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0ab7eb97b738c3d97b2bf7260354eebb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ashta-Pradhan | Ashta Pradhan | Ashta Pradhan
Ashta Pradhan, (Marathi: “Council of Eight”) also spelled Asta Pradhad, administrative and advisory council set up by the Indian Hindu Maratha leader Shivaji (died 1680), which contributed to his successful military attacks on the Muslim Mughal Empire and to the good government of the territory over which he established his rule.
The council’s senior member, the peshwa, or mukhya pradhan, was in charge of general administration and held the state seal. The amatya, or mazumdar, and the pant sachir dealt with finance, the sumanta with foreign affairs, and the mantri with intelligence and police reports. The commander in chief (senapati) together with a legal member (nyayadhisha) and a member for religious matters (pandit rao) completed the council. All except the last two held military commands, their civil duties often being performed by deputies. These deputies, along with a staff of secretaries, formed the nucleus of the peshwa’s bureaucracy.
Shivaji’s son Sambhaji (1680–89) scattered the council, but, when Maratha power revived in the 18th century, the council members became hereditary with nominal powers except for the peshwas, who, in the persons of the Bhat family, became the actual controllers of the Maratha state, which was nominally under the weaker descendants of Shivaji.
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5ffd80623e8570adb3aa608cd33de39d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Asia-Pacific-Economic-Cooperation | Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation | Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), organization that seeks to promote free trade and economic cooperation throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Established in 1989 in response to the growing interdependence of Asia-Pacific economies and the advent of regional economic blocs (such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Area) in other parts of the world, APEC works to raise living standards and education levels through sustainable economic growth and to foster a sense of community and an appreciation of shared interests among Asia-Pacific countries. At the end of the 1990s APEC’s membership included its 12 founding members—Australia, Brunei, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and the United States—as well as Chile, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC), the South Pacific Forum (SPF), and the secretariat of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) maintain observer status.
At its 1994 summit meeting, APEC set an ambitious goal of achieving a free trade and investment regime in the Asia-Pacific region by 2010 for members with developed economies and by 2020 for members with developing ones. The following year it adopted the Osaka Action Agenda, a plan to implement APEC’s goals of liberalizing trade and investment, facilitating business activities, and promoting economic and technical cooperation. Despite these commitments, APEC’s effectiveness has been limited by its requirement that all its decisions be made by consensus. Although APEC seeks unanimity, decisions can be taken in the absence of unanimity; however, decisions are not legally binding on member governments.
APEC is organized into numerous committees, ad hoc policy groups, working groups, and a business advisory council. The committees, which examine issues such as trade and investment, economic trends, and budgetary matters, meet twice per year. The working groups are headed by experts and consider specific issues, including energy, tourism, fishing, transportation, and telecommunications. The organization’s chair, which rotates annually, hosts an annual summit meeting and meetings of foreign and economic ministers and other senior officials. The APEC secretariat, established in 1993 and headquartered in Singapore, provides advisory and logistic services as well as research and analysis.
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09778e886e91d1c7dab0f6119ec2bf5a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Asian-Development-Bank | Asian Development Bank | Asian Development Bank
Asian Development Bank (ADB), organization that provides loans and equity investments for development projects in its member countries. The bank also provides technical assistance for projects and programs, and it promotes the investment of capital for development. It was established in August 1966 under the auspices of the United Nations organization now known as ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) and is headquartered in Manila.
At the turn of the 21st century, the ADB was composed of more than 40 regional members, which included countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. The bank’s top borrowers include Indonesia, the People’s Republic of China, India, and Pakistan.
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840afdc078c5fcab5b395ae12d8c3e2b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Asian-Drama-An-Inquiry-into-the-Poverty-of-Nations | Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations | Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations
The book Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968) represents a 10-year study of poverty in Asia. Whereas Mydral was a Malthusian who thought that population growth in Asia would stunt economic growth, conditions in the early 21st century show that many Asian countries…
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e7a9caec397ce43426b663d26b0f70c3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Asian-values | Asian values | Asian values
Asian values, set of values promoted since the late 20th century by some Asian political leaders and intellectuals as a conscious alternative to Western political values such as human rights, democracy, and capitalism. Advocates of Asian values typically claimed that the rapid development of many East Asian economies in the post-World War II period was due to the shared culture of their societies, especially those of Confucian heritage. They also asserted that Western political values were unsuited to East Asia because they fostered excessive individualism and legalism, which threatened to undermine the social order and destroy economic dynamism. Among Asian values that were frequently cited were discipline, hard work, frugality, educational achievement, balancing individual and societal needs, and deference to authority. Critics of Asian values disputed their role in economic growth and argued that they were being used to protect the interests of East Asia’s authoritarian elites.
Claims about the benefits of Asian values garnered particular attention in the early 1990s, when they were articulated by prominent political figures such as former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew. Such claims conflicted with contemporary Western assertions that the collapse of European communism and the success of China’s market socialism had demonstrated the superiority of human rights, democracy, and capitalism over competing forms of organizing society.
The Asian values debate was also internal to Asian societies. At a time of rapid economic and social change in East Asia, growing individualism and democratization and human rights movements challenged established socioeconomic orders and authoritarian regimes. The debate was an element within a larger struggle over competing visions of modernity and of how Asian societies should be organized.
Proponents of Asian values made several related claims. They asserted that Asian values were responsible for the region’s significant economic growth; that economic development must be prioritized in societies that are climbing out of poverty; and, more generally, that civil and political rights should be subordinate to economic and social rights. In addition, because the state embodies the collective identity and interests of its citizens, its needs should take precedence over the rights of the individual. Accordingly, Asian-values proponents were strong defenders of state sovereignty, including the right to noninterference by outsiders. Those ideas were expressed in the 1993 Bangkok Declaration on human rights, which was signed by many Asian governments but criticized by Asian human rights organizations.
Critics of Asian values have dismissed claims on their behalf as attempts to shore up authoritarian and illiberal rule against domestic and external opponents and to obscure the weaknesses of the Asian economic development model. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 appeared to vindicate some of their arguments. Some critics have charged that the discourse of Asian values trades on simplistic stereotypes of Asian cultures and in that respect is similar to the Orientalism that had long characterized Western scholarship on Asian and Arabic societies. Others pointed to the apparent contradiction between the antiliberalism espoused by proponents of Asian values and their promotion of market-oriented development, which has challenged and disrupted the established social order. Finally, feminist theorists viewed the Asian-values discourse as an attempt to legitimate gender, class, ethnic, and racial hierarchies embedded in Asian cultures, in the Asian development model, and in wider capitalist social relations.
The Asian values debate is relevant to arguments in political theory over whether commitments to global justice and equality can be grounded in human rights. Taking issue with the Western assumption that liberal political structures are the starting point for advancing human well-being, communitarians such as Charles Taylor have reflected on Asian cultural experiences to examine the potential and challenges of establishing a more inclusive, unforced, but robust global consensus on human rights. A growing literature, including that associated with Confucian communitarianism and reformist Islam, has examined whether particular values and institutions in Asian societies are consistent with human rights. Daniel A. Bell, a Canadian philosopher specializing in Confucian thought, argued that many “values in Asia,” as opposed to “Asian values,” can both enrich global human rights theory and practice and be deployed to improve the dignity and well-being of contemporary Asians.
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daeac73ed25326c2c6af384acffba8ac | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Asirgarh | Asirgarh | Asirgarh
Asirgarh, Indian fortress situated between the Tapti and Narmada rivers, just north of the city of Burhanpur, in the former Central Provinces and the present state of Maharashtra. The principal importance of the fortress was its strategic location on the only easily accessible route from northern India to the Deccan plateau in the southwest.
Asirgarh was a stronghold of the Hindu Rajputs (warrior caste) but fell to the Muslim sultanate of Delhi in the late 13th century. It was later held by the Fārūqī rulers of nearby Khandesh, from whom it was taken after a long and historic siege (1600–01) by the Mughal emperor Akbar; his success opened the way for later Mughal operations in the Deccan. The fortress was later held by the Hindu Marathas, whose lands lay to the west and from whom it was twice captured, in 1803 and 1819, by the British.
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1ef0f62d563150ccf5c13b91eaa3d205 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aspects-of-the-Novel | Aspects of the Novel | Aspects of the Novel
Aspects of the Novel, collection of literary lectures by E.M. Forster, published in 1927. For the purposes of his study, Forster defines the novel as “any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words.” He employs the term aspects because its vague, unscientific nature suits what he calls the “spongy” form in question. The seven aspects offered for discussion are the story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. The author compares the form and texture of the novel to those of a symphony. As for subject, he expects the work “to reveal the hidden life at its source.” Human nature, he concludes, is the novelist’s necessary preoccupation.
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7a375bd833986f59570d37bbfd78d153 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/aspic | Aspic | Aspic
Aspic, savoury clear jelly prepared from a liquid stock made by simmering the bones of beef, veal, chicken, or fish. The aspic congeals when refrigerated by virtue of the natural gelatin that dissolves into the stock from the tendons; commercial sheet or powdered gelatin is sometimes added to ensure a stiff set. Aspic is used to coat and glaze foods such as cold meats and fish, eggs, poached or roasted poultry, and vegetables; plain aspic chopped or cut into shapes garnishes cold dishes. Various foods can be combined with aspic in decorative molds. Mayonnaise or sauce velouté mixed with liquid aspic yields chaud-froid, a sauce that can be coloured and used to decorate cold foods.
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5fca9526b65d62135d14e84484997788 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/asrava | Āsrāva | Āsrāva
Āsrāva, (Sanskrit: “what leaks out”) Pāli āsava, also called kleśa (Sanskrit: “affliction”), Pāli kilesa, in Buddhist philosophy, the illusion that ceaselessly flows out from internal organs (i.e., five sense organs and the mind). To the unenlightened, every existence becomes the object of illusion or is inevitably accompanied by illusion. Such an existence is called sāsrava. Even if one leads a good life, it is still regarded as sāsrava, insofar as it leads to another existence in the world of transmigration. Through the effort of ridding oneself of āsrāva, one can attain anāsrāva (the Enlightenment), or freedom from the bond of illusion by undefiled wisdom.
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b36cdf36ea0d15500a35b91f7a25b416 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Asselar-man | Asselar man | Asselar man
Asselar man, extinct human known from a skeleton found in 1927 near the French military post of Asselar, French Sudan (now Mali), by M.V. Besnard and Théodore Monod. Some scholars consider it the oldest known skeleton of an African black. Asselar man is believed to belong to the Holocene Epoch.
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02cbf2be2be2a26308a196b2f2081136 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Assemblies-of-God | Assemblies of God | Assemblies of God
Assemblies of God, Pentecostal denomination of the Protestant church, generally considered the largest such denomination in the United States. It was formed by a union of several small Pentecostal groups at Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1914. The council of some 120 pastors and evangelists who effected this union among diverse regional associations adopted a simple type of polity that was an admixture of Congregational and Presbyterian elements. The council elected an Executive Presbytery to serve as the central administrative group; this organ was empowered to execute the mandates given it by the General Council and to act for the council in all matters that affected its interest when it was not in session.
Except for a pronouncement that “the Holy inspired Scriptures are the all-sufficient rule for faith and practice…and we shall not add to or take from them,” that first General Council postponed action on the matter of a definitive doctrinal statement. Subsequently, however, a Statement of Fundamental Truths was adopted. The document demonstrated that the Assemblies of God are Trinitarian (believing in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) and Arminian (accepting the doctrines of grace and free will as espoused by the 16th–17th-century Dutch theologian Arminius). They also subscribe to two ordinances (baptism by total immersion in water and the Lord’s Supper), hold a view of sanctification (becoming holy) that may be described as “progressive,” or gradual rather than “instantaneous” in regard to moral purity, and are strongly premillennial, believing in the doctrine of Christ’s Second Advent before the 1,000-year reign of Christ and his saints.
From the outset, the Assemblies of God has been intensely mission-conscious. In addition to extensive foreign missions, the denomination conducts a diversified program of home missions among foreign-language groups in America’s urban centres, on Indian reservations, in prisons, and among the deaf and the blind. The denomination operates the Gospel Publishing House in Springfield, Missouri, two colleges of arts and science—Evangel University (also in Springfield) and Vanguard University of Southern California (Costa Mesa)—and a number of regional Bible institutes.
In 1997 the group reported 2,494,574 members and 11,920 congregations in the United States. The related Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada reported 218,782 members and 1,100 congregations. U.S. headquarters are in Springfield, Missouri, and Canadian headquarters are in Mississauga, Ontario.
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eb76cbfd1f338cdc0b4d5c4136dc48ec | https://www.britannica.com/topic/assembly-government | Assembly | Assembly
Assembly, deliberative council, usually legislative or juridical in purpose and power. The name has been given to various ancient and modern bodies, both political and ecclesiastical. It has been applied to relatively permanent bodies meeting periodically, such as the ancient Greek and Roman assemblies, the Germanic tribal assemblies, the French National Assembly, the legislative houses called assemblies in certain states of the United States, and the UN General Assembly. It has also been applied to groups sitting only for special purposes and for limited periods, such as the Westminster Assembly, which met in 1643 to draft a new constitution for the Church of England.
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f7b329b5844c635ffcf29bc13b59e2c5 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Assembly-of-Delegates | Assembly of Delegates | Assembly of Delegates
…consultative council known as the Assembly of Delegates, the members of which were chosen by indirect election, the great majority of those elected were village headmen. While Ismāʿīl did not intend to give any of his powers to the Assembly, its establishment and composition pointed to the political growth that…
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b1a4009dc5754ee2de3478369352a2a2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Assembly-of-First-Nations | Assembly of First Nations | Assembly of First Nations
…National Indian Brotherhood (now the Assembly of First Nations), while Métis and nonstatus Indians were represented by the Native Council of Canada. These and other organizations advocated policies including aboriginal rights (recognized in the Constitution Act [Canada Act] of 1982), improved education, and economic development. In 1983 a government report…
…indigenous peoples of Canada, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), reported that as many as 1 in 10 native children were in outplacement situations; the ratio for nonnative children was approximately 1 in 200. The AFN also noted that indigenous child welfare agencies were funded at per capita levels more…
…as national chief of the Assembly of First Nations from 1991 to 1997.
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5403c4e5f82d3c1837d7f12f6e79dc99 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Assembly-of-the-Republic | Assembly of the Republic | Assembly of the Republic
The parliament comprises the unicameral Assembly of the Republic, which has 230 deputies. Its duties include debating and voting upon legislation, authorizing the government to raise revenues, and approving the laws passed by the legislatures of the autonomous regions. The parliament may also dismiss the government by rejecting a vote…
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49fbc747a7ef29599783bd3e522ba2ff | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Assessing-Progress-in-Haiti-Act | Assessing Progress in Haiti Act | Assessing Progress in Haiti Act
…the United States enacted the Assessing Progress in Haiti Act, which mandated the establishment of a three-year plan for meeting reconstruction benchmarks in Haiti and the provision of annual reports to the U.S. Congress by the State Department.
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e0bd1fea70eba3299ddcfb22f8d95672 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/assessment-behaviour | Assessment | Assessment
…activities under three main headings: assessment (including diagnosis), treatment, and research. In assessment, clinical psychologists administer and interpret psychological tests, either for the purpose of evaluating individuals’ relative intelligence or other capabilities or for the purpose of eliciting mental characteristics that will aid in diagnosing a particular mental disorder. The…
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56643c89a85770ece532f60c8abdcff7 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/assessment-calculation-of-value | Assessment | Assessment
Assessment, process of setting a value on real or personal property, usually for the purpose of taxation. In most countries central government agencies do the assessing, but in some it is done by local officials.
Property is perhaps most commonly assessed on the basis of its annual rental value, as in Great Britain. In some countries, though, including the United States, Austria, and Denmark, the tax base is the property’s capital value. Among the methods used to determine value are the analysis of market data to estimate the property’s current market price, the estimation of the costs of reproducing the property minus the accrued depreciation, and the capitalization of the earnings of the property.
The last method seems most appropriate for the appraisal of commercial property and apartment buildings, whereas the second is well suited for appraising factories and other specialized properties. In practice, many assessing officers utilize an approach derived from all three methods, and the assessed valuation often is actually less than the property’s current market value. Governments sometimes attempt to equalize effective assessed valuations by supplying a multiplying factor for various taxing districts based upon the degree to which their assessors undervalue.
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81365ba8225590ec47a7960264b17791 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/asset | Asset | Asset
…three major sections: (1) the assets, which are probable future economic benefits owned or controlled by the entity; (2) the liabilities, which are probable future sacrifices of economic benefits; and (3) the owners’ equity, calculated as the residual interest in the assets of an entity after deducting liabilities.
…consists of three major sections: assets (valuable rights owned by the company), liabilities (funds provided by outside lenders and other creditors), and the owners’ equity. On the balance sheet, total assets must always equal total liabilities plus total owners’ equity.
” Bank assets consist mainly of various kinds of loans and marketable securities and of reserves of base money, which may be held either as actual central bank notes and coins or in the form of a credit (deposit) balance at the central bank. The…
…required to list all their assets so that creditors will have the opportunity to claim a share of the earnings from the sale of those assets. Debtors who commit concealment of assets fraud will intentionally neglect to list all their assets, in the belief that creditors cannot obtain payment from…
…feature, the possession of distinct assets (or a distinct patrimony), is required for two purposes: (1) to delimit the assets to which creditors of the association can resort to satisfy their claims (though in the case of some associations, such as the partnership, they can also compel the members to…
The ratio of current assets to current liabilities, for example, gives the analyst an idea of the extent to which the firm can meet its current obligations. This is known as a liquidity ratio. Financial leverage ratios (such as the debt–asset ratio and debt as a percentage of total…
…for the future delivery of assets, which ultimately are never exchanged. Commodities fraud typically involves assets traded on organized exchanges such as the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the New York Futures Exchange, the MidAmerica Commodity Exchange, and the Kansas City Board of Trade. Commodities fraud pertains…
…as opposed to merely “financial” assets. Different as the two concepts may seem, they are not unrelated. If all balance sheets were consolidated in a closed economic system, all debts would be cancelled out because every debt is an asset in one balance sheet and a liability in another. What…
One of the most important aspects of bankruptcy legislation is the determination of the assets to be seized and sold for the purpose of distributing the proceeds among the creditors. Various legal systems have vastly different approaches. The disparities relate…
This is called the “asset” function of money.
The company uses its assets to produce goods and services. Its success depends on whether it is wise or lucky in the assets it chooses to hold and in the ways it uses these assets to produce goods and services.
If the assets left behind were not reassigned to some other individual, the eventual result would be complete ownership of all wealth by the community, and the system of individual property would end. A new individual owner could be determined in one of four ways: ownership by…
…administrator has to collect the assets of the estate, ascertain and pay the taxes and debts, and distribute the surplus to the legatees or intestate takers. In the civil-law system proper performance of these functions has its sanction in the personal liability of the heir for the debts of the…
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a563267b7ecfa28daff00a52b0f4f469 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/assimilation-stimulus-response-behaviour | Assimilation | Assimilation
The first, assimilation, is the relating of a new event or object to cognitive structures the child already possesses. A five-year-old who has a concept of a bird as a living thing with a beak and wings that flies will try to assimilate the initial perception of…
The first, which he called assimilation, incorporates new information into an already existing cognitive structure. The second, which he called accommodation, forms a new cognitive structure into which new information can be incorporated.
The former is called assimilation by Allport and Postman and is illustrated by the tendency to make rumour details consistent with prejudice. The latter trend indicates that a group is inclined to support those beliefs that supply justification for some course of action toward which they are already predisposed.
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fdec5a36c462773cd6f45254e2f2eeb2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/assize | Assize | Assize
Assize, in law, a session, or sitting, of a court of justice. It originally signified the method of trial by jury. During the Middle Ages the term was applied to certain court sessions held in the counties of England; it was also applied in France to special sessions of the Parlement of Paris (the High Court) that met in the provinces. The term also designated certain writs operable in such courts. In modern times courts of assize are criminal courts that deal with the most serious crimes.
In England all writs of assize originally had to either be tried at Westminster in London or await trial in the locality of origin at the circuit of the justices every seven years. In order to remedy such delay and inconvenience, Magna Carta (1215) provided that certain writs of assize be tried annually by the judges in every county. By successive enactments the civil jurisdiction of the justices of assize was extended, and the number of their sittings increased until it was no longer necessary to appear at Westminster.
In France assizes were held regularly in the large towns and were run by the prévôts, low-ranking royal judicial administrators, in conjunction with a group of local assessors (lay judges). The grand assizes met four times a year under the auspices of the area baron or count or his bailli (bailiff), a high-ranking royal judicial officer in charge of the prévôts.
An important type of French assize was the grand jour, a meeting in a province of magistrates from the Parlement of Paris. The grands jours often were held at times of civil disruption in the area as a way of making the power and presence of the central government felt. For example, they were convened with some regularity during the Wars of Religion in the 16th century and after the Fronde rebellions in the 17th. In Champagne the grand jour was a more permanent fixture, though by the 16th century it met only irregularly. It dealt with cases of special interest and with appeals from the bailli’s courts.
In modern England assizes (abolished in 1971) were periodic sessions of the High Court of Justice held in the counties; they dealt with issues such as the trying of prisoners who committed crimes in jail and regular cases of treason and murder. In France (and in Germany until 1975) the assize courts are criminal courts of first instance handling the most severe crimes.
Examples of ancient writs of assize were those of mort d’ancestor and novel disseizin. The former was an action to recover lawfully inherited land taken by another before the heir was able to take possession; the latter was an action to recover lands of which the plaintiff had been dispossessed.
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0ff31fc317930c01b7e400a34e3225e1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Assizes-of-Ariano | Assizes of Ariano | Assizes of Ariano
After the pacification of South Italy, the king promulgated in 1140 at the so-called Assizes of Ariano a corpus of law covering every aspect of his rule. He then returned to Palermo, which he seldom left again. There he spent his last…
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5189ed91c25c11ed40eda570fa34994e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Assizes-of-Jerusalem | Assizes of Jerusalem | Assizes of Jerusalem
Assizes of Jerusalem, French Assises De Jérusalem, a law code based on a series of customs and practices that developed in the Latin crusader kingdom of Jerusalem in the 12th century. It stands as one of the most complete monuments of feudal law.
The basis for the assizes was laid by Godfrey of Bouillon (d. 1100), first ruler of the kingdom. He asked his leading men to query crusaders regarding customs and practices prevalent in the West. The customs that were adopted were primarily French and were intended to govern and guard a population surrounded by enemies and dependent upon military service to maintain itself. Deposited in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the code was referred to as Lettres du Sepulchre (“Letters of the Sepulchre”).
The assizes provided for such things as the king’s officers, administration of justice, collection of taxes, granting of fiefs, provisions for military service, and regulation of trade. The original Lettres du Sepulchre perished at the capture of Jerusalem in 1187, but another compilation was made in the 13th century by a group of lawyers in the kingdom of Cyprus, where remnants of Frankish society in the Latin East settled after the Muslim reconquest of the Holy Land. Though the assizes were revised over the subsequent 300 years, they still elucidate the nature of the feudal state in the European Middle Ages.
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1caf6f3fd394a079b820e258c3460c60 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Associated-Universities-Inc | Associated Universities, Inc. | Associated Universities, Inc.
Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), group of U.S. universities that administers the operation of two federally funded research facilities, one in nuclear physics and the other in radio astronomy. The member institutions are Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Rochester, and Yale. AUI was incorporated in 1946 to manage the then new Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, Long Island, N.Y., for the Atomic Energy Commission. Brookhaven, now funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, carries out experiments in nuclear physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, and medicine. AUI was later chosen by the U.S. National Science Foundation to manage the National Radio Astronomical Observatory (NRAO), headquartered in Charlottesville, Va. The NRAO conducts extensive studies of cosmic sources of radio-frequency radiation.
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99f3442d5d5e02c7ad4036d065e493aa | https://www.britannica.com/topic/assumpsit | Assumpsit | Assumpsit
Assumpsit, (Latin: “he has undertaken”), in common law, an action to recover damages for breach of contract. Originating in the 14th century as a form of recovery for the negligent performance of an undertaking, this action gradually came to cover the many kinds of agreement called for by an expanding commerce and technology.
The concept of assumpsit was first introduced in cases in which the defendant damaged goods entrusted to him by the plaintiff—e.g., where the defendant had taken the plaintiff’s horse in order to transport it across a river and negligently caused the ferry to overturn so that the horse drowned.
Assumpsit did not become a contractual remedy in the modern sense until two modifications occurred: (1) the emphasis shifted from the negligent act of the defendant to the defendant’s failure to keep his promise; and (2) the action was made available as a remedy in situations where the defendant did something improperly or neglected to do something he had promised to do.
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be556f4782ff322abb98f529b49d8f05 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Assumption-painting-by-Titian | Assumption | Assumption
…his most revolutionary masterpieces, the Assumption (1516–18). This large and at the same time monumental composition occupies the high altar of Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice, a position that fully justifies the spectacular nature of the Virgin’s triumph as she ascends heavenward, accompanied by a large semicircular array of…
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bed5c542c196688631499ee6a0efdec4 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Astrodome | Astrodome | Astrodome
Astrodome, the world’s first domed air-conditioned indoor stadium, built in Houston, Texas, in 1965 and arguably the city’s most important architectural structure.
Conceived by Roy Mark Hofheinz (a former county judge and mayor of Houston, 1953–55) and designed by architects Hermon Lloyd and W.B. Morgan, in collaboration with the local firm Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson, the Astrodome is a prime example of late Modernist architecture, and its space-age appearance is aptly suited to the city that—with the opening of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center) in 1961 as the command post for U.S. spaceflights—had ushered in the age of space exploration in the United States. Hofheinz pitched a domed air-conditioned arena to increase attendance to the hot and humid city’s sporting events. He also helped the Houston Colt .45s, later renamed the Astros to associate them with their new stadium, join Major League Baseball. The Astrodome became the home of the Astros when it opened in 1965 and for the National Football League’s Houston Oilers (now the Tennessee Titans) in 1968.
Nicknamed the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the Astrodome was built to protect an entire sports area suitable for baseball and football, with seating for 66,000 spectators. The Lucite-paneled dome, spanning 642 feet (196 metres), is supported by a steel lattice. The entire interior is air-conditioned at 74 °F (23 °C) and fully lighted with power from its own electricity-generating system. The playing field, constructed 30 feet below grade, spans 150,000 square feet. When built, the stadium included an electronic scoreboard measuring 60 × 300 feet (18 × 91 metres) and was the first arena to have luxury “box” seating, a feature included in almost all subsequent large-scale stadiums in the U.S. AstroTurf, a brand of nylon grass named for the team, was developed when it became apparent that the dome’s Lucite panels prevented the growth of natural grass on the playing field.
The Houston Astros played their last game at the Astrodome in 1999. Other notable events that took place there included the second “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King in 1973 and the Republican National Convention in 1992. In 2005 the Astrodome was used as shelter for tens of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
The Astrodome has not been used since 2009. A November 2013 proposal to preserve and repurpose the massive structure was not successful. Although the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, it continues to be in danger of demolition.
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52aeaa9c9facc5c97cb96732554d32bd | https://www.britannica.com/topic/astrology/Purposes-of-astrology | Purposes of astrology | Purposes of astrology
The original purpose of astrology, on the other hand, was to inform the individual of the course of his life on the basis of the positions of the planets and of the zodiacal signs (the 12 astrological constellations) at the moment of his birth or conception. From this science, called genethlialogy (casting nativities), were developed the fundamental techniques of astrology. The main subdivisions of astrology that developed after genethlialogy are general, catarchic, and interrogatory.
General astrology studies the relationship of the significant celestial moments (e.g., the times of vernal equinoxes, eclipses, or planetary conjunctions) to social groups, nations, or all of humanity. It answers, by astrological means, questions formerly posed in Mesopotamia to the bāru.
Catarchic (pertaining to beginnings or sources) astrology determines whether or not a chosen moment is astrologically conducive to the success of a course of action begun in it. Basically in conflict with a rigorous interpretation of genethlialogy, it allows the individual (or corporate body) to act at astrologically favourable times and, thereby, to escape any failures predictable from his (or its) nativity.
Interrogatory astrology provides answers to a client’s queries based on the situation of the heavens at the moment of his posing the questions. This astrological consulting service is even more remote from determinism than is catarchic astrology; it is thereby closer to divination by omens and insists upon the ritual purification and preparation of the astrologer.
Other forms of astrology, such as iatromathematics (application of astrology to medicine) and military astrology, are variants on one or another of the above.
The astral omens employed in Mesopotamian divination were later commingled with what came to be known as astrology in the strict sense of the term and constituted within astrology a branch described as natural astrology. Though lunar eclipses apparently were regarded as ominous at a somewhat earlier period, the period of the 1st dynasty of Babylon (18th to 16th centuries bc) was the time when the cuneiform text Enūma Anu Enlil, devoted to celestial omina, was initiated. The final collection and codification of this series, however, was not accomplished before the beginning of the 1st millennium bc. But the tablets that have survived—mainly from the Assyrian library of King Ashurbanipal (7th century bc)—indicate that a standard version never existed. Each copy had its own characteristic contents and organization designed to facilitate its owner’s consultation of the omens.
The common categories into which the omens of Enūma Anu Enlil were considered to fall were four, named after the chief gods involved in the ominous communication: Sin, Shamash, Adad, and Ishtar. Sin (the Moon) contains omens involving such lunar phenomena as first crescents, eclipses, halos, and conjunctions with various fixed stars; Shamash (the Sun) deals with omens involving such solar phenomena as eclipses, simultaneous observations of two suns, and perihelia (additional suns); Adad (the weather god) is concerned with omens involving meteorological phenomena, such as thunder, lightning, and cloud formations, as well as earthquakes; and Ishtar (Venus) contains omens involving planetary phenomena such as first and last visibilities, stations (the points at which the planets appear to stand still), acronychal risings (rising of the planet in the east when the Sun sets in the west), and conjunctions with the fixed stars.
Though these omens are often cited in the reports of a network of observers established throughout the Assyrian empire in the 7th century bc, they seem to have lost their popularity late in the period of the Persian domination of Mesopotamia (ending in the 4th century bc). During the later period new efforts were made, in a large number of works called Diaries, to find the correct correlations between celestial phenomena and terrestrial events. Before this development, however, portions of the older omen series were transmitted to Egypt, Greece, and India as a direct result of Achaemenid domination (the Achaemenian dynasty ruled in Persia from 559 to 330 bc) of these cultural areas or of their border regions.
The evidence for a transmission of lunar omens to Egypt in the Achaemenian period lies primarily in a demotic papyrus based on an original of about 500 bc. A more extensive use of Mesopotamian celestial omens is attested by the fragments of a book written in Greek in the 2nd century bc and claimed as a work addressed to a King Nechepso by the priest Petosiris. From this source, among others, the contents of Enūma Anu Enlil were included in the second book of the Apotelesmatika, or “Work on Astrology” (commonly called the Tetrabiblos, or “Four Books”), by Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer of the 2nd century ad; the first book of an astrological compendium, by Hephaestion of Thebes, a Greco-Egyptian astrologer of the 5th century ad; and the On Signs of John Lydus, a Byzantine bureaucrat of the 6th century. Yet another channel of transmission to the Greeks was through the Magusaeans of Asia Minor, a group of Iranian settlers influenced by Babylonian ideas. Their teachings are preserved in several Classical works on natural history, primarily that of Pliny the Elder (c. ad 23–79), and the Geoponica (a late collection of agricultural lore).
In various Middle Eastern languages there also exist many texts dealing with celestial omens, though their sources and the question as to whether they are directly descended from a Mesopotamian tradition or are derived from Greek or Indian intermediaries is yet to be investigated. Of these texts the most important are those ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos by the Harranians and now preserved in Arabic, the Book of the Zodiac of the Mandaeans (a Gnostic sect still existing in Iraq and Khuzistan), the Apocalypse, attributed to the biblical prophet Daniel (extant in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic versions), and The Book of the Bee in Syriac.
The transmission of Mesopotamian omen literature to India, including the material in Enūma Anu Enlil, apparently took place in the 5th century bc during the Achaemenid occupation of the Indus valley. The first traces are found in Buddhist texts of this period, and Buddhist missionaries were instrumental in carrying this material to Central Asia, China, Tibet, Japan, and Southeast Asia. But the most important of the works of this Indian tradition and the oldest extant one in Sanskrit is the earliest version of the as-yet-unpublished Gargasamhita (“Compositions of Garga”) of about the 1st century ad. The original Mesopotamian material was modified so as to fit into the Indian conception of society, including the system of the four castes and the duty of the upper castes to perform the samskaras (sanctifying ceremonies).
There are numerous later compilations of omens in Sanskrit—of which the most notable are the Brhatsamhita, or “Great Composition,” of Varahamihira (c. 550), the Jain Bhadrabahu-samhita, or “Composition of Bhadrabahu” (c. 10th century), and the Parishishtas (“Supplements”) of the Atharvaveda (perhaps 10th or 11th century)—though these add little to the tradition. But in the works of the 13th century and later, entitled Tājika, there is a massive infusion of the Arabic adaptations of the originally Mesopotamian celestial omens as transmitted through Persian (Tājika) translations. In Tājika the omens are closely connected with general astrology; in the earlier Sanskrit texts their connections with astrology had been primarily in the fields of military and catarchic astrology.
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4efed2f218994e4413e5905ac5ec69f7 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aswan-High-Dam | Aswan High Dam | Aswan High Dam
Aswan High Dam, Arabic Al-Sadd al-ʿĀlī, rockfill dam across the Nile River, at Aswān, Egypt, completed in 1970 (and formally inaugurated in January 1971) at a cost of about $1 billion. The dam, 364 feet (111 metres) high, with a crest length of 12,562 feet (3,830 metres) and a volume of 57,940,000 cubic yards (44,300,000 cubic metres), impounds a reservoir, Lake Nasser, that has a gross capacity of 5.97 trillion cubic feet (169 billion cubic metres). Of the Nile’s total annual discharge, some 2.6 trillion cubic feet (74 billion cubic metres) of water have been allocated by treaty between Egypt and Sudan, with about 1.96 trillion cubic feet (55.5 billion cubic metres) apportioned to Egypt and the remainder to Sudan. Lake Nasser backs up the Nile about 200 miles (320 km) in Egypt and almost 100 miles (160 km) farther upstream (south) in Sudan; creation of the reservoir necessitated the costly relocation of the ancient Egyptian temple complex of Abu Simbel, which would otherwise have been submerged. Ninety thousand Egyptian fellahin (peasants) and Sudanese Nubian nomads had to be relocated. Fifty thousand Egyptians were transported to the Kawm Umbū valley, 30 miles (50 km) north of Aswān, to form a new agricultural zone called Nubaria, and most of the Sudanese were resettled around Khashm al-Qirbah, Sudan.
The Aswan High Dam yields enormous benefits to the economy of Egypt. For the first time in history, the annual Nile flood can be controlled by man. The dam impounds the floodwaters, releasing them when needed to maximize their utility on irrigated land, to water hundreds of thousands of new acres, to improve navigation both above and below Aswān, and to generate enormous amounts of electric power (the dam’s 12 turbines can generate 10 billion kilowatt-hours annually). The reservoir, which has a depth of 300 feet (90 metres) and averages 14 miles (22 km) in width, supports a fishing industry.
The Aswan High Dam has produced several negative side effects, however, chief of which is a gradual decrease in the fertility and hence the productivity of Egypt’s riverside agricultural lands. This is because of the dam’s complete control of the Nile’s annual flooding. Much of the flood and its load of rich fertilizing silt is now impounded in reservoirs and canals; the silt is thus no longer deposited by the Nile’s rising waters on farmlands. Egypt’s annual application of about 1 million tons of artificial fertilizers is an inadequate substitute for the 40 million tons of silt formerly deposited annually by the Nile flood.
Completed in 1902, with its crest raised in 1912 and 1933, an earlier dam 4 miles (6 km) downstream from the Aswan High Dam holds back about 174.2 billion cubic feet (4.9 billion cubic metres) of water from the tail of the Nile flood in the late autumn. Once one of the largest dams in the world, it is 7,027 feet (2,142 metres) long and is pierced by 180 sluices that formerly passed the whole Nile flood, with its heavy load of silt.
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52956cd4fcdb7f8872364d3ffc4d436c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atacama-people | Atacama | Atacama
Atacama, also called Atacameño, orCunza, extinct South American Indian culture of the Andean desert oases of northern Chile and northwestern Argentina. The last surviving groups of the Atacama have been assimilated by Spanish and Aymara culture.
In their widely scattered settlements the Atacama cultivated crops such as corn (maize), beans, quinoa, and squash with the aid of irrigation. They herded llama and alpaca and traded extensively between the coast and the interior, as well as with the neighbouring Diaguita and Peruvian Indians.
The arid climate limited settlements to small and isolated oases. Each village was autonomous, made up of a group of related families under a chief. Villages were usually located on high ground, surrounded by defensive walls. The houses were built of stone and arranged along streets. Archaeological evidence shows that warfare was prevalent among the Atacama.
The language of the Atacama was called Cunza, or Lincan Antai, of which a vocabulary of about 1,100 words has been recorded.
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dc0d7abbb01641fd7318c8e7097d17a2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atalanta | Atalanta | Atalanta
Atalanta, in Greek mythology, a renowned and swift-footed huntress, probably a parallel and less important form of the goddess Artemis. Traditionally, she was the daughter of Schoeneus of Boeotia or of Iasus and Clymene of Arcadia.
Her complex legend includes the following incidents. On her father’s orders, she was left to die at birth but was suckled by a she-bear. She took part in the Calydonian boar hunt; Atalanta drew first blood and was awarded the boar’s head and hide by the boar’s slayer, Meleager, who was in love with her. When his uncles took away the spoils from her, Meleager killed them and was in turn killed by their sister, his own mother. In the most famous story, one popular with ancient and modern artists, Atalanta offered to marry anyone who could outrun her—but those whom she overtook she speared. In one race Hippomenes (or Milanion) was given three of the golden apples of the Hesperides by the goddess Aphrodite; when he dropped them, Atalanta stopped to pick them up and so lost the race. Their son was Parthenopaeus, who later was one of the Seven who fought against Thebes after the death of King Oedipus. Atalanta and her husband, overcome with passion, made love in a shrine of the goddess Cybele (or of Zeus), for which they were turned into lions.
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7ec6dcc8a7f4e50bd8cad37f4b802a85 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/ATandT-Corporation | AT&T Corporation | AT&T Corporation
AT&T Corporation, formerly (1899–1994) American Telephone and Telegraph Company, American corporation that provides long-distance telephone and other telecommunications services. It is a descendant of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which built much of the United States’ long-distance and local telephone networks, becoming the world’s largest corporation and a standard for the telecommunications industry. This firm voluntarily split into three smaller companies in 1996, one of which retained the AT&T name.
The company’s origins date back to 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and made the first wire transmission of intelligible speech. Bell secured a patent for the device, and in 1877 he and two investors, Gardiner C. Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, formed the Bell Telephone Company, which they sold the next year to a group of financiers. The Bell Company was already embroiled in a race with the the leading telegraph company, Western Union Company, for the development of telephone service—Western Union by this time having acquired its own telephone devices and its own patents. Bell interests were represented by Theodore N. Vail, who was general manager from 1878 to 1887 and led the patent fight against Western Union. In 1879 Western Union, which was itself involved in a war of control between the Vanderbilts and Jay Gould, agreed to give up all its telephone patents, claims, and facilities in return for Bell’s promise to stay out of the telegraph business.
The Bell Telephone Company underwent a series of reorganizations and renamings between 1878 and 1900. In 1881 Bell bought Western Electric; this leading maker of telegraphic equipment thenceforth became the dominant manufacturer of telephone equipment as well. Another important unit, the Mechanical Department, formed in 1883, became the Bell Telephone Laboratories, incorporated as a separate company in 1925. In 1885 Bell established the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, or AT&T, as its subsidiary responsible for building long-distance telephone lines. In 1899 AT&T was made the parent company of the Bell System.
After the Bell Company’s patent on the telephone expired in 1894, it encountered growing competition from independent phone companies and telephone manufacturers. Vail was brought back into the company as president in 1907, and from then until his retirement in 1919 he molded AT&T into virtually the organization that lasted until 1984. Vail set about trying to achieve a monopoly for AT&T over the American telecommunications industry. He consolidated the Bell associated companies into state and regional organizations, acquired many previously independent companies, and achieved control over Western Union in 1910.
In a commitment first enunciated in 1913 but affirmed by the Graham-Willis Act of 1921, AT&T, as a “natural monopoly,” agreed to provide long-distance service to all independent telephone companies. By 1939 AT&T controlled 83 percent of all U.S. telephones and 98 percent of all long-distance telephone lines and manufactured 90 percent of all U.S. phone equipment. In 1949 the Justice Department brought suit against AT&T under the Sherman Antitrust Act, seeking, among other things, to divorce Western Electric from the Bell System; the suit ended in 1956 in a consent decree that kept Western Electric in the system but restricted monopolistic practices. AT&T kept growing; by the 1970s it had almost one million employees and was the largest company in the world, with total assets exceeding those of General Motors, the Exxon Corporation, and the Mobil Corporation combined.
In 1974 the United States instituted a second antitrust suit for the dismemberment of the Bell System. After years of litigation, AT&T and the U.S. Department of Justice reached an agreement in 1982 whereby AT&T would divest itself of 22 regional “operating companies” that would become separate entities and operate local telephone networks. The 22 regional operating companies were divested by Jan. 1, 1984, and were reorganized and converted into seven regional phone companies: Nynex, Bell Atlantic, Ameritech (or American Information Technologies, Inc.), BellSouth, Southwestern Bell Corporation, US West, and Pacific Telesis Group. AT&T relinquished the use of the name Bell to these companies, which became informally known as “Baby Bells.”
Though it had left the local-network business, AT&T remained the nation’s largest provider of long-distance telephone service. The company also retained its Western Electric subsidiary, which manufactured telephones and other equipment; and Bell Telephone Laboratories, its research and development arm. In addition, the company was freed to compete in such previously forbidden fields as data processing and computer communications. Among its efforts in this direction was the purchase in 1991 of NCR Corporation (q.v.), a major manufacturer of computers, electronic cash registers, and other data-processing systems. In 1994 AT&T purchased McCaw Cellular Communications Inc., the nation’s largest provider of cellular telephone service. That same year the company also formally adopted its traditional byname, AT&T, and became the AT&T Corporation.
In order to compete more effectively in an American telecommunications industry that had just been deregulated by the federal government, AT&T divided its operations into three separate companies in 1996. The largest of these, the AT&T Corporation, continued to provide long-distance telecommunications services. A second company, Lucent Technologies Inc., made and marketed telephones, network switching equipment, computer chips, and other hardware and also picked up most of the Bell Laboratories. The third company was the NCR Corporation. AT&T’s self-imposed dismantling was the largest corporate breakup in history.
AT&T gave the United States the largest, most advanced, and most efficient telecommunications network of any nation in the world. The company was responsible for most of the major technical advances made in telephone service, switching systems, and signal transmission during the 20th century. AT&T pioneered the building of transoceanic radiotelephone links and telephone cable systems, built early-warning radar systems for the U.S. Department of Defense, and created the Telstar satellite communications system. Bell Labs, one of the world’s foremost research centres, invented the transistor in 1948.
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e74667ed45b55c7ddfe4175b216866e5 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atharvaveda | Atharvaveda | Atharvaveda
Atharvaveda, collection of hymns and incantations that forms part of the ancient sacred literature of India known as the Vedas. See Veda.
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f6b30ca3dc0ddb865f1433e56cfdbba9 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/atheism | Atheism | Atheism
Atheism, in general, the critique and denial of metaphysical beliefs in God or spiritual beings. As such, it is usually distinguished from theism, which affirms the reality of the divine and often seeks to demonstrate its existence. Atheism is also distinguished from agnosticism, which leaves open the question whether there is a god or not, professing to find the questions unanswered or unanswerable.
The dialectic of the argument between forms of belief and unbelief raises questions concerning the most perspicuous delineation, or characterization, of atheism, agnosticism, and theism. It is necessary not only to probe the warrant for atheism but also carefully to consider what is the most adequate definition of atheism. This article will start with what have been some widely accepted, but still in various ways mistaken or misleading, definitions of atheism and move to more adequate formulations that better capture the full range of atheist thought and more clearly separate unbelief from belief and atheism from agnosticism. In the course of this delineation the section also will consider key arguments for and against atheism.
A central, common core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the affirmation of the reality of one, and only one, God. Adherents of these faiths believe that there is a God who created the universe out of nothing and who has absolute sovereignty over all his creation; this includes, of course, human beings—who are not only utterly dependent on this creative power but also sinful and who, or so the faithful must believe, can only make adequate sense of their lives by accepting, without question, God’s ordinances for them. The varieties of atheism are numerous, but all atheists reject such a set of beliefs.
Atheism, however, casts a wider net and rejects all belief in “spiritual beings,” and to the extent that belief in spiritual beings is definitive of what it means for a system to be religious, atheism rejects religion. So atheism is not only a rejection of the central conceptions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; it is, as well, a rejection of the religious beliefs of such African religions as that of the Dinka and the Nuer, of the anthropomorphic gods of classical Greece and Rome, and of the transcendental conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism. Generally atheism is a denial of God or of the gods, and if religion is defined in terms of belief in spiritual beings, then atheism is the rejection of all religious belief.
It is necessary, however, if a tolerably adequate understanding of atheism is to be achieved, to give a reading to “rejection of religious belief” and to come to realize how the characterization of atheism as the denial of God or the gods is inadequate.
To say that atheism is the denial of God or the gods and that it is the opposite of theism, a system of belief that affirms the reality of God and seeks to demonstrate his existence, is inadequate in a number of ways. First, not all theologians who regard themselves as defenders of the Christian faith or of Judaism or Islam regard themselves as defenders of theism. The influential 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, for example, regards the God of theism as an idol and refuses to construe God as a being, even a supreme being, among beings or as an infinite being above finite beings. God, for him, is “being-itself,” the ground of being and meaning. The particulars of Tillich’s view are in certain ways idiosyncratic, as well as being obscure and problematic, but they have been influential; and his rejection of theism, while retaining a belief in God, is not eccentric in contemporary theology, though it may very well affront the plain believer.
Second, and more important, it is not the case that all theists seek to demonstrate or even in any way rationally to establish the existence of God. Many theists regard such a demonstration as impossible, and fideistic believers (e.g., Johann Hamann and Søren Kierkegaard) regard such a demonstration, even if it were possible, as undesirable, for in their view it would undermine faith. If it could be proved, or known for certain, that God exists, people would not be in a position to accept him as their sovereign Lord humbly on faith with all the risks that entails. There are theologians who have argued that for genuine faith to be possible God must necessarily be a hidden God, the mysterious ultimate reality, whose existence and authority must be accepted simply on faith. This fideistic view has not, of course, gone without challenge from inside the major faiths, but it is of sufficient importance to make the above characterization of atheism inadequate.
Finally, and most important, not all denials of God are denials of his existence. Believers sometimes deny God while not being at all in a state of doubt that God exists. They either willfully reject what they take to be his authority by not acting in accordance with what they take to be his will, or else they simply live their lives as if God did not exist. In this important way they deny him. Such deniers are not atheists (unless we wish, misleadingly, to call them “practical atheists”). They are not even agnostics. They do not question that God exists; they deny him in other ways. An atheist denies the existence of God. As it is frequently said, atheists believe that it is false that God exists, or that God’s existence is a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.
Yet it remains the case that such a characterization of atheism is inadequate in other ways. For one it is too narrow. There are atheists who believe that the very concept of God, at least in developed and less anthropomorphic forms of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, is so incoherent that certain central religious claims, such as “God is my creator to whom everything is owed,” are not genuine truth-claims; i.e., the claims could not be either true or false. Believers hold that such religious propositions are true, some atheists believe that they are false, and there are agnostics who cannot make up their minds whether to believe that they are true or false. (Agnostics think that the propositions are one or the other but believe that it is not possible to determine which.) But all three are mistaken, some atheists argue, for such putative truth-claims are not sufficiently intelligible to be genuine truth-claims that are either true or false. In reality there is nothing in them to be believed or disbelieved, though there is for the believer the powerful and humanly comforting illusion that there is. Such an atheism, it should be added, rooted for some conceptions of God in considerations about intelligibility and what it makes sense to say, has been strongly resisted by some pragmatists and logical empiricists.
While the above considerations about atheism and intelligibility show the second characterization of atheism to be too narrow, it is also the case that this characterization is in a way too broad. For there are fideistic believers, who quite unequivocally believe that when looked at objectively the proposition that God exists has a very low probability weight. They believe in God not because it is probable that he exists—they think it more probable that he does not—but because belief is thought by them to be necessary to make sense of human life. The second characterization of atheism does not distinguish a fideistic believer (a Blaise Pascal or a Soren Kierkegaard) or an agnostic (a T.H. Huxley or a Sir Leslie Stephen) from an atheist such as Baron d’Holbach. All believe that “there is a God” and “God protects humankind,” however emotionally important they may be, are speculative hypotheses of an extremely low order of probability. But this, since it does not distinguish believers from nonbelievers and does not distinguish agnostics from atheists, cannot be an adequate characterization of atheism.
It may be retorted that to avoid apriorism and dogmatic atheism the existence of God should be regarded as a hypothesis. There are no ontological (purely a priori) proofs or disproofs of God’s existence. It is not reasonable to rule in advance that it makes no sense to say that God exists. What the atheist can reasonably claim is that there is no evidence that there is a God, and against that background he may very well be justified in asserting that there is no God. It has been argued, however, that it is simply dogmatic for an atheist to assert that no possible evidence could ever give one grounds for believing in God. Instead, atheists should justify their unbelief by showing (if they can) how the assertion is well-taken that there is no evidence that would warrant a belief in God. If atheism is justified, the atheist will have shown that in fact there is no adequate evidence for the belief that God exists, but it should not be part of his task to try to show that there could not be any evidence for the existence of God. If the atheist could somehow survive the death of his present body (assuming that such talk makes sense) and come, much to his surprise, to stand in the presence of God, his answer should be, “Oh! Lord, you didn’t give me enough evidence!” He would have been mistaken, and realize that he had been mistaken, in his judgment that God did not exist. Still, he would not have been unjustified, in the light of the evidence available to him during his earthly life, in believing as he did. Not having any such postmortem experiences of the presence of God (assuming that he could have them), what he should say, as things stand and in the face of the evidence he actually has and is likely to be able to get, is that it is false that God exists. (Every time one legitimately asserts that a proposition is false one need not be certain that it is false. “Knowing with certainty” is not a pleonasm.) The claim is that this tentative posture is the reasonable position for the atheist to take.
An atheist who argues in this manner may also make a distinctive burden-of-proof argument. Given that God (if there is one) is by definition a very recherché reality—a reality that must be (for there to be such a reality) transcendent to the world—the burden of proof is not on the atheist to give grounds for believing that there is no reality of that order. Rather, the burden of proof is on the believer to give some evidence for God’s existence—i.e., that there is such a reality. Given what God must be, if there is a God, the theist needs to present the evidence, for such a very strange reality. He needs to show that there is more in the world than is disclosed by common experience. The empirical method, and the empirical method alone, such an atheist asserts, affords a reliable method for establishing what is in fact the case. To the claim of the theist that there are in addition to varieties of empirical facts “spiritual facts” or “transcendent facts,” such as it being the case that there is a supernatural, self-existent, eternal power, the atheist can assert that such “facts” have not been shown.
It will, however, be argued by such atheists, against what they take to be dogmatic aprioristic atheists, that the atheist should be a fallibilist and remain open-minded about what the future may bring. There may, after all, be such transcendent facts, such metaphysical realities. It is not that such a fallibilistic atheist is really an agnostic who believes that he is not justified in either asserting that God exists or denying that he exists and that what he must reasonably do is suspend belief. On the contrary, such an atheist believes that he has very good grounds indeed, as things stand, for denying the existence of God. But he will, on the second conceptualization of what it is to be an atheist, not deny that things could be otherwise and that, if they were, he would be justified in believing in God or at least would no longer be justified in asserting that it is false that there is a God. Using reliable empirical techniques, proven methods for establishing matters of fact, the fallibilistic atheist has found nothing in the universe to make a belief that God exists justifiable or even, everything considered, the most rational option of the various options. He therefore draws the atheistical conclusion (also keeping in mind his burden-of-proof argument) that God does not exist. But he does not dogmatically in a priori fashion deny the existence of God. He remains a thorough and consistent fallibilist.
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ef563062968acca27841e1e2cf2be4b5 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/atheism/Atheism-and-intuitive-knowledge | Atheism and intuitive knowledge | Atheism and intuitive knowledge
The gnostic may reply that there is a nonempirical way of establishing or making it probable that God exists. The claim is that there are truths about the nature of the cosmos neither capable of verification nor standing in need of verification. There is, gnostics claim against empiricists, knowledge of the world that transcends experience and comprehends the sorry scheme of things entire.
Since the thorough probings of such epistemological foundations by David Hume and Immanuel Kant, skepticism about how, and indeed even that, such knowledge is possible is very strong indeed. With respect to knowledge of God in particular, both Hume and Kant provide powerful critiques of the traditional attempts to prove the existence of God (notwithstanding the fact that Kant remained a Christian). While some of the details of their arguments have been rejected and refinements rooted in their argumentative procedure have been developed, there is a considerable consensus among philosophers and theologians that arguments of the general type as those developed by Hume and Kant show that no proof of God’s existence is possible. Alternatively, to speak of “intuitive knowledge” (an intuitive grasp of being or of an intuition of the reality of the divine being) is to make an appeal to something that is not sufficiently clear to be of any value in establishing anything.
Prior to the rise of anthropology and the scientific study of religion, an appeal to revelation and authority as a substitute for knowledge or warranted belief might have been thought to have considerable force. But with a knowledge of other religions and their associated appeals to revealed truth, such arguments are without probative force. Claimed, or alleged, revelations are many, diverse, and not infrequently conflicting; without going in a small and vicious circle, it cannot be claimed, simply by appealing to a given putative revelation, that the revelation is the “true revelation” or the “genuine revelation” and that others are mistaken or, where nonconflicting, mere approximations to the truth. Similar things need to be said for religious authority. Moreover, it is at best problematic whether faith could sanction speaking of testing the genuineness of revelation or of the acceptability of religious authority. Indeed, if something is a “genuine revelation,” there is no using reason to assess it. But the predicament is that plainly, as a matter of anthropological fact, there is a diverse and sometimes conflicting field of alleged revelations with no way of deciding or even having a reasonable hunch which, if any, of the candidate revelations is the genuine article. But even if the necessity for tests for the genuineness of revelation is allowed, there still is a claim that clearly will not do, for such a procedure would make an appeal to revelation and authority supererogatory. It is, where such tests are allowed, not revelation or authority that can warrant the most fundamental religious truths on which the rest depend. It is something else—that which establishes the genuineness of the revelation or authority—that guarantees these religious truths (if such there be), including the proposition that God exists. But the question returns, like the repressed, what that fundamental guarantee is or could be. Perhaps such a belief is nothing more than a cultural myth. There is, as has been shown, neither empirical nor a priori knowledge of God, and talk of intuitive knowledge is without logical force.
If these considerations are near to the mark, it is unclear what it means to say, as some agnostics and even atheists have, that they are skeptical God-seekers who simply have not found, after a careful examination, enough evidence to make belief in God a warranted or even a reasonable belief. It is unclear what it would be like to have, or for that matter fail to have, evidence for the existence of God. It is not that the God-seeker has to be able to give the evidence, for if that were so no search would be necessary, but that he, or at least somebody, must be able to conceive what would count as evidence if he had it so that he (and others) have some idea of what to look for. But it appears to be just that which cannot be done.
Perhaps there is room for the retort that it is enough for the God-seeker not to accept any logical ban on the possibility of there being evidence. He need not understand what it would be like to have evidence in this domain. But, in turn, when one considers what kind of transcendent reality God is said to be, there seems to be an implicit logical ban on there being empirical evidence (a pleonasm) for his existence. It would seem plausible to assert that there is such a ban, though any such assertion should, of course, be made in a tentative way.
Someone trying to give empirical anchorage to talk of God might give the following hypothetical case. (It is, however, important in considering the case to keep in mind that things even remotely like what is described do not happen.) If thousands of people were standing out under the starry skies and all saw—the thing went on before their very eyes—a set of stars rearrange themselves to spell out “God,” they would indeed rightly be utterly astonished and think that they had gone mad. Even if they could somehow assure themselves that this was not in some way a form of mass hallucination—how they could do this is not evident—such an experience would not constitute evidence for the existence of God, for they still would be without a clue as to what could be meant by speaking of an infinite individual transcendent to the world. Such an observation (the stars so rearranging themselves), no matter how well confirmed, would not ostensively fix the reference range of “God.” Talk of such an infinite individual is utterly incomprehensible and has every appearance of being incoherent. No one knows what he is talking about in speaking of such a transcendent reality. All they would know is that something very strange indeed had happened. The doubt arises whether believers, or indeed anyone else in terms acceptable to believers, can give an intelligible account of the concept of God or of what belief in God comes to once God is de-anthropomorphized.
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4300b3ad849a173f70e79567f20d6761 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/atheism/Atheism-and-metaphysical-beliefs | Atheism and metaphysical beliefs | Atheism and metaphysical beliefs
Such a form of atheism (the atheism of those pragmatists who are also naturalistic humanists), though less inadequate than the first formation of atheism, is still inadequate. God in developed forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is not, like Zeus or Odin, construed in a relatively plain anthropomorphic way. Nothing that could count as “God” in such religions could possibly be observed, literally encountered, or detected in the universe. God, in such a conception, is utterly transcendent to the world; he is conceived of as “pure spirit,” an infinite individual who created the universe out of nothing and who is distinct from the universe. Such a reality—a reality that is taken to be an ultimate mystery—could not be identified as objects or processes in the universe can be identified. There can be no pointing at or to God, no ostensive teaching of “God,” to show what is meant. The word God can only be taught intralinguistically. “God” is taught to someone who does not understand what the word means by the use of descriptions such as “the maker of the universe,” “the eternal, utterly independent being upon whom all other beings depend,” “the first cause,” “the sole ultimate reality,” or “a self-caused being.” For someone who does not understand such descriptions, there can be no understanding of the concept of God. But the key terms of such descriptions are themselves no more capable of ostensive definition (of having their referents pointed out) than is “God,” where that term is not, like “Zeus,” construed anthropomorphically. (That does not mean that anyone has actually pointed to Zeus or observed Zeus but that one knows what it would be like to do so.)
In coming to understand what is meant by “God” in such discourses, it must be understood that God, whatever else he is, is a being that could not possibly be seen or be in any way else observed. He could not be anything material or empirical, and he is said by believers to be an intractable mystery. A nonmysterious God would not be the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
This, in effect, makes it a mistake to claim that the existence of God can rightly be treated as a hypothesis and makes it a mistake to claim that, by the use of the experimental method or some other determinate empirical method, the existence of God can be confirmed or disconfirmed as can the existence of an empirical reality. The retort made by some atheists, who also like pragmatists remain thoroughgoing fallibilists, is that such a proposed way of coming to know, or failing to come to know, God makes no sense for anyone who understands what kind of reality God is supposed to be. Anything whose existence could be so verified would not be the God of Judeo-Christianity. God could not be a reality whose presence is even faintly adumbrated in experience, for anything that could even count as the God of Judeo-Christianity must be transcendent to the world. Anything that could actually be encountered or experienced could not be God.
At the very heart of a religion such as Christianity there stands a metaphysical belief in a reality that is alleged to transcend the empirical world. It is the metaphysical belief that there is an eternal, ever-present creative source and sustainer of the universe. The problem is how it is possible to know or reasonably believe that such a reality exists or even to understand what such talk is about.
It is not that God is like a theoretical entity in physics such as a proton or a neutrino. They are, where they are construed as realities rather than as heuristically useful conceptual fictions, thought to be part of the actual furniture of the universe. They are not said to be transcendent to the universe, but rather are invisible entities in the universe logically on a par with specks of dust and grains of sand, only much, much smaller. They are on the same continuum; they are not a different kind of reality. It is only the case that they, as a matter of fact, cannot be seen. Indeed no one has an understanding of what it would be like to see a proton or a neutrino—in that way they are like God—and no provision is made in physical theory for seeing them. Still, there is no logical ban on seeing them as there is on seeing God. They are among the things in the universe, and thus, though they are invisible, they can be postulated as causes of things that are seen. Since this is so it becomes at least logically possible indirectly to verify by empirical methods the existence of such realities. It is also the case that there is no logical ban on establishing what is necessary to establish a causal connection, namely a constant conjunction of two discrete empirical realities. But no such constant conjunction can be established or even intelligibly asserted between God and the universe, and thus the existence of God is not even indirectly verifiable. God is not a discrete empirical thing or being, and the universe is not a gigantic thing or process over and above the things and processes in the universe of which it makes sense to say that the universe has or had a cause. But then there is no way, directly or indirectly, that even the probability that there is a God could be empirically established.
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9a66e0ae760125a658aace75dfadcdf3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Athletic-Association-of-Western-Universities | Athletic Association of Western Universities | Athletic Association of Western Universities
…UCLA, and Washington formed the Athletic Association of Western Universities (AAWU). After Washington State joined the new conference in 1962 and Oregon and Oregon State in 1964, the name was changed to the Pacific-8 Conference. The University of Arizona and Arizona State University were admitted in 1978, completing the renamed…
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14857ef31b7b6a6a4b060cb8f5442e3e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Athletics-by-Lowe | Athletics | Athletics
…(later Lord Porritt), he wrote Athletics (1929), which had training hints and described attitudes toward running in their day. Lowe was a tactical runner, more interested in winning than in fast time, and he used a finishing kick to advantage. Lowe was called to the bar in 1928, made queen’s…
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98f3c6323ef43e25143c595c240621e6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Athos | Athos | Athos
Athos, fictional character, one of the swashbuckling heroes of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas père. The other two musketeers are his friends Porthos and Aramis, who join him in fighting various enemies during the reigns of the French kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV.
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20ce0b45d30fd8318a1e7a21816d1783 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Athtar | ʿAthtar | ʿAthtar
…of the South Arabian pantheon, ʿAthtar had superseded the ancient supreme Semitic god Il or El, whose name survives nearly exclusively in theophoric names. ʿAthtar was a god of the thunderstorm, dispensing natural irrigation in the form of rain. When qualified as Sharīqān, “the Eastern One” (possibly a reference to…
…called “hunting the game of ʿAthtar and the game of Kurūm.” The gazelle was the symbol animal of ʿAthtar, and Kurūm is now known to be a hypostasis or a consort of ʿAthtar (this explains the name ʿAtarqurumā of an idol in Dūmat al-Jandal, mentioned above). This rite was aimed…
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06fdaf1b37cbf8410446374c710f1aa8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atkan-Aleut-language | Atkan Aleut language | Atkan Aleut language
…settled beginning in 1800; and Atkan Aleut, which is spoken also by young people (but no children) on Atka Island, Aleutian Islands, and by some old people on Bering Island, Komandor Islands, Russia, settled in 1826. Attu, once the westernmost Aleut dialect in Alaska, is now extinct in Alaska, but…
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ede69728218a90ebe1659babf90c8871 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atkins-v-Virginia | Atkins v. Virginia | Atkins v. Virginia
…Court ruled in 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, that a sentence of capital punishment for people with mental retardation was unconstitutional; however, such people can be sentenced to life in prison without parole. The practice of not acquitting those with mental impairments but mitigating their punishments is found in many…
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ef6c56b6cff9c8b17cfb039733bf8c68 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atlanta-Braves | Atlanta Braves | Atlanta Braves
Atlanta Braves, American professional baseball team based in Atlanta. The team is the only existing major league franchise to have played every season since professional baseball came into existence. They have won three World Series titles (1914, 1957, and 1995) and 17 National League (NL) pennants.
The franchise was founded by Ivers Whitney Adams in 1871 as the Boston Red Stockings, one of nine charter members of the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, the forerunner of the NL. During its 82-year stay in Boston, the team was known by various nicknames, including Red Stockings, Red Caps, Rustlers, and Bees, but finally settled on Braves. While in Boston the team won four National Association pennants (1872–75), 10 NL pennants, and a memorable World Series championship in 1914 that came after a season in which the Braves were in last place as late as July 15—a turnaround that led to the nickname “Miracle Braves.” In 1948 the Braves reached the World Series largely as a result of their two dominant pitchers, Warren Spahn and Johnny Spain, who inspired the slogan “Spahn and Spain and pray for rain.”
After losing many of their fans to Boston’s American League team (Red Sox) by the early 1950s, partly because the Braves posted a losing record in all but 12 of the 38 seasons since their World Series win, the franchise moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1953. Playing in Milwaukee County Stadium, the restructured team quickly improved, winning two pennants (1957, 1958) and a World Series (1957), behind the hitting of Hank Aaron and Eddie Matthews and the pitching of Spahn and Lew Burdette. The Braves finished with a winning record in each of their 13 seasons in Milwaukee, but their success could not prevent a precipitous decline in ballpark attendance in the 1960s, which led to the team moving to Atlanta after the 1965 season.
In 1976 the team was purchased by media entrepreneur Ted Turner, who began airing all the Braves’ games to a national audience on his cable “superstation,” WTCG (WTBS, or TBS, from 1979). While many criticized TBS’s prominent coverage of the recently poor team with a mostly regional appeal as both unnecessary and overly biased—the station blithely billed the Braves as “America’s Team”—the Braves’ national profile was nonetheless raised by the broadcasts, and the team eventually became one of the more popular in the country. After suffering through many dreadful seasons and only making the playoffs twice (1969, 1982) in its first 25 seasons in Atlanta, the team was revitalized in the 1990s under the leadership of general manager John Schuerholz and manager Bobby Cox. This new Braves team was led by the young pitching trio of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz—each of whom won at least one Cy Young Award with the Braves—and hitters such as David Justice and Chipper Jones. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the Braves had one of the most remarkable runs in U.S. sports history, winning an unprecedented 14 consecutive division titles from 1991 to 2005 (with the exception of the 1994 season, which because of a labour dispute was not finished), playing in the World Series five times in the 1990s, and winning the organization’s third World Series championship in 1995. In 2007 Time Warner (which had acquired the team in a 1996 merger with Turner Broadcasting System) sold the Braves, and TBS stopped its national broadcasts of the team’s games.
The Braves went back to the postseason in 2010, losing in their first playoff series. In 2011 the team surrendered an 8 1/2-game lead in the Wild Card standings with four weeks remaining in the season to miss the playoffs, which was the second worst September collapse in Major League Baseball history. The Braves returned to postseason play in 2012 but were quickly eliminated by the St. Louis Cardinals (the team that had edged out Atlanta for the Wild Card the previous season) in the newly instituted one-game Wild Card playoff game. In 2013 the Braves won their first division title in eight years but were again eliminated in their opening playoff series. After a disappointing follow-up season during which Atlanta missed the postseason, the team entered into a rebuilding period that saw the Braves post the franchise’s worst record in a quarter century in 2015 (67–95). Atlanta went from losing 90 games in 2017 to winning 90 games in 2018, qualifying for the playoffs before most baseball analysts expected the young team to do so, although the Braves lost their opening playoff series in just four games. The young Braves roster continued to improve in 2019, winning 97 games and another division title before again losing its first postseason series.
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359427d554973f394953566d753a56ca | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atlanta-Journal | Atlanta Journal | Atlanta Journal
He published the Atlanta Journal (1887–1900), which he used as a forum to champion virtually all progressive measures of the period, with the notable exception of civil rights for blacks.
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190427ad8029e125129edd0bbdd979b8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atlantic-Coast-Conference | Atlantic Coast Conference | Atlantic Coast Conference
Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), American collegiate athletic organization formed in 1953 as an offshoot of the Southern Conference. Member schools are Boston College (joined 2005), Clemson University, Duke University, Florida State University (joined 1990), the Georgia Institute of Technology (joined 1979), the University of Louisville (joined 2014), the University of Miami (joined 2004), the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, the University of Pittsburgh (joined 2013), Syracuse University (joined 2013), the University of Virginia, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (joined 2004), and Wake Forest University. The University of Notre Dame (joined 2013) is a member in all sports other than gridiron football.
The Southern Conference had been organized in 1921 to promote and govern intercollegiate athletics. By 1953 some of the member schools felt the conference had grown too large and unwieldy for competitive athletic scheduling. At the conference’s spring meeting, seven schools withdrew and formed the ACC. Virginia, which had not been a member of the Southern Conference, eventually joined the new organization, while the University of South Carolina, an original member, withdrew in 1971.
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01c73af3f7044c844148d2a1fc87d4c0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atlantis-legendary-island | Atlantis | Atlantis
Atlantis, also spelled Atalantis or Atlantica, a legendary island in the Atlantic Ocean, lying west of the Strait of Gibraltar. The principal sources for the legend are two of Plato’s dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. In the former, Plato describes how Egyptian priests, in conversation with the Athenian lawgiver Solon, described Atlantis as an island larger than Asia Minor and Libya combined, and situated just beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar). About 9,000 years before the birth of Solon, the priests said, Atlantis was a rich island whose powerful princes conquered many of the lands of the Mediterranean until they were finally defeated by the Athenians and the latter’s allies. The Atlantians eventually became wicked and impious, and their island was swallowed up by the sea as a result of earthquakes. In the Critias, Plato supplied a history of the ideal commonwealth of the Atlantians.
Atlantis is probably a mere legend, but medieval European writers who received the tale from Arab geographers believed it to be true, and later writers tried to identify it with an actual country. After the Renaissance, for example, attempts were made to identify Atlantis with America, Scandinavia, and the Canary Islands. The story of Atlantis, if Plato did not invent it, may in fact reflect ancient Egyptian records of a volcanic eruption on the island of Thera about 1500 bce. This eruption, one of the most stupendous of historical times, was accompanied by a series of earthquakes and tsunamis that shattered civilization on Crete, thereby perhaps giving rise to the legend of Atlantis.
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ec62e3a84b0e51a2cb5e550e10444ce1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atlantis-space-shuttle | Atlantis | Atlantis
Other shuttle flights included the Atlantis mission in October 1989, which deployed the Galileo spacecraft that explored Jupiter, and the June 2002 flight of Endeavour, during which he participated in three space walks to help repair the robotic arm of the International Space Station. Chang-Díaz was a visiting scientist (1983–93)…
…May 1997, successfully docking the Atlantis with Mir to transfer personnel, equipment, and supplies. With hundreds of hours in space to her credit, Collins became the first woman to command a shuttle mission in July 1999, taking Columbia into Earth orbit to deploy the Chandra X-ray Observatory. After Columbia was…
…board the American space shuttle Atlantis, which launched on May 15, 1997. Kondakova and the crew of Atlantis transferred equipment and supplies to Mir. Atlantis landed on May 24 after having spent nine days in space.
…flew on the space shuttle Atlantis as a payload specialist on the STS-61-B crew. He launched into space on November 26, 1985, and returned to Earth on December 3, 1985, after having spent seven days in space. During the mission, Neri Vela and his fellow crew members deployed three communications…
…was part of the STS-66 Atlantis mission in November 1994. STS-66 carried the ATLAS-3, which reflew experiments Ochoa had worked with on her previous flight. Another small satellite, CRISTA-SPAS, was released, which studied Earth’s atmosphere for eight days before being retrieved.
Columbia, Challenger, Atlantis, and Discovery, was built in order to allow multiple shuttle flights each year. Facilities in Florida originally constructed for the Apollo program were remodeled for shuttle use, and construction on a facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for launching the shuttle into…
…housed in the space shuttle Atlantis’s cargo bay that contained 12 experiments studying Earth’s atmosphere.
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d038b654e42eed21842ad845e18cfaeb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/atlas-maps | Atlas | Atlas
Atlas, a collection of maps or charts, usually bound together. The name derives from a custom—initiated by Gerardus Mercator in the 16th century—of using the figure of the Titan Atlas, holding the globe on his shoulders, as a frontispiece for books of maps. In addition to maps and charts, atlases often contain pictures, tabular data, facts about areas, and indexes of place-names keyed to coordinates of latitude and longitude or to a locational grid with numbers and letters along the sides of maps.
General-reference atlases emphasize place locations, the connections between them, and the relative size or significance of the places designated. Thematic, or special-subject, atlases deal primarily with a single subject, such as the agriculture, geology, climate, history, industry, languages, population, religions, resources, or other characteristics of a geographic area. National atlases are usually produced by government agencies to cartographically present the whole range of a particular nation’s salient features: physical, historical, economic, social, cultural, and administrative.
Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570; Theatre of the World) is generally thought to be the first modern atlas. Another monument of 16th-century cartography is the Lafréri Atlas, containing maps compiled by gifted Italian cartographers between 1556 and 1575. In the following century the Dutch reigned supreme in the production of high-quality atlases, as evidenced by the works of Mercator. French atlases in the 18th century were less ornate but were equal in accuracy and richness of content to the maps of the Dutch and Italians. German atlases of the same period were burdened with enormous detail, numerous insets, pictures, and notes. Among the most widely used great atlases of modern times, indexing 250,000 to 500,000 place-names, are Andree’s Allgemeiner Handatlas (1881–1930), the Russian Atlas Mira (first published 1954), and the London Times’s Atlas of the World, 5 vol. (1955–59).
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221f7c0dfe0494024bae7e990bfd011b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atli | Atli | Atli
…Nibelungenlied and under the name Atli in Icelandic sagas.
In the Norse poem, Atli (the Hunnish king Attila) is the villain, who is slain by his wife, Gudrun, to avenge her brothers.
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43961b1f837406fd982f88e495d3c584 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atmospheres | Atmosphères | Atmosphères
Atmosphères, orchestral composition known for its dense texture and stasis by avant-garde Hungarian-born composer György Ligeti. It was commissioned by Southwest German Radio and premiered at the Festival of Contemporary Music in Donaueschingen, West Germany, on October 22, 1961. But the piece reached its widest audience in 1968, when American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick used it in the sound track of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although Kubrick had not obtained permission to use Atmosphères (or the other three Ligeti pieces that he used in that film), he did mention Ligeti in the credits, and both the filmmaker and the composer benefited from the pairing. Kubrick got the otherworldly, gravity-free aural effect he wanted, and Ligeti gained another hearing and a new audience for his work. (Kubrick also used Ligeti compositions—with permission—in The Shining [1980] and Eyes Wide Shut [1999].)
Of Atmosphères Ligeti noted that “the sonorous texture is so dense that the individual interwoven instrumental voices are absorbed into the general texture and completely lose their individuality.” Ligeti privileged combinations of sound over traditional structural rules and the expansion and development of themes. In this work, subtle shifts of tone colour are the continuing focus, producing an ever-varying tapestry of sound. The score assigns each individual string player a distinct part rather than one that duplicates other strings, and the result is haunting and vaguely dissonant. Sustained chords build tension through the gradual alteration of pitch. As Ligeti described it, “Tone colour, usually a vehicle of musical form, is liberated from form to become an independent entity.”
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c03befa35d15aee594a0859e4f626695 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atomic-Blonde | Atomic Blonde | Atomic Blonde
…a Time in Venice, and Atomic Blonde. His later movies included Captive State (2019), in which aliens have colonized Earth and face a resistance movement.
…Fast and the Furious series—and Atomic Blonde, in which she played a British spy. Theron’s films in 2018 included the dark comedy Gringo, about a pharmaceutical company executive who is kidnapped by members of a drug cartel in Mexico, and Tully, for which she earned enthusiastic reviews for her uncompromising…
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43d634bbe8459fa8216b7be013ef042f | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atomic-Energy-Commission-French-organization | Atomic Energy Commission | Atomic Energy Commission
…October 18, 1945, the French Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique; CEA) was established by Gen. Charles de Gaulle with the objective of exploiting the scientific, industrial, and military potential of atomic energy. The military application of atomic energy did not begin until 1951. In July 1952 the National…
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1d9d87dfffd9d3b9d6d4235367dea122 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atomic-Energy-Commission-United-States-organization | Atomic Energy Commission | Atomic Energy Commission
Atomic Energy Commission, (AEC), U.S. federal civilian agency established by the Atomic Energy Act, which was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on Aug. 1, 1946, to control the development and production of nuclear weapons and to direct the research and development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy. On Dec. 31, 1946, the AEC succeeded the Manhattan Engineer District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (which had developed the atomic bomb during World War II) and thus officially took control of the nation’s nuclear program.
The AEC was headed by a five-member board of commissioners, one of whom served as chairman. During the late 1940s and early ’50s, the AEC devoted most of its resources to developing and producing nuclear weapons, though it also built several small-scale nuclear-power plants for research purposes. In 1954 the Atomic Energy Act was revised to permit private industry to build nuclear reactors (for electric power), and in 1956 the AEC authorized construction of the world’s first two large, privately owned atomic-power plants. Under the chairmanship (1961–71) of Glenn T. Seaborg, the AEC worked with private industry to develop nuclear fission reactors that were economically competitive with thermal generating plants, and the 1970s witnessed an ever-increasing commercial utilization of nuclear power in the United States.
Though it had virtually created the American nuclear-power industry, the AEC also had to regulate that industry to ensure public health and safety and to safeguard national security. Because these dual roles often conflicted with each other, the U.S. government under the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 disbanded the AEC and divided its functions between two new agencies: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (q.v.), which regulates the nuclear-power industry; and the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was disbanded in 1977 when the Department of Energy was created.
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e39a1194313250b6105e208d0bc0d2d6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atomic-Energy-Organization-of-Iran | Atomic Energy Organization of Iran | Atomic Energy Organization of Iran
The Atomic Energy Organization (AEO) of Iran was established in 1973 to construct a network of more than 20 nuclear power plants. By 1978 two 1,200-megawatt reactors near Būshehr on the Persian Gulf were near completion and were scheduled to begin operation early in 1980, but…
The Atomic Energy Organization (AEO) of Iran was established in 1973 to construct a network of more than 20 nuclear power plants. By 1978 two 1,200-megawatt reactors near Būshehr on the Persian Gulf were near completion and were scheduled to begin operation early in 1980, but the revolutionary government…
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877bad96625ca21e1b716630a9934c72 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/atomic-proposition | Atomic proposition | Atomic proposition
…an “atom” of language (an atomic proposition) and an atomic fact; thus, for each atomic fact there is a corresponding atomic proposition. An atomic proposition is one that asserts that a certain thing has a certain quality (e.g.: “This is red.”). An atomic fact is the simplest kind of fact…
…the atoms in question are atomic propositions, the simplest statements that it is possible to make about the world; and on the level of what language talks about, the atoms are the simplest atomic facts, those expressible by atomic propositions. More complex propositions, called molecular propositions, are built up out…
, an atomic proposition) and an atomic fact; i.e., for each atomic fact, there is a corresponding atomic proposition. An atomic proposition is one that asserts that a certain thing has a certain quality—e.g., “This is red.” An atomic fact is the simplest kind of fact and…
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08a0aebadab712abaa6d0b4a75576479 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/atomic-sentence | Atomic sentence | Atomic sentence
…as forming the simple (atomic) sentences, and (3) a set of inductive clauses—inductive inasmuch as they stipulate that natural combinations of given sentences formed by such logical connectives as the disjunction “or,” which is symbolized “∨”; “not,” symbolized “∼”; and “for all ,” symbolized “(∀),” are again sentences. [“(∀)”…
One application of these theorems is in the introduction of nonstandard analysis, which was originally instituted by other considerations. By using a suitable…
Atomic sentences stand in no logical relation to one another, since logic applies only to complex sentences built up from atomic sentences through simple logical operations, such as conjunction and negation (see connective). Logic itself is trivial, in the sense that it is merely a…
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7d209303b180bdb42c283c2878204ec9 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/atomism/Foundational-issues-posed-by-atomism | Foundational issues posed by atomism | Foundational issues posed by atomism
In discussing atomism, one particular system, that of Democritus, has been here distinguished as atomism in the strict sense because of the fact that in no other system have the foundational issues of atomism been so clearly expressed. Atomism in the strict sense is not merely one of the historical forms of atomism, one of the many possible scientific attempts at explaining certain physical phenomena; it is, first of all, a metaphysical system: it has been presented as the only possible explanation of change and multiplicity. And as a metaphysics it is rationalistic, mechanistic, and realistic.
It is rationalistic because it has so much confidence in reason that, in order to explain observed phenomena, it does not hesitate to postulate the existence of unobservable atoms—i.e., of things that are in principle unobservable by the human senses and can be known only by a process of reasoning. Atomists go even further, for they not only are convinced of the existence of atoms but also think it possible to deduce in a rational way their fundamental properties. Moreover, the description of these properties in mechanistic terms is not just a matter of convenience; it is supposed to be the adequate expression of reality.
This rationalistic and mechanistic metaphysics is characteristic not only of Democritus’s atomism but also of the early forms of scientific atomism. The clearest expression of this metaphysics is found in Descartes. For Democritus mechanistic concepts are clear and distinct ideas, so that any further experimental investigation is superfluous. It should be stressed that the atomistic assumption that the human mind, by mere reasoning, can know the properties of the atoms is a necessary consequence of the idea that atoms are not subject to internal change; for the changeless can never be a subject of experimentation. The great weakness of the mechanistic concept of immutable atoms was that it forced the analyzing experiments to stop at the atoms; but this weakness could reveal itself only after, in the course of the further development of science, the fundamentally experimental character of human knowledge had become evident.
This weakness, in fact, was precisely one of the reasons why Aristotle rejected the atomism of Democritus—namely, that the latter had postulated atoms that were not subject to change. For Aristotle the very essence of matter was its being subject to change; hence to him the concept of immutable atoms was a contradiction in terms.
Aristotle’s criticism of atomism was clearly directed against its mechanistic metaphysics, not against its realism. This latter characteristic was the target, however, of an attack launched by the incomparable 18th-century epistemologist Immanuel Kant. In a famous argument, known as the antinomy of the continuum, Kant tried to prove that the acceptance of the reality of spatial extension, the cornerstone of atomism, led to contradictions. His argument can be summarized as follows: It is possible to prove that any compound must be composed of simple things (for if not, there would be nothing but composition). On the other hand, it also is possible to prove that no material thing can be simple, for the very reason that a part of an extended being is always extended and is thus open to division. Hence, every allegedly simple part is at once simple and nonsimple. Consequently, spatial extension cannot be real. Extension is therefore not a property of the material world itself; it is a form imposed upon reality by human perception.
By his argument Kant did not intend to reject atomistic theories as such; he rejected only their realistic pretensions. Kant was deeply convinced that humans had to think of nature by way of analogy with a mechanism, but he denied that knowledge construed in such a fashion could reach reality itself.
In the 19th century scientists were, as a rule, hardly impressed by Kant’s attack on the realistic pretensions of human knowledge. Scientists had already learned to go their own way and no longer worried about philosophical considerations. Only when an internal crisis in science itself arose were they prepared to reflect upon their presuppositions. Such a crisis occurred in the 20th century when science was forced to accept the relativity of both classical models: the wave and the particle.
To a certain extent, the problem of whether a scientific model is nothing but a subjective construct in which the scientist unites his experience is the same as the problem that Kant had in mind. One of the differences, however, is that in Kant’s time science was still rather exclusively theory. Its close connection with praxis (practice, doing) had not yet been discovered. For this reason the Kantian epistemological (or human knowledge) problem could centre on such a question as: What guarantee does the knowing subject have that his “models” of reality reflect reality itself? Inasmuch as, in an exclusively theoretical science, the only contact that one has with reality is afforded by means of one’s knowledge, the problem seems to be insoluble.
The development of science from a theoretical to an experimental discipline has forced philosophy to view the epistemological problem in a new way, for in an experimental science the investigator is in a twofold contact with reality—namely, by his knowledge and by his experimental praxis. Modern atomic theory is one of the best examples to illustrate this point. It was this theory that was most directly confronted with the problem of the realistic value of its models. It could take up this challenge because of the theory’s effectiveness in experimental praxis, which is the final judge of the realistic value of the theoretical models. It has confirmed the audacious rational speculations of ancient atomism, but at the same time it has revealed that, in order to be really effective, reason is in need of experimental assistance.
In comparing Greek atomism and modern atomic theories, it should be recalled that in Greek thought philosophy and science still formed a unity. Greek atomism was inspired as much by the desire to find a solution for the problems of mutability and plurality in nature as by the desire to provide scientific explanations for specific phenomena. While it is true that some of the Greek atomists’ ideas can rightly be considered as precursors of later physics, the main importance of the old atomistic doctrines for modern science does not lie in these primitive anticipations. Much more important is the attempt to take seriously the variety and mutability discerned by sense experience and yet to reconcile them with the thesis of Parmenides about the unity and the immutability of matter. In its search for universal and unchangeable laws, modern science is to a great extent inspired by the same idea as Parmenides’, since universal laws presuppose a certain unity in the material world, and unchangeable laws cannot be established without the presupposition that something unchangeable must be hidden behind all changes. By the same token, without this latter presupposition, experiments would not make any sense at all, for, if the diversity of reactions occurring under different conditions is to reveal anything, these reactions must be the expression of an immutable nature. The differences have to indicate something about that which remains the same. The great achievement of the Greek philosophers was, therefore, that they took a general view of nature as a whole that made a scientific attitude possible. To this both the quantitative and the qualitative forms of atomism contributed—the former drawing attention to the mathematical aspects of the problem, the latter to the observational.
A comparison of ancient Greek atomism with scientific atomism merely on the basis of their respective scientific contents would therefore do a great injustice to Greek atomism; it would in fact misjudge its main value. Indeed, such a comparison would also take too narrow a view of modern scientific atomism. It would imply the philosophical irrelevance of the latter. It has here been shown, however, that the later development of the scientific atomic theory has clarified many philosophical problems that, as basic issues, divided atomism in the strict sense from other forms of atomism. To mention only a few examples: the development of the scientific atomic theory has deepened human insights into the relationship between a whole and its components, into the relative character of ultimate particles, and into certain fundamental epistemological problems.
The success of the atomic theory shows the value of the idea of atomism: the explanation of the complex in terms of aggregates of fixed particles or units. Its history also shows, however, the inherent danger of this idea—namely, that of absolutism. History has corrected this absolutism: the unitary factors have to be conceived as ultimate only with respect to the complex under consideration, and their union into aggregates need not occur only by way of juxtaposition.
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cf8512617e57c80ddddd2cf1903ae1d9 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/atomism/Modern-scientific-atomism-early-pioneering-work | Modern scientific atomism: early pioneering work | Modern scientific atomism: early pioneering work
Modern atomism arose with the flowering of science in the present sense of the word.
In the history of atomism the 17th century occupies a special place for two reasons: it saw the revival of Democritean atomism, and it saw the beginning of a scientific atomic theory.
The revival of Democritean atomism was the work of the ambiguous Epicureo-Christian thinker Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), who not only made his contemporaries better acquainted with atomism but also succeeded in divesting it of the materialistic interpretation with which it was hereditarily infected. This reintroduction of Democritus was well timed. Because of its quantitative character, Democritus’s atomism invited for its elucidation the application of mathematics and mechanics, which in the 17th century were sufficiently developed to answer this invitation. In point of fact, the 17th century was more interested in the possibilities that atomism offered for a physical theory than it was in the philosophical differences between the different atomistic systems. For this reason it saw, for example, hardly any difference between the systems of Gassendi and Descartes, although the latter explicitly rejected some of the fundamentals of Democritus, such as the existence of the void and the indivisibility of the atoms, as noted above.
In the case of scientists mainly interested in the chemical aspects, the same shift of emphasis from philosophical to scientific considerations can be discerned. According to the physician and philosopher of nature Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), Democritus’s atomism and the minima theory really amounted to the same thing. As far as philosophy was concerned, Sennert was only interested in the general idea of atomism; the precise content of an atomic doctrine, in his view, ought to be a matter of chemical experimentation. His own experience as a chemist taught him the specific differences existing between the atoms. In this respect Sennert continued the minima tradition. His own contribution to the chemical atomic theory lay in the clear distinction that he made between elementary atoms and the prima mista, or atoms of chemical compounds.
The early modern experimentalist Robert Boyle (1627–91) followed the same line of thought as Sennert, but he was much more aware of the discrepancy between Democritus’s atomism and an atomic theory suitable for chemical purposes. Boyle’s solution to this problem was the thesis that the atoms of Democritus are normally associated into primary concretions, which do not easily dissociate and which act as elementary atoms in the chemical sense. These primary concretions can combine to form compounds of a higher order, which may be compared to Sennert’s prima mista and to the molecules of modern chemistry.
The 17th century had laid the theoretical foundations for a scientific atomic theory. For its further development it was in need of better chemical insights, especially concerning the problem of what substances should be considered as chemical elements. Boyle had shown conclusively that the traditional four “elements” were certainly not elementary substances, but at the same time he confessed that he did not yet see any satisfactory method to determine which substances were true elements. This method was provided by another of the principal founders of modern chemistry, A.-L. Lavoisier (1743–94): a chemical element is a substance that cannot be further analyzed by known chemical methods.
John Dalton (1766–1844), usually regarded as the father of modern atomic theory, applied the results of Lavoisier’s chemical work to atomistic conceptions. When Dalton spoke of elementary atoms, he did not have a merely theoretical idea in mind but the chemical elements as determined by Lavoisier. Dalton held that there are as many different kinds of elementary atoms as there are chemical elements. The atoms of a certain element are perfectly alike in weight, figure, etc.; and the same point applies to the atoms of a certain compound. As weight was the decisive characteristic in Lavoisier’s theory, Dalton stressed the importance of ascertaining the relative weights of atoms and the number of elementary atoms that constitute one compound “atom.” As to the question of the way in which the atoms are combined in a compound, Dalton conceived this combination as a simple juxtaposition, with each atom under the influence of Newtonian forces of attraction. The atoms retain their identity through a chemical reaction. In this one point the founder of the chemical atomic theory did not differ from Democritus.
Until its development in the third decade of the 20th century, the scientific atomic theory did not differ philosophically very much from that of Dalton, although at first sight the difference may appear large. Dalton’s atoms were no longer considered to be immutable and indivisible; new elementary particles sometimes appeared on the scene; and molecules were no longer seen as a mere juxtaposition of atoms: when entering into a compound, atoms became ions. Yet, these differences were only accidental; the atoms revealed themselves as composed of more elementary particles—protons, neutrons, and electrons—but these particles themselves were considered then as immutable. Thus, the general picture remained the same. The material world was still thought to be composed of smallest particles, which differed in nature and which in certain definite ways could form relatively stable structures (atoms). These structures were able to form new combinations (molecules) by exchanging certain component parts (electrons). The whole process was ruled by well-known mechanical and electrodynamic laws.
In contemporary atomic theory the differences from Dalton are much more fundamental. The hypothesis of the existence of immutable elementary particles has been abandoned: elementary particles can be transformed into radiation and vice versa. And when they combine into greater units, the particles do not necessarily preserve their identity; they can be absorbed into a greater whole.
It is interesting to note that atomistic conceptions are not restricted to Western philosophy and science. Examples of qualitative atomism, based upon the doctrine of the four elements, are also found in Indian philosophy. In some Indian systems the atoms are not absolutely indivisible but only relatively so. In certain aspects Indian atomism is, therefore, more related to the minima doctrine than to the atomism of Democritus. Indian atomism has, however, not developed into a scientific theory.
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5ffb91945fcccdab76da3cfc13ad5a07 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aton | Aton | Aton
Aton, also spelled Aten, in ancient Egyptian religion, a sun god, depicted as the solar disk emitting rays terminating in human hands, whose worship briefly was the state religion. The pharaoh Akhenaton (reigned 1353–36 bce) returned to supremacy of the sun god, with the startling innovation that the Aton was to be the only god (see Re). To remove himself from the preeminent cult of Amon-Re at Thebes, Akhenaton built the city Akhetaton (now Tell el-Amarna) as the centre for the Aton’s worship.
The most important surviving document of the new religion is the Aton Hymn, which was inscribed in several versions in the tombs of Akhetaton. Like some other hymns of its period, the text focuses on the world of nature and the god’s beneficent provision for it. The hymn opens with the rising of the sun:
The only people who know and comprehend the god fully are said to be Akhenaton together with his wife, Nefertiti. The hymn to the Aton has been compared in imagery to Psalm 104 (“Bless the Lord, O my soul”).
Akhenaton devoted himself to the worship of the Aton, erasing all images of Amon and all writings of his name and sometimes even writings containing the word gods. But the new religion was rejected by the Egyptian elite after Akhenaton’s death, and the general populace had probably never adopted it in the first place. After Akhenaton’s death, the old gods were reestablished and the new city abandoned. Aton worship was not fully monotheistic (because the pharaoh himself was considered a god), nor was it a direct precursor of monotheistic religions such as Judaism.
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bd2949faeeeefb06a7bdfeaecdb468a9 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atonement-film-by-Wright | Atonement | Atonement
An Academy Award-winning film version of the story appeared in 2007.
…appeared in the film dramas Atonement (2007), an adaptation of the novel by Ian McEwan, and Evening (2007), in which she starred as a woman who remembers a long-lost love as she lies on her deathbed.
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fc659f57f7466aaf01e2616117bafafa | https://www.britannica.com/topic/atonement-religion | Atonement | Atonement
Atonement, the process by which a person removes obstacles to his reconciliation with God. It is a recurring theme in the history of religion and theology. Rituals of expiation and satisfaction appear in most religions, whether primitive or developed, as the means by which the religious person reestablishes or strengthens his relation to the holy or divine. Atonement is often attached to sacrifice, both of which often connect ritual cleanness with moral purity and religious acceptability.
The term atonement developed in the English language in the 16th century by the combination of “at onement,” meaning to “set at one,” or “to reconcile.” It was used in the various English translations of the Bible, including the King James Version (1611), to convey the idea of reconciliation and expiation, and it has been a favourite way for Christians to speak about the saving significance attributed to the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross. Various theories of the meaning of the Atonement of Christ have arisen: satisfaction for the sins of the world; redemption from the devil or from the wrath of God; a saving example of true, suffering love; the prime illustration of divine mercy; a divine victory over the forces of evil. In Christian orthodoxy there is no remission of sin without “the shedding of [Christ’s] blood” (Hebrews 9:26).
In Judaism vicarious atonement has little importance. For a traditional Jew, atonement is expiation for his own sin in order to attain God’s forgiveness. He may achieve this in various ways, including repentance, payment for a wrong action, good works, suffering, and prayer. Repentance and changed conduct are usually stressed as the most important aspects of atonement. The 10 “days of awe,” culminating in the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), are centred on repentance.
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4eb20f3836ff64fcc90157533502ac40 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Atreus | Atreus | Atreus
Atreus, in Greek legend, the son of Pelops of Mycenae and his wife, Hippodamia. Atreus was the elder brother of Thyestes and was the king of Mycenae. The story of his family—the House of Atreus—is virtually unrivaled in antiquity for complexity and corruption. There are several different accounts of Atreus’s feud with Thyestes.
A curse, said to have been pronounced by Myrtilus, plagued the descendants of Pelops. His sons Alcathous, Atreus, and Thyestes set upon a bloody course with the murder of their stepbrother Chrysippus, the son of Pelops’s union with a nymph. After the crime the three brothers fled their native city of Pisa; Alcathous went to Megara, and Atreus and Thyestes stopped at Mycenae, where Atreus became king. But Thyestes either contested Atreus’s right to rule or seduced Atreus’s wife, Aërope, and thus was driven from Mycenae. To avenge himself, Thyestes sent Pleisthenes (Atreus’s son, whom Thyestes had brought up as his own and who does not figure in every version of the story), to kill Atreus, but the boy was himself slain, unrecognized by his father.
When Atreus learned the identity of the boy, he recalled Thyestes to Mycenae in apparent reconciliation. At a banquet Atreus served Thyestes the flesh of Thyestes’ own son (or sons), whom Atreus had slain in vengeance for the death of Pleisthenes. Thyestes fled in horror to Sicyon; there he impregnated his own daughter Pelopia in the hope of raising one more son to avenge himself. Atreus subsequently married Pelopia, and she afterward bore Aegisthus. Atreus believed this child to be his own, but Aegisthus was in fact the son of Thyestes.
According to one version of the story, Agamemnon and Menelaus—sons of Atreus and Aërope—found Thyestes at Delphi and imprisoned him at Mycenae. Aegisthus was sent to murder Thyestes, but each recognized the other because of the sword that Pelopia had taken from her father and given to her son. Father and son slew Atreus, seized the throne, and drove Agamemnon and Menelaus out of the country.
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ba5bad601dd60bc27019a2d6316d5b6e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/ATTAC | ATTAC | ATTAC
…most well-known antiglobalization group is ATTAC (Association pour la Taxation des Transactions Financière et l’Aide aux Citoyens, “Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens”), which exists in more than 30 countries. ATTAC holds that financial globalization leads to a less secure and a less equal playing…
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18da4f7f908c6164c88fe07d0077b535 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Attica-prison-revolt | Attica prison revolt | Attica prison revolt
Attica prison revolt, prison insurrection in 1971, lasting from September 9 to September 13, during which inmates in New York’s maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility seized control of the prison and took members of the prison staff hostage to demand improved living conditions. After four days of negotiations with the inmates, state police officers stormed the prison, killing 29 inmates and 10 of the captive correctional staff members. The McKay Commission, which provided the official report on the events at Attica, commented that “with the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the state police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.”
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a rise in significant disturbances at American prisons. In New York alone, riots and partial takeovers of correctional facilities occurred at the Manhattan House of Detention in New York City in August 1970 and at the Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn in November 1970. Although neither event resulted in crises on the scale of the one at Attica, they did contribute to tension there, raising both the expectations of guards and inmates about the possibility of a future revolt. Also, some prisoners from Auburn were transferred to Attica. Attica’s severe overcrowding—in September 1971 the prison held 2,250 prisoners even though it had been designed for only 1,600—further increased the likelihood of an incident. Racial tensions were also a major factor in the revolt; the inmate population was nearly 55 percent African American and 10 percent Hispanic while all the guards were white.
The event that precipitated the Attica uprising occurred on September 8, when an episode of horseplay between inmates in the prison yard was interpreted by guards as a serious fight. There was an altercation between guards and inmates, and two of the inmates were sent to disciplinary confinement. Anger at the two men’s treatment spread through the prison, and on September 9 a lieutenant involved in the earlier incident was attacked when he asked a group of inmates to return to their cells after breakfast. In the chaotic violence that followed, inmates gained access to the prison’s central control area. Guards were beaten and taken hostage; one guard received a head injury from which he died two days later. About 1,300 rebelling prisoners congregated in the D yard, one of the prison’s four yards, and the 38 hostages were brought there. The inmates quickly began to organize themselves. A security force was formed to protect the hostages and keep order, and a negotiating committee was selected to handle contact with the prison administration.
Soon after the start of the uprising, the inmates produced a statement listing their grievances and laying out demands that would serve as the basis for negotiations. The first negotiations were carried out directly between Russell Oswald, who was New York’s commissioner of corrections, and the inmates. Oswald entered the prison on the afternoon of September 9. He was accompanied by representatives of the media, giving the outside world its first look inside the prison. However, miscommunications between Oswald and the prisoners quickly caused a breakdown in trust, and the prisoners refused to continue direct talks.
On September 10 an “observers committee” invited by the prisoners arrived at the prison. It included prominent African American and Hispanic political leaders from New York, activist lawyers, journalists, and members of the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam. That group, although originally invited as observers, took the role of intermediaries in negotiations. Meanwhile, a force of more than 1,000 law-enforcement officers, including state troopers, corrections officers, and local police, gathered at the prison. Over the next two days the administration and the prisoners exchanged proposals, but by September 12 Oswald and Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, had concluded that the situation could not be resolved through negotiations.
On the morning of September 13, a final ultimatum from Oswald was read to inmates, who signaled their rejection by taking eight blindfolded hostages to catwalks on the prison wall and holding knives to their throats or bodies. Fifteen minutes later a helicopter dropped tear gas into the yard, and state police and correctional officers stormed the prison, firing indiscriminately. When the shooting stopped, 10 hostages and 29 inmates were dead or dying. Within an hour Attica was secured. State police and correctional officers then began to search inmates and move them back into cells.
One of the most-infamous incidents of the uprising occurred shortly after the main yard had been secured. Gerald Houlihan, the public information officer for the New York Department of Corrections, falsely told the press that inmates had cut the throats of the 10 hostages who died during the assault. That was believed by the corrections officers and state troopers processing the surrendered and wounded inmates. As a result, there were numerous acts of brutality against them. Less than 24 hours later, however, autopsies revealed that all of the dead hostages had been killed by police gunfire.
In the years following the Attica uprising, 62 inmates were indicted for more than 1,200 criminal acts, and one state trooper was charged with a crime. An investigative commission led by Robert McKay, the dean of New York University’s Law School, held hearings regarding the Attica revolt in April 1972. The commission’s final report described in great detail the conditions that had led to the revolt and was strongly critical of the authorities’ handling of the crisis. It specifically rebuked Rockefeller for not personally visiting the prison before ordering its retaking.
In 1974 Gov. Hugh Carey sought to bring the matter to a close by pardoning seven inmates and commuting the sentence of an inmate convicted of killing a correctional officer. In addition, Carey ruled that no disciplinary action should be taken against 19 police officers and one civilian whom investigators had suggested should be disciplined. Civil suits by prisoners seeking monetary damages for the use of excessive force continued for years afterward. It was not until 2000 that the state of New York settled a civil suit brought by inmates for $12 million.
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75eba3d3e6ccc823c2a0d320613dde6e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/attorney | Attorney | Attorney
The “attorneys,” authorized by legislation, at first shared the life of the Inns with the “apprentices” in advocacy, who themselves in time acquired the title of barrister. Indeed, there were cases of men working as both barristers and attorneys. When in the 16th century the Court…
…trial typically begins with the attorneys for the plaintiff and the defendant making opening statements, outlining what each conceives to be the nature of the case and what each hopes to prove as the trial proceeds. Presentation of the plaintiff’s case follows. The plaintiff’s lawyer introduces documents and calls and…
Attorneys are considered to be under an obligation to refuse to testify about confidential communications with their clients. The privilege, however, protects the client, not the attorney, and, therefore, the client may waive it. This privilege applies principally to the adversary system, in which, so…
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b2205f0e982b4d87e24964ab2bfc90da | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aucassin-et-Nicolette | Aucassin et Nicolette | Aucassin et Nicolette
Aucassin et Nicolette, early 13th-century French chantefable (a story told in alternating sections of verse and prose, the former sung, the latter recited). Aucassin, “endowed with all good qualities,” is the son of the Count of Beaucaire and falls in love with Nicolette, a captive Saracen turned Christian. The lovers are imprisoned but manage to escape and, after many vicissitudes (including flight, capture, and shipwreck), are able to marry. This theme was also treated in the romance of Floire et Blancheflor, with which Aucassin et Nicolette is thought to share common Moorish and Greco-Byzantine sources.
The author of the chantefable may have been a professional minstrel from northeastern France, in whose dialect the work was written. The author shows more vigour in the work’s verse and musical sections than in the prose narrative, in which he displays comparatively little skill. He vividly depicts the ardour of young love, but he also mocks both epic and romance by portraying Nicolette as full of resourcefulness, while Aucassin is merely a lovesick swain who lacks initiative, is disrespectful toward his parents, needs to be bribed to do his duty as a knight, and defends his heritage absentmindedly until faced with death. Nor is Aucassin a very good Christian when in the chantefable he prefers hell with Nicolette and a convivial company of sinners to heaven with ill-clad priests and the lame. These latter characteristics may explain Aucassin et Nicolette’s apparent lack of popularity in the Middle Ages, but it was sufficiently esteemed to be plagiarized in Clarisse et Florent, a continuation of the 13th-century chanson de geste Huon de Bordeaux. Aucassin et Nicolette is preserved in a single manuscript, kept in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale.
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067eb841aa4bd8d89f44610fab71ff2e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Auction-Euchre | Auction Euchre | Auction Euchre
Auction euchre is played with five, six, or seven players and a three-card widow (cards dealt facedown). Each player in turn has one opportunity to bid at least three tricks using a named trump or to overcall a previous bid. A bid of five is…
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6558283634e2391ee4b2c95b16eefff8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/audiencia | Audiencia | Audiencia
Audiencia, in the kingdoms of late medieval Spain, a court established to administer royal justice; also, one of the most important governmental institutions of Spanish colonial America. In Spain the ordinary judges of audiencias in civil cases were called oidores and, for criminal cases, alcaldes de crimen. The presiding officer of the audiencia was called gobernador, or regente. From the reign of Philip II (1556–98), the decisions of audiencias were final, except when the death penalty was decreed or in civil cases when the amount of money involved exceeded a certain sum. In these instances appeals could be made to a higher court, the chancillería.
During the 16th century, audiencias were established in the various administrative districts (viceroyalties, captaincies general) of Spanish America. They were empowered to hear complaints against viceroys and captains general (executive officers) and to take appropriate actions to curb abuses of power. Audiencias were charged by the crown with safeguarding the rights of Indians, and two days a week were allotted to hearing cases involving them. Their primary function was still judicial. They had both civil and criminal jurisdiction, and appeals in major cases could be made from their decisions to the Council of the Indies in Madrid. The presiding officer of the audiencia was the viceroy or captain general, but, unless he was learned in the law, he was excluded from its strictly judicial functions. Three to five oidores and the presiding officer constituted the less-important audiencias, whereas the number of judges of the audiencia of Mexico City, founded in 1527 with four oidores, had risen to 10 by the 18th century.
The first audiencia in the New World was that of Santo Domingo, set up in 1511, with jurisdiction over the Caribbean islands. The audiencia of Mexico City, established in 1527, eventually embraced much of the present-day republic of Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico coastal region and Florida. The audiencias of Lima and Guatemala were set up in 1542 and 1543, respectively, and by about 1550 three more had been constituted. By the end of the colonial era, a total of 13 had been established within the four viceroyalties. See also Indies, Laws of the; residencia.
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dc93c5b7d6b1438a55b856083351cff0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Audumla | Audumla | Audumla
A cow, Audumla, nourished him with her milk. Audumla was herself nourished by licking salty, rime-covered stones. She licked the stones into the shape of a man; this was Buri, who became the grandfather of the great god Odin and his brothers. These gods later killed Aurgelmir,…
…reference to the primeval cow Audhumla (Auðumla), formed from drops of melting rime. She was nourished by licking salty, rime-covered stones. Four rivers of milk flowed from her udders and thus she fed the giant Ymir. The cow licked the stones into the shape of a man; this was Buri…
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0ca7ad482690d69f91efa4fde74ab794 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Auf-dem-See | Auf dem See | Auf dem See
…Goethe’s most perfect poems, “Auf dem See” (“On the Lake”), and was followed by a walking tour through the mountains, with Goethe sketching all the time. Up on St. Gotthard Pass he contemplated the road down to Italy but turned away toward Lili and home.
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daaa76e2c05efd637f1f1ef468fbdaa0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/augury | Augury | Augury
Augury, prophetic divining of the future by observation of natural phenomena—particularly the behaviour of birds and animals and the examination of their entrails and other parts, but also by scrutiny of man-made objects and situations. The term derives from the official Roman augurs, whose constitutional function was not to foretell the future but to discover whether or not the gods approved of a proposed course of action, especially political or military. Two types of divinatory sign, or omen, were recognized: the most important was that deliberately watched for, such as lightning, thunder, flights and cries of birds, or the pecking behaviour of sacred chickens; of less moment was that which occurred casually, such as the unexpected appearance of animals sacred to the gods—the bear (Artemis), wolf (Apollo), eagle (Zeus), serpent (Asclepius), and owl (Minerva), for instance—or such other mundane signs as the accidental spilling of salt, sneezing, stumbling, or the creaking of furniture.
The prophetic art is age-old; the practice of augury is well substantiated in the Bible. Cicero’s De divinatione (Concerning Divination), dated probably 44 bc, provides the best source on ancient divinatory practices. Both he and Plato distinguish between augury that can be taught and augury that is divinely inspired in ecstatic trance. In China for millennia many have sought the counsel of the I Ching (“Book of Changes”) before taking important action. This book interprets the hexagram created by the tossing of yarrow stalks. Among the vast number of sources of augury, each with its own specialist jargon and ritual, were atmospheric phenomena (aeromancy), cards (cartomancy), dice or lots (cleromancy), dots and other marks on paper (geomancy), fire and smoke (pyromancy), the shoulder blades of animals (scapulimancy), entrails of sacrificed animals (haruspicy), or their livers, which were considered to be the seat of life (hepatoscopy).
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e7a17afa6934a12832f08d7a9dc47644 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/August-Osage-County-film-by-Wells | August: Osage County | August: Osage County
…The Company You Keep (2012), August: Osage County (2013), and Demolition (2015), and he portrayed J.D. Salinger in Coming Through the Rye (2015).
…a hapless young man in August: Osage County, based on the play by Tracy Letts. He also lent his posh growl to the computer-animated dragon Smaug in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), the second installment in director Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel.
…by William Friedkin, and of August: Osage County (2013).
…husband has committed suicide in August: Osage County (2013), adapted from Tracy Letts’s play; for her performance, Streep earned her 18th Oscar nomination.
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4e4bfd9f0779cdb18d07cb2cb57a2a5b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Augustana-College-Rock-Island-Illinois | Augustana College | Augustana College
Augustana College, private, coeducational liberal arts college located along the Mississippi River in Rock Island, northwestern Illinois, U.S. The college is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Lutheran immigrants from Sweden, most of them graduates of Uppsala and Lund universities, founded the college in 1860. It was originally sited in Chicago and was named Augustana College and Theological Seminary. The school moved to Paxton in 1863 and to Rock Island in 1875. The theological seminary separated from the college in 1948. Total enrollment at the college is about 2,200.
Augustana offers only bachelor of arts degrees and has a curriculum of education, business, medicine, and the liberal arts and sciences. It operates study-abroad programs in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Israel. The campus features the Fryxell Geology Museum, the John Deere Planetarium, and the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center. Collinson Ecological Preserve and Green Wing Environmental Laboratory provide the college with nearly 500 acres (200 hectares) of research and teaching land. Among the college’s graduates is Daniel C. Tsui, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1998.
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ed2a5db50a737a3894699690870e2a46 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Augustinian-Hermits | Augustinian Hermits | Augustinian Hermits
Giles joined the Augustinian Hermits in about 1257 and in 1260 went to Paris, where he was educated in the house of his order. While in Paris from 1269 to 1272, he probably studied under St. Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophical doctrines he defended against ecclesiastical condemnation (1277). He…
…monastery in Erfurt of the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine, a mendicant order founded in 1256. His explanation for his abrupt change of heart was that a violent thunderstorm near the village of Stotternheim had terrified him to such a degree that he involuntarily vowed to become a…
…Austria), vicar-general of the German Augustinians during the revolt against the Roman Catholic church led by Martin Luther, of whom, for a time, he was teacher, patron, and counselor.
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daa5aee4f133273afaf1eb49038def07 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Augustinian-Recollect | Augustinian Recollect | Augustinian Recollect
…the Augustinian Hermits is the Augustinian Recollects (O.A.R.), formed in the 16th century by friars who desired a rule of stricter observance and a return to the eremitic ideals of solitude and contemplation. In 1588 the monastery at Talavera de la Reina in Spain was designated for the Recollects, and…
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6e3811948caf8afa2c93846ca5dc6917 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Augustinians | Augustinian | Augustinian
Augustinian, member of any of the Roman Catholic religious orders and congregations of men and women whose constitutions are based on the Rule of St. Augustine. More specifically, the name is used to designate members of two main branches of Augustinians—namely, the Augustinian Canons and the Augustinian Hermits, with their female offshoots. The Rule comprises instructions on the religious life written by St. Augustine, the great Western theologian, and widely disseminated after his death in 430 ce.
The Augustinian Canons, or Austin Canons (in full the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine), were in the 11th century the first religious order of men in the Roman Catholic Church to combine clerical status with a full common life. The moral impulse emanating from the Roman synods of 1059 and 1063 and the Gregorian Reform led many canons to give up private ownership and to live together according to monastic ideals. By 1150 the adoption of the Rule of St. Augustine by these canons was almost universal. The order grew and flourished until the Protestant Reformation, during which time many of its foundations perished. The French Revolution also put an end to a number of its houses. Modern emphasis has been on mission, educational, and hospital work.
The Augustinian Hermits, or Austin Friars (in full the Order of the Hermit Friars of Saint Augustine; O.S.A.), were one of the four great mendicant orders of the Middle Ages. Dispersed by the Vandal invasion of northern Africa (c. 428), a number of congregations of hermits who had been following the Rule of St. Augustine founded monasteries in central and northern Italy. These remained independent of one another until the 13th century, when Pope Innocent IV in 1244 established them as one order and Alexander IV in 1256 called them from their solitary seclusion as hermits to an active lay apostolate in the cities. The order spread rapidly throughout Europe and took a prominent part in university life and ecclesiastical affairs; perhaps its most famous member was the Protestant reformer Martin Luther in the 16th century. Its members now dedicate themselves to several activities, including foreign missions, as well as to the advancement of learning by teaching and scholarly research.
An offshoot of the Augustinian Hermits is the Augustinian Recollects (O.A.R.), formed in the 16th century by friars who desired a rule of stricter observance and a return to the eremitic ideals of solitude and contemplation. In 1588 the monastery at Talavera de la Reina in Spain was designated for the Recollects, and Luis de León was directed to devise constitutions for their government, but the movement proved so popular that soon it required four monasteries. In 1602 the Recollects were established as a distinct province of the Augustinians and in 1912 as an independent order. They now engage in high-school and college teaching, administer parishes, and conduct retreats and missions.
Among nuns, the term Second Order of St. Augustine applies only to those nuns who are jurisdictionally dependent upon the Augustinian Friars. They were founded in 1264 and remained strictly cloistered until 1401, but at that date they began to accept third-order affiliates—women who desired to perform apostolic works outside the cloister, in schools, hospitals, and missions.
A distinct group is the Hospital Sisters of Hôtel-Dieu and Malestroit. Sisters following the Rule of St. Augustine were staffing the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris at least from about 1217. They not only survived the French Revolution but were even allowed to continue their work. Though expelled in 1907, they managed to open other hospitals and today maintain several institutions.
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ed890b51f1c4430df832a10c6c311152 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aukstaiciai | Aukstaiciai | Aukstaiciai
…the Lithuanians—the Samogitians and the Aukstaiciai—covered most of present-day Lithuania, stretching into Belarus. Five more subdivisions formed the basis for the modern Latvians. Westernmost of these were the Kuronians, who were divided into five to seven principalities on the peninsula of Courland (modern Kurzeme). To the east were the Semigallians,…
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d142fdad000c85ef45fb51c05fb7c552 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Auldjo-Vase | Auldjo Vase | Auldjo Vase
…with Cupids gathering grapes; the Auldjo Vase, with an exquisitely naturalistic vine; and the celebrated Portland Vase, the scenes on which have always been the subject of scholarly controversy but are generally supposed to depict myths relating to the afterlife. Similar imitations of carving in precious stones are late antique…
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a789fe66cceea01978f3611673144d31 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aulularia | Aulularia | Aulularia
The play, based on the Aulularia of Roman comic playwright Plautus, recasts the ancient comic figure of the miser who is inhuman in his worship of money and all too human in his need for respect and affection.
…being overcareful of it (the Aulularia of Plautus); on a father who tries so hard to win the girl from his son that he falls into a trap set for him by his wife (Plautus’s Casina); and on an overstern father whose son turns out worse than the product of…
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a1830876b8c8d3a8349e68eafaa3c075 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Auntie-Mame-film-by-DaCosta | Auntie Mame | Auntie Mame
…of the long-running stage hit Auntie Mame (1956) and the subsequent movie version (1958), in which she played an unconventional woman whose nephew comes to live with her after his father’s death. She received her fourth Oscar nomination for her movie portrayal. In the 1950s and ’60s she enjoyed a…
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dbb30b13b073f725d8f5ef11fadb7407 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aura-novel-by-Fuentes | Aura | Aura
Aura (1962) is a novella that successfully fuses reality and fantasy. La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz), which presents the agony of the last hours of a wealthy survivor of the Mexican Revolution, was translated into several languages and established…
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61fd0f467079199f0710bb1c5eeb8b9c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aurelia | Aurelia | Aurelia
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of achievement of…
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393f01c3904663edab674a137577237f | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aureliano-in-Palmira | Aureliano in Palmira | Aureliano in Palmira
With Aureliano in Palmira (1814) the composer affirmed his authority over the singers; he decided to prescribe and write the ornaments for his arias, but the work was not a success. After L’Italiana he wrote Il Turco in Italia (1814; The Turk in Italy) for the…
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90e28c073ede6ababf674bf873f290a1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aureng-Zebe | Aureng-Zebe | Aureng-Zebe
…intelligent example of the genre, Aureng-Zebe. In this play he abandoned the use of rhymed couplets for that of blank verse.
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28ec1cbc6ea5e18a4807dae120b67759 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australasian-Football-Council | Australasian Football Council | Australasian Football Council
A national body, the Australasian Football Council, was formed in 1906 to regulate interstate player movement and develop contests on the national level, though it remained under the auspices of the VFL. As the council’s name suggests, efforts to keep the game alive in New Zealand were part of…
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4ed1e28db440440174082cf3ca9964b2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal | Australian Aboriginal peoples | Australian Aboriginal peoples
Australian Aboriginal peoples, one of the two distinct groups of Indigenous peoples of Australia, the other being the Torres Strait Islander peoples.
It has long been conventionally held that Australia is the only continent where the entire Indigenous population maintained a single kind of adaptation—hunting and gathering—into modern times. Some scholars now argue, however, that there is evidence of the early practice of both agriculture and aquaculture by Aboriginal peoples. This finding raises questions regarding the traditional viewpoint that presents Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples as perhaps unique in the degree of contrast between the complexity of their social organization and religious life and the relative simplicity of their material technologies. (For a discussion of the names given to the Indigenous peoples of Australia, see Researcher’s Note: Britannica usage standards: Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia.)
It is generally held that Australian Aboriginal peoples originally came from Asia via insular Southeast Asia (now Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and have been in Australia for at least 45,000–50,000 years. On the basis of research at the Nauwalabila I and Madjedbebe archaeological sites in the Northern Territory, however, some scientists have claimed that early humans arrived considerably sooner, perhaps as early as 65,000 to 80,000 years ago. That conclusion is consistent with the argument made by some scholars that the migration of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and adjacent areas of Southwest Asia to South and Southeast Asia along the so-called Southern Route predated migration to Europe. Other scholars question the earlier dating of human arrival in Australia, which is based on the use of optically stimulated luminescence (measurement of the last time the sand in question was exposed to sunlight), because the Northern Territory sites are in areas of termite activity, which can displace artifacts downward to older levels.
In either case, the first settlement would have occurred during an era of lowered sea levels, when there were more-coextensive land bridges between Asia and Australia. Watercraft must have been used for some passages, however, such as those between Bali and Lombok and between Timor and Greater Australia, because they entail distances greater than 120 miles (200 km). This is the earliest confirmed seafaring in the world. By about 35,000 years ago all of the continent had been occupied, including the southwest and southeast corners (Tasmania became an island when sea levels rose sometime between 13,500 and 8,000 years ago, thus isolating Aboriginal people who lived there from the mainland) as well as the highlands of the island of New Guinea. Archaeological evidence suggests that occupation of the interior of Australia by Aboriginal peoples during the harsh climatic regime of the last glacial maximum (between 30,000 and 18,000 years ago) was highly dynamic, and all arid landscapes were permanently occupied only roughly 10,000 years ago.
The dingo, a type of wild dog, appeared in Australia only 5,000 to 3,000 years ago, which postdates the time that Aboriginal people began hafting small stone implements into composite tools some 8,000 years ago. Whereas the dingo was introduced from Southeast Asia, the small implements appear to be independent inventions from within Australia. Within the past 1,500–3,000 years, other important changes occurred at the general continental level: population increases, the exploitation of new habitats, more efficient resource exploitation, and an increase in the exchange of valued items over wide areas.
There is evidence for complex social behaviours much earlier, however, including cremation before 40,000 years ago, personal ornamentation (shell beads) by 30,000 years ago, and long-distance trade in objects before 10,000 years ago. It has not yet been ascertained whether there were single or multiple waves of migration into Australia, although recent genetic evidence indicates multiple donor groups, whether from a single heterogeneous migration or multiple waves. While there is no doubt that only anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) have ever occupied Australia, skulls found in the southeast suggest to some the existence of two distinct physical types. However, most now accept that there was a wide range of variation in pre-European populations. It has also been argued that one group on the Murray River practiced a form of cosmetic cranial deformation that led to their different appearance. Some have posited that Aboriginal cultures have one of the longest deep-time chronologies of any groups on Earth.
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26745d2d7b335671ae68c4b344a293c0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal/Beliefs-and-aesthetic-values | Beliefs and aesthetic values | Beliefs and aesthetic values
Aboriginal people saw their way of life as already ordained by the creative acts of the Dreaming beings and the blueprint that was their legacy, so their mission was simply to live in agreement with the terms of that legacy. There was thus no notion of progress and no room for competing dogmas or rebellion against the status quo. Everything that now existed was fixed for all time in the mythic past, and all that the living were asked to do, in order to guarantee the continuance of their world, was obey the law of the Dreaming and perform correctly the rituals upon which physical and social reproduction were said to depend. Human creativity was not excluded but was explained away. The Dreaming legacy was not a static deadweight of tradition but was forever being added to and enlivened, despite an ideology that proclaimed non-change and the need only to reproduce existing forms. This view of the world gave precedence to spiritual powers and explanations over mundane knowledge or human intellect, and it placed everyone squarely under the authority of the law rather than that of other people. Aboriginal people were constantly surrounded by proofs of the existence and power of spiritual forces—the landscape itself was a dominant representation of the Dreaming’s reality—and their everyday activities were in large measure a reenactment of those of the creative beings, making religion indivisible from the mundane concerns of daily life. Outside the ritual arena, and notwithstanding the superior rights of men over women and of older men over younger men, people valued their personal autonomy highly and were likely to react with anger and violence to any attempts by others to deny or diminish it.
Through systems of totemic belief, individuals and groups are linked in many different ways to both the things of nature and the all-powerful beings of the spiritual realm. Totemic beliefs are more highly elaborated among Aboriginal people than among any other people. Totemism has been defined as a representation of the universe seen as a moral and social order, a worldview that regards humanity and nature as one corporate whole, or a set of symbols forming a conventional expression of the value system of a society. Such symbols provided intermediate links, both personal and social, between humans and the mythic beings. Many of the mythic beings in Australia are totemic in the sense of exemplifying in their own persons, or outward forms, the common life force pervading particular species. Others, originating in human or near-human form, at the end of their wanderings entered some physiographic feature, were metamorphosed as hills or rocks, or turned into various creatures or plants.
Totemism’s importance lies in providing individuals and groups with direct and life-sustaining links back to the very beginnings of society itself, the Dreaming, and to the enormous powers emanating from the spiritual realm. Conception totemism connects individuals to particular places and events and provides them with a unique account of their coming into being. It thus underpins individual identity while at the same time linking a person to many others who share similar associations. The plants, animals, or minerals that are selected as totems are not in themselves of religious significance, though in the case of foods a person may choose not to eat his or her totem, considering it to be of the same flesh. What is important is the connections symbolized by totems—the ties that bind people simultaneously to one another, to sites in the physical world, and to the omnipotent spiritual powers on which all worldly life depends.
Throughout the year, religious activity was often taking place or being planned or discussed, particularly by initiated men. However, the high points were large gatherings, made possible periodically by the local superabundance of a major food resource. These occasions enabled Aboriginal people to conduct their religious life in an atmosphere of heightened excitement and tension. The main ritual roles in most major religious sequences were reserved for initiated men, and much secret-sacred activity excluded all others, but women had important roles in many religious activities. Children also took part in many rituals. In some areas, such as the Great Sandy Desert, women had their own secret-sacred rites and objects. New rituals were always being composed or exchanged with other groups, and this diffusion added a vital dynamic element to religious life.
Sacred ritual provided immense scope for aesthetic expression, especially in dramatic performances with stylized posturing and complicated dance movements. Less intense but sometimes almost as elaborate were the nonsacred ceremonies (corroborees) with dance, mime, and singing designed for entertainment and relaxation. Songs ranged in style from the succinct verses or couplets of central Australia and the Great Sandy Desert, which were made up of three, four, or more words repeated in linked sequences, to the more elaborate songs of northeastern Arnhem Land, which were long verses building up complex word pictures through symbolic allusion and imagery. There was no poetry in terms of spoken verse, but there were chants, some of them outstandingly beautiful. The majority of secret-sacred songs comprised mythic cycles, each containing several hundred verses. The wide repertoire of songs on everyday events included the “gossip” songs of western Arnhem Land, composed by songmen with the aid of spirits. Instrumental music in the north was provided by the didjeridu and clapping sticks. In southern and central regions boomerangs or clubs were rhythmically beaten together or pounded on the ground; in southeastern Australia women used skin beating pads. Tunes and rhythms varied greatly from area to area.
Oral literature was rich. In addition to sacred mythology there were ordinary stories and tales, either historically true or presumed to be true. Some existed in several versions, depending on the situation in which they were told and the individual background of the storyteller.
Each cultural area had its own distinctive style of art. Tjurunga (sacred object) art, consisting of incised patterns on flat stones or wooden boards, was representative of a large area of Australia, although centralized in Aranda territory. In central Australia body decoration and elaborate headdresses on ritual occasions, using down, blood, and ochres, were especially striking. Everywhere, sacred ritual provided the incentive for making a large variety of objects—mostly impermanent, because the act of making them was itself one of the appropriate rites. In western Arnhem Land maraiin objects—realistic and stylized carved representations of various natural species—were made. The rangga, or ceremonial poles, of eastern Arnhem Land, many of durable hardwood, bore ochre designs and long pendants of feathered twine. For mortuary rituals the Tiwi made large wooden grave posts, and shaped and decorated receptacles for bones were common in eastern Arnhem Land. Also common were carved wooden figures of mythic beings and contemporary persons; some were used in sacred ritual, others as memorial posts for the dead.
Paintings in ochre on sheets of bark were indigenous to Arnhem Land, although examples could be found in the Kimberley and in southeastern Australia. They were used mostly on the initiation ground for the instruction of novices. In western Arnhem Land naturalistic patterns showing figures against an open background were the norm; there was also a unique kind of “X-ray” art that depicted the internal organs of animals and human beings. Also widespread were cave and rock paintings or engravings and sand paintings associated with desert rituals. (See also art and architecture, Oceanic.)
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14950300d113a192109f00a9a308c1ef | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal/Kinship-marriage-and-the-family | Kinship, marriage, and the family | Kinship, marriage, and the family
The smooth operation of social life depended on obedience to religious precepts and on the operation of kinship, which was the major force regulating interpersonal behaviour. Kinship is a system of social relationships expressed in a biological idiom through terms such as mother, son, and so on. All Aboriginal kinship systems were classificatory, that is, a limited number of terms was extended to cover all known persons. Thus, terms for lineal relatives, such as father, also referred to collateral relatives, such as father’s brothers. Likewise, mother’s sisters were classed as mother. Aboriginal people inhabited a universe of kin: everyone with whom one interacted in the normal course of life was not only classified and called by a kin term, but the behaviours between any two people were expected to conform to what was deemed appropriate between kin so related. A person thus showed respect and deference to almost all kin of the first ascending generation (i.e., “fathers,” “mothers,” “uncles,” and “aunts”) and claimed the same from all members of the generation below (i.e., “sons,” “daughters,” “nieces,” and “nephews”). These terms did not indicate the emotional content of such relationships, however, and between close relatives the intensity of feeling was bound to be greater (see also kinship terminology).
Kinship terms provided everyone with a ready-made guide to expected behaviour, indicating, for example, the expectation of sexual familiarity, a joking relationship, restraint, or complete avoidance. Friendships and temperament led many to bend the rules, and at times of heightened emotion, as during conflicts, some broke them; however, repeated flouting of kinship conventions brought censure, since it threatened the social structure. Children were not bound by such rules and did not normally begin to observe them until early adolescence. Affines (relatives by marriage) were often classified with consanguineal (blood) relatives, and certain terms indicated potential spouses or affines. Relationships between actual brothers and sisters were often restricted and involved some form of avoidance. The most outstanding avoidance relationship was between a man and his actual or potential mother-in-law—not just his wife’s mother but all women and girls who were classified as “mother-in-law.”
Reciprocity was a fundamental rule in Aboriginal kinship systems and also in marriage. Marriage was not simply a relationship between two persons. It linked two families or groups of kin, which, even before the union was confirmed and most certainly afterward, had mutual obligations and responsibilities. Generally, throughout Aboriginal Australia those who received a wife had to make repayment either at the time of marriage or at some future time. In the simplest form of reciprocity, men exchanged sisters, and women brothers. Such exchanges took place between different moieties, clans, or families. Most kinship-and-marriage systems provided for the possible replacement of spouses and for parent surrogates.
Infant betrothal was common. If arranged before the birth of one or both of the prospective spouses, it was a tentative arrangement subject to later ratification, mainly through continued gift giving to the girl’s parents. In some Aboriginal societies parents of marriageable girls played one man against another, although this was always a potentially dangerous game. Also, there might be a considerable age discrepancy between the members of an affianced pair. Generally, a long-standing betrothal, cemented by gift giving and the rendering of services, had a good chance of surviving and fostering a genuine attachment between a couple.
For a marriage to be recognized, it was usually enough that a couple should live together publicly and assume certain responsibilities in relation to each other and toward their respective families, but it might be considered binding only after a child was born. All persons were expected to marry. A girl’s marriage should be settled before she reached puberty, and, ideally, a husband should be older than his wife, although in some cases a man would receive an older widow in marriage.
Apart from formal betrothal, there were other ways of contracting marriages, such as elopement, capture during feuding or fighting, and redistribution of widows through the levirate (compulsory marriage of a widow to her deceased husband’s brother). Elopement was often supported by love magic, which emphasized romantic love, as well as by the oblique or direct approval of extramarital relations.
Although most men had only one wife at a time, polygyny was considered both legitimate and good. The average number of wives in polygynous unions was 2 or 3. The maximum in the Great Sandy Desert was 5 or 6; among the Tiwi, 29; among the Yolngu, 20 to 25, with many men having 10 to 12. In such circumstances, women had a scarcity value. Having more than one wife was usually a matter of personal inclination, but economic considerations were important; so were prestige and political advantage. Some women pressed their husbands to take an additional wife (or wives), since this meant more food coming into the family circle and more help with child care.
To terminate a marriage, a woman might try elopement. A man could bestow an unsatisfactory wife on someone else or divorce her. A formal declaration or some symbolic gesture on his part might be all that was necessary. In broad terms, a husband had more rights over his wife than she had over him. But, taking into account the overall relations between men and women and their separate and complementary arenas of activity in marriage and in other aspects of social living, women in Aboriginal societies were not markedly oppressed.
A child’s spirit was held to come from the Dreaming to animate a fetus. In some cases this was believed to occur through an action of a mythic being who might or might not be reincarnated in the child. Even when Aboriginal people acknowledged a physical bond between parents and child, the most important issue for them was the spiritual heritage.
In early childhood, children’s focus was on their actual parents, especially on their mothers, but others were close at hand to care for them. Weaning occurred at about two or three years of age but occasionally not until five or six for a youngest child. Through observation of camp life and informal instruction, children built up knowledge of their social world, learning through participation while becoming familiar with the natural environment. Children were also constantly having kin identified to them by their elders and receiving detailed instructions about correct kinship behaviours. Small children often went food collecting with their mothers and other women. As girls grew older, they continued to do so, but boys were thrown more on their own resources. Parents were, on the whole, very indulgent. Infanticide, even in arid areas, was much rarer than has been suggested by some researchers.
For girls, the transition into adulthood, marriage, and full responsibility was a direct one. Even before puberty, having already become a knowledgeable and efficient food provider, a girl normally went to live with her husband and assumed the status of a married woman. For a boy, on the other hand, his carefree life changed drastically with the advent of initiation. His formal instruction into adulthood began, and he was prepared for his entry into religious ritual. His future was henceforth in the hands of older men and ritual leaders who exercised authority in his community. But he was not among strangers; the relatives who played an active role in his initiation would also have significant roles in his adult life. A boy’s age at the first rite varied: in the Great Sandy Desert it was about 16, in the Kimberley about 12, in northeastern Arnhem Land 6 to 8, and among the Aranda 10 to 12 or older. Generally, once he had reached puberty and facial hair had begun to show, he was ready for the initial rituals.
Initiation in Aboriginal Australia was a symbolic reenactment of death in order to achieve new life as an adult. As a novice left his camp, the women would wail and other noises would be made, symbolizing the voice of a mythic being who was said to swallow the novice and later vomit him forth into a new life. The initiation rites themselves were a focal point in discipline and training; they included songs and rituals having an educational purpose. All boys were initiated, and traditionally there were no exceptions.
Circumcision was one of the most important rites over the greater part of Australia. Subincision (incisura of the urethra) was especially significant in its association with secret-sacred ritual. Other rites included piercing of the nasal septum, tooth pulling (in New South Wales this was central in initiation), and the blood rite, which involved bloodletting from an arm vein or a penis incisura—the blood being used for anointing or sipping (red ochre was used as a substitute for blood in some cases). Hair removal, cicatrization (scarring), and playing with fire were also fairly widespread practices. All such rites were usually substantiated by mythology.
For girls, puberty was marked by either total or partial seclusion and by food taboos (also applied to male novices). Afterward they were decorated and ritually purified. Ritual defloration and hymen cutting were practiced in a few areas, but, in general, puberty among girls was not ritually celebrated.
Boys, after circumcision, became increasingly involved in adult activities. Although they were not free to marry immediately, even if they had reached puberty, they might do so after undergoing certain rites, such as subincision. By delaying the age of marriage for young men, sometimes until they were in their late 20s, and keeping the age of first marriage for girls as low as 12 or 13, the practice of polygyny was made more workable. Initiation was a prelude to the religious activity in which all men participated. It meant, also, learning a wide range of things directly concerned with the practical aspects of social living. Adulthood brought increased status but added responsibilities. A vast store of information had to be handed down from one generation to the next. Initiation served as a medium for this, providing a basis of knowledge upon which an adult could build. This process continued through life and was especially marked in men’s religious activity.
For Aboriginal people, birth and death were an open-ended continuum: a spiritual religious power emerged from the Dreaming, was harnessed and utilized through initiation (as symbolic death-rebirth) and subsequent religious ritual, and finally, on death, went back into the Dreaming. Life and death were not seen as being diametrically opposed. The Dreaming provided a thread of life, even in physical death.
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de2abfa44867aff3ff555a9dd20bef9f | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal/Leadership-and-social-control | Leadership and social control | Leadership and social control
Aboriginal people had no chiefs or other centralized institutions of social or political control. In various measures, Aboriginal societies exhibited both hierarchical and egalitarian tendencies, but they were classless; an egalitarian ethos predominated, the subordinate status of women notwithstanding. However, there is evidence in some areas, such as northeast Arnhem Land, Bathurst and Melville islands, western Cape York Peninsula, and among the Aranda of central Australia, that strong leaders akin to the Melanesian “Big Man” existed and their preeminence in ritual matters carried over into the secular domain.
Everywhere, age and sex were the major criteria in differentiating status and roles, and it was in the religious arena that the greatest differentiation occurred. Women were excluded from the core of men’s secret-sacred ritual activities, and areas of privilege were further defined by graded acceptance of youths and adult men as they passed through rites of learning. Essentially, however, Aboriginal societies were “open”: there were no social barriers to prevent a man from becoming a leader in religious matters by his own efforts. Both men and women acquired prestige through knowledge of ritual performance and expertise in directing or performing ritual. In Great Sandy Desert rituals, for example, leadership roles were situationally determined—that is, the personnel changed as the ritual being performed changed such that most senior men adopted such roles at some stage in the protracted ritual proceedings. Although desert women were far less differentiated, they did have a ritual status hierarchy. In religious affairs everywhere, women took orders from, rather than gave orders to, initiated men.
Traditionally, most dissension arose over women, religious matters, and death. Some women fought with husbands, eloped, and engaged in unsanctioned extramarital liaisons. Such behaviour could mean serious fighting involving relatives of the parties concerned. Infringement of sacred law was less direct in its social repercussions but was nevertheless regarded as the most serious of all. In many cases an ordinary or accidental death had wide ramifications, particularly if they were accompanied by accusations of sorcery. An inquest was held, and, through divination, a supposed “murderer” was found, against whom punitive measures might or might not be taken.
Aboriginal people relied heavily on effective socialization and the inculcation of a high level of self-regulation, reinforced by strongly developed emotions of shame and embarrassment, to ensure individual conformity to society’s rules. Wrongdoers were generally more afraid of secular sanctions or sorcery than they were of supernatural punishment, since the withdrawn creative beings did not punish individuals. The rules were unwritten but known to all, and an array of sanctions, positive and negative, supported them. When action was called for against transgressors, role allocation depended on the kinship relationships involved. For example, elder brothers were often the major punishers of errant younger brothers but were also their nurturers and defenders in the case of an unwarranted attack.
The maintenance of law and order was quite narrowly localized. Authority was limited and qualified by kinship claims. Precedents were sought in order to guide or influence actions resulting from a breach, and all societies followed approved procedures for maintaining the peace. There were no judicial bodies as such, though on the lower Murray River a formal council, or tendi, of clan headmen and elders did arbitrate disagreements between adjacent groups. Generally, simple informal meetings of elders and men of importance dealt with grievances and other matters. There was also settlement by ordeal—the most outstanding example of this sort being the Makarrata (magarada, or maneiag) of Arnhem Land. During a ritualized meeting, the accused ran the gauntlet of his accusers, who threw spears at him; a wounded thigh was taken as proof of guilt.
Although it is inaccurate to speak of a gerontocracy in Aboriginal Australia, men of importance were easily distinguished. They were usually elders who had this status not necessarily because of their age or gray hair but because of their religious position and personal energy.
The Aboriginal peoples’ nomadic way of life was a direct result of a major limitation of the hunter-gatherer economy: the certainty of reduced food volume and ever-greater expenditure of effort to obtain it the longer a group stayed in one place. Aboriginal people had to be intimately acquainted with all the country within their range of movement and possess detailed knowledge of the location, distribution, and characteristics of its water holes, fauna, flora, and climatic conditions. Their ability to read the ground like a map greatly improved their efficiency as hunters. Knowledge of the topography and resources of huge areas of country was also gained through religion (see below), which related closely to their economic life.
As valuable as secular lore was, it was of a lower order in Aboriginal peoples’ worldview than religious knowledge. Aboriginal peoples believed that the Dreaming legacy gave them responsibility for and control over the fertility and reproduction of plants and animals and that it was therefore only through the use of ritual that resources were replenished and social life could continue. This heavy responsibility was claimed by senior males, though all adults shared in the maintenance of the land and its resources through ritual participation and obedience to the law.
Before Aboriginal life was transformed as a result of the European invasion, there were two basic patterns of movement. In fertile regions there were well-established camping areas, close to water and having important mythological associations, where people always camped at certain times of the year. Camps were bases from which people made forays into the surrounding bush for food, returning in the late afternoon or spending a few days away. The second pattern involved a much larger territory in arid or desert areas across which Aboriginal peoples moved in small family groups from water hole to water hole along well-defined tracks. The whole camp moved and rarely established bases. Only in good seasons and at sizable permanent waters was it possible for a large number of people to remain for an extended period.
These two patterns were reflected in domestic arrangements. In the north, people made bark shelters and during the monsoonal rains used caves and stilted huts as protection against flooding, mosquitoes, and sand flies. In the desert, windbreaks—bough shelters or saplings covered with brush or bark—were common. During fine weather, most Aboriginal people preferred to sleep in the open with a windbreak; when it was too cold, dogs helped to provide warmth. Fires were kept burning, and, when moving from one place to another or even when hunting, people carried live fire sticks. Throughout Australia, Aboriginal people generally went naked.
Outside the arena of religion, material objects were minimal. A useful threefold classification for Aboriginal tools was proposed by the archaeologist Richard A. Gould. Multipurpose tools, such as the digging stick or spear, were lightweight and portable. Appliances, such as large base stones on which food or ochre was ground, were left at a site and used whenever groups were in the vicinity. Instant tools, such as stone pounders or the grass cushions used by women when carrying heavy loads or wooden dishes on their heads, were fashioned as needed from raw materials available close at hand.
Men carried spears and spear throwers and, in some areas, boomerangs. There were bark canoes and rafts and dugout log canoes, some with pandanus-mat sails. Women’s digging sticks could double as fighting weapons. Their large, deep wooden dishes held seeds, vegetables, water—or even babies. In some areas painted bark baskets, plaited pandanus bags, and net bags served the same purposes. Rarer objects were the kangaroo-skin water bags of the arid central areas and the skull drinking vessels of the Coorong in South Australia. Implements included a large selection of stone tools, wedges, bone needles, bobbins, and sharkskin files.
The major division of labour was sex-based. In general, men and youths mostly hunted large game, while women collected vegetable foods and hunted small game, such as lizards. However, adults of one sex could easily subsist for long periods without members of the other—for example, when men absented themselves from their bands to undertake journeys related to religious concerns. All adults of each sex normally possessed the full range of skills required for getting a living.
Men’s networks of obligations were generally wider than those of women. They included payment in meat for ritual knowledge until their achievement of senior status and wisdom earned them roles as directors of ritual and guardians of sacred objects and lore. Food gathered by women was not usually shared throughout the band, whereas large game was always butchered and distributed to all members according to conventions surrounding a man’s kinship obligations. In most of Australia, women provided the major proportion of the food consumed—estimated at 60 to 80 percent, depending on area and season. Women were the major child minders, though children often played and foraged in groups and snacked on food they obtained. As girls approached their teens, they were expected to become providers, while boys had few responsibilities until initiation began.
Exchange and trade were important elements of the Aboriginal economy, but there were no markets, and the promotion of intergroup harmony and alliance was generally the primary goal. Nomadic culture allowed no place for the accumulation of material goods, nor was there any attempt to link status or prestige to the possession of objects. The dominant Aboriginal values were unselfishness and the dutiful discharge of kinship and religious obligations. In gift exchanges, especially, the emphasis centred on the social bond being reinforced rather than on the objects being transferred. Scarce goods passed along defined routes from one group to another in an intricate pattern that crisscrossed the continent. Boomerangs, for example, went in one direction, red ochre in another; pearl shells from the Kimberleys found their way, gradually, to the Great Australian Bight. To exchange red ochre for the pituri (a form of chewing tobacco), Dieri people east of Lake Eyre traveled several hundred miles.
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d15b2e5a80a4945afe9bd13865236227 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Broadcasting-Corporation | Australian Broadcasting Corporation | Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation is also an important patron of the arts, particularly of music. It supports the principal symphony orchestra in each state and gives strong encouragement to composers. In Sydney many new facilities were also built (and established ones refurbished) during the 1990s to…
, Australia), British-born Australian broadcasting executive who headed the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) for three decades, building it into a nationwide media corporation.
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71157fd0a5b992072c6639477f5acd87 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Council-of-Trade-Unions | Australian Council of Trade Unions | Australian Council of Trade Unions
Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the dominant association and governing body of the trade union movement in Australia, established in May 1927. Membership grew significantly when the Australian Workers’ Union joined the ACTU in 1967. Two other mergers with federations of white-collar unions—the Australian Council of Salaried and Professional Associations (in 1979) and the Council of Australian Government Employee Organisations (in 1981)—brought membership up to about 2.5 million members, or more than three-fourths of all trade union membership in Australia.
Although not formally affiliated with the Australian Labor Party, the ACTU has maintained a close association with it. The union has played a major role in Australian politics and is the recognized representative of organized labour in centralized wage negotiations with business and the federal government. Robert Hawke, who was president of the ACTU from 1970 to 1980, went on to serve as Australian prime minister from 1983 to 1991.
The ACTU’s policy-making body, a biennial congress, is made up of delegates from state branches of the federation (called trades and labour councils) and from affiliated trade unions. The decisions of the ACTU’s 17-member executive body must be ratified by a majority of the state branches before taking effect. The institution of Australia’s Industrial Relations Reform Act in 1993, which was designed to simplify the collective bargaining process, resulted in a decline in ACTU membership.
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be3dff3b6d9938f49040e22c0af7ac39 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-newspaper | Australian | Australian
…acquired in 1981) and the Australian (a national daily that he established in 1964). Murdoch took up residence in the United States in 1974 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985, based in New York City.
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ebbfd69c78f3ef667aee8511f451f57a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Stock-Exchange-Limited | Australian Stock Exchange Limited | Australian Stock Exchange Limited
…are now traded by the Australian Stock Exchange Limited (ASX), formed in 1987 to amalgamate the six state stock exchanges, via an all-electronic system.
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55f8ef4ca6d69f8f5f714be65dfbdde1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/australopith | Australopith | Australopith
The general term australopith (or australopithecine) is used informally to refer to members of the genus Australopithecus. Australopithecines include the genus Paranthropus (2.3–1.2 mya), which comprises three species of australopiths—collectively called the “robusts” because of their very large cheek teeth set in massive jaws. Non-australopithecine members of the…
…as Paranthropus, a type of australopith, or “southern ape.”
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39970d8ace653e0e2d82c5c537fbfd27 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australopithecus | Australopithecus | Australopithecus
Australopithecus, (Latin: “southern ape”) (genus Australopithecus), group of extinct primates closely related to, if not actually ancestors of, modern human beings and known from a series of fossils found at numerous sites in eastern, north-central, and southern Africa. The various species of Australopithecus lived 4.4 million to 1.4 million years ago (mya), during the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs (which lasted from 5.3 million to 11,700 years ago). The genus name, meaning “southern ape,” refers to the first fossils found, which were discovered in South Africa. Perhaps the most famous specimen of Australopithecus is “Lucy,” a remarkably preserved fossilized skeleton from Ethiopia that has been dated to 3.2 mya.
As characterized by the fossil evidence, members of Australopithecus bore a combination of humanlike and apelike traits. They were similar to modern humans in that they were bipedal (that is, they walked on two legs), but, like apes, they had small brains. Their canine teeth were smaller than those found in apes, and their cheek teeth were larger than those of modern humans.
The general term australopith (or australopithecine) is used informally to refer to members of the genus Australopithecus. Australopithecines include the genus Paranthropus (2.3–1.2 mya), which comprises three species of australopiths—collectively called the “robusts” because of their very large cheek teeth set in massive jaws. Non-australopithecine members of the human lineage (hominins) include Sahelanthropus tchadensis (7–6 mya), Orrorin tugenensis (6 mya), Ardipithecus kadabba (5.8–5.2 mya), and Ar. ramidus (5.8–4.4 mya)—that is, pre-Australopithecus species that are considered to be ancient humans—and one additional species of early human, Kenyanthropus platyops (3.5 mya). The first undisputed evidence of the genus Homo—the genus that includes modern human beings—appears as early as 2.8 mya, and some of the characteristics of Homo resemble those of earlier species of Australopithecus; however, considerable debate surrounds the identity of the earliest species of Homo. In contrast, remains older than six million years are widely regarded to be those of fossil apes.
Identifying the earliest member of the human tribe (Hominini) is difficult because the predecessors of modern humans become increasingly apelike as the fossil record is followed back through time. They resemble what would be expected in the common ancestor of humans and apes in that they possess a mix of human and ape traits. For example, the purported earliest species, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, is humanlike in having a slightly reduced canine tooth and a face that does not project forward very far. However, in most other respects, including brain size, it is apelike. Whether the species walked upright is not known because only a single cranium, fragments from one or more mandibles (lower jaws), and some teeth have been found.
Bipedalism, however, appears to have been established in the six-million-year-old Orrorin tugenensis, a pre-Australopithecus found in the Tugen Hills near Lake Baringo in central Kenya. In 2001 these fossils were described as the earliest known hominin. O. tugenensis is primitive in most if not all of its anatomy, except for femurs (thighbones) that appear to share traits of bipedalism with modern humans. Like later hominins, it has teeth with thick molar enamel, but, unlike humans, it has distinctively apelike canine and premolar teeth. The case for its hominin status rests on the humanlike features of the femur. According to its discoverers, features of the thighbone implying bipedalism include its overall proportions, the internal structure of the femoral neck (the column joining the ball-shaped head of the femur to the shaft of the bone), and a groove on the bone for a muscle used in upright walking (the obturator externus).
Another candidate for the earliest hominin is classified in the genus Ardipithecus (5.8–4.4 mya). The remains of Ar. kadabba (5.8–5.2 mya), which were discovered in the middle Awash River valley in the Afar region of Ethiopia (a depression located in the northern part of the country that extends northeast to the Red Sea), comprise fragments of limb bones, isolated teeth, a partial mandible, and a toe bone. While the canine tooth is apelike in some respects, it does not exhibit the classic interlocking honing complex (where the inner side of the upper canine sharpens itself against the lower premolar [or bicuspid]). The toe bone assigned to Ardipithecus exhibits bipedal anatomy, but it was found in sediments 400,000 years younger than, and some 20 km (12.4 miles) away from, the fossil used to define Ar. kadabba and may belong to another species of early hominin.
Ar. ramidus, which was discovered in the middle Awash valley in 1992 at a site named Aramis, is known from a crushed and distorted partial skeleton. The skull is apelike with a tiny brain—300–350 cc (18.3–21.4 cubic inches), which is equivalent to a brain weight of about 300–350 grams (10.6–12.3 ounces)—and a prognathic (projecting) snout. The foramen magnum (large hole) at the base of the skull is located under the braincase, as in a biped, and not posteriorly, as in a quadrupedal (four-legged) ape (see skull).
Several other anatomical characteristics of Ar. ramidus suggest that it was adapted to an arboreal setting. The upper limb differs from that of modern humans. It is very long, which allowed its fingertips to extend at least to the knee. The extremely large hands of the species suggest a lifestyle that included significant climbing and other activities among the trees. The pelvis is a mix of ape and human traits; it appears to be broader, shorter, and narrower than an ape’s pelvis and reminiscent of a bipedal pelvis. The foot is notably apelike with elongated toes and a fully divergent great toe for moving about in trees. Animal fossils, pollen, and other evidence associated with Ar. ramidus also indicate that it was at home in a wooded environment (see also Ardi).
The earliest member of the genus Australopithecus is Au. anamensis, which was discovered in northern Kenya near Lake Turkana at Kanapoi and Allia Bay. The species was first described in 1995 after an analysis of isolated teeth, upper and lower jaws, fragments of a cranium, and a tibia unearthed at the discovery sites. The fossils date to 4.2–3.9 mya, and, like Ardipithecus, Au. anamensis is associated with woodland animals and a few grassland species as well.
The snout is prognathic. The teeth have thick enamel, like the teeth of all later hominins but unlike those of Ar. ramidus, which have apelike thin enamel. The tibia (shinbone) exhibits anatomy at both the knee and ankle ends characteristic of later bipedal hominins.
A badly crushed and distorted cranium found at Lomekwi on the western shore of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya in 1998 was assigned to a new genus and species, “human from Kenya,” Kenyanthropus platyops (3.5 mya). It too is associated with woodland fauna. Whether this singular specimen is truly a new species is widely debated, since the cranium may be a highly distorted example of another species, Au. afarensis.
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a54d1da8ba913d687df40f143a0f5390 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Austro-Russian-agreements | Austro-Russian agreements | Austro-Russian agreements
The agreements signed as a result of that initiative aimed to exclude Italy from Balkan affairs and sought to entrust preservation of the Balkan order to the bilateral cooperation of the two eastern monarchies rather than to a multilateral alliance system. Thus, the final years of…
…eased European tensions with his Austro-Russian agreement of 1897 and with the Austro-Russian Mürzsteg Pact of 1903 concerning a joint policy toward Turkey. Gołuchowski nevertheless remained loyal to Austria’s principal ally, Germany. During the first Moroccan crisis (1905) between France and Germany, his role as mediator earned him the praise…
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4b51c4aef791c9bb81de65dad75a91b5 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Austronesian-languages | Austronesian languages | Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages, formerly Malayo-Polynesian languages, family of languages spoken in most of the Indonesian archipelago; all of the Philippines, Madagascar, and the island groups of the Central and South Pacific (except for Australia and much of New Guinea); much of Malaysia; and scattered areas of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Taiwan. In terms of the number of its languages and of their geographic spread, the Austronesian language family is among the world’s largest.
With approximately 1,200 members, the Austronesian language family includes about one-fifth of the world’s languages. Only the Niger-Congo family of Africa approaches it in number of languages, although both the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language families have considerably more speakers.
Before the European colonial expansions of the past five centuries, Austronesian languages were more widely distributed than any others, extending from Madagascar just off the southeast coast of Africa to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) some 2,200 miles west of Chile in South America—across an astonishing 206 degrees of longitude. Most of the languages are spoken within 10 degrees of the Equator, although some extend well beyond this, reaching as far north as 25° N latitude in northern Taiwan and as far south as 47° S latitude on New Zealand’s South Island.
Despite the enormous geographic extension of the Austronesian languages, the relationship of many (though not all) of the languages can easily be determined by an inspection of such basic subsystems as personal pronouns or the numerals. The Table presents names for the numbers 1 to 10 in the Paiwan language of southeastern Taiwan, Cebuano Bisayan (Visayan) of the central Philippines, Javanese of western Indonesia, Malagasy of Madagascar, Arosi of the southeastern Solomon Islands in Melanesia, and Hawaiian.
Fourteen of the 21 or 22 Austronesian languages spoken by the pre-Chinese aboriginal population of Taiwan (also called Formosa) survive. Siraya and Favorlang, which are now extinct, are attested from fairly extensive religious texts compiled by missionaries during the Dutch occupation of southwestern Taiwan (1624–62). All the roughly 160 native languages of the Philippines are Austronesian, although it is likely that the now highly marginalized hunter-gatherer populations of Negritos originally spoke languages of other affiliations. Approximately 110 Austronesian languages are spoken in Malaysia, mostly in the Bornean states of Sabah and Sarawak. In mainland Southeast Asia some 7 or 8 Austronesian languages belonging to the close-knit Chamic group are spoken in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in border regions of Laos, and on Hainan Island in southern China. Malagasy generally is regarded as a single language, although it may have as many as 20 dialects, some of which approach the dialect-language limit. The remaining 900 Austronesian languages are about equally divided among Indonesia (including the western half of the large island of New Guinea) and the Pacific islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. The great majority of Austronesian languages in the Pacific are found in Melanesia, particularly in coastal areas of New Guinea and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago (New Britain, New Ireland, the Admiralty Islands). The Austronesian languages of Melanesia are often found closely interspersed with an older population of non-Austronesian languages, collectively known as Papuan. With few exceptions the Austronesian languages of Melanesia tend to be spoken in coastal areas and on small offshore islands.
Major Austronesian languages include Cebuano, Tagalog, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Bicol, Waray-Waray, Kapampangan, and Pangasinan of the Philippines; Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Minangkabau, the Batak languages, Acehnese, Balinese, and Buginese of western Indonesia; and Malagasy of Madagascar. Each of these languages has more than one million speakers. Javanese alone accounts for about one-quarter of all speakers of Austronesian languages, which is a remarkable disparity in view of the total number of languages in this family. In eastern Indonesia the average number of speakers per language drops to a few tens of thousands and in western Melanesia to fewer than a thousand. In the central Pacific, where the average number of speakers per language again increases to more than 100,000, the major languages include Fijian, Samoan, and Tongan.
Tagalog forms the basis of Pilipino, the national language of the Philippines, and the Merina dialect of Malagasy, which is spoken in the highlands around the capital of Antananarivo, forms the basis for standard Malagasy. Hindu-Buddhist polities, based on Indian concepts of the state, arose in parts of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra during the first few centuries of the Christian era and somewhat later in Java. As a result of these contact influences, Sanskrit loanwords entered Malay and Javanese in large numbers. Many Philippine languages also contain substantial numbers of Sanskrit loans, even though no part of the Philippines was ever Indianized. It is generally agreed that these and the later Arabic and Persian loanwords that are found in Philippine languages were transmitted through the medium of Malay.
It is now widely agreed, following the pioneering thesis of the Norwegian linguist Otto Christian Dahl, that Madagascar was settled by immigrants from southeastern Borneo sometime between the 7th and 13th centuries ce. The presence of Sanskrit loans in Malagasy suggests that the movement to Madagascar took place after the beginnings of Indianization in western Indonesia, while the presence of some Arabic loans that show distinctive Malay adaptations suggests that contact between Madagascar and Malay-speaking portions of western Indonesia may have continued after the initial migration from Southeast Asia.
Of all Austronesian languages, Malay—which is native to the Malay Peninsula, adjacent portions of southern and central Sumatra, and some smaller neighbouring islands—probably has had the greatest political importance. Three stone inscriptions associated with the Indianized state of Srivijaya in southern Sumatra and bearing the dates 683, 684, and 686 ce are written in a language generally called Old Malay. After the introduction of Islam at the end of the 13th century, Malay-speaking sultanates were established not only in the Malay-speaking region of the Malay Peninsula but also in Brunei on the coast of northwestern Borneo. In other areas, such as Aceh of northern Sumatra, the Sulu Archipelago of the southern Philippines, and Ternate and Tidore of the northern Moluccas, Islamic sultanates made use of local languages, but the large number of Malay loanwords in these languages suggests that Malay-speaking missionaries must have played an important part in their establishment.
Fairly abundant palm-leaf manuscripts and inscriptions on stone or various metals constitute the textual record for Old Javanese, a language associated with the Indianized states of eastern Java from approximately the 9th to the 15th century. About half of the vocabulary of the Old Javanese texts is of Sanskrit origin, although this material clearly reflects the language of the courts and almost certainly would not have been representative of the common people.
The historical importance of both Tagalog and Malay probably was favoured by geographic considerations. Tagalog is the language native to the region of Manila Bay. When the Spanish initiated the 350-year-long Manila galleon trade in 1565 they found a preexisting trade network linking Fukienese traders from southern China with the local native population and probably with some Malay traders from western Indonesia. Malay was spoken on both sides of the strategic Strait of Malacca between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. When the India-China trade commenced at approximately the start of the 1st century ce, the favoured sea route passed through the Strait of Malacca, drawing the Malay-speaking populations of this region into a much wider network of international commerce. When representatives of the Dutch East India Company arrived in Indonesia at the beginning of the 17th century, they discovered that Malay served as a lingua franca in major ports throughout the archipelago; the language has retained that role to the present day. It was thus natural that Malay would be selected as the basis for the national language of Malaysia (Bahasa Malaysia), Brunei (Bahasa Kebangsaan ‘national language’), and Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia). In Indonesia speakers of Malay were far outnumbered by speakers of Javanese, but there Malay offered a neutral alternative to the widely perceived threat of ethnic domination by the overwhelming Javanese-speaking majority.
A similar geographic determinism favouring the rise of local languages to the status of lingua francas can be seen on a smaller scale in Melanesia. Motu, centred in the important harbour of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, was the medium through which the seasonal hiri (trading voyages) took place across the 225-mile-wide Gulf of Papua before the arrival of Europeans. Under British colonial rule a simplified form of Motu known as Hiri, or Police, Motu served as the language of the territorial constabulary. Tolai, spoken natively around the important harbour town of Rabaul on the island of New Britain, came under heavy contact influence from English in a 19th-century plantation setting. The result was a creolized form of the language known as Melanesian Pidgin, or Tok Pisin, today one of the national languages of Papua New Guinea.
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6f02b9bc7d70e87d19f152e1fa08c80f | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Austronesian-languages/Classification-and-prehistory | Classification and prehistory | Classification and prehistory
Given the size of the Austronesian family, the subgrouping of the languages is a matter of some importance, bearing on, among other things, the determination of the Austronesian homeland. Until the 1930s the branches of Austronesian were customarily identified with purely geographic labels: Indonesian, Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian. The inadequacy of this subdivision is apparent; Polynesian, for example, is known to encompass not only the languages of Polynesia but also Polynesian Outlier languages of both Melanesia and Micronesia. Moreover, each of the other geographically defined groups turns out to be a heterogeneous collection of languages that belong to more than one linguistically defined group.
The first breakthrough in the subgrouping of the Austronesian languages was made by Dempwolff in the second volume of his distinguished trilogy, where he concluded that the languages of Polynesia and most of those of Melanesia and Micronesia share a number of innovative features that are most plausibly attributed to changes in a single protolanguage, which he named Urmelanesisch (Proto-Melanesian) and which is known today as Proto-Oceanic. The Oceanic hypothesis maintains that all Austronesian languages east of a line that runs through Indonesian New Guinea at approximately 138° E longitude—except for Palauan and Chamorro of western Micronesia—are descended from a single protolanguage spoken many generations after the initial breakup of Proto-Austronesian itself.
The major subgroups of Austronesian as generally recognized today are shown in Figure 1.
The term Formosan language is not to be understood as representing a subgroup defined by exclusively shared innovations. Rather, it is a collective term for a highly diverse collection of languages, most of which share broad typological similarities with languages in the Philippines and some other areas (such as Madagascar). The Yami language, which is spoken on Lan-yü (Botel Tobago) island off the southeastern coast of Taiwan, forms a subgroup with Ivatan and Itbayaten in the northern Philippines. The other 14 surviving aboriginal languages of Taiwan may fall into as many as six primary branches of the language family, each one coordinate with the entire Malayo-Polynesian branch. Under such circumstances very small subgroups or even single languages provide an independent line of evidence for the nature of Proto-Austronesian that is theoretically equivalent to the entire Malayo-Polynesian branch of some 1,180 member languages. Among the best-described Formosan languages are Atayal (spoken in the northern mountains), Amis (spoken along the narrow east coast), and Paiwan (spoken near the southern tip of the island); only superficial descriptions are available for most of the other Formosan languages.
Although Western Malayo-Polynesian is a convenient cover term for the Austronesian languages of the Philippines, western Indonesia (Borneo, Sumatra, Java-Bali-Lombok, Sulawesi), mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and at least Chamorro and Palauan in western Micronesia, it is in effect a catchall category for the Malayo-Polynesian languages that do not exhibit any of the innovations characteristic of Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian and may very well contain several primary branches of Malayo-Polynesian. As mentioned previously, some of the largest and best-known Austronesian languages—including Ilokano, Tagalog, Cebuano, Malay, Acehnese, Toba Batak, Minangkabau, Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese, Buginese, Makasarese, and Malagasy—are Western Malayo-Polynesian.
The Central Malayo-Polynesian languages are found throughout much of eastern Indonesia, including the Lesser Sunda Islands from Sumbawa through Timor, and most of the Moluccas. Many of the changes that define this linguistic group cover most of the languages but do not reach the geographic extremes, and the group has therefore been questioned by some scholars. Few of the languages are large or well-known, but those for which fuller descriptions are available include Manggarai and Ngadha, spoken on the island of Flores; Roti, spoken on the island of the same name; Tetum, spoken on the island of Timor; and Buruese, spoken on the island of Buru in the central Moluccas.
This small group of Austronesian languages is found in the northern Moluccan island of Halmahera and in the Doberai Peninsula (also called Vogelkop or Bird’s Head) of western New Guinea. Preliminary descriptions exist only for Buli of Halmahera and Numfor-Biak and Waropen of western New Guinea; most of the languages are known only from short word lists.
The Oceanic subgroup is the largest and best-defined of all major subgroups in Austronesian. It includes all the languages of Polynesia, all the languages of Micronesia (except Palauan and Chamorro), and all the Austronesian languages of Melanesia east of the Mamberamo River in Indonesian New Guinea. Some of the better-known Oceanic languages are Motu of southeastern New Guinea, Tolai of New Britain, Sa’a of the southeastern Solomons, Mota of the Banks Islands in northern Vanuatu, Chuukese (Trukese) of Micronesia, Fijian, and many Polynesian languages, including Tongan, Samoan, Tahitian, Maori, and Hawaiian. Yapese, long considered unplaceable, now appears to be Oceanic, although its place within Oceanic remains obscure.
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001cc9eac1c9fb36e7356345a5f1f040 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Austronesian-languages/Morphology-and-canonical-shape | Morphology and canonical shape | Morphology and canonical shape
The Austronesian languages of Taiwan, the Philippines, northern Borneo, and Sulawesi and some other languages (such as Malagasy, Palauan, and Chamorro) are characterized by a very rich morphology, which functions in both verb-forming and noun-forming processes. Some languages use affixation to encode many types of syntactic relationships that are expressed in most other languages through the use of free words. Thao of central Taiwan, for example, allows aspect markers to be attached to prepositional phrases, as in in-i-nay yaku ‘I was here’ (literally, ‘[past]-location-this I’). In Thao, relative clauses are expressed through attributive constructions that may use complex nouns derived by affixation, as in m-ihu a s-in-aran-an yanan sapaz ‘the place where you walked has footprints’ (‘your [ligature-past]-walking-place has footprints’). Most of the so-called focus affixes in such languages have both verbalizing and nominalizing functions.
Many of the languages of Sulawesi and eastern Indonesia have prefixed subject markers on the verb. In some languages these co-occur with full free pronouns marking the subject and so function like a system of agreement. In some of the languages of western Melanesia, such as Motu, the verb complex consists of a prefixed subject marker, the verb stem, and a suffixed object marker, together with free nouns or pronouns marking subject and object, producing structures such as ‘the man the dog he-kicked-it’ for ‘the man kicked the dog.’ In a case such as this, the structure of the verb complex provides a clue that the current SOV order of sentence constituents has developed from an earlier SVO order.
Reduplication takes numerous forms and has a great variety of functions in Austronesian languages. Partial reduplication of a verb stem is used to mark the future tense in both Rukai of Taiwan and Tagalog of the Philippines, as in Tagalog l-um-akad ‘walk’ but la-lakad ‘will walk’ or s-um-ulat ‘write,’ su-sulat ‘will write.’ Full reduplication is used to mark plurality of nouns in Bahasa Indonesia, as with anak ‘child’ but anak anak ‘children.’ In many languages reduplication is used together with affixation to express a variety of semantic nuances. The pattern seen in Indonesian anak anak-an ‘doll’ or orang orang-an ‘scarecrow’ (orang ‘person’) is only one of many that occur in various languages.
Linguists have generally maintained that the smallest meaning-bearing units of language structure are morphemes, elements that are isolated by the contrast of partially similar words, as in berry: cranberry (hence both cran and berry are morphemes of English). However, English words such as glow, glimmer, glisten, glitter, glare, glint, gloss, and the like exhibit a recurrent association of sound and meaning without contrast. Many Austronesian languages, particularly in insular Southeast Asia, show similar types of recurrent sound-meaning associations that are not defined by contrast. In the great majority of cases, these consist of the last syllable of a morpheme. A clear illustration is seen in Malay, where about 40 two-syllable words end in -pit and roughly half of these have meanings that can be characterized as referring to the approximation of two surfaces, as in (h)apit ‘pressure between two disconnected surfaces,’ capit ‘pincers,’ men-cepit ‘to nip,’ dempit ‘pressed together, in contact,’ gapit ‘nipper, clamp,’ kempit ‘carry under the arm,’ and limpit ‘in layers.’
The term canonical shape refers to the clearly marked preferences that some languages show for number of syllables, sequencing of consonants and vowels, and so on in the construction of words. Many Austronesian languages show a clear preference for a disyllabic (two-syllable) canonical shape in content words (words that have a reference rather than a purely grammatical function). Where this preference is violated by the operation of other forces, it often reasserts itself through special mechanisms. Javanese əri ‘thorn’ passed through a stage in which it was ri but gained a schwa to meet the preferred two-syllable canonical shape. Many other quite varied examples of this type can be shown for languages throughout the Austronesian family.
In view of the disyllabic canonical target in Austronesian languages, the words that represent certain meanings are often conspicuous for their length. An example is the word for ‘butterfly’: Paiwan (Taiwan) quLipepe, Puyuma (Taiwan) Halivanvan, Bunun (Taiwan) talikoan, Ilokano (Philippines) kulibangbang, Tagalog (Philippines) alibangbang, Iban (Borneo and Malaysia) kelebembang, Tae’ (Sulawesi) kalubambang, Sichule (Sumatra) alifambang, Gani (Halmahera) kalibobo, Numbami (north coast of New Guinea) kaimbombo. This word contains a prefix or family of prefixes that almost invariably is fossilized, thus creating a much longer word than is typical of Austronesian languages. The same phenomenon is seen with certain other meanings, such as ‘ant,’ ‘firefly,’ ‘leech’ (two types), ‘echo,’ ‘dizzy,’ ‘rainbow,’ ‘whirlpool/whirlwind,’ and ‘hair whorl.’
In the Philippines clusters consisting of “heterorganic” consonants (consonants produced at different places in the mouth) are common in the middle of words (Tagalog hagpós ‘loose, slack,’ puknát ‘unglued, detached’), but this is not typical of Austronesian languages in most other areas, where consonants tend to alternate with vowels in CVCV sequences.
Most Austronesian languages do not permit final palatal consonants, although in a few cases these have developed through secondary change. Other languages have a severely restricted inventory of possible final consonants in relation to consonants in other positions, as with Makasarese of southern Sulawesi, where the only possible final consonants are the velar nasal -ŋ and the glottal stop (a consonant produced by suddenly closing the vocal cords so as to interrupt the outward flow of air from the lungs).
In most Oceanic languages and some Austronesian languages in other areas, all words end in a vowel. This is the result of either of two types of change: loss of final consonants or addition either of an “echo” vowel or of an invariant “supporting” vowel. Fijian and the Polynesian languages show open final syllables as a result of the first type of development; Mussau of western Melanesia and Malagasy show open final syllables as a result of the second type (see Table).
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f23c64412994b1919b20278ccfac15e4 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Author-Author-1982-film | Author! Author! | Author! Author!
…of forgettable comedies followed, including Author! Author! (1982), which starred Al Pacino as an overwhelmed playwright, and The Lonely Guy (1984), with Steve Martin and a scene-stealing Charles Grodin. Hiller had a modest hit with Outrageous Fortune (1987), which cast Bette Midler and Shelley Long as rivals, but See No
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