, The Kick Inside sold over a million copies. "Wuthering Heights" topped the UK and Australian charts and became an international hit. Bush became the first British woman to reach number one on the UK charts with a self-written song. "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" made it onto the American Billboard Hot 100 where it reached number 85 in early 1979, and went on to win her an Ivor Novello Award in 1979 for Outstanding British Lyric. According to Guinness World Records, Bush was the first female artist in pop history to have written every track on a million-selling debut album.
Bob Mercer blamed Bush's lesser success in the United States on American radio formats, saying there were no outlets for Bush's visual presentation. EMI capitalised on Bush's appearance by promoting the album with a poster of her in a tight pink top that emphasised her breasts. In an interview with NME in 1982, Bush criticised the choice: "People weren't even generally aware that I wrote my own songs or played the piano. The media just promoted me as a female body. It's like I've had to prove that I'm an artist in a female body." In late 1978, EMI persuaded Bush to quickly record a follow-up album, Lionheart, to take advantage of the success of The Kick Inside. The album was produced by Andrew Powell, assisted by Bush. While it gained high sales and spawned the hit single "Wow", it did not reach the success of The Kick Inside, reaching number six in the UK album charts. She went on to express dissatisfaction with Lionheart, feeling that it had needed more time.
Bush set up her own publishing company, Kate Bush Music, and her own management company, Novercia, to maintain control of her work. Members of her family, along with Bush herself, composed the board of directors. Following the release of Lionheart, she was required by EMI to undertake heavy promotional work and an exhausting tour. The Tour of Life began in April 1979 and lasted six weeks. It was described by The Guardian as "an extraordinary, hydra-headed beast, combining music, dance, poetry, mime, burlesque, magic and theatre". The show was co-devised and performed on stage with magician Simon Drake. Bush was involved in every aspect of the production, choreography, set design, costume design and hiring. The shows were noted for her dancing, complex lighting and her 17 costume changes per show. Because of her need to dance as she sang, sound engineers used a wire coat hanger and a radio microphone to fashion a headset microphone; it was the first used by a rock performer since the Spotnicks used a rudimentary version in the early 1960s.
1980–1984: Never for Ever and The Dreaming
Released in September 1980, Never for Ever saw Bush's second foray into production, co-producing with Jon Kelly. Her first experience as a producer was on her Live on Stage EP, released after her tour the previous year. The first two albums had resulted in a definitive sound evident in every track, with orchestral arrangements supporting the live band sound. The range of styles on Never for Ever is much more diverse, veering from the straightforward rocker "Violin" to the wistful waltz of hit single "Army Dreamers".
Never for Ever was her first album to feature synthesisers and drum machines, in particular the Fairlight CMI, to which she was introduced when providing backing vocals on Peter Gabriel's eponymous third album in early 1980. It was her first record to reach the top position in the UK album charts, also making her the first female British artist to achieve that status, and the first female artist ever to enter the album chart at the top. The top-selling single from the album was "Babooshka", which reached No. 5 in the UK Singles Chart. In November 1980, she released the standalone Christmas single "December Will Be Magic Again", which reached No. 29 in the UK charts.
September 1982 saw the release of The Dreaming, the first album Bush produced by herself. With her new-found freedom, she experimented with production techniques, creating an album that features a diverse blend of musical styles and is known for its near-exhaustive use of the Fairlight CMI. The Dreaming received a mixed reception in the UK, and critics were baffled by the dense soundscapes Bush had created to become "less accessible". In a 1993 interview with Q magazine, Bush stated: "That was my 'She's gone mad' album." However, the album became her first to enter the US Billboard 200 chart, albeit only reaching No. 157. The album entered the UK album chart at No. 3, but is to date her lowest-selling album, garnering "only" a silver disc.
"Sat in Your Lap" was the first single from the album to be released. It preceded the album by over a year and peaked at No. 11 in the UK. The title track, featuring Rolf Harris and Percy Edwards, stalled at No. 48, while the third single, "There Goes a Tenner", stalled at No. 93, despite promotion from EMI and Bush. The track "Suspended in Gaffa" was released as a single in Europe, but not in the UK.
Continuing in her storytelling tradition, Bush looked far outside her own personal experience for sources of inspiration. She drew on old crime films for "There Goes a Tenner", a documentary about the Vietnam War for "Pull Out the Pin", and the plight of Indigenous Australians for "The Dreaming". "Houdini" is about the magician's death, and "Get Out of My House" was inspired by Stephen King's novel The Shining.
1985–1988: Hounds of Love and The Whole Story
Hounds of Love was released in 1985. Because of the high cost of hiring studio space for her previous album, she built a private studio near her home, where she could work at her own pace. Hounds of Love ultimately topped the charts in the UK, knocking Madonna's Like a Virgin from the number-one position.
The album takes advantage of the vinyl and cassette formats with two very different sides. The first side, Hounds of Love, contains five "accessible" pop songs, including the four singles "Running Up That Hill", "Cloudbusting", "Hounds of Love", and "The Big Sky". "Running Up that Hill" reached No. 3 in the UK charts and re-introduced Bush to American listeners, climbing to No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1985. The second side of the album, The Ninth Wave, takes its name from Tennyson's poem, "Idylls of the King", about the legendary King Arthur's reign, and is seven interconnecting songs joined in one continuous piece of music.
The album earned Bush nominations for Best Female Solo Artist, Best Album, Best Single, and Best Producer at the 1986 Brit Awards. In the same year, Bush and Peter Gabriel had a UK Top 10 hit with the duet "Don't Give Up" (Dolly Parton, Gabriel's original choice to sing the female vocal, turned his offer down), and EMI released her "greatest hits" album, The Whole Story. Bush provided a new lead vocal and refreshed backing track on "Wuthering Heights", and recorded a new single, "Experiment IV", for inclusion on the compilation. Dawn French and Hugh Laurie were among those featured in the video for Experiment IV. At the 1987 Brit Awards, Bush won the award for Best Female Solo Artist.
1989–1993: The Sensual World and The Red Shoes
Released in 1989, The Sensual World was described by Bush herself as "her most honest, personal album". One of the tracks, "Heads We're Dancing", inspired by her own black humour, is about a woman who dances all night with a charming stranger only to discover in the morning that he is Adolf Hitler. The title track drew its inspiration from James Joyce's novel Ulysses. The Sensual World went on to become her biggest-selling album in the US, receiving an RIAA Gold certification four years after its release for 500,000 copies sold. In the United Kingdom album charts, it reached the number-two position. Another single from the album, "This Woman's Work", was featured in the John Hughes film She's Having a Baby, and a slightly remixed version appeared on Bush's album The Sensual World. The song reached number-eight in 2005 on the UK download chart after featuring in a British television advertisement for the charity NSPCC.
In 1990, the boxed set This Woman's Work was released; it included all of her albums with their original cover art, as well as two discs of all her singles' B-sides recorded from 1978 to 1990. In 1991, Bush released a cover of Elton John's "Rocket Man", which reached number 12 in the UK singles chart, and reached number two in Australia. In 2007, it was voted the greatest cover ever by readers of The Observer newspaper. Another John cover, "Candle in the Wind", was the B-side. In the same year, she starred in the black comedy film Les Dogs, produced by The Comic Strip for BBC television. Bush plays the bride Angela at a wedding set in a post-apocalyptic Britain.
Bush's seventh studio album, The Red Shoes, was released in November 1993. The album gave Bush her highest chart position in the US, reaching number 28, although the only song from the album to make the US singles chart was "Rubberband Girl", which peaked at number 88 in January 1994. In the UK, the album reached number-two, and the singles "Rubberband Girl", "The Red Shoes", "Moments of Pleasure", and "And So Is Love" all reached the top 30. Bush directed and starred in the short film The Line, the Cross and the Curve, which featured music from her album The Red Shoes, itself inspired by the 1948 film of that name. It was released on VHS in the UK in 1994 and also received a small number of cinema screenings around the world.
The initial plan had been to tour with The Red Shoes release, but did not reach fruition. Thus, Bush deliberately produced her tracks live, with less studio production that had typified her last three albums and which would have been too difficult to re-create on stage. The result polarised her fan base, who had enjoyed the intricacy of her earlier compositions, with other fans claiming they had found new complexities in the lyrics and the emotions they expressed.
During this period, Bush had suffered a series of bereavements, including the loss of guitarist Alan Murphy, who had started working with her on The Tour of Life in 1979, and her mother Hannah, to whom she was exceptionally close. The people she lost were honoured in the ballad "Moments of Pleasure." However, Bush's mother was still alive when "Moments of Pleasure" was written and recorded. Bush describes playing the song to her mother, who thought the line where she is quoted by Bush as saying, "Every old sock meets an old shoe", was hilarious and "couldn't stop laughing."
1994–2006: Motherhood, hiatus, and Aerial
After the release of The Red Shoes, Kate Bush dropped out of the public eye. She had originally intended to take one year off, but despite working on material, twelve years passed before her next album release. Her name occasionally cropped up in the media with rumours of a new album release. The press often viewed her as an eccentric recluse, sometimes drawing a comparison with Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. In 1998, Bush gave birth to Albert, known as "Bertie", fathered by guitarist Dan McIntosh, whom she met in 1992. In 2001, Bush was awarded a Q Award as Classic Songwriter. In 2002, she was awarded an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, and performed "Comfortably Numb" at David Gilmour's concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
Kate Bush's eighth studio album, Aerial, was released on double CD and vinyl in November 2005. The album single "King of the Mountain", had its premiere on BBC Radio 2 two months prior. The single entered the UK Downloads Chart at number six, and would become Bush's third-highest-charting single ever in the UK, peaking at number four on the full chart. Aerial entered the UK albums chart at number three, and the US chart at number 48.
Aerial, like Hounds of Love (1985), is divided into two sections, each with its own theme and mood. The first disc, subtitled A Sea of Honey, features a set of unrelated themed songs, including "King of the Mountain"; "Bertie", a Renaissance-style ode to her son; and "Joanni", based on the story of Joan of Arc. In the song "", Bush sings 117 digits of the number pi. The second disc, subtitled A Sky of Honey, features one continuous piece of music describing the experience of 24 hours passing by. Aerial earned Bush two nominations at the 2006 BRIT Awards, for Best British Female Solo Artist and Best British Album.
2007–2013: Director's Cut and 50 Words for Snow
In 2007, Bush was asked to write a song for The Golden Compass soundtrack which made reference to the lead character, Lyra Belacqua. The song, "Lyra", was used in the closing credits of the film, reached number 187 in the UK Singles Chart and was nominated for the International Press Academy's Satellite Award for original song in a motion picture. According to Del Palmer, Bush was asked to compose the song on short notice and the project was completed in 10 days.
In May 2011, Bush released the album Director's Cut, comprising 11 reworked tracks from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, recorded using analogue rather than digital equipment. All the tracks have new lead vocals, drums, and instrumentation. Some were transposed to a lower key to accommodate her lowering voice. Three of the songs, including "This Woman's Work", have been completely rerecorded, with lyrics often changed in places. Bush described the album as a new project rather than a collection of remixes. It was the first album on her new label, Fish People, a division of EMI Records. In addition to Director's Cut in its single CD form, the album was released with a box-set that contains the albums The Sensual World and the analogue re-mastered The Red Shoes. It debuted at number two on the United Kingdom chart.
Bush's next studio album, 50 Words for Snow, was released on 21 November 2011. It features high-profile cameo appearance of Elton John on the duet "Snowed in at Wheeler Street". The album contains seven new songs "set against a backdrop of falling snow", with a total running time of 65 minutes. The album's songs are built around Bush's quietly jazzy piano and Steve Gadd's drums, and use both sung and spoken word vocals in what Classic Rock critic Stephen Dalton calls "a ... supple and experimental affair, with a contemporary chamber pop sound grounded in crisp piano, minimal percussion and light-touch electronics ... billowing jazz-rock soundscapes, interwoven with fragmentary narratives delivered in a range of voices from shrill to Laurie Anderson-style cooing". Bassist Danny Thompson appears on the album, which also features a performance by Stephen Fry.
50 Words for Snow received general acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 88, based on 26 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim". She was nominated for a BRIT Award in the "Best Female Artist" category, and the album won the 2012 Best Album at the South Bank Arts Awards, and was also nominated for Best Album at the Ivor Novello Awards.
Bush turned down an invitation to perform at the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony. Instead, a new remix of her 1985 single "Running Up That Hill" was played. In 2013, Bush became the only female artist to have top five albums in the UK charts in five successive decades.
2014–present: Before the Dawn, How to Be Invisible and remastered catalogue
In March 2014, Bush announced her first live concerts in decades: Before the Dawn, a 22-night residency in London running from 26 August to 1 October 2014 at the Hammersmith Apollo. Tickets sold out in 15 minutes. The concerts received positive reviews. An album of recordings from the concerts, Before the Dawn, was released on 25 November 2016. Bolstered by publicity around Before the Dawn, Bush became the first female performer to have eight albums in the UK Top 40 Albums Chart simultaneously, putting her at number three for simultaneous UK Top 40 albums. The only artists ahead of Bush were Elvis Presley, who had 12 entries in the top 40 after his death in 1977 and The Beatles who had 11 in 2009. She had 11 albums in the top 50.
On 6 December 2018, Bush published her first book, How to Be Invisible, a compilation of lyrics. In November 2018, Bush released two boxsets of remasters of her studio albums. Vocals from Rolf Harris, who was convicted of multiple sexual assault charges in 2014, were replaced by versions by Bush's son Bertie. A compilation of rare tracks, cover versions and remixes from the boxsets, The Other Sides, was released on 8 March 2019. It includes the previously unreleased track "Humming," recorded in 1975. In September 2019, Bush released "" / "" on vinyl, in France, as a limited-edition promotional single.
Artistry
Musical style and voice
Bush's musical aesthetic is eclectic, and is known to employ varied influences and meld disparate styles, often within a single song or over the course of an album. Her music has primarily been described as art pop, art rock, experimental pop, pop rock, and avant-pop. Even in her earliest works, with piano the primary instrument, she wove together diverse influences, drawing on classical music, glam rock, and a wide range of ethnic and folk sources. This has continued throughout her career. By the time of Never for Ever, Bush had begun to make prominent use of the Fairlight CMI synthesiser, which allowed her to sample and manipulate sounds, expanding her sonic palette. She has been compared with other "'arty' 1970s and '80s British pop rock artists" such as Roxy Music and Peter Gabriel. The Guardian called Bush "the queen of art-pop".
Bush has a dramatic soprano vocal range. Her vocals contain elements of British, Anglo-Irish and most prominently (southern) English accents and, in its use of musical instruments from various periods and cultures, her music has differed from American pop norms. Reviewers have used the term "surreal" to describe her music. Her songs explore melodramatic emotional and musical surrealism that defies easy categorisation. It has been observed that even her more joyous pieces are often tinged with traces of melancholy and vice versa.
Songwriting and influences
Elements of Bush's lyrics employ historical or literary references, as embodied in her first single "Wuthering Heights", which is based on Emily Brontë's novel of the same name. She has described herself as a storyteller who embodies the character singing the song and has dismissed efforts by others to conceive of her work as autobiographical. Bush's lyrics have been known to touch on obscure or esoteric subject matter, and New Musical Express noted that Bush was not afraid to tackle sensitive and taboo subjects in her work. "The Kick Inside" is based on a traditional English folk song (The Ballad of Lucy Wan) about an incestuous pregnancy and a resulting suicide. "Kashka from Baghdad" is a song about a gay couple; Out magazine listed two of her albums in their "Top 100 Greatest Gayest Albums" list. She has referenced G. I. Gurdjieff in the song "Them Heavy People", while "Cloudbusting" was inspired by Peter Reich's autobiography, A Book of Dreams, about his relationship with his father, Wilhelm Reich. "Breathing" explores the results of nuclear fallout from the perspective of a fœtus.
Other non-musical sources of inspiration for Bush include horror films, which have influenced the gothic nature of her songs, such as "Hounds of Love", which samples the 1957 horror movie Night of the Demon. "The Infant Kiss" is a song about a haunted, unstable woman's paedophilic infatuation with a young boy in her care (inspired by Jack Clayton's film The Innocents (1961), which had been based on Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw);. Her songs have occasionally combined comedy and horror to form dark humour, such as murder by poisoning in "Coffee Homeground", an alcoholic mother in "Ran Tan Waltz" and the upbeat "The Wedding List", a song inspired by François Truffaut's 1967 film of Cornell Woolrich's The Bride Wore Black about the murder of a groom and the bride's subsequent revenge against the killer. Bush has also cited comedy as a significant influence. She has cited Woody Allen, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and The Young Ones as particular favourites.
Technical innovations
Bush is regarded as the first artist to have had a headset with a wireless microphone built for use in music. For her Tour of Life in 1979 she had a compact microphone combined with a self-made construction of wire clothes hangers, so that she did not have to use a hand microphone and had her hands free and could dance her rehearsed choreography of expressionist dance on the concert stage and sing with a microphone at the same time. Later, her idea was adopted by other artists such as Janet Jackson, Madonna and Peter Gabriel.
Influence and legacy
Musicians who have cited Bush as an influence include Beverley Craven, Regina Spektor, Ellie Goulding, Charli XCX, Tegan and Sara, k.d. lang, Paula Cole, Kate Nash, Bat for Lashes, Erasure, Alison Goldfrapp of Goldfrapp, Rosalía, Tim Bowness of No-Man, Chris Braide, Kyros, Aisles, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, Darren Hayes, Grimes, Solange Knowles, and Steven Wilson. Nerina Pallot was inspired to become a songwriter after seeing Bush play "This Woman's Work" on Wogan. Coldplay took inspiration from "Running Up That Hill" to compose their single "Speed of Sound". In 2015, Adele stated that the release of her third studio album was inspired by Bush's 2014 comeback to the stage.
In addition to those artists who state that Bush has been a direct influence on their own careers, other artists have been quoted expressing admiration for her work including Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Björk, Florence Welch, Little Boots, Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, Dido, Sky Ferreira, St. Vincent, Fiona Apple, Lily Allen, Anohni of Antony and the Johnsons, Big Boi of OutKast, Stevie Nicks, Steve Rothery of Marillion, and André Matos. According to an unauthorised biography, Courtney Love of Hole listened to Bush among other artists as a teenager. Tricky wrote an article about The Kick Inside, saying: "Her music has always sounded like dreamland to me.... I don't believe in God, but if I did, her music would be my bible". Suede front-man Brett Anderson stated about Hounds of Love: "I love the way it's a record of two halves, and the second half is a concept record about fear of drowning. It's an amazing record to listen to really late at night, unsettling and really jarring". John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, declared her work to be "beauty beyond belief". Rotten once wrote a song for her, titled "Bird in Hand" (about exploitation of parrots) that Bush rejected. Bush was one of the singers whom Prince thanked in the liner notes of 1991's Diamonds and Pearls. In December 1989, Robert Smith of the Cure chose "The Sensual World" as his favourite single of the year, The Sensual World as his favourite album of the year, and included "all of Kate Bush" in his list of "the best things about the eighties".
Kele Okereke of Bloc Party said about "Hounds of Love": "The first time I heard it I was sitting in a reclining sofa. As the beat started I was transported somewhere else. Her voice, the imagery, the huge drum sound: it seemed to capture everything for me. As a songwriter you're constantly chasing that feeling". Rufus Wainwright named Bush one of his top ten gay icons. Outside music, Bush has been an inspiration to several fashion designers, including Hussein Chalayan. In 1998 an asteroid was named after her.
In 2019, Pone, ex Fonky Family member, released Kate and me, an entire album created from samples of Kate Bush's work. According to The Guardian, it's the "first album in history to be entirely produced through an eye-tracking device". Pone declares that Bush is the greatest artist of the past 40 years. A few months later, after hearing about the album and listening to it, the English star wrote a message to the French producer, expressing her emotion, admiration and approval. With this encouragement, Pone reiterates the experience in June 2021 by publishing Listen And Donate . An EP composed of four tracks including two originals by Pone, still based on samples of Kate Bush's work, and two remixes produced by SCH and Para One. JR signs the visual part of the project. The goal is to raise funds for the Trakadom association, created by Pone and two doctors in collaboration with the intensive care unit of the hospital of Nîmes.
In 2020, Grazia magazine conducted an interview with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. When asked about the five most influential women in his life, Johnson placed Kate Bush at the fifth spot after deliberating between nominating Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, and Bush.
In addition to her music, her dancing has been critically acclaimed and proven influential, as well as enduring in the popular consciousness. Critics have noted her "pioneering synthesis of music and movement" and called her work "modern dance at its most powerful". Prix Benois de la Danse winner Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui credits her dancing as a formative influence. For the recurring The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever event, thousands of people gather worldwide to recreate her dance routine from the "Wuthering Heights" music video.
Live performances
Bush's only tour, the Tour of Life, ran for six weeks in May 1979, covering Britain and mainland Europe. The BBC suggested that she may have quit touring due to a fear of flying, or because of the death of a lighting engineer, Bill Duffield, who was killed in an accident during a warmup concert. Mercer, who signed Bush to EMI, said touring was "just too hard ... I think [Bush] liked it but the equation didn't work ... I could see at the end of the show that she was completely wiped out." Bush described the tour as "enormously enjoyable" but "absolutely exhausting".
During the same period as the Tour of Life, Bush performed on television programs including Top of the Pops in the UK, Bio's Bahnhof in Germany, and Saturday Night Live in the United States (performing "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" with Paul Shaffer on piano, and later in the programme, "Them Heavy People"), which remains her only American television appearance. On 28 December 1979, BBC TV aired the Kate Bush Christmas Special. Bush participated in the first benefit concert in aid of The Prince's Trust in July 1982, at which she sang "The Wedding List" with a backing band composed of Pete Townshend, Phil Collins, Midge Ure, Mick Karn, Gary Brooker, Dave Formula and Peter Hope Evans. The performance was later released on VHS video, Laserdisc and CED disc. She performed live for British charity event Comic Relief in 1986, singing "Do Bears... ?", a humorous duet with Rowan Atkinson, and a rendition of "Breathing". In March 1987, Bush sang "Running Up That Hill" at The Secret Policeman's Third Ball accompanied by David Gilmour. She appeared with Gilmour again in 2002, singing the Pink Floyd song "Comfortably Numb" at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
Bush returned to headline performance with a 22-night residency, Before the Dawn, which ran from 26 August to 1 October 2014 at the London Hammersmith Apollo. The set list encompassed most of Hounds of Love featuring the entire Ninth Wave suite, most of Aerial, two songs from The Red Shoes, and one song from 50 Words for Snow.
Collaborations
Bush provided vocals on two of Peter Gabriel's albums, including the hits "Games Without Frontiers" and "Don't Give Up", as well as "No Self-Control". Gabriel appeared on Bush's 1979 television special, where they sang a duet of Roy Harper's "Another Day". She has sung on two Roy Harper tracks, "You", on his 1979 album, "The Unknown Soldier"; and "Once", the title track of his 1990 album. She has also sung on the title song of the 1986 Big Country album The Seer; the Midge Ure song "Sister and Brother" from his 1988 album Answers to Nothing; Go West's 1987 single "The King Is Dead"; and two songs with Prince – "Why Should I Love You?", from her 1993 album The Red Shoes, and "My Computer" from Prince's 1996 album Emancipation. In 1987, she sang a verse on the Beatles cover charity single "Let It Be" by Ferry Aid. She sang a line on the charity single "Spirit of the Forest" by Spirit of the Forest in 1989.
In 1990 Bush produced a song for another artist, Alan Stivell's "Kimiad" for his album Again; this is the only time she has done this to date. Stivell had appeared on The Sensual World. In 1991, Kate Bush was invited to perform a cover of Elton John's 1972 song "Rocket Man" for the tribute album Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin. In 2011, Elton John collaborated with Bush once again in "Snowed in at Wheeler Street" for her most recent album 50 Words for Snow. In 1994, Bush covered George Gershwin's "The Man I Love" for the tribute album The Glory of Gershwin. In 1996, Bush contributed a version of "Mná na hÉireann" (Irish for "Women of Ireland") for the Anglo-Irish folk-rock compilation project Common Ground: The Voices of Modern Irish Music. Bush had to sing the song in Irish, which she learned to do phonetically.
Artists who have contributed to Bush's own albums include Elton John, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, Nigel Kennedy, Gary Brooker, Danny Thompson, and Prince. Bush provided backing vocals for a song that was recorded during the 1990s titled Wouldn't Change a Thing by Lionel Azulay, the drummer with the original band that was later to become the KT Bush Band. The song, which was engineered and produced by Del Palmer, was released on Azulay's album Out of the Ashes. Bush declined a request by Erasure to produce one of their albums because, according to Vince Clarke, "she didn't feel that that was her area".
Personal life
Bush was in a long-term relationship with bassist and engineer Del Palmer from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. She is married to guitarist Danny McIntosh.
Bush is a former resident of Eltham, southeast London. In the 1990s she moved to a canalside residence in Sulhamstead, Berkshire, and then to Devon in 2004. Bush is a vegetarian. Raised a Roman Catholic, she said in 1999:
The length of time between albums has led to rumours concerning Bush's health or appearance. In 2011, she told BBC Radio 4 that the amount of time between albums was stressful: "It's very frustrating the albums take as long as they do ... I wish there weren't such big gaps between them". In the same interview, she denied that she was a perfectionist, saying: "I think it's important that things are flawed ... That's what makes a piece of art interesting sometimes – the bit that's wrong or the mistake you've made that's led onto an idea you wouldn't have had otherwise." She reiterated her prioritisation of her family life.
Bush's son Bertie (Albert McIntosh), featured prominently in the 2014 concert Before the Dawn. Her nephew, Raven Bush, is a violinist in the English indie band Syd Arthur.
Political views
Some of Bush's songs have contained references to what critics have interpreted as political and social themes, such as "Breathing" which addresses the fear of nuclear warfare and "Army Dreamers" which examined the grief felt by mothers who lose children serving in the military during war. The tracks "Wow" and "Kashka from Baghdad" contain references to gay and LGBT themes. In a 1985 interview with The NewMusic, Bush stated "I've never felt I've written from a political point of view, it's always been an emotional point of view that just happens to perhaps be a political situation."
During the 1979 United Kingdom general election campaign, Bush, who at the time was on a live concert tour of the UK, posed for a photograph alongside the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. When asked about her political beliefs in a 1985 interview with Hot Press, Bush replied that she preferred not to discuss how she voted and added "I don't feel I am a political thinker at all. I don't really understand politics."
In the Comic Strip Presents episode GLC: The Carnage Continues..., she produced and sang on the theme song Ken. The song was a satirical take on how Hollywood glamourises and fictionalises political figures, in this particular case Ken Livingstone, the former leader of the Greater London Council, and the lyrics parodied the theme from Shaft.
In 2016, Canadian news magazine Maclean's published an interview in which Bush was asked about the role of misogyny in the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election. Bush pointed out that the UK, unlike the US, did have a female premier, Theresa May, who a few months earlier had become the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The interview quoted Bush as saying: "I actually really like her and think she's wonderful. I think it's the best thing that's happened to us in a long time ... It is great to have a woman in charge of the country. She's very sensible and I think that's a good thing at this point in time." In 2019, Bush published a clarifying statement on her website saying that she was not a Tory supporter and did not endorse any political parties. She wrote: "Over the years, I have avoided making political comments in interviews. My response to the interviewer was not meant to be political but rather was in the defence of women in power."
In April 2021, Bush was one of 156 signatories of an open letter to Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, calling for a change in the wording of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to make royalty payments for streaming closer to the amounts paid for radio broadcast.
Awards and nominations
Discography
Studio albums
The Kick Inside (1978)
Lionheart (1978)
Never for Ever (1980)
The Dreaming (1982)
Hounds of Love (1985)
The Sensual World (1989)
The Red Shoes (1993)
Aerial (2005)
Director's Cut (2011)
50 Words for Snow (2011)
References
Further reading
External links
Kate Bush interview, Ireland, 1978
1958 births
Living people
20th-century English women singers
21st-century English musicians
21st-century English women singers
Alternative rock keyboardists
Alternative rock pianists
Alternative rock singers
Art pop musicians
Art rock musicians
Avant-pop musicians
Brit Award winners
British alternative rock musicians
British female karateka
British women record producers
Columbia Records artists
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
EMI Group artists
EMI Records artists
English Roman Catholics
English people of Irish descent
English record producers
English rock keyboardists
English rock pianists
English rock singers
English sopranos
English women guitarists
English women in electronic music
English women pop singers
English women singer-songwriters
Experimental pop musicians
Harvest Records artists
Ivor Novello Award winners
Musicians from Kent
People from Bexleyheath
Singers from London
Singers with a three-octave vocal range
Women rock singers
Anti- (record label) artists | [
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17445 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kittiwake | Kittiwake | The kittiwakes (genus Rissa) are two closely related seabird species in the gull family Laridae, the black-legged kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) and the red-legged kittiwake (Rissa brevirostris). The epithets "black-legged" and "red-legged" are used to distinguish the two species in North America, but in Europe, where Rissa brevirostris is not found, the black-legged kittiwake is often known simply as kittiwake, or more colloquially in some areas as tickleass or tickleace. The name is derived from its call, a shrill 'kittee-wa-aaake, kitte-wa-aaake'. The genus name Rissa is from the Icelandic name Rita for the black-legged kittiwake.
Description
The two species are indeed physically very similar. They have a white head and body, grey back, grey wings tipped solid black and a bright yellow bill. Black-legged kittiwake adults are somewhat larger (roughly in length with a wingspan of ) than red-legged kittiwakes ( in length with a wingspan around ). Other differences include a shorter bill, larger eyes, a larger, rounder head and darker grey wings in the red-legged kittiwake. While most black-legged kittiwakes do, indeed, have dark-grey legs, some have pinkish-grey to reddish legs, making colouration a somewhat unreliable identifying marker.
In contrast to the dappled chicks of other gull species, kittiwake chicks are downy and white since they are under relatively little threat of predation, as the nests are on extremely steep cliffs. Unlike other gull chicks which wander around as soon as they can walk, kittiwake chicks instinctively sit still in the nest to avoid falling off. Juveniles take three years to reach maturity. When in winter plumage, both birds have a dark grey smudge behind the eye and a grey hind-neck collar. The sexes are visually indistinguishable.
Distribution and habitat
Kittiwakes are coastal breeding birds ranging in the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and Arctic oceans. They form large, dense, noisy colonies during the summer reproductive period, often sharing habitat with murres. They are the only gull species that are exclusively cliff-nesting. A colony of kittiwakes living in Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead in the north east of England has made homes on both the Tyne Bridge and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. This colony is notable because it is the furthest inland colony of kittiwakes in the world.
Species
Photo gallery
References
External links
Kittiwakes
Taxa named by James Francis Stephens | [
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17448 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti%20oil%20fires | Kuwaiti oil fires | The Kuwaiti oil fires were caused by Iraqi military forces setting fire to a reported 605 to 732 oil wells along with an unspecified number of oil filled low-lying areas, such as oil lakes and fire trenches, as part of a scorched earth policy while retreating from Kuwait in 1991 due to the advances of US-led coalition forces in the Arabian Gulf War. The fires were started in January and February 1991, and the first well fires were extinguished in early April 1991, with the last well capped on November 6, 1991.
Motives
The dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over alleged slant-drilling in the Rumaila oil field was one of the reasons for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
In addition, Kuwait had been producing oil above treaty limits established by OPEC. By the eve of the Iraqi invasion, Kuwait had set production quotas to almost , which coincided with a sharp drop in the price of oil. By the summer of 1990, Kuwaiti overproduction had become a serious point of contention with Iraq.
Some analysts have speculated that one of Saddam Hussein's main motivations in invading Kuwait was to punish the ruling al-Sabah family in Kuwait for not stopping its policy of overproduction, as well as his reasoning behind the destruction of said wells.
It is also hypothesized that Iraq decided to destroy the oil fields to achieve a military advantage, believing the intense smoke plumes serving as smoke screens created by the burning oil wells would inhibit Coalition offensive air strikes, foil allied precision guided weapons and spy satellites, and could screen Iraq’s military movements. Furthermore, it is thought that Iraq’s military leaders may have regarded the heat, smoke, and debris from hundreds of burning oil wells as presenting a formidable area denial obstacle to Coalition forces. The onset of the oil well destruction supports this military dimension to the sabotage of the wells; for example, during the early stage of the Coalition air campaign, the number of oil wells afire was relatively small but the number increased dramatically in late February with the arrival of the ground war.
The Iraqi military combat engineers also released oil into low-lying areas for defensive purposes against infantry and mechanized units along Kuwait’s southern border, by constructing several "fire trenches" roughly 1 kilometer long, 3 meters wide, and 3 meters deep to impede the advance of Coalition ground forces.
The military use of the land based fires should also be seen in context with the coinciding, deliberate, sea based Gulf War oil spill, the apparent strategic goal of which was to foil a potential amphibious landing by U.S. Marines.
Extent
As an international coalition under United States command assembled in anticipation of an invasion of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, the Iraqi regime decided to destroy as much of Kuwait's oil reserves and infrastructure as possible before withdrawing from that country. As early as December 1990, Iraqi forces placed explosive charges on Kuwaiti oil wells. The wells were systematically sabotaged beginning on January 16, 1991, when the allies commenced air strikes against Iraqi targets. On February 8, satellite images detected the first smoke from burning oil wells. The number of oil fires peaked between February 22 and 24, when the allied ground offensive began.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's report to Congress, "the retreating Iraqi army set fire to or damaged over 700 oil wells, storage tanks, refineries, and facilities in Kuwait." Estimates placed the number of oil well fires from 605 to 732. A further thirty-four wells had been destroyed by heavy coalition bombing in January. The Kuwait Petroleum Company's estimate as of September 1991 was that there had been 610 fires, out of a total of 749 facilities damaged or on fire along with an unspecified number of oil filled low-lying areas, such as "oil lakes" and "fire trenches". These fires constituted approximately 50% of the total number of oil well fires in the history of the petroleum industry, and temporarily damaged or destroyed approximately 85% of the wells in every major Kuwaiti oil field.
Concerted efforts to bring the fires and other damage under control began in April 1991. During the uncontrolled burning phase from February to April, various sources estimated that the ignited wellheads burnt through between four and six million barrels of crude oil, and between seventy and one hundred million cubic meters of natural gas per day. Seven months later, 441 facilities had been brought under control, while 308 remained uncontrolled. The last well was capped on November 6, 1991. The total amount of oil burned is generally estimated at about one billion barrels or just below one percent of Kuwait's entire supply of 104 billion barrels. <ref>The Energy Library (web site), "Gulf War oil well fires and oil spills," [http://www.theenergylibrary.com/node/13080 www.theenergylibrary.com] </ref> Daily global oil consumption in 2015 is about 91.4 million barrels; the oil lost to combustion would last 11 days at modern usage rates.
Military effects
On March 21, 1991, a Royal Saudi Air Force C-130H crashed in heavy smoke due to the Kuwaiti oil fires on approach to Ras Mishab Airport, Saudi Arabia. 92 Senegalese soldiers and 6 Saudi crew members were killed, the largest accident among Coalition forces.
The smoke screening was also used by Iraqi anti-armor forces to a successful extent in the Battle of Phase Line Bullet, having aided in achieving the element of surprise against advancing Bradley (IFV)s, along with increasing the general fog of war.
The fires burned out of control because of the dangers of sending in firefighting crews during the war. Land mines had been placed in areas around the oil wells and military demining was necessary before the fires could be put out. Around of oil were lost each day. Eventually, privately contracted crews extinguished the fires, at a total cost of US$1.5 billion to Kuwait. By that time, however, the fires had burned for approximately ten months, causing widespread pollution.
The fires have been linked with what was later deemed Gulf War syndrome, a chronic disorder afflicting military veterans and civilian workers that include fatigue, muscle pain, and cognitive problems; however, studies have indicated that the firemen who capped the wells did not report any of the symptoms that the soldiers experienced. The causes of Gulf War syndrome have yet to be determined.
From the perspective of ground forces, apart from the occasional "oil rain" experienced by troops very close to spewing wells, one of the more commonly experienced effects of the oil field fires were the ensuing smoke plumes which rose into the atmosphere and then precipitated or fell out of the air via dry deposition and by rain. The pillar-like plumes frequently broadened and joined up with other smoke plumes at higher altitudes, producing a cloudy grey overcast effect, as only about 10% of all the fires corresponding with those that originated from "oil lakes" produced pure black soot filled plumes, 25% of the fires emitted white to grey plumes, while the remainder emitted plumes with colors between grey and black. For example, one Gulf War veteran stated:
A paper published in 2000 analyzed the degree of exposure by troops to particulate matter, including soot. However, the paper focused more-so on silica sand, which can produce silicosis. The paper included troop medical records, and in its conclusion: "A literature review indicated negligible to nonexistent health risk from other inhaled particulate material (other than silica) during the Gulf War".
Extinguishing efforts
The burning wells needed to be extinguished as, without active efforts, Kuwait would lose billions of dollars in oil revenues. It was predicted that the fires would burn from two to five years before losing pressure and going out on their own, optimists estimating two years and pessimists estimating five while the majority estimated three years until this occurred.
The companies responsible for extinguishing the fires initially were Bechtel, Red Adair Company (now sold to Global Industries of Louisiana), Boots and Coots, and Wild Well Control. Safety Boss was the fourth company to arrive but ended up extinguishing and capping the most wells of any other company: 180 of the 600. Other companies including Cudd Well/Pressure Control, Neal Adams Firefighters, and Kuwait Wild Well Killers were also contracted.
According to Larry H. Flak, a petroleum engineer for Boots and Coots International Well Control, 90% of all the 1991 fires in Kuwait were put out with nothing but sea water, sprayed from powerful hoses at the base of the fire. The extinguishing water was supplied to the arid desert region by re-purposing the oil pipelines that prior to the arson attack had pumped oil from the wells to the Arabian Gulf. The pipeline had been mildly damaged but, once repaired, its flow was reversed to pump Arabian gulf seawater to the burning oil wells. The extinguishing rate was approximately 1 every 7–10 days at the start of efforts but then with experience gained and the removal of the mine fields that surrounded the burning wells, the rate increased to 2 or more per day.
For stubborn oil well fires, the use of a gas turbine to blast a large volume of water at high velocity at the fire proved popular with firefighters in Kuwait and was brought to the region by Hungarians equipped with MiG-21 engines mounted originally on a T-34 (later replaced with T-55) tank, called Big wind. It extinguished 9 fires in 43 days.
In fighting a fire at a directly vertical spewing wellhead, high explosives, such as dynamite were used to create a blast wave that pushes the burning fuel and local atmospheric oxygen away from the well. (This is a similar principle to blowing out a candle.) The flame is removed and the fuel can continue to spill out without igniting. Generally, explosives were placed within 55 gallon drums, the explosives surrounded by fire retardant chemicals, and then the drums are wrapped with insulating material with a horizontal crane being used to bring the drum as close to the burning area as possible.
The firefighting teams titled their occupation as "Operation Desert Hell" after Operation Desert Storm.
Fire documentaries
The fires were the subject of a 1992 IMAX documentary film, Fires of Kuwait, which was nominated for an Academy Award. The film includes footage of the Hungarian team using their jet turbine extinguisher.Lessons of Darkness is a 1992 film by director Werner Herzog that explores of the ravaged oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait.
Bechtel Corporation produced a short documentary titled Kuwait: Bringing Back the Sun that summarizes and focuses upon the fire fighting efforts, which were dubbed the Al-Awda (Arabic for "The Return") project.
Environmental impact
Oil fire smoke
Immediately following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, predictions were made of an environmental disaster stemming from Iraqi threats to blow up captured Kuwaiti oil wells. Speculation ranging from a nuclear winter type scenario, to heavy acid rain and even short term immediate global warming were presented at the World Climate Conference in Geneva that November.
On January 10, 1991, a paper appearing in the journal Nature stated Paul Crutzen's calculations predicting that the oil well fires would produce a cloud of smoke covering half the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in widespread cooling similar to nuclear winter; temperatures beneath the cloud would be reduced by 5—10 degrees Celsius after 100 days. This was followed by articles printed in the Wilmington Morning Star and the Baltimore Sun newspapers in mid to late January 1991, with the popular television scientist personality of the time, Carl Sagan, who was also the co-author of the first few nuclear winter papers along with Richard P. Turco, John W. Birks, Alan Robock and Paul Crutzen together collectively stated that they expected catastrophic nuclear winter like effects with continental sized impacts of "sub-freezing" temperatures as a result if the Iraqis went through with their threats of igniting 300 to 500 pressurized oil wells and they burned for a few months.
Later when Operation Desert Storm had begun, S. Fred Singer and Carl Sagan discussed the possible environmental impacts of the Kuwaiti petroleum fires on the ABC News program Nightline. Sagan again argued that some of the effects of the smoke could be similar to the effects of a nuclear winter, with smoke lofting into the stratosphere, a region of the atmosphere beginning around above sea level at Kuwait, resulting in global effects and that he believed the net effects would be very similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the Year Without a Summer. He reported on initial modeling estimates that forecast impacts extending to south Asia, and perhaps to the northern hemisphere as well.
Singer, on the other hand, said that calculations showed that the smoke would go to an altitude of about and then be rained out after about three to five days and thus the lifetime of the smoke would be limited. Both height estimates made by Singer and Sagan turned out to be wrong, albeit with Singer's narrative being closer to what transpired, with the comparatively minimal atmospheric effects remaining limited to the Arabian Gulf region, with smoke plumes, in general, lofting to about and a few times as high as .
Along with Singer's televised critique, Richard D. Small criticized the initial Nature paper in a reply on March 7, 1991 arguing along similar lines as Singer.
Sagan later conceded in his book The Demon-Haunted World that his prediction did not turn out to be correct: "it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6 °C over the Arabian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared."
At the peak of the fires, the smoke absorbed 75 to 80% of the sun’s radiation. The particles rose to a maximum of , but were scavenged by cloud condensation nuclei from the atmosphere relatively quickly.
Sagan and his colleagues expected that a "self-lofting" of the sooty smoke would occur when it absorbed the sun's heat radiation, with little to no scavenging occurring, whereby the black particles of soot would be heated by the sun and lifted/lofted higher and higher into the air, thereby injecting the soot into the stratosphere where it would take years for the sun blocking effect of this aerosol of soot to fall out of the air, and with that, catastrophic ground level cooling and agricultural impacts in Asia and possibly the Northern Hemisphere as a whole.
In retrospect, it is now known that smoke from the Kuwait oil fires only affected the weather pattern throughout the Arabian Gulf and surrounding region during the periods that the fires were burning in 1991, with lower atmospheric winds blowing the smoke along the eastern half of the Arabian Peninsula, and cities such as Dhahran and Riyadh, and countries such as Bahrain experienced days with smoke filled skies and carbon soot rainout/fallout.
Thus the immediate consequence of the arson sabotage was a dramatic regional decrease in air quality, causing respiratory problems for many Kuwaitis and those in neighboring countries.
According to the 1992 study from Peter Hobbs and Lawrence Radke, daily emissions of sulfur dioxide (which can generate acid rain) from the Kuwaiti oil fires were 57% of that from electric utilities in the United States, the emissions of carbon dioxide were 2% of global emissions and emissions of soot reached 3400 metric tons per day.
In a paper in the DTIC archive, published in 2000, it states that "Calculations based on smoke from Kuwaiti oil fires in May and June 1991 indicate that combustion efficiency was about 96% in producing carbon dioxide. While, with respect to the incomplete combustion fraction, Smoke particulate matter accounted for 2% of the fuel burned, of which 0.4% was soot." (With the remaining 2% being oil that did not undergo any initial combustion).
Smoke documentary
Peter V. Hobbs also narrated a short amateur documentary titled Kuwait Oil Fires that followed the University of Washington/UW's "Cloud and Aerosol Research Group" as they flew through, around and above the smoke clouds and took samples, measurements, and video of the smoke clouds in their Convair C-131(N327UW) Aerial laboratory.
Damage to coastline
Although scenarios that predicted long-lasting environmental impacts on a global atmospheric level due to the burning oil sources did not transpire, long-lasting ground level oil spill impacts were detrimental to the environment regionally.
Forty-six oil wells are estimated to have gushed, and before efforts to cap them began, they were releasing approximately 300,000-400,000 barrels of oil per day, with the last gusher being capped occurring in the latter days of October 1991.
The Kuwaiti Oil Minister estimated between twenty-five and fifty million barrels of unburned oil from damaged facilities pooled to create approximately 300 oil lakes, that contaminated around 40 million tons of sand and earth. The mixture of desert sand, unignited oil spilled and soot generated by the burning oil wells formed layers of hard "tarcrete", which covered nearly five percent of Kuwait's land mass.United States Geological Survey, Campbell, Robert Wellman, ed. 1999. Iraq and Kuwait: 1972, 1990, 1991, 1997. Earthshots: Satellite Images of Environmental Change. U.S. Geological Survey. http://earthshots.usgs.gov , revised February 14, 1999.
Cleaning efforts were led by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research and the Arab Oil Co., who tested a number of technologies including the use of petroleum-degrading bacteria on the oil lakes.
Vegetation in most of the contaminated areas adjoining the oil lakes began recovering by 1995, but the dry climate has also partially solidified some of the lakes. Over time the oil has continued to sink into the sand, with potential consequences for Kuwait's small groundwater resources.
The land based Kuwaiti oil spill surpassed the Lakeview Gusher, which spilled nine million barrels in 1910, as the largest oil spill in recorded history.
Six to eight million barrels of oil were directly spilled into the Arabian Gulf, which became known as the Gulf War oil spill.
Comparable incidents
During the second US invasion of Iraq in 2003, approximately 40 oil wells were set on fire in the Arabian Gulf within Iraqi territory, ostensibly to once again hinder the invasion.
The Kuwait Wild Well Killers, who successfully extinguished 41 of the Kuwait oil well fires in 1991, used their experience to tackle blazes in the Iraqi Rumaila oilfields in 2003.
See also
Environmental impact of war
Gulf War oil spill
Devil's Cigarette Lighter - a gas well fire that consumed 16 million cubic meters of gas per day.
References
Further reading
Against the Fires of Hell: The Environmental Disaster of the Gulf War''. Hawley, T. M., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1992.
External links
Fighting the Oil Well Fires
Oil fire photographs taken by a Kuwaiti journalist in 1991
"The Kuwaiti Oil Fires (Environmental Disasters)"Published by Facts on File, Inc, April 2005, , Author Kristine Hirschmann
Aftermath of the Gulf War
1991 disasters
Oil fires
Fires in Kuwait
Environmental impact of war
Industrial fires and explosions
1991 in the environment
Environmental disasters in Asia
History of Kuwait | [
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17449 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberly%20Beck | Kimberly Beck | Kimberly Beck (born January 9, 1956) is a former American actress and model. She is best known for her role as Trish Jarvis in Joseph Zito's Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984). Her other film roles include Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (1964), Luc Besson's The Big Blue (1988), George T. Miller's Frozen Assets (1992), and Roland Emmerich's Independence Day (1996).
Life and career
Beck was born to the actress Cindy Robbins. She starred in such movies as Massacre at Central High, Roller Boogie, and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Among her notable television credits are General Hospital, Capitol (billed as Kimberly Beck-Hilton), Fantasy Island, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (as one side of a Jekyll-and-Hyde character, whose counterpart was played by Trisha Noble), Westwind, The Brady Bunch, Dynasty, Lucas Tanner and Peyton Place (as the character Kim Schuster). As a child, she appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie and television commercials for such products as Mattel Toymakers Barbie and Chatty dolls. She had a very brief appearance on The Munsters as a transformed Eddie Munster after Eddie drank the rest of Grandpa's Texas Playgirl Potion in season 1, episode 33 entitled "Lily Munster, Girl Model". She starred on the pilot episode of Eight Is Enough as Nancy Bradford, the role that, in the series, went to Dianne Kay. She also had the role of Diane Porter in Rich Man, Poor Man Book II with Peter Strauss and appeared in a host of other well-received television miniseries productions. In 1968, she and her stepfather Tommy Leonetti, then working in Australia, recorded the single "Let's Take a Walk", released under the name of "Tommy Leonetti and his daughter Kim". It charted at #4 on the Melbourne charts.
In 1988, Beck married producer Jason Clark and they had two sons.
Filmography
Film
Television
References
External links
1956 births
Living people
Actresses from Glendale, California
American child actresses
American film actresses
American soap opera actresses
American television actresses
Glendale High School (Glendale, California) alumni
21st-century American women | [
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17450 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsten%20Dunst | Kirsten Dunst | Kirsten Caroline Dunst (; born April 30, 1982) is an American actress. She has received various accolades, including a Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, in addition to nominations for an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and four Golden Globe Awards. She made her acting debut in the short Oedipus Wrecks directed by Woody Allen in the anthology film New York Stories (1989). She then gained recognition for her role as child vampiress Claudia in the horror film Interview with the Vampire (1994), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She also had roles in her youth in Little Women (1994) and the fantasy films Jumanji (1995) and Small Soldiers (1998).
In the late 1990s, Dunst transitioned to leading roles in a number of teen films, including the political satire Dick (1999) and the Sofia Coppola-directed drama The Virgin Suicides (1999). In 2000, she starred in the lead role in the cheerleading film Bring It On, which has become a cult classic. She gained further wide attention for her role as Mary Jane Watson in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002) and its sequels Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007). Her career progressed with a supporting role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), followed by a lead role in Cameron Crowe's tragicomedy Elizabethtown (2005), and as the title character in Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006).
In 2011, Dunst starred as a depressed newlywed in Lars von Trier's science fiction drama Melancholia, which earned her the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress. In 2015, she played Peggy Blumquist in the second season of the FX series Fargo, which earned Dunst a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. She then had a supporting role in the film Hidden Figures (2016) and leading roles in The Beguiled (2017), and the black comedy series On Becoming a God in Central Florida (2019), for which she received a third Golden Globe nomination. She earned nominations for her fourth Golden Globe and first Academy Award nomination for her performance in the psychological drama The Power of the Dog (2021).
Early life and family
Dunst was born on April 30, 1982, at Point Pleasant Hospital in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Dunst's father worked for Siemens as a medical services executive, and her mother worked for Lufthansa as a flight attendant. She was also an artist and one-time gallery owner. Dunst's father is German, originally from Hamburg, and her American mother is of German and Swedish descent. Until age eleven, Dunst lived in Brick Township, New Jersey, and attended Ranney School in Tinton Falls.
In 1993, she moved to Los Angeles with her mother and brother, after her parents separated. After graduating from Notre Dame High School in 2000, Dunst continued acting. In her teens, she found it difficult to cope with her rising fame, and for a period she blamed her mother for pushing her into acting as a child. However, she later said that her mother "always had the best intentions". When asked if she had any regrets about her childhood, Dunst said, "Well, it's not a natural way to grow up, but it's the way I grew up and I wouldn't change it. I have my stuff to work out... I don't think anybody can sit around and say, 'My life is more screwed up than yours.' Everybody has their issues".
Career
1988–1993: Early work
Dunst began her career at age three as a child fashion model in television commercials. She was signed with Ford Models and Elite Model Management. In 1988, she appeared in Saturday Night Live as the granddaughter of George H.W. Bush. Later that year, she made her feature film debut with a minor role in Woody Allen's short film Oedipus Wrecks; it was released as one-third of the anthology film New York Stories (1989). Soon after, Dunst performed in the comedy-drama The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), based on Tom Wolfe's novel of the same name, in which she played the daughter of Tom Hanks' character. In 1993, Dunst made a guest appearance in an episode of the science fiction drama Star Trek: The Next Generation.
1994–2001: Breakthrough
Dunst's breakthrough role came in 1994, in the horror drama Interview with the Vampire opposite Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, based on Anne Rice's novel of the same name. She played Claudia, the child vampire who is a surrogate daughter to Cruise's and Pitt's characters. The film included a scene in which Dunst shared her first onscreen kiss with Pitt, who is nearly two decades her senior. She stated that kissing him had made her feel uncomfortable: "I thought it was gross, that Brad had cooties. I mean, I was 10," she recalled. While the film overall received mixed reviews, many critics singled out Dunst's performance for acclaim. Roger Ebert considered her portrayal of Claudia to be one of the "creepier" aspects of the film, and took note of how well she had conveyed the impression of great age inside apparent youth. Todd McCarthy of Variety stated that Dunst was "just right" for the family. For her performance, she won the MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance and the Saturn Award for Best Young Actress, in addition to receiving a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Later in 1994, Dunst co-starred in the drama film Little Women alongside Winona Ryder and Claire Danes. The film was critically acclaimed. Janet Maslin of The New York Times hailed it as the greatest adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel of the same name and wrote of Dunst's performance:
In 1995, Dunst starred in the fantasy adventure film Jumanji, a loose adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg's 1981 children's book of the same name. The story is about a supernatural and ominous board game in which animals and other jungle hazards appear with each roll of the dice. She was part of an ensemble cast that included Robin Williams, Bonnie Hunt and David Alan Grier. The film was a financial success and grossed $262 million worldwide. In that year, and again in 2002, Dunst was named one of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People.
From 1996 to 1997, Dunst had a recurring role in season three of the NBC medical drama ER. She played Charlie Chemingo, a child prostitute who was being cared for by the ER pediatrician Dr. Doug Ross (George Clooney). In 1997, she voiced Young Anastasia in the animated musical film Anastasia. Also in 1997, Dunst appeared in the black comedy film Wag the Dog, opposite Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. The following year she voiced the title character, Kiki, a thirteen-year-old apprentice witch who leaves her home village to spend a year on her own, in the anime Kiki's Delivery Service. She also starred in Sarah Kernochan's period comedy All I Wanna Do (1998), playing a student at an all girls' boarding school in the 1960s, opposite Gaby Hoffmann, Rachael Leigh Cook, and Lynn Redgrave. Writing for The New York Times, A. O. Scott opined that "the film is surprisingly pleasant, thanks to smart, unstereotyped performances – especially by Hoffmann and Dunst – and the filmmaker's evident respect and affection for her characters".
Dunst starred in Drop Dead Gorgeous, a 1999 American satirical black comedy mockumentary film about a small town beauty pageant with Ellen Barkin and Allison Janney. She turned down the role of Angela Hayes (played by Mena Suvari) in American Beauty (1999), because she did not want to appear in the film's sexual scenes or kiss the lead character, played by Kevin Spacey. She later explained: "When I read it, I was 15 and I don't think I was mature enough to understand the script's material." Dunst co-starred in the comedy film Dick, opposite Michelle Williams; it is a parody which retells the events of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of former United States president Richard Nixon. Her next film was Sofia Coppola's drama The Virgin Suicides (1999), based on Jeffrey Eugenides' novel of the same name. She played Lux Lisbon, one of the troubled teenage daughters of Ronald Lisbon (James Woods). The film was screened as a special presentation at the 43rd San Francisco International Film Festival in 2000. According to Metacritic, the film received generally favorable reviews. San Francisco Chronicle critic Peter Stack noted in his review that Dunst "beautifully balances innocence and wantonness". Dunst also appeared in Savage Garden's music video "I Knew I Loved You", the first single from their second and final album Affirmation (1999).
In 2000, Dunst starred in the comedy Bring It On as Torrance Shipman, the captain of a cheerleading squad. The film garnered mostly positive reviews, with many critics reserving praise for her performance. In his review, A. O. Scott called her "a terrific comic actress, largely because of her great expressive range, and the nimbleness with which she can shift from anxiety to aggression to genuine hurt". Charles Taylor of Salon noted that "among contemporary teenage actresses, Dunst has become the sunniest imaginable parodist", even though he thought the film had failed to provide her with as good a role as she had in either Dick or in The Virgin Suicides. Jessica Winter of The Village Voice praised Dunst, stating that her performance was "as sprightly and knowingly daft as her turn in Dick" adding that "[Dunst] provides the only major element of Bring It On that plays as tweaking parody rather than slick, strident, body-slam churlishness." Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle, despite giving the film an unfavorable review, commended Dunst for her willingness "to be as silly and cloyingly agreeable as it takes to get through a slapdash film".
The following year, Dunst starred in the comedy film Get Over It. She later explained that she took the role for the opportunity to showcase her singing. Also in 2001, she starred in the historical drama The Cat's Meow, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, as actress Marion Davies. Derek Elley of Variety described the film as "playful and sporty", deeming this Dunst's best performance to date: "Believable as both a spoiled ingenue and a lover to two very different men, Dunst endows a potentially lightweight character with considerable depth and sympathy". For her performance, she won the Best Actress Silver Ombú award at the 2002 Mar del Plata International Film Festival.
2002–2009: Stardom with Spider-Man and comedies
In 2002, Dunst starred opposite Tobey Maguire in the superhero film Spider-Man, the most financially successful film of her career up until this date. She played Mary Jane Watson, the best friend and love interest of Peter Parker (Maguire). The film was directed by Sam Raimi. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly noted Dunst's ability to "lend even the smallest line a tickle of flirtatious music". Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan reviewed that Dunst and Maguire made a real connection onscreen, concluding that their relationship "involved audiences to an extent rarely seen in films". Spider-Man was a critical and commercial success. The film grossed $114 million during its opening weekend in North America and earned $822 million worldwide.
Dunst next co-starred with Billy Bob Thornton, Morgan Freeman and Holly Hunter in the drama Levity (2003), a story of a man who is released on parole and returns to his hometown seeking redemption. That same year, she co-starred opposite Julia Roberts, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Julia Stiles in the drama Mona Lisa Smile (2003). The film received mostly negative reviews, with Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times describing it as "smug and reductive". Dunst co-starred as Mary Svevo opposite Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet and Tom Wilkinson in Michel Gondry's science fiction romantic comedy-drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). The latter film was critically acclaimed, with Entertainment Weekly describing Dunst's subplot as "nifty and clever". The film grossed $72 million worldwide.
The success of the first Spider-Man led Dunst to reprise her role as Mary Jane Watson in 2004 in Spider-Man 2. The film was acclaimed by critics and a commercial success, setting a new opening weekend box office record for North America. With box office revenues of $783 million worldwide, it was the second highest-grossing film in 2004. Also in 2004, Dunst co-starred opposite Paul Bettany in the romantic comedy Wimbledon in which she portrayed a rising tennis player in the Wimbledon Championships, while Bettany portrayed a fading former tennis star. The film received mixed reviews, but many critics enjoyed Dunst's performance. Claudia Puig of USA Today observed that the chemistry between Dunst and Bettany was potent, with Dunst doing a "fine job as a sassy and self-assured player".
In Dunst's sole project of 2005, she co-starred opposite Orlando Bloom in Cameron Crowe's romantic tragicomedy Elizabethtown as flight attendant Claire Colburn. The film premiered at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. Dunst revealed that working with Crowe was enjoyable, but more demanding than she had expected. The film garnered mixed reviews, with the Chicago Tribune rating it 1 out of 4 stars and describing Dunst's portrayal of a flight attendant as "cloying". It was also a box office disappointment. After Elizabethtown, Dunst collaborated with Sofia Coppola again and starred as the title character in the historical drama Marie Antoinette (2006), based on Antonia Fraser's book Marie Antoinette: The Journey. The film was screened at a special presentation at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, and was reviewed favorably. The film grossed $60 million at the box office from a budget of $40 million.
In 2007, Dunst reprised the role of Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man 3. In contrast to its predecessors' rave reviews, Spider-Man 3 received a mixed reaction from critics. Ryan Gilbey of the New Statesman was critical of Dunst's character, remarking that "the film-makers couldn't come up with much for Mary Jane to do other than scream a lot". Nevertheless, with a worldwide gross of $891 million, it stands as the most commercially successful film in the series and Dunst's highest-grossing film to the end of 2008. Having initially signed on for three Spider-Man films, she said she would consider doing a fourth, but only if Raimi and Maguire returned. In January 2010, it was announced that the fourth film was canceled and that the Spider-Man film series would be restarted, therefore dropping the trio from the franchise.
Dunst's next role was in 2008, in which she co-starred opposite Simon Pegg in the comedy How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, based on former Vanity Fair contributing editor Toby Young's memoir of the same name. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 37%, with the film gaining mostly negative reviews. Robert Wilonsky of The Village Voice was critical of Dunst's performance, writing she "seems to be speaking in four different accents at once, none of them quite of the English variety". He added that the film "plays like a made-for-CBS redo of The Devil Wears Prada".
2010–2016: Independent films, television work and dramas
Dunst made her screenwriting and directorial debut with the short film Bastard, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2010 and was later featured at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. She co-starred opposite Ryan Gosling in the mystery drama All Good Things (2010), based on the true story of New York real estate developer Robert Durst, whose wife disappeared in 1982. The film received fair reviews, but was a commercial failure, earning only $640,000 worldwide. The critic Roger Ebert praised Dunst for her ability to capture "a woman at a loss to understand who her husband really is, and what the true nature of his family involves". The San Francisco Chronicle complimented her performance as "the only one worth watching", despite the film's "slow crawl" and lack of suspense. Also in 2010, Dunst co-starred with Brian Geraghty in Carlos Cuarón's short film The Second Bakery Attack, based on Haruki Murakami's short story.
In 2011, Dunst co-starred opposite Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland and Charlotte Rampling in Lars von Trier's drama film Melancholia as a woman suffering depression as the world ends. It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and received positive reviews, in particular for Dunst's performance. Steven Loeb of Southampton Patch wrote "This film has brought the best out of von Trier, as well as his star. Dunst is so good in this film, playing a character unlike any other she has ever attempted... Even if the film itself were not the incredible work of art that it is, Dunst's performance alone would be incentive enough to recommend it". Sukhdev Sandhu of The Daily Telegraph wrote "Dunst is exceptional, so utterly convincing in the lead role – trouble, serene, a fierce savant – that it feels like a career breakthrough. Dunst won several awards for her performance, including the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival and the Best Actress Award from the U.S. National Society of Film Critics.
Dunst made a cameo in Beastie Boys' 2011 music video Fight For Your Right Revisited which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. A year later, she starred in Juan Diego Solanas' science fiction romance Upside Down with Jim Sturgess. Described as a Romeo and Juliet story, Peter Howell of the Toronto Star opined that there was no character development and Dunst "brings competence but no passion to her underwritten roles". The film's consensus on Rotten Tomatoes was also negative, with a 28% approval rating. Next, she had a role in Leslye Headland's romantic comedy Bachelorette (2012), starring Isla Fisher, Rebel Wilson and Lizzy Caplan; the film was produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay. Dunst plays Regan Crawford, one of three women who reunite for the wedding of a friend who was ridiculed in high school. The film garnered mixed reviews; New York Posts Sara Stewart thought Dunst and Caplan gave strong performances, and praised the writing despite it being "a little underwhelming" on the laughs. Dunst's appeared in the drama On the Road (2012), an adaptation of Jack Kerouac's novel of the same name, in which she plays Camille Moriarty. Dunst was first approached for the role by director Walter Salles several years prior. The film premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, and was released in the United States on December 21, 2012. On the Road gained mixed reviews and under-performed at the box office. Writing for Time magazine, Richard Corliss compared On the Road to "a diorama in a Kerouac museum ... [the film] lacks the novel’s exuberant syncopation", but praises Dunst's performance. Chicago Tribunes Michael Phillips was more positive, giving the film 3 out of 4 stars, praising the cinematic quality, and actors for their "kind of fluid motion and freedom that periodically makes On the Road make sense and makes it feel alive".
Hossein Amini's The Two Faces of January (2014) was Dunst's next major role, starring alongside Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac. Playing Colette MacFarland, the wife of a con artist, the thriller is based on Patricia Highsmith's 1964 novel of the same name. Garnering mostly favorable reviews, the Los Angeles Times complimented the 1960s Greek setting and observed Dunst "brings a potent complexity to Colette; every mood shift registers to the bone". Jake Wilson of The Sydney Morning Herald praised the script for "condensing the book's plot while retaining its spirit", although he thought there was some uneven editing. Of Dunst's performance, he called her "typically teasing yet sympathetic". Finally in 2014, Dunst voiced a character in the eighth episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, and made a guest appearance in an episode of Portlandia. Throughout 2015, Dunst focused solely on television work. She was cast as hairdresser Peggy Blumquist in the second season of the critically acclaimed FX crime comedy-drama Fargo, which earned her a nomination for Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.
In 2016, Dunst co-starred in Jeff Nichols' science fiction drama Midnight Special with Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton. The story is about a father and his eight-year-old son who go on the run upon discovering that the boy possesses mysterious powers. The film opened to mostly positive reviews; Tim Grierson of The New Republic was impressed by Midnight Specials special effects which imitated a late 20th century retro style. However, he questioned the purpose of Dunst's character which "simply has nothing to do". Dunst had a supporting role in the biographical drama Hidden Figures (2016), a loose adaptation of the book of the same name, about African-American mathematicians who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Space Race. Dunst's portrayal of a white supervisor drew praise from Slant Magazines Elise Nakhnikian, while The Guardian thought the film was educational and entertaining despite its underdeveloped supporting cast. The film was a commercial success, grossing $236 million worldwide and was nominated for three Academy Awards. The cast also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. In addition to acting, Dunst served as a member of the main competition jury of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. In that year, Dunst planned to direct an adaptation of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, starring Dakota Fanning, but stepped down from the project before production.
2017–present
Dunst had two film releases in 2017. She starred alongside Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning in the drama The Beguiled, which marked her third collaboration with Sofia Coppola, who wrote and directed the film. It is a remake of Don Siegel's 1971 film of the same name about a wounded Union soldier who seeks shelter at an all-girls' school in the Confederate States. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 79% approval rating which was "enlivened by strong performances from the cast". Matthew Norman of the Evening Standard similarly took note of the "impeccable" acting performances and wrote, "Dunst lends the ideal measure of coiled physical longing to her prim spinster".
Dunst then starred in the psychological thriller Woodshock, written and directed by her friends, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, founders of the Rodarte fashion label. The film is about a woman who falls deeper into paranoia after taking a deadly drug. The Mulleavys' personally approached Dunst for the lead role, which gave Dunst an "emotional safety net" during filming. She prepared for the role over the course of a year, undertaking dream experiments in order to try to inhabit the character's state of mind. Upon release, the film was unpopular with critics. Katie Rife of The A.V. Club acknowledged the "sophisticated" cinematography but thought "Character development and motivation are practically nonexistent, and the already-thin plot pushes ambiguity to the point of incoherence". Varietys Guy Lodge shared a similar opinion with the character, writing "Dunst has form in playing irretrievably inverted depression to riveting effect, but the Mulleavys’ script hardly gives her as complex an emotional or intellectual palette to work with".
In 2019, Dunst starred in the Showtime dark comedy television series On Becoming a God in Central Florida, which premiered in August that year. For her role, she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress and a Critics Choice Award for Best Actress in a Comedy Series. In September 2019, Showtime renewed the series for a second season, but ultimately canceled it the following year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dunst co-starred with her partner Jesse Plemons in Jane Campion's film The Power of the Dog distributed by Netflix, and given a limited theatrical release in the USA on 17 November 2021. She received Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress.
Music career
Dunst made her singing debut in the comedy film Get Over It, performing two songs written by Marc Shaiman.
She recorded Henry Creamer and Turner Layton's jazz standard "After You've Gone" that was used in the end credits of The Cat's Meow. In Spider-Man 3, she sang two songs as Mary Jane Watson, one during a Broadway performance, and one as a singing waitress in a jazz club. Dunst recorded the songs earlier and lip-synced while filming. She appeared in the music videos for Savage Garden's "I Knew I Loved You", Beastie Boys' "Make Some Noise" and R.E.M.'s "We All Go Back to Where We Belong" and she sang two tracks which were "This Old Machine" and "Summer Day" on Jason Schwartzman's 2007 solo album Nighttiming. In 2007, Dunst said she had no intention to release albums, saying, "It worked when Barbra Streisand was doing it, but now it's a little cheesy, I think. It works better when singers are in movies".
Dunst starred as the magical princess Majokko in the Takashi Murakami and McG directed short Akihabara Majokko Princess singing a cover of The Vapors' 1980 song "Turning Japanese". This was shown at the "Pop Life" exhibition in London's Tate Modern museum from October 1, 2009, to January 17, 2010. It shows Dunst dancing around Akihabara, a shopping district in Tokyo, Japan.
Personal life
Dunst dated actor Jake Gyllenhaal from 2002 to 2004, and Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell in 2007. She was in a relationship with her On the Road co-star Garrett Hedlund from 2012 to 2016; they were briefly engaged before eventually breaking up. She began a relationship with her Fargo co-star Jesse Plemons in 2016 and they became engaged in 2017. Their first son was born on May 3, 2018. In a cover shoot for W directed by long-time collaborator Sofia Coppola, she announced that she was pregnant with her second child, and later gave birth to their second son in May 2021.
In 2001, Dunst purchased a house in Toluca Lake, California but eventually sold it in September 2019 for $4.5 million. In 2010, she also sold a property in Nichols Canyon, California for $1.4 million. Dunst owned a Lower Manhattan apartment which she listed for sale in 2017.
In early 2008, Dunst was treated for depression at the Cirque Lodge treatment center in Utah. In late March 2008, she left the treatment center and began filming All Good Things. Two months later, she went public with this information in order to dispel rumors of drug and alcohol abuse, stating, "Now that I'm feeling stronger, I was prepared to say something. [...] Depression is pretty serious and should not be gossiped about".
Other ventures
Dunst supports the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, for which she helped design and promote a necklace whose sales proceeds went to the Foundation. She worked in support of breast cancer awareness, participating in the Stand Up to Cancer telethon in September 2008 in order to raise funds for cancer research. On December 5, 2009, she participated in the Teletón in Mexico, in order to raise awareness for cancer treatment and children's rehabilitation.
Dunst endorsed John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. She supported Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election, and directed and narrated a documentary, Why Tuesday, about the tradition of voting on Tuesdays and low voter turnout in the United States, to "influence people in a positive way". She endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential election. In 2011, she acquired German citizenship, which enabled her to "film in Europe without a problem". She now holds dual US and German citizenship.
Acting credits and awards
Dunst's most acclaimed films according to the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, include Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Melancholia (2011), The Two Faces of January (2014), Hidden Figures (2017), and The Power Of The Dog (2021).
Dunst has been nominated for four Golden Globe awards: Best Supporting Actress for Interview with the Vampire (1994) and The Power of the Dog, Best Actress for Miniseries or Television Film for Fargo (2015), and Best Actress for Television Series Musical or Comedy for On Becoming a God in Central Florida (2019). In August 2019, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Dunst was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Power of The Dog in the 2022 Academy Awards.
Discography
References
External links
1982 births
20th-century American actresses
21st-century American actresses
Actresses from New Jersey
American child actresses
American child models
American feminists
American film actresses
American people of German descent
American people of Swedish descent
American television actresses
American video game actresses
American voice actresses
Audiobook narrators
Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress winners
Citizens of Germany through descent
Female models from New Jersey
HIV/AIDS activists
Living people
New Jersey Democrats
Notre Dame High School (Sherman Oaks, California) alumni
Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award winners
People from Brick Township, New Jersey
People from Point Pleasant, New Jersey | [
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17453 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin%20Warwick | Kevin Warwick | Kevin Warwick (born 9 February 1954) is an English engineer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research concerning robotics.
Biography
Kevin Warwick was born in 1954 in Keresley, Coventry, England, and was raised in the nearby village of Ryton-on-Dunsmore, Warwickshire. His family attended a Methodist church but soon he began doubting the existence of God. He attended Lawrence Sheriff School in Rugby, Warwickshire, where he was a contemporary of actor Arthur Bostrom. He left school at the age of 16 to start an apprenticeship with British Telecom. In 1976, he was granted his first degree at Aston University, followed by a PhD degree and a research job at Imperial College London.
He took up positions at Somerville College in Oxford, Newcastle University, the University of Warwick, and the University of Reading, before relocating to Coventry University in 2014.
Warwick is a Chartered Engineer (CEng), a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET) and a Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute (FCGI). He is Visiting Professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague, the University of Strathclyde, Bournemouth University, and the University of Reading, and in 2004 he was Senior Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois in the United States. He is also on the Advisory Boards of the Instinctive Computing Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter.
By the age of 40, Warwick had been awarded a DSc degree by both Imperial College London and the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, for his research output in two entirely unrelated areas. He has received the IET Achievement Medal, the IET Mountbatten Medal, and in 2011 the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine. In 2000, Warwick presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled The Rise of Robots.
Research
Warwick performs research in artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, control systems and robotics. Much of Warwick's early research was in the area of discrete time adaptive control. He introduced the first state space based self-tuning controller and unified discrete time state space representations of ARMA models. He has also contributed to mathematics, power engineering and manufacturing production machinery.
Artificial intelligence
Warwick directed a research project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which investigated the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to suitably stimulate and translate patterns of electrical activity from living cultured neural networks to use the networks for the control of mobile robots. Hence the behaviour process for each robot was effectively provided by a biological brain.
Previously, Warwick helped to develop a genetic algorithm named Gershwyn, which was able to exhibit creativity in producing popular songs, learning what makes a hit record by listening to examples of previous successful songs. Gershwyn appeared on BBC's Tomorrow's World, having been successfully used to mix music for Manus, a group consisting of the four younger brothers of Elvis Costello.
Another of Warwick's projects involving AI was the robot head, Morgui. The head, which contained five "senses" (vision, sound, infrared, ultrasound and radar), was used to investigate sensor data fusion. It was X-rated by the University of Reading Research and Ethics Committee due to its image storage capabilities—anyone under the age of 18 who wished to interact with the robot had to obtain parental approval.
Warwick has very outspoken opinions about the future, particularly with respect to AI and its effect on the human species. He argues that humanity will need to use technology to enhance itself to avoid being overtaken by machines. He states that many human limitations, such as sensorimotor abilities, can be outperformed by machines, and he has said on record that he wants to gain these abilities: "There is no way I want to stay a mere human."
Bioethics
Warwick directed the University of Reading team in a number of European Community projects such as: FIDIS (Future of Identity in the Information Society), researching the future of identity; and ETHICBOTS and RoboLaw, both of which considered the ethical aspects of robots and cyborgs.
Warwick's topics of interest have many ethical implications, some due to his human enhancement experiments. The ethical dilemmas of his research are used by the Institute of Physics as a case study for schoolchildren and science teachers as a part of their formal Advanced level and GCSE studies. His work has also been discussed by The President's Council on Bioethics and the President's Panel on Forward Engagements. He is a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Party on Novel Neurotechnologies.
Deep brain stimulation
Along with Tipu Aziz and his team at John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, and John Stein of the University of Oxford, Warwick is helping to design the next generation of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease. Instead of stimulating the brain all the time, the goal is for the device to predict when stimulation is needed and to apply the signals prior to any tremors occurring to stop them before they even start. Recent results have also shown that it is possible to identify different types of Parkinson's Disease.
Public awareness
Warwick has directed a number of projects intended to interest schoolchildren in the technology with which he is involved. In 2000, he received the EPSRC Millennium Award for his Schools Robot League. In 2007, 16 school teams were involved in a project to design a humanoid robot to dance and then complete an assault course, with the final competition staged at the Science Museum, London. The project, entitled 'Androids Advance' was funded by EPSRC and was presented as a news item by Chinese television.
Warwick contributes significantly to the public understanding of science by giving regular public lectures, participating with radio programmes, and through popular writing. He has appeared in numerous television documentary programmes on AI, robotics and the role of science fiction in science, such as How William Shatner Changed the World, Future Fantastic and Explorations. He also appeared in the Ray Kurzweil-inspired movie Transcendent Man along with William Shatner, Colin Powell, and Stevie Wonder. He has guested on several television talk shows, including Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Først & sist, Sunday Brunch and Richard & Judy. He has appeared on the cover of a number of magazines, for example the February 2000 edition of Wired.
In 2005, Warwick was the subject of an early day motion tabled by members of the UK Parliament, in which he was congratulated for his work in attracting students to science and for teaching "in a way that makes the subject interesting and relevant so that more students will want to develop a career in science."
In 2013, Warwick appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity with Robert Llewellyn and Cleo Rocos. In 2014, he appeared on BBC Radio 4's Midweek with Libby Purves, Roger Bannister and Rachael Stirling.
Robotics
Warwick's claims that robots can program themselves to avoid each other while operating in a group raise the issue of self-organisation. In particular, the works of Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, once purely speculative have now become immediately relevant with respect to synthetic intelligence.
Cyborg-type systems, if they are to survive, need to be not only homeostatic (meaning that they are able to preserve stable internal conditions in various environments) but also adaptive. Testing the claims of Varela and Maturana using synthetic devices is the more serious concern in the discussion about Warwick and those involved in similar research. "Pulling the plug" on independent devices cannot be as simple as it appears, because if the device displays sufficient intelligence, and assumes a diagnostic and prognostic stature, we may ultimately one day be forced to decide between what it could be telling us as counterintuitive (but correct) and our impulse to disconnect because of our limited and "intuitive" perceptions.
Warwick's robots seemed to exhibit behaviour not anticipated by the research, one such robot "committing suicide" because it could not cope with its environment. In a more complex setting, it may be asked whether a "natural selection" might be possible, neural networks being the major operative.
The 1999 edition of the Guinness Book of Records recorded that Warwick performed the first robot learning experiment using the Internet. One robot, with an artificial neural network brain at the University of Reading in the UK, learned how to move around without bumping into things. It then taught, via the Internet, another robot at SUNY Buffalo in New York State to behave in the same way. The robot in the US was therefore not taught or programmed by a human, but rather by another robot based on what it had itself learnt.
Hissing Sid was a robot cat that Warwick took on a British Council lecture tour of Russia, where he presented it in lectures at such places as Moscow State University. The robot was put together as a student project; its name came from the noise made by the pneumatic actuators used to drive its legs when walking. Hissing Sid also appeared on BBC TV's Blue Peter but became more well known when it was refused a ticket by British Airways on the grounds that they did not allow animals in the cabin.
Warwick was also responsible for a robotic "magic chair" (based on the SCARA-form UMI RTX arm) used on BBC TV's Jim'll Fix It. The chair provided the show's host Jimmy Savile with tea and stored Jim'll Fix It badges for him to hand out to guests. Warwick appeared on the programme himself for a Fix-it involving robots.
Warwick was also involved in the development of the "Seven Dwarves" robots, a version of which was sold in kit form as "Cybot" on the cover of Real Robots magazine in 2001. The magazine series guided its readers through the stages of building and programming Cybot, an artificially intelligent robot capable of making its own decisions and thinking for itself.
Project Cyborg
Probably the most famous research undertaken by Warwick—and the origin of the nickname "Captain Cyborg" given to him by The Register—is the set of experiments known as Project Cyborg, in which an array was implanted into his arm, with the goal of him "becoming a cyborg".
The first stage of Project Cyborg, which began on 24 August 1998, involved a simple RFID transmitter being implanted beneath Warwick's skin, which was used to control doors, lights, heaters, and other computer-controlled devices based on his proximity. He explained that the main purpose of this experiment was to test the limits of what the body would accept, and how easy it would be to receive a meaningful signal from the microprocessor.
The second stage of the research involved a more complex neural interface, designed and built especially for the experiment by Dr. Mark Gasson and his team at the University of Reading. This device consisted of a BrainGate sensor, a silicon square about 3mm wide, connected to an external "gauntlet" that housed supporting electronics. It was implanted under local anaesthetic on 14 March 2002 at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, where it was interfaced directly into Warwick's nervous system via the median nerve in his left wrist. The microelectrode array that was inserted contained 100 electrodes, each the width of a human hair, of which 25 could be accessed at any one time, whereas the nerve that was being monitored carries many times that number of signals. The experiment proved successful, and the output signals were detailed enough to enable a robot arm, developed by Warwick's colleague Dr. Peter Kyberd, to mimic the actions of Warwick's own arm.
By means of the implant, Warwick's nervous system was connected to the Internet at Columbia University, New York. From there he was able to control the robot arm at the University of Reading and obtain feedback from sensors in the finger tips. He also successfully connected ultrasonic sensors on a baseball cap and experienced a form of extrasensory input.
In a highly publicised extension to the experiment, a simpler array was implanted into the arm of Warwick's wife, with the ultimate aim of one day creating a form of telepathy or empathy using the Internet to communicate the signal over huge distances. This experiment resulted in the first direct and purely electronic communication between the nervous systems of two humans. Finally, the effect of the implant on Warwick's hand function was measured using the University of Southampton's Hand Assessment Procedure (SHAP). There was a fear that directly interfacing with the nervous system might cause some form of damage or interference, but no measurable side effect (nor any sign of rejection) was encountered. In fact, it was observed that nerve tissue grew around the electrode array, enclosing the sensor.
Implications
Warwick and his colleagues claim that the Project Cyborg research could result in new medical tools for treating patients with damage to the nervous system, as well as assisting the more ambitious enhancements Warwick advocates. Some transhumanists even speculate that similar technologies could be used for technology-facilitated telepathy.
Tracking device
A controversy began in August 2002, shortly after the Soham murders, when Warwick reportedly offered to implant a tracking device into an 11-year-old girl as an anti-abduction measure. The plan produced a mixed reaction, with endorsement from many worried parents but ethical concerns from children's societies. As a result, the idea did not go ahead.
Anti-theft RFID chips are common in jewellery or clothing in some Latin American countries due to a high abduction rate, and the company VeriChip announced plans in 2001 to expand its line of available medical information implants, to be GPS trackable when combined with a separate GPS device.
Turing test
Warwick participated as a Turing Interrogator on two occasions, judging machines in the 2001 and 2006 Loebner Prize competitions, platforms for an "imitation game" as devised by Alan Turing. The 2001 Prize, held at the London Science Museum, featured Turing's "jury service" or one-to-one Turing tests and was won by A.L.I.C.E. The 2006 contest staged "parallel-paired" Turing tests at University College London and the winner was Rollo Carpenter. Warwick co-organised the 2008 Loebner Prize at the University of Reading, which also featured parallel-paired Turing tests.
In 2012, he co-organised with Huma Shah a series of Turing tests held at Bletchley Park. According to Warwick, the tests strictly adhered to the statements made by Alan Turing in his papers. Warwick himself participated in the tests as a hidden human. Results of the tests were discussed in a number of academic papers. One paper, entitled "Human Misidentification in Turing Tests", became one of the top three most-downloaded papers in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.
In June 2014, Warwick helped Shah stage a series of Turing tests to mark the 60th anniversary of Alan Turing's death. The event was performed at the Royal Society, London. Warwick regarded the winning chatbot, "Eugene Goostman", as having "passed the Turing test for the first time" by fooling a third of the event's judges into making an incorrect identification, and termed this a "milestone". A paper containing all of the transcripts involving Eugene Goostman entitled "Can Machines Think? A Report on Turing Test Experiments at the Royal Society", has also become one of the top three most-downloaded papers in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.
Warwick was criticised in the context of the 2014 Royal Society event, where he claimed that software program Eugene Goostman had passed the Turing test on the basis of its performance. The software successfully convinced over 30% of the judges who could not identify it as being a machine, on the basis of a five-minute text chat. Critics stated that the software's claim of being a young non-native English speaker weakened the spirit of the test, as any grammatical and semantic inconsistencies could be excused as a consequence of limited proficiency in the English language. Some critics also claimed that the software's performance had been exceeded by other programs in the past. However, the 2014 tests were entirely unrestricted in terms of discussion topics, whereas the previous tests referenced by the critics had been limited to very specific subject areas. Additionally, Warwick was criticised by editor and entrepreneur Mike Masnick for exaggerating the significance of the Eugene Goostman program to the press.
Other work
Warwick was a member of the 2001 Higher Education Funding Council for England (unit 29) Research Assessment Exercise panel on Electrical and Electronic Engineering and was Deputy chairman for the same panel (unit 24) in 2008. In March 2009, he was cited as being the inspiration of National Young Scientist of the Year, Peter Hatfield.
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
Warwick presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in December 2000, entitled Rise of the Robots. Although the lectures were well received by some, British computer scientist Simon Colton complained about the choice of Warwick prior to his appearance. He claimed that Warwick "is not a spokesman for our subject" (Artificial Intelligence) and "allowing him influence through the Christmas lectures is a danger to the public perception of science". In response to Warwick's claims that computers could be creative, Colton, who is a Professor of Computational Creativity, also said: "the AI community has done real science to reclaim words such as creativity and emotion which they claim computers will never have". Subsequent letters were generally positive; Ralph Rayner wrote: "With my youngest son, I attended all of the lectures and found them balanced and thought-provoking. They were not sensationalist. I applaud Warwick for his lectures".
Awards and recognition
Warwick received the Future Health Technology Award in 2000, and was presented with the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Achievement Medal in 2004. In 2008, he was awarded the Mountbatten Medal. In 2009 he received the Marcellin Champagnat award from Universidad Marista Guadalajara and the Golden Eurydice Award. In 2011 he received the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine. In 2014, he was elected to the membership of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 2018 Warwick was inducted into the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences and in 2020 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Cybernetics Society.
He is the recipient of ten honorary doctorates, these being from Aston University, Coventry University, Robert Gordon University, Bradford University, University of Bedfordshire, Portsmouth University, Kingston University, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, Edinburgh Napier University, and Galgotias University.
Reception
Warwick has both his critics and endorsers, some of whom describe him as a "maverick". Others see his work as "not very scientific" and more like "entertainment", whereas some regard him as "an extraordinarily creative experimenter", his presentations as "awesome" and his work as "profound".
Publications
Warwick has written several books, articles and papers. A selection of his books:
Lectures (inaugural and keynote lectures):
1998, Robert Boyle Lecture at the University of Oxford.
2000, Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. These lectures were repeated in 2001 during a tour of Japan, China and Korea.
2001, Higginson Lecture at Durham University, Hamilton institute inaugural lecture.
2003, Royal Academy of Engineering/Royal Society of Edinburgh Joint lecture in Edinburgh,
2003, IEEE (UK) Annual Lecture in London; Pittsburgh International Science and Technology Festival.
2004, Woolmer Lecture of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine at University of York; Robert Hooke Lecture (Westminster).
2005, Einstein Lecture in Potsdam, Germany
2006, Bernard Price Memorial Lecture tour in South Africa; Institution of Mechanical Engineers Prestige Lecture in London.
2007, Techfest plenary lecture in Mumbai; Kshitij keynote in Kharagpur (India); Engineer Techfest plenary lecture in NITK Surathkal (India); Annual Science Faculty lecture at University of Leicester; Graduate School in Physical Sciences and Engineering Annual Lecture, Cardiff University.
2008, Leslie Oliver Oration at Queen's Hospital; Techkriti keynote in Kanpur.
2008, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, guest lecture "Four weddings and a Funeral" for the Microsoft Research Chair.
2009, Cardiff University, 125th Anniversary Lecture; Orwell Society, Eton College.
2010, Robert Gordon University launch of Research Institute for Innovation Design and Sustainability (IDEAS)
2011, Ellison-Cliffe Lecture, Royal Society of Medicine; Inaugural research conference keynote, Anglia Ruskin University.
2012, IET Pinkerton Lecture, Bangalore.; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers UKRI 50 years Anniversary Lecture, Edinburgh.
2014, Sir Hugh Cairns Memorial Lecture, Society of British Neurological Surgeons, London.; Invited Keynote, BCS-SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Cambridge University.
2016, Launch of Wales Festival of Innovation, Cardiff.
2017, Paul B. Baltes Lecture, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Warwick is a regular presenter at the annual Careers Scotland Space School, University of Strathclyde.
He appeared at the 2009 World Science Festival with Mary McDonnell, Nick Bostrom, Faith Salie and Hod Lipson.
See also
Avatar Project
Brain–computer interface
Cyborg antenna
EyeTap
Grinder (biohacking)
Stelarc
The Age of Intelligent Machines
Tim Cannon
References
External links
"When man meets metal: rise of the transhumans" – article in The Guardian (29 October 2017) featuring Professor Kevin Warwick
"Cyborgs: A Personal Story" – Kevin Warwick TEDx talk at Coventry University (2016)
"Cyborgs: Ghosts of Christmas Future" – Kevin Warwick lecture (5 December 2013) on IET website
"I, Cyborg: An interview with Prof Kevin Warwick" (14 August 2013) on BCS website
BBC Radio 4 interview with Michael Buerk (14 Jun 2011)
Kevin Warwick article in Scientific American magazine (10 March 2008)
Kevin Warwick interview on IT Wales website (13 December 2006)
"Interview with the Cyborg" in The Future Fire magazine (2005)
1954 births
Living people
Academics of Imperial College London
Academics of the University of Reading
Academics of the University of Warwick
Alumni of Aston University
Alumni of Imperial College London
Artificial intelligence researchers
British Telecom people
British electrical engineers
British bioengineers
Control theorists
Cyberneticists
Cyborgs
Futurologists
Fellows of the Institution of Engineering and Technology
Human–computer interaction researchers
People educated at Lawrence Sheriff School
People associated with Newcastle University
People from Coventry
People in information technology
British roboticists
British systems scientists
Academics of Coventry University
Members of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts
British transhumanists
People known for their body modification
Engineers from the West Midlands (county) | [
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17454 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas%20City%2C%20Missouri | Kansas City, Missouri | Kansas City (abbreviated KC or KCMO) is the largest city in Missouri by population and area. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 508,090 in 2020, making it the 36th most-populous city in the United States. It is the most populated municipality and historic core city of the Kansas City metropolitan area, which straddles the Kansas–Missouri state line and has a population of 2,392,035. Most of the city lies within Jackson County, with portions spilling into Clay, Cass, and Platte counties. Kansas City was founded in the 1830s as a port on the Missouri River at its confluence with the Kansas River coming in from the west. On June 1, 1850, the town of Kansas was incorporated; shortly after came the establishment of the Kansas Territory. Confusion between the two ensued, and the name Kansas City was assigned to distinguish them soon after.
Sitting on Missouri's western boundary with Kansas, with Downtown near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, the city encompasses about , making it the 23rd largest city by total area in the United States. It serves as one of the two county seats of Jackson County, along with the major suburb of Independence. Other major suburbs include the Missouri cities of Blue Springs and Lee's Summit and the Kansas cities of Overland Park, Olathe, Lenexa, and Kansas City, Kansas.
The city is composed of several neighborhoods, including the River Market District in the north, the 18th and Vine District in the east, and the Country Club Plaza in the south. Celebrated cultural traditions include Kansas City jazz, theater which was the center of the Vaudevillian Orpheum circuit in the 1920s, the Chiefs and Royals sports franchises, and famous cuisine based on Kansas City-style barbecue, Kansas City strip steak, and craft breweries.
History
Kansas City, Missouri, was incorporated as a town on June 1, 1850, and as a city on March 28, 1853. The area, straddling the border between Missouri and Kansas at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, was considered a good place to build settlements.
The Antioch Christian Church, Dr. James Compton House, and Woodneath are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Exploration and settlement
The first documented European visitor to the eventual site of Kansas City was Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont, who was also the first European to explore the lower Missouri River. Criticized for his response to the Native American attack on Fort Détroit, he had deserted his post as fort commander and was avoiding French authorities. Bourgmont lived with a Native American wife in a village about east near Brunswick, Missouri, where he illegally traded furs.
To clear his name, he wrote Exact Description of Louisiana, of Its Harbors, Lands and Rivers, and Names of the Indian Tribes That Occupy It, and the Commerce and Advantages to Be Derived Therefrom for the Establishment of a Colony in 1713 followed in 1714 by The Route to Be Taken to Ascend the Missouri River. In the documents, he describes the junction of the "Grande Riv[ière] des Cansez" and Missouri River, making him the first to adopt those names. French cartographer Guillaume Delisle used the descriptions to make the area's first reasonably accurate map.
The Spanish took over the region in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, but were not to play a major role other than taxing and licensing Missouri River ship traffic. The French continued their fur trade under Spanish license. The Chouteau family operated under Spanish license at St. Louis, in the lower Missouri Valley as early as 1765 and in 1821 the Chouteaus reached Kansas City, where François Chouteau established Chouteau's Landing.
After the 1804 Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark visited the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, noting it was a good place to build a fort. In 1831, a group of Mormons from New York settled in what would become the city. They built the first school within Kansas City's current boundaries, but were forced out by mob violence in 1833, and their settlement remained vacant.
In 1831 Gabriel Prudhomme Sr., a Canadian trapper, purchased 257 acres of land fronting the Missouri River. He established a home for his wife, Josephine, and six children. He operated a ferry on the river.
In 1833 John McCoy, son of Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy, established West Port along the Santa Fe Trail, away from the river. In 1834 McCoy established Westport Landing on a bend in the Missouri to serve as a landing point for West Port. He found it more convenient to have his goods offloaded at the Prudhomme landing than in Independence. Several years after Gabriel Prudhomme's death, a group of fourteen investors purchased his land at auction on 14 November 1838. By 1839 the investors divided the property and the first lots were sold in 1846 after legal complications were settled. The remaining lots were sold by February 1850.
In 1850, the landing area was incorporated as the Town of Kansas. By that time, the Town of Kansas, Westport, and nearby Independence, had become critical points in the westward expansion of the United States. Three major trails – the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon – all passed through Jackson County.
On February 22, 1853, the City of Kansas was created with a newly elected mayor. It had an area of and a population of 2,500. The boundary lines at that time extended from the middle of the Missouri River south to what is now Ninth Street, and from Bluff Street on the west to a point between Holmes Road and Charlotte Street on the east.
American Civil War
During the Civil War, the city and its immediate surroundings were the focus of intense military activity. Although the First Battle of Independence in August 1862 resulted in a Confederate States Army victory, the Confederates were unable to leverage their win in any significant fashion, as Kansas City was occupied by Union troops and proved too heavily fortified to assault. The Second Battle of Independence, which occurred on October 21–22, 1864, as part of Sterling Price's Missouri expedition of 1864, also resulted in a Confederate triumph. Once again their victory proved hollow, as Price was decisively defeated in the pivotal Battle of Westport the next day, effectively ending Confederate efforts to regain Missouri.
General Thomas Ewing, in response to a successful raid on nearby Lawrence, Kansas, led by William Quantrill, issued General Order No. 11, forcing the eviction of residents in four western Missouri counties – including Jackson – except those living in the city and nearby communities and those whose allegiance to the Union was certified by Ewing.
Post–Civil War
After the Civil War, Kansas City grew rapidly. The selection of the city over Leavenworth, Kansas, for the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad bridge over the Missouri River brought about significant growth. The population exploded after 1869, when the Hannibal Bridge, designed by Octave Chanute, opened. The boom prompted a name change to Kansas City in 1889, and the city limits to be extended south and east. Westport became part of Kansas City on December 2, 1897. In 1900, Kansas City was the 22nd largest city in the country, with a population of 163,752 residents.
Kansas City, guided by landscape architect George Kessler, became a leading example of the City Beautiful movement, offering a network of boulevards and parks. New neighborhoods like Southmoreland and the Rockhill District were conceived to accommodate the city's largest residencies of palatial proportions.
The relocation of Union Station to its current location in 1914 and the opening of the Liberty Memorial in 1923 provided two of the city's most identifiable landmarks. Robert A. Long, president of the Liberty Memorial Association, was a driving force in the funding for construction. Long was a longtime resident and wealthy businessman. He built the R.A. Long Building for the Long-Bell Lumber Company, his home, Corinthian Hall (now the Kansas City Museum) and Longview Farm.
Further spurring Kansas City's growth was the opening of the innovative Country Club Plaza development by J.C. Nichols in 1925, as part of his Country Club District plan.
20th century streetcar system
The Kansas City streetcar system once had hundreds of miles of streetcars running through the city and was one of the largest systems in the country. In 1903 the 8th Street Tunnel was built as an underground streetcar system through the city. The last run of the streetcar was on June 23, 1957, but the tunnel still exists.
Pendergast era
At the start of the 20th century, political machines gained clout in the city, with the one led by Tom Pendergast dominating the city by 1925. Several important buildings and structures were built during this time, including the Kansas City City Hall and the Jackson County Courthouse. During this time, he aided one of his nephew's friends, Harry S. Truman in a political career. Truman eventually became a senator, then vice-president, then president. The machine fell in 1939 when Pendergast, riddled with health problems, pleaded guilty to tax evasion after long federal investigations. His biographers have summed up Pendergast's uniqueness:
Pendergast may bear comparison to various big-city bosses, but his open alliance with hardened criminals, his cynical subversion of the democratic process, his monarchistic style of living, his increasingly insatiable gambling habit, his grasping for a business empire, and his promotion of Kansas City as a wide-open town with every kind of vice imaginable, combined with his professed compassion for the poor and very real role as city builder, made him bigger than life, difficult to characterize.
Post–World War II
Kansas City's suburban development began with a streetcar system in the early decades of the 20th century. The city's first suburbs were in the neighborhoods of Pendleton Heights and Quality Hill. After World War II, many relatively affluent residents left for suburbs in Johnson County, Kansas, and eastern Jackson County, Missouri. Many also went north of the Missouri River, where Kansas City had incorporated areas between the 1940s and 1970s.
Troost dividing wall and white flight
Troost Avenue, once the eastern edge of Kansas City, Mo. and a residential corridor nicknamed Millionaire Row, is now widely seen as one of the city's most prominent racial and economic dividing lines due to urban decay, which was caused by white flight. During the civil rights era the city blocked people of color from moving to homes west of Troost Avenue, causing the areas east of Troost to have one of the worst murder rates in the country. This led to the dominating economic success of neighboring Johnson County.
In 1950, African Americans represented 12.2% of Kansas City's population. The sprawling characteristics of the city and its environs today mainly took shape after 1960s race riots. The April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was a catalyst for the 1968 Kansas City riot. At this time, slums were forming in the inner city, and many who could afford to do so left for the suburbs and outer areas of the city. The post-World War II ideals of suburban life and the "American Dream" also contributed to the sprawl of the area. The city's population continued to grow, but the inner city declined. The city's most populous ethnic group, non-Hispanic whites, declined from 89.5% in 1930 to 54.9% in 2010.
In 1940, the city had about 400,000 residents; by 2000, it was home to only about 440,000. From 1940 to 1960, the city more than doubled its physical size, while increasing its population by only about 75,000. By 1970, the city covered approximately , more than five times its size in 1940.
Hyatt Regency walkway collapse
The Hyatt Regency walkway collapse was a major disaster that occurred on July 17, 1981, killing 114 people and injuring more than 200 others during a tea dance in the 45-story Hyatt Regency hotel in Crown Center. It is the deadliest structural collapse in US history other than the September 11 attacks. In 2015 a memorial called the Skywalk Memorial Plaza was built for the families of the victims of the disaster, across the street from the hotel which is now a Sheraton.
21st century
Downtown Kansas City re-development
In the 21st century, the Kansas City area has undergone extensive redevelopment, with more than $6 billion in improvements to the downtown area on the Missouri side. One of the main goals is to attract convention and tourist dollars, office workers, and residents to downtown KCMO. Among the projects include the redevelopment of the Power & Light District, located in the area to the east of the Power & Light Building (the former headquarters of the Kansas City Power & Light Company, which is now based in the district's northern end), into a retail and entertainment district; and the Sprint Center, an 18,500-seat arena that opened in 2007, funded by a 2004 ballot initiative involving a tax on car rentals and hotels, designed to meet the stadium specifications for a possible future NBA or NHL franchise, and was renamed T-Mobile Center in 2020; Kemper Arena, which was replaced by Sprint Center, fell into disrepair and was sold to private developers. By 2018, the arena was being converted to a sports complex under the name Hy-Vee Arena. The Kauffman Performing Arts Center opened in 2011 providing a new, modern home to the KC Orchestra and Ballet. In 2015, an 800-room Hyatt Convention Center Hotel was announced for a site next to the Performance Arts Center & Bartle Hall. Construction was scheduled to start in early 2018 with Loews as the operator.
From 2007 to 2017, downtown residential population in Kansas City quadrupled and continues to grow. The area has grown from almost 4,000 residents in the early 2000s to nearly 30,000 . Kansas City's downtown ranks as the 6th-fastest-growing downtown in America with the population expected to grow by more than 40% by 2022. Conversions of office buildings such as the Power & Light Building and the Commerce Bank Tower into residential and hotel space has helped to fulfill the demand. New apartment complexes like One, Two, and Three Lights, River Market West, and 503 Main have begun to reshape Kansas City's skyline. Strong demand has led to occupancy rates in the upper 90%.
While the residential population of downtown has boomed, the office population has dropped significantly from the early 2000s to the mid 2010s. AMC and other top employers moved their operations to modern office buildings in the suburbs. High office vacancy plagued downtown, leading to the neglect of many office buildings. By the mid 2010s, many office buildings were converted to residential uses and the Class A vacancy rate plunged to 12% in 2017. Swiss Re, Virgin Mobile, AutoAlert, and others have begun to move operations to downtown Kansas City from the suburbs as well as expensive coastal cities.
Transportation developments
The area has seen additional development through various transportation projects, including improvements to the Grandview Triangle, which intersects Interstates 435 and 470, and U.S. Route 71, a thoroughfare long notorious for fatal accidents.
In July 2005, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA) launched Kansas City's first bus rapid transit line, the Metro Area Express (MAX), which links the River Market, Downtown, Union Station, Crown Center and the Country Club Plaza. The KCATA continues to expand MAX with additional routes on Prospect Avenue, Troost Avenue, and Independence Avenue.
In 2013, construction began on a two-mile streetcar line in downtown Kansas City (funded by a $102 million ballot initiative that was passed in 2012) that runs between the River Market and Union Station, it began operation in May 2016. In 2017, voters approved the formation of a TDD to expand the streetcar line south 3.5 miles from Union Station to UMKC's Volker Campus. Additionally in 2017, the KC Port Authority began engineering studies for a Port Authority funded streetcar expansion north to Berkley Riverfront Park. Citywide, voter support for rail projects continues to grow with numerous light rail projects in the works.
In 2016, Jackson County, Missouri, acquired unused rail lines as part of a long-term commuter rail plan. For the time being, the line is being converted to a trail while county officials negotiate with railroads for access to tracks in Downtown Kansas City.
On November 7, 2017, Kansas City, Missouri, voters overwhelmingly approved a new single terminal at Kansas City International Airport by a 75% to 25% margin. The new single terminal will replace the three existing "Clover Leafs" at KCI Airport and is expected to open in October 2022.
Geography
The city has an area of , of which, is land and is water. Bluffs overlook the rivers and river bottom areas. Kansas City proper is bowl-shaped and is surrounded to the north and south by glacier-carved limestone and bedrock cliffs. Kansas City is at the confluence between the Dakota and Minnesota ice lobes during the maximum late Independence glaciation of the Pleistocene epoch. The Kansas and Missouri rivers cut wide valleys into the terrain when the glaciers melted and drained. A partially filled spillway valley crosses the central city. This valley is an eastward continuation of the Turkey Creek Valley. It is the closest major city to the geographic center of the contiguous United States, or "Lower 48".
Cityscape
Kansas City, Missouri, comprises more than 240 neighborhoods, some with histories as independent cities or as the sites of major events.
Architecture
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opened its Euro-Style Bloch addition in 2007, and the Safdie-designed Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts opened in 2011. The Power and Light Building is influenced by the Art Deco style and sports a glowing sky beacon. The new world headquarters of H&R Block is a 20-story all-glass oval bathed in a soft green light. The four industrial artworks atop the support towers of the Kansas City Convention Center (Bartle Hall) were once the subject of ridicule, but now define the night skyline near the T-Mobile Center along with One Kansas City Place (Missouri's tallest office tower), the KCTV-Tower (Missouri's tallest freestanding structure) and the Liberty Memorial, a World War I memorial and museum that flaunts simulated flames and smoke billowing into the night skyline. It was designated as the National World War I Museum and Memorial in 2004 by the United States Congress. Kansas City is home to significant national and international architecture firms including ACI Boland, BNIM, 360 Architecture, HNTB, Populous. Frank Lloyd Wright designed two private residences and Community Christian Church there.
Kansas City hosts more than 200 working fountains, especially on the Country Club Plaza. Designs range from French-inspired traditional to modern. Highlights include the Black Marble H&R Block fountain in front of Union Station, which features synchronized water jets; the Nichols Bronze Horses at the corner of Main and J.C. Nichols Parkway at the entrance to the Plaza Shopping District; and the fountain at Hallmark Cards World Headquarters in Crown Center.
City Market
Since its inception in 1857, City Market has been one of the largest and most enduring public farmers' markets in the American Midwest, linking growers and small businesses to the community. More than 30 full-time merchants operate year-round and offer specialty foods, fresh meats and seafood, restaurants and cafes, floral, home accessories and more. The City Market is also home to the Arabia Steamboat Museum, which houses artifacts from a steamboat that sank near Kansas City in 1856.
Downtown
Downtown Kansas City is an area of bounded by the Missouri River to the north, 31st Street to the south, Troost Avenue to the East, and State Line Road to the west. Areas near Downtown Kansas City include the 39th Street District, which is known as Restaurant Row, and features one of Kansas City's largest selections of independently owned restaurants and boutique shops. It is a center of literary and visual arts, and bohemian culture. Crown Center is the headquarters of Hallmark Cards and a major downtown shopping and entertainment complex. It is connected to Union Station by a series of covered walkways. The Country Club Plaza, or simply "the Plaza", is an upscale, outdoor shopping and entertainment district. It was the first suburban shopping district in the United States, designed to accommodate shoppers arriving by automobile, and is surrounded by apartments and condominiums, including a number of high rise buildings. The associated Country Club District to the south includes the Sunset Hill and Brookside neighborhoods, and is traversed by Ward Parkway, a landscaped boulevard known for its statuary, fountains and large, historic homes. Kansas City's Union Station is home to Science City, restaurants, shopping, theaters, and the city's Amtrak facility.After years of neglect and seas of parking lots, Downtown Kansas City is undergoing a period of change with over $6 billion in development since 2000. Many residential properties recently have been or are under redevelopment in three surrounding warehouse loft districts and the Central Business District. The Power & Light District, a new, nine-block entertainment district comprising numerous restaurants, bars, and retail shops, was developed by the Cordish Company of Baltimore, Maryland. Its first tenant opened on November 9, 2007. It is anchored by the T-Mobile Center, a 19,000-seat sports and entertainment complex.
Climate
Kansas City lies in the Midwestern United States, near the geographic center of the country, at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers. The city lies in the northern periphery of the humid subtropical zone, but is interchangeable with the humid continental climate due to roughly 104 air frosts on average per annum. The city is part of USDA plant hardiness zones 5b and 6a. In the center of North America, far removed from a significant body of water, there is significant potential for extreme hot and cold swings throughout the year. The warmest month is July, with a 24-hour average temperature of . The summer months are hot and humid, with moist air riding up from the Gulf of Mexico, and high temperatures surpass on 5.6 days of the year, and on 47 days. The coldest month of the year is January, with an average temperature of . Winters are cold, with 22 days where the high temperature is at or below and 2.5 nights with a low at or below . The official record highest temperature is , set on August 14, 1936, at Downtown Airport, while the official record lowest is , set on December 22 and 23, 1989. Normal seasonal snowfall is at Downtown Airport and at Kansas City International Airport. The average window for freezing temperatures is October 31 to April 4, while for measurable () snowfall, it is November 27 to March 16 as measured at Kansas City International Airport. Precipitation, both in frequency and total accumulation, shows a marked uptick in late spring and summer.
Kansas City is located in "Tornado Alley", a broad region where cold air from Canada collides with warm air from the Gulf of Mexico, leading to the formation of powerful storms, especially during the spring. The Kansas City metropolitan area has experienced several significant outbreaks of tornadoes in the past, including the Ruskin Heights tornado in 1957 and the May 2003 tornado outbreak sequence. The region can also experience ice storms during the winter months, such as the 2002 ice storm during which hundreds of thousands of residents lost power for days and (in some cases) weeks. Kansas City and its outlying areas are also subject to flooding, including the Great Floods of 1951 and 1993.
Demographics
According to the 2010 census, the racial composition of Kansas City was as follows:
White: 59.2% (non-Hispanic white: 54.9%)
Black or African American: 29.9%
Hispanic or Latino (of any race): 10.0%
Some other race: 4.5%
Two or more races: 3.2%
Asian: 2.5%
Native American: 0.5%
Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander: 0.2%
Kansas City has the second largest Somali and Sudanese populations in the United States. The Latino/Hispanic population of Kansas City, which is heavily Mexican and Central American, is spread throughout the metropolitan area, with some concentration in the northeast part of the city and southwest of downtown. The Asian population, mostly Southeast Asian, is partly concentrated within the northeast side to the Columbus Park neighborhood in the Greater Downtown area, a historically Italian American neighborhood, the UMKC area and in River Market, in northern Kansas City.
The Historic Kansas City boundary is roughly and has a population density of about 5,000 people per sq. mi. It runs from the Missouri River to the north, 79th Street to the south, the Blue River to the east, and State Line Road to the west. During the 1960s and 1970s, Kansas City annexed large amounts of land, which are largely undeveloped to this day.
Between the 2000 and 2010 Census counts, the urban core of Kansas City continued to drop significantly in population. The areas of Greater Downtown in the center city, and sections near I-435 and I-470 in the south, and Highway 152 in the north are the only areas of Kansas City, Missouri, to have seen an increase in population, with the Northland seeing the greatest population growth. Even so, the population of Kansas City as a whole from 2000 to 2010 increased by 4.1%.
Economy
While it was once true that much of the economic development in the Kansas City metro area was on the Kansas side, as of May, 2021, the Missouri portion is leading in total non-farm employment. This reflects a more balanced new economic picture. The federal government is the largest employer in the Kansas City metro area. More than 146 federal agencies maintain a presence there. Kansas City is one of ten regional office cities for the US government. The Internal Revenue Service maintains a large service center in Kansas City that occupies nearly . It is one of only two sites to process paper returns. The IRS has approximately 2,700 full-time employees in Kansas City, growing to 4,000 during tax season. The General Services Administration has more than 800 employees. Most are at the Bannister Federal Complex in South Kansas City. The Bannister Complex was also home to the Kansas City Plant, which is a National Nuclear Security Administration facility operated by Honeywell. The Kansas City Plant has since been moved to a new location on Botts Road. Honeywell employs nearly 2,700 at the Kansas City Plant, which produces and assembles 85% of the non-nuclear components of the United States nuclear bomb arsenal. The Social Security Administration has more than 1,700 employees in the Kansas City area, with more than 1,200 at its downtown Mid-America Program Service Center (MAMPSC). The United States Postal Service operates post offices in Kansas City. The Kansas City Main Post Office is at 300 West Pershing Road.
In 2019, the US Department of Agriculture relocated two federal research labs, ERS and NIFA, to the metro area. This move was considered controversial at the time of announcement, and resulted in multiple people leaving the agencies. The new location for these agencies will be in the downtown area.
Ford Motor Company operates a large manufacturing facility in Claycomo at the Ford Kansas City Assembly Plant, which builds the Ford F-150. The General Motors Fairfax Assembly Plant is in adjacent Kansas City, Kansas. Now shuttered Smith Electric Vehicles built electric vehicles in the former TWA/American Airlines overhaul facility at Kansas City International Airport until 2017.
One of the largest US drug manufacturing plants is the Sanofi-Aventis plant in south Kansas City on a campus developed by Ewing Kauffman's Marion Laboratories. Of late, it has been developing academic and economic institutions related to animal health sciences, an effort most recently bolstered by the selection of Manhattan, Kansas, at one end of the Kansas City Animal Health Corridor, as the site for the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, which researches animal diseases. Additionally, the Stowers Institute for Medical Research engages in medical basic science research. They offer educational opportunities for both predoctoral and postdoctoral candidates and work with Open University and University of Kansas Medical Center in a joint Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Biomedical Science (IGPBS).
Numerous agriculture companies operate out of the city. Dairy Farmers of America, the largest dairy co-op in the United States is located in northern Kansas City. The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and The National Association of Basketball Coaches are based in Kansas City.
The business community is serviced by two major business magazines, the Kansas City Business Journal (published weekly) and Ingram's Magazine (published monthly), as well as other publications, including a local society journal, the Independent (published weekly).
The Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank built a new building that opened in 2008 near Union Station. Missouri is the only state to have two of the 12 Federal Reserve Bank headquarters (the second is in St. Louis). Kansas City's effort to get the bank was helped by former mayor James A. Reed, who as senator, broke a tie to pass the Federal Reserve Act.
The national headquarters for the Veterans of Foreign Wars is headquartered just south of Downtown.
With a Gross Metropolitan Product of $41.68 billion in 2004, Kansas City's (Missouri side only) economy makes up 20.5% of Missouri's gross state product. In 2014, Kansas City was ranked #6 for real estate investment.
Three international law firms, Lathrop & Gage, Stinson Leonard Street, and Shook, Hardy & Bacon are based in the city.
Headquarters
The following companies are headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri:
Top employers
According to the city's Fiscal Year 2014–15 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top ten principal employers are as follows:
Culture
Abbreviations and nicknames
Kansas City, Missouri is abbreviated as KCMO and the metropolitan area as KC. Residents are known as Kansas Citians. Kansas City, Missouri is officially nicknamed the "City of Fountains". The fountains at Kauffman Stadium, commissioned by original Kansas City Royals owner Ewing Kauffman, are the largest privately funded fountains in the world. In 2018, UNESCO designated Kansas City as a City of Music. The city has more boulevards than any other city except Paris and has been called "Paris of the Plains". Soccer's popularity, at both professional and youth levels, as well as Children's Mercy Park's popularity as a home stadium for the U.S. Men's National Team led to the appellation "Soccer Capital of America". The city is called the "Heart of America", as it is near both the population center of the United States and the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states.
Performing arts
There were only two theaters in Kansas City when David Austin Latchaw, originally from rural Pennsylvania, moved to Kansas City in 1886. Latchaw maintained friendly relations with a number of actors such as Otis Skinner, Richard Mansfield, Maude Adams, Margaret Anglin, John Drew, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Julia Marlowe, E. H. Sothern, and Robert Mantell.
Theater troupes in the 1870s toured the state performing in cities or small towns springing up along the railroad lines. Rail transport had made touring easy allowing theater troupes to travel with costumes, props and sets. As theater grew in popularity after the mid-1880s that number increased and by 1912 ten new theaters had been built in Kansas City.
By the 1920s Kansas City was the center of the vaudevillian Orpheum circuit.
The Kansas City Repertory Theatre is the metropolitan area's top professional theatre company. The Starlight Theatre is an 8,105-seat outdoor theatre designed by Edward Delk. The Kansas City Symphony was founded by R. Crosby Kemper Jr. in 1982 to replace the defunct Kansas City Philharmonic, which was founded in 1933. The symphony performs at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Michael Stern is the symphony's music director and lead conductor. Lyric Opera of Kansas City, founded in 1958, performs at the Kauffman Center, offers one American contemporary opera production during its season, consisting of either four or five productions. The Civic Opera Theater of Kansas City performs at the downtown Folly Theater and at the UMKC Performing Arts Center. Every summer from mid-June to early July, The Heart of America Shakespeare Festival performs at Southmoreland Park near the Nelson-Atkins Museum; the festival was founded by Marilyn Strauss in 1993.
The Kansas City Ballet, founded in 1957 by Tatiana Dokoudovska, is a ballet troupe comprising 25 professional dancers and apprentices. Between 1986 and 2000, it combined with Dance St. Louis to form the State Ballet of Missouri, although it remained in Kansas City. From 1980 to 1995, the Ballet was run by dancer and choreographer Todd Bolender. Today, the Ballet offers an annual repertory split into three seasons, performing classical to contemporary ballets. The Ballet also performs at the Kauffman Center. Kansas City is home to The Kansas City Chorale, a professional 24-voice chorus conducted by Charles Bruffy. The chorus performs an annual concert series and a concert in Phoenix each year with their sister choir, the Phoenix Chorale. The Chorale has made nine recordings (three with the Phoenix Chorale).
Jazz
Kansas City jazz in the 1930s marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. The 1979 documentary The Last of the Blue Devils portrays this era in interviews and performances by local jazz notables. In the 1970s, Kansas City attempted to resurrect the glory of the jazz era in a family-friendly atmosphere. In the 1970s, an effort to open jazz clubs in the River Quay area of City Market along the Missouri ended in a gang war. Three of the new clubs were blown up in what ultimately ended Kansas City mob influence in Las Vegas casinos. The annual "Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival" attracts top jazz stars and large out-of-town audiences. It was rated Kansas City's "best festival." by Pitch.com.
Live music venues are found throughout the city, with the highest concentration in the Westport entertainment district centered on Broadway and Westport Road near the Country Club Plaza, as well as the 18th and Vine area's flourish for jazz music. A variety of music genres can be heard or have originated there, including musicians Janelle Monáe, Puddle of Mudd, Isaac James, The Get Up Kids, Shiner, Flee The Seen, The Life and Times, Reggie and the Full Effect, Coalesce, The Casket Lottery, The Gadjits, The Rainmakers, Vedera, The Elders, Blackpool Lights, The Republic Tigers, Tech N9ne, Krizz Kaliko, Kutt Calhoun, Skatterman & Snug Brim, Mac Lethal, Ces Cru, and Solè. As of 2003, the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra, a big band jazz orchestra, performs in the metropolitan area.
In 2018, UNESCO named Kansas City as a "City of Music", making it the only city in the United States with that distinction. The city's funding of $7 million for improvements to the 18th and Vine Jazz District in 2016, coupled with the city's rich musical heritage, contributed to the designation.
Irish culture
The large community of Irish-Americans numbers over 50,000. The Irish were the first large immigrant group to settle in Kansas City and founded its first newspaper. The Irish community includes bands, dancers, Irish stores, newspapers and the Kansas City Irish Center at Drexel Hall in Midtown. The first book that detailed the history of the Irish in Kansas City was Missouri Irish: Irish Settlers on the American Frontier, published in 1984. The Kansas City Irish Fest is held over Labor Day weekend every year in Crown Center and Washington Park.
Casinos
Missouri voters approved riverboat casino gaming on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers by referendum with a 63% majority on November 3, 1992. The first casino facility in the state opened in September 1994 in North Kansas City by Harrah's Entertainment (now Caesar's Entertainment). The combined revenues for four casinos exceeded $153 million per month in May 2008. The metropolitan area is home to six casinos: Ameristar Kansas City, Argosy Kansas City, Harrah's North Kansas City, Isle of Capri Kansas City, the 7th Street Casino (which opened in Kansas City, Kansas, in 2008) and Hollywood Casino (which opened in February 2012 in Kansas City, Kansas).
Cuisine
Kansas City is famous for its steak and Kansas City-style barbecue, along with the typical array of Southern cuisine. During the heyday of the Kansas City Stockyards, the city was known for its Kansas City steaks or Kansas City strip steaks. The most famous of its steakhouses is the Golden Ox in the Kansas City Live Stock Exchange in the West Bottoms stockyards. These stockyards were second only to those of Chicago in size, but they never recovered from the Great Flood of 1951 and eventually closed. Founded in 1938, Jess & Jim's Steakhouse in the Martin City neighborhood was also well known.
The Kansas City Strip cut of steak is similar to the New York Strip cut, and is sometimes referred to just as a strip steak. Along with Texas, Memphis, North, and South Carolina, Kansas City is lauded as a "world capital of barbecue". More than 90 barbecue restaurants operate in the metropolitan area. The American Royal each fall hosts what it claims is the world's biggest barbecue contest.
Classic Kansas City-style barbecue was an inner-city phenomenon that evolved from the pit of Henry Perry, a migrant from Memphis who is generally credited with opening the city's first barbecue stand in 1921, and blossomed in the 18th and Vine neighborhood. Arthur Bryant's took over the Perry restaurant and added sugar to his sauce to sweeten the recipe a bit. In 1946 one of Perry's cooks, George W. Gates, opened Gates Bar-B-Q, later Gates and Sons Bar-B-Q when his son Ollie joined the family business. Bryant's and Gates are the two definitive Kansas City barbecue restaurants; native Kansas Citian and essayist Calvin Trillin famously called Bryant's "the single best restaurant in the world" in an essay he wrote for Playboy magazine in the 1960s. Fiorella's Jack Stack Barbecue is also well regarded. In 1977, Rich Davis, a psychiatrist, test-marketed his own concoction called K.C. Soul Style Barbecue Sauce. He renamed it KC Masterpiece, and in 1986, he sold the recipe to the Kingsford division of Clorox. Davis retained rights to operate restaurants using the name and sauce, whose recipe popularized the use of molasses as a sweetener in Kansas City-style barbecue sauces.
Kansas City has several James Beard Award-winning/nominated chefs and restaurants. Winning chefs include Michael Smith, Celina Tio, Colby Garrelts, Debbie Gold, Jonathan Justus and Martin Heuser. A majority of the Beard Award-winning restaurants are in the Crossroads district, downtown and in Westport.
Points of interest
Religion
The proportion of Kansas City area residents with a known religious affiliation is 50.75%. The most common religious denominations in the area are:
None/No affiliation 49.25%
Catholic 13.2%
Baptists 10.4%
Other Christian 10.3%
Methodist 6.0%
Pentecostal 2.7%
Latter-day Saint 2.5%
Lutheran 2.3%
Presbyterian 1.7%
Judaism 0.4%
Eastern religions 0.4%
Islam 0.4%
Walt Disney
In 1911, Elias Disney moved his family from Marceline to Kansas City. They lived in a new home at 3028 Bellefontaine with a garage he built, in which Walt Disney made his first animation. In 1919, Walt returned from France where he had served as a Red Cross Ambulance Driver in World War I. He started the first animation company in Kansas City, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, in which he designed the character Mickey Mouse. When the company went bankrupt, Walt Disney moved to Hollywood and started The Walt Disney Company on October 16, 1923.
Sports
Professional sports teams in Kansas City include the Kansas City Chiefs in the National Football League (NFL), the Kansas City Royals in Major League Baseball (MLB) and Sporting Kansas City in Major League Soccer (MLS).
The following table lists the professional teams in the Kansas City metropolitan area:
Professional football
The Chiefs, now a member of the NFL's American Football Conference, started play in 1960 as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League before moving to Kansas City in 1963. The Chiefs lost Super Bowl I to the Green Bay Packers by a score of 35–10. They came back in 1969 to become the last AFL champion and win Super Bowl IV against the NFL champion Minnesota Vikings by a score of 23–7. In 2020, after 50 years, they won Super Bowl LIV with the score of 31–20 against the San Francisco 49ers. In 2021, they lost Super Bowl LV to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers by a score of 31–9.
Professional baseball
The Athletics baseball franchise played in the city from 1955, after moving from Philadelphia, to 1967, when the team relocated to Oakland, California. The city's current Major League Baseball franchise, the Royals, started play in 1969, and are the only major league sports franchise in Kansas City that has not relocated or changed its name. The Royals were the first American League expansion team to reach the playoffs (in 1976) to reach the World Series (in 1980) and to win the World Series (in 1985). The Royals returned to the World Series in 2014 and won in 2015.
The Kansas City Monarchs, formerly the Kansas City T-Bones, are an unaffiliated minor league team. They played in the independent Northern League from 2003 until 2010 and have been part of the independent American Association since 2011. They play their games at Legends Field in Kansas City, Kansas.
Professional soccer
The Kansas City Wiz became a charter member of Major League Soccer in 1996. It was renamed the Kansas City Wizards in 1997. In 2011, the team was renamed Sporting Kansas City and moved to its new stadium Children's Mercy Park in Kansas City, Kansas. They have won the MLS Cup twice, the Supporters' Shield once, and the US Open Cup four times. FC Kansas City played from 2013-2017 in the National Women's Soccer League; the team's home games were held at Swope Soccer Village. They won the NWSL in 2014 and 2015. The team folded after the 2017 season and its assets were transferred to Utah Royals FC. After the 2020 season, the Utah Royals folded and its assets were transferred to a new Kansas City team, now known as the Kansas City Current. The Current moved to Children's Mercy Park after spending their first season at Legends Field, where they were known as KC NWSL.
College athletics
In college athletics, Kansas City has been the home of the Big 12 College Basketball Tournaments. The men's tournament has been played at T-Mobile Center since March 2008. The women's tournament is played at Municipal Auditorium.
The city has one NCAA Division I program, the Kansas City Roos, representing the University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC). The program, historically known as the UMKC Kangaroos, adopted its current branding after the 2018–19 school year.
In addition to serving as the home stadium of the Chiefs, Arrowhead Stadium serves as the venue for various intercollegiate football games. It has hosted the Big 12 Championship Game five times. On the last weekend in October, the MIAA Fall Classic rivalry game between Northwest Missouri State University and Pittsburg State University took place at the stadium.
Professional rugby
Kansas City is represented on the rugby pitch by the Kansas City Blues RFC, a former member of the Rugby Super League and a Division 1 club. The team works closely with Sporting Kansas City and splits home-games between Sporting's training pitch and Rockhurst University's stadium.
Former teams
Kansas City briefly had four short-term major league baseball teams between 1884 and 1915: the Kansas City Unions of the short-lived Union Association in 1884, the Kansas City Cowboys in the National League in 1886, a team of the same name in the then-major league American Association in 1888 and 1889, and the Kansas City Packers in the Federal League in 1914 and 1915. The Kansas City Monarchs of the now-defunct Negro National and Negro American Leagues represented Kansas City from 1920 through 1955. The city also had a number of minor league baseball teams between 1885 and 1955. After the Kansas City Cowboys began play in the 1885 Western League, from 1903 through 1954, the Kansas City Blues played in the high-level American Association minor league. In 1955, Kansas City became a major league city when the Philadelphia Athletics baseball franchise relocated to the city in 1955. Following the 1967 season, the team relocated to Oakland, California.
Kansas City was represented in the National Basketball Association by the Kansas City Kings (called the Kansas City-Omaha Kings from 1972 to 1975), when the former Cincinnati Royals moved to the Midwest. The team left for Sacramento in 1985.
In 1974, the National Hockey League placed an expansion team in Kansas City called the Kansas City Scouts. The team moved to Denver in 1976, then to New Jersey in 1982 where they have remained ever since as the New Jersey Devils.
Parks and boulevards
Kansas City has of boulevards and parkways, 214 urban parks, 49 ornamental fountains, 152 ball diamonds, 10 community centers, 105 tennis courts, 5 golf courses, 5 museums and attractions, 30 pools, and 47 park shelters. These amenities are found across the city. Much of the system, designed by George E. Kessler, was constructed from 1893 to 1915.
Cliff Drive, in Kessler Park on the North Bluffs, is a designated State Scenic Byway. It extends from The Paseo and Independence Avenue through Indian Mound on Gladstone Boulevard at Belmont Boulevard, with many historical points and architectural landmarks.
Ward Parkway, on the west side of the city near State Line Road, is lined by many of the city's largest and most elaborate homes.
The Paseo is a major north–south parkway that runs through the center of the city beginning at Cliff Drive. It was modeled on the Paseo de la Reforma, a fashionable Mexico City boulevard. It has been recently renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and now the city has voted to change it back to the Paseo.
Swope Park is one of the nation's largest city parks, comprising , more than twice the size of New York City's Central Park. It features a zoo, a woodland nature and wildlife rescue center, 2 golf courses, 2 lakes, an amphitheatre, a day-camp, and numerous picnic grounds. Hodge Park, in the Northland, covers (1.61 sq. mi.). This park includes the Shoal Creek Living History Museum, a village of more than 20 historical buildings dating from 1807 to 1885. Berkely Riverfront Park, on the banks of the Missouri River on the north edge of downtown, holds annual Independence Day celebrations and other festivals.
A program went underway to replace many of the fast-growing sweetgum trees with hardwood varieties.
Civil Engineering Landmark
In 1974, the Kansas City Park and Boulevard System was recognized by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. The nomination noted that this park system was among "...the first to integrate the aesthetics of landscape architecture with the practicality of city planning, stimulating other metropolitan areas to undertake similar projects." The park's plan developed by civil engineer George Kessler included some of the "...first specifications for pavements, gutters, curbs, and walks. Other engineering advances included retaining walls, earth dams, subsurface drains, and an impoundment lake - all part of Kansas City's legacy that has influenced urban planning in cities throughout North America."
Law and government
City government
Kansas City is home to the largest municipal government in the state of Missouri. The city has a council/manager form of government. The role of city manager has diminished over the years. The non-elective office of city manager was created following excesses during the Pendergast days.
The mayor is the head of the Kansas City City Council, which has 12 members elected from six districts (one member elected by voters in the district and one at-large member elected by voters citywide). The mayor is the presiding member. By charter, Kansas City has a "weak-mayor" system, in which most of the power is formally vested in the city council. However, in practice, the mayor is very influential in drafting and guiding public policy.
Kansas City holds city elections in every fourth odd numbered year. The last citywide election was held in May 2019. The officials took office in August 2019 and will hold the position until 2023.
Pendergast was the most prominent leader during the machine politics days. The most nationally prominent Democrat associated with the machine was Harry S Truman, who became a Senator, Vice President and then President of the United States from 1945 to 1953. Kansas City is the seat of the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri, one of two federal district courts in Missouri. The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri is in St. Louis. It also is the seat of the Western District of the Missouri Court of Appeals, one of three districts of that court (the Eastern District is in St. Louis and the Southern District is in Springfield).
The Mayor, City Council, and City Manager are listed below:
National political conventions
Kansas City hosted the 1900 Democratic National Convention, the 1928 Republican National Convention and the 1976 Republican National Convention. The urban core of Kansas City consistently votes Democratic in presidential elections; however, on the state and local level Republicans often find success, especially in the Northland and other suburban areas of Kansas City.
Federal representation
Kansas City is represented by three members of the United States House of Representatives:
Missouri's 4th congressional district – the Cass County portion of Kansas City; represented by Vicky Hartzler (Republican)
Missouri's 5th congressional district – all of Kansas City proper in Jackson County, plus Independence; represented by Emanuel Cleaver (Democrat)
Missouri's 6th congressional district – all of Kansas City proper north of the Missouri River and plus suburbs in eastern Jackson County beyond Independence; represented by Sam Graves (Republican)
Crime
Some of the earliest organized violence in Kansas City erupted during the American Civil War. Shortly after the city's incorporation in 1850, so-called Bleeding Kansas erupted, affecting border ruffians and Jayhawkers. During the war, Union troops burned all occupied dwellings in Jackson County south of Brush Creek and east of Blue Creek to Independence in an attempt to halt raids into Kansas. After the war, the Kansas City Times turned outlaw Jesse James into a folk hero via its coverage. James was born in the Kansas City metro area at Kearney, Missouri, and notoriously robbed the Kansas City Fairgrounds at 12th Street and Campbell Avenue.
In the early 20th century under Pendergast, Kansas City became the country's "most wide open town". While this would give rise to Kansas City Jazz, it also led to the rise of the Kansas City mob (initially under Johnny Lazia), as well as the arrival of organized crime. In the 1970s, the Kansas City mob was involved in a gang war over control of the River Quay entertainment district, in which three buildings were bombed and several gangsters were killed. Police investigations gained after boss Nick Civella was recorded discussing gambling bets on Super Bowl IV (where the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the Minnesota Vikings). The war and investigation led to the end of mob control of the Stardust Casino, which was the basis for the film Casino, though the production minimizes the Kansas City connections.
, Kansas City ranked 18th on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s annual survey of crime rates for cities with populations over 100,000. Much of the city's violent crime occurs on the city's lower income East Side. Revitalizing the downtown and midtown areas has been fairly successful and now these areas have below average violent crime compared to other major downtowns. According to a 2007 analysis by The Kansas City Star and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, downtown experienced the largest drop in crime of any neighborhood in the city during the 2000s.
Education
Colleges and universities
Many universities, colleges, and seminaries are in the Kansas City metropolitan area, including:
University of Missouri–Kansas City − one of four schools in the University of Missouri System − serving more than 15,000 students
Rockhurst University − Jesuit university founded in 1910
Kansas City Art Institute − four-year college of fine arts and design founded in 1885
Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences − medical and graduate school founded in 1916
Avila University − Catholic university of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet
Park University − private institution established in 1875; Park University Graduate School is downtown
Baker University − multiple branches of the School of Professional and Graduate Studies
William Jewell College − private liberal arts institution founded in 1849
Metropolitan Community College (Kansas City) − a two-year college with multiple campuses in the city and suburbs
Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary − Southern Baptist Convention
Nazarene Theological Seminary − Church of the Nazarene
Calvary University
Saint Paul School of Theology − Methodist
Primary and secondary schools
Kansas City is served by 16 school districts including 10 public school districts, with a significant portion being nationally ranked. There are also numerous private schools; Catholic schools in Kansas City are governed by the Diocese of Kansas City.
The following Public School Districts serve Kansas City:
Kansas City Public Schools (formerly Kansas City, Missouri School District)
North Kansas City School District
Center School District
Hickman Mills C-1 School District
Grandview C-4 School District
Liberty School District
Park Hill School District
Platte County R-3 School District
Raytown C-2 School District
Lees Summit R-7 School District
Blue Springs R-4 School District
Independence School District
Fort Osage R-1 School District
Libraries and archives
Linda Hall Library − internationally recognized independent library of science, engineering and technology, housing over one million volumes.
Mid-Continent Public Library − largest public library system in Missouri, and among the largest collections in America.
Kansas City Public Library − oldest library system in Kansas City.
University of Missouri-Kansas City Libraries − four collections: Leon E. Bloch Law Library and Miller Nichols Library, both on Volker Campus; and Health Sciences Library and Dental Library, both on Hospital Hill in Kansas City.
Rockhurst University Greenlease Library
The Black Archives of Mid-America− research center of the African American experience in the central Midwest.
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Central Plains Region − one of 18 national records facilities, holding millions of archival records and microfilms for Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska in a new facility adjacent to Union Station, which was opened to the general public in 2008.
Media
Print media
The Kansas City Star is the area's primary newspaper. William Rockhill Nelson and his partner, Samuel Morss, first published the evening paper on September 18, 1880. The Star competed with the morning Kansas City Times before acquiring that publication in 1901. The "Times" name was discontinued in March 1990, when the morning paper was renamed the "Star".
Weekly newspapers include The Call (which is focused toward Kansas City's African-American community), the Kansas City Business Journal, The Pitch, Ink, and the bilingual publications Dos Mundos and KC Hispanic News.
The city is served by two major faith-oriented newspapers: The Kansas City Metro Voice, serving the Christian community, and the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle, serving the Jewish community. It is the headquarters of the National Catholic Reporter, an independent Catholic newspaper.
Broadcast media
The Kansas City media market (ranked 32nd by Arbitron and 31st by Nielsen) includes 10 television stations, 30 FM and 21 AM radio stations. Kansas City broadcasting jobs have been a stepping stone for national television and radio personalities, notably Walter Cronkite and Mancow Muller.
WDAF radio (now at 106.5 FM; original 610 AM frequency now occupied by KCSP) signed on in 1927 as an affiliate of the NBC Red Network, under the ownership of The Star. In 1949, the Star signed on WDAF-TV as an affiliate of the NBC television network. The Star sold off the WDAF stations in 1957, following an antitrust investigation by the United States government (reportedly launched at Truman's behest, following a long-standing feud with the Star) over the newspaper's ownership of television and radio stations. KCMO radio (originally at 810 AM, now at 710 AM) signed on KCMO-TV (now KCTV) in 1953. The respective owners of WHB (then at 710 AM, now at 810 AM) and KMBC radio (980 AM, now KMBZ), Cook Paint and Varnish Company and the Midland Broadcasting Company, signed on WHB-TV/KMBC-TV as a time-share arrangement on VHF channel 9 in 1953; KMBC-TV took over channel 9 full-time in June 1954, after Cook Paint and Varnish purchased Midland Broadcasting's stations.
The major broadcast television networks have affiliates in the Kansas City market (covering 32 counties in northwestern Missouri, with the exception of counties in the far northwestern part of the state that are within the adjacent Saint Joseph market, and northeastern Kansas); including WDAF-TV 4 (Fox), KCTV 5 (CBS), KMBC-TV 9 (ABC), KCPT 19 (PBS), KCWE 29 (The CW), KSHB-TV 41 (NBC) and KSMO-TV 62 (MyNetworkTV). Other television stations in the market include Saint Joseph-based KTAJ-TV 16 (TBN), Kansas City, Kansas-based TV25.tv (consisting of three locally owned stations throughout northeast Kansas, led by KCKS-LD 25, affiliated with several digital multicast networks), Lawrence, Kansas-based KMCI-TV 38 (independent), Spanish-language station KUKC-LD 20 (Univision), Spanish-language station KGKC 39 (Telemundo-KC), and KPXE-TV 50 (Ion Television). The Kansas City television stations also serve as alternates for the Saint Joseph television market due to the short distance between the two cities.
Film community
Kansas City has been a locale for film and television productions. Between 1931 and 1982 Kansas City was home to the Calvin Company, a large movie production company that specialized in promotional and sales short films and commercials for corporations, as well as educational films for schools and the government. Calvin was an important venue for Kansas City arts, training local filmmakers who went on to Hollywood careers and also employing local actors, most of whom earned their main income in fields such as radio and television announcing. Kansas City native Robert Altman directed movies at the Calvin Company, which led him to shoot his first feature film, The Delinquents, in Kansas City using many local players.
The 1983 television movie The Day After was filmed in Kansas City and Lawrence, Kansas. The 1990s film Truman, starring Gary Sinise, was filmed in the city. Other films shot in or around Kansas City include Article 99, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Kansas City, Paper Moon, In Cold Blood, Ninth Street, and Sometimes They Come Back (in and around nearby Liberty, Missouri). More recently, a scene in the controversial film Brüno was filmed in downtown Kansas City's historic Hotel Phillips.
Today, Kansas City is home to an active independent film community. The Independent Filmmaker's Coalition is an organization dedicated to expanding and improving independent filmmaking in Kansas City. The city launched the KC Film Office in October 2014 with the goal of better marketing the city for prospective television shows and movies to be filmed there. The City Council passed several film tax incentives in February 2016 to take effect in May 2016; the KC Film Office is coordinating its efforts with the State of Missouri to reinstate film incentives on a statewide level. Kansas City was named as a top city to live and work in as a movie maker in 2020.
Transportation
Originally, Kansas City was the launching point for travelers on the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails. Later, with the construction of the Hannibal Bridge across the Missouri River, it became the junction of 11 trunk railroads. More rail tonnage passes through the city than through any other U.S. city. Trans World Airlines (TWA) located its headquarters in the city, and had ambitious plans to turn the city into an air hub.
Highways
Missouri and Kansas were the first states to start building interstates with Interstate 70. Interstate 435, which encircles the entire city, is the second longest beltway in the nation. (Interstate 275 around Cincinnati, Ohio is the longest.) The Kansas City metro area has more limited-access highway lane-miles per capita than any other large US metro area, over 27% more than the second-place Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, over 50% more than the average American metropolitan area. From 2013 to 2017 the average commuting time was 21.8 minutes. The Sierra Club blames the extensive freeway network for excessive sprawl and the decline of central Kansas City. On the other hand, the relatively uncongested road network contributes significantly to Kansas City's position as one of America's largest logistics hubs.
Airports
Kansas City International Airport, airport code MCI (Mid-Continent International Airport) was built to TWA's specifications to make a world hub. Its original passenger-friendly design placed each of its gates
from the street. Following the September 11, 2001, attacks, it required a costly overhaul to conform to the tighter security protocols. Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport was TWA's original headquarters and houses the Airline History Museum. It is still used for general aviation and airshows. As of August, 2021, an entirely new $1.5 billion terminal on the site of the old terminal A, is midway through construction. Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), it is a single, advanced technology terminal with 39 gates, initially, that will entirely replace the two remaining terminals, B and C.
Public transportation
Like most American cities, Kansas City's mass transit system was originally rail-based. From 1870 to 1957, Kansas City's streetcar system was among the top in the country, with over of track at its peak. The rapid sprawl in the following years led this private system to be shut down.
Amtrak
Amtrak currently operates two routes via Kansas City, the Southwest Chief to Chicago or Los Angeles, and the Missouri River Runner to St. Louis
KCATA- RideKC
On December 28, 1965, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA) was formed via a bi-state compact created by the Missouri and Kansas legislatures. The compact gave the KCATA responsibility for planning, construction, owning and operating passenger transportation systems and facilities within the seven-county area.
RideKC Bus and MAX
In July 2005, the KCATA launched Kansas City's first bus rapid transit line, the Metro Area Express (MAX). MAX links the River Market, Downtown, Union Station, Crown Center and the Country Club Plaza. MAX operates and is marketed more like a rail system than a local bus line. A unique identity was created for MAX, including 13 modern diesel buses and easily identifiable "stations". MAX features (real-time GPS tracking of buses, available at every station), and stoplights automatically change in their favor if buses are behind schedule. In 2010, a second MAX line was added on Troost Avenue. The city is planning another MAX line down Prospect Avenue.
The Prospect MAX line launched in 2019 and Mayor Quinton Lucas announced the service would be fare-free indefinitely.
RideKC Streetcar
On December 12, 2012, a ballot initiative to construct a $102 million, 2-mile (3200 m) modern streetcar line in downtown Kansas City was approved by local voters. The streetcar route runs along Main Street from the River Market to Union Station; it debuted on May 6, 2016. A new non-profit corporation made up of private sector stakeholders and city appointees – the Kansas City Streetcar Authority – operates and maintains the system. Unlike many similar systems around the U.S., no fare is to be charged initially. Residents within the proposed Transportation Development District are determining the fate of the KC Streetcar's southern extension through Midtown and the Plaza to UMKC. The Port Authority of Kansas City is also studying running an extension to Berkley Riverfront Park.
RideKC Bridj
In 2015, the KCATA, Unified Government Transit, Johnson County Transit, and IndeBus began merging from individual metro services into one coordinated transit service for the metropolitan area, called RideKC. The buses and other transit options are branded as RideKC Bus, RideKC MAX, RideKC Streetcar, and RideKC Bridj. RideKC Bridj is a micro transit service partnership between Ford Bridj and KCATA that began on March 7, 2016, much like a taxicab service and with a mobile app. The merger and full coordination is expected to be complete by 2019.
Walkability
A 2015 study by Walk Score ranked Kansas City as the 42nd most walkable out of the 50 largest U.S. cities. As a whole, the city has a score of 34 out of 100. However, several of the more densely populated neighborhoods have much higher scores: Westport has a score of 91, the Downtown Loop has a score of 85, the Crossroads scored 85, and the Plaza scored 83. Those ratings range from "A Walker's Paradise" to "Very Walkable". In April 2017, voters approved an $800 million general obligation bond, part of which is designated for sidewalk repairs and creating complete-streets.
Modal characteristics
According to the American Community Survey, 81.6 percent of working Kansas City residents commuted to work by driving alone, 7.9 percent carpooled, 2.7 percent used public transportation, and 1.7 percent walked to work. About 1.5 percent commuted by other means, including taxi, bicycle, or motorcycle. About 4.6 of working Kansas City residents worked at home.
In 2015, 11.4 percent of Kansas City households were without a car, which was virtually unchanged in 2016 (11.3 percent). The national average was 8.7 percent in 2016. Kansas City averaged 1.58 cars per household in 2016, compared to a national average of 1.8 per household.
Sister cities
Kansas City has 15 sister cities:
See also
Kansas City Police Officers Association
List of people from Kansas City, Missouri
Sites of interest of Kansas City
Notes
References
Further reading
Online sources
University of Missouri at Kansas City. Marr Sound Archives. Rags to Be-bop: the Sounds of Kansas City Music, 1890–1945. [Text by] Chuck Haddix. Kansas City, Mo.: University of Missouri at Kansas City, University Libraries, Marr Sound Archives, 1991. Without ISBN
External links
Official Travel and Tourism Site
Kansas City Chamber of Commerce
Historic maps of Kansas City in the Sanborn Maps of Missouri Collection at the University of Missouri
The Black Archives of Mid-America on Google Cultural Institute
1850 establishments in Missouri
Cities in Cass County, Missouri
Cities in Clay County, Missouri
Cities in Jackson County, Missouri
Cities in Kansas City metropolitan area
Cities in Missouri
Cities in Platte County, Missouri
Missouri populated places on the Missouri River
Populated places established in 1850 | [
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17455 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kocher%E2%80%93Debre%E2%80%93Semelaigne%20syndrome | Kocher–Debre–Semelaigne syndrome | The Kocher–Debré–Semelaigne syndrome is hypothyroidism in infancy or childhood characterised by lower extremity or generalized muscular hypertrophy, myxoedema, short stature and cretinism. The absence of painful spasms and pseudomyotonia differentiates this syndrome from its adult form, which is Hoffmann syndrome.
The syndrome is named after Emil Theodor Kocher, Robert Debré and Georges Semelaigne. Also known as Debré–Semelaigne syndrome or cretinism-muscular hypertrophy, hypothyroid myopathy, hypothyroidism-large muscle syndrome, hypothyreotic muscular hypertrophy in children, infantile myxoedema-muscular hypertrophy, myopathy-myxoedema syndrome, myxoedema-muscular hypertrophy syndrome, myxoedema-myotonic dystrophy syndrome.
Kocher–Debre–Semelaigne syndrome gives infant a Hercules appearance.
Presentation
The age at which child presents with KDSS may vary from new born to as late as 11 years of age. This disease is very rare as only less than 10% of children with hypothyroid myopathy develops this condition. Along with features of hypothyroidism the main additional feature is muscle hypertrophy. It can happen in any muscle of the limbs, but commonly affects the proximal muscles giving the typical Hercules appearance. Even though the muscle appears enlarged, it is weak and so the affliction is pseudo hypertrophy especially of the calf muscles.
Other features are pseudomyotonia, myokymia, slow tendon reflex, slowed muscle contractions and relaxations, muscle stiffness, proximal muscle weakness and myopathy. The severity of these symptoms are determined by the period of hypothyroidism and the degree of deficiency of thyroid hormones.
EMG is either normal or may show myopathic low amplitude and short motor unit's potential (MUAPS). The enzymes creatine kinase is elevated usually.
Pathophysiology
The assumed cause of muscle hypertrophy in KDSS is an abnormal metabolism of carbohydrates leading to increased glycogen accumulation and increased mucopolysaccharide deposits in the muscles. Yet another speculation is an excess intra cellular calcium due to ineffective reuptake into the sarcoplasmic reticulum, which causes a sustained contraction and thereby hypertrophy.
In hypothyroidism the fast twitch muscle fiber is converted to slow twitch fiber, causing the slower reflex or hung up reflex. This may occur as a result of reduction in muscle mitochondrial oxidative capacity and beta-adrenergic receptors, as well as the induction of an insulin-resistant state, due to decrease in thyroid hormones.
The causes for muscle weakness is said to be decrease in muscle carnitine, decreased muscle oxidation, expression of a slower ATPase in myosin chain and decreased transport across the cell membrane.
The rigidity associated with congenital hypothyroidism may be due to abnormal development of basal ganglia.
Diagnosis
Treatment
The muscle hypertrophy and other symptoms are reversible on treatment with levothyroxine.
References
External links
Syndromes affecting the endocrine system
Syndromes affecting stature | [
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17459 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koi | Koi | or more specifically , are colored varieties of the Amur carp (Cyprinus rubrofuscus) that are kept for decorative purposes in outdoor koi ponds or water gardens.
Koi is an informal name for the colored variants of C. rubrofuscus kept for ornamental purposes. There are many varieties of ornamental koi, originating from breeding that began in Niigata, Japan in the early 19th century. Several varieties are recognized by the Japanese, distinguished by coloration, patterning, and scalation. Some of the major colors are white, black, red, orange, yellow, blue, brown and cream. The most popular category of koi is the Gosanke, which is made up of the Kōhaku, Taishō Sanshoku and Shōwa Sanshoku varieties.
History
Carp are a large group of fish originally found in Central Europe and Asia. Various carp species were originally domesticated in East Asia, where they were used as food fish. Carp are coldwater fish, and their ability to survive and adapt to many climates and water conditions allowed the domesticated species to be propagated to many new locations, including Japan. Natural color mutations of these carp would have occurred across all populations. Jin Dynasty (fourth century AD) texts mentioned carp of various colors. The oldest mention of colored carp in Japan is found in the Japanese history book Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan) completed in 720. According to the Nihon shoki, it is recorded that Emperor Keikō praised colored carp in a pond in the Mino region in 94 and that Emperor Suiko saw them in the garden of Soga no Umako's residence in 620. Carp were first bred for color mutations in China more than a thousand years ago, where selective breeding of colored varieties led to the development of the goldfish (Carassius auratus).
The Amur carp (Cyprinus rubrofuscus) is a member of the cyprinid family species complex native to East Asia. Amur carp were previously identified as a subspecies of the common carp (as C. c. haematopterus), but recent authorities treat it as a separate species under the name C. rubrofuscus. Amur carp have been aquacultured as a food fish at least as long ago as the fifth century BC in China. The systematic breeding of ornamental Amur carp began in the 1820s, in Ojiya and Yamakoshi in the Niigata Prefecture (located on the northeastern coast of Honshu) in Japan. Selective breeding gave rise first to red carp, then to pale blue Asagi and white, red, and yellow Bekkou. The Sarasa variety, with a red on white pattern, was created around 1830. Later, a yellow-based Ki uturi variety was born. From this original handful of koi varieties, all other Nishikigoi varieties were bred, with the exception of the Ogon variety (single-colored, metallic koi), which was developed relatively recently.
The outside world was unaware of the development of color variations in Japanese koi until 1914 when the Niigata koi were exhibited at an annual exposition in Tokyo. From that time, interest in koi spread throughout Japan. The number of varieties continued to grow, and repeated cross-breeding gave rise to more flashy varieties, such as Kōhaku , Taishō Sanshoku and Shōwa Sanshoku.
The hobby of keeping koi eventually spread worldwide. They are sold in many pet aquarium shops, with higher-quality fish available from specialist dealers. Collecting koi has become a social hobby. Passionate hobbyists join clubs, share their knowledge and help each other with their koi. In particular, since the 21st century, some wealthy Chinese have imported large quantities of koi from Niigata in Japan, and the price of high-quality carp has soared. In 2018, one carp was bought by a Chinese collector for about $2 million, the highest price ever. There are also cases in which purchased carp are bred in China and sold to foreign countries, and many breeds are spreading all over the world.
Etymology
The words "koi" and "nishikigoi" come from the Japanese words 鯉 (carp), and 錦鯉 (brocaded carp), respectively. In Japanese, "koi" is a homophone for 恋, another word that means "affection" or "love", so koi are symbols of love and friendship in Japan.
Colored ornamental carp were originally called Irokoi (色鯉) meaning colored carp, Hanakoi (花鯉) meaning floral carp, and Moyōkoi (模様鯉) meaning patterned carp. There are various theories as to how these words came to be disused, in favor of Nishikigoi (錦鯉), which is used today. One theory holds that, during World War II, the words Irokoi and Hanakoi (which can have sexual meanings) were changed to Nishikigoi because they were not suitable for the social situation of war. Another theory is that Nisikigoi, which was the original name for the popular Taishō Sanshoku variety, gradually became the term used for all ornamental koi.
Taxonomy
In the past, koi were commonly believed to have been bred from the common carp (Cyprinus carpio). Extensive hybridization between different populations, coupled with widespread translocations, have muddled the historical zoogeography of the common carp and its relatives. Traditionally, Amur carp (C. rubrofuscus) were considered a subspecies of the common carp, often under the scientific name C. carpio haematopterus. However, they differ in meristics from the common carp of Europe and Western Asia, leading recent authorities to recognize them as a separate species, C. rubrofuscus (C. c. haematopterus being a junior synonym). Although one study of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was unable to find a clear genetic structure matching the geographic populations (possibly because of translocation of carp from separate regions), others based on mtDNA, microsatellite DNA and genomic DNA found a clear separation between the European/West Asian population and the East Asian population, with koi belonging in the latter. Consequently, recent authorities have suggested that the ancestral species of the koi is C. rubrofuscus (syn. C. c. haematopterus) or at least an East Asian carp species instead of C. carpio. Regardless, a taxonomic review of Cyprinus carp from eastern and southeastern Asia may be necessary, as the genetic variations do not fully match the currently recognized species pattern, with one study of mtDNA suggesting that koi are close to the Southeast Asian carp, but not necessarily the Chinese.
Varieties
According to Zen Nippon Airinkai, a group that leads the breeding and dissemination of koi in Japan, there are more than 100 varieties of koi created through breeding, and each variety is classified into 16 groups. Koi varieties are distinguished by coloration, patterning, and scalation. Some of the major colors are white, black, red, yellow, blue, and cream. Although the possible colors are virtually limitless, breeders have identified and named a number of specific categories. The most notable category is , which is made up of the Kōhaku, Taishō Sanshoku, and Shōwa Sanshoku varieties.
New koi varieties are still being actively developed. Ghost koi developed in the 1980s have become very popular in the United Kingdom; they are a hybrid of wild carp and Ogon koi and are distinguished by their metallic scales. Butterfly koi (also known as longfin koi, or dragon carp), also developed in the 1980s, are notable for their long and flowing fins. They are hybrids of koi with Asian carp. Butterfly koi and ghost koi are considered by some to be not true nishikigoi.
The major named varieties include:
is a white-skinned koi, with large red markings on the top. The name means "red and white"; kōhaku was the one of the first ornamental variety to be established in Japan (late 19th century).
is very similar to the kōhaku, except for the addition of small black markings called . This variety was first exhibited in 1914 by the koi breeder Gonzo Hiroi, during the reign of the Taishō Emperor. In the United States, the name is often abbreviated to just "Sanke". The kanji, 三色, may be read as either sanshoku or as sanke (from its earlier name 三毛).
is a black koi with red (hi 緋) and white (shiroji 白地) markings. The first Shōwa Sanke was exhibited in 1927, during the reign of the Shōwa Emperor. In America, the name is often abbreviated to just "Shōwa". The amount of shiroji on Shōwa Sanke has increased in modern times (Kindai Shōwa 近代昭和), to the point that it can be difficult to distinguish from Taishō Sanke. The kanji, 三色, may be read as either sanshoku or as sanke.
is a white-, red-, or yellow-skinned koi with black markings . The Japanese name means "tortoise shell", and is commonly written as 鼈甲. The white, red, and yellow varieties are called , and , respectively. It may be confused with the Utsuri.
is a black koi with white, red, or yellow markings, in a zebra color pattern. The oldest attested form is the yellow form, called in the 19th century, but renamed by Elizaburo Hoshino, an early 20th-century koi breeder. The red and white versions are called and (piebald color morph), respectively. The word utsuri means to print (the black markings are reminiscent of ink stains). Genetically, it is the same as Shōwa, but lacking either red pigment (Shiro Utsuri) or white pigment (Hi Utsuri/Ki Utsuri).
koi is light blue above and usually red below, but also occasionally pale yellow or cream, generally below the lateral line and on the cheeks. The Japanese name means pale greenish-blue, spring onion color, or indigo.
' means "autumn green"; the Shūsui was created in 1910 by Yoshigoro Akiyama（秋山 吉五郎, by crossing Japanese Asagi with German mirror carp. The fish has no scales, except for a single line of large mirror scales dorsally, extending from head to tail. The most common type of Shūsui has a pale, sky-blue/gray color above the lateral line and red or orange (and very, very rarely bright yellow) below the lateral line and on the cheeks.
is a white fish with a Kōhaku-style pattern with blue or black-edged scales only over the hi pattern. This variety first arose in the 1950s as a cross between a Kōhaku and an Asagi. The most commonly encountered Koromo is an , which is colored like a Kōhaku, except each of the scales within the red patches has a blue or black edge to it. Less common is the , which has a darker (burgundy) hi overlay that gives it the appearance of bunches of grapes. Very rarely seen is the , which is similar to Budō-Goromo, but the hi pattern is such a dark burgundy that it appears nearly black.
is a "catch-all" term for koi that cannot be put into one of the other categories. This is a competition category, and many new varieties of koi compete in this one category. It is also known as .
is a dark koi with red (Kōhaku style) hi pattern. The Japanese name means "five colors". It appears similar to an Asagi, with little or no hi below the lateral line and a Kōhaku Hi pattern over reticulated (fishnet pattern) scales. The base color can range from nearly black to very pale, sky blue.
is a variety of which the whole body is one color and the body is shiny, and it is called differently depending on the color.
is a koi with colored markings over a metallic base or in two metallic colors.
is a cross between utsurimono series and Ōgon.
is a koi with metallic (glittering, metal-flake-appearing) scales. The name translates into English as "gold and silver scales"; it is often abbreviated to Ginrin. Ginrin versions of almost all other varieties of koi occur, and they are fashionable. Their sparkling, glittering scales contrast to the smooth, even, metallic skin and scales seen in the Ogon varieties. Recently, these characteristics have been combined to create the new ginrin Ogon varieties.
is any koi with a solitary red patch on its head. The fish may be a Tanchō Shōwa, Tanchō Sanke, or even Tanchō Goshiki. It is named for the Japanese red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis), which also has a red spot on its head.
, "tea-colored", this koi can range in color from pale olive-drab green or brown to copper or bronze and more recently, darker, subdued orange shades. Famous for its docile, friendly personality and large size, it is considered a sign of good luck among koi keepers.
is a metallic koi of one color only (hikarimono 光者). The most commonly encountered colors are gold, platinum, and orange. Cream specimens are very rare. Ogon compete in the Kawarimono category and the Japanese name means "gold". The variety was created by Sawata Aoki in 1946 from wild carp he caught in 1921.
' （literally "nine tattooed dragons" is a black doitsu-scaled fish with curling white markings. The patterns are thought to be reminiscent of Japanese ink paintings of dragons. They famously change color with the seasons. Kumonryu compete in the Kawarimono category.
is a light blue/gray koi with copper, bronze, or yellow (Kohaku-style) pattern, reminiscent of autumn leaves on water. The Japanese name means "fallen leaves".
Kikokuryū (輝黒竜, literally "sparkle" or "glitter black dragon") is a metallic-skinned version of the Kumonryu.
Kin-Kikokuryū (金輝黒竜, literally "gold sparkle black dragon" or "gold glitter black dragon") is a metallic-skinned version of the Kumonryu with a Kōhaku-style hi pattern developed by Mr. Seiki Igarashi of Ojiya City. At least six different genetic subvarieties of this general variety are seen.
Ghost koi (人面魚、じんめんぎょ), a hybrid of Ogon and wild carp with metallic scales, is considered by some to be not nishikigoi.
Butterfly koi (鰭長錦鯉、ひれながにしきごい) is a hybrid of koi and Asian carp with long flowing fins. Various colorations depend on the koi stock used to cross. It also is considered by some to not be nishikigoi.
originated by crossbreeding numerous different established varieties with "scaleless" German carp (generally, fish with only a single line of scales along each side of the dorsal fin). Also written as 独逸鯉, four main types of Doitsu scale patterns exist. The most common type (referred to above) has a row of scales beginning at the front of the dorsal fin and ending at the end of the dorsal fin (along both sides of the fin). The second type has a row of scales beginning where the head meets the shoulder and running the entire length of the fish (along both sides). The third type is the same as the second, with the addition of a line of (often quite large) scales running along the lateral line (along the side) of the fish, also referred to as "mirror koi". The fourth (and rarest) type is referred to as "armor koi" and is completely (or nearly) covered with very large scales that resemble plates of armor. It also is called Kagami-goi (鏡鯉、カガミゴイ), or mirror carp (ミラーカープ).
Differences from goldfish
Goldfish (Carassius auratus) were developed in China more than a thousand years ago by selectively breeding colored varieties; by the Song dynasty (960–1279), yellow, orange, white, and red-and-white colorations had been developed. Goldfish were introduced to Japan in the 16th century and to Europe in the 17th century. On the other hand, most ornamental koi breeds currently distributed worldwide originate from Amur carp (Cyprinus rubrofuscus) bred in Japan in the first half of the 19th century. Koi are domesticated Amur carp that are selected or culled for color; they are not a different species, and will revert to the original coloration within a few generations if allowed to breed freely.
Some goldfish varieties, such as the common goldfish, comet goldfish, and shubunkin, have body shapes and coloration that are similar to koi, and can be difficult to tell apart from koi when immature. Goldfish and koi can interbreed; however, as they were developed from different species of carp, their offspring are sterile.
Health, maintenance, and longevity
The Amur carp is a hardy fish, and koi retain that durability. Koi are coldwater fish, but benefit from being kept in the range, and do not react well to long, cold, winter temperatures; their immune systems are very weak below 10 °C. Koi ponds usually have a metre or more of depth in areas of the world that become warm during the summer, whereas in areas that have harsher winters, ponds generally have a minimum of . Specific pond construction has been evolved by koi keepers intent on raising show-quality koi.
The bright colors of koi put them at a severe disadvantage against predators; a white-skinned Kōhaku is a visual dinner bell against the dark green of a pond. Herons, kingfishers, otters, raccoons, mink, cats, foxes, and badgers are all capable of emptying a pond of its fish. A well-designed outdoor pond has areas too deep for herons to stand, overhangs high enough above the water that mammals cannot reach in, and shade trees overhead to block the view of aerial passers-by. It may prove necessary to string nets or wires above the surface. A pond usually includes a pump and filtration system to keep the water clear.
Koi are an omnivorous fish. They eat a wide variety of foods, including peas, lettuce, and watermelon. Koi food is designed not only to be nutritionally balanced, but also to float so as to encourage them to come to the surface. When they are eating, koi can be checked for parasites and ulcers. Naturally, koi are bottom feeders with a mouth configuration adapted for that. Some koi have a tendency to eat mostly from the bottom, so food producers create a mixed sinking and floating combination food. Koi recognize the persons feeding them and gather around them at feeding times. They can be trained to take food from one's hand. In the winter, their digestive systems slow nearly to a halt, and they eat very little, perhaps no more than nibbles of algae from the bottom. Feeding is not recommended when the water temperature drops below . Care should be taken by hobbyists that proper oxygenation, pH stabilization, and off-gassing occur over the winter in small ponds, so they do not perish. Their appetites do not come back until the water becomes warm in the spring.
Koi have been reported to achieve ages of 100–200 years. One famous scarlet koi named "Hanako" was owned by several individuals, the last of whom was Komei Koshihara. In July 1974, a study of the growth rings of one of the koi's scales reported that Hanako was 226 years old. Some sources give an accepted age for the species at little more than 50 years.
Disease
Koi are very hardy. With proper care, they resist many of the parasites that affect more sensitive tropical fish species, such as Trichodina, Epistylis, and Ichthyophthirius multifiliis infections. Water pH is important for maintaining koi's health. Water changes help reduce the risk of diseases and keep koi from being stressed. Two of the biggest health concerns among koi breeders are the koi herpes virus (KHV) and rhabdovirus carpio, which causes spring viraemia of carp (SVC). No treatment is known for either disease. Some koi farms in Israel use the KV3 vaccine, developed by Prof. M. Kotler from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and produced by Kovax, to immunise fish against KHV. Israel is currently the only country in the world to vaccinate koi against the KHV. The vaccine is injected into the fish when they are under one year old, and is accentuated by using an ultraviolet light. The vaccine has a 90% success rate and when immunized, the fish cannot succumb to a KHV outbreak and neither can the immunised koi pass KHV onto other fish in a pond. Only biosecurity measures such as prompt detection, isolation, and disinfection of tanks and equipment can prevent the spread of the disease and limit the loss of fish stock. In 2002, spring viraemia struck an ornamental koi farm in Kernersville, North Carolina, and required complete depopulation of the ponds and a lengthy quarantine period. For a while after this, some koi farmers in neighboring states stopped importing fish for fear of infecting their own stocks.
Breeding
When koi naturally breed on their own they tend to spawn in the spring and summer seasons. The male will start following the female, swimming right behind her and nudging her. After the female koi releases her eggs they sink to the bottom of the pond and stay there. A sticky outer shell around the egg helps keep it in place so it does not float around. Although the female can produce many spawns, many of the fry do not survive due to being eaten by others. On average if the egg survives around 4–7 days the fry will be hatched from the egg.
Like most fish, koi reproduce through spawning in which a female lays a vast number of eggs and one or more males fertilize them. Nurturing the resulting offspring (referred to as "fry") is a tricky and tedious job, usually done only by professionals. Although a koi breeder may carefully select the parents they wish based on their desired characteristics, the resulting fry nonetheless exhibit a wide range of color and quality.
Koi produce thousands of offspring from a single spawning. However, unlike cattle, purebred dogs, or more relevantly, goldfish, the large majority of these offspring, even from the best champion-grade koi, are not acceptable as nishikigoi (they have no interesting colors) or may even be genetically defective. These unacceptable offspring are culled at various stages of development based on the breeder's expert eye and closely guarded trade techniques. Culled fry are usually destroyed or used as feeder fish (mostly used for feeding arowana due to the belief that it will enhance its color), while older culls, within their first year between 3 and 6 inches long (also called tosai), are often sold as lower-grade, pond-quality koi.
The semi-randomized result of the koi's reproductive process has both advantages and disadvantages for the breeder. While it requires diligent oversight to narrow down the favorable result that the breeder wants, it also makes possible the development of new varieties of koi within relatively few generations.
In the wild
Koi have been accidentally or deliberately released into the wild in every continent except Antarctica. They quickly revert to the natural coloration of an Amur carp within a few generations. In many areas, they are considered an invasive species and a pest. In the state of Queensland in Australia, they are considered noxious fish.
Koi greatly increase the turbidity of the water because they are constantly stirring up the substrate. This makes waterways unattractive, reduces the abundance of aquatic plants, and can render the water unsuitable for swimming or drinking, even by livestock. In some countries, koi have caused so much damage to waterways that vast amounts of money and effort have been spent trying to eradicate them, largely unsuccessfully.
In many areas of North America, koi are introduced into the artificial "water hazards" and ponds on golf courses to keep water-borne insect larvae under control through predation.
In common culture
In Japan, the koi is a symbol of luck, prosperity, and good fortune, and also of perseverance in the face of adversity. Ornamental koi are symbolic of Japanese culture and are closely associated with the country's national identity.
Since the late 20th century, the keeping of koi in outdoor water gardens has become popular among the more affluent Chinese. Koi ponds are found in Chinese communities around the world, and the number of people who keep koi imported from Niigata, has been increasing. In addition, there are increasing numbers of Japanese koi bred in China that are sold domestically and exported to foreign countries.
Koi are also popular in many countries in the equatorial region, where outdoor water gardens are popular. In Sri Lanka, interior courtyards most often have one or several fish ponds dedicated to koi.
See also
Culture of Japan
Japanese aesthetics
Japanese white crucian carp
References
History of Koi Fish
Further reading
External links
Feature article on treating sick fish, especially koi, "Surgery to Scale," Cosmos Magazine
Koi in the NIWA Atlas
Carp
Fish of China
Fish of Japan
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17461 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut%20Hamsun | Knut Hamsun | Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 – February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun's work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to consciousness, subject, perspective and environment. He published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, works of non-fiction and some essays.
Hamsun is considered to be "one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years" (ca. 1890–1990). He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, and influenced authors such as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorky, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, John Fante and Ernest Hemingway. Isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun "the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun". Since 1916, several of Hamsun's works have been adapted into motion pictures. On August 4, 2009, the Knut Hamsun Centre was opened in Hamarøy.
The young Hamsun objected to realism and naturalism. He argued that the main object of modernist literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow". Hamsun is considered the "leader of the Neo-Romantic revolt at the turn of the 20th century", with works such as Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and Victoria (1898). His later works—in particular his "Nordland novels"—were influenced by the Norwegian new realism, portraying everyday life in rural Norway and often employing local dialect, irony, and humour. Hamsun only published one poetry collection, The Wild Choir, which has been set to music by several composers.
Hamsun had strong anti-English views, and openly supported Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. Due to his professed support for the German occupation of Norway, he was charged with treason after the war. He was not convicted, due to what was deemed psychological problems and issues with old age.
Biography
Early life
Knut Hamsun was born as Knud Pedersen in Lom in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway. He was the fourth son (of seven children) of Tora Olsdatter and Peder Pedersen. When he was three, the family moved to Hamsund, Hamarøy in Nordland. They were poor and an uncle had invited them to farm his land for him.
At nine Knut was separated from his family and lived with his uncle Hans Olsen, who needed help with the post office he ran. Olsen used to beat and starve his nephew, and Hamsun later stated that his chronic nervous difficulties were due to the way his uncle treated him.
In 1874 he finally escaped back to Lom; for the next five years he did any job for money; he was a store clerk, peddler, shoemaker's apprentice, sheriff's assistant, and an elementary-school teacher.
At 17 he became a ropemaker's apprentice; at about the same time he started to write. He asked businessman Erasmus Zahl to give him significant monetary support, and Zahl agreed. Hamsun later used Zahl as a model for the character Mack appearing in his novels Pan (1894), Dreamers (1904), Benoni (1908) and Rosa (1908).
He spent several years in America, traveling and working at various jobs, and published his impressions under the title Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889).
Early literary career
Working all those odd jobs paid off, and he published his first book: Den Gaadefulde: En Kjærlighedshistorie fra Nordland (The Enigmatic Man: A Love Story from Northern Norway, 1877). It was inspired from the experiences and struggles he endured from his jobs.
In his second novel Bjørger (1878), he attempted to imitate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's writing style of the Icelandic saga narrative. The melodramatic story follows a poet, Bjørger, and his love for Laura. This book was published under the pseudonym Knud Pedersen Hamsund. This book later served as the basis for Victoria: En Kærligheds Historie (1898; translated as Victoria: A Love Story, 1923).
Major works
Hamsun first received wide acclaim with his 1890 novel Hunger (Sult). The semiautobiographical work described a young writer's descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty in the Norwegian capital of Kristiania (modern name Oslo). To many, the novel presages the writings of Franz Kafka and other twentieth-century novelists with its internal monologue and bizarre logic.
A theme to which Hamsun often returned is that of the perpetual wanderer, an itinerant stranger (often the narrator) who shows up and insinuates himself into the life of small rural communities. This wanderer theme is central to the novels Mysteries, Pan, Under the Autumn Star, The Last Joy, Vagabonds, Rosa, and others.
Hamsun's prose often contains rapturous depictions of the natural world, with intimate reflections on the Norwegian woodlands and coastline. For this reason, he has been linked with the spiritual movement known as pantheism ("No one knows God," he once wrote, "man knows
only gods."). Hamsun saw mankind and nature united in a strong, sometimes mystical bond. This connection between the characters and their natural environment is exemplified in the novels Pan, A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings, and the epic Growth of the Soil, "his monumental work" credited with securing him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1920.
World War II, arrest and trial
During World War II, Hamsun put his support behind the German war effort. He courted and met with high-ranking Nazi officers, including Adolf Hitler. Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote a long and enthusiastic diary entry concerning a private meeting with Hamsun; according to Goebbels Hamsun's "faith in German victory is unshakable". In 1940 Hamsun wrote that "the Germans are fighting for us". After Hitler's death, he published a short obituary in which he described him as "a warrior for mankind" and "a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations."
After the war, he was detained by police on June 14, 1945, for treason, then committed to a hospital in Grimstad (Grimstad sykehus) "due to his advanced age", according to Einar Kringlen (a professor and medical doctor). In 1947 he was tried in Grimstad, and fined. Norway's supreme court reduced the fine from 575,000 to 325,000 Norwegian kroner.
After the war, Hamsun's views on the Germans during the war were a serious grief for the Norwegians, and they tried to separate their world-famous writer from his Nazi beliefs. At the trial Hamsun had pleaded ignorance. Deeper explanations involve his contradictory personality, his distaste for hoi polloi, his inferiority complex, a profound distress at the spread of indiscipline, antipathy toward the interwar democracy, and especially his anglophobia.
Death
Knut Hamsun died on February 19, 1952, aged 92, in Grimstad. His ashes are buried in the garden of his home at Nørholm.
Legacy
Thomas Mann described him as a "descendant of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche." Arthur Koestler was a fan of his love stories. H. G. Wells praised Markens Grøde (1917) for which Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Isaac Bashevis Singer was a fan of his modern subjectivism, use of flashbacks, his use of fragmentation, and his lyricism. A character in Charles Bukowski's book Women referred to him as the greatest writer who has ever lived.
A fifteen-volume edition of Hamsun's complete works was published in 1954. In 2009, to mark the 150-year anniversary of his birth, a new 27-volume edition of his complete works was published, including short stories, poetry, plays, and articles not included in the 1954 edition. For this new edition, all of Hamsun's works underwent slight linguistic modifications in order to make them more accessible to contemporary Norwegian readers. Fresh English translations of two of his major works, Growth of the Soil and Pan, were published in 1998.
Hamsun's works remain popular. In 2009, a Norwegian biographer stated, "We can’t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years ... That’s our Hamsun trauma. He’s a ghost that won’t stay in the grave."
Writing techniques
Along with August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, and Sigrid Undset, Hamsun formed a quartet of Scandinavian authors who became internationally known for their works. Hamsun pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, as found in material by, for example, Joyce, Proust, Mansfield and Woolf.
Personal life
In 1898, Hamsun married Bergljot Göpfert (née Bech), who bore daughter Victoria, but the marriage ended in 1906. Hamsun then married Marie Andersen (1881-1969) in 1909 and she was his companion until the end of his life. They had four children: sons Tore and Arild and daughters Ellinor and Cecilia.
Marie wrote about her life with Hamsun in two memoirs. She was a promising actress when she met Hamsun but ended her career and traveled with him to Hamarøy. They bought a farm, the idea being "to earn their living as farmers, with his writing providing some additional income".
After a few years they decided to move south, to Larvik. In 1918 they bought Nørholm, an old, somewhat dilapidated manor house between Lillesand and Grimstad. The main residence was restored and redecorated. Here Hamsun could occupy himself with writing undisturbed, although he often travelled to write in other cities and places (preferably in spartan housing).
Political sympathies
From his youth onward, Hamsun espoused anti-egalitarian and racist beliefs. In The Cultural Life of Modern America (1889), he expressed his firm opposition to miscegenation: "The Negros are and will remain Negros, a nascent human form from the tropics, rudimentary organs on the body of white society. Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto studfarm."
Hamsun wrote several newspaper articles in the course of the Second World War, including his notorious 1940 assertion that "the Germans are fighting for us, and now are crushing England's tyranny over us and all neutrals". In 1943, he sent Germany's minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a gift. His biographer Thorkild Hansen interpreted this as part of the strategy to get an audience with Hitler. Hamsun was eventually invited to meet with Hitler; during the meeting, he complained about the German civilian administrator in Norway, Josef Terboven, and asked that imprisoned Norwegian citizens be released, enraging Hitler. Otto Dietrich describes the meeting in his memoirs as the only time that another person was able to get a word in edgeways with Hitler. He attributes the cause to Hamsun's deafness. Regardless, Dietrich notes that it took Hitler three days to get over his anger. Hamsun also on other occasions helped Norwegians who had been imprisoned for resistance activities and tried to influence German policies in Norway.
Nevertheless, a week after Hitler's death, Hamsun wrote a eulogy for him, saying “He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.” Following the end of the war, angry crowds burned his books in public in major Norwegian cities and Hamsun was confined for several months in a psychiatric hospital.
Hamsun was forced to undergo a psychiatric examination, which concluded that he had "permanently impaired mental faculties," and on that basis the charges of treason were dropped. Instead, a civil liability case was raised against him, and in 1948 he had to pay a ruinous sum to the Norwegian government of 325,000 kroner ($65,000 or £16,250 at that time) for his alleged membership in Nasjonal Samling and for the moral support he gave to the Germans, but was cleared of any direct Nazi affiliation. Whether he was a member of Nasjonal Samling or not and whether his mental abilities were impaired is a much debated issue even today. Hamsun stated he was never a member of any political party. He wrote his last book Paa giengrodde Stier (On Overgrown Paths) in 1949, a book many take as evidence of his functioning mental capabilities. In it, he harshly criticizes the psychiatrists and the judges and, in his own words, proves that he is not mentally ill.
The Danish author Thorkild Hansen investigated the trial and wrote the book The Hamsun Trial (1978), which created a storm in Norway. Among other things Hansen stated: "If you want to meet idiots, go to Norway," as he felt that such treatment of the old Nobel Prize-winning author was outrageous. In 1996, Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell based the movie Hamsun on Hansen's book. In Hamsun, Swedish actor Max von Sydow plays Knut Hamsun; his wife Marie is played by Danish actress Ghita Nørby.
Studies on Hamsun's writings
Hamsun's writings have been the subject of numerous books and journal articles. Some of these writings explore the dialectic between Hamsun's literary works and his political and cultural leanings expressed in his non-fiction.
Bibliography
Non-Fiction
1889 Lars Oftedal. Udkast (Draft) (11 articles, previously printed in Dagbladet)
1889 Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (The Cultural Life of Modern America) - lectures and criticism
1903 I Æventyrland. Oplevet og drømt i Kaukasien (In Wonderland) - travelogue
1918 Sproget i Fare (The Language in Danger) - essays
Poetry
1878 Et Gjensyn (A Reunion) - epic poem (Published as Knud Pedersen Hamsund)
1904 Det vilde Kor, poetry (The Wild Choir)
Plays
1895 Ved Rigets Port (At the Gate of the Kingdom)
1896 Livets Spil (The Game of Life)
1898 Aftenrøde. Slutningspil (Evening Red: Inference Games)
1902 Munken Vendt. Brigantine's Saga I
1903 Dronning Tamara (Queen Tamara)
1910 Livet i Vold (In the Grip of Life)
Short Story Collections
1897 Siesta - short story collection
1903 Kratskog - shory story collection
Series
1906 Under Høststjærnen. En Vandrers Fortælling (Under the Autumn Star)
1909 En Vandrer spiller med Sordin (A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings/Wanderers) (2 Volumes)
Benoni and Rosa
1908 Benoni
1908 Rosa: Af Student Parelius' Papirer (By Student Parelius' Papers) (Rosa)
The August Trilogy
1927 Landstrykere I (Wayfarers) (2 Volumes)
1930 August (2 Volumes)
1933 Men Livet lever (The Road Leads On) (2 Volumes)
Stories
1877 Den Gaadefulde. En kjærlighedshistorie fra Nordland (The Gracious. A love story from Nordland) (Published as Knud Pedersen)
1878 Bjørger (Published as Knud Pedersen Hamsund)
Novels
1890 Sult (Hunger)
1892 Mysterier (Mysteries)
1893 Redaktør Lynge (Editor Lynge)
1893 Ny Jord (Shallow Soil)
1894 Pan (Pan)
1898 Victoria. En kjærlighedshistorie (Victoria)
1904 Sværmere (Mothwise, 1921), (Dreamers)
1905 Stridende Liv. Skildringer fra Vesten og Østen (Fighting Life. Depictions from the West and the East)
1912 Den sidste Glæde (The Last Joy - Look Back in Happiness)
1913 Børn av Tiden (Children of the Age)
1915 Segelfoss By 1 ( 2 Volumes) (Segelfoss Town)
1917 Markens Grøde 2 Volumes (The Growth of the Soil)
1920 Konerne ved 2 Volumes (The Women at the Pump)
1923 Siste Kapitel (2 Volumes) (The Last Chapter)
1936 Ringen sluttet (The Ring is Closed)
1949 Paa gjengrodde Stier (On Overgrown Paths)
Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer translated some of his works.
Film and TV adaptations
Prime among all of Hamsun's works adapted to film is Hunger, a 1966 film starring Per Oscarsson. It is still considered one of the top film adaptations of any Hamsun works. Hamsun's works have been the basis of 25 films and television mini-series adaptations, starting in 1916.
The book Mysteries was the basis of a 1978 film of the same name (by the Dutch film company Sigma Pictures), directed by Paul de Lussanet, starring Sylvia Kristel, Rutger Hauer, Andrea Ferreol and Rita Tushingham.
Landstrykere (Wayfarers) is a Norwegian film from 1990 directed by Ola Solum.
The Telegraphist is a Norwegian movie from 1993 directed by Erik Gustavson. It is based on the novel Dreamers (Sværmere, also published in English as Mothwise).
Pan has been the basis of four films between 1922 and 1995. The latest adaptation, the Danish film of the same name, was directed by Henning Carlsen, who also directed the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish coproduction of the 1966 film Sult from Hamsun's novel of the same name.
Remodernist filmmaker Jesse Richards has announced he is in preparations to direct an adaptation of Hamsun's short story The Call of Life.
Cinematized biography
A biopic entitled Hamsun was released in 1996, directed by Jan Troell, starring Max von Sydow as Hamsun.
Reviews
Wark, Wesley K. (1980), review of Wayfarers, in Cencrastus No. 4, Winter 1980-81, pp48 & 49,
References
Further reading
Ferguson, Robert. 1987. Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Hamsun, Knut. 1990. Selected Letters, Volume 1, 1879-98. Edited by Harald Næss and James McFarlane. Norwich, England: Norvik Press.
Hamsun, Knut. 1998. Selected Letters, Volume 2, 1898-1952. Edited by Harald Næss and James McFarlane. Norwich, England: Norvik Press.
Haugan, Jørgen. 2004. The Fall of the Sun God. Knut Hamsun - a Literary Biography Oslo: Aschehoug.
Humpal, Martin. 1999. The Roots of Modernist Narrative: Knut Hamsun's Novels Hunger, Mysteries and Pan. International Specialized Book Services.
Kolloen, Ingar Sletten. 2009. Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissident. Yale University Press.
Larsen, Hanna Astrup. 1922. Knut Hamsun. Alfred A. Knopf.
Shaer, Matthew. 2009. Tackling Knut Hamsun. Review of Kollen Sletten, Dreamer and dissenter and Žagar, The dark side of literary brilliance. In Los Angeles Times, 25 October 2009.
D'Urance, Michel. 2007. Hamsun. Editions Pardès, Paris, 128 p.
Žagar, Monika. 2009. The dark side of literary brilliance. University of Washington Press.
External links
Biographical
National Library of Norway Commemoration Page
Biography, from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Hamsun bibliography 1879–2009 : literature on Knut Hamsun (National Library of Norway)
Kristofer Janson and Knut Hamsun at the National Library of Norway
Knut Hamsun's America at the Norwegian-American Historical Association
Knut Hamsun's Early Years in the Northwest in Minnesota History Magazine
"Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter", bio and review at The New Republic, September 2010
Knut Hamsun Online, fan-supported website
Works
Hamsun bibliography 1879–2009 published by the National Library of Norway and the University library of Tromsø
List of Works
Det Vilde Kor 1904 at the Internet Archive (Hamsun's only collection of verse)
Other
Wood, James, Addicted to Unpredictability, an essay. Retrieved 8 October 2006.
Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater, Davi Napoleon. Includes discussion of Ice Age, a controversial production in which Hamson is the protagonist. Iowa State University Press. , 1991.
Norwegian Nobel Laureate, Once Shunned, Is Now Celebrated, New York Times. 27 February 2009
Trials in Norway
1859 births
1952 deaths
People from Lom
People from Hamarøy
Nobel laureates in Literature
Norwegian Nobel laureates
Norwegian male writers
19th-century Norwegian novelists
20th-century Norwegian novelists
Modernist writers
Prisoners and detainees of Norway
Norwegian prisoners and detainees
Norwegian anti-communists
Psychological fiction writers | [
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17466 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen%20Kain | Karen Kain | Karen Alexandria Kain (born March 28, 1951) is a Canadian former ballet dancer, and was the artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada from 2005 - 2021.
Early training and childhood
Kain's mother enrolled her daughter in ballet training because she believed it would improve her postural alignment, poise, and discipline. The family moved from Ancaster to Erindale Woodlands, Toronto Township when Kain was in grade 6 (age 11, 1962) so she could begin training at the National Ballet School of Canada. (The majority of Toronto Township, including Erindale Woodlands, is now Mississauga.) Upon graduating in 1969, she was invited to join the National Ballet of Canada. She also participated in Girl Guides of Canada programs as a member.
Career
Kain became a principal dancer in 1971, performing central roles in a wide array of ballets, eventually becoming well known in Canada, with the help of legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev. She worked as a guest artist with Roland Petit's Ballet National de Marseilles, the Bolshoi Ballet, the London Festival Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Hamburg Ballet, the Vienna State Opera Ballet, and the Eliot Feld Ballet. Kain is a subject of The Portraits of Andy Warhol, c. 1980.
During her career, she performed in many ballets from classical and modern repertoire including among others Swan Lake (Erik Bruhn) Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty (Rudolph Nureyev), Giselle, Romeo and Juliet (John Cranko), La fille mal gardée, Onegin (John Cranko), The Taming of the Shrew (John Cranko), Pastorale (James Kudelka), Carmen (Roland Petit), Concerto Barocco (Balanchine), A Month in the Country (Frederick Ashton) and Nutcracker in which she was often paired with dancer Frank Augustyn. The talent of Kain and Augustyn came to the attention of the public and peers as soon as 1973 when they won prizes at the 1973 Moscow International Ballet Competition.
In 1977, Kain stopped dancing, but started again in 1981 with the National Ballet of Canada, where she performed for 15 more years. In 1996, Kain reunited with Frank Augustyn to appear in her husband Ross Petty's panto production of Robin Hood at Toronto's Elgin Theatre. Kain retired as a professional dancer in 1997.
In 1998, she returned to the National Ballet of Canada as part of the senior management team, in the role of artistic associate. She supported artistic director James Kudelka against principal dancer Kimberley Glasco in a wrongful-dismissal suit. In 2005, she succeeded Kudelka as artistic director. She stepped down from that role in 2021.
Kain was the founding board president of Canada's Dancer Transition Resource Centre. Kain's autobiography, Movement Never Lies, was published in 1994 by McClelland and Stewart.
Awards
In 1973, she won silver in the women's competition and the first prize for best pas de deux (with Frank Augustyn) at the second International Ballet Competition in Moscow dancing the Bluebird pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty.
In 1976, she became an Officer of the Order of Canada and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1991. She was made a member of the Order of Ontario in 1990. She holds honorary degrees from the University of Toronto, York University, McMaster University, Trent University, and the University of British Columbia. In May 1998, the French Government named her an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. Among Kain's other honours are the National Arts Centre Award, a companion award of the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards (1997) and the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement (2002). In 1996, she became the first Canadian to receive the Cartier Lifetime Achievement Award. The choreographer Marguerite Derricks cited Kain as one of her heroes. in 1989 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation made a documentary about her, Karen Kain, Prima Ballerina. Kain had an arts based public middle school in Etobicoke named after her (Karen Kain School of the Arts) in 2008. In 2012, Kain received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. In 1998, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
Honorary postage stamp
In April 2021, Kain was recognized by Canada Post as a "legend of ballet" for her lifetime of artistic achievements with a permanent domestic stamp displaying a ballet leap.
Personal life
Kain has been married since 1983 to Ross Petty, a stage and film actor, and producer of theatrical pantomime productions in Canada for over 20 years. Kain's brother, Kevin Kain, is a noted tropical medicine expert based in Toronto, Ontario; she has three younger siblings and two nephews - Dylan and Taylor Kain.
Other
In 1976, Kain appeared in a televised version of the ballet Giselle in the highly coveted title role, alongside Nadia Potts, Frank Augustyn, and Anne Ditchburn. The production was first shown in 1986. In 1985, Kain starred in an episode of the popular Canadian TV series Seeing Things. Kain was also alluded to in the 2003 movie directed by Denys Arcand, "The Barbarian Invasions", when Rémy Girard reminisced about his past love affairs. Kain did a TV commercial for The Art Shoppe, a furniture store in Toronto during the 1970s
References
External links
The Canadian Encyclopedia - Kain, Karen featuring a clip of Karen's performance in the National Ballet of Canada's 1976 production of Giselle
Canada's Walk of Fame: Karen Kain
CBC Digital Archives: Karen Kain, Prima Ballerina
Karen Kain fonds (R4321) at Library and Archives Canada
Prima ballerinas
Canadian ballerinas
Canadian female dancers
Companions of the Order of Canada
Officiers of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
Members of the Order of Ontario
People from Hamilton, Ontario
1951 births
Living people
National Ballet of Canada dancers
Prix Benois de la Danse jurors
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17467 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu | Keiretsu | A is a set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings. In the legal sense, it is a type of informal business group that are loosely organized alliances within the social world of Japan's business community. The keiretsu system predominated the Japanese economy for the second half of the 20th century, and, to a lesser extent, continues to do so in the early 21st century.
The members' companies own small portions of the shares in each other's companies, centered on a core bank; this system helps insulate each company from stock market fluctuations and takeover attempts, thus enabling long-term planning in projects. It is a key element of the manufacturing industry in Japan.
History
The prototypical keiretsu appeared during the Japanese economic miracle which followed World War II, amid the collapse of family-controlled vertical monopolies called zaibatsu.
The zaibatsu had been at the heart of economic and industrial activity within the Empire of Japan since Japanese industrialization accelerated during the Meiji Era. They held great influence over Japanese national and foreign policies which only increased following the Japanese victories in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and World War I. During the inter-war period the zaibatsu aided Japanese militarism and benefited from their conquest of East Asia by receiving lucrative contracts.
After the surrender of Japan the Allied occupation forces partially attempted to dissolve the zaibatsu which had worked closely with the militarists during the first half of the 20th century and during the war. However, the United States government later rescinded those orders in an effort to reindustrialize Japan as a bulwark against Communism in Asia, so the zaibatsu were never completely dissolved.
Types
The two types of keiretsu, horizontal and vertical, can be further categorized as:
Horizontal keiretsu
The primary aspect of a horizontal keiretsu (also known as financial keiretsu) is that it is set up around a Japanese bank through cross-shareholding relationships with other companies. The bank assists these companies with a range of financial services. The leading horizontal Japanese keiretsu, also referred to as the "Big Six", include: Fuyo, Sanwa, Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and DKB Group. Horizontal keiretsu may also have vertical relationships, called branches.
Horizontal keiretsu peaked around 1988, when over half of the value in the Japanese stock market consisted of cross-shareholdings. Since then, banks have gradually reduced their cross-shareholdings. The Japanese corporate governance code, effective from June 2015, requires listed companies to disclose a rationale for their cross-shareholdings. Partly as a result of this requirement, the three Japanese "megabanks" descended from the six major keiretsu banks (namely Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and Mizuho Financial Group) have indicated plans to further reduce their balance of cross-shareholding investments.
Vertical keiretsu
Vertical keiretsu (also known as industrial or distribution keiretsu) are used to link suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors of one industry. Banks have less influence on vertical keiretsu. Examples of this type include Toyota, Toshiba, and Nissan. One or more sub-companies, arranged in tiers of importance, are created to benefit the parent company. Major suppliers form the second tier beneath the parent, and smaller manufacturing companies make up the third and fourth tiers. Those at the highest levels are most profitable, and most insulated from fluctuations in the market.
Some vertical keiretsu may belong to one or another horizontal keiretsu. Some vertical keiretsu are family businesses, such as the Hitotsubashi/Shogakukan, Kodansha and APA groups. Studies have found these vertical keiretsus, particularly those that belong to the same horizontal keiretsu, are more likely to form alliances than the other types or even those companies where one or two have keiretsu affiliations. Vertical keiretsu is considered an effective and competitive organizational model in the car industry.
In Japan
During the occupation of Japan, under the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, a partially successful attempt was made to dissolve the zaibatsu in the late 1940s. Sixteen zaibatsu were targeted for complete dissolution, and 26 more for reorganization after dissolution. However, the companies formed from the dismantling of the zaibatsu were later reintegrated. The dispersed corporations were reinterlinked through share purchases to form horizontally integrated alliances across many industries. Where possible, keiretsu companies would also supply one another, making the alliances vertically integrated, as well. In this period, official government policy promoted the creation of robust trade corporations that could withstand heavy pressures from intensified trade competition.
The major keiretsu were each centered on one bank, which lent money to the keiretsu member companies and held equity positions in the companies. Each bank had great control over the companies in the keiretsu and acted as a monitoring and emergency bail-out entity. One effect of this structure was to minimize the presence of hostile takeovers in Japan, because no entities could challenge the power of the banks.
Although the divisions between them have blurred in recent years, there have been eight major postwar keiretsu:
Toyota is considered the biggest of the vertically integrated keiretsu groups, although the company is rather considered as a "emerged" keiretsu, along with Softbank, Seven & I Holdings Co. The banks at the top are not as large as normally required, so it is actually considered to be more horizontally integrated than other keiretsu.
The Japanese recession in the 1990s had profound effects on the keiretsu. Many of the largest banks were hit hard by bad loan portfolios and forced to merge or go out of business. This had the effect of blurring the lines between the individual keiretsu: Sumitomo Bank and Mitsui Bank, for instance, became Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation in 2001, while Sanwa Bank (the banker for the Hankyu-Toho Group) became part of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ.
Generally, these causes gave rise to a strong notion in the Japanese business community that the old keiretsu system was not an effective business model, and led to an overall loosening of keiretsu alliances. While they still exist, they are not as centralized or integrated as they were before the 2000s. For instance, many troubled Japanese companies are faced with a new reality in which receiving financial support from their main banks are getting harder and unlikelier than ever before. The companies include Sharp Corporation and Toshiba, both the iconic Japanese electronics companies.
This changed environment, in turn, has led to a growing corporate acquisition industry in Japan, as companies are no longer able to be easily "bailed out" by their banks, as well as rising derivative litigation by more independent shareholders.
Outside Japan
The keiretsu model is fairly unique to Japan. The closest foreign counterpart would be the Korean chaebol, but many diversified non-Japanese businesses groups have been described as keiretsu, such as the Virgin Group (UK), and Tata Group (India), and the Colombian Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño.
Some industry consortiums and alliances have also been described in this way. The most common examples are the airline code-sharing alliances, such as Oneworld and Star Alliance. While those arrangements link a broad range of companies around a common organization, the groupings tend to have minimal financial entanglement and are generally designed around gaining access to foreign markets within industries that governments consider sensitive such as mining and aviation when foreign ownership is limited or even banned.
The automotive and industries have created broad cross-ownership networks across nations, but the national companies are normally independently managed. Banks cited as being central to keiretsu-like systems include Deutsche Bank and some keiretsu-like systems, generally referred to as trusts, were created by investment banks in the United States such as JP Morgan and Mellon Financial/Mellon family beginning in the late 19th century (roughly the same period they were created in Japan), but they were largely curtailed through anti-trust legislation championed by Theodore Roosevelt in the early part of the 20th century. A form of keiretsu can also be found in the cross-shareholdings of the large media companies throughout most developed nations. These are largely designed to link content producers to particular distribution channels, and larger content projects, such as expensive movies, are often incorporated with ownership spread across a number of larger companies.
Contrarian view
Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer and University of Tokyo professor Yoshiro Miwa have argued that the postwar keiretsu are a "fable" created by Marxist thinkers in the 1960s so as to argue that monopoly capital dominated the Japanese economy. They point to the sparsity and tenuousness of cross-shareholding relationships within the keiretsu, the inconsistency in members' relationships with the "main banks" of each keiretsu, and the lack of power and reach of the zaibatsu alumni "lunch clubs" which are often argued to form a core of keiretsu governance.
United States–Japan bilateral relationship
By April 2015, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and Japanese Economy Minister Akira Amari, representing the two largest economies of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, were involved in bilateral talks regarding agriculture and auto parts, the "two largest obstacles for Japan." These bilateral accords would open each other's markets for products such as rice, pork and automobiles.
During the two-day ministerial TPP negotiating session held in Singapore in May 2015, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and veteran negotiator, Wendy Cutler, and Oe Hiroshi, of the Japanese Gaimusho, held bilateral trade talks regarding one of the most contentious trade issues, automobiles. American negotiators wanted the Japanese to open their entire keiretsu structure, a cornerstone of the Japanese economy, to American automobiles. They wanted Japanese dealer networks such as Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi, and Mazda to sell American cars. The successful conclusion of these bilateral talks was necessary before the other ten TPP members could complete the trade deal.
See also
Corporate ecosystem
Economy of Japan
Four big families of Hong Kong
Horizontal integration
Vertical integration
Zaibatsu
References
Further reading
Masahiko Aoki, Information, Incentives and Bargaining in the Japanese Economy (1988)
Masahiko Aoki and Hugh Patrick, The Japanese Main Bank System (1994)
Ronald Gilson and Mark J. Roe, 'Understanding the Japanese Keiretsu' (1993) 102 Yale Law Journal 871
Yoshiro Miwa and Mark Ramseyer, 'The Fable of the Keiretsu' (2002) 11 J. Econ. & Mgmt. Strategy 169
Kenichi Miyashita & David Russell, "Keiretsu: inside the hidden Japanese conglomerates" (McGraw-Hill 1995)
Bremner, Brian. (15 March 1999). Fall of a Keiretsu. Business Week, issue 3620, 86–92. Retrieved 27 October 2007, from Academic Search Premier database
'Whingeing: Japanese-American Trade'. The Economist 18 May 1991
http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/ramseyer/jemskeiretsu.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20120402215916/http://www.econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~ida/3Kenkyuu/4ouyoumicro/2006ouyoumicro/060727flath.pdf
http://research.ecstu.com/km/efile/alliances/vertical_heiretsu.pdf
Japanese business terms
Strategic management | [
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17470 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt%20Georg%20Kiesinger | Kurt Georg Kiesinger | Kurt Georg Kiesinger (; 6 April 1904 – 9 March 1988) was a German politician who served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1 December 1966 to 21 October 1969. Before he became Chancellor he served as Minister President of Baden-Württemberg from 1958 to 1966 and as President of the Federal Council from 1962 to 1963. He was Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union from 1967 to 1971.
Kiesinger gained his certificate as a lawyer in March 1933 and worked as a lawyer in Berlin's Kammergericht court from 1935 to 1940. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, but remained a largely inactive member. To avoid conscription, he found work at the Foreign Office in 1940, and became deputy head of the Foreign Office's broadcasting department. During his service at the Foreign Office, he was denounced by two colleagues for his anti-Nazi stance. In 1946 he became a member of the Christian Democratic Union. He was elected to the Bundestag in 1949, and was a member of the Bundestag until 1958 and again from 1969 to 1980. He left federal politics for eight years (from 1958 to 1966) to serve as Minister President of Baden-Württemberg, and subsequently became Chancellor by forming a grand coalition with Willy Brandt's Social Democratic Party.
Kiesinger was considered an outstanding orator and mediator, and was dubbed "King Silver Tongue". He was an author of poetry and various books, and founded the universities of Konstanz and Ulm as Minister President of Baden-Württemberg. Kiesinger is also considered controversial, which is mainly due to his affiliation and work with the Nazis. The student movement in particular, but also other sections of the population, saw Kiesinger as a politician who stood for inadequate German coming to terms with the past.
Early life and Nazi activities
Kurt Georg Kiesinger was born in Ebingen, Kingdom of Württemberg (now Albstadt, Baden-Württemberg). His father was a commercial clerk in companies engaged in the local textile industry. Kiesinger was baptized Catholic because his mother was Catholic, though his father was a protestant. His mother died six months after he was born. Her mother (Kiesinger's grandmother) exerted a strong influence on Kiesinger and encouraged him, while his father was indifferent to his advancement. After a year, his father was remarried to a Karoline Victoria Pfaff. They had seven children, of whom Kiesinger's half-sister Maria died a year after she was born. Pfaff was also a Catholic. Kiesinger was therefore shaped by both denominations and later referred to himself gladly as a "Protestant Catholic". Politically, Kiesinger grew up in a liberal, democratically-minded milieu.
Kiesinger studied law in Berlin and worked as a then as lawyer in Berlin from 1935 to 1940. As a student, he joined the (non-couleur wearing) Roman Catholic corporations KStV Alamannia Tübingen and Askania-Burgundia Berlin. He became a member of the Nazi Party in February 1933, but remained a largely inactive member. In 1940, he was called to arms but avoided mobilization by finding a job in the Foreign Office's broadcasting department, rising quickly to become deputy head of the department from 1943 to 1945 and the department's liaison with the Propaganda Ministry. He worked under Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would later be condemned to death at Nuremberg. After the war, he was interned by the Americans for his connection to Ribbentrop and spent 18 months in the Ludwigsburg camp before being released as a case of mistaken identity.
Franco-German journalist Beate Klarsfeld demonstrated Kiesinger's close connections to Ribbentrop and Joseph Goebbels, the head of Nazi Germany's Propaganda Ministry. She also asserted that Kiesinger had been chiefly responsible for the contents of German international broadcasts which included anti-Semitic and war propaganda, and had collaborated closely with SS functionaries and Franz Alfred Six. The latter was responsible for mass murders in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and was tried as a war criminal in the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg. Even after becoming aware of the extermination of the Jews, Kiesinger had continued to produce anti-Semitic propaganda. These allegations were based in part on documents that Albert Norden published about the culprits of war and Nazi crimes.
Early political career
Kiesinger joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1946. From 1946 he gave private lessons to law students, and in 1948 he resumed his practice as a lawyer. In 1947 he also became unpaid secretary-general of the CDU in Württemberg-Hohenzollern.
In the federal election in 1949 he was elected to the Bundestag, where he will be a member until 1958 and then from 1969 to 1980. In his first legislative term he represented the constituency of Ravensburg, in which he achieved record results of over 70 percent, from 1969 the constituency of Waldshut. For the 1976 federal election, Kiesinger renounced his own constituency and entered parliament via the Baden-Württemberg state list of his party. In the first two legislative periods (1949–1957) he was chairman of the mediation committee of the Bundestag and Bundesrat. On 19 October 1950, Kiesinger received 55 votes against his party friend Hermann Ehlers (201 votes) in the election for President of the Bundestag, although he had not been proposed. In 1951 he became a member of the CDU executive board. From December 17, 1954 to January 29, 1959, he was chairman of the Bundestag Committee on Foreign Affairs, to which he had been a member since 1949.
During that time, he became known for his rhetorical brilliance, as well as his in-depth knowledge of foreign affairs. However, despite the recognition he enjoyed within the Christian Democrat parliamentary faction, he was passed over during various cabinet reshuffles. Consequently, he decided to switch from federal to state politics.
Minister President of Baden-Württemberg
Kiesinger became Minister President of the state of Baden-Württemberg on 17 December 1958, an office in which he served until 1 December 1966. At that time Kiesinger was also a member of the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. As Minister President he was President of the German Bundesrat from 1 November 1962 to 31 October 1963. During his time in office he founded two universities, the University of Konstanz and the University of Ulm.
In the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany, oversized coalitions were not uncommon at the state level, and so Kiesinger led a coalition of the CDU, SPD, FDP/DVP and BHE until 1960, but then a coalition from 1960 to 1966. On 15 April 1961, the BHE disbanded.
Chancellorship
In 1966 following the collapse of the existing CDU/CSU-FDP coalition, Kiesinger was elected to replace Ludwig Erhard as Chancellor, heading a new CDU/CSU-SPD alliance. The government formed by Kiesinger remained in power for nearly three years with the SPD leader Willy Brandt as Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister. Kiesinger reduced tensions with the Soviet bloc nations establishing diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia but he opposed any major conciliatory moves. A number of progressive reforms were also realised during Kiesinger's time as Chancellor. Pension coverage was extended in 1967 via the abolition of the income-ceiling for compulsory membership. In education, student grants were introduced, together with a university building programme, while a constitutional reform of 1969 empowered the federal government to be involved with the Länder in educational planning through joint planning commission. Vocational training legislation was also introduced, while a reorganisation of unemployment insurance promoted retraining schemes, counselling and advice services and job creation places. In addition, under the “Lohnfortzahlunggesetz” of 1969, employers had to pay all employees’ wages for the first six weeks of sickness. In August 1969, the Landabgaberente (a higher special pension for farmers willing to cede farms that were unprofitable according to certain criteria) was introduced.
The historian Tony Judt has observed that Kiesinger's chancellorship, like the presidency of Heinrich Lübke, showed the "a glaring contradiction in the Bonn Republic's self-image" in view of their previous Nazi allegiances. One of his low points as Chancellor was in 1968 when Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld, who campaigned with her husband Serge Klarsfeld against Nazi criminals, publicly slapped him in the face during the 1968 Christian Democrat convention, while calling him a Nazi. She did so in French and – whilst being dragged out of the room by two ushers – repeated her words in German saying "Kiesinger! Nazi! Abtreten!" ("Kiesinger! Nazi! Step down!") Kiesinger, holding his left cheek, did not respond. Up to his death he refused to comment on the incident and in other opportunities he denied explicitly that he had been opportunistic by joining the NSDAP in 1933 (although he admitted to joining the German Foreign Ministry to dodge his 1940 draft by the Wehrmacht). Other prominent critics included the writers Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass (in 1966, Grass had written an open letter urging Kiesinger not to accept the chancellorship).
After the election of 1969, the SPD preferred to form a coalition with the FDP, ending the uninterrupted post-war reign of the CDU chancellors. Kiesinger was succeeded as Chancellor by his former Vice-Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Later years and death
Kiesinger continued to head the CDU/CSU in opposition and remained a member of the Bundestag until 1980. In July 1971 Kiesinger was succeeded as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union by Rainer Barzel. In 1972 he justified the constructive vote of no confidence by the CDU/CSU parliamentary group against Willy Brandt in the Bundestag. The subsequent vote in Brandt with the aim of electing the then CDU leader Rainer Barzel as chancellor was unsuccessful because of the bribery of Julius Steiner and probably Leo Wagner by GDR's Stasi.
In 1980 Kiesinger ended his career as politician and worked on his memoir. Of his planned memoirs, only the first part (Dark and Bright Years) was completed, covering the years up to 1958. It was released after his death in 1989. Kiesinger died in Tübingen on 9 March 1988, four weeks before his 84th birthday. After a requiem mass in Stuttgart's St. Eberhard Church, his funeral procession was followed by protesters (mainly students) who wanted his former membership in the Nazi Party remembered.
Books
Schwäbische Kindheit. (“Swabian childhood.”), Wunderlich Verlag, Tübingen 1964.
Ideen vom Ganzen. Reden und Betrachtungen. (“Ideas from the whole. Speeches and reflections.”), Wunderlich Verlag, Tübingen 1964.
Stationen 1949-1969,. (“Stations 1949-1969.”), Wunderlich Verlag, Wunderlich Verlag, Tübingen 1969.
Die Stellung des Parlamentariers in unserer Zeit. (“The position of the parliamentarian in our time.”), Stuttgart 1981.
Dunkle und helle Jahre: Erinnerungen 1904–1958. (“Dark and Bright Years: Memoirs 1904–1958.”), Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1989
References
Notes
Further reading
Braunbuch, chapter "Kiesinger - ein führender Nazi-Propagandist als Bonner Regierungschef", 3rd Volume, Berlin, GDR 1968, https://web.archive.org/web/20101120003249/http://braunbuch.de/8-01.shtml
Philipp Gassert: Kurt Georg Kiesinger 1904–1988. Kanzler zwischen den Zeiten. DVA, München 2006, (Rezension Daniela Münkler und Benjamin Obermüller, rezensionen.ch, 19. Juli 2006, S. 31).
Michael F. Feldkamp: Katholischer Studentenverein Askania-Burgundia im Kartellverband Katholischer Deutscher Studentenvereine (KV) zu Berlin 1853–2003. (PDF) Eine Festschrift herausgegeben von der K.St.V. Askania-Burgundia, Berlin 2006.
Otto Rundel: Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Sein Leben und sein politisches Wirken. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2006, .
Günter Buchstab, Philipp Gassert, Peter Thaddäus Lang (Hrsg.): Kurt Georg Kiesinger 1904–1988. Von Ebingen ins Kanzleramt. Herder, Freiburg 2005, im Auftrag der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, .
Reinhard Schmoeckel, Bruno Kaiser: Die vergessene Regierung. Die große Koalition 1966–1969 und ihre langfristigen Wirkungen. Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 2005, .
Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes 1871–1945. Herausgegeben vom Auswärtigen Amt, Historischer Dienst. Band 2: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: G–K. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2005, .
Albrecht Ernst: Kurt Georg Kiesinger 1904–1988. Rechtslehrer, Ministerpräsident, Bundeskanzler. Begleitbuch zur Wanderausstellung des Hauptstaatsarchivs Stuttgart, Stuttgart 2004, .
Joachim Samuel Eichhorn: Durch alle Klippen hindurch zum Erfolg: Die Regierungspraxis der ersten Großen Koalition (1966–1969) (Studien zur Zeitgeschichte, Band 79); München 2009.
1904 births
1988 deaths
20th-century Chancellors of Germany
Chancellors of Germany
Presidents of the German Bundesrat
Christian Democratic Union of Germany politicians
Nazi Party politicians
German Roman Catholics
Grand Crosses 1st class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Recipients of the Order of Merit of Baden-Württemberg
Members of the Bundestag for Baden-Württemberg
Members of the Bundestag 1976–1980
Members of the Bundestag 1972–1976
Members of the Bundestag 1969–1972
Members of the Bundestag 1957–1961
Members of the Bundestag 1953–1957
Members of the Bundestag 1949–1953
Nazi Party members
People from Albstadt
People from the Kingdom of Württemberg
People of the Cold War
Ministers-President of Baden-Württemberg
Members of the Bundestag for the Christian Democratic Union of Germany | [
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17479 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx | Lynx | A lynx (; plural lynx or lynxes) is any of the four species (the Canada lynx, Iberian lynx, Eurasian lynx, or bobcat) within the medium-sized wild cat genus Lynx. The name lynx originated in Middle English via Latin from the Greek word λύγξ, derived from the Indo-European root leuk- ('light, brightness') in reference to the luminescence of its reflective eyes.
Appearance
Lynx have a short tail, characteristic tufts of black hair on the tips of their ears, large, padded paws for walking on snow and long whiskers on the face. Under their neck, they have a ruff, which has black bars resembling a bow tie, although this is often not visible.
Body colour varies from medium brown to goldish to beige-white, and is occasionally marked with dark brown spots, especially on the limbs. All species of lynx have white fur on their chests, bellies and on the insides of their legs, fur which is an extension of the chest and belly fur. The lynx's colouring, fur length and paw size vary according to the climate in their range. In the Southwestern United States, they are short-haired, dark in colour and their paws are smaller and less padded. As climates get colder and more northerly, lynx have progressively thicker fur, lighter colour, and their paws are larger and more padded to adapt to the snow. Their paws may be larger than a human hand or foot.
The smallest species are the bobcat and the Canada lynx, while the largest is the Eurasian lynx, with considerable variations within species.
Species
The four living species of the genus Lynx are believed to have evolved from Lynx issiodorensis, which lived in Europe and Africa during the late Pliocene to early Pleistocene. The Pliocene felid Felis rexroadensis from North America has been proposed as an even earlier ancestor; however, this was larger than any living species, and is not currently classified as a true lynx.
Eurasian lynx
Of the four lynx species, the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) is the largest in size. It is native to European, Central Asian, and Siberian forests. While its conservation status has been classified as "least concern", populations of Eurasian lynx have been reduced or extirpated from much of Europe, where it is now being reintroduced.
During the summer, the Eurasian lynx has a relatively short, reddish or brown coat which is replaced by a much thicker silver-grey to greyish-brown coat during winter. The lynx hunts by stalking and jumping on its prey, helped by the rugged, forested country in which it resides. A favorite prey for the lynx in its woodland habitat is roe deer. It will feed however on whatever animal appears easiest, as it is an opportunistic predator much like its cousins.
Canada lynx
The Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis), or Canadian lynx, is a North American felid that ranges in forest and tundra regions across Canada and into Alaska, as well as some parts of the northern United States. Historically, the Canadian lynx ranged from Alaska across Canada and into many of the northern U.S. states. In the eastern states, it resided in the transition zone in which boreal coniferous forests yielded to deciduous forests. By 2010, after an 11-year effort, it had been successfully reintroduced into Colorado, where it had become extirpated in the 1970s. In 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated the Canada lynx a threatened species in the lower 48 states.
The Canada lynx is a good climber and swimmer; it constructs rough shelters under fallen trees or rock ledges. It has a thick coat and broad paws, and is twice as effective as the bobcat at supporting its weight on the snow. The Canada lynx feeds almost exclusively on snowshoe hares; its population is highly dependent on the population of this prey animal. It will also hunt medium-sized mammals and birds if hare numbers fall.
Iberian lynx
The Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) is an endangered species native to the Iberian Peninsula in Southern Europe. It was the most endangered cat species in the world, but conservation efforts have changed its status from critical to endangered. According to the Portuguese conservation group SOS Lynx, if this species dies out, it will be the first feline extinction since the Smilodon 10,000 years ago. The species used to be classified as a subspecies of the Eurasian lynx, but is now considered a separate species. Both species occurred together in central Europe in the Pleistocene epoch, being separated by habitat choice. The Iberian lynx is believed to have evolved from Lynx issiodorensis.
Conservation efforts
In 2004, a Spanish government survey showed just two isolated breeding populations of Iberian lynx in southern Spain, totaling about 100 lynx (including only 25 breeding females). An agreement signed in 2003 by the Spanish Environment Ministry and the Andalusian Environment Council seeks to breed the Iberian lynx in captivity. Three Iberian lynx cubs were born as part of the Spanish program in 2005, at the Centro El Acebuche facility in Doñana National Park.
As a result of the Spanish government program and efforts by others (such as the WWF and the EU's Life projects), the Iberian lynx "has recovered from the brink of extinction"; from 2000 to 2015, the population of Iberian lynx more than tripled. The IUCN reassessed the species from "critically endangered" to "endangered" in 2015. A 2014 census of the species showed 327 animals in Andalucia in the "reintroduction areas" of Sierra Morena and Montes de Toledo (Castilla-La Mancha, Spain), the Matachel Valley (Extremadura, Spain), and the Guadiana Valley (Portugal).
Bobcat
The bobcat (Lynx rufus) is a North American wild cat. With 13 recognized subspecies, the bobcat is common throughout southern Canada, the continental United States, and northern Mexico. Like the Eurasian lynx, its conservation status is "least concern." The bobcat is an adaptable predator that inhabits deciduous, coniferous, or mixed woodlands, but unlike other Lynx, does not depend exclusively on the deep forest, and ranges from swamps and desert lands to mountainous and agricultural areas, its spotted coat serving as camouflage. The population of the bobcat depends primarily on the population of its prey. Nonetheless, the bobcat is often killed by larger predators such as coyotes.
The bobcat resembles other species of the genus Lynx, but is on average the smallest of the four. Its coat is variable, though generally tan to grayish brown, with black streaks on the body and dark bars on the forelegs and tail. The ears are black-tipped and pointed, with short, black tufts. There is generally an off-white color on the lips, chin, and underparts. Bobcats in the desert regions of the southwest have the lightest-colored coats, while those in the northern, forested regions have the darkest.
Behavior and diet
The lynx is usually solitary, although a small group of lynx may travel and hunt together occasionally. Mating takes place in the late winter and once a year the female gives birth to between one and four kittens. The gestation time of the lynx is about 70 days. The young stay with the mother for one more winter, a total of around nine months, before moving out to live on their own as young adults. The lynx creates its den in crevices or under ledges. It feeds on a wide range of animals from white-tailed deer, reindeer, roe deer, small red deer, and chamois, to smaller, more usual prey: snowshoe hares, fish, foxes, sheep, squirrels, mice, turkeys and other birds, and goats. It also eats ptarmigans, voles, and grouse.
Distribution and habitat
The lynx inhabits high altitude forests with dense cover of shrubs, reeds, and tall grass. Although this cat hunts on the ground, it can climb trees and can swim swiftly, catching fish.
Europe and Asia
The Eurasian lynx ranges from central and northern Europe across Asia up to Northern Pakistan and India. In Iran, they live in Mount Damavand area. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the Eurasian lynx was considered extinct in the wild in Slovenia and Croatia. A resettlement project, begun in 1973, has successfully reintroduced lynx to the Slovenian Alps and the Croatian regions of Gorski Kotar and Velebit, including Croatia's Plitvice Lakes National Park and Risnjak National Park. In both countries, the lynx is listed as an endangered species and protected by law. The lynx was distributed throughout Japan during Jōmon period; with no paleontological evidence thereafter suggesting extinction at that time.
Several lynx resettlement projects begun in the 1970s have been successful in various regions of Switzerland. Since the 1990s, there have been numerous efforts to resettle the Eurasian lynx in Germany, and since 2000, a small population can now be found in the Harz mountains near Bad Lauterberg.
The lynx is found in the Białowieża Forest in northeastern Poland, in Estonia and in the northern and western parts of China, particularly the Tibetan Plateau. In Romania, the numbers exceed 2,000, the largest population in Europe outside of Russia, although most experts consider the official population numbers to be overestimated.
The lynx is more common in northern Europe, especially in Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Finland, and the northern parts of Russia. The Swedish population is estimated to be 1200–1500 individuals, spread all over the country, but more common in middle Sweden and in the mountain range. The lynx population in Finland was 1900–2100 individuals in 2008, and the numbers have been increasing every year since 1992. The lynx population in Finland is estimated currently to be larger than ever before. Lynx in Britain were wiped out in the 17th century, but there have been calls to reintroduce them to curb the numbers of deer.
The endangered Iberian lynx lives in southern Spain and formerly in eastern Portugal. There is an Iberian lynx reproduction center outside Silves in the Algarve in southern Portugal.
North America
The two Lynx species in North America, Canada lynx and bobcats, are both found in the temperate zone. While the bobcat is common throughout southern Canada, the continental United States and northern Mexico, the Canada lynx is present mainly in boreal forests of Canada and Alaska.
See also
Caracal, a small African cat with lynx-like ears
Lynx (constellation)
Lynx (mythology)
Wildcat, a small predator native to Europe, the western part of Asia, and Africa
References
External links
Holarctic fauna
Mammal genera
Taxa named by Robert Kerr (writer)
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17503 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure | Leisure | Leisure has often been defined as a quality of experience or as free time. Free time is time spent away from business, work, job hunting, domestic chores, and education, as well as necessary activities such as eating and sleeping. Leisure as an experience usually emphasizes dimensions of perceived freedom and choice. It is done for "its own sake", for the quality of experience and involvement. Other classic definitions include Thorsten Veblen's (1899) of "nonproductive consumption of time." Free time is not easy to define due to the multiplicity of approaches used to determine its essence. According to Mastrothanasis K. and Kladaki M., two types of free time definitions may be distinguished: quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative definitions consider leisure time as the remaining time of working time. Different disciplines have definitions reflecting their common issues: for example, sociology on social forces and contexts and psychology as mental and emotional states and conditions. From a research perspective, these approaches have an advantage of being quantifiable and comparable over time and place.
Leisure studies and sociology of leisure are the academic disciplines concerned with the study and analysis of leisure. Recreation differs from leisure in that it is a purposeful activity that includes the experience of leisure in activity contexts. Economists consider that leisure times are valuable to a person like wages that they could earn for the same time spend towards the activity. If it were not, people would have worked instead of taking leisure. However, the distinction between leisure and unavoidable activities is not a rigidly defined one, e.g. people sometimes do work-oriented tasks for pleasure as well as for long-term utility. A related concept is social leisure, which involves leisurely activities in social settings, such as extracurricular activities, e.g. sports, clubs. Another related concept is that of family leisure. Relationships with others is usually a major factor in both satisfaction and choice.
The concept of leisure as a human right was realised in article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
History
Leisure has historically been the privilege of the upper class. Opportunities for leisure came with more money, or organization, and less working time, rising dramatically in the mid-to-late 19th century, starting in Great Britain and spreading to other rich nations in Europe. It spread as well to the United States, although that country had a reputation in Europe for providing much less leisure despite its wealth. Immigrants to the United States discovered they had to work harder than they did in Europe. Economists continue to investigate why Americans work longer hours. In a recent book, Laurent Turcot argues that leisure was not created in the 19th century but is imbricated in the occidental world since the beginning of history.
Canada
In Canada, leisure in the country is related to the decline in work hours and is shaped by moral values, and the ethnic-religious and gender communities. In a cold country with winter's long nights, and summer's extended daylight, favorite leisure activities include horse racing, team sports such as hockey, singalongs, roller skating and board games. The churches tried to steer leisure activities, by preaching against drinking and scheduling annual revivals and weekly club activities. By 1930 radio played a major role in uniting Canadians behind their local or regional hockey teams. Play-by-play sports coverage, especially of ice hockey, absorbed fans far more intensely than newspaper accounts the next day. Rural areas were especially influenced by sports coverage.
France
Leisure by the mid-19th century was no longer an individualistic activity. It was increasingly organized. In the French industrial city of Lille, with a population of 80,000 in 1858, the cabarets or taverns for the working class numbered 1300, or one for every three houses. Lille counted 63 drinking and singing clubs, 37 clubs for card players, 23 for bowling, 13 for skittles, and 18 for archery. The churches likewise have their social organizations. Each club had a long roster of officers, and a busy schedule of banquets, festivals and competitions.
United Kingdom
As literacy, wealth, ease of travel, and a broadened sense of community grew in Britain from the mid-19th century onward, there was more time and interest in leisure activities of all sorts, on the part of all classes.
Opportunities for leisure activities increased because real wages continued to grow and hours of work continued to decline. In urban Britain, the nine-hour day was increasingly the norm; the 1874 Factory Act limited the workweek to 56.5 hours. The movement toward an eight-hour day. Furthermore, system of routine annual vacations came into play, starting with white-collar workers and moving into the working-class. Some 200 seaside resorts emerged thanks to cheap hotels and inexpensive railway fares, widespread banking holidays and the fading of many religious prohibitions against secular activities on Sundays.
By the late Victorian era, the leisure industry had emerged in all British cities, and the pattern was copied across Western Europe and North America. It provided scheduled entertainment of suitable length and convenient locales at inexpensive prices. These include sporting events, music halls, and popular theater. By 1880 football was no longer the preserve of the social elite, as it attracted large working-class audiences. Average gate was 5,000 in 1905, rising to 23,000 in 1913. That amounted to 6 million paying customers with a weekly turnover of £400,000. Sports by 1900 generated some three percent of the total gross national product in Britain. Professionalization of sports was the norm, although some new activities reached an upscale amateur audience, such as lawn tennis and golf. Women were now allowed in some sports, such as archery, tennis, badminton and gymnastics.
Leisure was primarily a male activity, with middle-class women allowed in at the margins. There were class differences with upper-class clubs, and working-class and middle-class pubs. Heavy drinking declined; there was more betting on outcomes. Participation in sports and all sorts of leisure activities increased for average English people, and their interest in spectator sports increased dramatically.
By the 1920s the cinema and radio attracted all classes, ages, and genders in very large numbers. Giant palaces were built for the huge audiences that wanted to see Hollywood films. In Liverpool 40 percent of the population attended one of the 69 cinemas once a week; 25 percent went twice. Traditionalists grumbled about the American cultural invasion, but the permanent impact was minor.
The British showed a more profound interest in sports, and in greater variety, that any rival. They gave pride of place to such moral issues as sportsmanship and fair play. Cricket became symbolic of the Imperial spirit throughout the Empire. Soccer proved highly attractive to the urban working classes, which introduced the rowdy spectator to the sports world. In some sports, there was significant controversy in the fight for amateur purity especially in rugby and rowing. New games became popular almost overnight, including golf, lawn tennis, cycling and hockey. Women were much more likely to enter these sports than the old established ones. The aristocracy and landed gentry, with their ironclad control over land rights, dominated hunting, shooting, fishing and horse racing.
Cricket had become well-established among the English upper class in the 18th century, and was a major factor in sports competition among the public schools. Army units around the Empire had time on their hands, and encouraged the locals to learn cricket so they could have some entertaining competition. Most of the Empire embraced cricket, with the exception of Canada. Cricket test matches (international) began by the 1870s; the most famous is that between Australia and Britain for "The Ashes".
Types
The range of leisure activities extends from the very informal and casual to highly organised and long-lasting activities. A significant subset of leisure activities are hobbies which are undertaken for personal satisfaction, usually on a regular basis, and often result in satisfaction through skill development or recognised achievement, sometimes in the form of a product. The list of hobbies is ever changing as society changes.
Substantial and fulfilling hobbies and pursuits are described by Sociologist Robert Stebbins as serious leisure. The serious leisure perspective is a way of viewing the wide range of leisure pursuits in three main categories: casual leisure, serious leisure, and project-based leisure.
Serious leisure
"Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer ... that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where ... participants find a [leisure] career...". For example, collecting stamps or maintaining a public wetland area.
People undertaking serious leisure can be categorised as amateurs, volunteers or hobbyists. Their engagement is distinguished from casual leisure by a high level of perseverance, effort, knowledge and training required and durable benefits and the sense that one can create in effect a leisure career through such activity.
The range of serious leisure activities is growing rapidly in modern times with developed societies having greater leisure time, longevity and prosperity. The Internet is providing increased support for amateurs and hobbyists to communicate, display and share products.
Reading
As literacy and leisure time expanded after 1900, reading became a popular pastime. New additions to adult fiction doubled during the 1920s, reaching 2800 new books a year by 1935. Libraries tripled their stocks, and saw heavy demand for new fiction. A dramatic innovation was the inexpensive paperback, pioneered by Allen Lane (1902–70) at Penguin Books in 1935. The first titles included novels by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie. They were sold cheap (usually sixpence) in a wide variety of inexpensive stores such as Woolworth's. Penguin aimed at an educated middle class "middlebrow" audience. It avoided the downscale image of American paperbacks. The line signaled cultural self-improvement and political education. The more polemical Penguin Specials, typically with a leftist orientation for Labour readers, were widely distributed during World War II. However the war years caused a shortage of staff for publishers and book stores, and a severe shortage of rationed paper, worsened by the air raid on Paternoster Square in 1940 that burned 5 million books in warehouses.
Romantic fiction was especially popular, with Mills and Boon the leading publisher. Romantic encounters were embodied in a principle of sexual purity that demonstrated not only social conservatism, but also how heroines could control their personal autonomy. Adventure magazines became quite popular, especially those published by DC Thomson; the publisher sent observers around the country to talk to boys and learn what they wanted to read about. The story line in magazines and cinema that most appealed to boys was the glamorous heroism of British soldiers fighting wars that were perceived as exciting and just.
Casual leisure
"Casual leisure is immediately, intrinsically rewarding; and it is a relatively short-lived, pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it." For example, watching TV or going for a swim.
Project-based leisure
"Project-based leisure is a short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time." For example, working on a single Wikipedia article or building a garden feature.
Cultural differences
Time available for leisure varies from one society to the next, although anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherers tend to have significantly more leisure time than people in more complex societies. As a result, band societies such as the Shoshone of the Great Basin came across as extraordinarily lazy to European colonialists.
Workaholics, less common than the social myths, are those who work compulsively at the expense of other activities. They prefer to work rather than spend time socializing and engaging in other leisure activities.
European and American men statistically have more leisure time than women, due to both household and parenting responsibilities and increasing participation in the paid employment. In Europe and the United States, adult men usually have between one and nine hours more leisure time than women do each week.
Family leisure
Family leisure is defined as time that parents and children spend together in free time or recreational activities, and it can be expanded to address intergenerational family leisure as time that grandparents, parents, and grandchildren spend together in free time or recreational activities. Leisure can become a central place for the development of emotional closeness and strong family bonds. Contexts such as urban/rural shape the perspectives, meanings, and experiences of family leisure. For example, leisure moments are part of work in rural areas, and the rural idyll is enacted by urban families on weekends, but both urban and rural families somehow romanticize rural contexts as ideal spaces for family making (connection to nature, slower and more intimate space, notion of a caring social fabric, tranquillity, etc.). Also, much "family leisure" requires tasks that are most often assigned to women. Family leisure also includes playing together with family members on the weekend day.
Aging
Leisure is important across the lifespan and can facilitate a sense of control and self-worth. Children's leisure time is an important part of their daily lives and it constitutes an important factor in socializing, developing skills and shaping personal identities. Older adults, specifically, can benefit from physical, social, emotional, cultural, and spiritual aspects of leisure. Leisure engagement and relationships are commonly central to "successful" and satisfying aging. For example, engaging in leisure with grandchildren can enhance feelings of generativity, whereby older adults can achieve well-being by leaving a legacy beyond themselves for future generations.
See also
Conspicuous consumption
Conspicuous leisure
Entertainment
Labour economics
Leisure satisfaction
Lifestyle (sociology)
Money-rich, time-poor
Recreation
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Travel + Leisure
Waiting for the Weekend
Work-leisure dichotomy
Work-life balance
References
Further reading
Cross, Gary S. Encyclopedia of recreation and leisure in America. (2004).
Harris, David. Key concepts in leisure studies. (Sage, 2005)
Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. (Temple University Press, 2013).
Ibrahim, Hilmi. Leisure and society: a comparative approach (1991).
Jenkins, John M., and J.J.J. Pigram. Encyclopedia of leisure and outdoor recreation. (Routledge, 2003). .
Kostas Kalimtzis. An Inquiry into the Philosophical Concept of Scholê: Leisure As a Political End. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Rojek, Chris, Susan M. Shaw, and A.J. Veal, eds/ A Handbook of Leisure Studies. (2006).
History of leisure
Abrams, Lynn. Workers' culture in imperial Germany: leisure and recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (2002).
Beck, Peter J. "Leisure and Sport in Britain." in Chris Wrigley, ed., A Companion to Early Twentieth-Century Britain (2008): 453–69.
Borsay, Peter. A History of Leisure: The British Experience since 1500 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Burke, Peter. "The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe". In: Past and Present 146 (1995), p. 136-150.
Cross, Gary. A social history of leisure since 1600 (1990).
De Grazia, Victoria. The culture of consent: mass organisation of leisure in fascist Italy (2002).
Hatcher, John. "Labour, Leisure and Economic Thought before the Nineteenth Century". In: Past and Present 160 (1998), p. 64-115.
Koshar, Rudy. Histories of Leisure (2002).
Levinson, David, and Karen Christensen. Encyclopedia of world sport: from ancient times to the present (Oxford UP, 1999).
Marrus, Michael R. The Emergence of Leisure. New York 1974
Poser, Stefan: Leisure Time and Technology, European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2011, retrieved: 25 October 2011.
Stearns, Peter N. ed. Encyclopedia of European social history from 1350 to 2000 (2001) 5:3-261; 18 essays by experts
Struna, Nancy L. People of Prowess Sport Leisure and Labor in Early Anglo-America (1996) excerpt
Towner, John, and Geoffrey Wall. "History and tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 18.1 (1991): 71–84. online
Towner, John. "The Grand Tour: a key phase in the history of tourism." Annals of tourism research 12#3 (1985): 297–333.
Turcot, Laurent Sports et Loisirs. Une histoire des origines à nos jours, Paris, Gallimard, 2016.
Turcot, Laurent "The origins of Leisure", International Innovation, April 2016
Walton, John K. Leisure in Britain, 1780-1939 (1983).
Withey, Lynne. Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A history of leisure travel, 1750 to 1915 (1997).
Historiography
Akyeampong, Emmanuel, and Charles Ambler. "Leisure in African history: An introduction." International journal of African historical studies 35#1 (2002): 1-16.
Mommaas, Hans, et al. Leisure research in Europe: methods and traditions (Cab international, 1996), on France, Poland, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and the UK.
External links
Leisure
Peter Burke, The invention of leisure in early modern Europe, Past & Present, February 1995
The Development of Leisure Amongst the Social Classes During the Industrial Revolution
Quality of life | [
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17505 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie%20Caron | Leslie Caron | Leslie Claire Margaret Caron (; born July 1, 1931) is a French-American actress and dancer. She is the recipient of a Golden Globe Award, two BAFTA Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards. She is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
Caron began her career as a ballerina. She made her film debut in the musical An American in Paris (1951), followed by roles in The Man with a Cloak (1951), Glory Alley (1952) and The Story of Three Loves (1953), before her role of an orphan in Lili (also 1953), which earned her the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress and garnered nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award.
As a leading lady, Caron starred in films such as The Glass Slipper (1955), Daddy Long Legs (1955), Gigi (1958), Fanny (1961), both of which earned her Golden Globe nominations, Guns of Darkness (1962), The L-Shaped Room (1962), Father Goose (1964) and A Very Special Favor (1965). For her role as a single pregnant woman in The L-Shaped Room, Caron, in addition to receiving a second Academy Award nomination, won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and a second BAFTA Award.
Caron's other roles include Is Paris Burning? (1966), The Man Who Loved Women (1977), Valentino (1977), Damage (1992), Funny Bones (1995), Chocolat (2000) and Le Divorce (2003). In 2007, she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for portraying a rape victim in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Early life
Caron was born in Boulogne-sur-Seine, Seine (now Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine), the daughter of Margaret (née Petit), a Franco-American dancer on Broadway, and Claude Caron, a French chemist, pharmacist, perfumer and boutique owner. Claude Caron was the founder of the artisanal perfumier Guermantes. While her older brother Aimery Caron became a chemist like their father, Leslie was prepared for a performing career from childhood by her mother. The family lost its wealth during World War II and could not provide a dowry for Caron. "My mother said: 'There's only one profession that leads you to marrying money and becoming a princess or duchess, and that's ballet.' ... My grandfather whispered heavily: 'Margaret, you want your daughter to be a whore?' I heard it. This has always followed me".
Career
Caron was initially a ballerina. Gene Kelly discovered her in the Roland Petit company "" and cast her to appear opposite him in the musical An American in Paris (1951), a role for which a pregnant Cyd Charisse was originally cast. The prosperity, sunshine and abundance of California was a cultural shock to Caron. She had lived in Paris during the German occupation, which left her malnourished and anemic. She later remarked how nice people were in comparison to wartime Paris, in which poverty and deprivation had caused people to be bitter and violent. She had a friendly relationship with Kelly, who nicknamed her "Lester the Pester" and "kid". Kelly helped the inexperienced Caron—who had never spoken on stage—adjust to filmmaking..
Her role led to a seven-year MGM contract. The films which followed included the musical The Glass Slipper (1955) and the drama The Man with a Cloak (1951), with Joseph Cotten and Barbara Stanwyck. Still, Caron has said of herself: "Unfortunately, Hollywood considers musical dancers as hoofers. Regrettable expression." She also starred in the musicals Lili (1953, receiving an Academy Award for Best Actress nomination), with Mel Ferrer; Daddy Long Legs (1955), with Fred Astaire; and Gigi (1958) with Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier.
Dissatisfied with her career despite her success ("I thought musicals were futile and silly", she said in 2021; "I appreciate them better now"), Caron studied the Stanislavski method. In the 1960s and thereafter, Caron worked in European films as well. For her performance in the British drama The L-Shaped Room (1962), she won the BAFTA Award for Best British Actress and the Golden Globe, and was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar. Her other film assignments in this period included Father Goose (1964) with Cary Grant; Ken Russell's Valentino (1977), in the role of silent-screen legend Alla Nazimova; and Louis Malle's Damage (1992). Sometime in 1970, Caron was one of the many actresses considered for the lead role of Eglantine Price in Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks, losing the role to British actress Angela Lansbury.
In 1967, she was a member of the jury of the 5th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1989, she was a member of the jury at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival.
Caron returned to France in the early 1970s, which she later said was a mistake. "They adore someone who's really British or really American", Caron said, "but somebody who's French and has made it in Hollywood – and I was the only one who had really made it in a big way – they can't forgive". During the 1980s, she appeared in several episodes of the soap opera Falcon Crest as Nicole Sauguet. Caron is one of the few actresses from the classic era of MGM musicals who are still active in film — a group that includes Rita Moreno, Margaret O'Brien and June Lockhart. Caron's later credits include Funny Bones (1995) with Jerry Lewis and Oliver Platt; The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2000) with Judi Dench and Cleo Laine; Chocolat (2000) and Le Divorce (2003), directed by James Ivory, with Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts.
On June 30, 2003, Caron traveled to San Francisco to appear as the special guest star in The Songs of Alan Jay Lerner: I Remember It Well, a retrospective concert staged by San Francisco's 42nd Street Moon Company. In 2007, her guest appearance on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit earned her a Primetime Emmy Award. On April 27, 2009, Caron traveled to New York as an honored guest at a tribute to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe at the Paley Center for Media.
For her contributions to the film industry, Caron was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 8, 2009, with a motion pictures star located at 6153 Hollywood Boulevard. In February 2010, she played Madame Armfeldt in A Little Night Music at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, which also featured Greta Scacchi and Lambert Wilson.
In 2016, Caron appeared in the ITV television series The Durrells (produced by her son Christopher Hall) as the Countess Mavrodaki.
Veteran documentarian Larry Weinstein's Leslie Caron: The Reluctant Star premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on June 28, 2016.
Personal life
In September 1951, Caron married American George Hormel II, a grandson of George A. Hormel, the founder of the Hormel meat-packing company. They divorced in 1954. During that period, while under contract to MGM, she lived in Laurel Canyon in a Normandie style 1927 mansion near the country store on Laurel Canyon Blvd. One bedroom was all mirrored for her dancing rehearsals.
Her second husband was British theatre director Peter Hall. They married in 1956 and had two children: Christopher John Hall, a television drama producer, and Jennifer Caron Hall, a writer, painter and actress. Her son-in-law, married to Jennifer, is Glenn Wilhide, a producer and screenwriter.
Caron had an affair with Warren Beatty in 1961. When she and Hall divorced in 1965, Beatty was named as a co-respondent and was ordered by the London court to pay the costs of the case. In 1969, Caron married Michael Laughlin, the producer of the film Two-Lane Blacktop; the couple divorced in 1980.
Caron was also romantically linked to Dutch television actor Robert Wolders from 1994 to 1995.
From June 1993 until September 2009, Caron owned and operated the hotel and restaurant Auberge la Lucarne aux Chouettes (The Owls' Nest), in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, about south of Paris. Caron's mother had committed suicide in her 60s; suffering from a lifetime of depression, Caron also considered doing so in 1995. She was hospitalized for a month and began attending Alcoholics Anonymous. Unhappy with the lack of acting opportunities in France, she returned to England in 2013.
In her autobiography, Thank Heaven, she states that she obtained American citizenship in time to vote for Barack Obama for president.
In October 2021, she was chosen to receive the Oldie of the Year Award by The Oldie magazine. It was initially offered to Queen Elizabeth II, who had declined it on the grounds that she did not meet the criteria, even though she is five years older than Caron.
Filmography
Theatre
1955: Orvet, by Jean Renoir, director Jean Renoir, Théâtre de la Renaissance, Paris
1955: Gigi, by Anita Loos, director Sir Peter Hall, New Theatre, London
1961: Ondine, by Jean Giraudoux, director Peter Hall, Aldwych Theatre, London. The second act of this Royal Shakespeare Company production was broadcast on BBC Television on April 11, 1961.
1965: Carola, by Jean Renoir, director Norman Lloyd, PBS TV, Los Angeles
1975–1981: 13, rue de l'amour (Monsieur Chasse), by Georges Feydeau, director Basil Langton, US and Australia
1978: Can-Can, musical by Cole Porter & Abe Burrows, director John Bishop, US and Canadian tour
1983: The rehearsal by Jean Anouilh, director Gillian Lynne, English tour
1984: On your toes by Rodgers and Hart, director George Abbott, US tour
1985: One for the Tango (Apprends-moi Céline) by Maria Pacôme, director Pierre Epstein, US tour
1985: L'inaccessible, author and director Krzysztof Zanussi, Théâtre du Petit Odéon of Paris and Spoletto Festival, Italy
1991: Grand hotel, adaptation from the novel of Vicki Baum, director Tommy Tune, Berlin
1991: Le martyre de Saint Sebastien by Claude Debussy and Gabriele d'Annunzio, narration, directed by Michael Tilson Thomas, London Symphony Orchestra
1995: Georges Sand et Chopin, author Bruno Villien, Greenwich Festival, Great Britain
1997: Nocturne for lovers, adaptation Gavin Lambert, director Kado Kostzer, Chichester Festival Theatre, Great Britain
1997: The story of Babar, by Jean de Brunhoff, narration, music from Francis Poulenc, Chichester Festival, Great Britain
1998: Apprends-moi Céline, by Maria Pacôme, director Raymond Acquaviva, French tour
1999: Readings from Colette, director Roger Hodgeman, Melbourne Festival, Australia
1999: Nocturne for lovers, director Roger Hodgeman, Melbourne Festival, Australia
2006: I Remember It Well Special Guest Artist in a retrospective tribute to Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner (and his music), 42nd Street Moon Theatre Company, Herbst Theater, San Francisco
2009: Thank Heaven – 'platform' at the Théâtre National of London
2009: A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim, director Lee Blakeley, Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris
2014: Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks by Richard Alfieri, director Michael Arabian, Laguna Playhouse, Laguna Beach, California
Recordings
The Lover (l'Amant) by Marguerite Duras on cassettes
First World War for the radio
Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien by Claude Debussy and Gabriele d'Annunzio, with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas
Gigi by Colette in English on cassettes recorded in public at Merkin Concert Hall at Abraham Goodman House in New York City, 1996
Narrated "Carnival of the Animals" music by Camille St Saëns with the Nash Ensemble – Wigmore Hall, 1999
The Plutocrats play for the BBC dir. Bill Bryden, written by Michael Hastings, from the novel by Booth Tarkington, January 1999
Bibliography
Caron, Leslie: Vengeance. Doubleday, 1982.
Caron, Leslie: Thank Heaven: A Memoir. Viking Adult, 2009.
Honors
Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur by President François Mitterrand in June 1993
Ordre National du Mérite, by Catherine Trautmann, Minister of Culture, in February 1998
Officier de la Légion d'Honneur, given by Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin in June 2004
Medaille D'Or De La Ville De Paris in 2012
Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur in March 2013
J F Kennedy Gold Medal in the Arts in 2015
The Oldie of the Year (TOOTY) in 2021
References
External links
1931 births
20th-century American actresses
20th-century American dancers
20th-century French actresses
20th-century French dancers
21st-century American actresses
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century French actresses
21st-century French non-fiction writers
American autobiographers
American ballerinas
American female dancers
American film actresses
American musical theatre actresses
American stage actresses
American television actresses
American voice actresses
Best British Actress BAFTA Award winners
Best Drama Actress Golden Globe (film) winners
Best Foreign Actress BAFTA Award winners
Commandeurs of the Légion d'honneur
Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
French autobiographers
French ballerinas
French emigrants to the United States
French female dancers
French film actresses
French people of American descent
French musical theatre actresses
French stage actresses
French television actresses
French voice actresses
Living people
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players
Officers of the National Order of Merit (France)
People from Boulogne-Billancourt
Primetime Emmy Award winners
Women autobiographers | [
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17514 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvia | Latvia | Latvia ( or ; ; ; ), officially known as the Republic of Latvia (, , ), is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is one of the Baltic states; and is bordered by Estonia to the north, Lithuania to the south, Russia to the east, Belarus to the southeast, and shares a maritime border with Sweden to the west. Latvia covers an area of , with a population of 1.9 million. The country has a temperate seasonal climate. Its capital and largest city is Riga. Latvians belong to the ethno-linguistic group of the Balts; and speak Latvian, one of the only two surviving Baltic languages. Russians are the most prominent minority in the country, at almost a quarter of the population.
After centuries of German, Swedish, Polish-Lithuanian and Russian rule, which was mainly executed by the Baltic German aristocracy, the Republic of Latvia was established on 18 November 1918 when it broke away from the German Empire and declared independence in the aftermath of World War I. However, by the 1930s the country became increasingly autocratic after the coup in 1934 establishing an authoritarian regime under Kārlis Ulmanis. The country's de facto independence was interrupted at the outset of World War II, beginning with Latvia's forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union, followed by the invasion and occupation by Nazi Germany in 1941, and the re-occupation by the Soviets in 1944 to form the Latvian SSR for the next 45 years. As a result of extensive immigration during the Soviet occupation, ethnic Russians became the most prominent minority in the country, now constituting nearly a quarter of the population. The peaceful Singing Revolution started in 1987, and ended with the restoration of de facto independence on 21 August 1991. Since then, Latvia has been a democratic unitary parliamentary republic.
Latvia is a developed country, with a high-income advanced economy; ranking very high in the Human Development Index. It performs favorably in measurements of civil liberties, press freedom, internet freedom, democratic governance, living standards, and peacefulness. Latvia is a member of the European Union, Eurozone, NATO, the Council of Europe, the United Nations, the Council of the Baltic Sea States, the International Monetary Fund, the Nordic-Baltic Eight, the Nordic Investment Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the World Trade Organization.
Etymology
The name Latvija is derived from the name of the ancient Latgalians, one of four Indo-European Baltic tribes (along with Curonians, Selonians and Semigallians), which formed the ethnic core of modern Latvians together with the Finnic Livonians. Henry of Latvia coined the latinisations of the country's name, "Lettigallia" and "Lethia", both derived from the Latgalians. The terms inspired the variations on the country's name in Romance languages from "Letonia" and in several Germanic languages from "Lettland".
History
Around 3000 BC, the proto-Baltic ancestors of the Latvian people settled on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea. The Balts established trade routes to Rome and Byzantium, trading local amber for precious metals. By 900 AD, four distinct Baltic tribes inhabited Latvia: Curonians, Latgalians, Selonians, Semigallians (in Latvian: kurši, latgaļi, sēļi and zemgaļi), as well as the Finnic tribe of Livonians (lībieši) speaking a Finnic language.
In the 12th century in the territory of Latvia, there were lands with their rulers: Vanema, Ventava, Bandava, Grauzējupe, Piemare, Duvzare, Dirsupe, Sēlija, Koknese, Jersika, Tālava and Adzele.
Medieval period
Although the local people had contact with the outside world for centuries, they became more fully integrated into the European socio-political system in the 12th century. The first missionaries, sent by the Pope, sailed up the Daugava River in the late 12th century, seeking converts. The local people, however, did not convert to Christianity as readily as the Church had hoped.
German crusaders were sent, or more likely decided to go on their own accord as they were known to do. Saint Meinhard of Segeberg arrived in Ikšķile, in 1184, traveling with merchants to Livonia, on a Catholic mission to convert the population from their original pagan beliefs. Pope Celestine III had called for a crusade against pagans in Northern Europe in 1193. When peaceful means of conversion failed to produce results, Meinhard plotted to convert Livonians by force of arms.
At the beginning of the 13th century, Germans ruled large parts of what is currently Latvia. Together with southern Estonia, these conquered areas formed the crusader state that became known as Terra Mariana or Livonia. In 1282, Riga, and later the cities of Cēsis, Limbaži, Koknese and Valmiera, became part of the Hanseatic League. Riga became an important point of east–west trading and formed close cultural links with Western Europe. The first German settlers were knights from northern Germany and citizens of northern German towns who brought their Low German language to the region, which shaped many loanwords in the Latvian language.
Reformation period and Polish and Swedish rule
After the Livonian War (1558–1583), Livonia (Northern Latvia & Southern Estonia) fell under Polish and Lithuanian rule. The southern part of Estonia and the northern part of Latvia were ceded to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and formed into the Duchy of Livonia (Ducatus Livoniae Ultradunensis). Gotthard Kettler, the last Master of the Order of Livonia, formed the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. Though the duchy was a vassal state to Lithuanian Grand Duchy and later of Polish and Lithuanian commonwealth, it retained a considerable degree of autonomy and experienced a golden age in the 16th century. Latgalia, the easternmost region of Latvia, became a part of the Inflanty Voivodeship of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
In the 17th and early 18th centuries, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, and Russia struggled for supremacy in the eastern Baltic. After the Polish–Swedish War, northern Livonia (including Vidzeme) came under Swedish rule. Riga became the capital of Swedish Livonia and the largest city in the entire Swedish Empire. Fighting continued sporadically between Sweden and Poland until the Truce of Altmark in 1629. In Latvia, the Swedish period is generally remembered as positive; serfdom was eased, a network of schools was established for the peasantry, and the power of the regional barons was diminished.
Several important cultural changes occurred during this time. Under Swedish and largely German rule, western Latvia adopted Lutheranism as its main religion. The ancient tribes of the Couronians, Semigallians, Selonians, Livs, and northern Latgallians assimilated to form the Latvian people, speaking one Latvian language. Throughout all the centuries, however, an actual Latvian state had not been established, so the borders and definitions of who exactly fell within that group are largely subjective. Meanwhile, largely isolated from the rest of Latvia, southern Latgallians adopted Catholicism under Polish/Jesuit influence. The native dialect remained distinct, although it acquired many Polish and Russian loanwords.
Livonia & Courland in the Russian Empire (1795–1917)
During the Great Northern War (1700–1721), up to 40 percent of Latvians died from famine and plague. Half the residents of Riga were killed by plague in 1710–1711. The capitulation of Estonia and Livonia in 1710 and the Treaty of Nystad, ending the Great Northern War in 1721, gave Vidzeme to Russia (it became part of the Riga Governorate). The Latgale region remained part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth as Inflanty Voivodeship until 1772, when it was incorporated into Russia. The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, a vassal state of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was annexed by Russia in 1795 in the Third Partition of Poland, bringing all of what is now Latvia into the Russian Empire. All three Baltic provinces preserved local laws, German as the local official language and their own parliament, the Landtag.
The emancipation of the serfs took place in Courland in 1817 and in Vidzeme in 1819. In practice, however, the emancipation was actually advantageous to the landowners and nobility, as it dispossessed peasants of their land without compensation, forcing them to return to work at the estates "of their own free will".
During these two centuries Latvia experienced economic and construction boom – ports were expanded (Riga became the largest port in the Russian Empire), railways built; new factories, banks, and a university were established; many residential, public (theatres and museums), and school buildings were erected; new parks formed; and so on. Riga's boulevards and some streets outside the Old Town date from this period.
Numeracy was also higher in the Livonian and Courlandian parts of the Russian Empire, which may have been influenced by the Protestant religion of the inhabitants.
National awakening
During the 19th century, the social structure changed dramatically. A class of independent farmers established itself after reforms allowed the peasants to repurchase their land, but many landless peasants remained. There also developed a growing urban proletariat and an increasingly influential Latvian bourgeoisie. The Young Latvian () movement laid the groundwork for nationalism from the middle of the century, many of its leaders looking to the Slavophiles for support against the prevailing German-dominated social order. The rise in use of the Latvian language in literature and society became known as the First National Awakening. Russification began in Latgale after the Polish led the January Uprising in 1863: this spread to the rest of what is now Latvia by the 1880s. The Young Latvians were largely eclipsed by the New Current, a broad leftist social and political movement, in the 1890s. Popular discontent exploded in the 1905 Russian Revolution, which took a nationalist character in the Baltic provinces.
Declaration of independence
World War I devastated the territory of what became the state of Latvia, and other western parts of the Russian Empire. Demands for self-determination were initially confined to autonomy, until a power vacuum was created by the Russian Revolution in 1917, followed by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Russia and Germany in March 1918, then the Allied armistice with Germany on 11 November 1918. On 18 November 1918, in Riga, the People's Council of Latvia proclaimed the independence of the new country and Kārlis Ulmanis was entrusted to set up a government and he took the position of Prime Minister.
The General representative of Germany August Winnig formally handed over political power to the Latvian Provisional Government on 26 November. On November 18, the Latvian People's Council entrusted him to set up the government. He took the office of Minister of Agriculture from November 18 to December 19. He took a position of Prime Minister from 19 November 1918 to 13 July 1919.
The war of independence that followed was part of a general chaotic period of civil and new border wars in Eastern Europe. By the spring of 1919, there were actually three governments: the Provisional government headed by Kārlis Ulmanis, supported by the Tautas padome and the Inter-Allied Commission of Control; the Latvian Soviet government led by Pēteris Stučka, supported by the Red Army; and the Provisional government headed by Andrievs Niedra and supported by the Baltische Landeswehr and the German Freikorps unit Iron Division.
Estonian and Latvian forces defeated the Germans at the Battle of Wenden in June 1919, and a massive attack by a predominantly German force—the West Russian Volunteer Army—under Pavel Bermondt-Avalov was repelled in November. Eastern Latvia was cleared of Red Army forces by Latvian and Polish troops in early 1920 (from the Polish perspective the Battle of Daugavpils was a part of the Polish–Soviet War).
A freely elected Constituent assembly convened on 1 May 1920, and adopted a liberal constitution, the Satversme, in February 1922. The constitution was partly suspended by Kārlis Ulmanis after his coup in 1934 but reaffirmed in 1990. Since then, it has been amended and is still in effect in Latvia today. With most of Latvia's industrial base evacuated to the interior of Russia in 1915, radical land reform was the central political question for the young state. In 1897, 61.2% of the rural population had been landless; by 1936, that percentage had been reduced to 18%.
By 1923, the extent of cultivated land surpassed the pre-war level. Innovation and rising productivity led to rapid growth of the economy, but it soon suffered from the effects of the Great Depression. Latvia showed signs of economic recovery, and the electorate had steadily moved toward the centre during the parliamentary period. On 15 May 1934, Ulmanis staged a bloodless coup, establishing a nationalist dictatorship that lasted until 1940. After 1934, Ulmanis established government corporations to buy up private firms with the aim of "Latvianising" the economy.
Latvia in World War II
Early in the morning of 24 August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a 10-year non-aggression pact, called the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945, according to which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet "spheres of influence". In the north, Latvia, Finland and Estonia were assigned to the Soviet sphere. A week later, on 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland; on 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded Poland as well.
After the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, most of the Baltic Germans left Latvia by agreement between Ulmanis's government and Nazi Germany under the Heim ins Reich programme. In total 50,000 Baltic Germans left by the deadline of December 1939, with 1,600 remaining to conclude business and 13,000 choosing to remain in Latvia. Most of those who remained left for Germany in summer 1940, when a second resettlement scheme was agreed. The racially approved being resettled mainly in Poland, being given land and businesses in exchange for the money they had received from the sale of their previous assets.
On 5 October 1939, Latvia was forced to accept a "mutual assistance" pact with the Soviet Union, granting the Soviets the right to station between 25,000 and 30,000 troops on Latvian territory.
State administrators were murdered and replaced by Soviet cadres. Elections were held with single pro-Soviet candidates listed for many positions. The resulting people's assembly immediately requested admission into the USSR, which the Soviet Union granted. Latvia, then a puppet government, was headed by Augusts Kirhenšteins. The Soviet Union incorporated Latvia on 5 August 1940, as the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic.
The Soviets dealt harshly with their opponents – prior to Operation Barbarossa, in less than a year, at least 34,250 Latvians were deported or killed. Most were deported to Siberia where deaths were estimated at 40 percent.
On 22 June 1941, German troops attacked Soviet forces in Operation Barbarossa. There were some spontaneous uprisings by Latvians against the Red Army which helped the Germans. By 29 June Riga was reached and with Soviet troops killed, captured or retreating, Latvia was left under the control of German forces by early July. The occupation was followed immediately by SS Einsatzgruppen troops, who were to act in accordance with the Nazi Generalplan Ost that required the population of Latvia to be cut by 50 percent.
Under German occupation, Latvia was administered as part of Reichskommissariat Ostland. Latvian paramilitary and Auxiliary Police units established by the occupation authority participated in the Holocaust and other atrocities. 30,000 Jews were shot in Latvia in the autumn of 1941. Another 30,000 Jews from the Riga ghetto were killed in the Rumbula Forest in November and December 1941, to reduce overpopulation in the ghetto and make room for more Jews being brought in from Germany and the West. There was a pause in fighting, apart from partisan activity, until after the siege of Leningrad ended in January 1944, and the Soviet troops advanced, entering Latvia in July and eventually capturing Riga on 13 October 1944.
More than 200,000 Latvian citizens died during World War II, including approximately 75,000 Latvian Jews murdered during the Nazi occupation. Latvian soldiers fought on both sides of the conflict, mainly on the German side, with 140,000 men in the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS, The 308th Latvian Rifle Division was formed by the Red Army in 1944. On occasions, especially in 1944, opposing Latvian troops faced each other in battle.
In the 23rd block of the Vorverker cemetery, a monument was erected after the Second World War for the people of Latvia who had died in Lübeck from 1945 to 1950.
Soviet era (1940–1941, 1944–1991)
In 1944, when Soviet military advances reached Latvia, heavy fighting took place in Latvia between German and Soviet troops, which ended in another German defeat. In the course of the war, both occupying forces conscripted Latvians into their armies, in this way increasing the loss of the nation's "live resources". In 1944, part of the Latvian territory once more came under Soviet control. The Soviets immediately began to reinstate the Soviet system. After the German surrender, it became clear that Soviet forces were there to stay, and Latvian national partisans, soon joined by some who had collaborated with the Germans, began to fight against the new occupier.
Anywhere from 120,000 to as many as 300,000 Latvians took refuge from the Soviet army by fleeing to Germany and Sweden. Most sources count 200,000 to 250,000 refugees leaving Latvia, with perhaps as many as 80,000 to 100,000 of them recaptured by the Soviets or, during few months immediately after the end of war, returned by the West.
The Soviets reoccupied the country in 1944–1945, and further deportations followed as the country was collectivised
and Sovietised.
On 25 March 1949, 43,000 rural residents ("kulaks") and Latvian nationalists were deported to Siberia in a sweeping Operation Priboi in all three Baltic states, which was carefully planned and approved in Moscow already on 29 January 1949. This operation had the desired effect of reducing the anti Soviet partisan activity. Between 136,000 and 190,000 Latvians, depending on the sources, were imprisoned or deported to Soviet concentration camps (the Gulag) in the post war years, from 1945 to 1952.
In the post-war period, Latvia was made to adopt Soviet farming methods. Rural areas were forced into collectivization. An extensive program to impose bilingualism was initiated in Latvia, limiting the use of Latvian language in official uses in favor of using Russian as the main language. All of the minority schools (Jewish, Polish, Belarusian, Estonian, Lithuanian) were closed down leaving only two media of instructions in the schools: Latvian and Russian. An influx of new colonists, including laborers, administrators, military personnel and their dependents from Russia and other Soviet republics started. By 1959 about 400,000 Russian settlers arrived and the ethnic Latvian population had fallen to 62%.
Since Latvia had maintained a well-developed infrastructure and educated specialists, Moscow decided to base some of the Soviet Union's most advanced manufacturing in Latvia. New industry was created in Latvia, including a major machinery factory RAF in Jelgava, electrotechnical factories in Riga, chemical factories in Daugavpils, Valmiera and Olaine—and some food and oil processing plants. Latvia manufactured trains, ships, minibuses, mopeds, telephones, radios and hi-fi systems, electrical and diesel engines, textiles, furniture, clothing, bags and luggage, shoes, musical instruments, home appliances, watches, tools and equipment, aviation and agricultural equipment and long list of other goods. Latvia had its own film industry and musical records factory (LPs). However, there were not enough people to operate the newly built factories. To maintain and expand industrial production, skilled workers were migrating from all over the Soviet Union, decreasing the proportion of ethnic Latvians in the republic. The population of Latvia reached its peak in 1990 at just under 2.7 million people.
In late 2018 the National Archives of Latvia released a full alphabetical index of some 10,000 people recruited as agents or informants by the Soviet KGB. 'The publication, which followed two decades of public debate and the passage of a special law, revealed the names, code names, birthplaces and other data on active and former KGB agents as of 1991, the year Latvia regained its independence from the Soviet Union.'
Restoration of independence in 1991
In the second half of the 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev started to introduce political and economic reforms in the Soviet Union that were called glasnost and perestroika. In the summer of 1987, the first large demonstrations were held in Riga at the Freedom Monument—a symbol of independence. In the summer of 1988, a national movement, coalescing in the Popular Front of Latvia, was opposed by the Interfront. The Latvian SSR, along with the other Baltic Republics was allowed greater autonomy, and in 1988, the old pre-war Flag of Latvia flew again, replacing the Soviet Latvian flag as the official flag in 1990.
In 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted a resolution on the Occupation of the Baltic states, in which it declared the occupation "not in accordance with law", and not the "will of the Soviet people". Pro-independence Popular Front of Latvia candidates gained a two-thirds majority in the Supreme Council in the March 1990 democratic elections. On 4 May 1990, the Supreme Council adopted the Declaration on the Restoration of Independence of the Republic of Latvia, and the Latvian SSR was renamed Republic of Latvia.
However, the central power in Moscow continued to regard Latvia as a Soviet republic in 1990 and 1991. In January 1991, Soviet political and military forces unsuccessfully tried to overthrow the Republic of Latvia authorities by occupying the central publishing house in Riga and establishing a Committee of National Salvation to usurp governmental functions. During the transitional period, Moscow maintained many central Soviet state authorities in Latvia.
The Popular Front of Latvia advocated that all permanent residents be eligible for Latvian citizenship, however, universal citizenship for all permanent residents was not adopted. Instead, citizenship was granted to persons who had been citizens of Latvia on the day of loss of independence in 1940 as well as their descendants. As a consequence, the majority of ethnic non-Latvians did not receive Latvian citizenship since neither they nor their parents had ever been citizens of Latvia, becoming non-citizens or citizens of other former Soviet republics. By 2011, more than half of non-citizens had taken naturalization exams and received Latvian citizenship, but in 2015 there were still 290,660 non-citizens in Latvia, which represented 14.1% of the population. They have no citizenship of any country, and cannot participate in the parliamentary elections. Children born to non-nationals after the re-establishment of independence are automatically entitled to citizenship.
The Republic of Latvia declared the end of the transitional period and restored full independence on 21 August 1991, in the aftermath of the failed Soviet coup attempt. Latvia resumed diplomatic relations with Western states, including Sweden. The Saeima, Latvia's parliament, was again elected in 1993. Russia ended its military presence by completing its troop withdrawal in 1994 and shutting down the Skrunda-1 radar station in 1998. The major goals of Latvia in the 1990s, to join NATO and the European Union, were achieved in 2004. The NATO Summit 2006 was held in Riga. Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga was President of Latvia from 1999 until 2007. She was the first female head of state in the former Soviet block state and was active in Latvia joining both NATO and the European Union in 2004.
Approximately 72% of Latvian citizens are Latvian, while 20% are Russian; less than 1% of non-citizens are Latvian, while 71% are Russian. The government denationalized private property confiscated by the Soviets, returning it or compensating the owners for it, and privatized most state-owned industries, reintroducing the prewar currency. Albeit having experienced a difficult transition to a liberal economy and its re-orientation toward Western Europe, Latvia is one of the fastest growing economies in the European Union. In 2014, Riga was the European Capital of Culture, Latvia joined the eurozone and adopted the EU single currency euro as the currency of the country and Latvian Valdis Dombrovskis was named vice-president of the European Commission. In 2015 Latvia held the presidency of Council of the European Union. Big European events have been celebrated in Riga such as the Eurovision Song Contest 2003 and the European Film Awards 2014. On 1 July 2016, Latvia became a member of the OECD.
Geography
Latvia lies in Northern Europe, on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea and northwestern part of the East European Craton (EEC), between latitudes 55° and 58° N (a small area is north of 58°), and longitudes 21° and 29° E (a small area is west of 21°). Latvia has a total area of of which land, agricultural land, forest land and inland water.
The total length of Latvia's boundary is . The total length of its land boundary is , of which is shared with Estonia to the north, with the Russian Federation to the east, with Belarus to the southeast and with Lithuania to the south. The total length of its maritime boundary is , which is shared with Estonia, Sweden and Lithuania. Extension from north to south is and from west to east .
Most of Latvia's territory is less than above sea level. Its largest lake, Lubāns, has an area of , its deepest lake, Drīdzis, is deep. The longest river on Latvian territory is the Gauja, at in length. The longest river flowing through Latvian territory is the Daugava, which has a total length of , of which is on Latvian territory. Latvia's highest point is Gaiziņkalns, . The length of Latvia's Baltic coastline is . An inlet of the Baltic Sea, the shallow Gulf of Riga is situated in the northwest of the country.
Climate
Latvia has a temperate climate that has been described in various sources as either humid continental (Köppen Dfb) or oceanic/maritime (Köppen Cfb).
Coastal regions, especially the western coast of the Courland Peninsula, possess a more maritime climate with cooler summers and milder winters, while eastern parts exhibit a more continental climate with warmer summers and harsher winters.
Latvia has four pronounced seasons of near-equal length. Winter starts in mid-December and lasts until mid-March. Winters have average temperatures of and are characterized by stable snow cover, bright sunshine, and short days. Severe spells of winter weather with cold winds, extreme temperatures of around and heavy snowfalls are common. Summer starts in June and lasts until August. Summers are usually warm and sunny, with cool evenings and nights. Summers have average temperatures of around , with extremes of . Spring and autumn bring fairly mild weather.
2019 was the warmest year in the history of weather observation in Latvia with an average temperature +8.1 °C higher.
Environment
Most of the country is composed of fertile lowland plains and moderate hills. In a typical Latvian landscape, a mosaic of vast forests alternates with fields, farmsteads, and pastures. Arable land is spotted with birch groves and wooded clusters, which afford a habitat for numerous plants and animals. Latvia has hundreds of kilometres of undeveloped seashore—lined by pine forests, dunes, and continuous white sand beaches.
Latvia has the fifth highest proportion of land covered by forests in the European Union, after Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Slovenia. Forests account for or 56% of the total land area.
Latvia has over 12,500 rivers, which stretch for . Major rivers include the Daugava River, Lielupe, Gauja, Venta, and Salaca, the largest spawning ground for salmon in the eastern Baltic states. There are 2,256 lakes that are bigger than , with a collective area of . Mires occupy 9.9% of Latvia's territory. Of these, 42% are raised bogs; 49% are fens; and 9% are transitional mires. 70% percent of the mires are untouched by civilization, and they are a refuge for many rare species of plants and animals.
Agricultural areas account for or 29% of the total land area. With the dismantling of collective farms, the area devoted to farming decreased dramatically – now farms are predominantly small. Approximately 200 farms, occupying , are engaged in ecologically pure farming (using no artificial fertilizers or pesticides).
Latvia's national parks are Gauja National Park in Vidzeme (since 1973), Ķemeri National Park in Zemgale (1997), Slītere National Park in Kurzeme (1999), and Rāzna National Park in Latgale (2007).
Latvia has a long tradition of conservation. The first laws and regulations were promulgated in the 16th and 17th centuries. There are 706 specially state-level protected natural areas in Latvia: four national parks, one biosphere reserve, 42 nature parks, nine areas of protected landscapes, 260 nature reserves, four strict nature reserves, 355 nature monuments, seven protected marine areas and 24 microreserves. Nationally protected areas account for or around 20% of Latvia's total land area. Latvia's Red Book (Endangered Species List of Latvia), which was established in 1977, contains 112 plant species and 119 animal species. Latvia has ratified the international Washington, Bern, and Ramsare conventions.
The 2012 Environmental Performance Index ranks Latvia second, after Switzerland, based on the environmental performance of the country's policies.
Access to biocapacity in Latvia is much higher than world average. In 2016, Latvia had 8.5 global hectares of biocapacity per person within its territory, much more than the world average of 1.6 global hectares per person. In 2016 Latvia used 6.4 global hectares of biocapacity per person - their ecological footprint of consumption. This means they use less biocapacity than Latvia contains. As a result, Latvia is running a biocapacity reserve.
Biodiversity
Approximately 30,000 species of flora and fauna have been registered in Latvia. Common species of wildlife in Latvia include deer, wild boar, moose, lynx, bear, fox, beaver and wolves. Non-marine molluscs of Latvia include 159 species.
Species that are endangered in other European countries but common in Latvia include: black stork (Ciconia nigra), corncrake (Crex crex), lesser spotted eagle (Aquila pomarina), white-backed woodpecker (Picoides leucotos), Eurasian crane (Grus grus), Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), European wolf (Canis lupus) and European lynx (Felis lynx).
Phytogeographically, Latvia is shared between the Central European and Northern European provinces of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. According to the WWF, the territory of Latvia belongs to the ecoregion of Sarmatic mixed forests. 56 percent of Latvia's territory is covered by forests, mostly Scots pine, birch, and Norway spruce. It had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 2.09/10, ranking it 159th globally out of 172 countries.
Several species of flora and fauna are considered national symbols. Oak (Quercus robur, ), and linden (Tilia cordata, ) are Latvia's national trees and the daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare, ) its national flower. The white wagtail (Motacilla alba, ) is Latvia's national bird. Its national insect is the two-spot ladybird (Adalia bipunctata, ). Amber, fossilized tree resin, is one of Latvia's most important cultural symbols. In ancient times, amber found along the Baltic Sea coast was sought by Vikings as well as traders from Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire. This led to the development of the Amber Road.
Several nature reserves protect unspoiled landscapes with a variety of large animals. At Pape Nature Reserve, where European bison, wild horses, and recreated aurochs have been reintroduced, there is now an almost complete Holocene megafauna also including moose, deer, and wolf.
Politics
The 100-seat unicameral Latvian parliament, the Saeima, is elected by direct popular vote every four years. The president is elected by the Saeima in a separate election, also held every four years. The president appoints a prime minister who, together with his cabinet, forms the executive branch of the government, which has to receive a confidence vote by the Saeima. This system also existed before World War II. The most senior civil servants are the thirteen Secretaries of State.
Administrative divisions
Latvia is a unitary state, currently divided into 43 local government units consisting of 36 municipalities () and 7 state cities () with their own city council and administration: Daugavpils, Jelgava, Jūrmala, Liepāja, Rēzekne, Riga, and Ventspils. There are four historical and cultural regions in Latvia – Courland, Latgale, Vidzeme, Zemgale, which are recognised in Constitution of Latvia. Selonia, a part of Zemgale, is sometimes considered culturally distinct region, but it is not part of any formal division. The borders of historical and cultural regions usually are not explicitly defined and in several sources may vary. In formal divisions, Riga region, which includes the capital and parts of other regions that have a strong relationship with the capital, is also often included in regional divisions; e.g., there are five planning regions of Latvia (), which were created in 2009 to promote balanced development of all regions. Under this division Riga region includes large parts of what traditionally is considered Vidzeme, Courland, and Zemgale. Statistical regions of Latvia, established in accordance with the EU Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, duplicate this division, but divides Riga region into two parts with the capital alone being a separate region.
The largest city in Latvia is Riga, the second largest city is Daugavpils and the third largest city is Liepaja.
Political culture
In 2010 parliamentary election ruling centre-right coalition won 63 out of 100 parliamentary seats. Left-wing opposition Harmony Centre supported by Latvia's Russian-speaking minority got 29 seats. In November 2013, Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, in office since 2009, resigned after at least 54 people were killed and dozens injured in the collapse at a supermarket in Riga.
In 2014 parliamentary election was won again by the ruling centre-right coalition formed by the Latvian Unity Party, the National Alliance and the Union of Greens and Farmers. They got 61 seats and Harmony got 24. In December 2015, country's first female Prime Minister, in office since January 2014, Laimdota Straujuma resigned. In February 2016, a coalition of Union of Greens and Farmers, The Unity and National Alliance was formed by new Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis.
In 2018 parliamentary election pro-Russian Harmony was again the biggest party securing 23 out of 100 seats, the second and third were the new populist parties KPV LV and New Conservative Party. Ruling coalition, comprising the Union of Greens and Farmers, the National Alliance and the Unity party, lost. In January 2019, Latvia got a government led by new Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins of the centre-right New Unity. Karins’ coalition was formed by five of the seven parties in parliament, excluding only the pro-Russia Harmony party and the Union of Greens and Farmers.
Foreign relations
Latvia is a member of the United Nations, European Union, Council of Europe, NATO, OECD, OSCE, IMF, and WTO. It is also a member of the Council of the Baltic Sea States and Nordic Investment Bank. It was a member of the League of Nations (1921–1946). Latvia is part of the Schengen Area and joined the Eurozone on 1 January 2014.
Latvia has established diplomatic relations with 158 countries. It has 44 diplomatic and consular missions and maintains 34 embassies and 9 permanent representations abroad. There are 37 foreign embassies and 11 international organisations in Latvia's capital Riga. Latvia hosts one European Union institution, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC).
Latvia's foreign policy priorities include co-operation in the Baltic Sea region, European integration, active involvement in international organisations, contribution to European and transatlantic security and defence structures, participation in international civilian and military peacekeeping operations, and development co-operation, particularly the strengthening of stability and democracy in the EU's Eastern Partnership countries.
Since the early 1990s, Latvia has been involved in active trilateral Baltic states co-operation with its neighbours Estonia and Lithuania, and Nordic-Baltic co-operation with the Nordic countries. The Baltic Council is the joint forum of the interparliamentary Baltic Assembly (BA) and the intergovernmental Baltic Council of Ministers (BCM). Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB-8) is the joint co-operation of the governments of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden. Nordic-Baltic Six (NB-6), comprising Nordic-Baltic countries that are European Union member states, is a framework for meetings on EU-related issues. Interparliamentary co-operation between the Baltic Assembly and Nordic Council was signed in 1992 and since 2006 annual meetings are held as well as regular meetings on other levels. Joint Nordic-Baltic co-operation initiatives include the education programme NordPlus and mobility programmes for public administration, business and industry and culture. The Nordic Council of Ministers has an office in Riga.
Latvia participates in the Northern Dimension and Baltic Sea Region Programme, European Union initiatives to foster cross-border co-operation in the Baltic Sea region and Northern Europe. The secretariat of the Northern Dimension Partnership on Culture (NDPC) will be located in Riga. In 2013 Riga hosted the annual Northern Future Forum, a two-day informal meeting of the prime ministers of the Nordic-Baltic countries and the UK. The Enhanced Partnership in Northern Europe or e-Pine is the U.S. Department of State diplomatic framework for co-operation with the Nordic-Baltic countries.
Latvia hosted the 2006 NATO Summit and since then the annual Riga Conference has become a leading foreign and security policy forum in Northern Europe. Latvia held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2015.
Military
The National Armed Forces (Latvian: Nacionālie bruņotie spēki (NAF)) of Latvia consists of the Land Forces, Naval Forces, Air Force, National Guard, Special Tasks Unit, Military Police, NAF staff Battalion, Training and Doctrine Command, and Logistics Command. Latvia's defence concept is based upon the Swedish-Finnish model of a rapid response force composed of a mobilisation base and a small group of career professionals. From 1 January 2007, Latvia switched to a professional fully contract-based army.
Latvia participates in international peacekeeping and security operations. Latvian armed forces have contributed to NATO and EU military operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1996–2009), Albania (1999), Kosovo (2000–2009), Macedonia (2003), Iraq (2005–2006), Afghanistan (since 2003), Somalia (since 2011) and Mali (since 2013). Latvia also took part in the US-led Multi-National Force operation in Iraq (2003–2008) and OSCE missions in Georgia, Kosovo and Macedonia. Latvian armed forces contributed to a UK-led Battlegroup in 2013 and the Nordic Battlegroup in 2015 under the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) of the European Union. Latvia acts as the lead nation in the coordination of the Northern Distribution Network for transportation of non-lethal ISAF cargo by air and rail to Afghanistan. It is part of the Nordic Transition Support Unit (NTSU), which renders joint force contributions in support of Afghan security structures ahead of the withdrawal of Nordic and Baltic ISAF forces in 2014. Since 1996 more than 3600 military personnel have participated in international operations, of whom 7 soldiers perished. Per capita, Latvia is one of the largest contributors to international military operations.
Latvian civilian experts have contributed to EU civilian missions: border assistance mission to Moldova and Ukraine (2005–2009), rule of law missions in Iraq (2006 and 2007) and Kosovo (since 2008), police mission in Afghanistan (since 2007) and monitoring mission in Georgia (since 2008).
Since March 2004, when the Baltic states joined NATO, fighter jets of NATO members have been deployed on a rotational basis for the Baltic Air Policing mission at Šiauliai Airport in Lithuania to guard the Baltic airspace. Latvia participates in several NATO Centres of Excellence: Civil-Military Co-operation in the Netherlands, Cooperative Cyber Defence in Estonia and Energy Security in Lithuania. It plans to establish the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga.
Latvia co-operates with Estonia and Lithuania in several trilateral Baltic defence co-operation initiatives:
Baltic Battalion (BALTBAT) – infantry battalion for participation in international peace support operations, headquartered near Riga, Latvia;
Baltic Naval Squadron (BALTRON) – naval force with mine countermeasures capabilities, headquartered near Tallinn, Estonia;
Baltic Air Surveillance Network (BALTNET) – air surveillance information system, headquartered near Kaunas, Lithuania;
Joint military educational institutions: Baltic Defence College in Tartu, Estonia, Baltic Diving Training Centre in Liepāja, Latvia and Baltic Naval Communications Training Centre in Tallinn, Estonia.
Future co-operation will include sharing of national infrastructures for training purposes and specialisation of training areas (BALTTRAIN) and collective formation of battalion-sized contingents for use in the NATO rapid-response force. In January 2011, the Baltic states were invited to join NORDEFCO, the defence framework of the Nordic countries. In November 2012, the three countries agreed to create a joint military staff in 2013.
Human rights
According to the reports by Freedom House and the US Department of State, human rights in Latvia are generally respected by the government: Latvia is ranked above-average among the world's sovereign states in democracy, press freedom, privacy and human development.
More than 56% of leading positions are held by women in Latvia, which ranks first in Europe; Latvia ranks first in the world in women's rights sharing the position with five other European countries according to World Bank.
The country has a large ethnic Russian community, which was guaranteed basic rights under the constitution and international human rights laws ratified by the Latvian government.
Approximately 206,000 non-citizens – including stateless persons – have limited access to some political rights – only citizens are allowed to participate in parliamentary or municipal elections, although there are no limitations in regards to joining political parties or other political organizations. In 2011, the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities "urged Latvia to allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections." Additionally, there have been reports of police abuse of detainees and arrestees, poor prison conditions and overcrowding, judicial corruption, incidents of violence against ethnic minorities, and societal violence and incidents of government discrimination against homosexuals.
Economy
Latvia is a member of the World Trade Organization (1999) and the European Union (2004). On 1 January 2014, the euro became the country's currency, superseding the Lats. According to statistics in late 2013, 45% of the population supported the introduction of the euro, while 52% opposed it. Following the introduction of the Euro, Eurobarometer surveys in January 2014 showed support for the euro to be around 53%, close to the European average.
Since the year 2000, Latvia has had one of the highest (GDP) growth rates in Europe. However, the chiefly consumption-driven growth in Latvia resulted in the collapse of Latvian GDP in late 2008 and early 2009, exacerbated by the global economic crisis, shortage of credit and huge money resources used for the bailout of Parex Bank. The Latvian economy fell 18% in the first three months of 2009, the biggest fall in the European Union.
The economic crisis of 2009 proved earlier assumptions that the fast-growing economy was heading for implosion of the economic bubble, because it was driven mainly by growth of domestic consumption, financed by a serious increase of private debt, as well as a negative foreign trade balance. The prices of real estate, which were at some points growing by approximately 5% a month, were long perceived to be too high for the economy, which mainly produces low-value goods and raw materials.
Privatisation in Latvia is almost complete. Virtually all of the previously state-owned small and medium companies have been privatised, leaving only a small number of politically sensitive large state companies. The private sector accounted for nearly 68% of the country's GDP in 2000.
Foreign investment in Latvia is still modest compared with the levels in north-central Europe. A law expanding the scope for selling land, including to foreigners, was passed in 1997. Representing 10.2% of Latvia's total foreign direct investment, American companies invested $127 million in 1999. In the same year, the United States of America exported $58.2 million of goods and services to Latvia and imported $87.9 million. Eager to join Western economic institutions like the World Trade Organization, OECD, and the European Union, Latvia signed a Europe Agreement with the EU in 1995—with a 4-year transition period. Latvia and the United States have signed treaties on investment, trade, and intellectual property protection and avoidance of double taxation.
In 2010 Latvia launched a Residence by Investment program (Golden Visa) in order to attract foreign investors and make local economy benefit from it. This program allows investors to get a Latvian residence permit by investing at least €250,000 in property or in an enterprise with at least 50 employees and an annual turnover of at least €10M.
Economic contraction and recovery (2008–12)
The Latvian economy entered a phase of fiscal contraction during the second half of 2008 after an extended period of credit-based speculation and unrealistic appreciation in real estate values. The national account deficit for 2007, for example, represented more than 22% of the GDP for the year while inflation was running at 10%.
Latvia's unemployment rate rose sharply in this period from a low of 5.4% in November 2007 to over 22%. In April 2010 Latvia had the highest unemployment rate in the EU, at 22.5%, ahead of Spain, which had 19.7%.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate in economics for 2008, wrote in his New York Times Op-Ed column on 15 December 2008:
The most acute problems are on Europe's periphery, where many smaller economies are experiencing crises strongly reminiscent of past crises in Latin America and Asia: Latvia is the new Argentina
However, by 2010, commentators noted signs of stabilisation in the Latvian economy. Rating agency Standard & Poor's raised its outlook on Latvia's debt from negative to stable. Latvia's current account, which had been in deficit by 27% in late 2006 was in surplus in February 2010. Kenneth Orchard, senior analyst at Moody's Investors Service argued that:
The strengthening regional economy is supporting Latvian production and exports, while the sharp swing in the current account balance suggests that the country's 'internal devaluation' is working.
The IMF concluded the First Post-Program Monitoring Discussions with the Republic of Latvia in July 2012 announcing that Latvia's economy has been recovering strongly since 2010, following the deep downturn in 2008–09. Real GDP growth of 5.5 percent in 2011 was underpinned by export growth and a recovery in domestic demand. The growth momentum has continued into 2012 and 2013 despite deteriorating external conditions, and the economy is expected to expand by 4.1 percent in 2014. The unemployment rate has receded from its peak of more than 20 percent in 2010 to around 9.3 percent in 2014.
Infrastructure
The transport sector is around 14% of GDP. Transit between Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan as well as other Asian countries and the West is large.
The four biggest ports of Latvia are located in Riga, Ventspils, Liepāja and Skulte. Most transit traffic uses these and half the cargo is crude oil and oil products. Free port of Ventspils is one of the busiest ports in the Baltic states. Apart from road and railway connections, Ventspils is also linked to oil extraction fields and transportation routes of Russian Federation via system of two pipelines from Polotsk, Belarus.
Riga International Airport is the busiest airport in the Baltic states with 7.8 million passengers in 2019. It has direct flight to over 80 destinations in 30 countries. The only other airport handling regular commercial flights is Liepāja International Airport.
airBaltic is the Latvian flag carrier airline and a low-cost carrier with hubs in all three Baltic States, but main base in Riga, Latvia.
Latvian Railway's main network consists of 1,860 km of which 1,826 km is 1,520 mm Russian gauge railway of which 251 km are electrified, making it the longest railway network in the Baltic States. Latvia's railway network is currently incompatible with European standard gauge lines. However, Rail Baltica railway, linking Helsinki-Tallinn-Riga-Kaunas-Warsaw is under construction and is set to be completed in 2026.
National road network in Latvia totals 1675 km of main roads, 5473 km of regional roads and 13 064 km of local roads. Municipal roads in Latvia totals 30 439 km of roads and 8039 km of streets. The best known roads are A1 (European route E67), connecting Warsaw and Tallinn, as well as European route E22, connecting Ventspils and Terehova. In 2017 there were a total of 803,546 licensed vehicles in Latvia.
Latvia has three large hydroelectric power stations in Pļaviņu HES (825MW), Rīgas HES (402 MW) and Ķeguma HES-2 (192 MW). In recent years a couple of dozen of wind farms as well as biogas or biomass power stations of different scale have been built in Latvia.
Latvia operates Inčukalns underground gas storage facility, one of the largest underground gas storage facilities in Europe and the only one in the Baltic states. Unique geological conditions at Inčukalns and other locations in Latvia are particularly suitable for underground gas storage.
Demographics
The total fertility rate (TFR) in 2018 was estimated at 1.61 children born/woman, which is lower than the replacement rate of 2.1. In 2012, 45.0% of births were to unmarried women. The life expectancy in 2013 was estimated at 73.19 years (68.13 years male, 78.53 years female). As of 2015, Latvia is estimated to have the lowest male-to-female ratio in the world, at 0.85 males per female. In 2017, there were 1,054,433 females and 895,683 males living in Latvian territory. Every year, more boys are born than girls. Until the age of 39, there are more males than females. From the age of 70, there are 2.3 times as many females as males.
Ethnic groups
As of March 2011, Latvians form about 62.1% of the population, while 26.9% are Russians, Belarusians 3.3%, Ukrainians 2.2%, Poles 2.2%, Lithuanians 1.2%, Jews 0.3%, Romani people 0.3%, Germans 0.1%, Estonians 0.1% and others 1.3%. 250 people identify as Livonians (Baltic Finnic people native to Latvia). There were 290,660 "non-citizens" living in Latvia or 14.1% of Latvian residents, mainly Russian settlers who arrived after the occupation of 1940 and their descendants.
In some cities, e.g., Daugavpils and Rēzekne, ethnic Latvians constitute a minority of the total population. Despite a steadily increasing proportion of ethnic Latvians for more than a decade, ethnic Latvians also still make up slightly less than a half of the population of the capital city of Latvia – Riga.
The share of ethnic Latvians had fallen from 77% (1,467,035) in 1935 to 52% (1,387,757) in 1989. In the context of a decreasing overall population, there were fewer Latvians in 2011 than in 1989, but their share of the population was larger – 1,285,136 (62.1% of the population).
Language
The sole official language of Latvia is Latvian, which belongs to the Baltic language sub-group of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Another notable language of Latvia is the nearly extinct Livonian language of the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family, which enjoys protection by law; Latgalian – as a dialect of Latvian is also protected by Latvian law but as a historical variation of the Latvian language. Russian, which was widely spoken during the Soviet period, is still the most widely used minority language by far (in 2011, 34% spoke it at home, including people who were not ethnically Russian).
While it is now required that all school students learn Latvian, schools also include English, German, French and Russian in their curricula. English is also widely accepted in Latvia in business and tourism. there were 109 schools for minorities that use Russian as the language of instruction (27% of all students) for 40% of subjects (the remaining 60% of subjects are taught in Latvian).
On 18 February 2012, Latvia held a constitutional referendum on whether to adopt Russian as a second official language. According to the Central Election Commission, 74.8% voted against, 24.9% voted for and the voter turnout was 71.1%.
From 2019, the instruction in Russian language was gradually discontinued in private colleges and universities in Latvia, as well as general instruction in Latvian public high schools, except for subjects related to culture and history of the Russian minority, such as Russian language and literature classes.
Religion
The largest religion in Latvia is Christianity (79%). The largest groups were:
Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia – 708,773
Roman Catholic – 500,000
Russian Orthodox – 370,000
In the Eurobarometer Poll 2010, 38% of Latvian citizens responded that "they believe there is a God", while 48% answered that "they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force" and 11% stated that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force".
Lutheranism was more prominent before the Soviet occupation, when it was a majority religion of ~60% due to strong historical links with the Nordic countries and to the influence of the Hansa in particular and Germany in general. Since then, Lutheranism has declined to a slightly greater extent than Roman Catholicism in all three Baltic states. The Evangelical Lutheran Church, with an estimated 600,000 members in 1956, was affected most adversely. An internal document of 18 March 1987, near the end of communist rule, spoke of an active membership that had shrunk to only 25,000 in Latvia, but the faith has since experienced a revival.
The country's Orthodox Christians belong to the Latvian Orthodox Church, a semi-autonomous body within the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2011, there were 416 religious Jews in Lativa and 319 Muslims in Latvia. As of 2004, there were more than 600 Latvian neopagans, Dievturi (The Godskeepers), whose religion is based on Latvian mythology. About 21% of the total population is not affiliated with a specific religion.
Education and science
The University of Latvia and Riga Technical University are two major universities in the country, both established on the basis of Riga Polytechnical Institute and located in Riga. Other important universities, which were established on the base of State University of Latvia, include the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies (established in 1939 on the basis of the Faculty of Agriculture) and Riga Stradiņš University (established in 1950 on the basis of the Faculty of Medicine). Both nowadays cover a variety of different fields. The University of Daugavpils is another significant centre of education.
Latvia closed 131 schools between 2006 and 2010, which is a 12.9% decline, and in the same period enrolment in educational institutions has fallen by over 54,000 people, a 10.3% decline.
Latvian policy in science and technology has set out the long-term goal of transitioning from labor-consuming economy to knowledge-based economy. By 2020 the government aims to spend 1.5% of GDP on research and development, with half of the investments coming from the private sector. Latvia plans to base the development of its scientific potential on existing scientific traditions, particularly in organic chemistry, medical chemistry, genetic engineering, physics, materials science and information technologies. The greatest number of patents, both nationwide and abroad, are in medical chemistry. Latvia was ranked 36th in the Global Innovation Index in 2020, down from 34th in 2019.
Health
The Latvian healthcare system is a universal programme, largely funded through government taxation. It is among the lowest-ranked healthcare systems in Europe, due to excessive waiting times for treatment, insufficient access to the latest medicines, and other factors. There were 59 hospitals in Latvia in 2009, down from 94 in 2007 and 121 in 2006.
Culture
Traditional Latvian folklore, especially the dance of the folk songs, dates back well over a thousand years. More than 1.2 million texts and 30,000 melodies of folk songs have been identified.
Between the 13th and 19th centuries, Baltic Germans, many of whom were originally of non-German ancestry but had been assimilated into German culture, formed the upper class. They developed distinct cultural heritage, characterised by both Latvian and German influences. It has survived in German Baltic families to this day, in spite of their dispersal to Germany, the United States, Canada and other countries in the early 20th century. However, most indigenous Latvians did not participate in this particular cultural life. Thus, the mostly peasant local pagan heritage was preserved, partly merging with Christian traditions. For example, one of the most popular celebrations is Jāņi, a pagan celebration of the summer solstice—which Latvians celebrate on the feast day of St. John the Baptist.
In the 19th century, Latvian nationalist movements emerged. They promoted Latvian culture and encouraged Latvians to take part in cultural activities. The 19th century and beginning of the 20th century is often regarded by Latvians as a classical era of Latvian culture. Posters show the influence of other European cultures, for example, works of artists such as the Baltic-German artist Bernhard Borchert and the French Raoul Dufy. With the onset of World War II, many Latvian artists and other members of the cultural elite fled the country yet continued to produce their work, largely for a Latvian émigré audience.
The Latvian Song and Dance Festival is an important event in Latvian culture and social life. It has been held since 1873, normally every five years. Approximately 30,000 performers altogether participate in the event. Folk songs and classical choir songs are sung, with emphasis on a cappella singing, though modern popular songs have recently been incorporated into the repertoire as well.
After incorporation into the Soviet Union, Latvian artists and writers were forced to follow the socialist realism style of art. During the Soviet era, music became increasingly popular, with the most popular being songs from the 1980s. At this time, songs often made fun of the characteristics of Soviet life and were concerned about preserving Latvian identity. This aroused popular protests against the USSR and also gave rise to an increasing popularity of poetry. Since independence, theatre, scenography, choir music, and classical music have become the most notable branches of Latvian culture.
During July 2014, Riga hosted the eighth World Choir Games as it played host to over 27,000 choristers representing over 450 choirs and over 70 countries. The festival is the biggest of its kind in the world and is held every two years in a different host city.
Starting in 2019 Latvia hosts the inaugural Riga Jurmala Music Festival, a new festival in which world-famous orchestras and conductors perform across four weekends during the summer. The festival takes place at the Latvian National Opera, the Great Guild, and the Great and Small Halls of the Dzintari Concert Hall. This year features the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Russian National Orchestra.
Cuisine
Latvian cuisine typically consists of agricultural products, with meat featuring in most main meal dishes. Fish is commonly consumed due to Latvia's location on the Baltic Sea. Latvian cuisine has been influenced by neighbouring countries. Common ingredients in Latvian recipes are found locally, such as potatoes, wheat, barley, cabbage, onions, eggs, and pork. Latvian food is generally quite fatty and uses few spices.
Grey peas with speck are generally considered as staple foods of Latvians. Sorrel soup (skābeņu zupa) is also consumed by Latvians. Rye bread is considered the national staple.
Sport
Ice hockey is usually considered the most popular sport in Latvia. Latvia has had many famous hockey stars like Helmuts Balderis, Artūrs Irbe, Kārlis Skrastiņš and Sandis Ozoliņš and more recently Zemgus Girgensons, whom the Latvian people have strongly supported in international and NHL play, expressed through the dedication of using the NHL's All Star Voting to bring Zemgus to number one in voting. Dinamo Riga is the country's strongest hockey club, playing in the Kontinental Hockey League. The national tournament is the Latvian Hockey Higher League, held since 1931. The 2006 IIHF World Championship was held in Riga.
The second most popular sport is basketball. Latvia has a long basketball tradition, as the Latvian national basketball team won the first ever EuroBasket in 1935 and silver medals in 1939, after losing the final to Lithuania by one point. Latvia has had many European basketball stars like Jānis Krūmiņš, Maigonis Valdmanis, Valdis Muižnieks, Valdis Valters, Igors Miglinieks, as well as the first Latvian NBA player Gundars Vētra. Andris Biedriņš is one of the most well-known Latvian basketball players, who played in the NBA for the Golden State Warriors and the Utah Jazz. Current NBA players include Kristaps Porziņģis, who plays for the Dallas Mavericks, Dāvis Bertāns, who plays for the Washington Wizards, and Rodions Kurucs, who last played for the Milwaukee Bucks. Former Latvian basketball club Rīgas ASK won the Euroleague tournament three times in a row before becoming defunct. Currently, VEF Rīga, which competes in EuroCup, is the strongest professional basketball club in Latvia. BK Ventspils, which participates in EuroChallenge, is the second strongest basketball club in Latvia, previously winning LBL eight times and BBL in 2013. Latvia was one of the EuroBasket 2015 hosts.
Other popular sports include football, floorball, tennis, volleyball, cycling, bobsleigh and skeleton. The Latvian national football team's only major FIFA tournament participation has been the 2004 UEFA European Championship.
Latvia has participated successfully in both Winter and Summer Olympics. The most successful Olympic athlete in the history of independent Latvia has been Māris Štrombergs, who became a two-time Olympic champion in 2008 and 2012 at Men's BMX.
In Boxing, Mairis Briedis is the first and only Latvian to date, to win a boxing world title, having held the WBC cruiserweight title from 2017 to 2018, the WBO cruiserweight title in 2019, and the IBF / The Ring magazine cruiserweight titles in 2020.
In 2017, Latvian tennis player Jeļena Ostapenko won the 2017 French Open Women's singles title, being the first unseeded player to do so in the open era.
See also
Outline of Latvia
5 min
References
Bibliography
Latvia
Dzenovska, Dace. School of Europeanness: Tolerance and other lessons in political liberalism in Latvia (Cornell University Press, 2018).
Hazans, Mihails. "Emigration from Latvia: Recent trends and economic impact." in Coping with emigration in Baltic and East European countries (2013) pp: 65–110. online
Pabriks, Artis, and Aldis Purs. Latvia: the challenges of change (Routledge, 2013).
Baltic states
Auers, Daunis. Comparative politics and government of the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the 21st century (Springer, 2015).
Lane, Thomas, et al. The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Routledge, 2013).
Steen, Anton. Between past and future: elites, democracy and the state in post-communist countries: a comparison of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Routledge, 2019).
Russia connection
Cheskin, Ammon. "Exploring Russian-speaking identity from below: The case of Latvia." Journal of Baltic Studies 44.3 (2013): 287–312. online
Cheskin, Ammon. Russian-Speakers in Post-Soviet Latvia: Discursive Identity Strategies (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
External links
Government
President of Latvia
Parliament of Latvia
Government of Latvia
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia
Statistical Office of Latvia
Latvian Institute
Bank of Latvia
General information
Latvia Online
European Union country profile
Britannica Online Encyclopedia
BBC News country profile
Latvia. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
Latvia from UCB Libraries GovPubs
Key Development Forecasts for Latvia from International Futures
Culture
Latvian Cultural Canon
Latvian Culture Map
Latvian Culture Portal
Livonian Culture Portal
State Agency of Cultural Heritage
National Library of Latvia
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Travel
Official Latvian Tourism Portal
Maps
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States and territories established in 1918
States and territories established in 1991 | [
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17515 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg | Luxembourg | Luxembourg ( ; ; ; ), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, is a landlocked country in Western Europe. It is bordered by Belgium to the west and north, Germany to the east, and France to the south. Its capital, Luxembourg City, is one of the four official capitals of the European Union (together with Brussels, Frankfurt, and Strasbourg) and the seat of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the highest judicial authority in the EU. Its culture, people, and languages are highly intertwined with its neighbors, making it a mixture of French and German cultures. Luxembourgish is the only national language of the Luxembourgish people, as defined by law. In addition to Luxembourgish, French and German are used in administrative and judicial matters; the three languages are jointly considered administrative languages of Luxembourg.
With an area of , it is one of the smallest sovereign states in Europe. In 2019, Luxembourg had a population of 634,730, which makes it one of the least-populous countries in Europe, but by far the one with the highest population growth rate. Foreigners account for nearly half of Luxembourg's population. As a representative democracy with a constitutional monarch, it is headed by Grand Duke Henri and is the world's only remaining sovereign grand duchy. Luxembourg is a developed country, with an advanced economy and one of the world's highest GDP (PPP) per capita. The City of Luxembourg, with its old quarters and fortifications, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 due to the exceptional preservation of the vast fortifications and the old city.
The history of Luxembourg is considered to begin in 963, when count Siegfried acquired a rocky promontory and its Roman-era fortifications known as Lucilinburhuc, "little castle", and the surrounding area from the Imperial Abbey of St. Maximin in nearby Trier. Siegfried's descendants increased their territory through marriage, war and vassal relations. At the end of the 13th century, the counts of Luxembourg reigned over a considerable territory. In 1308, Count of Luxembourg Henry VII became King of the Romans and later Holy Roman Emperor. The House of Luxembourg produced four Holy Roman Emperors during the High Middle Ages. In 1354, Charles IV elevated the county to the Duchy of Luxembourg. The duchy eventually became part of the Burgundian Circle and then one of the Seventeen Provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands.
Over the centuries, the City and Fortress of Luxembourg, of great strategic importance situated between the Kingdom of France and the Habsburg territories, was gradually built up to be one of the most reputed fortifications in Europe. After belonging to both the France of Louis XIV and the Austria of Maria Theresa, Luxembourg became part of the First French Republic and Empire under Napoleon.
The present-day state of Luxembourg first emerged at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Grand Duchy, with its powerful fortress, became an independent state under the personal possession of William I of the Netherlands with a Prussian garrison to guard the city against another invasion from France. In 1839, following the turmoil of the Belgian Revolution, the purely French-speaking part of Luxembourg was ceded to Belgium and the Luxembourgish-speaking part (except the Arelerland, the area around Arlon) became what is the present state of Luxembourg.
Luxembourg is a founding member of the European Union, OECD, United Nations, NATO, and Benelux. The city of Luxembourg, which is the country's capital and largest city, is the seat of several institutions and agencies of the EU. Luxembourg served on the United Nations Security Council for the years 2013 and 2014, which was a first in the country's history. As of 2020, Luxembourg citizens had visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 187 countries and territories, ranking the Luxembourgish passport fifth in the world, tied with Denmark and Spain.
History
Before 963 AD
The first traces of settlement in what is now Luxembourg are dated back to the Paleolithic Age, about 35,000 years ago. From the 2nd century BC, Celtic tribes settled in the region between the rivers Rhine and Meuse, thus settling in the region which constitutes today's Grand-Duchy.
A few centuries later, the Romans would name the Celtic tribes inhabiting these exact regions collectively as the Treveri. Multiple examples of archeological evidence proving their existence in Luxembourg have been discovered, the most famous being the "Oppidum of the Titelberg".
In around 58 to 51 BC, the Romans invaded the country when Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and part of Germania up to the Rhine border, thus the area of what is now Luxembourg became part of the Roman Empire for the next 450 years, living in relative peace under the Pax Romana.
Similarly to what happened in Gaul, the Celts of Luxembourg adopted Roman culture, language, morals and a way of life, effectively becoming what historians later described as Gallo-Roman civilization. Evidences from that period of time include the Dalheim Ricciacum and the Vichten mosaic which is on display at the National Museum of History and Art in Luxembourg City.
The territory was infiltrated by the Germanic Franks starting from the 4th century, and was abandoned by Rome in 406 AD. The territory of what would become Luxembourg now became part of the Kingdom of the Franks. The Salian Franks who settled in the area are often described as the ones having brought the Germanic language to present-day Luxembourg, since the old Frankish language spoken by them is considered by linguists to be a direct forerunner of the Moselle Franconian dialect, which later evolved, among others, into the modern-day Luxembourgish language.
The Christianization of Luxembourg also falls into this epoch and is usually dated back to the end of the 7th century. The most famous figure in this context is Willibrord, a Northumbrian missionary saint, who together with other monks established the Abbey of Echternach in 698 AD.
It is in his honor that the notable Dancing procession of Echternach takes place annually on Whit Tuesday. For a few centuries, the abbey would become one of northern Europe's most influential abbeys. The Codex Aureus of Echternach, an important surviving codex written entirely in gold ink, was produced here in the 11th century. The so-called Emperor's Bible and the Golden Gospels of Henry III were also produced in Echternach at this time, when production of books at the scriptorium peaked during the middle-age.
Emergence and expansion of the County of Luxemburg (963–1312)
When the Carolingian Empire was divided multiple times starting with the Treaty of Verdun in 843, today's Luxembourgish territory became successively part of the Kingdom of Middle Francia (843–855), the Kingdom of Lotharingia (855-959) and finally of the Duchy of Lorraine (959–1059), which itself had become a state of the Holy Roman Empire.
The recorded history of Luxembourg begins with the acquisition of Lucilinburhuc (today Luxembourg Castle) situated on the Bock rock by Siegfried, Count of the Ardennes, in 963 through an exchange act with St. Maximin's Abbey, Trier. Around this fort, a town gradually developed, which became the center of a state of great strategic value within the Duchy of Lorraine. Over the years, the fortress was extended by Siegfried's descendants and by 1083, one of them, Conrad I, was the first to call himself a "Count of Luxembourg", and with it effectively creating the independent County of Luxembourg (which was still a state within the Holy Roman Empire).
By the middle of the 13th century, the counts of Luxembourg had managed to considerably gain in wealth and power, and had expanded their territory from the river Meuse to the Moselle. By the time of the reign of Henry V the Blonde, Bitburg, La Roche-en-Ardenne, Durbuy, Arlon, Thionville, Marville, Longwy, and in 1264 the competing County of Vianden (and with it St. Vith and Schleiden) had either been incorporated directly or become vassal states to the County of Luxembourg. The only major setback during their rise in power came in 1288, when Henry VI and his three brothers died at the Battle of Worringen, while trying unsuccessfully to also add the Duchy of Limburg into their realm. But despite the defeat, the Battle of Worringen helped the Counts of Luxembourg to achieve military glory, which they had previously lacked, as they had mostly enlarged their territory by means of inheritances, marriages and fiefdoms.
The ascension of the Counts of Luxembourg culminated when Henry VII became King of the Romans, King of Italy and finally, in 1312, Holy Roman Emperor.
Golden Age: The House of Luxembourg contending for supremacy in Central Europe (1312–1443)
With the ascension of Henry VII as Emperor, the dynasty of the House of Luxembourg not only began to rule the Holy Roman Empire, but rapidly began to exercise growing influence over other parts of Central Europe as well.
Henry's son, John the Blind, in addition to being Count of Luxembourg, also became King of Bohemia. He remains a major figure in Luxembourgish history and folklore and is considered by many historians the epitome of chivalry in medieval times. He is also known for having founded the Schueberfouer in 1340 and for his heroic death at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. John the Blind is considered a national hero in Luxembourg.
In the 14th and early 15th centuries, three more members of the House of Luxembourg reigned as Holy Roman Emperors and Bohemian Kings: John's descendants Charles IV, Sigismund (who also was King of Hungary and Croatia), and Wenceslaus IV. Charles IV created the long-lasting Golden Bull of 1356, a decree which fixed important aspects of the constitutional structure of the Empire. Luxembourg remained an independent fief (county) of the Holy Roman Empire, and in 1354, Charles IV elevated it to the status of a duchy with his half-brother Wenceslaus I becoming the first Duke of Luxembourg. While his kin were occupied ruling and expanding their power within the Holy Roman Empire and elsewhere, Wenceslaus, annexed the County of Chiny in 1364, and with it, the territories of the new Duchy of Luxembourg reached its greatest extent.
During these 130 years, the House of Luxembourg was contending with the House of Habsburg for supremacy within the Holy Roman Empire and Central Europe. It all came to end in 1443, when the House of Luxembourg suffered a succession crisis, precipitated by the lack of a male heir to assume the throne. Since Sigismund and Elizabeth of Görlitz were both heirless, all possessions of the Luxembourg Dynasty were redistributed among the European aristocracy. The Duchy of Luxembourg become a possession of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.
As the House of Luxembourg had become extinct and Luxembourg now became part of the Burgundian Netherlands, this would mark the start of nearly 400 years of foreign rule over Luxembourg.
Luxembourg under Habsburg rule and repeated French invasions (1444–1794)
In 1482, Philip the Handsome inherited all of what became then known as the Habsburg Netherlands, and with it the Duchy of Luxembourg. For nearly 320 years Luxembourg would remain a possession of the mighty House of Habsburg, at first under Austrian rule (1506-1556), then under Spanish rule (1556-1714), before going back again to Austrian rule (1714-1794).
With having become a Habsburg possession, the Duchy of Luxembourg became, like many countries in Europe at the time, heavily involved into the many conflicts for dominance of Europe between the Habsburg-held countries and the Kingdom of France.
In 1542 Francois I invaded Luxembourg twice, but the Habsburgs under Charles V managed to reconquer the Duchy each time.
Luxembourg became part of the Spanish Netherlands in 1556, and when France and Spain went to war in 1635 it resulted in the Treaty of the Pyrenees, in which the first partition of Luxembourg was decided. Under the Treaty, Spain ceded the Luxembourgish fortresses of Stenay, Thionville, and Montmédy, and the surrounding territory to France, effectively reducing the size of Luxembourg for the first time in centuries.
In context of the Nine Years' War in 1684, France invaded Luxembourg again, conquering and occupying the Duchy until 1697 when it was returned to the Spanish in order to garner support for the Bourbon cause during the prelude to the War of the Spanish Succession. When the war broke out in 1701 Luxembourg and the Spanish Netherlands were administered by the pro-french faction under the governor Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria and sided with the Bourbons. The duchy was subsequently occupied by the pro-Austrian allied forces during the conflict and was awarded to Austria at its conclusion in 1714.
As the Duchy of Luxembourg repeatedly passed back and forth from Spanish and Austrian to French rule, each of the conquering nations contributed to strengthening and expanding the Fortress that the Castle of Luxembourg had become over the years. One example of this includes French military engineer Marquis de Vauban who advanced the fortifications around and on the heights of the city, fortification walls that are still visible today.
Luxembourg under French Rule (1794–1815)
During the War of the First Coalition, Revolutionary France invaded the Austrian Netherlands, and with it, Luxembourg, yet again. In the years 1793 and 1794 most of the Duchy was conquered relatively fast and the French Revolutionary Army committed many atrocities and pillages against the luxembourgish civilian population and abbeys, the most infamous being the massacres of Differdange and Dudelange. However the Fortress of Luxembourg resisted for nearly 7 months before the Austrian forces holding it surrendered. Luxembourg's long defense led Lazare Carnot to call Luxembourg "the best fortress in the world, except Gibraltar", giving rise to the city's nickname the Gibraltar of the North.
Luxembourg was annexed by France, becoming the département des forêts (department of forests), and the incorporation of the former Duchy as a département into France was formalised at the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797.
From the start of the occupation the new French officials in Luxembourg, who spoke only French, implemented many republican reforms, among them the principle of laicism, which led to an outcry in strongly catholic Luxembourg. Additionally French was implemented as the only official language and luxembourgish people were barred access to all civil services. When the French Army introduced military duty for the local population, riots broke out which culminated in 1798 when luxembourgish peasants started a rebellion. Even though the French managed to rapidly suppress this revolt called Klëppelkrich, it had a profound effect on the historical memory of the country and its citizens.
However, many republican ideas of this era continue to have a lasting effect on Luxembourg: one of the many examples features the implementation of the Napoleonic Code Civil which was introduced in 1804 and is still valid today.
National Awakening and Independence (1815–1890)
After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Duchy of Luxembourg was restored. However, as the territory had been part of the Holy Roman Empire as well as the Habsburgian Netherlands in the past, both the Kingdom of Prussia and the United Kingdom of the Netherlands now claimed possession of the territory. At the Congress of Vienna the great powers decided that Luxembourg would become a member state of the newly formed German Confederation, but at the same time William I of the Netherlands, the King of the Netherlands, would become, in personal union, the head of state. To satisfy Prussia, it was decided that not only the Fortress of Luxembourg be manned by Prussian troops, but also that large parts of Luxembourgish territory (mainly the areas around Bitburg and St. Vith) become Prussian possessions. This marked the second time that the Duchy of Luxembourg was reduced in size, and is generally known as the Second Partition of Luxembourg. To compensate the Duchy for this loss, it was decided to elevate the Duchy to a Grand-Duchy, thus giving the Dutch monarchs the additional title of Grand-Duke of Luxembourg.
After Belgium became an independent country following the victorious Belgian Revolution of 1830-1831, it claimed the entire Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg as being part of Belgium, however the Dutch King who was also Grand Duke of Luxembourg, as well as Prussia, didn't want to lose their grip on the mighty fortress of Luxembourg and did not agree with the Belgian claims. The dispute would be solved at the 1839 Treaty of London where the decision of the Third Partition of Luxembourg was taken. This time the territory was reduced by more than half, as the predominantly francophone western part of the country (but also the then luxembourgish-speaking part of Arelerland) was transferred to the new state of Belgium and with it giving Luxembourg its modern-day borders. The treaty of 1839 also established full independence of the remaining Germanic-speaking Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg.
In 1842 Luxembourg joined the German Customs Union (Zollverein). This resulted in the opening of the German market, the development of Luxembourg's steel industry, and expansion of Luxembourg's railway network from 1855 to 1875.
After the Luxembourg Crisis of 1866 nearly led to war between Prussia and France, as both were unwilling to see the other taking influence over Luxembourg and its mighty fortress, the Grand Duchy's independence and neutrality were reaffirmed by the Second Treaty of London and Prussia was finally willing to withdraw its troops from the Fortress of Luxembourg under the condition that the fortifications would be dismantled. That happened the same year. At the time of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, Luxembourg's neutrality was respected by the North German Confederation, and neither France nor Germany invaded the country.
As a result of the recurring disputes between the major European powers, the people of Luxembourg gradually developed a consciousness of independence and a national awakening took place in the 19th century. The people of Luxembourg began referring to themselves as Luxembourgers, rather than being part of one of the larger surrounding nations. This consciousness of Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sinn culminated in 1890, when the last step towards full independence was finally taken: due to a succession crisis the Dutch monarchy ceased to hold the title Grand-Duke of Luxembourg. Beginning with Adolph of Nassau-Weilburg, the Grand-Duchy would have their own monarchy, thus reaffirming its full independence.
Two German occupations and interwar political crisis (1890–1945)
In August 1914, during World War I, Imperial Germany violated Luxembourg's neutrality by invading it in order to defeat France. Nevertheless, despite the German occupation, Luxembourg was allowed to maintain much of its independence and political mechanisms. Unaware of the fact that Germany secretly planned to annex the Grand-Duchy in case of a German victory (the Septemberprogramm), the Luxembourgish government continued to pursue a policy of strict neutrality. However, the Luxembourgish population did not believe Germany's good intentions, fearing that Germany would annex Luxembourg. Around 3,700 Luxembourgers served in the French army, of whom 2,000 died. Their sacrifices have been commemorated at the Gëlle Fra.
After the war, Grand-Duchess Marie-Adélaïde, was seen by many people (including the French and Belgian governments) as having collaborated with the Germans and calls for her abdication and the establishment of a Republic became louder. After the retreat of the German army, communists in Luxembourg City and Esch-sur-Alzette tried to establish a soviet worker's republic similar to the ones emerging in Germany, but these attempts lasted only 2 days.
In November 1918, a motion in the Chamber of Deputies demanding the abolition of the monarchy was defeated narrowly by 21 votes to 19 (with 3 abstentions).
France questioned the Luxembourgish government's, and especially Marie-Adélaïde's, neutrality during the war, and calls for an annexation of Luxembourg to either France or Belgium grew louder in both countries.
In January 1919, a company of the Luxembourgish Army rebelled, declaring itself to be the army of the new republic, but French troops intervened and put an end to the rebellion. Nonetheless, the disloyalty shown by her own armed forces was too much for Marie-Adélaïde, who abdicated in favor of her sister Charlotte 5 days later.
The same year, in a popular referendum, 77.8% of the Luxembourgish population declared in favor of maintaining monarchy and rejected the establishment of a republic.
During this time, Belgium pushed for an annexation of Luxembourg. However, all such claims were ultimately dismissed at the Paris Peace Conference, thus securing Luxembourg's independence.
In 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, Luxembourg's neutrality was violated again when Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht entered the country, "entirely without justification". In contrast to the First World War, under the German occupation of Luxembourg during World War II, the country was treated as German territory and informally annexed to the adjacent province of Nazi Germany, Gau Moselland. This time, Luxembourg did not remain neutral as Luxembourg's government in exile based in London supported the Allies, sending a small group of volunteers who participated in the Normandy invasion, and multiple resistance groups formed inside the occupied country.
With 2.45% of its prewar population killed, and a third of all buildings in Luxembourg being destroyed or heavily damaged (mainly due to the Battle of the Bulge), Luxembourg suffered the highest such loss in Western Europe and its commitment to the Allied war effort was never questioned. Around 1,000-2,500 of Luxembourg's Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
Modern history: Integration into NATO and European Union (1945–)
The Grand Duchy became a founding member of the United Nations in 1945. Luxembourg's neutral status under the constitution formally ended in 1948, and in April 1949 it also became a founding member of NATO. During the Cold War, Luxembourg continued its involvements on the side of the Western Bloc. In the early fifties a small contingent of troops fought in the Korean War.
Luxembourg troops have also deployed to Afghanistan, to support ISAF.
In 1951, Luxembourg became one of the six founding countries of the European Coal and Steel Community, which in 1957 would become the European Economic Community and in 1993 the European Union. With Robert Schuman (one of the founding fathers of the EU), Pierre Werner (considered the father of the Euro), Jacques Santer and Jean-Claude Juncker (both President of the European Commission), Luxembourgish politicians contributed in great share to the formation and establishment of the European Union. In 1999 Luxembourg joined the Eurozone.
The steel industry exploiting the Red Lands' rich iron-ore grounds in the beginning of the 20th century drove the country's industrialization. After the decline of the steel industry in the 1970s, the country focused on establishing itself as a global financial center and developed into the banking hub it is reputed to be. Since the beginning of the 21st century, its governments have focused on developing the country into a knowledge economy, with the founding of the University of Luxembourg and a national space program.
Luxembourg is the only sovereign state in the world still governed as a grand duchy, with the Grand Duke as its official head of state.
Government and politics
Luxembourg is described as a "full democracy", with a parliamentary democracy headed by a constitutional monarch. Executive power is exercised by the grand duke and the cabinet, which consists of several other ministers. The Constitution of Luxembourg, the supreme law of Luxembourg, was adopted on 17 October 1868. The grand duke has the power to dissolve the legislature, in which case new elections must be held within three months. However, since 1919, sovereignty has resided with the nation, exercised by the grand duke in accordance with the Constitution and the law.
Legislative power is vested in the Chamber of Deputies, a unicameral legislature of sixty members, who are directly elected to five-year terms from four constituencies. A second body, the Council of State (Conseil d'État), composed of twenty-one ordinary citizens appointed by the grand duke, advises the Chamber of Deputies in the drafting of legislation.
Luxembourg has three lower tribunals (justices de paix; in Esch-sur-Alzette, the city of Luxembourg, and Diekirch), two district tribunals (Luxembourg and Diekirch), and a Superior Court of Justice (Luxembourg), which includes the Court of Appeal and the Court of Cassation. There is also an Administrative Tribunal and an Administrative Court, as well as a Constitutional Court, all of which are located in the capital.
Administrative divisions
Luxembourg is divided into 12 cantons, which are further divided into 102 communes. Twelve of the communes have city status; the city of Luxembourg is the largest.
Foreign relations
Luxembourg has long been a prominent supporter of European political and economic integration. In 1921, Luxembourg and Belgium formed the Belgium–Luxembourg Economic Union (BLEU) to create a regime of inter-exchangeable currency and a common customs. Luxembourg is a member of the Benelux Economic Union and was one of the founding members of the European Economic Community (now the European Union). It also participates in the Schengen Group (named after the Luxembourg village of Schengen where the agreements were signed). At the same time, the majority of Luxembourgers have consistently believed that European unity makes sense only in the context of a dynamic transatlantic relationship, and thus have traditionally pursued a pro-NATO, pro-US foreign policy.
Luxembourg is the site of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Court of Auditors, the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat) and other vital EU organs. The Secretariat of the European Parliament is located in Luxembourg, but the Parliament usually meets in Brussels and sometimes in Strasbourg.
Military
The Luxembourgish army is mostly based in its casern, the Centre militaire Caserne Grand-Duc Jean on the Härebierg in Diekirch.The general staff is based in the capital, the État-Major. The army is under civilian control, with the grand duke as Commander-in-Chief. The Minister for Defense, François Bausch, oversees army operations. The professional head of the army is the Chief of Defense, who answers to the minister and holds the rank of general.
Being a landlocked country, Luxembourg has no navy. Seventeen NATO AWACS airplanes are registered as aircraft of Luxembourg. In accordance with a joint agreement with Belgium, both countries have put forth funding for one A400M military cargo plane.
Luxembourg has participated in the Eurocorps, has contributed troops to the UNPROFOR and IFOR missions in former Yugoslavia, and has participated with a small contingent in the NATO SFOR mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Luxembourg troops have also deployed to Afghanistan, to support ISAF. The army has also participated in humanitarian relief missions such as setting up refugee camps for Kurds and providing emergency supplies to Albania.
Geography
Luxembourg is one of the smallest countries in Europe, and ranked 167th in size of all the 194 independent countries of the world; the country is about in size, and measures long and wide. It lies between latitudes 49° and 51° N, and longitudes 5° and 7° E.
To the east, Luxembourg borders the German Bundesländer of Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland, and to the south, it borders the French région of Grand Est (Lorraine). The Grand Duchy borders Belgium's Wallonia, in particular the Belgian provinces of Luxembourg and Liège, part of which comprises the German-speaking Community of Belgium, to the west and to the north, respectively.
The northern third of the country is known as the Oesling, and forms part of the Ardennes. It is dominated by hills and low mountains, including the Kneiff near Wilwerdange, which is the highest point, at . Other mountains are the Buurgplaatz at near Huldange and the Napoléonsgaard at near Rambrouch. The region is sparsely populated, with only one town (Wiltz) with a population of more than four thousand people.
The southern two-thirds of the country is called the Gutland, and is more densely populated than the Oesling. It is also more diverse and can be divided into five geographic sub-regions. The Luxembourg plateau, in south-central Luxembourg, is a large, flat, sandstone formation, and the site of the city of Luxembourg. Little Switzerland, in the east of Luxembourg, has craggy terrain and thick forests. The Moselle valley is the lowest-lying region, running along the southeastern border. The Red Lands, in the far south and southwest, are Luxembourg's industrial heartland and home to many of Luxembourg's largest towns.
The border between Luxembourg and Germany is formed by three rivers: the Moselle, the Sauer, and the Our. Other major rivers are the Alzette, the Attert, the Clerve, and the Wiltz. The valleys of the mid-Sauer and Attert form the border between the Gutland and the Oesling.
Environment
According to the 2012 Environmental Performance Index, Luxembourg is one of the world's best performers in environmental protection, ranking 4th out of 132 assessed countries. In 2020 the country was ranked second out of 180 countries Luxembourg also ranks 6th among the top ten most livable cities in the world by Mercer's. The country wants to cut GHG emissions by 55% in 10 years and reach zero emissions by 2050. Luxemburg wants to increase fivefold its organic farming. Luxembourg had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 1.12/10, ranking it 164th globally out of 172 countries.
Climate
Luxembourg has an oceanic climate (Köppen: Cfb), marked by high precipitation, particularly in late summer. The summers are warm and winters cool.
Economy
Luxembourg's stable and high-income market economy features moderate growth, low inflation, and a high level of innovation. Unemployment is traditionally low, although it had risen to 6.1% by May 2012, due largely to the effect of the 2008 global financial crisis. In 2011, according to the IMF, Luxembourg was the second richest country in the world, with a per capita GDP on a purchasing-power parity (PPP) basis of $80,119. Its GDP per capita in purchasing power standards was 261% of the EU average (100%) in 2019. Luxembourg is ranked 13th in The Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, 26th in the United Nations Human Development Index, and 4th in the Economist Intelligence Unit's quality of life index. Luxembourg was ranked 18th in the Global Innovation Index in 2019 and 2020.
The industrial sector, which was dominated by steel until the 1960s, has since diversified to include chemicals, rubber, and other products. During the past decades, growth in the financial sector has more than compensated for the decline in steel production. Services, especially banking and finance, account for the majority of the economic output. Luxembourg is the world's second largest investment fund center (after the United States), the most important private banking center in the Eurozone and Europe's leading center for reinsurance companies. Moreover, the Luxembourg government has aimed to attract Internet startups, with Skype and Amazon being two of the many Internet companies that have shifted their regional headquarters to Luxembourg. Other high-tech companies have established themselves in Luxembourg, including 3D scanner developer/manufacturer Artec 3D.
In April 2009, concern about Luxembourg's banking secrecy laws, as well as its reputation as a tax haven, led to its being added to a "gray list" of nations with questionable banking arrangements by the G20. In response, the country soon after adopted OECD standards on exchange of information and was subsequently added into the category of "jurisdictions that have substantially implemented the internationally agreed tax standard". In March 2010, the Sunday Telegraph reported that most of Kim Jong-Il's $4 billion in secret accounts is in Luxembourg banks. Amazon.co.uk also benefits from Luxembourg tax loopholes by channeling substantial UK revenues as reported by The Guardian in April 2012. Luxembourg ranked third on the Tax Justice Network's 2011 Financial Secrecy Index of the world's major tax havens, scoring only slightly behind the Cayman Islands. In 2013, Luxembourg is ranked as the 2nd safest tax haven in the world, behind Switzerland.
In early November 2014, just days after becoming head of the European Commission, the Luxembourg's former Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker was hit by media disclosures—derived from a document leak known as Luxembourg Leaks—that Luxembourg under his premiership had turned into a major European center of corporate tax avoidance.
Agriculture employed about 2.1 percent of Luxembourg's active population in 2010, when there were 2200 agricultural holdings with an average area per holding of 60 hectares.
Luxembourg has especially close trade and financial ties to Belgium and the Netherlands (see Benelux), and as a member of the EU it enjoys the advantages of the open European market.
With $171 billion in May 2015, the country ranks eleventh in the world in holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. However, securities owned by non-Luxembourg residents, but held in custodial accounts in Luxembourg, are also included in this figure.
, the public debt of Luxembourg totaled $15,687,000,000, or a per capita debt of $25,554. The debt to GDP was 22.10%.
The Luxembourg labor market represents 445,000 jobs occupied by 120,000 Luxembourgers, 120,000 foreign residents and 205,000 cross-border commuters. The latter pay their taxes in Luxembourg, but their education and social rights are the responsibility of their country of residence. The same applies to pensioners. The Luxembourg government has always refused to share a portion of its tax revenues with the local authorities on the French border. This system is seen as one of the keys to Luxembourg's economic growth, but at the expense of the border countries.
Transport
Luxembourg has road, rail and air transport facilities and services. The road network has been significantly modernized in recent years with of motorways connecting the capital to adjacent countries. The advent of the high-speed TGV link to Paris has led to renovation of the city's railway station and a new passenger terminal at Luxembourg Airport was opened in 2008. Luxembourg city reintroduced trams in December 2017 and there are plans to open light-rail lines in adjacent areas within the next few years.
The number of cars per 1000 persons amount to 681 in Luxembourg — higher than most of other states, being surpassed by USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland or other small states like Principality of Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, the British overseas territory of Gibraltar or Brunei.
On 29 February 2020 Luxembourg became the first country to introduce no-charge public transportation which will be almost completely funded through public expenditure.
Communications
The telecommunications industry in Luxembourg is liberalized and the electronic communications networks are significantly developed. Competition between the different operators is guaranteed by the legislative framework Paquet Telecom of the Government of 2011 which transposes the European Telecom Directives into Luxembourgish law. This encourages the investment in networks and services. The regulator ILR – Institut Luxembourgeois de Régulation ensures the compliance to these legal rules.
Luxembourg has modern and widely deployed optical fiber and cable networks throughout the country. In 2010, the Luxembourg Government launched its National strategy for very high-speed networks with the aim to become a global leader in terms of very high-speed broadband by achieving full 1 Gbit/s coverage of the country by 2020. In 2011, Luxembourg had an NGA coverage of 75%. In April 2013 Luxembourg featured the 6th highest download speed worldwide and the 2nd highest in Europe: 32,46 Mbit/s. The country's location in Central Europe, stable economy and low taxes favour the telecommunication industry.
It ranks 2nd in the world in the development of the Information and Communication Technologies in the ITU ICT Development Index and 8th in the Global Broadband Quality Study 2009 by the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo.
Luxembourg is connected to all major European Internet Exchanges (AMS-IX Amsterdam, DE-CIX Frankfurt, LINX London), datacenters and POPs through redundant optical networks. In addition, the country is connected to the virtual meetme room services (vmmr) of the international data hub operator Ancotel. This enables Luxembourg to interconnect with all major telecommunication operators and data carriers worldwide. The interconnection points are in Frankfurt, London, New York and Hong Kong. Luxembourg has established itself as one of the leading financial technology (FinTech) hubs in Europe, with the Luxembourg government supporting initiatives like the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology.
Some 20 data centers are operating in Luxembourg. Six data centers are Tier IV Design certified: three of ebrc, two of LuxConnect and one of European Data Hub. In a survey on nine international data centers carried out in December 2012 and January 2013 and measuring availability (up-time) and performance (delay by which the data from the requested website was received), the top three positions were held by Luxembourg data centers.
Demographics
Largest towns
Ethnicity
The people of Luxembourg are called Luxembourgers. The immigrant population increased in the 20th century due to the arrival of immigrants from Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, and Portugal; the latter comprised the largest group. In 2013 about 88,000 Luxembourg inhabitants possessed Portuguese nationality. In 2013, there were 537,039 permanent residents, 44.5% of which were of foreign background or foreign nationals; the largest foreign ethnic groups were the Portuguese, comprising 16.4% of the total population, followed by the French (6.6%), Italians (3.4%), Belgians (3.3%) and Germans (2.3%). Another 6.4% were of other EU background, while the remaining 6.1% were of other non-EU, but largely other European, background.
Since the beginning of the Yugoslav wars, Luxembourg has seen many immigrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia. Annually, over 10,000 new immigrants arrive in Luxembourg, mostly from the EU states, as well as Eastern Europe. In 2000 there were 162,000 immigrants in Luxembourg, accounting for 37% of the total population. There were an estimated 5,000 illegal immigrants in Luxembourg in 1999.
Language
As determined by law since 1984, Luxembourg has only one national language, which is Luxembourgish. It is considered to be the mother tongue or "language of the heart" for Luxembourgers and the language that they generally use to speak or write to each other. Luxembourgish is considered a Franconian language specific to the local population which is partially mutually intelligible with the neighboring High German, but which also includes more than 5,000 words of French origin. Knowledge of Luxembourgish is a criterion for naturalisation.
In addition to Luxembourgish, both French and German are used in administrative and judicial matters, making all three of them administrative languages of Luxembourg. As by article 4 of the law promulgated in 1984, if a citizen asks a question in Luxembourgish, German or French, the administration must reply, as far as possible, in the language in which the question was asked.
Luxembourg is largely multilingual: as of 2012, 52% of citizens claimed Luxembourgish as their native language, 16.4% Portuguese, 16% French, 2% German and 13.6% different languages (mostly English, Italian or Spanish). Even though French was the mother tongue of only 16% of residents in Luxembourg (placing 3rd), 98% of its citizens were able to speak it on a high level. The great majority of Luxembourg residents are able to speak it as a second or third language. As of 2018, much of the population was able to speak multiple other languages: 80% of citizens reported being able to hold a conversation in English, 78% in German and 77% in Luxembourgish, claiming these languages as their respective second, third or fourth language.
Each of the three official languages is used as a primary language in certain spheres of everyday life, without being exclusive. The national language of the Grand Duchy, Luxembourgish, is the language that Luxembourgers generally use to speak and write to each other, and there has been a recent increase in the production of novels and movies in the language; at the same time, the numerous expatriate workers (approximately 44% of the population) generally do not use it to speak to each other.
Most official business and written communication is carried out in French, which is also the language mostly used for public communication, with written official statements, advertising displays and road signs generally being in French. Due to the historical influence of the Napoleonic Code on the legal system of the Grand Duchy, French is also the sole language of the legislation and generally the preferred language of the government, administration and justice. The parliamentary debates are however mostly conducted in Luxembourgish, whereas the written government communications and the official documents (e.g. administrative or judicial decisions, passports, etc.) are drafted mostly in French and sometimes additionally in German.
Although professional life is largely multilingual, French is described by private sector business leaders as the main working language of their companies (56%), followed by Luxembourgish (20%), English (18%), and German (6%).
German is very often used in much of the media along with French and is considered by most Luxembourgers their second language. This is mostly due to the high similarity of German to Luxembourgish but also because it is the first language taught to children in primary school (language of literacy acquisition).
Due to the large community of Portuguese origin, the Portuguese language is fairly present in Luxembourg, though it remains limited to the relationships inside this community. Although Portuguese has no official status, the administration sometimes makes certain informative documents available in Portuguese.
Even though Luxembourg is largely multilingual today, some people claim that Luxembourg is subject of intense francization and that Luxembourgish and German are in danger of disappearing in the country, thus making Luxembourg either a unilingual French speaking country, or at best a bilingual French and English speaking country sometime in the far future.
Religion
Luxembourg is a secular state, but the state recognizes certain religions as officially mandated religions. This gives the state a hand in religious administration and appointment of clergy, in exchange for which the state pays certain running costs and wages. Religions covered by such arrangements are Catholicism, Judaism, Greek Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Russian Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Mennonitism, and Islam.
Since 1980, it has been illegal for the government to collect statistics on religious beliefs or practices. An estimation by the CIA Factbook for the year 2000 is that 87% of Luxembourgers are Catholic, including the grand ducal family, the remaining 13% being made up of Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and those of other or no religion. According to a 2010 Pew Research Center study, 70.4% are Christian, 2.3% Muslim, 26.8% unaffiliated, and 0.5% other religions.
According to a 2005 Eurobarometer poll, 44% of Luxembourg citizens responded that "they believe there is a God", whereas 28% answered that "they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force", and 22% that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, god, or life force".
Education
Luxembourg's education system is trilingual: the first years of primary school are in Luxembourgish, before changing to German; while in secondary school, the language of instruction changes to French. Proficiency in all three languages is required for graduation from secondary school, but half the students leave school without a certified qualification, with the children of immigrants being particularly disadvantaged. In addition to the three national languages, English is taught in compulsory schooling and much of the population of Luxembourg can speak English. The past two decades have highlighted the growing importance of English in several sectors, in particular the financial sector. Portuguese, the language of the largest immigrant community, is also spoken by large segments of the population, but by relatively few from outside the Portuguese-speaking community.
The University of Luxembourg is the only university based in Luxembourg. In 2014, Luxembourg School of Business, a graduate business school, has been created through private initiative and has received the accreditation from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research of Luxembourg in 2017. Two American universities maintain satellite campuses in the country, Miami University (Dolibois European Center) and Sacred Heart University (Luxembourg Campus).
Health
According to data from the World Health Organization, healthcare spending on behalf of the government of Luxembourg topped $4.1 Billion, amounting to about $8,182 for each citizen in the nation. The nation of Luxembourg collectively spent nearly 7% of its Gross Domestic Product on health, placing it among the highest spending countries on health services and related programs in 2010 among other well-off nations in Europe with high average income among its population.
Culture
Luxembourg has been overshadowed by the culture of its neighbors. It retains a number of folk traditions, having been for much of its history a profoundly rural country. There are several notable museums, located mostly in the capital. These include the National Museum of History and Art (NMHA), the Luxembourg City History Museum, and the new Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art (Mudam). The National Museum of Military History (MNHM) in Diekirch is especially known for its representations of the Battle of the Bulge. The city of Luxembourg itself is on the UNESCO World Heritage List, on account of the historical importance of its fortifications.
The country has produced some internationally known artists, including the painters Théo Kerg, Joseph Kutter and Michel Majerus, and photographer Edward Steichen, whose The Family of Man exhibition has been placed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register, and is now permanently housed in Clervaux. Editor and author Hugo Gernsback, whose publications crystallized the concept of science fiction, was born in Luxembourg City. Movie star Loretta Young was of Luxembourgish descent.
Luxembourg was a founding participant of the Eurovision Song Contest, and participated every year between 1956 and 1993, with the exception of 1959. It won the competition a total of five times, 1961, 1965, 1972, 1973 and 1983 and hosted the contest in 1962, 1966, 1973, and 1984, but only nine of its 38 entries were performed by Luxembourgish artists.
Luxembourg was the first city to be named European Capital of Culture twice. The first time was in 1995. In 2007, the European Capital of Culture was to be a cross-border area consisting of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Rheinland-Pfalz and Saarland in Germany, the Walloon Region and the German-speaking part of Belgium, and the Lorraine area in France. The event was an attempt to promote mobility and the exchange of ideas, crossing borders physically, psychologically, artistically and emotionally.
Luxembourg was represented at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, China, from 1 May to 31 October 2010 with its own pavilion. The pavilion was based on the transliteration of the word Luxembourg into Chinese, "Lu Sen Bao", which means "Forest and Fortress". It represented Luxembourg as the "Green Heart in Europe".
Sports
Unlike most countries in Europe, sports in Luxembourg are not concentrated upon a particular national sport, but instead encompass a number of sports, both team and individual. Despite the lack of a central sporting focus, over 100,000 people in Luxembourg, out of a total population of near 500,000–600,000, are licensed members of one sports federation or another. The Stade de Luxembourg, situated in Gasperich, southern Luxembourg City, is the country's national stadium and largest sports venue in the country with a capacity of 9,386 for sporting events, including football and rugby union, and 15,000 for concerts. The largest indoor venue in the country is d'Coque, Kirchberg, north-eastern Luxembourg City, which has a capacity of 8,300. The arena is used for basketball, handball, gymnastics, and volleyball, including the final of the 2007 Women's European Volleyball Championship.
Cuisine
Luxembourg cuisine reflects its position on the border between the Latin and Germanic worlds, being heavily influenced by the cuisines of neighboring France and Germany. More recently, it has been enriched by its many Italian and Portuguese immigrants.
Most native Luxembourg dishes, consumed as the traditional daily fare, share roots in the country's folk dishes the same as in neighboring Germany.
Luxembourg sells the most alcohol in Europe per capita. However, the large proportion of alcohol purchased by customers from neighboring countries contributes to the statistically high level of alcohol sales per capita; this level of alcohol sales is thus not representative of the actual alcohol consumption of the Luxembourg population.
Media
The main languages of media in Luxembourg are French and German. The newspaper with the largest circulation is the German-language daily Luxemburger Wort. Because of the strong multilingualism in Luxembourg, newspapers often alternate articles in French and articles in German, without translation. In addition, there are both English and Portuguese radio and national print publications, but accurate audience figures are difficult to gauge since the national media survey by ILRES is conducted in French.
Luxembourg is known in Europe for its radio and television stations (Radio Luxembourg and RTL Group). It is also the uplink home of SES, carrier of major European satellite services for Germany and Britain.
Due to a 1988 law that established a special tax scheme for audiovisual investment, the film and co-production in Luxembourg has grown steadily. There are some 30 registered production companies in Luxembourg.
Luxembourg won an Oscar in 2014 in the Animated Short Films category with Mr Hublot.
Notable Luxembourgers
See also
Outline of Luxembourg
Disability in Luxembourg
References
Informational notes
Citations
Works cited
Further reading
Plan d'action national luxembourgeois en matière de TIC et de haut-débit
CEE- Europe's Digital Competitiveness Report –Volume 2: i2010 –ICT Country Profiles- page 40-41
Inauguration of LU-CIX
Art and Culture in Luxembourg
External links
The Official Portal of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg
Luxembourg from UCB Libraries GovPubs
Luxembourg. The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency.
Luxembourg profile from the BBC News
Luxembourg's Constitution of 1868 with Amendments through 2009, English Translation 2012
Countries in Europe
Duchy of Luxembourg
French-speaking countries and territories
German-speaking countries and territories
Landlocked countries
Member states of NATO
Member states of the European Union
Member states of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie
Member states of the Union for the Mediterranean
Current member states of the United Nations
NUTS 1 statistical regions of the European Union
NUTS 2 statistical regions of the European Union
States and territories established in 1815
States of the German Confederation
Western European countries | [
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17516 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location%20parameter | Location parameter | In statistics, a location parameter of a probability distribution is a scalar- or vector-valued parameter , which determines the "location" or shift of the distribution. In the literature of location parameter estimation, the probability distributions with such parameter are found to be formally defined in one of the following equivalent ways:
either as having a probability density function or probability mass function ; or
having a cumulative distribution function ; or
being defined as resulting from the random variable transformation , where is a random variable with a certain, possibly unknown, distribution (See also #Additive_noise).
A direct example of a location parameter is the parameter of the normal distribution. To see this, note that the probability density function of a normal distribution can have the parameter factored out and be written as:
thus fulfilling the first of the definitions given above.
The above definition indicates, in the one-dimensional case, that if is increased, the probability density or mass function shifts rigidly to the right, maintaining its exact shape.
A location parameter can also be found in families having more than one parameter, such as location–scale families. In this case, the probability density function or probability mass function will be a special case of the more general form
where is the location parameter, θ represents additional parameters, and is a function parametrized on the additional parameters.
Additive noise
An alternative way of thinking of location families is through the concept of additive noise. If is a constant and W is random noise with probability density then has probability density and its distribution is therefore part of a location family.
Proofs
For the continuous univariate case, consider a probability density function , where is a vector of parameters. A location parameter can be added by defining:
it can be proved that is a p.d.f. by verifying if it respects the two conditions and . integrates to 1 because:
now making the variable change and updating the integration interval accordingly yields:
because is a p.d.f. by hypothesis. follows from sharing the same image of , which is a p.d.f. so its image is contained in .
See also
Central tendency
Location test
Invariant estimator
Scale parameter
Two-moment decision models
References
Summary statistics
Statistical parameters
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17519 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry%20Wall | Larry Wall | Larry Arnold Wall (born September 27, 1954) is an American computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language.
Personal life
Wall grew up in Los Angeles and then Bremerton, Washington, before starting higher education at Seattle Pacific University in 1976, majoring in chemistry and music and later pre-medicine with a hiatus of several years working in the university's computing center before graduating with a bachelor's degree in Natural and Artificial Languages.
While in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, Wall and his wife were studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it. They would then use this new writing system to translate various texts into the language, among them the Bible. Due to health reasons these plans were cancelled, and they remained in the United States, where Wall instead joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory after he finished graduate school.
Wall is an active member of the New Life, Church of the Nazarene.
Accomplishments
Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the widely used patch program. He has won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest twice and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998.
Beyond his technical skills, Wall has a reputation for his wit and often sarcastic sense of humour.
Wall developed the Perl interpreter and language while working for System Development Corporation, which later became part of Unisys. He is the co-author of Programming Perl (often referred to as the Camel Book and published by O'Reilly), which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers; and edited the Perl Cookbook. He then became employed full-time by O'Reilly Media to further develop Perl and write books on the subject.
Wall's training as a linguist is apparent in his books, interviews, and lectures. He often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with linguistic rationale. He also often uses linguistic terms for Perl language constructs, so instead of traditional terms such as "variable", "function", and "accessor" he sometimes says "noun", "verb", and "topicalizer".
Wall's Christian faith has influenced some of the terminology of Perl, such as the name itself, a biblical reference to the "pearl of great price" (Matthew 13:46). Similar references are the function name bless, and the organization of Raku (previously known as Perl 6) design documents with categories such as apocalypse and exegesis. Wall has also alluded to his faith when speaking at conferences, including on August 23, 1999, at the Perl Conference 3.0 in Monterey, CA.
See also
List of computer scientists
List of programmers
Timeline of programming languages
Raku programming language
References
Further reading
Slightly Skeptical View on Larry Wall and Perl (Softpanorama Larry Wall's page)
Perl, the first Postmodern Language
State of the Onion keynotes
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
External links
1954 births
American computer programmers
American members of the Church of the Nazarene
Free software programmers
Living people
O'Reilly writers
Perl writers
Programming language designers
Seattle Pacific University alumni
UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni
Engineers from California
People from Los Angeles | [
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17524 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language | Language | A language is a structured system of communication used by humans. Languages can be based on speech and gesture (spoken language), sign, or writing. The structure of language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Many languages, including the most widely-spoken ones, have writing systems that enable sounds or signs to be recorded for later reactivation. Human language is unique among the known systems of animal communication in that it is not dependent on a single mode of transmission (sight, sound, etc.), is highly variable between cultures and across time, and affords a much wider range of expression than other systems.
Human languages have the properties of productivity and displacement, and rely on social convention and learning.
Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) being established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, writing, whistling, signing, or braille. In other words, human language is modality-independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures.
Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.
The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationships between language and thought, etc., such as how words represent experience, have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greek civilization. Thinkers such as Rousseau (1712 – 1778) have debated that language originated from emotions, while others like Kant (1724 –1804), have held that languages originated from rational and logical thought. Twentieth century philosophers such as Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself. Major figures in contemporary linguistics of these times include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.
Language is thought to have gradually diverged from earlier primate communication systems when early hominins acquired the ability to form a theory of mind and shared intentionality. This development is sometimes thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old. Language and culture are codependent. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for social grooming and entertainment.
Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family; in contrast, a language that has been demonstrated to not have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate. There are also many unclassified languages whose relationships have not been established, and spurious languages may have not existed at all. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100.
Definitions
The English word language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European "tongue, speech, language" through Latin , "language; tongue", and Old French . The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers, and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as formally defined computer languages used for computer programming. Unlike conventional human languages, a formal language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of natural human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics.
As an object of linguistic study, "language" has two primary meanings: an abstract concept, and a specific linguistic system, e.g. "French". The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly formulated the distinction using the French word for language as a concept, as a specific instance of a language system, and for the concrete usage of speech in a particular language.
When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress different aspects of the phenomenon. These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they also inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory. Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgias and Plato debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias argued that language could represent neither the objective experience nor human experience, and that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that communication is possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of, and prior to, language.
During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable to speculate about the origin of language. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Herder argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and poetry than to the logical expression of rational thought. Rationalist philosophers such as Kant and Descartes held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to wonder about the role of language in shaping our experiences of the world – asking whether language simply reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that it in turn impose on our experience of the objective world. This led to the question of whether philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic problems. The resurgence of the view that language plays a significant role in the creation and circulation of concepts, and that the study of philosophy is essentially the study of language, is associated with what has been called the linguistic turn and philosophers such as Wittgenstein in 20th-century philosophy. These debates about language in relation to meaning and reference, cognition and consciousness remain active today.
Mental faculty, organ or instinct
One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and to produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it emphasizes the biological basis for the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. Proponents of the view that the drive to language acquisition is innate in humans argue that this is supported by the fact that all cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even develop spontaneously in environments where people live or grow up together without a common language; for example, creole languages and spontaneously developed sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view, which can be traced back to the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to be largely innate, for example, in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, or American philosopher Jerry Fodor's extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.
Formal symbolic system
Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and his structuralism remains foundational for many approaches to language.
Some proponents of Saussure's view of language have advocated a formal approach which studies language structure by identifying its basic elements and then by presenting a formal account of the rules according to which the elements combine in order to form words and sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who has defined language as the construction of sentences that can be generated using transformational grammars. Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human mind and to constitute the rudiments of what language is. By way of contrast, such transformational grammars are also commonly used in formal logic, in formal linguistics, and in applied computational linguistics. In the philosophy of language, the view of linguistic meaning as residing in the logical relations between propositions and reality was developed by philosophers such as Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and other formal logicians.
Tool for communication
Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their environment. Functional theories of grammar explain grammatical structures by their communicative functions, and understand the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was "tailored" to serve the communicative needs of its users.
This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive, and interactive frameworks, as well as in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as dynamic phenomena, as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the classification of languages according to structural features, as it can be shown that processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology. In the philosophy of language, the view of pragmatics as being central to language and meaning is often associated with Wittgenstein's later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as J.L. Austin, Paul Grice, John Searle, and W.O. Quine.
Distinctive features of human language
A number of features, many of which were described by Charles Hockett and called design features set human language apart from communication used by non-human animals.
Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited, number of possible ideas that can be expressed. In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. This is possible because human language is based on a dual code, in which a finite number of elements which are meaningless in themselves (e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form an infinite number of larger units of meaning (words and sentences). However, one study has demonstrated that an Australian bird, the chestnut-crowned babbler, is capable of using the same acoustic elements in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations. Additionally, pied babblers have demonstrated the ability to generate two functionally distinct vocalisations composed of the same sound type, which can only be distinguished by the number of repeated elements.
Several species of animals have proved to be able to acquire forms of communication through social learning: for instance a bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself using a set of symbolic lexigrams. Similarly, many species of birds and whales learn their songs by imitating other members of their species. However, while some animals may acquire large numbers of words and symbols, none have been able to learn as many different signs as are generally known by an average 4 year old human, nor have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language.
Human languages differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb, present and past, which may be used to express exceedingly complex meanings. It is distinguished by the property of recursivity: for example, a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase (as in "[[the chimpanzee]'s lips]") or a clause can contain another clause (as in "[I see [the dog is running]]"). Human language is the only known natural communication system whose adaptability may be referred to as modality independent. This means that it can be used not only for communication through one channel or medium, but through several. For example, spoken language uses the auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality, and braille writing uses the tactile modality.
Human language is unusual in being able to refer to abstract concepts and to imagined or hypothetical events as well as events that took place in the past or may happen in the future. This ability to refer to events that are not at the same time or place as the speech event is called displacement, and while some animal communication systems can use displacement (such as the communication of bees that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of sight), the degree to which it is used in human language is also considered unique.
Origin
Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic assumptions about what language is. Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity-based. Similarly, theories based on the generative view of language pioneered by Noam Chomsky see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, whereas functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural, learned through social interaction.
Continuity-based theories are held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly innate, such as psychologist Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition, whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as psychologist Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal communication in primates: either gestural or vocal communication to assist in cooperation. Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. A prominent proponent of this view is archaeologist Steven Mithen. Stephen Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 years and that: Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to suggest that language was invented only once, and that all modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered ... because of limitations on the methods available for reconstruction.
Because language emerged in the early prehistory of man, before the existence of any written records, its early development has left no historical traces, and it is believed that no comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. Early human fossils can be inspected for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour. Among the signs in human fossils that may suggest linguistic abilities are: the size of the brain relative to body mass, the presence of a larynx capable of advanced sound production and the nature of tools and other manufactured artifacts.
It was mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general. However, a 2017 study on Ardipithecus ramidus challenges this belief. Scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of the genus Homo some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago), and the development of language proper with anatomically modern Homo sapiens with the Upper Paleolithic revolution less than 100,000 years ago.
Chomsky is one prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins. He suggests that for scholars interested in the nature of language, "talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point." Chomsky proposes that perhaps "some random mutation took place [...] and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain." Though cautioning against taking this story literally, Chomsky insists that "it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language."
Study
The study of language, linguistics, has been developing into a science since the first grammatical descriptions of particular languages in India more than 2000 years ago, after the development of the Brahmi script. Modern linguistics is a science that concerns itself with all aspects of language, examining it from all of the theoretical viewpoints described above.
Subdisciplines
The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages, theoretical linguistics develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language based on data from the various extant human languages, sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description, neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain and allows the experimental testing of theories, computational linguistics builds on theoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at processing natural language or at testing linguistic hypotheses, and historical linguistics relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the comparative method.
Early history
The formal study of language is often considered to have started in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. However, Sumerian scribes already studied the differences between Sumerian and Akkadian grammar around 1900 BC. Subsequent grammatical traditions developed in all of the ancient cultures that adopted writing.
In the 17th century AD, the French Port-Royal Grammarians developed the idea that the grammars of all languages were a reflection of the universal basics of thought, and therefore that grammar was universal. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by British philologist and expert on ancient India William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them.
By introducing a distinction between diachronic and synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still fundamental in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue-parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system (langue), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system (parole).
Modern linguistics
In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky formulated the generative theory of language. According to this theory, the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that is universal for all humans and which underlies the grammars of all human languages. This set of rules is called Universal Grammar; for Chomsky, describing it is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics. Thus, he considered that the grammars of individual languages are only of importance to linguistics insofar as they allow us to deduce the universal underlying rules from which the observable linguistic variability is generated.
In opposition to the formal theories of the generative school, functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, its structures are best analyzed and understood by reference to their functions. Formal theories of grammar seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, while functional theories seek to define the functions performed by language and then relate them to the linguistic elements that carry them out. The framework of cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of the concepts (which are sometimes universal, and sometimes specific to a particular language) which underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language.
Physiological and neural architecture of language and speech
Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures. The production of spoken language depends on sophisticated capacities for controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus, the ability to acoustically decode speech sounds, and the neurological apparatus required for acquiring and producing language. The study of the genetic bases for human language is at an early stage: the only gene that has definitely been implicated in language production is FOXP2, which may cause a kind of congenital language disorder if affected by mutations.
The brain
The brain is the coordinating center of all linguistic activity; it controls both the production of linguistic cognition and of meaning and the mechanics of speech production. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the neurological bases for language is quite limited, though it has advanced considerably with the use of modern imaging techniques. The discipline of linguistics dedicated to studying the neurological aspects of language is called neurolinguistics.
Early work in neurolinguistics involved the study of language in people with brain lesions, to see how lesions in specific areas affect language and speech. In this way, neuroscientists in the 19th century discovered that two areas in the brain are crucially implicated in language processing. The first area is Wernicke's area, which is in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere. People with a lesion in this area of the brain develop receptive aphasia, a condition in which there is a major impairment of language comprehension, while speech retains a natural-sounding rhythm and a relatively normal sentence structure. The second area is Broca's area, in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. People with a lesion to this area develop expressive aphasia, meaning that they know what they want to say, they just cannot get it out. They are typically able to understand what is being said to them, but unable to speak fluently. Other symptoms that may be present in expressive aphasia include problems with word repetition. The condition affects both spoken and written language. Those with this aphasia also exhibit ungrammatical speech and show inability to use syntactic information to determine the meaning of sentences. Both expressive and receptive aphasia also affect the use of sign language, in analogous ways to how they affect speech, with expressive aphasia causing signers to sign slowly and with incorrect grammar, whereas a signer with receptive aphasia will sign fluently, but make little sense to others and have difficulties comprehending others' signs. This shows that the impairment is specific to the ability to use language, not to the physiology used for speech production.
With technological advances in the late 20th century, neurolinguists have also incorporated non-invasive techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology to study language processing in individuals without impairments.
Anatomy of speech
Spoken language relies on human physical ability to produce sound, which is a longitudinal wave propagated through the air at a frequency capable of vibrating the ear drum. This ability depends on the physiology of the human speech organs. These organs consist of the lungs, the voice box (larynx), and the upper vocal tract – the throat, the mouth, and the nose. By controlling the different parts of the speech apparatus, the airstream can be manipulated to produce different speech sounds.
The sound of speech can be analyzed into a combination of segmental and suprasegmental elements. The segmental elements are those that follow each other in sequences, which are usually represented by distinct letters in alphabetic scripts, such as the Roman script. In free flowing speech, there are no clear boundaries between one segment and the next, nor usually are there any audible pauses between them. Segments therefore are distinguished by their distinct sounds which are a result of their different articulations, and can be either vowels or consonants. Suprasegmental phenomena encompass such elements as stress, phonation type, voice timbre, and prosody or intonation, all of which may have effects across multiple segments.
Consonants and vowel segments combine to form syllables, which in turn combine to form utterances; these can be distinguished phonetically as the space between two inhalations. Acoustically, these different segments are characterized by different formant structures, that are visible in a spectrogram of the recorded sound wave. Formants are the amplitude peaks in the frequency spectrum of a specific sound.
Vowels are those sounds that have no audible friction caused by the narrowing or obstruction of some part of the upper vocal tract. They vary in quality according to the degree of lip aperture and the placement of the tongue within the oral cavity. Vowels are called close when the lips are relatively closed, as in the pronunciation of the vowel (English "ee"), or open when the lips are relatively open, as in the vowel (English "ah"). If the tongue is located towards the back of the mouth, the quality changes, creating vowels such as (English "oo"). The quality also changes depending on whether the lips are rounded as opposed to unrounded, creating distinctions such as that between (unrounded front vowel such as English "ee") and (rounded front vowel such as German "ü").
Consonants are those sounds that have audible friction or closure at some point within the upper vocal tract. Consonant sounds vary by place of articulation, i.e. the place in the vocal tract where the airflow is obstructed, commonly at the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, palate, velum, uvula, or glottis. Each place of articulation produces a different set of consonant sounds, which are further distinguished by manner of articulation, or the kind of friction, whether full closure, in which case the consonant is called occlusive or stop, or different degrees of aperture creating fricatives and approximants. Consonants can also be either voiced or unvoiced, depending on whether the vocal cords are set in vibration by airflow during the production of the sound. Voicing is what separates English in bus (unvoiced sibilant) from in buzz (voiced sibilant).
Some speech sounds, both vowels and consonants, involve release of air flow through the nasal cavity, and these are called nasals or nasalized sounds. Other sounds are defined by the way the tongue moves within the mouth such as the l-sounds (called laterals, because the air flows along both sides of the tongue), and the r-sounds (called rhotics).
By using these speech organs, humans can produce hundreds of distinct sounds: some appear very often in the world's languages, whereas others are much more common in certain language families, language areas, or even specific to a single language.
Modality
Human languages display considerable plasticity in their deployment of two fundamental modes: oral (speech and mouthing) and manual (sign and gesture). For example it is common for oral language to be accompanied by gesture, and for sign language to be accompanied by mouthing. In addition, some language communities use both modes to convey lexical or grammatical meaning, each mode complementing the other. Such bimodal use of language is especially common in genres such as story-telling (with Plains Indian Sign Language and Australian Aboriginal sign languages used alongside oral language, for example), but also occurs in mundane conversation. For instance, many Australian languages have a rich set of case suffixes that provide details about the instrument used to perform an action. Others lack such grammatical precision in the oral mode, but supplement it with gesture to convey that information in the sign mode. In Iwaidja, for example, 'he went out for fish using a torch' is spoken as simply "he-hunted fish torch", but the word for 'torch' is accompanied by a gesture indicating that it was held. In another example, the ritual language Damin had a heavily reduced oral vocabulary of only a few hundred words, each of which was very general in meaning, but which were supplemented by gesture for greater precision (e.g., the single word for fish, l*i, was accompanied by a gesture to indicate the kind of fish).
Secondary modes of language, by which a fundamental mode is conveyed in a different medium, include writing (including braille), sign (in manually coded language), whistling and drumming. Tertiary modes – such as semaphore, Morse code and spelling alphabets – convey the secondary mode of writing in a different medium. For some extinct languages that are maintained for ritual or liturgical purposes, writing may be the primary mode, with speech secondary.
Structure
When described as a system of symbolic communication, language is traditionally seen as consisting of three parts: signs, meanings, and a code connecting signs with their meanings. The study of the process of semiosis, how signs and meanings are combined, used, and interpreted is called semiotics. Signs can be composed of sounds, gestures, letters, or symbols, depending on whether the language is spoken, signed, or written, and they can be combined into complex signs, such as words and phrases. When used in communication, a sign is encoded and transmitted by a sender through a channel to a receiver who decodes it.
Some of the properties that define human language as opposed to other communication systems are: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, meaning that there is no predictable connection between a linguistic sign and its meaning; the duality of the linguistic system, meaning that linguistic structures are built by combining elements into larger structures that can be seen as layered, e.g. how sounds build words and words build phrases; the discreteness of the elements of language, meaning that the elements out of which linguistic signs are constructed are discrete units, e.g. sounds and words, that can be distinguished from each other and rearranged in different patterns; and the productivity of the linguistic system, meaning that the finite number of linguistic elements can be combined into a theoretically infinite number of combinations.
The rules by which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, morphemes, words, phrases, and texts is called semantics. The division of language into separate but connected systems of sign and meaning goes back to the first linguistic studies of de Saussure and is now used in almost all branches of linguistics.
Semantics
Languages express meaning by relating a sign form to a meaning, or its content. Sign forms must be something that can be perceived, for example, in sounds, images, or gestures, and then related to a specific meaning by social convention. Because the basic relation of meaning for most linguistic signs is based on social convention, linguistic signs can be considered arbitrary, in the sense that the convention is established socially and historically, rather than by means of a natural relation between a specific sign form and its meaning.
Thus, languages must have a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning. The English sign "dog" denotes, for example, a member of the species Canis familiaris. In a language, the array of arbitrary signs connected to specific meanings is called the lexicon, and a single sign connected to a meaning is called a lexeme. Not all meanings in a language are represented by single words. Often, semantic concepts are embedded in the morphology or syntax of the language in the form of grammatical categories.
All languages contain the semantic structure of predication: a structure that predicates a property, state, or action. Traditionally, semantics has been understood to be the study of how speakers and interpreters assign truth values to statements, so that meaning is understood to be the process by which a predicate can be said to be true or false about an entity, e.g. "[x [is y]]" or "[x [does y]]". Recently, this model of semantics has been complemented with more dynamic models of meaning that incorporate shared knowledge about the context in which a sign is interpreted into the production of meaning. Such models of meaning are explored in the field of pragmatics.
Sounds and symbols
Depending on modality, language structure can be based on systems of sounds (speech), gestures (sign languages), or graphic or tactile symbols (writing). The ways in which languages use sounds or signs to construct meaning are studied in phonology.
Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes. Phonemes are abstract units of sound, defined as the smallest units in a language that can serve to distinguish between the meaning of a pair of minimally different words, a so-called minimal pair. In English, for example, the words bat and pat form a minimal pair, in which the distinction between and differentiates the two words, which have different meanings. However, each language contrasts sounds in different ways. For example, in a language that does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants, the sounds and (if they both occur) could be considered a single phoneme, and consequently, the two pronunciations would have the same meaning. Similarly, the English language does not distinguish phonemically between aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations of consonants, as many other languages like Korean and Hindi do: the unaspirated in spin and the aspirated in pin are considered to be merely different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme (such variants of a single phoneme are called allophones), whereas in Mandarin Chinese, the same difference in pronunciation distinguishes between the words 'crouch' and 'eight' (the accent above the á means that the vowel is pronounced with a high tone).
All spoken languages have phonemes of at least two different categories, vowels and consonants, that can be combined to form syllables. As well as segments such as consonants and vowels, some languages also use sound in other ways to convey meaning. Many languages, for example, use stress, pitch, duration, and tone to distinguish meaning. Because these phenomena operate outside of the level of single segments, they are called suprasegmental. Some languages have only a few phonemes, for example, Rotokas and Pirahã language with 11 and 10 phonemes respectively, whereas languages like Taa may have as many as 141 phonemes. In sign languages, the equivalent to phonemes (formerly called cheremes) are defined by the basic elements of gestures, such as hand shape, orientation, location, and motion, which correspond to manners of articulation in spoken language.
Writing systems represent language using visual symbols, which may or may not correspond to the sounds of spoken language. The Latin alphabet (and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) was originally based on the representation of single sounds, so that words were constructed from letters that generally denote a single consonant or vowel in the structure of the word. In syllabic scripts, such as the Inuktitut syllabary, each sign represents a whole syllable. In logographic scripts, each sign represents an entire word, and will generally bear no relation to the sound of that word in spoken language.
Because all languages have a very large number of words, no purely logographic scripts are known to exist. Written language represents the way spoken sounds and words follow one after another by arranging symbols according to a pattern that follows a certain direction. The direction used in a writing system is entirely arbitrary and established by convention. Some writing systems use the horizontal axis (left to right as the Latin script or right to left as the Arabic script), while others such as traditional Chinese writing use the vertical dimension (from top to bottom). A few writing systems use opposite directions for alternating lines, and others, such as the ancient Maya script, can be written in either direction and rely on graphic cues to show the reader the direction of reading.
In order to represent the sounds of the world's languages in writing, linguists have developed the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages.
Grammar
Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements called morphemes within a language can be combined into utterances. Morphemes can either be free or bound. If they are free to be moved around within an utterance, they are usually called words, and if they are bound to other words or morphemes, they are called affixes. The way in which meaningful elements can be combined within a language is governed by rules. The study of the rules for the internal structure of words are called morphology. The rules of the internal structure of phrases and sentences are called syntax.
Grammatical categories
Grammar can be described as a system of categories and a set of rules that determine how categories combine to form different aspects of meaning. Languages differ widely in whether they are encoded through the use of categories or lexical units. However, several categories are so common as to be nearly universal. Such universal categories include the encoding of the grammatical relations of participants and predicates by grammatically distinguishing between their relations to a predicate, the encoding of temporal and spatial relations on predicates, and a system of grammatical person governing reference to and distinction between speakers and addressees and those about whom they are speaking.
Word classes
Languages organize their parts of speech into classes according to their functions and positions relative to other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic distinction between a group of words that prototypically denotes things and concepts and a group of words that prototypically denotes actions and events. The first group, which includes English words such as "dog" and "song", are usually called nouns. The second, which includes "think" and "sing", are called verbs. Another common category is the adjective: words that describe properties or qualities of nouns, such as "red" or "big". Word classes can be "open" if new words can continuously be added to the class, or relatively "closed" if there is a fixed number of words in a class. In English, the class of pronouns is closed, whereas the class of adjectives is open, since an infinite number of adjectives can be constructed from verbs (e.g. "saddened") or nouns (e.g. with the -like suffix, as in "noun-like"). In other languages such as Korean, the situation is the opposite, and new pronouns can be constructed, whereas the number of adjectives is fixed.
Word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically, verbs are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments of predicates. In a sentence such as "Sally runs", the predicate is "runs", because it is the word that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally". Some verbs such as "curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John". A predicate that can only take a single argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two arguments is called transitive.
Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions like "and" that serve to join two sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as "wow!", or ideophones like "splash" that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity. Many languages have classifiers that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in Japanese, the general noun classifier for humans is nin (人), and it is used for counting humans, whatever they are called:
san-nin no gakusei (三人の学生) lit. "3 human-classifier of student" — three students
For trees, it would be:
san-bon no ki (三本の木) lit. "3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree" — three trees
Morphology
In linguistics, the study of the internal structure of complex words and the processes by which words are formed is called morphology. In most languages, it is possible to construct complex words that are built of several morphemes. For instance, the English word "unexpected" can be analyzed as being composed of the three morphemes "un-", "expect" and "-ed".
Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are independent morphemes, so-called roots, or whether they can only co-occur attached to other morphemes. These bound morphemes or affixes can be classified according to their position in relation to the root: prefixes precede the root, suffixes follow the root, and infixes are inserted in the middle of a root. Affixes serve to modify or elaborate the meaning of the root. Some languages change the meaning of words by changing the phonological structure of a word, for example, the English word "run", which in the past tense is "ran". This process is called ablaut. Furthermore, morphology distinguishes between the process of inflection, which modifies or elaborates on a word, and the process of derivation, which creates a new word from an existing one. In English, the verb "sing" has the inflectional forms "singing" and "sung", which are both verbs, and the derivational form "singer", which is a noun derived from the verb with the agentive suffix "-er".
Languages differ widely in how much they rely on morphological processes of word formation. In some languages, for example, Chinese, there are no morphological processes, and all grammatical information is encoded syntactically by forming strings of single words. This type of morpho-syntax is often called isolating, or analytic, because there is almost a full correspondence between a single word and a single aspect of meaning. Most languages have words consisting of several morphemes, but they vary in the degree to which morphemes are discrete units. In many languages, notably in most Indo-European languages, single morphemes may have several distinct meanings that cannot be analyzed into smaller segments. For example, in Latin, the word bonus, or "good", consists of the root bon-, meaning "good", and the suffix -us, which indicates masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. These languages are called fusional languages, because several meanings may be fused into a single morpheme. The opposite of fusional languages are agglutinative languages which construct words by stringing morphemes together in chains, but with each morpheme as a discrete semantic unit. An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or "from your houses", consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. The languages that rely on morphology to the greatest extent are traditionally called polysynthetic languages. They may express the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example, in Persian the single word nafahmidamesh means I didn't understand it consisting of morphemes na-fahm-id-am-esh with the meanings, "negation.understand.past.I.it". As another example with more complexity, in the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksatengqiggtuq, which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer", the word consists of the morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, "reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative", and except for the morpheme tuntu ("reindeer") none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation.
Many languages use morphology to cross-reference words within a sentence. This is sometimes called agreement. For example, in many Indo-European languages, adjectives must cross-reference the noun they modify in terms of number, case, and gender, so that the Latin adjective bonus, or "good", is inflected to agree with a noun that is masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. In many polysynthetic languages, verbs cross-reference their subjects and objects. In these types of languages, a single verb may include information that would require an entire sentence in English. For example, in the Basque phrase ikusi nauzu, or "you saw me", the past tense auxiliary verb n-au-zu (similar to English "do") agrees with both the subject (you) expressed by the n- prefix, and with the object (me) expressed by the – zu suffix. The sentence could be directly transliterated as "see you-did-me"
Syntax
Another way in which languages convey meaning is through the order of words within a sentence. The grammatical rules for how to produce new sentences from words that are already known is called syntax. The syntactical rules of a language determine why a sentence in English such as "I love you" is meaningful, but "*love you I" is not. Syntactical rules determine how word order and sentence structure is constrained, and how those constraints contribute to meaning. For example, in English, the two sentences "the slaves were cursing the master" and "the master was cursing the slaves" mean different things, because the role of the grammatical subject is encoded by the noun being in front of the verb, and the role of object is encoded by the noun appearing after the verb. Conversely, in Latin, both Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus mean "the master was reprimanding the slaves", because servos, or "slaves", is in the accusative case, showing that they are the grammatical object of the sentence, and dominus, or "master", is in the nominative case, showing that he is the subject.
Latin uses morphology to express the distinction between subject and object, whereas English uses word order. Another example of how syntactic rules contribute to meaning is the rule of inverse word order in questions, which exists in many languages. This rule explains why when in English, the phrase "John is talking to Lucy" is turned into a question, it becomes "Who is John talking to?", and not "John is talking to who?". The latter example may be used as a way of placing special emphasis on "who", thereby slightly altering the meaning of the question. Syntax also includes the rules for how complex sentences are structured by grouping words together in units, called phrases, that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure. Sentences can be described as consisting of phrases connected in a tree structure, connecting the phrases to each other at different levels. To the right is a graphic representation of the syntactic analysis of the English sentence "the cat sat on the mat". The sentence is analyzed as being constituted by a noun phrase, a verb, and a prepositional phrase; the prepositional phrase is further divided into a preposition and a noun phrase, and the noun phrases consist of an article and a noun.
The reason sentences can be seen as being composed of phrases is because each phrase would be moved around as a single element if syntactic operations were carried out. For example, "the cat" is one phrase, and "on the mat" is another, because they would be treated as single units if a decision was made to emphasize the location by moving forward the prepositional phrase: "[And] on the mat, the cat sat". There are many different formalist and functionalist frameworks that propose theories for describing syntactic structures, based on different assumptions about what language is and how it should be described. Each of them would analyze a sentence such as this in a different manner.
Typology and universals
Languages can be classified in relation to their grammatical types. Languages that belong to different families nonetheless often have features in common, and these shared features tend to correlate. For example, languages can be classified on the basis of their basic word order, the relative order of the verb, and its constituents in a normal indicative sentence. In English, the basic order is SVO (subject–verb–object): "The snake(S) bit(V) the man(O)", whereas for example, the corresponding sentence in the Australian language Gamilaraay would be d̪uyugu n̪ama d̪ayn yiːy (snake man bit), SOV. Word order type is relevant as a typological parameter, because basic word order type corresponds with other syntactic parameters, such as the relative order of nouns and adjectives, or of the use of prepositions or postpositions. Such correlations are called implicational universals. For example, most (but not all) languages that are of the SOV type have postpositions rather than prepositions, and have adjectives before nouns.
All languages structure sentences into Subject, Verb, and Object, but languages differ in the way they classify the relations between actors and actions. English uses the nominative-accusative word typology: in English transitive clauses, the subjects of both intransitive sentences ("I run") and transitive sentences ("I love you") are treated in the same way, shown here by the nominative pronoun I. Some languages, called ergative, Gamilaraay among them, distinguish instead between Agents and Patients. In ergative languages, the single participant in an intransitive sentence, such as "I run", is treated the same as the patient in a transitive sentence, giving the equivalent of "me run". Only in transitive sentences would the equivalent of the pronoun "I" be used. In this way the semantic roles can map onto the grammatical relations in different ways, grouping an intransitive subject either with Agents (accusative type) or Patients (ergative type) or even making each of the three roles differently, which is called the tripartite type.
The shared features of languages which belong to the same typological class type may have arisen completely independently. Their co-occurrence might be due to universal laws governing the structure of natural languages, "language universals", or they might be the result of languages evolving convergent solutions to the recurring communicative problems that humans use language to solve.
Social contexts of use and transmission
While humans have the ability to learn any language, they only do so if they grow up in an environment in which language exists and is used by others. Language is therefore dependent on communities of speakers in which children learn language from their elders and peers and themselves transmit language to their own children. Languages are used by those who speak them to communicate and to solve a plethora of social tasks. Many aspects of language use can be seen to be adapted specifically to these purposes. Owing to the way in which language is transmitted between generations and within communities, language perpetually changes, diversifying into new languages or converging due to language contact. The process is similar to the process of evolution, where the process of descent with modification leads to the formation of a phylogenetic tree.
However, languages differ from biological organisms in that they readily incorporate elements from other languages through the process of diffusion, as speakers of different languages come into contact. Humans also frequently speak more than one language, acquiring their first language or languages as children, or learning new languages as they grow up. Because of the increased language contact in the globalizing world, many small languages are becoming endangered as their speakers shift to other languages that afford the possibility to participate in larger and more influential speech communities.
Usage and meaning
When studying the way in which words and signs are used, it is often the case that words have different meanings, depending on the social context of use. An important example of this is the process called deixis, which describes the way in which certain words refer to entities through their relation between a specific point in time and space when the word is uttered. Such words are, for example, the word, "I" (which designates the person speaking), "now" (which designates the moment of speaking), and "here" (which designates the position of speaking). Signs also change their meanings over time, as the conventions governing their usage gradually change. The study of how the meaning of linguistic expressions changes depending on context is called pragmatics. Deixis is an important part of the way that we use language to point out entities in the world. Pragmatics is concerned with the ways in which language use is patterned and how these patterns contribute to meaning. For example, in all languages, linguistic expressions can be used not just to transmit information, but to perform actions. Certain actions are made only through language, but nonetheless have tangible effects, e.g. the act of "naming", which creates a new name for some entity, or the act of "pronouncing someone man and wife", which creates a social contract of marriage. These types of acts are called speech acts, although they can also be carried out through writing or hand signing.
The form of linguistic expression often does not correspond to the meaning that it actually has in a social context. For example, if at a dinner table a person asks, "Can you reach the salt?", that is, in fact, not a question about the length of the arms of the one being addressed, but a request to pass the salt across the table. This meaning is implied by the context in which it is spoken; these kinds of effects of meaning are called conversational implicatures. These social rules for which ways of using language are considered appropriate in certain situations and how utterances are to be understood in relation to their context vary between communities, and learning them is a large part of acquiring communicative competence in a language.
Acquisition
All healthy, normally developing human beings learn to use language. Children acquire the language or languages used around them: whichever languages they receive sufficient exposure to during childhood. The development is essentially the same for children acquiring sign or oral languages. This learning process is referred to as first-language acquisition, since unlike many other kinds of learning, it requires no direct teaching or specialized study. In The Descent of Man, naturalist Charles Darwin called this process "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art".
First language acquisition proceeds in a fairly regular sequence, though there is a wide degree of variation in the timing of particular stages among normally developing infants. Studies published in 2013 have indicated that unborn fetuses are capable of language acquisition to some degree. From birth, newborns respond more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month of age, babies appear to be able to distinguish between different speech sounds. Around six months of age, a child will begin babbling, producing the speech sounds or handshapes of the languages used around them. Words appear around the age of 12 to 18 months; the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month-old child is around 50 words. A child's first utterances are holophrases (literally "whole-sentences"), utterances that use just one word to communicate some idea. Several months after a child begins producing words, he or she will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more months will begin to produce telegraphic speech, or short sentences that are less grammatically complex than adult speech, but that do show regular syntactic structure. From roughly the age of three to five years, a child's ability to speak or sign is refined to the point that it resembles adult language.
Acquisition of second and additional languages can come at any age, through exposure in daily life or courses. Children learning a second language are more likely to achieve native-like fluency than adults, but in general, it is very rare for someone speaking a second language to pass completely for a native speaker. An important difference between first language acquisition and additional language acquisition is that the process of additional language acquisition is influenced by languages that the learner already knows.
Culture
Languages, understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speaks them. Languages differ not only in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, but also through having different "cultures of speaking." Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group as well as difference from others. Even among speakers of one language, several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities.
Linguists use the term "varieties" to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. This term includes geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture.
Because norms for language use are shared by members of a specific group, communicative style also becomes a way of displaying and constructing group identity. Linguistic differences may become salient markers of divisions between social groups, for example, speaking a language with a particular accent may imply membership of an ethnic minority or social class, one's area of origin, or status as a second language speaker. These kinds of differences are not part of the linguistic system, but are an important part of how people use language as a social tool for constructing groups.
However, many languages also have grammatical conventions that signal the social position of the speaker in relation to others through the use of registers that are related to social hierarchies or divisions. In many languages, there are stylistic or even grammatical differences between the ways men and women speak, between age groups, or between social classes, just as some languages employ different words depending on who is listening. For example, in the Australian language Dyirbal, a married man must use a special set of words to refer to everyday items when speaking in the presence of his mother-in-law. Some cultures, for example, have elaborate systems of "social deixis", or systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English, social deixis is shown mostly through distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, and in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy", "Doctor", or "Your Honor", but in other languages, such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance, in languages of east Asia such as Thai, Burmese, and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest.
Writing, literacy and technology
Throughout history a number of different ways of representing language in graphic media have been invented. These are called writing systems.
The use of writing has made language even more useful to humans. It makes it possible to store large amounts of information outside of the human body and retrieve it again, and it allows communication across physical distances and timespans that would otherwise be impossible. Many languages conventionally employ different genres, styles, and registers in written and spoken language, and in some communities, writing traditionally takes place in an entirely different language than the one spoken. There is some evidence that the use of writing also has effects on the cognitive development of humans, perhaps because acquiring literacy generally requires explicit and formal education.
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.
Change
All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable.
Changes may affect specific sounds or the entire phonological system. Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound or phonetic feature by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there had been none. Sound changes can be conditioned in which case a sound is changed only if it occurs in the vicinity of certain other sounds. Sound change is usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors. On the other hand, sound changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity. Sometimes a simple change triggers a chain shift in which the entire phonological system is affected. This happened in the Germanic languages when the sound change known as Grimm's law affected all the stop consonants in the system. The original consonant * became /b/ in the Germanic languages, the previous * in turn became /p/, and the previous * became /f/. The same process applied to all stop consonants and explains why Italic languages such as Latin have p in words like pater and pisces, whereas Germanic languages, like English, have father and fish.
Another example is the Great Vowel Shift in English, which is the reason that the spelling of English vowels do not correspond well to their current pronunciation. This is because the vowel shift brought the already established orthography out of synchronization with pronunciation. Another source of sound change is the erosion of words as pronunciation gradually becomes increasingly indistinct and shortens words, leaving out syllables or sounds. This kind of change caused Latin mea domina to eventually become the French madame and American English ma'am.
Change also happens in the grammar of languages as discourse patterns such as idioms or particular constructions become grammaticalized. This frequently happens when words or morphemes erode and the grammatical system is unconsciously rearranged to compensate for the lost element. For example, in some varieties of Caribbean Spanish the final /s/ has eroded away. Since Standard Spanish uses final /s/ in the morpheme marking the second person subject "you" in verbs, the Caribbean varieties now have to express the second person using the pronoun tú. This means that the sentence "what's your name" is ¿como te llamas? in Standard Spanish, but in Caribbean Spanish. The simple sound change has affected both morphology and syntax. Another common cause of grammatical change is the gradual petrification of idioms into new grammatical forms, for example, the way the English "going to" construction lost its aspect of movement and in some varieties of English has almost become a full-fledged future tense (e.g. I'm gonna).
Language change may be motivated by "language internal" factors, such as changes in pronunciation motivated by certain sounds being difficult to distinguish aurally or to produce, or through patterns of change that cause some rare types of constructions to drift towards more common types. Other causes of language change are social, such as when certain pronunciations become emblematic of membership in certain groups, such as social classes, or with ideologies, and therefore are adopted by those who wish to identify with those groups or ideas. In this way, issues of identity and politics can have profound effects on language structure.
Contact
One important source of language change is contact and resulting diffusion of linguistic traits between languages. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact on a regular basis. Multilingualism is likely to have been the norm throughout human history and most people in the modern world are multilingual. Before the rise of the concept of the ethno-national state, monolingualism was characteristic mainly of populations inhabiting small islands. But with the ideology that made one people, one state, and one language the most desirable political arrangement, monolingualism started to spread throughout the world. Nonetheless, there are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6000 languages, which means that most countries are multilingual and most languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages.
When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Through sustained language contact over long periods, linguistic traits diffuse between languages, and languages belonging to different families may converge to become more similar. In areas where many languages are in close contact, this may lead to the formation of language areas in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A number of such language areas have been documented, among them, the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area. Also, larger areas such as South Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia have sometimes been considered language areas, because of widespread diffusion of specific areal features.
Language contact may also lead to a variety of other linguistic phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification (replacement of much of the native vocabulary with that of another language). In situations of extreme and sustained language contact, it may lead to the formation of new mixed languages that cannot be considered to belong to a single language family. One type of mixed language called pidgins occurs when adult speakers of two different languages interact on a regular basis, but in a situation where neither group learns to speak the language of the other group fluently. In such a case, they will often construct a communication form that has traits of both languages, but which has a simplified grammatical and phonological structure. The language comes to contain mostly the grammatical and phonological categories that exist in both languages. Pidgin languages are defined by not having any native speakers, but only being spoken by people who have another language as their first language. But if a Pidgin language becomes the main language of a speech community, then eventually children will grow up learning the pidgin as their first language. As the generation of child learners grow up, the pidgin will often be seen to change its structure and acquire a greater degree of complexity. This type of language is generally called a creole language. An example of such mixed languages is Tok Pisin, the official language of Papua New-Guinea, which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen, the French-based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French.
Linguistic diversity
SIL Ethnologue defines a "living language" as "one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language". The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular, on how one defines the distinction between a "language" and a "dialect". As of 2016, Ethnologue cataloged 7,097 living human languages. The Ethnologue establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often includes more categories than more conservative classifications. For example, the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects is classified as two distinct languages (Danish and Jutish) by the Ethnologue.
According to the Ethnologue, 389 languages (nearly 6%) have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world's population, whereas 94% of the world's languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population.
Languages and dialects
There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy". For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects. Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin are, for example, often classified as "dialects" of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than Swedish is from Norwegian. Before the Yugoslav civil war, Serbo-Croatian was generally considered a single language with two normative variants, but due to sociopolitical reasons, Croatian and Serbian are now often treated as separate languages and employ different writing systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual intelligibility.
Language families of the world
The world's languages can be grouped into language families consisting of languages that can be shown to have common ancestry. Linguists recognize many hundreds of language families, although some of them can possibly be grouped into larger units as more evidence becomes available and in-depth studies are carried out. At present, there are also dozens of language isolates: languages that cannot be shown to be related to any other languages in the world. Among them are Basque, spoken in Europe, Zuni of New Mexico, Purépecha of Mexico, Ainu of Japan, Burushaski of Pakistan, and many others.
The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world's population. This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu). The Indo-European family achieved prevalence first during the Eurasian Migration Period (c. 400–800 AD), and subsequently through the European colonial expansion, which brought the Indo-European languages to a politically and often numerically dominant position in the Americas and much of Africa. The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by 20% of the world's population and include many of the languages of East Asia, including Hakka, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and hundreds of smaller languages.
Africa is home to a large number of language families, the largest of which is the Niger-Congo language family, which includes such languages as Swahili, Shona, and Yoruba. Speakers of the Niger-Congo languages account for 6.9% of the world's population. A similar number of people speak the Afroasiatic languages, which include the populous Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew language, and the languages of the Sahara region, such as the Berber languages and Hausa.
The Austronesian languages are spoken by 5.5% of the world's population and stretch from Madagascar to maritime Southeast Asia all the way to Oceania. It includes such languages as Malagasy, Māori, Samoan, and many of the indigenous languages of Indonesia and Taiwan. The Austronesian languages are considered to have originated in Taiwan around 3000 BC and spread through the Oceanic region through island-hopping, based on an advanced nautical technology. Other populous language families are the Dravidian languages of South Asia (among them Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu), the Turkic languages of Central Asia (such as Turkish), the Austroasiatic (among them Khmer), and Tai–Kadai languages of Southeast Asia (including Thai).
The areas of the world in which there is the greatest linguistic diversity, such as the Americas, Papua New Guinea, West Africa, and South-Asia, contain hundreds of small language families. These areas together account for the majority of the world's languages, though not the majority of speakers. In the Americas, some of the largest language families include the Quechumaran, Arawak, and Tupi-Guarani families of South America, the Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, and Mayan of Mesoamerica, and the Na-Dene, Iroquoian, and Algonquian language families of North America. In Australia, most indigenous languages belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, whereas New Guinea is home to a large number of small families and isolates, as well as a number of Austronesian languages.
Language endangerment
Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language. While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.
The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. Of the between 6,000 and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, between 50 and 90% of those are expected to have become extinct by the year 2100. The top 20 languages, those spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: "safe", "vulnerable" (not spoken by children outside the home), "definitely endangered" (not spoken by children), "severely endangered" (only spoken by the oldest generations), and "critically endangered" (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers). Notwithstanding claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca, such as English or Esperanto, there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic diversity causes political conflict, but this is contradicted by the fact that many of the world's major episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic diversity, such as the Yugoslav and American Civil War, or the genocide of Rwanda, whereas many of the most stable political units have been highly multilingual.
Many projects aim to prevent or slow this loss by revitalizing endangered languages and promoting education and literacy in minority languages. Across the world, many countries have enacted specific legislation to protect and stabilize the language of indigenous speech communities. A minority of linguists have argued that language loss is a natural process that should not be counteracted, and that documenting endangered languages for posterity is sufficient.
The University of Waikato are using the Welsh language as a model for their Māori language revitalisation programme as they deem Welsh to be the world's leading example for the survival of languages. In 2019 a Hawaiian TV company Oiwi visited a Welsh language centre in Nant Gwrtheyrn, North Wales to help find ways of preserving their Ōlelo Hawaiʻi language.
See also
Lists of languages
Human communication
Listening
Speaking
Reading
Attitude
Body language (approachable)
Humor
Social skills
International auxiliary language
List of language regulators
List of official languages
Outline of linguistics
Problem of religious language
Psycholinguistics
Speech–language pathology
Father Tongue hypothesis
Notes
Commentary notes
Citations
Works cited
(pbk)
Further reading
External links
World Atlas of Language Structures: a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a comprehensive catalog of all of the world's known living languages
Human communication
Linguistics
Wikipedia articles with ASCII art
Articles containing video clips
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17528 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura%20Bush | Laura Bush | Laura Lane Welch Bush (née Welch; born November 4, 1946) is an American teacher, librarian, memoirist and author who was the first lady of the United States from 2001 to 2009. Bush previously served as the first lady of Texas from 1995 to 2000. She is the wife of former President George W. Bush.
Born in Midland, Texas, Bush graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in education, and took a job as a second grade teacher. After attaining her master's degree in library science at the University of Texas at Austin, she was employed as a librarian.
Bush met her future husband, George W. Bush, in 1977, and they were married later that year. The couple had twin daughters in 1981. Bush's political involvement began during her marriage. She campaigned with her husband during his unsuccessful 1978 run for the United States Congress, and later for his successful Texas gubernatorial campaign.
As First Lady of Texas, Bush implemented many initiatives focused on health, education, and literacy. In 1999–2000, she aided her husband in campaigning for the presidency in a number of ways, such as delivering a keynote address at the 2000 Republican National Convention, which gained her national attention. She became First Lady after her husband was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2001.
Polled by The Gallup Organization as one of the most popular First Ladies, Bush was involved in national and global concerns during her tenure. She continued to advance her trademark interests of education and literacy by establishing the annual National Book Festival in 2001, and encouraged education on a worldwide scale. She also advanced women's causes through The Heart Truth and Susan G. Komen for the Cure organizations. She represented the United States during her foreign trips, which tended to focus on HIV/AIDS and malaria awareness.
Early life and career
Laura Lane Welch was born on November 4, 1946, at Midland Memorial Hospital in Midland, Texas, the only child of Harold Welch and Jenna Louise Hawkins Welch.
Bush is of English, French, and Swiss ancestry. Her father was a house builder and later successful real estate developer, while her mother worked as the bookkeeper for her father's business. Early on, her parents encouraged her to read, leading to what would become her love of reading. She said, "I learned [how important reading is] at home from my mother. When I was a little girl, my mother would read stories to me. I have loved books and going to the library ever since. In the summer, I liked to spend afternoons reading in the library. I enjoyed the Little House on the Prairie and Little Women books, and many others ... Reading gives you enjoyment throughout your life." Bush has also credited her second grade teacher, Charlene Gnagy, for inspiring her interest in education.
On the night of November 6, 1963, two days after her 17th birthday, Laura Welch ran a stop sign and struck another car, killing its driver. The victim was her close friend and classmate Michael Dutton Douglas. By some accounts, Douglas had been Welch's boyfriend at one time, but she stated that he was not her boyfriend at that time but rather a very close friend. Bush and her passenger, both 17, were treated for minor injuries. According to the accident report released by the city of Midland in 2000, in response to an open-records request, she was not charged in the incident. Bush's spokesman said, "It was a very tragic accident that deeply affected the families and was very painful for all involved, including the community at large." In her book Spoken from the Heart, she said that the crash caused her to lose her faith "for many, many years".
She attended James Bowie Elementary School, San Jacinto Junior High School, and Robert E. Lee High School in Midland. She graduated from Lee in 1964 and went on to attend Southern Methodist University in Dallas where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. She graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science degree in education.
After graduating from SMU, she began her career as a school teacher at Longfellow Elementary School in the Dallas Independent School District. She then taught for three years at John F. Kennedy Elementary School, a Houston Independent School District school in Houston, until 1972.
In 1973, Bush attained a Master of Science degree in Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin. She was soon employed as a librarian at the Kashmere Gardens Branch at the Houston Public Library. The following year, she moved back to Austin and took another job as a librarian in the Austin Independent School District school Dawson Elementary until 1977. She reflected on her employment experiences to a group of children in 2003, saying, "I worked as a teacher and librarian and I learned how important reading is in school and in life."
Marriage and family
She met George W. Bush in July 1977 when mutual friends Joe and Jan O'Neill invited her and Bush to a backyard barbecue at their home. He proposed to her at the end of September and they were married on November 5 of that year, the day after her 31st birthday, at the First United Methodist Church in Midland, the same church in which she had been baptized. Laura bought a tan, two-toned dress off the rack for the wedding. The couple honeymooned in Cozumel, Mexico. George W. Bush detailed his choice to marry Laura as the "best decision of [his] life". Laura, an only child, said she gained "brothers and sisters and wonderful in-laws" who all accepted her after she wed George W. Bush.
The year after their marriage, the couple began campaigning for George W. Bush's 1978 Congressional candidacy. According to George Bush, when he asked her to marry him, she had said, "Yes. But only if you promise me that I'll never have to make a campaign speech." She soon relented, and gave her first stump speech for him in 1978 on the courthouse steps in Muleshoe, Texas. After narrowly winning the primary, he lost the general election.
Bush attended the inauguration of father-in-law George H. W. Bush as vice president in January 1981, after he and his running mate Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election. She attributed her father-in-law's election to the vice presidency with giving her and her husband national exposure.
The Bushes had tried to conceive for three years, but pregnancy did not happen easily. On November 25, 1981, Laura Bush gave birth to fraternal twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna. The twins were born five weeks early by an emergency Caesarean section in Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, as Laura had developed life-threatening pre-eclampsia (toxemia).
George W. Bush credited his wife with his decision to stop drinking in 1986. She reflected that she thought her husband "was drinking too much" amid her knowing it was not his desired way of living. Approaching him, she related that her father had been alcoholic and it was not a pattern she wished to repeat in their family.
She is also credited with having a stabilizing effect on his private life. According to People magazine reporter Jane Simms Podesta, "She is the steel in his back. She is a civilizing influence on him. I think she built him, in many ways, into the person he is today."
Bush traveled to Kuwait in April 1993, accompanying her in-laws as well as brothers-in-law Jeb and Marvin Bush after former president Bush was invited to return to the Middle East for the first time since his presidency.
Several times a year, Bush and her husband travel to their sprawling family estate, the Bush compound, better known as Walker's Point. Located in Kennebunkport, Maine, the compound is where Bush family gatherings have been held for nearly 100 years.
First Lady of Texas
Bush became the First Lady of Texas when her husband was elected as the Governor of Texas and served as first lady of that state from January 17, 1995, to December 21, 2000. When asked about her interest in politics, she responded "It doesn't drive me."
Though during her years in the Governor's Mansion, she did not hold a single formal event, Laura worked for women's and children's causes including health, education, and literacy. She implemented four major initiatives: Take Time For Kids, an awareness campaign to educate parents and caregivers on parenting; family literacy, through cooperation with the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, she urged Texas communities to establish family literacy programs; Reach Out and Read, a pediatric reading program; and Ready to Read, an early childhood educational program.
She raised money for public libraries through her establishment of the Texas Book Festival, in 1995. She established the First Lady's Family Literacy Initiative, which encouraged families to read together. Bush further established "Rainbow Rooms" across the state, in an effort to provide emergency services for neglected or abused children. Through this, she promoted the Adopt-a-Caseworker Program to provide support for Child Protective Services. She used her position to advocate Alzheimer's disease and breast cancer awareness as well.
Her husband announced his campaign for President of the United States in mid-1999, something that she agreed to. She did say, however, that she had never dreamed that he would run for office. The Bush campaign worked to assure voters that as First Lady, she would not seek to emulate then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, who had faced controversy for leading several policy initiatives from within the White House despite being unelected. When asked who she would be like out of the past First Ladies, she insisted it would be herself.
In July, she delivered a keynote address to the delegates at the 2000 Republican National Convention, which put her on the national stage. In December 2000, her husband resigned as Governor of Texas to prepare for his inauguration as President of the United States in January 2001.
First Lady of the United States
As First Lady, Bush was involved in issues of concern to children and women, both nationally and internationally. Her major initiatives included education and women's health.
Education and children
Early into the administration, Bush made it known that she would focus much of her attention on education. This included recruiting highly qualified teachers to ensure that young children would be taught well. She also focused on early child development. In 2001, to promote reading and education, she partnered with the Library of Congress to launch the annual National Book Festival. In January 2002, Bush testified before the Senate Committee on Education, asking for higher teachers' salaries and better training for Head Start programs. She is also credited with creating a national initiative called "Ready to Read, Ready to Learn", which promotes reading at a young age. To promote American patriotic heritage in schools, she helped launch the National Anthem Project. In 2006, Bush and media executives worked together to provide a $500,000 grant for school libraries along the Gulf Coast which had been devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bush spoke regarding America's children:
[W]e need to reassure our children that they are safe in their homes and schools. We need to reassure them that many people love them and care for them, and that while there are some bad people in the world, there are many more good people.
The following day, she composed open letters to America's families, focusing on elementary and middle school students, which she distributed through state education officials. She took an interest in mitigating the emotional effects of the attacks on children, particularly the disturbing images repeatedly replayed on television. On the one-year anniversary, she encouraged parents to instead read to their children, and perhaps light a candle in memoriam, saying, "Don't let your children see the images, especially on September 11, when you know it'll probably be on television again and again – the plane hitting the building or the buildings falling."
Later in her tenure, she was honored by the United Nations, as the body named her honorary ambassador for the United Nations' Decade of Literacy. In this position, she announced that she would host a Conference on Global Literacy. The conference, held in September 2006, encouraged a constant effort to promote literacy and highlighted many successful literacy programs..She coordinated this as a result of her many trips abroad where she witnessed how literacy benefited children in poorer nations.
On July 28, 2008, she visited Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina, where she met with superintendent Connie Backlund and the Friends of Carl Sandburg Home's President Linda Holt as well as various students from Boys and Girls Club of Henderson County, North Carolina.
On October 3, 2008, she visited Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum where she praised her works such as Farmer Boy, These Happy Golden Years and Little House on the Prairie, the last of which she had felt an association with as a child. During the same Laura Ingalls Wilder's estate visit, she said that she read her books to her daughters and gave the writer Save America's Treasures grant.
September 11 attacks
On September 11, 2001, Bush had been hosting her in-laws George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush at the White House and was scheduled to give a testimony to Congress on education. Instead, during the September 11 attacks, Bush was taken to inside the White House and placed in an underground bunker, later being met by her husband, who had returned to Washington from Florida.
Two weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush inaugurated a music concert at the Kennedy Center, organized to raise funds for families of the victims. Though she received applause, she returned the compliment to members of the audience and added that although the event was tragic, Americans had deepened their appreciation "of life itself, how fragile it can be, what a gift it is and how much we need each other". Senator Ted Kennedy, who introduced Bush at the event, praised her and said he knew his late brother, President John F. Kennedy, would also be proud of her. Bush believes the September 11 attacks ignited the interest in the way Afghan women were treated.
Women's health and rights
Another of her signature issues were those relating to the health and well-being of women. She established the Women's Health and Wellness Initiative and became involved with two major campaigns.
Bush first became involved with The Heart Truth awareness campaign in 2003. It is an organization established by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to raise awareness about heart disease in women, and how to prevent the condition. She serves in the honorary position of ambassador for the program leading the federal government's effort to give women a "wake up call" about the risk of heart disease. She commented on the disease: "Like many women, I assumed heart disease was a man's disease and cancer was what we would fear the most. Yet heart disease kills more women in our country than all forms of cancer combined. When it comes to heart disease, education, prevention, and even a little red dress can save lives." She has undertaken a signature personal element of traveling around the country and talking to women at hospital and community events featuring the experiences of women who live, or had lived, with the condition. This outreach was credited with directly saving the life of at least one woman who went to the hospital after experiencing symptoms of a heart attack after hearing her message.
With her predecessor, former First Lady Nancy Reagan, Bush dedicated the First Ladies Red Dress Collection at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in May 2005. It is an exhibit containing red suits worn by former First Ladies Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bush meant to raise awareness by highlighting America's first ladies. She has participated in fashion shows displaying red dresses worn on celebrities as well.
Bush's mother, Jenna Welch, was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 78. She endured surgery and currently has no further signs of cancer. Laura Bush has become a breast cancer activist on her mother's behalf through her involvement in the Susan G. Komen for the Cure. She applauded the foundation's efforts in eliminating cancer and said, "A few short years ago, a diagnosis of breast cancer left little hope of recovery. But thanks to the work of the Komen Foundation ... more women and men are beating breast cancer and beating the odds." She used her position to gain international support for the foundation through the Partnership for Breast Cancer Awareness and Research of the Americas, an initiative that unites experts from the United States, Brazil, Costa Rica and Mexico.
In November 2001, she became the first person other than a president to deliver the weekly presidential radio address. She used the opportunity to discuss the plight of women in Afghanistan leading up to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, saying "The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists." Her husband was originally to give the address but he felt that she should do it; she later recalled, "At that moment, it was not that I found my voice. Instead, it was as if my voice found me." Her words summarized one of the goals and moral rationales of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and it became one of the more famous speeches of his administration. In May 2002, she made a speech to the people of Afghanistan through Radio Liberty. In March 2005, she made the first of three trips to that country as First Lady.
Campaigning
Bush campaigned for Republicans around the country in 2002 for that year's midterm elections, attending and hosting fundraisers as well as giving speeches that were deemed as the Bush administration "working against women's rights issues and using women to do their dirty work" and partly a test for Bush on how well she could campaign for her husband in the impending two years when he sought re-election.
During the 2004 election cycle, Bush made joint appearances with her husband on the campaign trail, including in battleground states such as Florida. She advocated for his re-election in a speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and was credited with having raised $15 million for her husband's campaign as well as the Republican Party while still succeeding in keeping a separate schedule that allowed for her to tend to the traditional duties she had as First Lady. In a July 2004 interview, Teresa Heinz, wife of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, said, "Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job—I mean, since she's been grown up." Heinz later apologized for the remark, stating that she had forgotten that Laura Bush was a teacher and librarian prior to her marriage. Bush stated that she forgave her while insisting her apology was unnecessary, citing her understanding of the "trick questions" asked by the media.
Bush was a participant in the 2006 midterm elections, beginning her campaigning in April. Though her poll numbers had decreased from an 80% approval rating, they still superseded that of President Bush, whose approval rating was only praised by a third of Americans. Ed Henry of CNN noted Bush's popularity, writing, "The first lady is treated like a rock star on the campaign trail – with local Republicans lining up for photographs and autographs – as she criss-crosses the country to help candidates." Bush relied on a strategy of praising the Republican candidate for their achievements and attending events alongside them. In September 2008, Bush spoke during the first night of the 2008 Republican National Convention, her joint appearance with Cindy McCain geared toward raising hurricane relief funds for victims of Hurricane Gustav.
Popularity and style
Laura Bush's approval ratings have consistently ranked very high. In January 2006, a USA Today/CBS/Gallup poll recorded her approval rating at 82 percent and disapproval at 13 percent. That places Bush as one of the most popular first ladies. Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said, "She is more popular, and more welcome, in many parts of the country than the president ... In races where the moderates are in the most trouble, Laura Bush is the one who can do the most good."
Jude Ellison Sady Doyle reasoned that Bush was hard to dislike due to her adopting "the least partisan causes" such as literacy and breast cancer, which would attract the support of most Americans and her coming off as a "mild, polite, ordinary woman who might go to church with your mother, or organize suburban potlucks". Doyle furthered that her statements were never enough to offend others and the harshest criticism that could be bestowed upon her was that she was boring.
She disagreed with Fox News' Chris Wallace in 2006 when Wallace asked why the American people were beginning to lose confidence in President Bush, saying, "Well, I don't think they are. And I don't really believe those polls. I travel around the country, I see people, I see their response to my husband, I see their response to me. There are a lot of difficult challenges right now in the United States ... All of those decisions that the President has to make surrounding each one of these very difficult challenges are hard. They're hard decisions to make. And of course some people are unhappy about what some of those decisions are. But I think people know that he is doing what he thinks is right for the United States, that he's doing what he – especially in the war on terror, what he thinks he is obligated to do for the people in the United States, and that is to protect them ... When his polls were really high they weren't on the front page."
During the January 2005 second inauguration ceremonies for her husband, Laura Bush was looked highly upon by People magazine, The Washington Post, and others for her elegance and fashion sense. At the inauguration she wore a winter white cashmere dress and matching coat designed by Oscar de la Renta. Following the inauguration were the inaugural galas, to which Bush wore a pale, aqua lace gown, sprinkled with crystals, with long sleeves in a silver blue mist. The tulle gown was also designed for her by de la Renta. According to The Washington Post, "[I]t made her look radiant and glamorous."
Foreign trips
During her husband's second term, Bush was more involved in foreign matters. She traveled to numerous countries as a representative of the United States.
As First Lady, she took five goodwill trips to Africa. The purpose of these has mostly been to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and malaria as part of the Bush administration's initiative to address the global epidemics, but Bush has also stressed the need for education and greater opportunities for women. She has taken many other trips to other countries to promote and gain support for President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS relief; these countries include Zambia (2007), Mozambique (2007), Mali (2007), Senegal (2007), and Haiti (2008).
In mid-2007, she took a trip to Myanmar where she spoke out in support of the pro-democracy movement, and urged Burmese soldiers and militias to refrain from violence. Later that October, she ventured to the Middle East. Bush said she was in the region in an attempt to improve America's image by highlighting concern for women's health, specifically promoting her breast cancer awareness work with the US-Middle East Partnership for Breast Cancer Awareness and Research. She defined the trip as successful, saying that stereotypes were broken on both sides.
Overall, Bush traveled to 77 countries in the eight years of her husband's presidency, touring 67 of those during the second term.
Views on policy
Bush is a Republican and has identified herself with the GOP since her marriage.
When asked about abortion in 2000, Bush said she did not believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned. She did not comment on whether women had the right to an abortion. She did say, however, that the country should do "what we can to limit the number of abortions, to try to reduce the number of abortions in a lot of ways, and that is, by talking about responsibility with girls and boys, by teaching abstinence, having abstinence classes everywhere in schools and in churches and in Sunday school".
Bush responded to a question during a 2006 interview concerning the Federal Marriage Amendment by calling for elected leaders not to politicize same-sex marriage, "I don't think it should be used as a campaign tool, obviously. It requires a lot of sensitivity to just talk about the issue ... a lot of sensitivity."
On July 12, 2005, while in South Africa, Bush suggested her husband replace retiring Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor with another woman. On October 2, during a private dinner at the White House with his wife, President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to replace O'Connor. Later that month, after Miers had faced intense criticism, Laura Bush questioned whether the charges were sexist in nature.
Legacy
In late October 2008, days before that year's presidential election, Bush hosted a three-hour session with staffers and historians discussing how she would like to be remembered, leading to this meeting being termed the "legacy lunch". According to historian Myra Gutin, this was the first time in history that a First Lady had ever directly reached out to historians to talk about her accomplishments. Attendants of the meeting said that Bush wanted to change the perception that she was a traditional First Lady in that she always stayed by her husband's side. At a 2014 National Press Club, Anita McBride opined that it would be harder for people to understand where Bush had "the greatest impact" due to the several signature issues that Bush advocated for while First Lady.
In 2017, journalist Brooke Baldwin suggested Bush's efforts toward improving the lives of Afghan women may have contributed to more Afghanistan women being in positions within the Afghanistan private sector.
Bush enjoyed widespread approval by the American public both as the incumbent First Lady and during her retirement. The Washington Post contributor Krissah Thompson recalled Bush's favorability being "as close to universal popularity as any modern political figure" when the Bushes left the White House in 2009 and called her "the most high-profile promoter of the George W. Bush legacy — a burden she carries lightly and with a smile." A 2014 poll which asked who was the most popular First Lady in the past 25 years found Bush ranked in fourth place (out of 4 candidates), behind Hillary Clinton, mother-in-law Barbara and direct successor Michelle Obama.
Subsequent activities
In February 2009, the month after she and her husband left office, Laura and George W. Bush moved into a new residence in Dallas. In November 2009, the former First Lady, accompanied by her husband, made a visit to families of veterans in Fort Hood. The couple expressed their wishes that the trip not be publicized. However, Fox News revealed the trip the following morning.
In May 2010, Bush released her memoir, Spoken from the Heart, in conjunction with a national tour.
On May 11, 2010, during an interview on Larry King Live, Bush was asked about same-sex marriage. She said she viewed it as a generational issue and believed it would be made legal in the future. Bush offered support for the issue by saying "when couples are committed to each other and love each other ... they ought to have the same sort of rights that everyone has." Bush referred to her 2000 interview, reaffirming her support for Roe v. Wade, "I think it's important that [abortion] remain legal. Because I think it's important for people – that for medical reasons and, and other reasons."
On February 22, 2013, without her consent, she was included in a pro-gay advertisement from the Respect of Marriage Coalition. A statement from Bush's spokesperson states that Bush "did not approve of her inclusion in this advertisement nor is she associated with the group that made the ad in any way. When she became aware of the advertisement last night, we requested that the group remove her from it."
Bush continued to remain involved and concerned over the state of women in Afghanistan, speaking out editorials and appearances during 2013 that the women and girls who had been helped could not be abandoned during and after the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. In March 2016, Bush wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post on changes occurring among women in Afghanistan while noting continued violence and calling for American involvement in Afghanistan to be consistent and predictable in continuing along with the international community "to provide significant development assistance in the areas of health care, entrepreneurship and education". In June 2016, Bush stated that she hoped the US remained in Afghanistan and had consulted with women there who feared the departure of American troops would create "a vacuum" similar to Iraq, furthering that the US "would have to start all over again" if they withdrew troops. In late 2017, Bush and First Lady of Afghanistan Rula Ghani traveled to Washington to rally lawmaker support for Afghanistan and women there.
In April 2015, Bush criticized Rand Paul's isolationist stance on U.S. foreign aid, calling the view "not really realistic" and asserting the United States should save lives whenever it can. That August, she shared the first public photos of her newborn granddaughter Poppy Louise.
Public appearances
On October 26, 2009, Bush spoke at the 25th Annual Women's Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.
On May 31, 2012, Bush and her husband unveiled their official portraits painted by John Howard Sanden in a ceremony at the White House attended by several members of their family and former members of the Bush administration. Bush jokingly told then First Lady Michelle Obama at the ceremony that "nothing makes a house a home like having portraits of its former occupants staring down at you from the walls". Bush was portrayed in the White House's Green Room in her portrait, wearing a midnight blue gown.
On July 25, 2012, she spoke at the Luisa Hunnewell's estate, where she praised Edith Wharton's works, in particular Ethan Frome on her 150th anniversary. She also said that prior to this speech she also visited houses of Mark Twain at his 166th anniversary on November 29, 2001, and was a guest of the show Mark Twain Tonight. Ten years prior to the Luisa Hunnewell's estate visit she also visited Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts at which she met with the National Trust for Historic Preservation's President and listened to Concord-Carlisle High School's chorus.
In April 2013, Bush was in attendance at a news conference, where she said the recently built George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum was not a monument for her husband but instead a representation of the White House and the struggles of America during his tenure. She also mentioned not having trouble donating clothes to the library, admitting that she probably would have never worn them again in the first place. That month it was announced that she would serve as a keynote speaker for the 2013 Global Business Travel Association Convention in August. At the convention, she stressed the importance of child literacy, continuing her advocating of an issue that she had become associated with since her tenure as First Lady. In early August 2013, she reported that her husband was in stable condition after having a stent implanted in his heart, calling it "terrific" that it was caught in time, and stressed the importance of regular check ups with doctors. In September, she appeared at a fundraiser for the organization Solutions for Change.
On April 26, 2014, she gave a speech at the Ericsson Center in Plano, Texas, where she spoke on behalf of the company's mentoring program for girls. Throughout the month, she made appearances at fundraisers for schools in Colorado. On May 9, 2014, she was scheduled to speak at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on the anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing. She was to arrive there with her daughter Barbara Pierce Bush, her husband George W. Bush, and Soledad O'Brien, a journalist.
In 2015, Bush had several speaking arrangements on issues relating to her husband's presidency. In July, the former First Lady, accompanied by her husband, attended the centennial anniversary of Tioga Road In Yosemite National Park in July and appeared in New Orleans in order to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In October, she was a featured speaker for Wayland Baptist University.
Bush was keynote speaker at the Go Red for Women Summit in Austin in February 2016, an event designed to promote both financing and awareness for women fighting heart disease. In March, Bush attended the funeral of Nancy Reagan in California. and attended the memorial service for victims in the Dallas police officers shooting four months later in July.
On February 4, 2017, Bush appeared at the annual Union Regional Foundation's Heart of a Woman brunch, saying women do not worry about their own health due to often taking care of someone else and that their improving in health would benefit those around them.
On March 8, Bush was keynote speaker at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center's annual Humanitarian Awards Dinner, Bush relating that she had learned about the Holocaust through her father. In April, Bush was the keynote speaker of the 25th annual Art of Hope Gala at the Dallas Museum of Art. On May 17, Bush made her second visit to the Andrew Johnson Hermitage and gave the keynote address at the 117th Spring Outing celebration. On May 31, Bush delivered a speech at the South-Central Monarch Symposium on the monarch butterfly decline in recent years. On June 3, Bush served as the keynote speaker at the National Willa Cather Center dedication in Red Cloud, Nebraska and officially opened the center with a ribbon cut. The following month, Bush accepted an invitation to join the eminent international Council of Patrons of the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The university, which is the product of east–west foundational partnerships (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Open Society Foundation, IKEA Foundation etc.) and regional cooperation, serves extraordinarily talented women from 15 countries across Asia and the Middle East, including Afghanistan and Myanmar. In September, Bush delivered the keynote address at the Gateway to Opportunity luncheon at the Omni Dallas Hotel.
In April 2020, amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Bush and Michelle Obama made a joint appearance on the "One World: Together At Home" televised concert special by the Global Citizen Festival where they expressed appreciation for healthcare workers, first responders, pharmacists, veterinarians, sanitation workers as well as grocery store workers and those delivering food and supplies to homes.
On September 11, 2021, Bush and her husband commemorated the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks at the Flight 93 National Memorial.
Obama administration
Over the course of the Obama presidency, she developed an alliance with Michelle Obama, her immediate successor as First Lady. Despite their political differences, Michelle Obama has called Laura Bush both her friend and a role model, crediting Bush with setting "a high bar" for her during her tenure as First Lady. Bush defended Obama during her husband's campaign for president in 2008, publicly coming to her defense when she received criticism for a remark she made about being proud of her country for the first time in her adulthood during the campaign.
Obama sent Bush a note thanking her and after the election met with Bush at the White House in November 2008, Bush giving Obama a tour of her and her family's soon-to-be home.
In September 2009, Bush openly praised President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. She reasoned that President Obama was performing well in the presidency despite having multiple initiatives taking place and complimented the First Lady's transformation of the White House into "a comfortable home for her family".
The following year, in September 2010, Bush and Obama commemorated the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks by leading a ceremony from a mountaintop to national memorial park.
The two both acted as keynote speakers and met with the families of the 40 victims of United Airlines Flight 93 plane crash. In their remarks, the two sang each other's praises. Obama thanked Bush for her handling of the aftermath of September 11 attacks, while Bush called her a "first lady who serves this country with such grace".
In July 2013, Bush and Obama appeared together in Africa at the First Ladies Summit. Their husbands were also present, leading White House staffer Ben Rhodes to refer to the joint appearance as proof of the support for Africa in the United States regardless of political party. In their remarks, both Bush and Obama stressed the importance of being role models.
Nine months later, on April 18, 2014, Bush spoke to Inquisitr regarding income inequality where she said next regarding Michelle Obama's income: "I want to make sure that when she's working she's getting paid the same as men. I gotta say that First Ladies right now don't [get paid], even though that's a tough job!" In August 2014, Bush and Obama appeared together at the Kennedy Center. Shortly afterward, Bush told The Washington Post that she believed Obama was ready to leave the White House.
In March 2015, Bush and Obama were named as co-chairs of the Find Your Park campaign, an attempt to increase national park support and introduce millennials to the park service before its centennial the following year. The pair made a joint appearance at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in September 2015, Bush appearing physically while Obama was present through a video call. Obama spoke of her admiration for Bush, who in turn mentioned their collaborations as "a great example for the world to see that women in different political parties, in the United States, agree on so many issues".
Trump administration
On January 20, 2017, Bush and her husband attended the Inauguration of Donald Trump. In a November interview, Bush stated that she wished the Trumps "the very best" given that she knew what it was like to live in the White House and confirmed that she both been in contact with former First Lady Melania Trump and been invited to the Diplomatic Reception Room by retained personnel from the Bush administration.
On June 17, 2018, Bush wrote an opinion piece firmly opposing the Trump administration family separation policy in The Washington Post. She mentioned how her mother-in-law Barbara Bush had picked up a crying AIDS baby while on a visit to the HIV/AIDS shelter "Grandma's House" in 1989. She mentioned this to indicate her shock upon discovery that the workers at the children's border shelter have been instructed "not to pick up or touch the children to comfort them".
Biden administration
On January 20, 2021, Bush and her husband attended the Inauguration of Joe Biden.
Involvement with GOP
In the later months of 2012, Bush campaigned for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, hosting a fundraiser in September with Ann Romney and appearing in Livonia, Michigan, the following month for a Romney campaign event. Michigan spokeswoman for the Romney campaign Kelsey Knight said having Mrs. Bush there would "just fuel the fire and the momentum we are seeing". She also campaigned for vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, telling a crowd in Detroit that he and Romney had "better answers" on the economy and foreign policy.
After the 2012 election, where Romney lost to President Obama, Bush was asked in March 2013 during an interview whether the GOP's positions on social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion led to more than half of female voters voting for the President. Bush responded that some of the candidates had "frightened some candidates", but at the same time expressed her liking of the Republican Party having room for difference of opinion and that within the party, "we have room for all".
Throughout 2015, Bush was active in the presidential campaign of brother-in-law Jeb Bush, hosting fundraisers and endorsing him. This was the most politically involved she had been since leaving the White House seven years prior, supporting her brother-in-law alongside the rest of her family because, in her words, he was "our candidate".
In March she affirmed her support for her brother-in-law, calling herself and her husband "huge Jeb supporters". It was reported that she would be assisting the campaign's fundraising in Florida in October, Bloomberg News commenting that Jeb Bush was "calling in help from perhaps the most popular member of his family". According to Clay Johnson, a friend of the Bush family, she was reportedly surprised by Donald Trump's becoming frontrunner over the course of the election cycle. In February 2016, amid her brother-in-law's campaign trailing Trump in South Carolina polls, Bush traveled there with her husband. Jeb Bush dropped out of the race after the South Carolina primary. The following month, Bush declined answering if she would vote for Trump, who was the frontrunner in the Republican primary, should he become the nominee and said the U.S. was going through a xenophobic period at the time of the election cycle. Ultimately, Bush and her husband refused to vote for president in 2016.
Libraries
Bush created the Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries "to support the education of our nation's children by providing funds to update, extend, and diversify the book and print collections of America's school libraries". Every year, the Laura Bush Foundation's grants awards more than $1,000,000 to US schools. The Laura Bush 21st Century Library Program grant, offered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, provides funding for "the recruitment and education of library students and continuing education for those already in the profession, as well as the development of new programs and curricula". Bush's 21st Century Library Program is an equal opportunity grant that does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, or age. In May 2015, Bush bestowed a $7,000 grant to six schools within Austin, Texas. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries awarded grants of $10,000 to $75,000 to school libraries whose collections were damaged or destroyed in the hurricanes. In 2017, after the devastation from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria as well the California wildfires, the foundation again is going to dedicate their resources to disaster-affected schools to rebuild their book collections.
Laura W. Bush Institute for Women's Health
In August 2007, the Laura W. Bush Institute for Women's Health (LWBIWH) was founded at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. This institute aims to integrate research, education and community outreach in a multidisciplinary approach to women's health and has begun efforts to establish a multi-campus women's health institute in Amarillo, El Paso, Lubbock and the Permian Basin.
A subsidiary of the center, the Jenna Welch Women's Center, opened in Midland, Texas, on August 10, 2010, to deliver expert medical care to women and their families. Operating in partnership with the Laura Bush Institute, the Jenna Welch Center, named for Bush's mother, strives for excellence in research, education and community outreach.
Writings and recordings
Bush wrote her first book with her daughter Jenna called Read All About It!. It was published on April 23, 2008. Bush's memoir, Spoken from the Heart, was published in 2010. The book received mixed reviews from critics but got positive responses from readers. The book earned Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Memoir and Autobiography (2010). Her non-fictional book about oppressed women of Afghanistan titled We Are Afghan Women: Voices of Hope was published on March 8, 2016. She wrote another children's book with her daughter Jenna, Our Great Big Backyard. The book was published on May 10, 2016. She was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Junior League of Dallas, of which she is a member.
Awards and honors
During and after her tenure as the First Lady, Laura Bush received a number of awards and honors. In October 2002, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity honored her in recognition of her efforts on behalf of education. Also in 2002, she was named Barbara Walters' Most Fascinating Person of the year.
The American Library Association honored her for her years of support to America's libraries and librarians in April 2005.
On October 18, 2003, she was conferred by the former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo the Order of Gabriela Silang, a single-class order which makes her the first U.S. First Lady recipient during the state visit of President George Bush to the Philippines.
She received an award in honor of her dedication to help improve the living conditions and education of children around the world, from the Kuwait-American Foundation in March 2006. She accepted The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal on behalf of disaster relief workers around the world in May 2006 from Vanderbilt University. In 2007, she received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Four learning facilities have been named for her: the Laura Welch Bush Elementary School of Pasadena ISD in Houston, Texas, the Laura W. Bush Elementary School in the Leander ISD in Travis County, Texas, just outside Austin, the Laura Bush Middle School (Lubbock-Cooper ISD) in Lubbock, Texas, and the Laura Bush Education Center at Camp Bondsteel, a U.S. military base in Kosovo. She was awarded the 2008 Christian Freedom International Freedom Award. Bush is on the Board of Selectors of Jefferson Awards for Public Service.
In 2012, Bush—along with Hector Ruiz, Charles Matthews, Melinda Perrin, Julius Glickman and Admiral William H. McRaven, the Navy Seal who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden—was named a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin.
In October 2015, Bush was conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Wayland Baptist University in recognition of her longtime advocacy on behalf of education, health care and human rights following an address she gave on the university's campus. November, she received the 2015 Prevent Blindness Person of Vision Award.
In November 2016 Bush received 10 for 10 award from Women's Democracy Network in recognition of her years of work on behalf of Afghan women's rights.
In May 2017 Bush received an honor at the Women Making History Awards in Washington, D.C.
In 2018 Laura Bush and former President George W. Bush were awarded the National Constitution Center Liberty Medal for their work with U.S. military veterans since leaving the White House.
In 2021 Bush received the Concordia Leadership Award.
In popular culture
Laura Bush is portrayed by Elizabeth Banks in Oliver Stone's film W.
Curtis Sittenfeld's bestseller novel American Wife is based on much of her life. In 2005 her biography The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush by Ann Gerhart was published. In 2006 another biography was also published called Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady by Ronald Kessler.
Bush appeared in the last season of HGTV's Fixer Upper.
See also
References
Further reading
Gerhart, Ann. The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush. A biography.
Gormley, Beatrice. Laura Bush: America's First Lady. A biography.
Kelley, Kitty. The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty.
Kessler, Ronald. Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of the First Lady. A biography.
Montgomery, Leslie. Were It Not For Grace: Stories From Women After God's Own Heart; Featuring Condoleezza Rice, First Lady Laura Bush, Beth Moore & Others. Laura Bush shares her story about how God has had his hand on her life.
External links
Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. U.S.Institute of Museums and Library Services.
First Lady biography at Whitehouse.gov
"The book on Laura Bush" by Dennis B. Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A Laura Bush we don't know" by Eugene Robinson, San Francisco Chronicle
Laura Bush at C-SPAN's First Ladies: Influence & Image
Jessie Hawkins and Jenna Welch Grandmother and Mother of Laura Bush Borderlands EPCC
|-
|-
1946 births
Living people
20th-century American educators
20th-century American women educators
20th-century Methodists
21st-century Methodists
21st-century American women writers
21st-century American memoirists
American educational theorists
American librarians
American women librarians
American people of English descent
American people of French descent
American people of Swiss descent
Schoolteachers from Texas
American women activists
Daughters of the American Revolution people
Bush family
Members of the Junior League
First Ladies and Gentlemen of Texas
First Ladies of the United States
HIV/AIDS activists
People from Midland, Texas
Robert E. Lee High School (Midland, Texas) alumni
Southern Methodist University alumni
Texas Republicans
University of Texas at Austin School of Information alumni
American women children's writers
American children's writers
American women memoirists
Writers from Texas
American United Methodists
UNESCO Goodwill Ambassadors
Philanthropists from Texas | [
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17530 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice | Lattice | Lattice may refer to:
Arts and design
Latticework, an ornamental criss-crossed framework, an arrangement of crossing laths or other thin strips of material
Lattice (music), an organized grid model of pitch ratios
Lattice (pastry), an ornamental pattern of crossing strips of pastry
Companies
Lattice Engines, a technology company specializing in business applications for marketing and sales
Lattice Group, a former British gas transmission business
Lattice Semiconductor, a US-based integrated circuit manufacturer
Science, technology, and mathematics
Mathematics
Lattice (group), a repeating arrangement of points
Lattice (discrete subgroup), a discrete subgroup of a topological group whose quotient carries an invariant finite Borel measure
Lattice (module), a module over a ring which is embedded in a vector space over a field
Lattice graph, a graph that can be drawn within a repeating arrangement of points
Lattice-based cryptography, encryption systems based on repeating arrangements of points
Lattice (order), a partially ordered set with unique least upper bounds and greatest lower bounds
Lattice-based access control, computer security systems based on partially ordered access privileges
Skew lattice, a non-commutative generalization of order-theoretic lattices
Lattice multiplication, a multiplication algorithm suitable for hand calculation
Other uses in science and technology
Bethe lattice, a regular infinite tree structure used in statistical mechanics
Crystal lattice or Bravais lattice, a repetitive arrangement of atoms
Lattice C, a compiler for the C programming language
Lattice mast, a type of observation mast common on major warships in the early 20th century
Lattice model (physics), a model defined not on a continuum, but on a grid
Lattice tower, or truss tower is a type of freestanding framework tower
Lattice truss bridge, a type of truss bridge that uses many closely spaced diagonal elements
Other uses
Lattice model (finance), a method for evaluating stock options that divides time into discrete intervals
See also
Grid (disambiguation)
Mesh (disambiguation)
Trellis (disambiguation) | [
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17532 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorisidae | Lorisidae | Lorisidae (or sometimes Loridae) is a family of strepsirrhine primates. The lorisids are all slim arboreal animals and comprise the lorises, pottos and angwantibos. Lorisids live in tropical, central Africa as well as in south and southeast Asia.
Classification
There are four genera and sixteen species of lorisid.
Order Primates
Suborder Strepsirrhini: non-tarsier prosimians
Infraorder Lemuriformes
Superfamily Lemuroidea
Superfamily Lorisoidea
Family Lorisidae
Subfamily Perodicticinae
Genus Arctocebus, angwantibos
Genus Perodicticus, pottos
Subfamily Lorisinae
Genus Loris, slender lorises
Genus Nycticebus, slow lorises
Family Galagidae: galagos
Suborder Haplorrhini: tarsiers, monkeys and apes
Description
Lorisids have a close, woolly fur, which is usually grey or brown, darker on the top side. The eyes are large and face forward. The ears are small and often partially hidden in the fur. The thumbs are opposable and the index finger is short. The second toe of the hind legs has a fine claw for grooming, typical for strepsirrhines. Their tails are short or are missing completely. They grow to a length of 17 to 40 cm and a weight of between 0.3 and 2 kg, depending on the species. Their dental formula is similar to that of lemurs:
Behavior and ecology
Lorisids are nocturnal and arboreal. Unlike the closely related galagos, lorisids never jump. Some have slow deliberate movements, whilst others can move with some speed across branches. It was previously thought that all lorisids moved slowly, but investigations using red light proved this to be wrong. Nonetheless, even the faster species freeze or move slowly if they hear or see any potential predator. This habit of remaining motionless whilst in danger is successful only because of the leafy environment of their jungle home, which helps to conceal their true position. With their strong hands they clasp at the branches and cannot be removed without significant force. Most lorisids are solitary or live in small family groups.
Slow lorises from southeast Asia produce a secretion from their brachial gland (a scent gland on the upper arm, between the axilla and elbow), that is licked and mixed with their saliva to form a toxin which may be used for defense. The red slender loris (Loris tardigradus) from India also possesses brachial glands, but it is uncertain whether they also synthesize the toxin. The potto (Perodicticus potto) is thought to lack brachial glands, though it produces similar toxic excretions with its anal glands.
Lorisids have a gestation period of four to six months and give birth to two young. These often clasp themselves to the belly of the mother or wait in nests, while the mother goes to search for food. After three to nine months - depending on the species - they are weaned and are fully mature within 10 to 18 months. The life expectancy of lorises can be to up to 20 years.
Lorisids consume insects, bird eggs and small vertebrates as well as fruits and gums.
References
Literature cited
.
Primate families
Lorises and galagos
Miocene primates
Miocene mammals of Africa
Extant Miocene first appearances
Taxa named by John Edward Gray | [
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17537 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic%20acid%20diethylamide | Lysergic acid diethylamide | Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily visual, as well as auditory, hallucinations. Dilated pupils, increased blood pressure, and increased body temperature are typical. Effects typically begin within half an hour and can last for up to 20 hours. LSD is also capable of causing mystical experiences and ego dissolution, albeit less frequently than compounds such as psilocybin. It is used mainly as a recreational drug or for spiritual reasons. LSD is both the prototypical psychedelic and one of the 'classical' psychedelics, being the psychedelics with the greatest scientific and cultural significance. LSD is typically either swallowed or held under the tongue. It is most often sold on blotter paper and less commonly as tablets, in a watery solution or in gelatin squares.
LSD is considered to be non-addictive with low potential for abuse. Frequent use rapidly builds tolerance, requiring exponentially larger doses to feel an effect. Adverse psychological reactions are possible, such as anxiety, paranoia, and delusions. It is possible for LSD to induce either intermittent or chronic visual hallucinations, in spite of no further use. Common effects include visual snow and palinopsia. In cases where this causes distress or impairment it is diagnosed as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD). While overdose from LSD is unknown, LSD can cause injury and death as a result of accidents stemming from psychological impairment. The effects of LSD are thought to stem primarily from it being an agonist at the 5-HT2A receptor, while how exactly LSD exerts its effects by agonism at this receptor are still not fully known, corresponding increased glutamatergic neurotransmission and reduced default mode network activity are thought to be key mechanisms of action. In addition to serotonin, LSD also binds to dopamine D1 and D2 receptors, which is why LSD tends to be more stimulating than compounds such as psilocybin. In pure form, LSD is clear or white in color, has no smell, and is crystalline. It breaks down with exposure to ultraviolet light.
LSD was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938 from lysergic acid, a chemical derived from the hydrolysis of ergotamine, an alkaloid found in ergot, a fungus that infects grain. LSD was one of various lysergamides Hofmann synthesized from lysergic acid while trying to develop a new analeptic. Hofmann discovered its effects in humans in 1943, after unintentionally ingesting an unknown amount, possibly absorbing it through his skin. LSD was subject to exceptional interest within the field of psychiatry in the 1950s and early 1960s, with Sandoz distributing LSD to researchers under the trademark name Delysid in an attempt to find a marketable use for it.
LSD-assisted psychotherapy was used in the 1950s and early 1960s by psychiatrists such as Humphry Osmond, who pioneered the application of LSD to the treatment of alcoholism, with promising results, resulting in Osmond coining the term 'psychedelic' (lit. mind manifesting) as a term for LSD and related hallucinogens, superseding the previously held 'psychotomimetic' model in which LSD was believed to mimic schizophrenia, due to the discovery of LSD's ability to induce transcendental experiences with lasting psychological benefit, in contrast to schizophrenia. During this time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was interested in LSD as an addition to its preexisting research into using psychoactive substances to aid interrogation under Project MKUltra. Due to LSD's unpredictability, the CIA eventually ceased research into this in favor of the possibility of giving LSD to world leaders so that they would discredit themselves under its influence. This resulted in the CIA administering LSD to unwitting test subjects in order to observe how they would react, the most well-known example of this being Operation Midnight Climax. LSD was one of several psychoactive substances evaluated by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps as possible non-lethal incapacitants in the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments.
In the 1960s LSD and other psychedelics were adopted by, and became synonymous with, the counterculture movement due to their perceived ability to 'expand consciousness'. This resulted in LSD being viewed as a cultural threat to American values and the Vietnam war effort, and it was designated as a Schedule I (illegal) substance in 1968. It was listed as a schedule 1 controlled substance by the United Nations in 1971 and currently has no approved medical uses. , about 10% of people in the United States have used LSD at some point in their lives, while 0.7% have used it in the last year. It was most popular in the 1960s to 1980s. The use of LSD among US adults increased 56.4% from 2015 to 2018.
Uses
Recreational
LSD is commonly used as a recreational drug in the company of friends, in large crowds, or by oneself.
Spiritual
LSD can catalyze intense spiritual experiences and is thus considered an entheogen. Some users have reported out of body experiences. In 1966, Timothy Leary established the League for Spiritual Discovery with LSD as its sacrament. Stanislav Grof has written that religious and mystical experiences observed during LSD sessions appear to be phenomenologically indistinguishable from similar descriptions in the sacred scriptures of the great religions of the world and the texts of ancient civilizations.
Medical
LSD currently has no approved uses in medicine. A meta analysis concluded that a single dose was effective at reducing alcohol consumption in alcoholism. LSD has also been studied in depression, anxiety, and drug dependence, with positive preliminary results.
Effects
LSD is exceptionally potent, with as little as 20 μg capable of producing a noticeable effect.
Physical
LSD can cause pupil dilation, reduced appetite, profuse sweating, and wakefulness. Other physical reactions to LSD are highly variable and nonspecific, some of which may be secondary to the psychological effects of LSD. Among the reported symptoms are elevated body temperature, blood sugar, and heart rate, alongside goose bumps, jaw clenching, mouth dryness, and hyperreflexia. In negative experiences, numbness, weakness, nausea, and tremors have also been exhibited.
Psychological
The most common immediate psychological effects of LSD are visual hallucinations and illusions (colloquially known as "trips"), which vary depending on how much is used and how the dosage interacts with the brain. Trips usually start within 20–30 minutes of taking LSD orally (less if snorted or taken intravenously), peak three to four hours after ingestion, and can last up to 20 hours in high doses. Users may also experience an "afterglow" of improved mood or perceived mental state for days or even weeks after ingestion in some experiences. Good trips are reportedly deeply stimulating and pleasurable, and typically involve intense joy or euphoria, a greater appreciation for life, reduced anxiety, a sense of spiritual enlightenment, and a sense of belonging or interconnectedness with the universe. Negative experiences, colloquially known as "bad trips," evoke an array of dark emotions, such as irrational fear, anxiety, panic, paranoia, dread, distrustfulness, hopelessness, and even suicidal ideation. While it is impossible to predict when a bad trip will occur, one's mood, surroundings, sleep, hydration, social setting, and other factors can be controlled (colloquially referred to as "set and setting") to minimize the risk of a bad trip.
Sensory
LSD causes an animated sensory experience of senses, emotions, memories, time, and awareness for 6 to 20 hours, depending on dosage and tolerance. Generally beginning within 30 to 90 minutes after ingestion, the user may experience anything from subtle changes in perception to overwhelming cognitive shifts. Changes in auditory and visual perception are also typical.
Some sensory effects may include an experience of radiant or more vibrant colors, objects and surfaces appearing to ripple, "breathe," or otherwise move, spinning fractals superimposed on one's vision, colored patterns behind closed eyelids, an altered sense of time, geometric patterns emerging on walls and other textured objects, and morphing objects. Some users also report a strong metallic taste for the duration of the effects. Food's texture or taste may be different, and users may also have an aversion to foods that they would normally enjoy. Similar effects have also been found in rats.
Some report that the inanimate world appears to animate in an inexplicable way; for instance, objects that are static in three dimensions can seem to be moving relative to one or more additional spatial dimensions. Many of the basic visual effects resemble the phosphenes seen after applying pressure to the eye and have also been studied as form constants. Sometimes these effects and patterns can be changed when concentrated on, or can change based on thoughts, emotions or music. The auditory effects of LSD may include echo-like distortions of sounds, changes in ability to discern concurrent auditory and visual stimuli, and a general intensification of the experience of music. Higher doses often cause intense and fundamental distortions of sensory perception such as synesthesia, the experience of additional spatial or temporal dimensions, and temporary dissociation.
Adverse effects
Out of the 20 drugs ranked in order of individual and societal harm by David Nutt, LSD was third to last, or approximately 1/10th as harmful as alcohol. The most significant adverse effect of LSD was impairment of mental functioning while intoxicated.
Mental disorders
LSD may trigger panic attacks or feelings of extreme anxiety, known colloquially as a "bad trip". LSD is capable of exacerbating mental illnesses and precipitating the early onset of schizophrenia in vulnerable individuals. Although population studies have not found an increase incidence of mental illness in psychedelic drug users overall, with psychedelic users actually having lower rates of depression and substance abuse than the control group, there is evidence that people with severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia have a higher likelihood of experiencing adverse effects from taking LSD.
Suggestibility
While publicly available documents indicate that the CIA and Department of Defense have discontinued research into the use of LSD as a means of mind control, research from the 1960s suggests that both mentally ill and healthy people are more suggestible while under its influence.
Flashbacks
"Flashbacks" are a reported psychological phenomenon in which an individual experiences an episode of some of LSD's subjective effects after the drug has worn off, persisting for days or months after hallucinogen use. Individuals with hallucinogen persisting perception disorder experience intermittent or chronic flashbacks that cause distress or impairment in life and work.
Cancer and pregnancy
The mutagenic potential of LSD is unclear. Overall, the evidence seems to point to limited or no effect at commonly used doses. Studies showed no evidence of teratogenic or mutagenic effects.
Addiction and tolerance
Tolerance to LSD builds up with consistent use and cross-tolerance has been demonstrated between LSD, mescaline,
and psilocybin.
Researchers believe that tolerance returns to baseline after two weeks of not using psychedelics.
The NIH states that LSD is addictive, while most other sources state it is not. A 2009 textbook states that it "rarely produce[s] compulsive use." A 2006 review states it is readily abused, but does not result in addiction. There are no recorded successful attempts to train animals to self-administer LSD in laboratory settings.
Overdose
A report in 2008 stated that, though there was no "comprehensive review since the 1950s" and "almost no legal clinical research" since the 1970s, there had been "no documented human deaths from an LSD overdose". Eight individuals who accidentally consumed very high amounts by mistaking LSD for cocaine developed comatose states, hyperthermia, vomiting, gastric bleeding, and respiratory problems—all survived, however, with supportive care. According to more recent reports, several behavioral-related fatalities and suicides have occurred due to LSD.
Reassurance in a calm, safe environment is beneficial. Agitation can be safely addressed with benzodiazepines such as lorazepam or diazepam. Neuroleptics such as haloperidol are not recommended because they may have adverse effects. LSD is rapidly absorbed, so activated charcoal and emptying of the stomach is of little benefit, unless done within 30–60 minutes of ingesting an overdose of LSD. Sedation or physical restraint is rarely required, and excessive restraint may cause complications such as hyperthermia (over-heating) or rhabdomyolysis.
Massive doses "should be treated with supportive care, including respiratory support and endotracheal intubation if needed. Hypertension [high blood pressure], tachycardia [rapid heart-beat], and hyperthermia should be treated symptomatically. Hypotension [low blood pressure] should be treated initially with fluids and subsequently with pressors if required." "Intravenous administration of anticoagulants, vasodilators, and sympatholytics may be useful" when treating ergotism.
Pharmacology
Pharmacodynamics
Most serotonergic psychedelics are not significantly dopaminergic, and LSD is therefore atypical in this regard. The agonism of the D2 receptor by LSD may contribute to its psychoactive effects in humans.
LSD binds to most serotonin receptor subtypes except for the 5-HT3 and 5-HT4 receptors. However, most of these receptors are affected at too low affinity to be sufficiently activated by the brain concentration of approximately 10–20 nM. In humans, recreational doses of LSD can affect 5-HT1A (Ki=1.1nM), 5-HT2A (Ki=2.9nM), 5-HT2B (Ki=4.9nM), 5-HT2C (Ki=23nM), 5-HT5A (Ki=9nM [in cloned rat tissues]), and 5-HT6 receptors (Ki=2.3nM). Although not present in humans, 5-HT5B receptors found in rodents also have a high affinity for LSD. The psychedelic effects of LSD are attributed to cross-activation of 5-HT2A receptor heteromers. Many but not all 5-HT2A agonists are psychedelics and 5-HT2A antagonists block the psychedelic activity of LSD. LSD exhibits functional selectivity at the 5-HT2A and 5HT2C receptors in that it activates the signal transduction enzyme phospholipase A2 instead of activating the enzyme phospholipase C as the endogenous ligand serotonin does.
Exactly how LSD produces its effects is unknown, but it is thought that it works by increasing glutamate release in the cerebral cortex and therefore excitation in this area, specifically in layers IV and V. LSD, like many other drugs of recreational use, has been shown to activate DARPP-32-related pathways. The drug enhances dopamine D2 receptor protomer recognition and signaling of D2–5-HT2A receptor complexes, which may contribute to its psychotic effects. LSD has been shown to have low affinity for H1 receptors, displaying antihistamine effects.
LSD is a biased agonist that induces a conformation in serotonin receptors that preferentially recruits β-arrestin over activating G proteins. LSD also has an exceptionally long residence time when bound to serotonin receptors lasting hours, consistent with the long lasting effects of LSD despite its relatively rapid clearance. A crystal structure of 5-HT2B bound to LSD reveals an extracellular loop that forms a lid over the diethylamide end of the binding cavity which explains the slow rate of LSD unbinding from serotonin receptors. The related lysergamide lysergic acid amide (LSA) that lacks the diethylamide moiety is far less hallucinogenic in comparison.
Pharmacokinetics
The effects of LSD normally last between 6 and 12 hours depending on dosage, tolerance, body weight, and age. The Sandoz prospectus for "Delysid" warned: "intermittent disturbances of affect may occasionally persist for several days." Aghajanian and Bing (1964) found LSD had an elimination half-life of only 175 minutes (about 3 hours). However, using more accurate techniques, Papac and Foltz (1990) reported that 1 µg/kg oral LSD given to a single male volunteer had an apparent plasma half-life of 5.1 hours, with a peak plasma concentration of 5 ng/mL at 3 hours post-dose.
The pharmacokinetics of LSD were not properly determined until 2015, which is not surprising for a drug with the kind of low-μg potency that LSD possesses. In a sample of 16 healthy subjects, a single mid-range 200 μg oral dose of LSD was found to produce mean maximal concentrations of 4.5 ng/mL at a median of 1.5 hours (range 0.5–4 hours) post-administration. Concentrations of LSD decreased following first-order kinetics with a half-life of 3.6±0.9 hours and a terminal half-life of 8.9±5.9 hours.
The effects of the dose of LSD given lasted for up to 12 hours and were closely correlated with the concentrations of LSD present in circulation over time, with no acute tolerance observed. Only 1% of the drug was eliminated in urine unchanged, whereas 13% was eliminated as the major metabolite 2-oxo-3-hydroxy-LSD (O-H-LSD) within 24 hours. O-H-LSD is formed by cytochrome P450 enzymes, although the specific enzymes involved are unknown, and it does not appear to be known whether O-H-LSD is pharmacologically active or not. The oral bioavailability of LSD was crudely estimated as approximately 71% using previous data on intravenous administration of LSD. The sample was equally divided between male and female subjects and there were no significant sex differences observed in the pharmacokinetics of LSD.
Chemistry
LSD is a chiral compound with two stereocenters at the carbon atoms C-5 and C-8, so that theoretically four different optical isomers of LSD could exist. LSD, also called (+)-D-LSD, has the absolute configuration (5R,8R). The C-5 isomers of lysergamides do not exist in nature and are not formed during the synthesis from d-lysergic acid. Retrosynthetically, the C-5 stereocenter could be analysed as having the same configuration of the alpha carbon of the naturally occurring amino acid L-tryptophan, the precursor to all biosynthetic ergoline compounds.
However, LSD and iso-LSD, the two C-8 isomers, rapidly interconvert in the presence of bases, as the alpha proton is acidic and can be deprotonated and reprotonated. Non-psychoactive iso-LSD which has formed during the synthesis can be separated by chromatography and can be isomerized to LSD.
Pure salts of LSD are triboluminescent, emitting small flashes of white light when shaken in the dark. LSD is strongly fluorescent and will glow bluish-white under UV light.
Synthesis
LSD is an ergoline derivative. It is commonly synthesized by reacting diethylamine with an activated form of lysergic acid. Activating reagents include phosphoryl chloride and peptide coupling reagents. Lysergic acid is made by alkaline hydrolysis of lysergamides like ergotamine, a substance usually derived from the ergot fungus on agar plate; or, theoretically possible, but impractical and uncommon, from ergine (lysergic acid amide, LSA) extracted from morning glory seeds. Lysergic acid can also be produced synthetically, although these processes are not used in clandestine manufacture due to their low yields and high complexity.
Dosage
A single dose of LSD may be between 40 and 500 micrograms—an amount roughly equal to one-tenth the mass of a grain of sand. Threshold effects can be felt with as little as 25 micrograms of LSD. The practice of using sub-threshold doses is called microdosing. Dosages of LSD are measured in micrograms (µg), or millionths of a gram. By comparison, dosages of most drugs, both recreational and medicinal, are measured in milligrams (mg), or thousandths of a gram. For example, an active dose of mescaline, roughly , has effects comparable to 100 µg (0.0001 g) or less of LSD.
In the mid-1960s, the most important black market LSD manufacturer (Owsley Stanley) distributed acid at a standard concentration of 270 µg, while street samples of the 1970s contained 30 to 300 µg. By the 1980s, the amount had reduced to between 100 and 125 µg, dropping more in the 1990s to the 20–80 µg range, and even more in the 2000s (decade).
Reactivity and degradation
"LSD," writes the chemist Alexander Shulgin, "is an unusually fragile molecule ... As a salt, in water, cold, and free from air and light exposure, it is stable indefinitely."
LSD has two labile protons at the tertiary stereogenic C5 and C8 positions, rendering these centers prone to epimerisation. The C8 proton is more labile due to the electron-withdrawing carboxamide attachment, but removal of the chiral proton at the C5 position (which was once also an alpha proton of the parent molecule tryptophan) is assisted by the inductively withdrawing nitrogen and pi electron delocalisation with the indole ring.
LSD also has enamine-type reactivity because of the electron-donating effects of the indole ring. Because of this, chlorine destroys LSD molecules on contact; even though chlorinated tap water contains only a slight amount of chlorine, the small quantity of compound typical to an LSD solution will likely be eliminated when dissolved in tap water. The double bond between the 8-position and the aromatic ring, being conjugated with the indole ring, is susceptible to nucleophilic attacks by water or alcohol, especially in the presence of UV or other kinds of light. LSD often converts to "lumi-LSD," which is inactive in human beings.
A controlled study was undertaken to determine the stability of LSD in pooled urine samples.
The concentrations of LSD in urine samples were followed over time at various temperatures, in different types of storage containers, at various exposures to different wavelengths of light, and at varying pH values. These studies demonstrated no significant loss in LSD concentration at 25 °C for up to four weeks. After four weeks of incubation, a 30% loss in LSD concentration at 37 °C and up to a 40% at 45 °C were observed. Urine fortified with LSD and stored in amber glass or nontransparent polyethylene containers showed no change in concentration under any light conditions. Stability of LSD in transparent containers under light was dependent on the distance between the light source and the samples, the wavelength of light, exposure time, and the intensity of light. After prolonged exposure to heat in alkaline pH conditions, 10 to 15% of the parent LSD epimerized to iso-LSD. Under acidic conditions, less than 5% of the LSD was converted to iso-LSD. It was also demonstrated that trace amounts of metal ions in buffer or urine could catalyze the decomposition of LSD and that this process can be avoided by the addition of EDTA.
Detection
LSD may be quantified in urine as part of a drug abuse testing program, in plasma or serum to confirm a diagnosis of poisoning in hospitalized victims or in whole blood to assist in a forensic investigation of a traffic or other criminal violation or a case of sudden death. Both the parent drug and its major metabolite are unstable in biofluids when exposed to light, heat or alkaline conditions and therefore specimens are protected from light, stored at the lowest possible temperature and analyzed quickly to minimize losses.
The apparent plasma half life of LSD is considered to be around 5.1 hours with peak plasma concentrations occurring 3 hours after administration.
LSD can be detected using an Ehrlich's reagent and a Hofmann's reagent.
History
LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland as part of a large research program searching for medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives. LSD's psychedelic properties were discovered 5 years later when Hofmann himself accidentally ingested an unknown quantity of the chemical. The first intentional ingestion of LSD occurred on April 19, 1943, when Hofmann ingested 250 µg of LSD. He said this would be a threshold dose based on the dosages of other ergot alkaloids. Hofmann found the effects to be much stronger than he anticipated. Sandoz Laboratories introduced LSD as a psychiatric drug in 1947 and marketed LSD as a psychiatric panacea, hailing it "as a cure for everything from schizophrenia to criminal behavior, 'sexual perversions,' and alcoholism." The abbreviation "LSD" is from the German "Lysergsäurediethylamid".
Beginning in the 1950s, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began a research program code named Project MKUltra. The CIA introduced LSD to the United States, purchasing the entire world's supply for $240,000 and propagating the LSD through CIA front organizations to American hospitals, clinics, prisons and research centers. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subjects' knowledge. The project was revealed in the US congressional Rockefeller Commission report in 1975.
In 1963, the Sandoz patents expired on LSD. Several figures, including Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, and Al Hubbard, began to advocate the consumption of LSD. LSD became central to the counterculture of the 1960s. In the early 1960s the use of LSD and other hallucinogens was advocated by new proponents of consciousness expansion such as Leary, Huxley, Alan Watts and Arthur Koestler, and according to L. R. Veysey they profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth.
On October 24, 1968, possession of LSD was made illegal in the United States. The last FDA approved study of LSD in patients ended in 1980, while a study in healthy volunteers was made in the late 1980s. Legally approved and regulated psychiatric use of LSD continued in Switzerland until 1993.
In November 2020, Oregon became the first US state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of LSD after voters approved Ballot Measure 110.
Society and culture
Counterculture
By the mid-1960s, the youth countercultures in California, particularly in San Francisco, had adopted the use of hallucinogenic drugs, with the first major underground LSD factory established by Owsley Stanley. From 1964, the Merry Pranksters, a loose group that developed around novelist Ken Kesey, sponsored the Acid Tests, a series of events primarily staged in or near San Francisco, involving the taking of LSD (supplied by Stanley), accompanied by light shows, film projection and discordant, improvised music known as the psychedelic symphony. The Pranksters helped popularize LSD use, through their road trips across America in a psychedelically decorated converted school bus, which involved distributing the drug and meeting with major figures of the beat movement, and through publications about their activities such as Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).
In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, brothers Ron and Jay Thelin opened the Psychedelic Shop in January 1966. The Thelins opened the store to promote safe use of LSD, which was then still legal in California. The Psychedelic Shop helped to further popularize LSD in the Haight and to make the neighborhood the unofficial capital of the hippie counterculture in the United States. Ron Thelin was also involved in organizing the Love Pageant rally, a protest held in Golden Gate park to protest California's newly adopted ban on LSD in October 1966. At the rally, hundreds of attendees took acid in unison. Although the Psychedelic Shop closed after barely a year-and-a-half in business, its role in popularizing LSD was considerable.
A similar and connected nexus of LSD use in the creative arts developed around the same time in London. A key figure in this phenomenon in the UK was British academic Michael Hollingshead, who first tried LSD in America in 1961 while he was the Executive Secretary for the Institute of British-American Cultural Exchange. After being given a large quantity of pure Sandoz LSD (which was still legal at the time) and experiencing his first "trip," Hollingshead contacted Aldous Huxley, who suggested that he get in touch with Harvard academic Timothy Leary, and over the next few years, in concert with Leary and Richard Alpert, Hollingshead played a major role in their famous LSD research at Millbrook before moving to New York City, where he conducted his own LSD experiments. In 1965 Hollingshead returned to the UK and founded the World Psychedelic Center in Chelsea, London.
Music and art
In both music and art, the influence of LSD was soon being more widely seen and heard thanks to the bands that participated in the Acid Tests and related events, including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and through the inventive poster and album art of San Francisco-based artists like Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Bonnie MacLean, Stanley Mouse & Alton Kelley, and Wes Wilson, meant to evoke the visual experience of an LSD trip. LSD had a strong influence on the Grateful Dead and the culture of "Deadheads."
Among the many famous people in the UK that Michael Hollingshead is reputed to have introduced to LSD are artist and Hipgnosis founder Storm Thorgerson, and musicians Donovan, Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison. Although establishment concern about the new drug led to it being declared an illegal drug by the Home Secretary in 1966, LSD was soon being used widely in the upper echelons of the British art and music scene, including members of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues, the Small Faces, Syd Barrett, Jimi Hendrix and others, and the products of these experiences were soon being both heard and seen by the public with singles like the Small Faces' "Itchycoo Park" and LPs like the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Cream's Disraeli Gears, which featured music that showed the obvious influence of the musicians' recent psychedelic excursions, and which were packaged in elaborately-designed album covers that featured vividly-coloured psychedelic artwork by artists like Peter Blake, Martin Sharp, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Nigel Waymouth and Michael English) and art/music collective The Fool.
In the 1960s, musicians from psychedelic music and psychedelic rock bands began to refer (at first indirectly, and later explicitly) to the drug and attempted to recreate or reflect the experience of taking LSD in their music. A number of features are often included in psychedelic music. Exotic instrumentation, with a particular fondness for the sitar and tabla are common. Electric guitars are used to create feedback, and are played through wah wah and fuzzbox effect pedals. Elaborate studio effects are often used, such as backwards tapes, panning, phasing, long delay loops, and extreme reverb. In the 1960s there was a use of primitive electronic instruments such as early synthesizers and the theremin. Later forms of electronic psychedelia also employed repetitive computer-generated beats. Songs allegedly referring to LSD include John Prine's "Illegal Smile" and the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," although the authors of the latter song repeatedly denied this claim.
In modern times, LSD has had a prominent influence on artists such as Keith Haring, electronic dance music, and the jam band Phish.
Legal status
The United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances (adopted in 1971) requires the signing parties to prohibit LSD. Hence, it is illegal in all countries that were parties to the convention, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe. However, enforcement of those laws varies from country to country. Medical and scientific research with LSD in humans is permitted under the 1971 UN Convention.
Australia
LSD is a Schedule 9 prohibited substance in Australia under the Poisons Standard (February 2017). A Schedule 9 substance is defined as a substance which may be abused or misused, the manufacture, possession, sale or use of which should be prohibited by law except when required for medical or scientific research, or for analytical, teaching or training purposes with approval of Commonwealth and/or State or Territory Health Authorities.
In Western Australia section 9 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1981 provides for summary trial before a magistrate for possession of less than 0.004g; section 11 provides rebuttable presumptions of intent to sell or supply if the quantity is 0.002g or more, or of possession for the purpose of trafficking if 0.01g.
Canada
In Canada, LSD is a controlled substance under Schedule III of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Every person who seeks to obtain the substance, without disclosing authorization to obtain such substances 30 days before obtaining another prescription from a practitioner, is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 3 years. Possession for purpose of trafficking is an indictable offense punishable by imprisonment for 10 years.
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, LSD is a Schedule 1 Class 'A' drug. This means it has no recognized legitimate uses and possession of the drug without a license is punishable with 7 years' imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine, and trafficking is punishable with life imprisonment and an unlimited fine (see main article on drug punishments Misuse of Drugs Act 1971).
In 2000, after consultation with members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Faculty of Substance Misuse, the UK Police Foundation issued the Runciman Report which recommended "the transfer of LSD from Class A to Class B."
In November 2009, the UK Transform Drug Policy Foundation released in the House of Commons a guidebook to the legal regulation of drugs, After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation, which details options for regulated distribution and sale of LSD and other psychedelics.
United States
LSD is Schedule I in the United States, according to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. This means LSD is illegal to manufacture, buy, possess, process, or distribute without a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). By classifying LSD as a Schedule I substance, the DEA holds that LSD meets the following three criteria: it is deemed to have a high potential for abuse; it has no legitimate medical use in treatment; and there is a lack of accepted safety for its use under medical supervision. There are no documented deaths from chemical toxicity; most LSD deaths are a result of behavioral toxicity.
There can also be substantial discrepancies between the amount of chemical LSD that one possesses and the amount of possession with which one can be charged in the US. This is because LSD is almost always present in a medium (e.g. blotter or neutral liquid), and in some contexts, the amount that can be considered with respect to sentencing is the total mass of the drug and its medium. This discrepancy was the subject of 1995 United States Supreme Court case, Neal v. United States, which determined that for finding minimum sentence lengths, the total medium weight is used, while for determining the severity of the offense, an estimation of the chemical mass is used.
Lysergic acid and lysergic acid amide, LSD precursors, are both classified in Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. Ergotamine tartrate, a precursor to lysergic acid, is regulated under the Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act.
Personal possession of small amounts of drugs including LSD (40 units or less) was decriminalized in the U.S. state of Oregon on February 1, 2021. This came as a result of the passing of 2020 Oregon Ballot Measure 110. The movement to decriminalize psychedelics in the United States includes LSD in the ongoing effort in California. In November 2020, California Senator Scott Wiener introduced a bill to decriminalize psychedelics such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, ibogaine, and LSD. In April 2021, the bill has been approved by the Senates Public Safety Committee and the Health Committee, in May 2021, it was cleared by the Senate Appropriations Committee and approved by the California Senate, and in June 2021, advanced by the Assembly Public Safety Committee.
Mexico
In April 2009, the Mexican Congress approved changes in the General Health Law that decriminalized the possession of illegal drugs for immediate consumption and personal use, allowing a person to possess a moderate amount of LSD. The only restriction is that people in possession of drugs should not be within a 300-meter radius of schools, police departments, or correctional facilities. Marijuana, along with cocaine, opium, heroin, and other drugs were also decriminalized; their possession is not considered a crime as long as the dose does not exceed the limit established in the General Health Law. Many question this, as cocaine is as synthesised as heroin, and both are produced as extracts from plants. The law establishes very low amount thresholds and strictly defines personal dosage. For those arrested with more than the threshold allowed by the law this can result in heavy prison sentences, as they will be assumed to be small traffickers even if there are no other indications that the amount was meant for selling.
Czech Republic
In the Czech Republic, until 31 December 1998 only drug possession "for other person" (i.e. intent to sell) was criminal (apart from production, importation, exportation, offering or mediation, which was and remains criminal) while possession for personal use remained legal.
On 1 January 1999, an amendment of the Criminal Code, which was necessitated in order to align the Czech drug rules with the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, became effective, criminalizing possession of "amount larger than small" also for personal use (Art. 187a of the Criminal Code) while possession of small amounts for personal use became a misdemeanor.
The judicial practice came to the conclusion that the "amount larger than small" must be five to ten times larger (depending on drug) than a usual single dose of an average consumer.
Under the Regulation No. 467/2009 Coll, possession of less than 5 doses of LSD was to be considered smaller than large for the purposes of the Criminal Code and was to be treated as a misdemeanor subject to a fine equal to a parking ticket.
Ecuador
According to the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, in its Article 364, the Ecuadorian state does not see drug consumption as a crime but only as a health concern. Since June 2013 the State drugs regulatory office CONSEP has published a table which establishes maximum quantities carried by persons so as to be considered in legal possession and that person as not a seller of drugs. The "CONSEP established, at their latest general meeting, that the 0.020 milligrams of LSD shall be considered the maximum consumer amount.
Economics
Price
The street price of a single dose of LSD can be anywhere from $2 to $50. In Europe, as of 2011, the typical cost of a dose was between 4.50 and 25.
Production
An active dose of LSD is very minute, allowing a large number of doses to be synthesized from a comparatively small amount of raw material. Twenty five kilograms of precursor ergotamine tartrate can produce 5–6 kg of pure crystalline LSD; this corresponds to around 50–60 million doses at 100 µg. Because the masses involved are so small, concealing and transporting illicit LSD is much easier than smuggling cocaine, cannabis, or other illegal drugs.
Manufacturing LSD requires laboratory equipment and experience in the field of organic chemistry. It takes two to three days to produce 30 to 100 grams of pure compound. It is believed that LSD is not usually produced in large quantities, but rather in a series of small batches. This technique minimizes the loss of precursor chemicals in case a step does not work as expected.
Forms
LSD is produced in crystalline form and is then mixed with excipients or redissolved for production in ingestible forms. Liquid solution is either distributed in small vials or, more commonly, sprayed onto or soaked into a distribution medium. Historically, LSD solutions were first sold on sugar cubes, but practical considerations forced a change to tablet form. Appearing in 1968 as an orange tablet measuring about 6 mm across, "Orange Sunshine" acid was the first largely available form of LSD after its possession was made illegal. Tim Scully, a prominent chemist, made some of these tablets, but said that most "Sunshine" in the USA came by way of Ronald Stark, who imported approximately thirty-five million doses from Europe.
Over a period of time, tablet dimensions, weight, shape and concentration of LSD evolved from large (4.5–8.1 mm diameter), heavyweight (≥150 mg), round, high concentration (90–350 µg/tab) dosage units to small (2.0–3.5 mm diameter) lightweight (as low as 4.7 µg/tab), variously shaped, lower concentration (12–85 µg/tab, average range 30–40 µg/tab) dosage units. LSD tablet shapes have included cylinders, cones, stars, spacecraft, and heart shapes. The smallest tablets became known as "Microdots."
After tablets came "computer acid" or "blotter paper LSD," typically made by dipping a preprinted sheet of blotting paper into an LSD/water/alcohol solution. More than 200 types of LSD tablets have been encountered since 1969 and more than 350 blotter paper designs have been observed since 1975. About the same time as blotter paper LSD came "Windowpane" (AKA "Clearlight"), which contained LSD inside a thin gelatin square a quarter of an inch (6 mm) across. LSD has been sold under a wide variety of often short-lived and regionally restricted street names including Acid, Trips, Uncle Sid, Blotter, Lucy, Alice and doses, as well as names that reflect the designs on the sheets of blotter paper. Authorities have encountered the drug in other forms—including powder or crystal, and capsule.
Modern distribution
LSD manufacturers and traffickers in the United States can be categorized into two groups: A few large-scale producers, and an equally limited number of small, clandestine chemists, consisting of independent producers who, operating on a comparatively limited scale, can be found throughout the country.
As a group, independent producers are of less concern to the Drug Enforcement Administration than the large-scale groups because their product reaches only local markets.
Many LSD dealers and chemists describe a religious or humanitarian purpose that motivates their illicit activity. Nicholas Schou's book Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World describes one such group, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The group was a major American LSD trafficking group in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In the second half of the 20th century, dealers and chemists loosely associated with the Grateful Dead like Owsley Stanley, Nicholas Sand, Karen Horning, Sarah Maltzer, "Dealer McDope," and Leonard Pickard played an essential role in distributing LSD.
Mimics
Since 2005, law enforcement in the United States and elsewhere has seized several chemicals and combinations of chemicals in blotter paper which were sold as LSD mimics, including DOB, a mixture of DOC and DOI, 25I-NBOMe, and a mixture of DOC and DOB. Many mimics are toxic in comparatively small doses, or have extremely different safety profiles. Many street users of LSD are often under the impression that blotter paper which is actively hallucinogenic can only be LSD because that is the only chemical with low enough doses to fit on a small square of blotter paper. While it is true that LSD requires lower doses than most other hallucinogens, blotter paper is capable of absorbing a much larger amount of material. The DEA performed a chromatographic analysis of blotter paper containing 2C-C which showed that the paper contained a much greater concentration of the active chemical than typical LSD doses, although the exact quantity was not determined. Blotter LSD mimics can have relatively small dose squares; a sample of blotter paper containing DOC seized by Concord, California police had dose markings approximately 6 mm apart. Several deaths have been attributed to 25I-NBOMe.
Research
A number of organizations—including the Beckley Foundation, MAPS, Heffter Research Institute and the Albert Hofmann Foundation—exist to fund, encourage and coordinate research into the medicinal and spiritual uses of LSD and related psychedelics. New clinical LSD experiments in humans started in 2009 for the first time in 35 years. As it is illegal in many areas of the world, potential medical uses are difficult to study.
In 2001 the United States Drug Enforcement Administration stated that LSD "produces no aphrodisiac effects, does not increase creativity, has no lasting positive effect in treating alcoholics or criminals, does not produce a 'model psychosis', and does not generate immediate personality change." More recently, experimental uses of LSD have included the treatment of alcoholism, pain and cluster headache relief, and prospective studies on depression. There is evidence that psychedelics induce molecular and cellular adaptations related to neuroplasticity and that these could potentially underlie therapeutic benefits.
Psychedelic therapy
In the 1950s and 1960s LSD was used in psychiatry to enhance psychotherapy known as psychedelic therapy. Some psychiatrists believed LSD was especially useful at helping patients to "unblock" repressed subconscious material through other psychotherapeutic methods, and also for treating alcoholism. One study concluded, "The root of the therapeutic value of the LSD experience is its potential for producing self-acceptance and self-surrender," presumably by forcing the user to face issues and problems in that individual's psyche.
Two recent reviews concluded that conclusions drawn from most of these early trials are unreliable due to serious methodological flaws. These include the absence of adequate control groups, lack of followup, and vague criteria for therapeutic outcome. In many cases studies failed to convincingly demonstrate whether the drug or the therapeutic interaction was responsible for any beneficial effects.
In recent years organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies have renewed clinical research of LSD.
It has been proposed that LSD be studied for use in the therapeutic setting particularly in anxiety.
Other uses
In the 1950s and 1960s, some psychiatrists (e.g. Oscar Janiger) explored the potential effect of LSD on creativity. Experimental studies attempted to measure the effect of LSD on creative activity and aesthetic appreciation.
Since 2008 there has been ongoing research into using LSD to alleviate anxiety for terminally ill cancer patients coping with their impending deaths.
A 2012 meta-analysis found evidence that a single dose of LSD in conjunction with various alcoholism treatment programs was associated with a decrease in alcohol abuse, lasting for several months, but no effect was seen at one year. Adverse events included seizure, moderate confusion and agitation, nausea, vomiting, and acting in a bizarre fashion.
LSD has been used as a treatment for cluster headaches with positive results in some small studies.
LSD may have analgesic properties related to pain in terminally ill patients and phantom pain and may be useful for treating inflammatory diseases including rheumatoid arthritis.
Notable individuals
Some notable individuals have commented publicly on their experiences with LSD. Some of these comments date from the era when it was legally available in the US and Europe for non-medical uses, and others pertain to psychiatric treatment in the 1950s and 1960s. Still others describe experiences with illegal LSD, obtained for philosophic, artistic, therapeutic, spiritual, or recreational purposes.
W. H. Auden, the poet, said, "I myself have taken mescaline once and L.S.D. once. Aside from a slight schizophrenic dissociation of the I from the Not-I, including my body, nothing happened at all." He also said, "LSD was a complete frost. … What it does seem to destroy is the power of communication. I have listened to tapes done by highly articulate people under LSD, for example, and they talk absolute drivel. They may have seen something interesting, but they certainly lose either the power or the wish to communicate." He also said, "Nothing much happened but I did get the distinct impression that some birds were trying to communicate with me."
Daniel Ellsberg, an American peace activist, says he has had several hundred experiences with psychedelics.
Richard Feynman, a notable physicist at California Institute of Technology, tried LSD during his professorship at Caltech. Feynman largely sidestepped the issue when dictating his anecdotes; he mentions it in passing in the "O Americano, Outra Vez" section.
Jerry Garcia stated in a July 3, 1989 interview for Relix Magazine, in response to the question "Have your feelings about LSD changed over the years?," "They haven't changed much. My feelings about LSD are mixed. It's something that I both fear and that I love at the same time. I never take any psychedelic, have a psychedelic experience, without having that feeling of, "I don't know what's going to happen." In that sense, it's still fundamentally an enigma and a mystery."
Bill Gates implied in an interview with Playboy that he tried LSD during his youth.
Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, became a user of psychedelics after moving to Hollywood. He was at the forefront of the counterculture's use of psychedelic drugs, which led to his 1954 work The Doors of Perception. Dying from cancer, he asked his wife on 22 November 1963 to inject him with 100 µg of LSD. He died later that day.
Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple Inc., said, "Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life."
Ernst Jünger, German writer and philosopher, throughout his life had experimented with drugs such as ether, cocaine, and hashish; and later in life he used mescaline and LSD. These experiments were recorded comprehensively in Annäherungen (1970, Approaches). The novel Besuch auf Godenholm (1952, Visit to Godenholm) is clearly influenced by his early experiments with mescaline and LSD. He met with LSD inventor Albert Hofmann and they took LSD together several times. Hofmann's memoir LSD, My Problem Child describes some of these meetings.
In a 2004 interview, Paul McCartney said that The Beatles' songs "Day Tripper" and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" were inspired by LSD trips. Nonetheless, John Lennon consistently stated over the course of many years that the fact that the initials of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" spelled out L-S-D was a coincidence (the title came from a picture drawn by his son Julian) and that the band members did not notice until after the song had been released, and Paul McCartney corroborated that story. John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr also used the drug, although McCartney cautioned that "it's easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles' music."
Michel Foucault had an LSD experience with Simeon Wade in the Death Valley and later wrote “it was the greatest experience of his life, and that it profoundly changed his life and his work." According to Wade, as soon as he came back to Paris, Foucault scrapped the second History of Sexuality's manuscript, and totally rethought the whole project.
Kary Mullis is reported to credit LSD with helping him develop DNA amplification technology, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.
Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist and writer, has credited his use of LSD with sparking his interest in theoretical physics.
Oliver Sacks, a neurologist famous for writing best-selling case histories about his patients' disorders and unusual experiences, talks about his own experiences with LSD and other perception altering chemicals, in his book, Hallucinations.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of the TV series South Park, claimed to have shown up at the 72nd Academy Awards, at which they nominated for Best Original Song, under the influence of LSD.
See also
1P-LSD
1cP-LSD
LSD art
Psychedelic microdosing
Psychedelic therapy
Owsley Stanley
Urban legends about LSD
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
Drug Profiles: LSD European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction
LSD-25 at Erowid
LSD entry in TiHKAL • info
Winstock, Ar; Timmerman, C; Davies, E; Maier, Lj; Zhuparris, A; Ferris, Ja; Barratt, Mj; Kuypers, Kpc (2021). "Global Drug Survey (GDS) 2020 Psychedelics Key Findings Report".
U.S. National Library of Medicine: Drug Information Portal – Lysergic acid diethylamide
Documentaries
Hofmann's Potion a documentary on the origins of LSD, 2002
, documentary film directed by Aron Ranen, 2006
Inside LSD National Geographic Channel, 2009
Counterculture of the 1960s
Dopamine agonists
Eli Lilly and Company brands
Entheogens
Light-sensitive chemicals
Mind control
Novartis brands
Serotonin receptor agonists
Swiss inventions
Withdrawn drugs
Wikipedia medicine articles ready to translate
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17539 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linnaean%20taxonomy | Linnaean taxonomy | Linnaean taxonomy can mean either of two related concepts:
the particular form of biological classification (taxonomy) set up by Carl Linnaeus, as set forth in his Systema Naturae (1735) and subsequent works. In the taxonomy of Linnaeus there are three kingdoms, divided into classes, and they, in turn, into lower ranks in a hierarchical order.
a term for rank-based classification of organisms, in general. That is, taxonomy in the traditional sense of the word: rank-based scientific classification. This term is especially used as opposed to cladistic systematics, which groups organisms into clades. It is attributed to Linnaeus, although he neither invented the concept of ranked classification (it goes back to Plato and Aristotle) nor gave it its present form. In fact, it does not have an exact present form, as "Linnaean taxonomy" as such does not really exist: it is a collective (abstracting) term for what actually are several separate fields, which use similar approaches.
Linnaean name also has two meanings: depending on the context, it may either refer to a formal name given by Linnaeus (personally), such as Giraffa camelopardalis Linnaeus, 1758, or a formal name in the accepted nomenclature (as opposed to a modernistic clade name).
The taxonomy of Linnaeus
In his Imperium Naturae, Linnaeus established three kingdoms, namely Regnum Animale, Regnum Vegetabile and Regnum Lapideum. This approach, the Animal, Vegetable and Mineral Kingdoms, survives today in the popular mind, notably in the form of the parlour game question: "Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?". The work of Linnaeus had a huge impact on science; it was indispensable as a foundation for biological nomenclature, now regulated by the nomenclature codes. Two of his works, the first edition of the Species Plantarum (1753) for plants and the tenth edition of the Systema Naturae (1758), are accepted as part of the starting points of nomenclature; his binomials (names for species) and generic names take priority over those of others. However, the impact he had on science was not because of the value of his taxonomy.
Linnaeus' kingdoms were in turn divided into classes, and they, in turn, into orders, genera (singular: genus), and species (singular: species), with an additional rank lower than species, though these do not precisely correspond to the use of these terms in modern taxonomy.
Classification of plants
His classes and orders of plants, according to his Systema Sexuale, were never intended to represent natural groups (as opposed to his ordines naturales in his Philosophia Botanica) but only for use in identification. They were used for that purpose well into the nineteenth century. Within each class were several orders. This system is based on the number and arrangement of male (stamens) and female (pistils) organs.
The Linnaean classes for plants, in the Sexual System, were (page numbers refer to Species plantarum):
Classis 1. Monandria: flowers with 1 stamen
Classis 2. Diandria: flowers with 2 stamens
Classis 3. Triandria: flowers with 3 stamens
Classis 4. Tetrandria: flowers with 4 stamens
Classis 5. Pentandria: flowers with 5 stamens
Classis 6. Hexandria: flowers with 6 stamens
Hexandria monogynia pp. 285–352
Hexandria polygynia pp. 342–343
Classis 7. Heptandria: flowers with 7 stamens
Classis 8. Octandria: flowers with 8 stamens
Classis 9. Enneandria: flowers with 9 stamens
Classis 10. Decandria: flowers with 10 stamens
Classis 11. Dodecandria: flowers with 11 to 19 stamens
Classis 12. Icosandria: flowers with 20 (or more) stamens, perigynous
Classis 13. Polyandria: flowers with many stamens, inserted on the receptacle
Classis 14. Didynamia: flowers with 4 stamens, 2 long and 2 short
Gymnospermia
Angiospermia
Classis 15. Tetradynamia: flowers with 6 stamens, 4 long and 2 short
Classis 16. Monadelphia; flowers with the anthers separate, but the filaments united, at least at the base
Pentandria
Decandria
Polyandria
Classis 17. Diadelphia; flowers with the stamens united in two separate groups
Hexandria
Octandria
Decandria
Classis 18. Polyadelphia; flowers with the stamens united in several separate groups
Pentandria
Icosandria
Polyandria
Classis 19. Syngenesia; flowers with stamens united by their anthers
Polygamia aequalis
Polygamia superba
Polygamia frustranea
Polygamia necessaria
Monogamia
Classis 20. Gynandria; flowers with the stamens united to the pistils
Classis 21. Monoecia: monoecious plants
Classis 22. Dioecia: dioecious plants
Classis 23. Polygamia: polygamodioecious plants
Classis 24. Cryptogamia: the "flowerless" plants, including ferns, fungi, algae, and bryophytes
The classes based on the number of stamens were then subdivided by the number of pistils, e.g. Hexandria monogynia with six stamens and one pistil. Index to genera p. 1201
By contrast his ordines naturales numbered 69, from Piperitae to Vagae.
Classification for animals
Only in the Animal Kingdom is the higher taxonomy of Linnaeus still more or less recognizable and some of these names are still in use, but usually not quite for the same groups. He divided the Animal Kingdom into six classes, in the tenth edition, of 1758, these were:
Classis 1. Mammalia (mammals)
Classis 2. Aves (birds)
Classis 3. Amphibia (amphibians)
Classis 4. Pisces
Classis 5. Insecta
Classis 6. Vermes
Classification for minerals
His taxonomy of minerals has long since dropped from use. In the tenth edition, 1758, of the Systema Naturae, the Linnaean classes were:
Classis 1. Petræ
Classis 2. Mineræ
Classis 3. Fossilia
Classis 4. Vitamentra
Rank-based scientific classification
This rank-based method of classifying living organisms was originally popularized by (and much later named for) Linnaeus, although it has changed considerably since his time. The greatest innovation of Linnaeus, and still the most important aspect of this system, is the general use of binomial nomenclature, the combination of a genus name and a second term, which together uniquely identify each species of organism within a kingdom. For example, the human species is uniquely identified within the animal kingdom by the name Homo sapiens. No other species of animal can have this same binomen (the technical term for a binomial in the case of animals). Prior to Linnaean taxonomy, animals were classified according to their mode of movement.
Linnaeus's use of binomial nomenclature was anticipated by the theory of definition used in Scholasticism. Scholastic logicians and philosophers of nature defined the species man, for example, as Animal rationalis, where animal was considered a genus and rationalis (Latin for "rational") the characteristic distinguishing man from all other animals. Treating animal as the immediate genus of the species man, horse, etc. is of little practical use to the biological taxonomist, however. Accordingly, Linnaeus's classification treats animal as a class including many genera (subordinated to the animal "kingdom" via intermediary classes such as "orders"), and treats homo as the genus of a species Homo sapiens, with sapiens (Latin for "knowing" or "understanding") playing a differentiating role analogous to that played, in the Scholastic system, by rationalis (the word homo, Latin for "human being", was used by the Scholastics to denote a species, not a genus).
A strength of Linnaean taxonomy is that it can be used to organize the different kinds of living organisms, simply and practically. Every species can be given a unique (and, one hopes, stable) name, as compared with common names that are often neither unique nor consistent from place to place and language to language. This uniqueness and stability are, of course, a result of the acceptance by working systematists (biologists specializing in taxonomy), not merely of the binomial names themselves, but of the rules governing the use of these names, which are laid down in formal nomenclature codes.
Species can be placed in a ranked hierarchy, starting with either domains or kingdoms. Domains are divided into kingdoms. Kingdoms are divided into phyla (singular: phylum) — for animals; the term division, used for plants and fungi, is equivalent to the rank of phylum (and the current International Code of Botanical Nomenclature allows the use of either term). Phyla (or divisions) are divided into classes, and they, in turn, into orders, families, genera (singular: genus), and species (singular: species). There are ranks below species: in zoology, subspecies (but see form or morph); in botany, variety (varietas) and form (forma), etc.
Groups of organisms at any of these ranks are called taxa (singular: taxon) or taxonomic groups.
The Linnaean system has proven robust and it remains the only extant working classification system at present that enjoys universal scientific acceptance. However, although the number of ranks is unlimited, in practice any classification becomes more cumbersome the more ranks are added. Among the later subdivisions that have arisen are such entities as phyla, families, and tribes, as well as any number of ranks with prefixes (superfamilies, subfamilies, etc.). The use of newer taxonomic tools such as cladistics and phylogenetic nomenclature has led to a different way of looking at evolution (expressed in many nested clades) and this sometimes leads to a desire for more ranks. An example of such complexity is the scheme for mammals proposed by McKenna and Bell.
Alternatives
Over time, understanding of the relationships between living things has changed. Linnaeus could only base his scheme on the structural similarities of the different organisms. The greatest change was the widespread acceptance of evolution as the mechanism of biological diversity and species formation, following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. It then became generally understood that classifications ought to reflect the phylogeny of organisms, their descent by evolution. This led to evolutionary taxonomy, where the various extant and extinct are linked together to construct a phylogeny. This is largely what is meant by the term 'Linnaean taxonomy' when used in a modern context.
In cladistics, originating in the work of Willi Hennig, 1950 onwards, each taxon is grouped so as to include the common ancestor of the group's members (and thus to avoid phylogeny). Such taxa may be either monophyletic (including all descendants) such as genus Homo, or paraphyletic (excluding some descendants), such as genus Australopithecus.
Originally, Linnaeus established three kingdoms in his scheme, namely for Plants, Animals and an additional group for minerals, which has long since been abandoned. Since then, various life forms have been moved into three new kingdoms: Monera, for prokaryotes (i.e., bacteria); Protista, for protozoans and most algae; and Fungi. This five kingdom scheme is still far from the phylogenetic ideal and has largely been supplanted in modern taxonomic work by a division into three domains: Bacteria and Archaea, which contain the prokaryotes, and Eukaryota, comprising the remaining forms. These arrangements should not be seen as definitive. They are based on the genomes of the organisms; as knowledge on this increases, classifications will change.
Representing presumptive evolutionary relationships, especially given the wide acceptance of cladistic methodology and numerous molecular phylogenies that have challenged long-accepted classifications, within the framework of Linnaean taxonomy, is sometimes seen as problematic. Therefore, some systematists have proposed a PhyloCode to replace it.
See also
History of plant systematics
Phylogenetic tree – a way to express insights into evolutionary relationships
Zoology mnemonic for a list of mnemonic sentences used to help people remember the list of Linnaean ranks.
References
Bibliography
Books
Dawkins, Richard. 2004. The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Ereshefsky, Marc. 2000. The Poverty of the Linnaean Hierarchy: A Philosophical Study of Biological Taxonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W. W. Norton & Co.
Pavord, Anna. The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants. Bloomsbury.
Articles
Websites
External links
International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (Saint Louis Code), Electronic version
International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (Melbourne Code, 2011), Electronic version
ICZN website, for zoological nomenclature
Text of the ICZN, Electronic version
ZooBank: The World Register of Animal Names
International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes for bacteria
International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. 4th Edition. By the International Union of Biological Sciences
ICTVdB website, for virus nomenclature by the International Union of Microbiological Societies
Tree of Life
European Species Names in Linnaean, Czech, English, German and French
Taxonomy
Taxonomy (biology)
Biological nomenclature
Botanical nomenclature
Zoological nomenclature
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17541 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawyer | Lawyer | A lawyer or attorney is a person who practices law, as an advocate, attorney at law, barrister, barrister-at-law, bar-at-law, canonist, canon lawyer, civil law notary, counsel, counselor, solicitor, legal executive, or public servant preparing, interpreting and applying the law, but not as a paralegal or charter executive secretary. Working as a lawyer involves the practical application of abstract legal theories and knowledge to solve specific individualized problems, or to advance the interests of those who hire lawyers to perform legal services. The role of the lawyer varies greatly across different legal jurisdictions.
Terminology
In practice, legal jurisdictions exercise their right to determine who is recognized as being a lawyer. As a result, the meaning of the term "lawyer" may vary from place to place. Some jurisdictions have two types of lawyers, barrister and solicitors, while others fuse the two. A barrister is a lawyer who specializes in higher court appearances. A solicitor is a lawyer who is trained to prepare cases and give advice on legal subjects and can represent people in lower courts. Both barristers and solicitors have gone through law school, and completed the requisite practical training. However, in jurisdictions where there is a split-profession, only barristers are admitted as members of their respective bar associations.
In New Zealand, a person can only call themselves a lawyer if they have been admitted to the bar and enrolled as a Barrister and Solicitor of the High Court of New Zealand. A Barrister is usually the term used to refer to a lawyer that frequents Court, or a Court lawyer.
In Australia, the word "lawyer" can be used to refer to both barristers and solicitors (whether in private practice or practicing as corporate in-house counsel), and whoever is admitted as a lawyer of the Supreme Court of a state or territory.
In Canada, the word "lawyer" only refers to individuals who have been called to the bar or, in Quebec, have qualified as civil law notaries. Common law lawyers in Canada are formally and properly called "barristers and solicitors", but should not be referred to as "attorneys", since that term has a different meaning in Canadian usage, being a person appointed under a power of attorney. However, in Quebec, civil law advocates (or avocats in French) often call themselves "attorney" and sometimes "barrister and solicitor" in English, and all lawyers in Quebec, or lawyers in the rest of Canada when practising in French, are addressed with the honorific title, "Me." or "Maître".
In England and Wales, "lawyer" is used to refer to persons who provide reserved and unreserved legal activities and includes practitioners such as barristers, attorneys, solicitors, registered foreign lawyers, patent attorneys, trademark attorneys, licensed conveyancers, public notaries, commissioners for oaths, immigration advisers and claims management services. The Legal Services Act 2007 defines the "legal activities" that may only be performed by a person who is entitled to do so pursuant to the Act. "Lawyer" is not a protected title.
In South Africa, the profession is divided into "advocates" and "attorneys", having comparable descriptions to "barristers" and “solicitors" in the UK. Advocates spend one year under pupillage and attorneys spend two years under Articles of Clerkship before being admitted in the High Court to the role of advocates or attorneys as the case may be. "Lawyer" is a generic term referring to anyone qualified in law, however, its use is not widespread, especially not within the profession. "Legal practitioner" has gained limited usage with the introduction of the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014, under which the functions of attorneys and advocates overlap and are less distinct. This is not prevalent, however. "Legal advisor" is commonly used to describe in-house or corporate advisors.
In Pakistan, the term "Advocate" is used instead of lawyer in the Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Act, 1973.
In India, the term "lawyer" is often commonly used, but the official term is "advocate" as prescribed under the Advocates Act, 1961.
In Scotland, the word "lawyer" refers to a more specific group of legally trained people. It specifically includes advocates and solicitors. In a generic sense, it may also include judges and law-trained support staff.
In the United States, the term generally refers to attorneys who may practice law. It is never used to refer to patent agents or paralegals. In fact, there are statutory and regulatory restrictions on non-lawyers like paralegals practicing law.
Other nations tend to have comparable terms for the analogous concept.
Responsibilities
In most countries, particularly civil law countries, there has been a tradition of giving many legal tasks to a variety of civil law notaries, clerks, and scriveners. These countries do not have "lawyers" in the American sense, insofar as that term refers to a single type of general-purpose legal services provider; rather, their legal professions consist of a large number of different kinds of law-trained persons, known as jurists, some of whom are advocates who are licensed to practice in the courts. It is difficult to formulate accurate generalizations that cover all the countries with multiple legal professions because each country has traditionally had its own peculiar method of dividing up legal work among all its different types of legal professionals.
Notably, England, the mother of the common law jurisdictions, emerged from the Middle Ages with similar complexity in its legal professions, but then evolved by the 19th century to a single division between barristers and solicitors. An equivalent division developed between advocates and procurators in some civil law countries; these two types did not always monopolize the practice of law, in that they coexisted with civil law notaries.
Several countries that originally had two or more legal professions have since fused or united their professions into a single type of lawyer. Most countries in this category are common law countries, though France, a civil law country, merged its jurists in 1990 and 1991 in response to Anglo-American competition. In countries with fused professions, a lawyer is usually permitted to carry out all or nearly all the responsibilities listed below.
Oral argument in the courts
Arguing a client's case before a judge or jury in a court of law is the traditional province of the barrister in England and Australia, and of advocates in some civil law jurisdictions. However, the boundary between barristers and solicitors has evolved. In England today, the barrister monopoly covers only appellate courts, and barristers must compete directly with solicitors in many trial courts. In countries like the United States, which have fused legal professions, there are trial lawyers who specialize in trying cases in court, but trial lawyers do not have a legal monopoly like barristers. In some countries, litigants have the option of arguing pro se, or on their own behalf. It is common for litigants to appear unrepresented before certain courts like small claims courts; indeed, many such courts do not allow lawyers to speak for their clients, in an effort to save money for all participants in a small case. In other countries, like Venezuela, no one may appear before a judge unless represented by a lawyer. The advantage of the latter regime is that lawyers are familiar with the court's customs and procedures, and make the legal system more efficient for all involved. Unrepresented parties often damage their own credibility or slow the court down as a result of their inexperience.
Research and drafting of court papers
Often, lawyers brief a court in writing on the issues in a case before the issues can be orally argued. They may have to perform extensive research into relevant facts. Also, they are drafting legal papers and preparing for an oral argument.
In England, the usual division of labor is that a solicitor will obtain the facts of the case from the client and then brief a barrister (usually in writing). The barrister then researches and drafts the necessary court pleadings (which will be filed and served by the solicitor) and orally argues the case.
In Spain, the procurator merely signs and presents the papers to the court, but it is the advocate who drafts the papers and argues the case.
In some countries, like Japan, a scrivener or clerk may fill out court forms and draft simple papers for laypersons who cannot afford or do not need attorneys, and advise them on how to manage and argue their own cases.
Advocacy (written and oral) in administrative hearings
In most developed countries, the legislature has granted original jurisdiction over highly technical matters to executive branch administrative agencies which oversee such things. As a result, some lawyers have become specialists in administrative law. In a few countries, there is a special category of jurists with a monopoly over this form of advocacy; for example, France formerly had conseils juridiques (who were merged into the main legal profession in 1991). In other countries, like the United States, lawyers have been effectively barred by statute from certain types of administrative hearings in order to preserve their informality.
Client intake and counseling (with regard to pending litigation)
An important aspect of a lawyer's job is developing and managing relationships with clients (or the client's employees, if the lawyer works in-house for a government or corporation). The client-lawyer relationship is explained in six steps. First, the relationship begins with an intake interview where the lawyer gets to know the client personally. The second step is discovering the facts of the client's case. Thirdly is clarifying what the client wants to accomplish. The fourth step is where the lawyer shapes the client's expectations as to what actually can be accomplished. The second to last step begins to develop various claims or defenses for the client. Lastly, the lawyer explains her or his fees to the client.
In England, only solicitors were traditionally in direct contact with the client. The solicitor retained a barrister if one was necessary and acted as an intermediary between the barrister and the client. In most cases barristers were obliged, under what is known as the "cab rank rule", to accept instructions for a case in an area in which they held themselves out as practicing, at a court at which they normally appeared and at their usual rates.
Legal advice
Legal advice is the application of abstract principles of law to the concrete facts of the client's case to advise the client about what they should do next. In many countries, only a properly licensed lawyer may provide legal advice to clients for good consideration, even if no lawsuit is contemplated or is in progress. Therefore, even conveyancers and corporate in-house counsel must first get a license to practice, though they may actually spend very little of their careers in court. Failure to obey such a rule is the crime of the unauthorized practice of law.
In other countries, jurists who hold law degrees are allowed to provide legal advice to individuals or to corporations, and it is irrelevant if they lack a license and cannot appear in court. Some countries go further; in England and Wales, there is no general prohibition on the giving of legal advice. Singapore does not have any admission requirements for in-house counsel. Sometimes civil law notaries are allowed to give legal advice, as in Belgium.
In many countries, non-jurist accountants may provide what is technically legal advice in tax and accounting matters.
Protecting intellectual property
In virtually all countries, patents, trademarks, industrial designs and other forms of intellectual property must be formally registered with a government agency in order to receive maximum protection under the law. The division of such work among lawyers, licensed non-lawyer jurists/agents, and ordinary clerks or scriveners varies greatly from one country to the next.
Negotiating and drafting contracts
In some countries, the negotiating and drafting of contracts is considered to be similar to the provision of legal advice, so that it is subject to the licensing requirement explained above. In others, jurists or notaries may negotiate or draft contracts.
Lawyers in some civil law countries traditionally deprecated "transactional law" or "business law" as beneath them. French law firms developed transactional departments only in the 1990s when they started to lose business to international firms based in the United States and the United Kingdom (where solicitors have always done transactional work).
Conveyancing
Conveyancing is the drafting of the documents necessary for the transfer of real property, such as deeds and mortgages. In some jurisdictions, all real estate transactions must be carried out by a lawyer (or a solicitor where that distinction still exists). Such a monopoly is quite valuable from the lawyer's point of view; historically, conveyancing accounted for about half of English solicitors' income (though this has since changed), and a 1978 study showed that conveyancing "accounts for as much as 80 percent of solicitor-client contact in New South Wales." In most common law jurisdictions outside of the United States, this monopoly arose from an 1804 law that was introduced by William Pitt the Younger as a quid pro quo for the raising of fees on the certification of legal professionals such as barristers, solicitors, attorneys, and notaries.
In others, the use of a lawyer is optional and banks, title companies, or realtors may be used instead. In some civil law jurisdictions, real estate transactions are handled by civil law notaries. In England and Wales a special class of legal professionals–the licensed conveyancer–is also allowed to carry out conveyancing services for reward.
Carrying out the intent of the deceased
In many countries, only lawyers have the legal authority to draft wills, trusts, and any other documents that ensure the efficient disposition of a person's property after death. In some civil law countries, this responsibility is handled by civil law notaries.
In the United States, the estates of the deceased must generally be administered by a court through probate. American lawyers have a profitable monopoly on dispensing advice about probate law (which has been heavily criticized).
Prosecution and defense of criminal suspects
In many civil law countries, prosecutors are trained and employed as part of the judiciary; they are law-trained jurists, but may not necessarily be lawyers in the sense that the word is used in the common law world. In common law countries, prosecutors are usually lawyers holding regular licenses who simply happen to work for the government office that files criminal charges against suspects. Criminal defense lawyers specialize in the defense of those charged with any crimes.
Education
The educational prerequisites for becoming a lawyer vary greatly from country to country. In some countries, law is taught by a faculty of law, which is a department of a university's general undergraduate college. Law students in those countries pursue a Master or Bachelor of Laws degree. In some countries it is common or even required for students to earn another bachelor's degree at the same time. It is often followed by a series of advanced examinations, apprenticeships, and additional coursework at special government institutes.
In other countries, particularly the UK and U.S.A., law is primarily taught at law schools. In America, the American Bar Association decides which law schools to approve and thereby which ones are deemed most respectable. In England and Wales, the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) must be taken to have the right to work and be named as a barrister. Students who decide to pursue a non-law subject at degree level can instead study the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL) after their degrees, before beginning the Legal Practice Course (LPC) or BPTC. In the United States and countries following the American model, (such as Canada with the exception of the province of Quebec) law schools are graduate/professional schools where a bachelor's degree is a prerequisite for admission. Most law schools are part of universities but a few are independent institutions. Law schools in the United States and Canada (with the exception of McGill University) award graduating students a J.D. (Juris Doctor/Doctor of Jurisprudence) (as opposed to the Bachelor of Laws) as the practitioner's law degree. Many schools also offer post-doctoral law degrees such as the LL.M (Legum Magister/Master of Laws), or the S.J.D. (Scientiae Juridicae Doctor/Doctor of Juridical Science) for students interested in advancing their research knowledge and credentials in a specific area of law.
The methods and quality of legal education vary widely. Some countries require extensive clinical training in the form of apprenticeships or special clinical courses. Others, like Venezuela, do not. A few countries prefer to teach through assigned readings of judicial opinions (the casebook method) followed by intense in-class cross-examination by the professor (the Socratic method). Many others have only lectures on highly abstract legal doctrines, which forces young lawyers to figure out how to actually think and write like a lawyer at their first apprenticeship (or job). Depending upon the country, a typical class size could range from five students in a seminar to five hundred in a giant lecture room. In the United States, law schools maintain small class sizes, and as such, grant admissions on a more limited and competitive basis.
Some countries, particularly industrialized ones, have a traditional preference for full-time law programs, while in developing countries, students often work full- or part-time to pay the tuition and fees of their part-time law programs.
Law schools in developing countries share several common problems, such as an over reliance on practicing judges and lawyers who treat teaching as a part-time hobby (and a concomitant scarcity of full-time law professors); incompetent faculty with questionable credentials; and textbooks that lag behind the current state of the law by two or three decades.
Earning the right to practice law
Some jurisdictions grant a "diploma privilege" to certain institutions, so that merely earning a degree or credential from those institutions is the primary qualification for practicing law. Mexico allows anyone with a law degree to practice law. However, in a large number of countries, a law student must pass a bar examination (or a series of such examinations) before receiving a license to practice. In a handful of U.S. states, one may become an attorney (a so-called country lawyer) by simply "reading law" and passing the bar examination, without having to attend law school first (although very few people actually become lawyers that way).
Some countries require a formal apprenticeship with an experienced practitioner, while others do not. For example, in South Africa it is required that in addition to obtaining an LL.B degree that person has to complete a year of pupillage under an experienced Advocate and have to be admitted to the bar to practice as an Advocate. Holders of an LL.B must have completed two years of clerkship under a principal Attorney (known as Articles) and passed all four board exams to be admitted as an "Attorney" and refer to themselves as such. A few jurisdictions still allow an apprenticeship in place of any kind of formal legal education (though the number of persons who actually become lawyers that way is increasingly rare).
Some countries, such as Singapore, do not have any admission requirements for in-house counsel.
Career structure
The career structure of lawyers varies widely from one country to the next.
Common law/civil law
In most common law countries, especially those with fused professions, lawyers have many options over the course of their careers. Besides private practice, they can become a prosecutor, government counsel, corporate in-house counsel, administrative law judge, judge, arbitrator, or law professor. There are also many non-legal jobs for which legal training is good preparation, such as politician, corporate executive, government administrator, investment banker, entrepreneur, or journalist. In developing countries like India, a large majority of law students never actually practice, but simply use their law degree as a foundation for careers in other fields.
In most civil law countries, lawyers generally structure their legal education around their chosen specialty; the boundaries between different types of lawyers are carefully defined and hard to cross. After one earns a law degree, career mobility may be severely constrained. For example, unlike their American counterparts, Another interesting example is France, where for much of the 20th century, all judiciary officials were graduates of an elite professional school for judges. Although the French judiciary has begun experimenting with the Anglo-American model of appointing judges from accomplished advocates, the few advocates who have actually joined the bench this way are looked down upon by their colleagues who have taken the traditional route to judicial office.
In a few civil law countries, such as Sweden, the legal profession is not rigorously bifurcated and everyone within it can easily change roles and arenas.
Specialization
In many countries, lawyers are general practitioners who represent clients in a broad field of legal matters. In others, there has been a tendency since the start of the 20th century for lawyers to specialize early in their careers.
In countries where specialization is prevalent, many lawyers specialize in representing one side in one particular area of the law; thus, it is common in the United States to hear of plaintiffs' personal injury attorneys. Texas offers attorneys the opportunity to receive a board certification through the state's Texas Board of Legal Specialization. To be board certified, attorney applicants undergo a rigorous examination in one of 24 areas of practice offered by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. Only those attorneys who are "board certified" are permitted to use the word "specialize" in any publicly accessible materials such as a website or television commercial. See Texas Rule 7.02(a)(6).
Organizations
Lawyers in private practice generally work in specialized businesses known as law firms, with the exception of English barristers. The vast majority of law firms worldwide are small businesses that range in size from 1 to 10 lawyers. The United States, with its large number of firms with more than 50 lawyers, is an exception. The United Kingdom and Australia are also exceptions, as the UK, Australia and the U.S. are now home to several firms with more than 1,000 lawyers after a wave of mergers in the late 1990s.
Notably, barristers in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and some states in Australia do not work in "law firms". Those who offer their services to members of the general public—as opposed to those working "in-house" — are required to be self-employed. Most work in groupings known as "sets" or "chambers", where some administrative and marketing costs are shared. An important effect of this different organizational structure is that there is no conflict of interest where barristers in the same chambers work for opposing sides in a case, and in some specialized chambers this is commonplace. Where lawyer will decide to work is largely down to the remuneration that they will receive. Trainee lawyer salaries vary widely throughout the UK, with their location having a big impact on their pay.
Professional associations and regulation
Mandatory licensing and membership in professional organizations
In some jurisdictions, either the judiciary or the Ministry of Justice directly supervises the admission, licensing, and regulation of lawyers.
Other jurisdictions, by statute, tradition, or court order, have granted such powers to a professional association which all lawyers must belong to. In the U.S., such associations are known as mandatory, integrated, or unified bar associations. In the Commonwealth of Nations, similar organizations are known as Inns of Court, bar councils or law societies. In civil law countries, comparable organizations are known as Orders of Advocates, Chambers of Advocates, Colleges of Advocates, Faculties of Advocates, or similar names. Generally, a nonmember caught practicing law may be liable for the crime of unauthorized practice of law.
In common law countries with divided legal professions, barristers traditionally belong to the bar council (or an Inn of Court) and solicitors belong to the law society. In the English-speaking world, the largest mandatory professional association of lawyers is the State Bar of California, with 230,000 members.
Some countries admit and regulate lawyers at the national level, so that a lawyer, once licensed, can argue cases in any court in the land. This is common in small countries like New Zealand, Japan, and Belgium. Others, especially those with federal governments, tend to regulate lawyers at the state or provincial level; this is the case in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Switzerland, to name a few. Brazil is the most well-known federal government that regulates lawyers at the national level.
Some countries, like Italy, regulate lawyers at the regional level, and a few, like Belgium, even regulate them at the local level (that is, they are licensed and regulated by the local equivalent of bar associations but can advocate in courts nationwide). In Germany, lawyers are admitted to regional bars and may appear for clients before all courts nationwide with the exception of the Federal Court of Justice of Germany (Bundesgerichtshof or BGH); oddly, securing admission to the BGH's bar limits a lawyer's practice solely to the supreme federal courts and the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany.
Generally, geographic limitations can be troublesome for a lawyer who discovers that his client's cause requires him to litigate in a court beyond the normal geographic scope of his license. Although most courts have special pro hac vice rules for such occasions, the lawyer will still have to deal with a different set of professional responsibility rules, as well as the possibility of other differences in substantive and procedural law.
Some countries grant licenses to non-resident lawyers, who may then appear regularly on behalf of foreign clients. Others require all lawyers to live in the jurisdiction or to even hold national citizenship as a prerequisite for receiving a license to practice. But the trend in industrialized countries since the 1970s has been to abolish citizenship and residency restrictions. For example, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down a citizenship requirement on equality rights grounds in 1989, and similarly, American citizenship and residency requirements were struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 and 1985, respectively. The European Court of Justice made similar decisions in 1974 and 1977 striking down citizenship restrictions in Belgium and France.
Who regulates lawyers
A key difference among countries is whether lawyers should be regulated solely by an independent judiciary and its subordinate institutions (a self-regulating legal profession), or whether lawyers should be subject to supervision by the Ministry of Justice in the executive branch.
In most civil law countries, the government has traditionally exercised tight control over the legal profession in order to ensure a steady supply of loyal judges and bureaucrats. That is, lawyers were expected first and foremost to serve the state, and the availability of counsel for private litigants was an afterthought. Even in civil law countries like Norway which have partially self-regulating professions, the Ministry of Justice is the sole issuer of licenses, and makes its own independent re-evaluation of a lawyer's fitness to practice after a lawyer has been expelled from the Advocates' Association. Brazil is an unusual exception in that its national Order of Advocates has become a fully self-regulating institution (with direct control over licensing) and has successfully resisted government attempts to place it under the control of the Ministry of Labor.
Of all the civil law countries, Communist countries historically went the farthest towards total state control, with all Communist lawyers forced to practice in collectives by the mid-1950s. China is a prime example: technically, the People's Republic of China did not have lawyers, and instead had only poorly trained, state-employed "legal workers," prior to the enactment of a comprehensive reform package in 1996 by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress.
In contrast, common law lawyers have traditionally regulated themselves through institutions where the influence of non-lawyers, if any, was weak and indirect (despite nominal state control). Such institutions have been traditionally dominated by private practitioners who opposed strong state control of the profession on the grounds that it would endanger the ability of lawyers to zealously and competently advocate their clients' causes in the adversarial system of justice.
However, the concept of the self-regulating profession has been criticized as a sham which serves to legitimize the professional monopoly while protecting the profession from public scrutiny. Disciplinary mechanisms have been astonishingly ineffective, and penalties have been light or nonexistent.
Voluntary associations
Lawyers are always free to form voluntary associations of their own, apart from any licensing or mandatory membership that may be required by the laws of their jurisdiction. Like their mandatory counterparts, such organizations may exist at all geographic levels. In American English, such associations are known as voluntary bar associations. The largest voluntary professional association of lawyers in the English-speaking world is the American Bar Association.
In some countries, like France and Italy, lawyers have also formed trade unions.
Cultural perception
Hostility towards the legal profession is a widespread phenomenon. For example, William Shakespeare famously wrote, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" in Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2. The legal profession was abolished in Prussia in 1780 and in France in 1789, though both countries eventually realized that their judicial systems could not function efficiently without lawyers. Complaints about too many lawyers were common in both England and the United States in the 1840s, Germany in the 1910s, and in Australia, Canada, the United States, and Scotland in the 1980s.
Public distrust of lawyers reached record heights in the United States after the Watergate scandal. In the aftermath of Watergate, legal self-help books became popular among those who wished to solve their legal problems without having to deal with lawyers. Lawyer jokes (already a perennial favorite) also soared in popularity in English-speaking North America as a result of Watergate. In 1989, American legal self-help publisher Nolo Press published a 171-page compilation of negative anecdotes about lawyers from throughout human history.
In Adventures in Law and Justice (2003), legal researcher Bryan Horrigan dedicated a chapter to "Myths, Fictions, and Realities" about law and illustrated the perennial criticism of lawyers as "amoral [...] guns for hire" with a quote from Ambrose Bierce's satirical The Devil's Dictionary (1911) that summarized the noun as: "LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law."
More generally, in Legal Ethics: A Comparative Study (2004), law professor Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr. with Angelo Dondi briefly examined the "regulations attempting to suppress lawyer misconduct" and noted that their similarity around the world was paralleled by a "remarkable consistency" in certain "persistent grievances" about lawyers that transcends both time and locale, from the Bible to medieval England to dynastic China. The authors then generalized these common complaints about lawyers as being classified into five "general categories" as follows:
abuse of litigation in various ways, including using dilatory tactics and false evidence and making frivolous arguments to the courts
preparation of false documentation, such as false deeds, contracts, or wills
deceiving clients and other persons and misappropriating property
procrastination in dealings with clients
charging excessive fees
Some studies have shown that suicide rates among lawyers may be as much as six times higher than the average population, and commentators suggest that the low opinion the public has of lawyers, combined with their own high ideals of justice, which in practice they may see denied, increase the depression rates of those in this profession. Additionally, lawyers are twice as likely to suffer from addiction to alcohol and other drugs.
Compensation
In the United States, lawyers typically earn between $45,000 and $160,000 per year, although earnings vary by age and experience, practice setting, sex, and race.
Solo practitioners typically earn less than lawyers in corporate law firms but more than those working for state or local government.
Lawyers are paid for their work in a variety of ways. In private practice, they may work for an hourly fee according to a billable hour structure, a contingency fee (usually in cases involving personal injury), or a lump sum payment if the matter is straightforward. Normally, most lawyers negotiate a written fee agreement up front and may require a non-refundable retainer in advance. Recent studies suggest that when lawyers charge a fixed-fee rather than billing by the hour, they work less hard on behalf of clients and client get worse outcomes. In many countries there are fee-shifting arrangements by which the loser must pay the winner's fees and costs; the United States is the major exception, although in turn, its legislators have carved out many exceptions to the so-called "American Rule" of no fee shifting.
Lawyers working directly on the payroll of governments, nonprofits, and corporations usually earn a regular annual salary. In many countries, with the notable exception of Germany, lawyers can also volunteer their labor in the service of worthy causes through an arrangement called pro bono (short for pro bono publico, "for the common good"). Traditionally such work was performed on behalf of the poor, but in some countries it has now expanded to many other causes such as the environment.
In some countries, there are legal aid lawyers who specialize in providing legal services to the indigent. France and Spain even have formal fee structures by which lawyers are compensated by the government for legal aid cases on a per-case basis. A similar system, though not as extensive or generous, operates in Australia, Canada, and South Africa.
In other countries, legal aid specialists are practically nonexistent. This may be because non-lawyers are allowed to provide such services; in both Italy and Belgium, trade unions and political parties provide what can be characterized as legal aid services. Some legal aid in Belgium is also provided by young lawyer apprentices subsidized by local bar associations (known as the pro deo system), as well as consumer protection nonprofit organizations and Public Assistance Agencies subsidized by local governments. In Germany, mandatory fee structures have enabled widespread implementation of affordable legal expense insurance.
History
Ancient Greece
The earliest people who could be described as "lawyers" were probably the orators of ancient Athens (see History of Athens). However, Athenian orators faced serious structural obstacles. First, there was a rule that individuals were supposed to plead their own cases, which was soon bypassed by the increasing tendency of individuals to ask a "friend" for assistance. However, around the middle of the fourth century, the Athenians disposed of the perfunctory request for a friend. Second, a more serious obstacle, which the Athenian orators never completely overcame, was the rule that no one could take a fee to plead the cause of another. This law was widely disregarded in practice, but was never abolished, which meant that orators could never present themselves as legal professionals or experts. They had to uphold the legal fiction that they were merely an ordinary citizen generously helping out a friend for free, and thus they could never organize into a real profession—with professional associations and titles and all the other pomp and circumstance—like their modern counterparts. Therefore, if one narrows the definition to those men who could practice the legal profession openly and legally, then the first lawyers would have to be the orators of ancient Rome.
Ancient Rome
A law enacted in 204 BC barred Roman advocates from taking fees, but the law was widely ignored. The ban on fees was abolished by Emperor Claudius, who legalized advocacy as a profession and allowed the Roman advocates to become the first lawyers who could practice openly—but he also imposed a fee ceiling of 10,000 sesterces. This was apparently not much money; the Satires of Juvenal complained that there was no money in working as an advocate.
Like their Greek contemporaries, early Roman advocates were trained in rhetoric, not law, and the judges before whom they argued were also not law-trained. But very early on, unlike Athens, Rome developed a class of specialists who were learned in the law, known as jurisconsults (iuris consulti). Jurisconsults were wealthy amateurs who dabbled in law as an intellectual hobby; they did not make their primary living from it. They gave legal opinions (responsa) on legal issues to all comers (a practice known as publice respondere). Roman judges and governors would routinely consult with an advisory panel of jurisconsults before rendering a decision, and advocates and ordinary people also went to jurisconsults for legal opinions. Thus, the Romans were the first to have a class of people who spent their days thinking about legal problems, and this is why their law became so "precise, detailed, and technical."
During the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, jurisconsults and advocates were unregulated, since the former were amateurs and the latter were technically illegal. Any citizen could call himself an advocate or a legal expert, though whether people believed him would depend upon his personal reputation. This changed once Claudius legalized the legal profession. By the start of the Byzantine Empire, the legal profession had become well-established, heavily regulated, and highly stratified. The centralization and bureaucratization of the profession was apparently gradual at first, but accelerated during the reign of Emperor Hadrian. At the same time, the jurisconsults went into decline during the imperial period.
In the words of Fritz Schulz, "by the fourth century things had changed in the eastern Empire: advocates now were really lawyers." For example, by the fourth century, advocates had to be enrolled on the bar of a court to argue before it, they could only be attached to one court at a time, and there were restrictions (which came and went depending upon who was emperor) on how many advocates could be enrolled at a particular court. By the 380s, advocates were studying law in addition to rhetoric (thus reducing the need for a separate class of jurisconsults); in 460, Emperor Leo imposed a requirement that new advocates seeking admission had to produce testimonials from their teachers; and by the sixth century, a regular course of legal study lasting about four years was required for admission. Claudius's fee ceiling lasted all the way into the Byzantine period, though by then it was measured at 100 solidi. It was widely evaded, either through demands for maintenance and expenses or a sub rosa barter transaction. The latter was cause for disbarment.
The notaries (tabelliones) appeared in the late Roman Empire. Like their modern-day descendants, the civil law notaries, they were responsible for drafting wills, conveyances, and contracts. They were ubiquitous and most villages had one. In Roman times, notaries were widely considered to be inferior to advocates and jury consults.
Middle Ages
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the onset of the Early Middle Ages, the legal profession of Western Europe collapsed. As James Brundage has explained: "[by 1140], no one in Western Europe could properly be described as a professional lawyer or a professional canonist in anything like the modern sense of the term 'professional.' " However, from 1150 (when Decretum Gratiani was compiled) onward, a small but increasing number of men became experts in canon law but only in furtherance of other occupational goals, such as serving the Catholic Church as priests. From 1190 to 1230, however, there was a crucial shift in which some men began to practice canon law as a lifelong profession in itself.
The legal profession's return was marked by the renewed efforts of church and state to regulate it. In 1231, two French councils mandated that lawyers had to swear an oath of admission before practicing before the bishop's courts in their regions, and a similar oath was promulgated by the papal legate in London in 1237. During the same decade, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Frederick II, the king of the Kingdom of Sicily, imposed a similar oath in his civil courts. By 1250, the nucleus of a new legal profession had clearly formed. The new trend towards professionalization culminated in a controversial proposal at the Second Council of Lyon in 1275 that all ecclesiastical courts should require an oath of admission. Although not adopted by the council, it was highly influential in many such courts throughout Europe. The civil courts in England also joined the trend towards professionalization; in 1275 a statute was enacted that prescribed punishment for professional lawyers guilty of deceit, and in 1280 the mayor's court of the city of London promulgated regulations concerning admission procedures, including the administering of an oath. And in 1345, the French crown promulgated a royal ordinance which set forth 24 rules governing advocates, of which 12 were integrated into the oath to be taken by them.
The French medieval oaths were widely influential and of enduring importance; for example, they directly influenced the structure of the advocates' oath adopted by the Canton of Geneva in 1816. In turn, the 1816 Geneva oath served as the inspiration for the attorney's oath drafted by David Dudley Field as Section 511 of the proposed New York Code of Civil Procedure of 1848, which was the first attempt in the United States at a comprehensive statement of a lawyer's professional duties.
Titles
Generally speaking, the modern practice is for lawyers to avoid use of any title, although formal practice varies across the world.
Historically lawyers in most European countries were addressed with the title of doctor, and countries outside of Europe have generally followed the practice of the European country which had policy influence through colonization. The first university degrees, starting with the law school of the University of Bologna (or glossators) in the 11th century, were all law degrees and doctorates. Degrees in other fields did not start until the 13th century, but the doctor continued to be the only degree offered at many of the old universities until the 20th century. Therefore, in many of the southern European countries, including Portugal, Italy and Malta, lawyers have traditionally been addressed as “doctor,” a practice, which was transferred to many countries in South America and Macau. The term "doctor" has since fallen into disuse, although it is still a legal title in Italy and in use in many countries outside of Europe.
In French- (France, Quebec, Belgium, Luxembourg, French-speaking area of Switzerland) and Dutch-speaking countries (Netherlands, Belgium), legal professionals are addressed as Maître ..., abbreviated to Me ... (in French) or Meester ..., abbreviated to mr. ... (in Dutch).
The title of doctor has never been used to address lawyers in England or other common law countries (with the exception of the United States). This is because until 1846 lawyers in England were not required to have a university degree and were trained by other attorneys by apprenticeship or in the Inns of Court. Since law degrees started to become a requirement for lawyers in England, the degree awarded has been the undergraduate LL.B. In South Africa holders of a LL.B, who have completed a year of pupillage and have been admitted to the bar may use the title "Advocate", abbreviated to "Adv" in written correspondence. Holders of an LL.B who have completed two years of clerkship with a principal Attorney and passed all four board exams may be admitted as an "Attorney" and refer to themselves as such. Likewise, Italian law graduates who have qualified for the bar use the title "Avvocato", abbreviated in "Avv."
Even though most lawyers in the United States do not use any titles, the law degree in that country is the Juris Doctor, a professional doctorate degree, and some J.D. holders in the United States use the title of "Doctor" in professional and academic situations.
In countries where holders of the first law degree traditionally use the title of doctor (e.g. Peru, Brazil, Macau, Portugal, Argentina), J.D. holders who are attorneys will often use the title of doctor as well. It is common for English-language male lawyers to use the honorific suffix "Esq." (for "Esquire"). In the United States the style is also used by female lawyers.
In many Asian countries, holders of the Juris Doctor degree are also called "博士" (doctor).
In the Philippines and Filipino communities overseas, lawyers who are either Filipino or naturalized-citizen expatriates at work there, especially those who also profess other jobs at the same time, are addressed and introduced as either Attorney or Counselor (especially in courts), rather than Sir/Madam in speech or Mr./Mrs./Ms. (G./Gng./Bb. in Filipino) before surnames. That word is used either in itself or before the given name or surname.
See also
Ambulance chasing
Association of Pension Lawyers
Avocats Sans Frontières
Cause lawyer
Corporate lawyer
Court dress
Fiduciary
Ghost lawyer
Law broker
Lawyer-supported mediation
Legalese
List of jurists
Notary public
Privilege of the predecessors
Public defender
Rules lawyer
Shyster
Sole practitioner (lawyer)
St. Ivo of Kermartin (patron saint of lawyers)
Trainee solicitor
Notes
External links
Legal ethics
Legal professions
Law enforcement
Positions of authority | [
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17542 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logrolling | Logrolling | Logrolling is the trading of favors, or quid pro quo, such as vote trading by legislative members to obtain passage of actions of interest to each legislative member. In organizational analysis, it refers to a practice in which different organizations promote each other's agendas, each in the expectation that the other will reciprocate. In an academic context, the Nuttall Encyclopedia describes logrolling as "mutual praise by authors of each other's work".
Concept and origin
There are three types of logrolling:
Logrolling in direct democracies: a few individuals vote openly, and votes are easy to trade, rearrange, and observe. Direct democracy is pervasive in representative assemblies and small-government units
Implicit logrolling: large bodies of voters decide complex issues and trade votes without a formal vote trade (Buchanan and Tullock 1962)
Distributive logrolling: enables policymakers to achieve their public goals. These policymakers logroll to ensure that their district policies and pork barrel packages are put into practice regardless of whether their policies are actually efficient (Evans 1994 and Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
Distributive logrolling is the most prevalent kind of logrolling found in a democratic system of governance.
"Quid pro quo" sums up the concept of logrolling in the United States' political process today. Logrolling is the process by which politicians trade support for one issue or piece of legislation in exchange for another politician's support, especially by means of legislative votes (Holcombe 2006). If a legislator logrolls, he initiates the trade of votes for one particular act or bill in order to secure votes on behalf of another act or bill. Logrolling means that two parties will pledge their mutual support, so both bills can attain a simple majority. For example, a vote on behalf of a tariff may be traded by a congressman for a vote from another congressman on behalf of an agricultural subsidy to ensure that both acts will gain a majority and pass through the legislature (Shughart 2008). Logrolling cannot occur during presidential elections, where a vast voting population necessitates that individual votes have little political power, or during secret-ballot votes (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Because logrolling is pervasive in the political process, it is important to understand which external situations determine when, why, and how logrolling will occur, and whether it is beneficial, efficient, or neither.
Origins
The widest accepted origin is the old custom of neighbors assisting each other with the moving of logs. If two neighbors had cut a lot of timber which needed to be moved, it made more sense for them to work together to roll the logs. In this way, it is similar to a barn-raising where a neighbor comes and helps a family build their barn, and, in turn, that family goes and returns the favor, helping him build his.
Here is an example of the term's original use:
"A family comes to sit in the forest," wrote an observer in 1835; "Their neighbors lay down their employments, shoulder their axes, and come in to the log-rolling. They spend the day in hard labor, and then retire, leaving the newcomers their good wishes, and a habitation."American frontiersman Davy Crockett was one of the first to apply the term to legislation:
The first known use of the term was by Congressman Davy Crockett, who said on the floor (of the U.S. House of Representatives) in 1835, "my people don't like me to log-roll in their business, and vote away pre-emption rights to fellows in other states that never kindle a fire on their own land."
The Choice to Logroll
Human beings, whether ignorant or informed, rational or irrational, logical or illogical, determine individual and group action through choices. Economics studies these choices, including the choice to logroll, and their particular influence within the market sector (Schwartz 1977). In America, political and economic decisions are usually made by politicians elected to legislative assemblies, and not directly by the citizenry (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Although legislative votes are recorded and are available to the American public, legislators can exchange their votes on issues they do not care much about for votes on other issues that are more important to their personal agendas (Holcombe 2006). In The Calculus of Consent, James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock explore the relationship between individual choice in the voting process and in the marketplace, specifically within logrolling. Logrolling vote trades, like any activity within the marketplace, must be mutually beneficial (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
A vote trade is like a legislative IOU. When a legislator needs a few more votes to acquire a simple majority, he will seek support through a vote exchange. He will promise a fellow legislator an IOU vote for another piece of legislation in return for a vote on his own act or bill. Legislators who logroll within a small body, for example, the U.S. House or Senate, have incentive to honor their IOU votes because they cannot have their reputations tainted if they wish to be effective politicians (Holcombe 2006).
Logrolling and the role of preference
People have varying preferences, and make decisions at the margin to maximize their utility and improve their welfare. The same is true for legislators, who all enter office with different agendas, passions, and goals. Ideological diversity plays a significant role in the result of a vote and carries with it a significant cost. In addition, legislators will favor interests that offer them the most support. Legislative votes are determined by the intensity of personal preference, desires of constituents, and, ultimately, what will lead to the particular legislator's greatest utility. When people have ideologies at opposite ends of the political spectrum, it's difficult to ensure a simple majority, so buying a supermajority vote through logrolling may be the most cost effective (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
In the General Possibility Theorem, Kenneth Arrow argues that if a legislative consensus can be reached through a simple majority, then minimum conditions must be satisfied, and these conditions must provide a superior ranking to any subset of alternative votes (Arrow 1963). A bill must be attractive to a legislator, or else he will not cast his vote for it. A vote, by the pure nature of the voting process, demonstrates explicit interest in whatever is voted upon. In logrolling, a superior ranking means that the marginal benefit of the vote is greater than any alternatives, so exchanging votes is worthwhile. The General Possibility Theorem necessitates that allocating one vote for another must constitute true utility and a sincere vote. Arrow's theory may place more restrictions and limitations on an individual voter's preferences than Buchanan and Tullock's; regardless, individuals will always choose the option they value most.
Logrolling to reach the optimal decision
Decisions reach an optimum only when they are unanimous, when votes are not coerced and everyone has veto power (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Unanimous votes, however, are not required for the American voting process. This is why some logrolling advocates argue that logrolling must be allowed within a democracy—sometimes there may not be a "best" or "most efficient" option on a vote.
Logrolling creates a market within which votes are exchanged as a sort of currency, and thus, facilitates the political process that produces the highest valued outcomes (Holcombe 2006). If individual participants recognize the value of their own vote, they are motivated to trade. When methods of trade do not conflict with given standards or ethical procedures, individuals naturally seek mutually advantageous vote trades. An individual may effectually, but imperfectly, "sell" his vote on a particular issue to, in return, secure votes from other individuals on behalf of legislation he prefers (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
Logrolling has one necessary condition: benefits from the public activity must be significantly more concentrated or localized than the costs. In economics, decisions are made at the margin. Logrolling depends on the reality that the marginal benefit (or utility) of at least some elected officials, or the citizenry, will increase when the legislation is passed (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Any economist will consider the immediate opportunity cost of the logrolling procedure within the legislative body, as well as the external cost of the vote (the cost to enact and see the bill through to fruition).
When transaction costs are low and parties involved are perfectly informed, a mutually beneficial agreement will occur: whoever values the property the highest will end up with it. This is what Ronald H. Coase proposed in his Theory of Property Rights in 1960. This theory holds true within the world of economics. In the American system of government, legislators have the incentive to logroll because transaction costs are low. When transaction costs are low, the Coase theorem says that the political marketplace (the decisions of the legislatures) will allocate resources to the highest valued point (Coase 1960).
Typically, logrolling is a mechanism used to gain support for special interest and minority groups. However, because of the ideological mix that already exists within the legislature itself, minority views are often represented, even if only marginally. With low transaction costs, the Coase theorem will come into play. The highest valued outcome is chosen by the legislature, regardless the member's ideological stance or political affiliation (Holcombe 2006).
The problem of cyclical majorities may arise with the absence of logrolling. The cyclical majority problem occurs when voters are faced with multiple voting options but cannot choose the option they most prefer, since it is not available. Voters must consider whether the alternative option is closer to their original preference (Bara and Weale 2006). However, when logrolling is allowed, the highest valued outcome is secure without the threat of a cyclical majority. For example, suppose a country road in West Virginia is in disrepair. The local congressman proposes a bill to have the main road in his community resurfaced and paved. The road leads to a town of merely 600 residents. Thus, the other legislators will vote against the measure because the funding is not worthwhile to their constituents. In a logrolling system, the local legislator can use his vote to bargain with his fellow legislators. He will exchange his vote for his fellow legislators' bills to promote, for instance, the construction of new hospitals and the increase of veteran's benefits, in return for their votes to repair the road (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
Logrolling: An example
Table 1-1 explains another example of logrolling. In the example, we have three individuals: Tanya, Alvin, and Rebecca. Tanya favors subsidies for agriculture, Alvin favors school construction, and Rebecca favors the recruitment of more firefighters. It seems as if the proposals are doomed to fail because each is opposed by a majority of voters. Even so, this may not be the outcome. Tanya may visit Rebecca and tell her that she will vote for Rebecca's bill to recruit more firefighters so long as Rebecca votes for her policy, subsidies for agriculture, in return. Now both proposals will win because they have gained a simple majority (Table 1-2), even though in reality the subsidy is opposed by two of the three voters. It's easy to see the Coase theorem at work in examples like this. Here, transaction costs are low, so mutually beneficial agreements are found, and the person who values the service the most will hold it (Browning and Browning 1979). Still, outcomes may be inefficient.
Efficient logrolling
If the sum of the total benefit of the legislation for all the voters is less than the cost of the legislation itself, the legislation is inefficient. Despite its inefficiency, however, it still may pass if logrolling is permitted. If Tanya trades her vote to recruit more firemen to Rebecca in exchange for Rebecca's vote in favor of agriculture subsidies, a mutually beneficial agreement will be reached, even though the outcome is inefficient. On the other hand, if the sum of the total benefit of the legislation for all voters is greater than the cost of the legislation itself, the legislation is efficient. If Tanya trades her vote once again for Rebecca's vote, both parties will reach a mutually beneficial agreement and an efficient outcome.
Minimum winning coalitions and logrolling
A minimum winning coalition is the smallest number of votes required to win the passage of a piece of legislation. Minimum winning coalitions demonstrate the importance of logrolling within a democracy, because the minimal winning coalition may be overthrown with the sway of a single vote. As previously mentioned, coalitions will buy a supermajority of votes if the support for the proposed legislation sways. If a legislator logrolls a few votes beyond the minimal winning coalition to his side, he will ensure that the final vote will be in favor of his legislation. In a way, vote trading does combine positions on distinct issues to form single legislative votes and packages (Stratmann 1992). Logrolled votes transcend affiliations and party lines and become feasible outcomes preferred by a majority or winning coalition (Schwartz 1977).
Logrolling in real politics
A problem in research is that it is impossible to identify vote trading directly within the House of Representatives or the Senate because roll call votes on specific goods are not observed (Irwin and Kroszner 1996). However, examples of refurbished bills can shed some light on the working-out of logrolling within the legislature. For example, in 1930, the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the second-highest tariff in U.S. history, passed the House and Senate. Congress voted to increase tariffs exponentially, which worked to push the United States from a stagnant recession into a plummeting depression (Irwin and Kroszner 1996). Strict party line votes suggest that partisan polarization in 1929 prevented the Smoot-Hawley bill from passing through Congress. The bill, however, was revamped, and legislators used logrolling to pass it through both chambers in 1930.
Omnibus bills can be an alternative market to logrolling. Various clauses are added to a bill to satisfy all involved parties sufficiently. However, large bills, like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, require an in depth knowledge of 1,000 plus pages. Many sections of these types of bills are initially opposed but are later supported because of special benefit clauses (Evans 1994).
Because logrolling allows special-interest groups a voice in the political process, programs that benefit a minority group can get the approval of a majority. However, this may not be in the best interest of the majority. Special-interest groups typically do not represent the typical voter, but rather, small branches of minority ideologies (Holcombe 2006). Voting results with or without logrolling will differ only if the minority is more interested in an issue than the majority, enough to separate the marginal voters from the majority. Studies show that lobbying and political pressure exerted by special-interest groups are not atypical behavior in a modern democracy (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Conditions imposed upon the social choice of the legislature imply a more severe restriction on the individual voter's preferences than the theory of logrolling presented by Buchanan and Tullock and presumed by Arrow's General Possibility Theory (Wilson 1969).
Critics reproach members of Congress for protecting their own electoral interests at the expense of the general welfare. Congressmen tend to distribute specialized benefits at a great cost and ignore the particular costs the legislation bears upon the taxpayers (Evans 1994). Legislators, who seek their personal benefit via logrolling even though it may not benefit those who must pay for the measure, are known as maximizers. Maximizers only take into account their personal cost and electability, instead of the effects of their actions on other parties involved. In short, other taxpayers will pay for the policy even if it does not affect them (Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Initially, maximizers will encourage other legislators to have the same selfish behavior because significant gains can be accrued in the short run. Buchanan and Tullock state that within a system of maximizers, all individuals are worse off than if they had all adopted Kantian norms of behavior.
Legislative bodies can expect higher government spending and taxation when logrolling is allowed to flourish. Logrolling does not imply excessive spending; members can trade tax reductions just as easily as they can trade pork barrel policies. The problem is that benefits of a vote only reach a particular portion of the population, while the tax costs that pay for the vote are spread throughout the entire populace, especially when the act depends on revenue from sales or income taxes. Benefits are concentrated in localities, and the costs are dispersed throughout the nation. Committee members can thus exploit pork barrel projects for electoral purposes. The citizenry is seen as a "common pool," used to finance projects through taxes. Somehow the citizens end up paying higher taxes than those who are not in a logroll system (Dalenberg and Duffy-Deno 1991 and Gilligan and Matsusaka 1995). In a system where logrolling is permitted, a third party may bear the cost of the project, rather than those who receive the full benefit of the legislation. This is always inefficient.
The logic of collective action shows that votes for bills are motivated by politicians and are determined by a simple majority (Olson 1971). Politicians are in the game to win it. Collective effort explains why farms acquire government subsidies at the expense of millions of consumers and why those in the textile industry benefit at the expense of clothing buyers (Shughart 2008). Congressional committees ensure that each committee leader will create legislative coalitions to push his policies to fruition. Thus, ceteris paribus, members who receive such projects, are likely to vote in support of their leader's wishes (Evans 1994).
Policymakers and congressmen have goals of power, and making their own mark in public policy, not pure aims of reelection (Dodd 1977). Reelection does play a great part in the legislative process as a condition to achieving any other political goal. Thus, logrolling can be a powerful tool for committee chairs, who control the voting agendas (Evans 1994). While committee leaders create the supermajority, they try to achieve their personal goals and help a bare majority of members achieve theirs. A skilled policy-oriented committee leader often seeks to exploit the goals of other members in order to construct legislation he or she will prefer (Arnold 1979 and Strahan 1989).
Wafelijzerpolitiek
Wafelijzerpolitiek (lit. waffle iron politics) is a form of logrolling used in Belgium. Until the split of the unitary Belgium in several parts, the unitary government decided on the funds given to big projects. As there were usually two opposing groups of about equal size in Belgium, this norm resulted in the approval of two equally sized projects in the two parts of the country, with the funds given to the two projects being equal. As a result, one project was always overfunded. Many see wafelijzerpolitiek as the source of Belgium's high debt.
After the first state reformation in 1988, many big projects were decided regionally, so the number of wafelijzer projects went down. There are still some things that fall under the supervision of the federal government, where wafelijzerpolitiek still happens. One example is the Belgian railway network.
Another result of the wafelijzerpolitiek is the big useless works. As Flanders is a part of Belgium with many ports (e.g., big ports in Antwerp and Zeebrugge), for every investment in Flemish waterways there had to be an investment in Walloon waterways. Some results are the Ronquières inclined plane and the Strépy-Thieu boat lift.
Simple referenda
In a referendum on a simple issue, the voter cannot easily trade his own vote for a vote on a reciprocal favor. This is because first, he is unsure as to when and how the other issues will be voted upon, and second, he and his immediate neighbors represent a fraction of the total electorate. Thus, trading may not be worthwhile (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
Vote trading under a democratic, majority-rule institution is sometimes considered morally reprehensible behavior. However, the only perfect solution to rid the political system of distributive logrolling would be to develop a specific formula to weigh the costs and benefits of legislation perfectly and only allow efficient programs to be enacted (This is inconceivable. Therefore, logrolling must occur, but only by observing the constitutional rules that have been laid down as safeguards of democracy (Buchanan and Tullock 1962).
Summary
The reality is that transaction costs are high, and most voters, who are ignorant of political issues and the political process, see little incentive to attempt to influence their local legislator's political decisions (Holcombe 2006). It is also difficult for voters to be informed of their legislator's voting habits. Because of this, distributive logrolling will occur in democratic systems. Furthermore, it is the responsibility of the legislator to measure the costs and benefits of legislation and determine what is most efficient for his constituents. Logrolling will occur only if members of the legislature fail to gather enough votes for the passage of specific legislation. In essence, logrolling is a legal way to manipulate voter preference toward either an efficient or an inefficient outcome that would not otherwise be enacted (Browning 1979).
Legality
Logrolling is illegal in numerous jurisdictions, and in some instances is a crime. Sophisticated computational techniques have been developed for the detection and prosecution of this crime.
Other usages
Spy Magazine ran a feature entitled "Logrolling in Our Time" that cited suspicious or humorous examples of mutually admiring book jacket blurbs by pairs of authors. Private Eye magazine regularly draws attention to alleged logrolling by authors in "books of the year" features published by British newspapers and magazines.
See also
Barn raising
Bee (gathering)
Blog roll
Vote trading
References
English-language idioms
Ethically disputed political practices
Political terminology
Public choice theory
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